The Chairman In The Garage

Chapter Six: The Star In The Engine

Juliet set the toolbox on the bonnet of her mother's Sable, with the lid open and the little star facing the door, and waited.

She didn't fetch a coat, and she didn't go back for the torch she had come out for. The kitchen could stay dark. She stood in the cold garage with her arms folded, listening to the house settle around her, and turned every year of her marriage over in her mind until none of it sat the way it had that morning.

Just after midnight, the side door opened and Grayson came in out of the rain. He saw the toolbox first. Then he saw her, and he went very still, like a man who had reached for a step he'd climbed a thousand times and found nothing there.

She didn't ask whether it was true. Somewhere in the last hour she had stopped needing to.

"Every Sable engine has that star cast into it," she said. "My father spent years trying to find out why. So tell me why every Sable engine carries a drawing from your toolbox."

He closed the door behind him. For a moment she thought he would lie, and she braced herself for it. He didn't.

"I drew it for my mother when I was seven," he said. "She was building her first engine in a workshop behind a fishmonger's, and she pressed my drawing into the mould. She never took it out. My mother was Elena Sable."

Everyone in the trade knew that name. Juliet had grown up on it, the woman who had built the world's most coveted car out of a backstreet shed and then died in the fire that took it.

He told her the rest standing beside her mother's car, in a low voice that never once rose. He told her about the fire eleven years ago, and waking on the grass with no idea who had carried him out. He told her about Renata standing in front of the cameras while he stayed out of every photograph, and about the truck that had pushed him into the sea on the coast road and the driver nobody ever caught. Then he told her about the twelve cars that morning, the words on their screens, and the device hidden under her seat that had copied his code while she sat beside a knife.

"Why didn't you tell me?" Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it.

"Because everyone who ever knew my face became a way to reach me." He was looking at the star, not at her. "My mother understood that, and it didn't save her. You were the one person I couldn't let anyone reach."

Juliet thought of four years of cold plates handed through a doorway. She thought of Hayden's video, and her mother's finger pushing his dinner an inch away across the tablecloth.

"You let my mother make you eat in the garage," she said.

"It was the safest seat in the house." Something close to a smile touched his mouth. "Nobody looks at the man in the garage."

"I did." She put her hand flat on the little star, over the faded lines a seven-year-old had drawn. "Every night."

He looked at her then, properly, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.

Her family would have shouted at him, or started bargaining, or begun counting what a Chairman's wife could buy. Juliet did none of those things. Fear had always made her practical, and the questions were already lining up in her head.

"Only four people knew what time I was leaving that night," she said. "I told the whole table I was going to the dealership. My mother, Hayden, Camille and Laurent." She counted them off on her fingers, and her voice steadied as she went. "Marrow Street is the only sensible way from this house to the showroom at that hour. Those men didn't follow me, Grayson. I'd have seen their headlights. They were already waiting at the lights."

Grayson had heard every word of that dinner from the garage door. It didn't occur to her to count him.

***

Across the city, Laurent Bexley was learning what a suspended franchise cost.

His bank had called him in at four that afternoon and left him waiting in a glass room for an hour before a man half his age explained, very politely, that the group's credit was under review. By six, two of his biggest investors had stopped taking his calls. Their assistants were terribly sorry, and they would certainly pass on his message.

He sat in his study with a whisky he hadn't touched and the cheap black phone lying silent on the desk. He had made plenty of enemies in twenty years of selling cars, and he had kept careful track of every one of them. None of them could do this. None of them could turn Sable against him. He kept hearing one small word spoken under the noise of two thousand people, and he still couldn't make it fit the man holding the coats.

***

The kitchen lights came back on when Grayson reset the switch in the fuse box. A minute later, Cressida came down in her dressing gown to find out who was wandering about her house at one in the morning. She found her daughter at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the car-washer standing by the fridge, and she looked at the pair of them as if they had tracked mud across her floor.

Then the house phone rang.

Nobody called the landline after ten. Cressida answered in her best voice, listened for a moment, and her mouth went thin. She held the receiver out to Grayson at arm's length, as though it smelled. "It's for the car-washer."

He took it. "Hello?"

For a second there was only breathing, fast and ragged, with wind gusting across the mouthpiece. Then a voice came through, young and terrified.

"It's Yannis. From the coast road. They killed Reece, and they're coming for me. You're the only man I know who can stop a car."