THE next day was another beauty. The sun streamed through the freshly cleaned high windows in Sandy’s bedroom on the third floor. Mind you, it could have been snowing and thirty below zero with a howling wind. It still would have been a beautiful day to me.
We were a little shy with each other at first, but over a hearty bacon and egg breakfast that I wolfed down in her kitchen, we were both soon talking a mile a minute.
I remembered that I was to join JP at Britfit to check out the Lagonda.
“I’ll stock up on some things for here, Conn, and then I’ll collect Jane later this afternoon. Why don’t you come back here for dinner?”
“I’d better get over to Isabelle’s myself and change … how about 7 or so tonight?”
“Perfect … Conn … I know Jane can be a bit of a pill sometimes …”
“Don’t worry. We’ll take it easy.”
We’d agreed on this already, murmuring until late, bathed in moonlight, naked under the covers. There was no rush to cast a relationship in stone, and Sandy’s daughter was going to need some time to get used to me. The dinners we’d shared at Isabelle’s obviously didn’t seem to count. At least she’d settled reasonably well into the public school that Sandy had enrolled her in near the flat.
When I got to Britfit, Michelle and JP were already waiting inside, sitting in Marjorie’s cubbyhole office with coffees in front of them from the ubiquitous chain down the street.
“Hey boss … hey, we missed you Friday night. We were finished with my case at the night court very fast and we met up with the gang at the pub after. But you weren’t there. Where did you go?”
“A friend came by and took me to Chinatown to meet some people. I really didn’t have any choice in the matter. Did you have a good evening?”
“Oui, oui … we closed the doors there,” JP said grinning, then turned serious.
“Conn, I must thank you again, we both do. I will pay you for your lawyer’s time, it must have cost …”
“We’ll worry about that later, JP. Derek will send me a bill and we’ll figure something out. Perhaps you can put in some extra hours at a reduced rate … Let’s leave it for now. The main thing is you’re in the clear.”
“Bien, let’s go see this car,” Michelle said.
We trooped down the back staircase to the basement of the shop. Reg and Dougald had simply pushed the Lagonda down the back ramp, and it was still covered with its ragged tarp.
“Okay, we need more lighting. JP, bring down some work lights and we’ll be able to see better.”
With strategically placed work lights plugged in to augment the flickering florescent lights in the basement ceiling, JP and I pulled the tarp off the car and stood back. Michelle clattered down the inside steps from the main shop floor with JP’s digital camera and a notepad.
We were looking at a twelve-foot-long, massive piece of motoring history. Aside from the comparatively dainty cycle fenders, the body tub of the car was square and quite plain. The car was the size of a half-ton truck, the wheels, even with flattened tires, as high as my middle, the top of the door as high as my chest. Once dark green, the dusty coachwork was dented here and there, but I couldn’t see any corrosion to speak of. These cars were often panelled partly in aluminum, very expensive for the time, but befitting a hand-built pedigreed sports car for gentlemen. We walked around it, slowly.
The number 18 was stencilled onto faded white roundels on the doors. The front section of the four-seat interior was dominated by a massive leather-wrapped steering wheel, and looked intact with dusty, stained, torn and creased black leather seats for driver and navigator. Judging from some circular holes in the dashboard facing, a few of the instruments had been removed, which was a pity. There was no windscreen in place, but there were fittings on the cowl where a folding type of windscreen would go.
We sprayed the folding bonnet’s hinges and latches with lubricant, and opened up the engine compartment from the driver’s side since the passenger’s side bonnet seemed melted onto the remains of the outside exhaust manifold. The motor looked complete, with two gigantic Skinner’s Union carbs, and lots of greened-over copper and brass piping to the radiator and elsewhere. Other parts, what appeared to be the starter and water pump, were even darker, likely bronze. No expense had been spared in this car’s manufacture.
We undid, with some difficulty, the rear tonneau cover behind the rear bench seat to reveal a tattered black canvas convertible top, neatly stowed but cracked along the fold lines. Tucked underneath it, we saw the removed windscreen, glass still intact.
At the back, JP managed to lever open the boot, again after we lubricated the seized hinges and locking lever. Inside, a battered wooden box contained the missing instruments from the dashboard.
I blew out a breath.
“Well, this is a bit of luck. It looks like a complete car, which must be amazing in itself. Let’s take some more photos.”
JP had done some research on the Internet, and found a British Lagonda club that had posted on its web site some guidance on serial number locations. By about 3 p.m. we’d basically been all over the car finding numbers on the firewall and engine block. Michelle recorded them all carefully and JP photographed them in situ along with the entire rest of the car, concentrating mostly on the bodywork and engine.
He was keen to contact the Lagonda club in Britain right away, providing them with serial numbers and photos with which the car’s history could be traced.
“Let’s talk to Derek, first, JP. I think we would want some kind of legally binding undertaking from the club that they’d keep news of this find to themselves, for now. Just to be on the safe side.”
We turned our attention to the rest of the car. There was a glove box in the dashboard that contained nothing but mouse droppings. Rummaging around in the boot, JP found a couple of rusted spanners, a wooden mallet for loosening the knockoff wheel nuts, and a foot pump for the tires, but no manuals or other written material, which would have been helpful.
It was Michelle who noticed a map pocket set into the moss-covered passenger side door trim and fished out a blackand-white photograph. Despite the extra work lights we’d set up in the basement, it was still shadowy. We replaced the tarp over the car, retrieved the work lights, and headed back up to the office area where there was better lighting.
Michelle placed the photo on the blotter on my desk and I pulled a magnifying glass out of my desk drawer so we could take a better look.
The photo was small, only two by three inches, but clear and crisply black and white as the day it was processed over seventy years ago. Presumably it had been tucked away in the car’s map pocket for that length of time, protected from sunlight or anything else that would cause the image to fade.
Clearly shown was a front three-quarters view of what appeared to be the car we now had in our basement. A figure with legs crossed at the ankles, left arm bent, leaned his left elbow on the right, or an English car’s driver’s side, door. This figure had a huge black mustache and a grin on his face. Dressed in a full motoring coat with gauntlets covering his hands and wrists, he wore a flat cap pulled down to one side at a jaunty angle.
Michelle turned the photo over. On the back, still fairly legible, was “LC, Bklds, Nov9/37” in faded black ink from a fountain pen.
“Quoi? What does it mean?” JP asked.
“Bklds could be Brooklands, which is a racing track in England. I think it’s in use again now for historic car racing. It must be one of the oldest tracks in the world. The numbers? Must be November 9, 1937, when the photo was taken, and I’m betting the LC initials stand for the name of the man in the photo.”
“England? But ’ow did the car get to Quebec?” Michelle asked.
“This was an expensive car at the time, virtually hand-built, and you’d have to be a rich man to own it anyway. If he wanted to race it, he could transport it anywhere he wanted by ship or plane. All it took, then as now, is money.”
“But he is … who?” asked JP.
I looked at the photo again. There was something familiar about the face, something that said “movies.”
“I don’t know, but I bet I know someone who does.”
I shooed them out of the shop, reminding JP that I wanted to talk to Derek first before we contacted the club in Britain about this car.
“But why don’t you speak to Michelle’s uncle, JP? Tell him what we plan to do and make sure he’s comfortable with it.”
“Okay, boss, see you tomorrow.”
I parked the Land Rover around the back and locked the rear compound gate before heading the Mini Cooper south to my flat. By now, 4 p.m., it was cooling off slightly from the day’s high of nearly twenty degrees Celsius, but it was still a gloriously sunny and warm afternoon. I wound down the windows of the Cooper at a stoplight, thinking that the new owner of my Austin Healey, due to collect the car around 5 this afternoon, had a wonderful inaugural drive in store for himself.
Traffic was still light. I cleared the Hunt Club intersection and by the time I was past the Fallowfield Road turnoff I was better than half-way home. I had the Cooper in fourth gear, humming along at about eighty kilometers an hour down the old Prescott highway.
The car was equipped with a radio below the dashboard shelf, and I fiddled with the sixties-era tuning dial while keeping one eye on the road. Mini Coopers of this vintage have go-kart-like direct steering that is rewardingly delivered through an almost flatly positioned steering wheel much like that of a bus. It’s easy to let the car get away from you.
I’d found a station, straightened up, and glanced in the tiny mirror to see a massive grill filling up the entire view. Some madman in a hurry was only a foot away from the diminutive Cooper’s rear end.
Irritated, I checked ahead for oncoming traffic, saw that it was clear, stuck my arm out of the open driver’s side window and waved the sedan driver to pass me. He didn’t. I felt a bump as he nudged the Cooper’s low-to-the-ground rear bodywork, then he backed off.
I couldn’t believe it. I tried to make eye contact in my driving mirror, but such was the extreme height difference between the cars, I couldn’t see above the sedan’s lower windshield. I could just make out the driver’s chin in the Cooper’s vibrating, blurring mirror, but that was all. Enough to see, though, that he was grinning and the sedan was staying right on my tail.
I downshifted the Cooper into third and put my foot to the gas pedal, shrieking the little car up to almost 100 kph and 5,000 rpm in a matter of seconds, then slamming it back into fourth, quickly reaching 130 kph. The sedan stayed right with me, still filling the mirror, even closer if possible.
At this point, the Cooper’s twin-carbed 1275 cc engine was howling at almost full revolutions. We were fast approaching a sweeping right hander with a line of cars approaching in the opposite northbound lane. If I pulled over onto the right shoulder at this speed, I was likely to flip the car on the gravel.
Coming rapidly up ahead, to my left, across the northbound lane, was the entrance to a strip mall. I made up my mind. Whoever this driver was, and I had an idea who he was, he was going to punt the Cooper into the oncoming traffic.
I swept the Cooper over to my left into the lane of northbound oncoming traffic and hit the foot brake hard. As the Cooper rapidly slowed, the sedan, its driver obviously surprised by my maneuver, swept past to my right in the southbound lane. Lights flashed from the black SUV heading straight for me in the northbound lane. Nearly at the entrance to the strip mall, I released the foot brake, yanked up the handbrake which locked the Cooper’s rear wheels, pressed my foot on the accelerator after downshifting into second and started twirling the steering wheel to turn the front drive wheels to the left.
The little car spun sideways into the strip mall entrance with inches to spare from being hammered into scrap by the oncoming northbound SUV, the driver of which was now pounding his horn as well as flashing his lights. I managed to correct the slewing Cooper and somehow avoided curbs at the strip mall entrance, all four tires yowling and smoking in protest. The car finally rocked to a stop facing back toward the highway, engine stalled. I leapt from the Cooper, and ran to the roadway, just in time to see the sedan, a late model gray GM product, disappear around a bend about two hundred yards away, still going at full tilt.
“What are you, nuts?” the voice said behind me.
A very angry male in his late thirties, about my height, was staring at me, still shaking. He’d pulled his northbound SUV over onto the shoulder and was panting from trotting back to the strip mall entrance.
I held both my hands up. “I’m sorry. The idiot behind me was right on my tail and wasn’t letting go.”
“We nearly had a head-on …”
It took awhile, but I let him vent and he finally wound down. His small son had trotted up to join him.
“Jeez, mister, how did you do that?”
I looked over at his father, whose look of rage had gradually diminished somewhat to just plain anger.
“It’s called a handbrake turn. You can only really do it with a small front-wheel drive car like this. But don’t try it at home.”
They left, the father still muttering. I walked around the Cooper and saw that the twelve-inch radials had all held onto their rims despite the punishment. The upright trunk lid was only slightly dented from the sedan’s punt. If there had been cars waiting to exit the strip mall, or pedestrians strolling along the northbound shoulder … I shuddered.
I got into the Cooper and started it, flipping the interior heater on full blast to help draw off the excessive heat caused by the high revving I’d put the car’s engine through. I turned the radio off and sat a minute.
I had only been able to glimpse the fast-moving sedan heading south in the distance, with no chance of seeing a single letter or number on its rear licence plate. But to me it looked very much like the car I had noticed on Sandy’s street in Old Ottawa South yesterday: a gray, late-model Chevrolet – a government car.