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fingernails during this brief encomium. He looked up now, blinking against the smoke of Anderson’s cigarette. ‘I suppose Mr DeLorean was telling you that Bank of America has already pledged eighteen million dollars.’
    ‘It came up in the conversation,’ Randall said, ‘yes.’
    To be precise it had come up as they walked downstairs to the lobby at the end of lunch (an apple, a banana and three lychees), Randall’s mind already made up.
    ‘And Johnny Carson, I’m sure... half a million?’
    ‘That came up too.’ And Sammy Davis Junior, Randall did not say, and Ira Levin, and Roy Clark. Hee Haw !
    Anderson smiled, practically licked his lips. ‘And did it also come up that John Z was arrested back when he was at college for selling stuff that wasn’t his to sell?’
    Randall couldn’t help it, he froze.
    ‘Advertising space for the Detroit Yellow Pages. An old scam. Lucky not to do time for it.’
    Dan Stevens frowned. His entire demeanour suggested that unlike Anderson he took no pleasure in communicating any of this. ‘The way I hear it his departure from GM wasn’t quite how he has been describing it. The board had his letter of resignation ready and waiting for him to sign when he went in looking for a showdown.’
    Anderson took another draw then crushed his cigarette in the ashtray Randall had just that moment emptied. ‘The man is a liability. He loves the limelight too much. Nobody in the industry will touch him any more.’
    Randall stared at the last of the smoke drifting up from the butt then he tipped it into the wastebasket and shoved basket and ashtray both into Anderson’s arms.
    ‘Bullshit,’ he said, and with a nod to the other man as he headed for the door, ‘A pleasure meeting you, Mr Stevens.’
    *
    That was the summer that Liz and Robert bought the orange Morris Marina. Only four years old and less than seventy thousand miles on the clock. They took it a day here and a day there over the July fortnight: Ballywalter, Castlerock, Whitepark Bay, the Ulster American Folk Park, which was as close, Liz had thought, walking around its reconstructed settlers’ cabins, as they were ever likely to get to the real thing. They had talked about a package holiday on the continent – Torremolinos, Benidorm – had gone as far as making an appointment with Joe Walsh Tours in Castle Street the first weekend after Easter, but even at their rates, what with the new car and everything... No, it was just too much of a stretch. Maybe next year, they said, just as they had the year before. Instead, the next year Liz buried her brother, Pete, and felt guilty enough those first few months just breathing in and out, never mind lying sunning herself somewhere on the Costa Brava.
    Anyway, a day here, a day there... Meant you weren’t tied, didn’t it?

3
    The team that DeLorean was putting together was still under half a dozen strong when Randall moved into the on-loan Kimmerly offices. Besides being temporary landlord Tom Kimmerly himself was acting as the company’s attorney and chief secretary. His was the name entered in the Michigan State Business Register next to number 190407, the DeLorean Manufacturing Company. Bill Collins the chief engineer was another GM refugee – another former Pontiac man – who had felt the life, and the spirit, being slowly squeezed out of him by the sheer weight of the behemoth. Almost the first thing he and DeLorean had done together on his defection was fly to Europe, to the Turin Auto Show, searching for a designer they could work with. Actually, searching for one particular designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose concept car for Lotus – more space-age architectural sculpture than automobile – had been shown in Turin the same year as DeLorean’s last ever Vega was being unveiled in Chicago.
    (‘You can drive yourself nuts in this world comparing things that bear no direct comparison,’ DeLorean told Randall. ‘Or you can spur yourself on.’)
    Giugiaro was