Angel Confidential (13 page)

Modern cars are so boring, the classic car nut would say. For effect, you need a car with outstanding looks, they would claim. Why? To pull the birds? I don't think so. In my experience, women are far more sensible, and sensitive to their creature comforts. I've known none who actually got turned on by the
cramped, bony seats and the overwhelming smell of faded leather, Brylcreem, wet
dog and dust.

No, that wasn't the attraction. A better explanation could be found in the columns of the magazines Veronica was flipping through. The interviews with, and features on, the enthusiasts were full of statements such as: ‘Scraping off the underseal alone look the best part of a year ...' Or, ‘It needed new kingpins so I reamed them out myself …' And each statement would be made to glow with an almost erotic pride, if, that is, you found red oxide primer, semi-elliptic leaf springs, bushes or shackle pins, erotic. This wasn't about appealing to women, this was escaping from them, an excuse for men to behave badly in the garage, restoring rusted piles of metal whilst up to their wrists in oil and grease.

And the magazines even had the classic car equivalent of the soft-porn magazines' ‘Readers' Wives' column. Almost invariably, these were letters, with grainy black-and-white photographs of wrecked or abandoned cars found by the fan whilst on holiday. Check out this little beauty, say the accompanying letters. What a fender; look at the
hubcaps on her!

And invariably the photograph shows a barely-recognisable piece
of squashed metal. Fancy finding a Peugeot 304 after 20 years in a field in Kenya, gushes the text. Or the Standard Ensign in the drainage ditch in Cornwall, or the
World War II Kubelwagen on Crete? (Personally, I'd be more impressed if they had found the Ensign on Crete and the Kubelwagen in a lay-by on the Penzance ring road.) To judge from the holiday snaps sent in, virtually every British car of the 1950s and 1960s ended up somewhere in Greece, so why waste film on all those old ruins?

I had never understood the fascination. Vehicles were there to get you from A to B or, preferably, back from B in one piece, with as few people as possible knowing where A was. The only useful thing I had ever learned from any of the car magazines was from a story about a newish Porsche 911 found in a million-gallon lagoon of pig slurry. It had floated
to the top even though the windows had been
opened and the petrol cap removed before it was pushed in. Lesson to be learned: next time you want to scam the insurance company, open the front boot as well. The damn things are so well made, the boot traps enough air to raise it. (Another tip: don't push it in, drive it in so the engine is running when it goes under. That really buggers things up, and it's a write-off even if it reappears.)

‘What's the attraction?' Veronica asked from the back, tossing the last of the magazines on to the seat at her side. ‘For men, I mean?'

‘What? The attraction of cars?'

‘No, of collecting.'

‘Eh?'

‘You know, they're always collecting something. Cars, stamps, beer bottle labels. Bird-watching and train-spotting, they're like collecting as well.'

‘And women don't collect things?' I asked. I knew one who had an unrivalled collection of worn-once boxer shorts from airline pilots, but I didn't think that was what she meant.

‘Not like men.
Not obsessively. That's something peculiar to men.'

‘Well, I always believe in travelling light.'

‘Is that one of your Rules of Life?'

‘Yes,' I said, looking at her in Armstrong's mirror, and thinking maybe I should listen to myself more.

 

Sandpit Lodge was an impressive pile. Once.

If only one architect had been responsible, then with the best will in the world, he must have been on drugs. More likely, the place had been built piecemeal over the decades and at the whim of whatever retrospective fashion was in vogue, with a series of architects each determined not so much to outdo the previous one, as settle a score with him. Consequently, there was a turret here, a square tower of the type found in 19
th
Century breweries there, the odd splash of mock-Tudor stud work, and a Victorian west wing that probably had mad spinster aunts on a waiting list for rooms.

If it had had a sign saying ‘Not Used in the Filming
Brideshead Revisited
' I wouldn't have been surprised. Instead, it had one giving prices of admission for visitors, families, cars and coach parties. Then another, advertising cream teas available (summer only). And one advertising – for a modest extra charge – the availability of guided tours of the house. Having seen it from the outside, I had to admire their nerve. How much did they charge to let you out?

Because the house was such a mish-mash of styles (and I suspected that few of them were actually authentic), I doubted if the owner had run into trouble getting planning permission for the huge aircraft hangar of a building that loomed up out of the lawns to the left. The planner must have thought that as the house itself was so ghastly, a few thousand square feet of glass and aluminium couldn't make matters worse.

Above the sliding doors of the hangar was a cut-out sign about ten feet high saying CLASSIC CAR CENTRE. The graphic designer had done each letter without using the same typeface twice. Whatever he'd been drinking at the time, I fancied a double.

Between the hangar and the house was a gravel drive bulging into a semi-circle, bounded by a low, curved wall that I knew was called a ha-ha. I knew this because there was another sign saying: ‘Please Park ‘Em Pretty Against the Ha-Ha'. Someone had added, underneath in black fell-tip pen, ‘This is not a joke', and nobody had bothered to clean it off.

There was a gap in the ha-ha dead centre (actually, slightly off dead centre, to the right) and by it stood a wooden sentry box construction. On top of it, pointing down, was a handpainted sign in the shape of an arm and hand with extended forefinger, saying PAY HERE. It looked as if it had been stolen from a fun fair.

I parked Armstrong as instructed, but unlike the other dozen or so cars there, I reversed up to the ha-ha so I was pointing towards the exit and the B road we had taken after leaving Hatfield. (Rule of Life No. 277: Always park facing the way you'd make a quick exit.)

‘Impressive, isn't it?' said Veronica, climbing regally from the back of the cab.

‘Distinctive,' I conceded. Then I checked my watch. ‘We're early. Fancy a look around the car museum?'

‘Whatever for?'

‘Would you go to Longleat and not see the lions?'

She shrugged and followed me towards the pay box. At least she didn't ask if they had a lion museum at Longleat.

A small, skinny youth with dark curly hair bobbed out of the wooden kiosk like a jack-in-the-box as we approached. He had two old-fashioned ticket machines slung across his chest, bandoleero style, the sort bus conductors used to use – or so I've seen in old movies. One dispensed orange tickets, the other, blue. His hands poised over them like a gunfighter.

‘Classic Car Centre, or the unguided tour of the Lodge, sir? Or can I do you for both?' he chirped.

‘We're here to see Sir Drummond Rudgard,' I said.

He smiled at me.

‘The owner,' said Veronica unhelpfully. ‘On business.'

‘You'll save two pounds if you buy both tickets now,' he said, still smiling.

‘We're here to see Sir Drummond,' Veronica started indignantly. ‘And I don't think …'

The kid still smiled.

‘You've heard all this before, haven't you?' I eyeballed him.

‘Twice a day, three times Saturday and Sunday. And I've only worked here a month. You'd be amazed how many punters try and get in for free. They're here on business or delivering something or are personal friends of the management. The worst are the National Trust members. They try it on, then when they have to pay, ask for discount by producing their membership card.'

‘And I don't suppose this place is in the National Trust?'

‘Hey, come on. The Trust ain't that desperate. So what'll it be?'

‘Two tickets for the museum,' I conceded. ‘But we
really do have business with Sir Drummond, in about half an hour.'

He cranked out two orange tickets, and I had to pay as Veronica made no move to.

‘Half an hour will just about do you, sir,' he said as he counted out my change. ‘If you walk slowly.'

‘How slowly?' I asked.

‘Try limping.'

We had crunched halfway across the gravel before Veronica said: ‘What a rude youth. Do you think we should report him to Sir Drummond?'

‘Only for a pay rise. He's doing a good job. And I don't get the impression that there's a queue to take his place.'

As we approached the sliding doors of the museum hangar, it was obvious there was no-one to take our orange tickets. Nor were there any attendants or guides. The Classic Car Centre was very much a do-it-yourself operation.

Even the notices describing the cars on show were home-made, typed and then enlarged on a photocopier and covered with what looked like plastic kitchen film. But to be fair, the cars themselves looked to be in immaculate condition and clean enough to cook pizza on, though even thinking such a thing would probably induce hysteria in the true classic car fan.

Two-thirds of the way down the hangar was a sign saying ‘Commercial Vehicles', with the larger exhibits – old trucks with company names and slogans on the side. But the main display was of saloon cars, mostly British, though with odd foreigners, in two lines, each car at a slight diagonal. I counted 32 different models down one phalanx, and there were about the same down the other side of the hangar. Some crude guesswork and some shaky mental arithmetic gave me a net value of about £400,000-worth of cars under the one roof, and I had no idea what the commercial vehicles were worth. Sir Drummond may not believe in spending money on staff or graphic designers, but he certainly put his cash where his cars were.

There was no logic – to me anyway – to the order of display. As we walked down the central aisle, to our left were: a metallic silver blue Alvis (1961), a white Austin Healey ‘Frogeye' Sprite (1959), a Wolseley Hornet in racing green (1964), and a dark tan Vauxhall FD Victor, which the blurb on the sign in front of it told me had been voted Car of the 1967 Motor Show.

To our right, the first car was a 1962 Ford Zephyr, the Mark II mind you, and the blurb told us to note the two-tone blue paint job, the alloy wheels and the external metal sun visor. It didn't tell us why. Then came an American import, a 30-year-old Lincoln Continental with black and tan upholstery and a seven-litre engine. We learned it had been voted the seventh most luxurious car in the world in 1964, and so now we could sleep nights. Then came a bright red Triumph Herald 12/50 from 1965 and a black Austin A40 from 1963, the car that if invented 20 years later would have been marketed as a hot hatchback. Well, tepid hatchback anyway.

Beyond that lot stretched a proud line-up of Rileys, Austins, Fords, the odd Fiat and Citroen, even a Bentley or two. Okay, so there were a couple of classic designs there, but the majority of cars were the sort that, if you were behind them in a traffic jam, you'd ask yourself how the thing managed to stay on the road, then you'd drop a gear and overtake and forget it before it had gone from your mirror.

There were only two other visitors, a father and son way up the other end of the hangar. Their voices echoed in the spaces, and though I couldn't hear the words, the kid was bored. So was Veronica.

‘Is that it, then? You just look at them? Cars.'

‘What did you expect? Practical displays of ram raiding? An interactive display of hotwiring skills?'

‘Well, there's nothing here for the kids, is there? I mean …' She paused, then looked at me. ‘Did you just say hotwiring?'

I made a dance of looking around just to emphasise that there was no-one else within 50 yards. ‘Must have been me.'

‘You know how to hotwire a car?' Her eyes gleamed. Or it could have been the strip lights reflecting in her glasses. ‘Yes,' I said, knowing I'd regret it. ‘And I can hotwire aeroplanes too.'

‘Now you're having me on.' She all but wagged a finger at me.

‘No, seriously. They're actually easier than cars. Light aircraft, that is; you know, with a propeller at the front. Not a jumbo or anything.'

‘Could you teach me? To do a car, I mean?'

It was time to change the subject.

‘I think it's time to see Sir Drummond. You can tell him he's got a fascinating collection.'

‘But can you?'

‘Why do you need to know stuff like that?' I said as I turned to go.

‘Albert said he would teach me about the hardware.'

‘What hardware?'

‘Detective work these days is all hardware. Electronic listening devices, alarm systems, video surveillance, planting bugs, sweeping for bugs, all that stuff. I don't even know about cars. Or picking locks,' she added as an afterthought. ‘These are the tools of my trade and I need to learn about them.'