The Way to Dusty Death. Alistair MacLean

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t answer immediately. There came the sound of an approaching racing engine and Harlow nodded towards the track. The others followed his line of sight. A lime-green Coronado flashed by but still Harlow stared out over the track. At least another fifteen seconds elapsed before the next car, Neubauer’s royal blue Cagliari came by. Harlow turned and looked at MacAlpine. Harlow’s normally impassive face had come as near as it was possible for it to register a degree of incredulity.

      ‘Pull him in? Good God, Mac, are you mad? Nikki’s got fifteen clear seconds now that I’m out. There’s no way he can lose. Our Signor Tracchia would never forgive me – or you – if you were to pull him in now. It’ll be his first Grand Prix – and the one he most wanted to win.’

      Harlow turned and walked away as if the matter was settled. Both Mary and Rory watched him go, the former with dull misery in her eyes, the latter with a mixture of triumph and contempt at which he was at no pains at all to conceal. MacAlpine hesitated, made as if to speak, then he too turned and walked away, although in a different direction. Dunnet accompanied him. The two men halted in a corner of the pits.

      MacAlpine said: ‘Well?’

      Dunnet said: ‘Well what, James?’

      ‘Please. I don’t deserve that from you.’

      ‘You mean, did I see what you saw? His hands?’

      ‘He’s got the shakes again.’ MacAlpine made a long pause then sighed and shook his head. ‘I keep on saying it. It happens to them all. No matter how cool or brave or brilliant – hell, I’ve said it all before. And when a man has icy calm and iron control like Johnny – well, when the break comes it’s liable to be a pretty drastic one.’

      ‘And when does the break come?’

      ‘Pretty soon, I think. I’ll give him one more Grand Prix. Do you know what he’s going to do now? Later tonight, rather – he’s become very crafty about it.’

      ‘I don’t think I want to know.’

      ‘He’s going to hit the bottle.’

      A voice with a very powerful Glasgow accent said: ‘The word is that he already has.’

      Both MacAlpine and Dunnet turned slowly round. Coming out of the shadows of the hut behind was a small man with an incredibly wizened face, whose straggling white moustache contrasted oddly with his monk’s tonsure. Even odder was the long, thin and remarkably bent black cigar protruding from one corner of his virtually toothless mouth. His name was Henry, he was the transporter’s old driver – long long past retiring age – and the cigar was his trademark. It was said that he occasionally ate with the cigar in his mouth.

      MacAlpine said without inflection: ‘Eavesdropping, eh?’

      ‘Eavesdropping!’ It was difficult to say whether Henry’s tone and expression reflected indignation or incredulity but in either event they were on an Olympian scale. ‘You know very well that I would never eavesdrop, Mr MacAlpine. I was just listening. There’s a difference.’

      ‘What did you say just now?’

      ‘I know you heard what I said.’ Henry was still splendidly unperturbed. ‘You know that he’s driving like a madman and that all the other drivers are getting terrified of him. In fact, they are terrified of him. He shouldn’t be allowed on a racetrack again. The man’s shot, you can see that. And in Glasgow, when we say that a man’s shot, we mean – ’

      Dunnet said: ‘We know what you mean. I thought you were a friend of his, Henry?’

      ‘Aye, I’m all that. Finest gentleman I’ve ever known, begging the pardon of you two gentlemen. It’s because I’m his friend that I don’t want him killed – or had up for manslaughter.’

      MacAlpine said without animosity: ‘You stick to your job of running the transporter, Henry: I’ll stick to mine of running the Coronado team.’

      Henry nodded and turned away, gravity in his face and a certain carefully controlled degree of outrage in his walk as if to say he’d done his duty, delivered his witch’s warning and if that warning were not acted upon the consequences weren’t going to be his, Henry’s, fault. MacAlpine, his face equally grave, rubbed his cheek thoughtfully and said: ‘He could be right at that. In fact, I have every reason for thinking he is.’

      ‘Is what, James?’

      ‘On the skids. On the rocks. Shot, as Henry would say.’

      ‘Shot by whom? By what?’

      ‘Chap called Bacchus, Alexis. The chap that prefers using booze to bullets.’

      ‘You have evidence of this?’

      ‘Not so much evidence of his drinking as lack of evidence of his not drinking. Which can be just as damning.’

      ‘Sorry, don’t follow. Can it be that you have been holding out on me, James?’

      MacAlpine nodded and told briefly of his duplicity in the line of duty. It was just after the day that Jethou had died and Harlow had shown his lack of expertise both in pouring and drinking brandy that MacAlpine had first suspected that Harlow had forgone his lifelong abstention from alcohol. There had been, of course, no spectacular drinking bouts, for those would have been automatically responsible for having him banned from the race-tracks of the world: a genius for avoiding company, he just went about it quietly, steadily, persistently and above all secretly, for Harlow always drank alone, almost invariably in out of the way places, usually quite remote, where he stood little or no chance of being discovered. This MacAlpine knew for he had hired what was practically a full-time investigator to follow him but Harlow was either extremely lucky or, aware of what was going on – he was a man of quite remarkable intelligence and must have suspected the possibility of his being followed – extremely astute and skilled in his avoidance of surveillance, for he had been tracked down only three times to sources of supply, small Weinstuben lost in the forests near the Hocken-heim and Nurburgring circuits. Even on those occasions he had been observed to be sipping, delicately and with what appeared to be commendable restraint, a small glass of hock which was hardly sufficient to blunt even the highly-tuned faculties and reactions of a Formula One driver: what made this elusiveness all the more remarkable was that Harlow drove everywhere in his flame-red Ferrari, the most conspicuous car on the roads of Europe. But that he went to such extraordinary – and extraordinarily successful – lengths to escape surveillance was, for MacAlpine, all the circumstantial evidence he required that Harlow’s frequent, mysterious and unexplained absences coincided with Harlow’s frequent and solitary drinking bouts. MacAlpine finished by saying that a later and more sinister note had crept in: there was now daily and incontrovertible evidence that Harlow had developed a powerful affinity for scotch.

      Dunnet was silent until he saw that MacAlpine apparently had no intention of adding to what he had said. ‘Evidence?’ he said, ‘What kind of evidence?’

      ‘Olfactory evidence.’

      Dunnet paused briefly then said: ‘I’ve never smelt anything.’

      MacAlpine said kindly: ‘That, Alexis, is because you are not capable of smelling anything. You can’t smell oil, you can’t smell fuel, you can’t smell burning tyres. How do you expect to be able to smell scotch?’

      Dunnet inclined his head in acknowledgment. СКАЧАТЬ