‘There was a director named … just one.’
Straker stayed silent.
‘I assumed he would be one of those professional company secretary — trustee — director — types?’ Karen went on. ‘I made some further enquiries around Vaduz. And that’s when I struck gold.’
‘How?’
‘This guy’s only ever named with the interests of one other client.’
‘Who?’
‘A Swiss oil company … Helveticoil.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘You probably won’t have. But you will have heard of its owner.’
‘Who’s that?’
She paused again. ‘None other than … Avel … Obrenovich!’
‘Shit — no!’
There was silence on the phone.
‘Matt?’
‘Karen, that’s brilliant work. You might just have blown this whole thing wide open.’
Straker continued his march to the office, buoyed up once more. Before he had the chance to think through the ramifications of Karen’s discoveries, his phone went again. This time it was Oliver Treadwell.
‘How soon can you get up to the Ptarmigan factory?’ he asked.
Straker heard an edge to the Strategy Director’s voice. ‘As soon as you like. Why? What’s happened?’
‘We’ve found the cause of Helli’s crash.’
Straker sensed the answer was sinister. ‘What was it?’
‘It would be better to show you — in person. I should warn you, though … it’s not good news.’
THIRTY-FOUR
Just under two hours later, having hammered his Honda Civic up the M40, Straker was standing in the loading bay of the Ptarmigan factory. Treadwell led him over to a temporary workbench, set up for the purposes of the investigation. Straker still had no inkling of what was coming.
Treadwell had laid out two component fragments from Cunzer’s car on the work surface. ‘This is what we’ve found,’ he said gravely.
On the table were two things. Straker understood one of them to be a wishbone — a V-shaped boomerang-looking component made of carbon fibre, part of the car’s suspension. The other, he would hazard a guess, was a section of exhaust.
‘This is what we believe caused Helli’s crash,’ said Treadwell seriously, lifting up the V-shaped component. ‘These wishbones are made of carbon fibre — a lightweight, strong material. But it has a drawback…’
‘… it won’t take the thread of a screw,’ offered Straker, remembering his tour with Andy Backhouse.
‘Precisely — the stuff just crumbles. The only way to fix it to other components and materials, therefore, is glue.’
‘Okay.’
‘So on the wishbones — to fix the V-shaped spars at either end — we fit metal lugs, or flexures. These flexures are then used to bolt the wishbone to the wheel assembly at one end, and to the chassis mount on the other.’
‘And the flexures are held to the spars by the glue?’
‘Except that here, on Helli’s car, the glue on the chassis flexure of the wishbone has failed.’
‘Does it do that?’
Treadwell’s face looked even blacker. ‘Not normally, no. In any case, this was no wear-and-tear failure.’
It was Straker’s turn to look grave. ‘Why? What’s happened to it?’
‘It’s been melted.’
‘What do you mean — been — melted?’
Treadwell placed the wishbone back down on the table top and picked up the other component lying on the workbench. ‘On our cars,’ he said, ‘the exhaust system runs very close to the chassis-mounting of the lower rear wishbones. We can do that because we heavily insulate the exhaust with a special silicon-based polymer — as you see, here,’ he said pointing to the lagging around the pipe.
Straker leaned in and studied the casing. But then he spotted something else. And leant in closer.
There seemed to be a tiny, ragged-edged hole through the metal tubing and insulation. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘That’s not machine made?’
Treadwell’s face told him he had hit the mark. ‘It isn’t,’ said the Strategy Director. ‘It’s not meant to be there.’
Straker frowned. ‘What’re the consequences of that hole? You talked about the wishbone first — I’m guessing there’s some kind of cause and effect here?’
Treadwell nodded at Straker’s quick thinking. ‘That hole, even that small, could have, over time, released heat — enough heat, given its precise location, to melt the carbon fibre glue. Hot gas had been escaping from the exhaust — straight onto the metal flexure on the end of the wishbone.’
Straker ducked his head down to look at the hole in the exhaust pipe again, and even rubbed a finger over it. His mind was already whirring with the inevitable question: ‘Okay, Ollie,’ he said. ‘How did that hole come about?’
Treadwell now looked like he was in mourning. ‘We’ve never had a failure in that exhaust system. Not one. That’s not to say we couldn’t — but we haven’t yet. In any case, a natural failure wouldn’t happen right there — it’s not subjected to that much heat- or pressure loading.’
‘So you’re saying it didn’t just give out — you’re saying it was made?’
Treadwell nodded.
‘Deliberately?’
Treadwell nodded again.
‘We’re working on determining how it was made — but that hole, in that exact location, is utterly suspicious.’
Straker straightened up. ‘Let’s suppose someone did make this hole. What could they have expected to happen because of it?’
‘One thing — and one thing only. Suspension failure. Melting that glue would inevitably degrade the wishbone. That wishbone giving out would completely degrade the rear axle. Any rear axle failure would collapse the back end, rendering the car undriveable.’
‘And what would be the consequences?’
‘Depends on the speed the car was going at the moment it failed. At high speed — as in Monaco — we saw the results all too clearly.’
‘You think that’s what the saboteurs were going for?’
Treadwell shook his head. ‘Possibly, if they’re psychotic. To do us straightforward competitive harm, they didn’t need it to fail quite so spectacularly. Even at a slow speed, suspension failure would still degrade the car completely. We’d have been significantly inconvenienced — because of the time and work it would take to replace it. It would have easily disrupted Qualifying or our race, had the car survived that long. So — no — I don’t think they minded, really, when it gave out. Any amount of use — even over several sessions — would have taken its toll on the glue, and, certainly over the course of a race weekend, would have provided enough cumulative heat to degrade it to the point of failure at some point.’
Both men fell silent as the malice behind all this sunk in.
‘These bastards are up to more than just interfering with our electronics,’ said Straker almost to himself.
‘And, again, it’s clever, Matt,’ said Treadwell. ‘This interference was so small and hidden we’d be unlikely to see it — as, indeed, we didn’t during Andy’s checks in Monaco. And, a broken suspension could be so easily dismissed as mechanical failure or driver error — especially with the unforgiving bumps, barriers and kerbstones in Monte-Carlo. Who wouldn’t suspect a young driver like Helli of hitting something around that circuit over the course of a weekend? As a way of attacking us — without immediately arousing suspicion — this sabotage, along with the radio jamming, is fiendishly clever.’
‘We should be in no doubt, then,’ said Straker as a conclusion. ‘These people are deadly serious about wanting to do us harm.’