Gull by Glenn Patterson Page A

drawer. ‘It’s all right, I’ve heard what I need to hear, thanks.’
    ‘Please.’
    June did as he asked, though her sideways glance at Sandra who sat at the desk next to hers left him in no doubt: he was acting strangely.
    The news of course was over, the next programme begun, blandly.
    ‘That story that was on a minute ago, the German man...’ He clicked his fingers as though he could conjure it up again.
    ‘Niedermayer?’ Now she understood. ‘Poor man.’
    ‘Poor wife. Poor kids.’ This from Sandra, who was opening the front of her typewriter to get at the ribbon.
    ‘They found him?’ Randall asked.
    ‘His remains,’ June said and Sandra shuddered.
    ‘Over the border?’ That’s where they take them all, the security man at the Conway had said.
    June blinked. ‘No, in Colin Glen.’ Randall had seen the name on maps of the area around the factory: a narrow strip of forest park between the housing estates running back from the west towards the city. ‘All this time,’ June said, ‘he was just up the road.’
    Just up the road and, Randall discovered later, reading the newspaper at the table set for one in Warren House, buried face down. Seems as though the men who had beaten him around the head with their guns wanted to make sure that even if he did regain consciousness he never found his way out of the hole they had dug for him.

7
    The eighteen months were up on 3 February 1980. The cow pasture was long gone. They had a factory with two gates in and out. They had a workforce of getting on for a thousand to enter and leave by them in almost equal proportion. They had, instead of a car in production, a new prototype to ponder.
    DeLorean marked the occasion by requesting a further £15 million of credit from the British government.
    Which refused, of course, in no uncertain terms. Until Kimmerly drew to its lawyers’ attention a clause in the initial letter of agreement that bound the Labour government and its successors not to let the enterprise fail, as fail it undoubtedly would if more time – and therefore money – were not committed to the development work at Lotus.
    Besides, the British were getting a $370 cut on the first ninety thousand cars produced: thirty-three and a bit millions. (Dollars, not pounds, but still, thirty-three and a bit million of them.) And what about the other jobs that DMCL’s presence was attracting? Not a single cent of US investment in the previous seven years and all of a sudden there were thirty companies lined up. LearAvia was already in, north of the city, with – lest anyone forget – fifty million dollars of new, Conservative government grants and loans to make components for its Lear Fan executive jet.
    Jennings, who needless to say could not let the day pass, or rather, 3 February being a Sunday, let the day after it pass without paying a call was more rueful than raging at finding himself, and the government whose bidding he did, over a barrel.
    ‘You can rest assured that there will be no such clause in the revised letter that accompanies this loan. As for Lear Fan, by the way, there is no comparison. It brought rather more of its own money to the table and it won’t see a penny of ours unless it gets a plane in the air before the end of this year, which’ – not quite under his breath – ‘might have been a sensible condition to apply in this instance too.’
    Maybe he thought those really were gull’s wings.
    He had walked with Randall around the assembly shop (still sparsely enough fitted out that Randall had broken up a full-scale lunch-hour soccer game only two days before), nodding with what at moments and in another person might almost have been taken for approval. Well, if you did have £65 million of public money to spend this would not be the worst way to spend it...
    His parting shot, though, was a reversion to type. ‘The problem with making unrealistic promises is that even though people know they are unrealistic they are inclined to