Алистер Маклин - The Way to Dusty Death

The three of them caught sight of Harlow at almost the same instant as he saw them. MacAlpine immediately rose to his feet.

‘I’d be grateful, Alexis, if you could take Mary in to dinner. I’m going into the dining-room. I’m afraid if I were to stay–’

‘It’s all right, James. I understand.’

Harlow watched the calculated snub of the departing back without expression, an absence of outward feeling that quickly changed to a certain apprehension as he saw Mary bearing down on him. No question now as to whom the unspoken hostility had been directed. She gave the very distinct impression of having been waiting for him. That bewitching smile that had made her the sweetheart of the race tracks was, Harlow observed, in marked abeyance. He braced himself for what he knew was going to be a low but correspondingly fierce voice.

‘Must you let everybody see you like this? And in a place like this.’ Harlow frowned in puzzlement. ‘You’ve been at it again.’

He said: ‘That’s right. Go ahead. Wound an innocent man’s feelings. You have my worded bond – I mean my bonded word–’

‘It’s disgusting! Sober men don’t fall flat on their faces in the street. Look at the state of your clothes, your filthy hands. Go on! Just look at yourself.’

Harlow looked at himself.

‘Oh! Aha! Well, sweet dreams, sweet Mary.’

He turned towards the stairs, took five steps and halted abruptly when confronted by Dunnet. For a moment the two men looked at each other, faces immobile, then there was an almost imperceptible lift of Dunnet’s eyebrow. When Harlow spoke, his voice was very quiet.

He said: ‘We go now.’

‘The Coronado?’

‘Yes.’

‘We go now.’

Harlow drained his coffee – it was by now his invariable custom to breakfast alone in his bedroom – and crossed to the window. The famed Italian September sun was nowhere to be seen that morning. The overcast was very heavy, but the ground was dry and the visibility excellent, a combination making for ideal race track conditions. He went into the bathroom, opened the window to its fullest extent, removed the cistern cover, took out the scotch, turned on the hot water tap and systematically poured half the contents of the bottle into the basin. He returned the bottle to its hiding-place, sprayed the room very heavily with an airfresh aerosol and left.

He drove alone to the race track – the passenger seat in his red Ferrari was rarely occupied now – to find Jacobson, his two mechanics and Dunnet already there. He greeted them briefly and in very short order, overalled and helmeted, was sitting in the cockpit of his new Coronado. Jacobson favoured him with his usual grimly despondent look.

He said: ‘I hope you can give us good practice lap-time today, Johnny.’

Harlow said mildly: ‘I thought I didn’t do too badly yesterday. However, one can but try.’ With his finger on the starter button he glanced at Dunnet. ‘And where is our worthy employer today? Never known him to miss a practice lap before.’

‘In the hotel. He has things to attend to.’

MacAlpine did, indeed, have things to attend to. What he was attending to at that moment had by this time become almost a routine chore – investigating the current level of Harlow’s alcohol supply. As soon as he entered Harlow’s bathroom he realized that checking the level of scotch in the bottle in the cistern was going to be a mere formality: the wide open window and the air heavy with the scent of the aerosol spray made further investigation almost superfluous. However, investigate he did: even though he had been almost certain what to expect, his face still darkened with anger as he held the half empty bottle up for inspection. He replaced the bottle, left Harlow’s room almost at a run, actually ran across the hotel foyer, climbed into his Aston and drove off in a fashion that might well have left the astonished onlookers with the impression that he had mistaken the forecourt of the Villa-Hotel Cessni for the Monza circuit.

MacAlpine was still running when he arrived at the Coronado pits: there he encountered Dunnet who was just leaving them. MacAlpine was panting heavily. He said: ‘Where’s that young bastard Harlow?’

Dunnet did not reply at once. He seemed more concerned with shaking his head slowly from side to side.

‘God’s sake, man, where’s that drunken layabout?’ MacAlpine’s voice was almost a shout. ‘He mustn’t be allowed anywhere near that damned track.’

‘There’s a lot of other drivers in Monza who would agree with you.’

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘It means that that drunken layabout has just broken the lap record by two point one seconds.’ Dunnet continued to shake his head in continued disbelief. ‘Bloody well incredible.’

‘Two point one! Two point one! Two point one!’ It was MacAlpine’s turn to take up the head-shaking. ‘Impossible. A margin like that? Impossible.’

‘Ask the time-keepers. He did it twice.’

‘Jesus!’

‘You don’t seem as pleased as you might, James.’

‘Pleased. I’m bloody well terrified. Sure, sure, he’s still the best driver in the world – except in actual competition when his nerve goes. But it wasn’t driving skill that took him around in that time. It was Dutch courage. Sheer bloody suicidal Dutch courage.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘He’d a half-bottle of scotch inside him, Alexis.’

Dunnet stared at him. He said at length, ‘I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. He may have driven like a bat out of hell but he also drove like an angel. Half a bottle of scotch? He’d have killed himself.’

‘Perhaps it’s as well there was no one else on the track at the time. He’d have killed them, maybe.’

‘But – but a whole half-bottle!’

‘Want to come and have a look in the cistern in his bathroom?’

‘No, no. You think I’d ever question your word? It’s just that I can’t understand it.’

‘Nor can I, nor can I. And where is our world champion at the moment?’

‘Left the track. Says he’s through for the day. Says he’s got the pole position for tomorrow and if anyone takes it from him he’ll just come back and take it away from them again. He’s in an uppish sort of mood today, is our Johnny.’

‘And he never used to talk that way. That’s not uppishness, Alexis, it’s sheer bloody euphoria dancing on clouds of seventy proof. God Almighty, do I have a problem or do I have a problem.’

‘You have a problem, James.’

On the afternoon of that same Saturday MacAlpine, had he been in a certain rather shabby little side street in Monza, might well have had justification for thinking that his problems were being doubly or trebly compounded. Two highly undistinguished little cafés faced each other across the narrow street. They had in common the same peeling paint façade, hanging reed curtains, chequered cloth-covered sidewalk tables and bare, functional and splendidly uninspired interiors. And both of them, as was so common in cafés of this type, featured high-backed booths facing end-on to the street.

Sitting well back from the window in such a booth on the southern and shaded side of the street were Neubauer and Tracchia with untouched drinks in front of them. The drinks were untouched because neither man was interested in them. Their entire interest was concentrated upon the café opposite where, close up to the window and clearly in view, Harlow and Dunnet, glasses in their hands, could be seen engaged in what appeared to be earnest discussion across their booth table.

Neubauer said: ‘Well, now that we’ve followed them here, Nikki, what do we do now? I mean, you can’t lip-read, can you?’