‘Where are you? I’ve just left your hotel.’
McMahon heard a groan.
‘Are you all right? You don’t sound it.’
‘Not really,’ he breathed.
‘What happened? Where are you?’
McMahon heard a street name and a landmark. She had to ask her driver which part of Moscow it was in. She asked: ‘What are you doing there?’
‘I’ve got some evidence,’ he wheezed.
‘You sound dreadful. Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m hurt.’
Twenty minutes later McMahon's Mercedes pulled up to the kerb by a small town park near the Avtozavodskaya Hotel. She spotted Straker sitting on a wooden bench, leaning over to his left, a seriously uncomfortable expression on his face.
Climbing out, McMahon crossed the pavement. ‘God, what happened to you?’
He gave no reply.
She had to help him to stand.
Straker, with McMahon taking a fair amount of his weight, shuffled across the pavement to the open car door, groaning as he lowered himself into the back seat. McMahon rounded the back of the car and climbed in the other side.
‘What the hell happened?’ she asked.
‘I was hit by a passing car,’ he said, keeping the explanation as uncomplicated as possible. ‘Have you got any painkillers?’
After a question in Russian, the driver reached across and produced some from the glove compartment. Straker swallowed a handful dry.
‘We need to get you to a doctor,’ she stated.
Straker grunted. ‘No. Need to get to the motor home – there's something you all have to see.’
McMahon made a phone call to her office at Brandeis Gertner. She instructed a fee-earning colleague to clear a visit to the Zhar-ptitsa Autodrom.
Going against the rush-hour traffic, they made good progress through Moscow.
McMahon's phone rang a short while later.
‘Good,’ she said ringing off afterwards. ‘For some reason we’ve achieved quicker authorization to enter the circuit this time. We can go straight in. How are you now?’
Straker nodded more freely then he would have done fifteen minutes before. The painkillers were beginning to work.
Helped by McMahon, Straker climbed awkwardly up into the motor home. He found the Ptarmigan team already assembled. It was a quarter to nine.
‘God, Matt, are you all right?’ asked Backhouse looking at Straker's dishevelled state.
He didn’t answer. Pulling Sabatino's phone from his pocket, Straker said: ‘I want to show you something. Can we link this up to one of the screens?’
Backhouse's expression changed markedly: ‘Why? What have you found?’
A minute or two later Sabatino's phone was connected up. Everyone gathered around to look.
Straker explained slowly: ‘I only had snatched conversations yesterday with Tahm and Remy. Both, though, were utterly clear in their opinions: there was nothing wrong with Remy's car.’ He paused to breathe, Straker's face contorting as the movement in his chest pained his ribs. ‘Neither did Tahm have any reservations about where she had been trying to go – wide – at Turn Eleven. He saw nothing wrong with her attempting to go round the outside. In view of what happened, then, the crash didn’t seem right. There was an inconsistency – a conflict – between their opinions and what happened.
‘So this morning, I “went for a run”.’ Straker didn’t turn to face McMahon. ‘I ran through a public park,’ he said as the map he had cobbled together appeared on the screen. ‘By chance, I happened to get close to this point here,’ he said, and pointed to the grassy bank.
‘Isn’t that the crash site?’ asked McMahon in a strained tone.
‘While in the public area,’ Straker continued, ‘I was able to examine the point of Sabatino's impact,’ with which he showed them a photograph. The first image looked down the bank towards the fence. ‘This is the line of her approach to where she crashed,’ he said, pointing further up the image to the end of the Hermitage Straight. ‘She got to here, expecting to turn left’ – indicating to the right across the image as they looked at it – ‘and round Turn Eleven. Instead, as we know, she came straight off,’ he said running his finger straight down the picture, ‘going straight on at the corner, over the kerbstones, across the gravel trap, to hit the tyre wall – here – did her somersault and came through the wire mesh fence, hitting it right – here – puncturing the perimeter, and came to rest about where my feet were when I took this.’
All eyes were glued to the screen.
‘On my “run”,’ Straker continued, ‘I wanted to look at one specifc thing. To get there, I had to drop down the grassy bank and go through the hole in the fence.’
There was an air of expectation in the motor home.
‘Getting there, I had to place my feet carefully,’ he said, flicking to his next image. ‘I had to keep looking down. When I did, I caught sight of the ripped end of the mesh. You’re all engineers: tell me, what forces acted on the wire when Sabatino struck it?’
‘Tensile,’ said Backhouse.
‘Stretching it, then,’ summarized Straker. ‘And what happens to wire when you stretch it?’
‘It gets thinner and thinner.’
