The Chairman In The Garage

Chapter Ten: What Frederick Kept

The old workshop behind Rothwell Motors had stayed locked for six years, ever since the winter morning Frederick Rothwell's heart gave out. Juliet had the only key. It had hung on her keyring all that time, bright and unused, a weight she carried everywhere and never touched.

They crossed the dark yard just before midnight, past the spot where the builder's van had waited the night before. At the side door Juliet stopped with the key raised and stood there long enough for Grayson to wonder whether she would change her mind. Then she pushed it into the lock, and the lock fought her for a long moment before it turned.

Grayson found the switch by feel. One after another, the old strip lights stuttered on along the beams.

The workshop smelled of cold oil and dust. Tools still hung on their painted outlines along the walls, every spanner in its place, as if their owner had only stepped out for lunch. In the middle of the floor, a car-shaped hump lay under grey dust sheets. Juliet pulled back one corner to show a small green hatchback with rust blooming along the wheel arches.

"The first car he ever sold," she said. "He bought it back years later and never drove it once. He said it reminded him where he started." She let the sheet fall. "I haven't been in here since the funeral. None of us have."

Against the back wall stood a tall steel cabinet with its grey paint chipped at the edges. Nobody had opened it since the day they buried him.

They went through it drawer by drawer. The top one held invoices bound in rubber bands. The next held service manuals with her father's handwriting crowding the margins, and the one below that held a tin of old badges and a photograph of Juliet at about eight, grinning beside an engine with a lamp in her hand. Juliet looked at the photograph for a long time before she slipped it into her pocket.

The bottom drawer stuck. Grayson worked it free. Inside, wrapped in an oily rag, lay a phone.

It was an old model, thick and scuffed, the kind nobody had carried for a decade. Juliet unwrapped it slowly and held the rag while Grayson searched the tangle of leads on the workbench for a cable that fitted. For two long minutes after he plugged it in, nothing happened. Then the screen glowed a weak green, and the phone shivered awake.

There was no password. There was only a single contact, saved under one word.

The Governor.

Juliet made a small sound that wasn't quite a word. Grayson opened the messages.

They went back years, hundreds of them, and almost all of them came from the Governor. Some were instructions about prices. "Raise your trade-in rate by four per cent on the first." "Hold your price on the saloon, whatever the factory says." Others were lists of dealers in towns up and down the coast, five or six names at a time, with a single line underneath. "These will fail by spring. Don't help them." Grayson recognised some of the names. Every one of them was gone now.

Juliet touched one of them on the screen with her fingertip. "Marsh and Daughters," she whispered. "Dad went to Mr. Marsh's retirement party when they closed. He gave a speech. He said it was the saddest day in the trade."

Then, ten years ago, came a message that was longer than the rest.

"Congratulations. Sable has approved your franchise. You'll find the papers already signed."

Frederick had replied with a single question. "I never applied. How?"

The Governor never answered it.

Grayson sat very still. Ten years ago, the year after the fire, he had been nineteen, grieving and furious and completely alone. He had signed whatever his mother's board put in front of him because he didn't yet know which of them he could trust. Somewhere in one of those stacks of paper, he had put his own name to Frederick Rothwell's franchise.

He kept scrolling. Frederick's replies grew shorter with every year. At first there were paragraphs, polite and careful and grateful. Then there were single lines. Then there was one word, over and over again. "Done." "Done." "Done."

"He stopped sleeping," Juliet said, almost to herself. "Those last years, he'd sit up in his chair until three in the morning with the television off. Mum said it was the business. I thought he was just getting old."

The last message on the phone was from Frederick, sent a month before he died.

"I'm finished. Keep my daughter out of this."

Juliet read it over his shoulder. She didn't cry. She stood very straight with the rag in both hands, the way she had stood at the dinner table refusing to sign, and Grayson watched her throat work as she swallowed. Her father had begged for one thing at the end. Six years later, two men had held a knife to that daughter's ribs.

Grayson scrolled all the way back to the top, to the very first message ever sent to that phone.

It was dated eleven years ago. He didn't need to count. He knew that date the way he knew his own name, because it was the night his mother's workshop burned.

"Leave the boy. He'll be useful."

The strip lights hummed overhead. Grayson stared at the screen until the letters blurred.

He thought of the wet grass outside the fire, the smoke burning in his lungs and the sky spinning above him when he opened his eyes. He thought of the hands that must have carried him there, the ones he had never seen. For eleven years he had wondered who saved him. He had pictured a passer-by or a neighbour, some stranger who had walked away into the night without wanting thanks. Now he had to wonder why.

Beside him, Juliet set the oily rag down on the workbench with great care, as if it might break.

"Grayson," she said quietly. "That's the night my father came home with both his hands burned."