Алистер Маклин - The Way to Dusty Death

MacAlpine looked at Rory in a less than paternal fashion. ‘Is this true?’

Rory wiped his sleeve across his eyes, concentrated sullenly on the examination of the toes of his shoes and prudently said nothing.

‘Leave him to me, Johnny.’ MacAlpine didn’t look particularly angry or upset, just very very tired. ‘My apologies if I seemed to doubt you – I didn’t.’

Harlow nodded, left, returned to Dunnet’s room, closed and locked the door then, as Dunnet watched in silence, proceeded to search the room thoroughly. A few minutes later, apparently still not satisfied, he moved into the adjacent bathroom, turned a tap and the shower on to maximum then went out, leaving the door wide open behind him. It is difficult for even the most sensitive microphone to pick up with any degree of clarity the sound of human voices against a background of running water.

Without any by-your-leave, he searched through the outer clothing that Dunnet had been wearing. He replaced the clothing and looked at Dunnet’s torn shirt and the white band that a wrist watch had left on a sun-tanned wrist.

‘Has it occurred to you, Alexis,’ Harlow said, ‘that some of your activities are causing displeasure in certain quarters and that they are trying to discourage you?’

‘Funny. Bloody funny.’ Dunnet’s voice was, understandably, so thick and slurred that in his case the use of any anti-microphone devices was almost wholly superfluous. ‘Why didn’t they discourage me permanently?’

‘Only a fool kills unnecessarily. We are not up against fools. However, who knows, one day? Well, now. Wallet, loose change, watch, cuff-links, even your half-dozen fountain pens and car keys – all gone. Looks like a pretty professional roll job, doesn’t it?’

‘The hell with that.’ Dunnet spat blood into a handful of tissue. ‘What matters is that the cassette is gone.’

Harlow hesitated then cleared his throat in a diffident fashion.

‘Well, let’s say that a cassette is missing.’

The only really viable feature in Dunnet’s face was his unblemished right eye: this, after a momentary puzzlement, he used most effectively to glower at Harlow with the maximum of suspicion.

‘What the hell do you mean?’

Harlow gazed into the middle distance.

‘Well, Alexis, I do feel a little bit apologetic about this, but the cassette that matters is in the hotel safe. The one our friends now have – the one I gave to you – was a plant.’

Dunnet, with what little could be seen of his sadly battered face slowly darkening in anger, tried to sit up: gently but firmly Harlow pushed him down again.

Harlow said: ‘Now, now, Alexis, don’t do yourself an injury. Another one, I mean. They were on to me and I had to put myself in the clear or I was finished – although God knows I never expected them to do this to you.’ He paused. ‘I’m in the clear now.’

‘You’d better be sure of that, my boy.’ Dunnet had subsided but his anger hadn’t.

‘I’m sure. When they develop that film spool they’ll find it contains micro photos – about a hundred – of line drawings of a prototype gas turbine engine. They’ll conclude I’m as much a criminal as they are, but as my business is industrial espionage, there can be no possible conflict of interests. They’ll lose interest in me.’

Dunnet looked at him balefully. ‘Clever bastard, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am, rather.’ He went to the door, opened it and turned round. ‘Especially, it seems, when it is at other people’s expense.’

In the Coronado pits on the following afternoon a heavily panting MacAlpine and a still sadly battered Dunnet argued in low and urgent tones. The faces of both men were marked with worry.

MacAlpine made no attempt to conceal the savagery he felt inside him. He said: ‘But the bottle’s empty, man. Drained to the last drop. I’ve just checked. Jesus, I can’t just let him go out there and kill another man.’

‘If you stop him you’ll have to explain why to the press. It’ll be a sensation, the international sporting scandal of the last decade. It’ll kill Johnny. Professionally, I mean.’

‘Better have him killed professionally than have him kill another driver for real.’

Dunnet said: ‘Give him two laps. If he’s in the lead, then let him go. He can’t kill anyone in that position. If not, flag him in. We’ll cook up something for the press. Anyway, remember what he did yesterday with the same skinful inside him?’

‘Yesterday he was lucky. Today–’

‘Today it’s too late.’

Even at a distance of several hundred feet the sound of twenty-four Grand Prix racing engines accelerating away from the starting grid was startling, almost shattering, both in its unexpectedness and ear-cringing fury of sound. MacAlpine and Dunnet looked at each other and shrugged simultaneously. There seemed to be no other comment or reaction to meet the case.

The first driver past the pits, already pulling fractionally clear of Nicolo Tracchia, was Harlow in his lime-green Coronado. MacAlpine turned to Dunnet and said heavily: ‘One swallow does not make a summer.’

Eight laps later MacAlpine was beginning to question his ornithological expertise. He was looking slightly dazed while Dunnet was indulging in considerable eyebrow-lifting, Jacobson’s expression was not one indicative of any marked internal pleasure while Rory was positively scowling although manfully trying not to. Only Mary expressed her true emotion and that without inhibition. She looked positively radiant.

‘Three lap records gone,’ she said incredulously. ‘Three lap records in eight laps.’

By the end of the ninth lap the emotions of those in the Coronado pits, as registered by their facial expressions, had radically altered. Jacobson and Rory were, with difficulty, refraining from looking cheerful. Mary was chewing anxiously on her pencil. MacAlpine looked thunderous but the thunder was overlaid by deep anxiety.

‘Forty seconds overdue!’ he said. ‘Forty seconds! All the field’s gone past and he’s not even in sight. What in God’s name could have happened to him?’

Dunnet said: ‘Shall I phone the track-marshals’ checkpoints?’

MacAlpine nodded and Dunnet began to make calls. The first two yielded no information and he was about to make a third when Harlow’s Coronado appeared and drew into the pits. The engine note of the Coronado sounded perfectly healthy in every way, which was more than could be said for Harlow when he had climbed out of his car and removed his helmet and goggles. His eyes were glazed, and bloodshot. He looked at them for a moment then spread his hands: the tremor in them was unmistakable.

‘Sorry. Had to pull up about a mile out. Double vision. Could hardly see where I was going. Come to that, I still can’t.’

‘Get changed.’ The bleak harshness in MacAlpine’s voice startled the listeners. ‘I’m taking you to hospital.’

Harlow hesitated, made as if to speak, shrugged, turned and walked away. Dunnet said in a low voice: ‘You’re not taking him to the course doctor?’

‘I’m taking him to see a friend of mine. An optometrist of note but many other things besides. All I want him to do is a little job for me, a job I couldn’t get done in privacy and secrecy on the track.’

Dunnet said quietly, almost sadly: ‘A blood sample?’

‘Just one positive blood sample.’

‘And that will be the end of the road for Grand Prix’s superstar?’

‘The end of the road.’

For a person who might well have good reason for believing he had reached the end of his professional career Harlow, as he sat relaxed in his chair in a hospital corridor, seemed singularly unperturbed. Most unusually for him he was smoking a cigarette, the hand holding the cigarette as steady as if it had been carved from marble. Harlow gazed thoughtfully at the door at the far end of the corridor. Behind that door MacAlpine, his face registering a combination of disbelief and consternation, looked at the man seated across the desk from him, a benign and elderly bearded doctor in shirt sleeves.