The yard was silent. Rusting hulks sat atop each other. Dismantled doors, bonnets, boot lids and hatchbacks hung off racks divided up by make and model. With all the surrounding businesses closed for the night, the silence stretched beyond the confines of the yard. I felt that if I screamed, no one would hear.
‘Well done, Aidy,’ Hancock said, ‘and I’ll see you soon.’
‘Do you think you could give us a tour while we’re here?’
‘What, now?’
‘We are here and it would help me. Pit Lane magazine is going to be interviewing me about the Festival.’ They weren’t but it was a plausible lie. ‘It will be good if I can sound knowledgeable about Hancock Salvage.’
My appeal to Hancock’s business side worked. He locked the yard gates and led us into the offices inside a large warehouse. We stood in a spacious waiting room while Hancock disappeared inside the building to deactivate the alarm system.
‘What are you doing?’ Dylan asked.
‘I want to see what happened to those cars Derek transported out here on Saturday. OK?’
‘Last night almost had you on your way to prison,’ Steve said. ‘Can’t you leave it alone for one day?’
I felt the weight of Steve and Dylan’s disapproval squeezing me, but I wouldn’t be dissuaded. ‘This is different. We’re not in Derek’s territory. Brennan isn’t acting as his eyes and ears. Hancock is the weak link out here. He’s vulnerable and that’s good for us.’
Neither Steve nor Dylan said anything. Their silence spoke volumes. They knew I was right.
‘I won’t need to do much. I just need to find something on those cars Derek transported. Just follow my lead, OK?’
‘I’m with you,’ Dylan said.
‘OK,’ Steve said, ‘but on one condition. The second I don’t like what’s happening, I’m pulling us out.’
‘Thanks.’
Hancock appeared in a doorway. ‘Come through here and I’ll show you how everything works.’
We followed him into an open plan office filled with workstations.
‘Essentially, I buy write-offs from the insurance companies and low end trade-ins from car dealerships. I break the vehicles down for parts and classify them so individuals and repair shops can buy the parts. What can’t be salvaged is crushed and sold for scrap.’
‘You auction cars too?’ Dylan said.
‘Yeah. We act as auctioneers for dealerships, municipalities and individuals who want to offload their unwanted vehicles.’
‘Do you ever auction the write-offs?’ I asked.
‘We have. Half the cars classified as write-offs are totally good cars. The damage is cosmetic but the parts and labour make it cost-prohibitive for the insurance companies to repair them. We can fix them up. The down side is we have to register the cars as recovered vehicles and we can never get their real value at auction. We do it from time to time, but not often.’
‘Could you walk us through the process from write-off to salvage?’ I asked.
Hancock didn’t look keen but he agreed. He fired up a computer and launched an inventory program that logged the cars entering Hancock Salvage.
‘Has anything good come through recently?’ Steve asked.
‘Got any 7-series BMWs?’ Dylan asked. ‘I’ve had my eye on one of them.’
I thought Dylan was pushing a little too hard to the point of cluing Hancock in to our motives, but he played along. He ran a search for BMW 7-series and four popped up. I looked for the one I’d taken pictures of in Bristol. It was there, third one on the list.
‘Take your pick,’ Hancock told Dylan.
‘I like that one,’ Dylan said and pointed to a red one and not the one I’d seen. ‘Complements the colour of my eyes.’
Hancock double-clicked on the red BMW’s details. It listed all that had happened to the car since Hancock had received it. ‘It’s gone, my friend. You wouldn’t have wanted it. It was a wreck according to this.’
I didn’t want to fixate on the BMW too much or we might alert Hancock. ‘So what happened to that car then?’
‘This way,’ Hancock said and led us out of the office and into an area of the warehouse with clean and well-equipped service bays. ‘The car would have been brought here and my guys would have stripped it for everything we could get — engine, headlamps, mirrors, seats, steering wheels, bumpers, doors. Basically, anything that wasn’t damaged. The small stuff goes into our warehouse and the big stuff goes out in the yard. You saw the racks with doors and bonnets on them.’
Hancock ran a very smooth operation. It was easy to picture the salvage business as a dirty business run by guys covered in grease and dirt, but Hancock had a twenty-first century grasp on the business. He’d taken the supermarket approach to selling scrap. It was pretty impressive.
‘That’s how you deal with the meat,’ Dylan said, ‘but what do you do with the bones?’
‘We crush them.’
‘You have a crusher here?’ Dylan asked with boyish enthusiasm. ‘I’ve always wanted to see one of those things.’
‘Well, let’s go see it. It’s not anything special, so don’t get too excited.’ Hancock walked over to one of the bay doors and hit a button. It rolled up into the roof.
‘Don’t spoil it. It must have some awesome force to squash a car into a three foot cube.’
Dylan played the dopey friend to a tee. It gave me the opening I needed.
‘I’ll give it a miss,’ I said. ‘Can I use your toilets?’
‘Sure. They’re back in the office, next to the reception area where I brought you in.’
The second Hancock, Steve and Dylan were out of sight, I sprinted back to the offices. I ignored the men’s toilet for the computer Hancock had left on. I closed the file he’d opened and double-clicked on the dark blue BMW I’d seen Derek drive out of here. The notations on the file said the car couldn’t be salvaged and was crushed in ‘as-purchased’ condition.
I searched for the other cars I’d seen transported from the warehouse. They all had the same notation: Unsalvageable condition. Crushed in ‘as-purchased’ condition.
I stared at the innocuous sounding statement. It sounded so believable. But none of it was. It was a deception. Was I looking at the information that got Alex killed? If I was, then I’d just made myself a bigger target.
‘You’re a big fat liar, Vic.’
Lap Twenty-One
On Friday night, Steve, Dylan and I got dolled up in suits and ties for the Clark Paints Formula Ford Championship banquet. The banquet was being held at the Priory House, a fairly plush hotel a few miles from the Stowe Park circuit. The championship trophy was being officially presented along with the other awards. As a top ten finisher in the overall standings, I would be receiving an award and prize money. Also, Myles was going to announce how much money had been raised for the safety fund. These were all good reasons to attend, but I had a different reason for going. I wanted to dangle a fresh carrot in front of Derek to draw him out. It had to be something big enough to lure him out from under the umbrella of Brennan’s protection. It was about time he came after me on my terms.
We took the Capri. Steve drove with Dylan alongside him while I rode in the back. Nobody talked. We were getting to the sharp end of things and we knew it. Everybody was lost in their own thoughts, which was fine with me. I wanted to think and I spent the drive staring out the small window on my side.
Hancock had been on my mind since we’d visited his scrap yard. He’d given me another piece of the puzzle. He was fixing up high end cars written off by the insurance companies, then selling with new identities. Derek was transporting the cars and his mates were doing the makeovers. Brennan provided protection. The last part of the puzzle was how these cars were getting sold. For that, I needed to follow the cars when they left Morgan’s workshop.