But that MacAlpine was more often right than wrong was sadly clear from the sight of that trembling figure hunched on the bench. If ever a man had gone over the top, had reached and passed the limit of endurance before tumbling over the precipice of self-abnegation and hapless acceptance of ultimate defeat, it was Johnny Harlow, the golden boy of the Grand Prix circuits, unquestionably, until that afternoon, the outstanding driver of his time and, it was being increasingly suggested, of all time: with last year’s world championship safely his and the current year’s, by any reasonable standards, almost inevitably his with half the Grand Prix races still to run, Harlow’s will and nerve would have appeared to have crumbled beyond recovery: it was plain to MacAlpine and Dunnet that the charred being who had been Isaac Jethou would haunt him for however long his days were to be.
Not that the signs hadn’t been there before for those with eyes to see them and most of the drivers and mechanics on the circuits had the kind of eyes that were required.. Ever since the second Grand Prix race of the season, which he had easily and convincingly won unaware of the fact that his brilliant younger brother had been forced off the track and had telescoped his car into a third of its length against the base of a pine tree at something over a hundred and fifty miles an hour, the signs had been there. Never a sociable or gregarious person, he had become increasingly withdrawn, increasingly taciturn and when he smiled, and it was rarely, it was the empty smile of a man who could find nothing in life to smile about. Normally the most icily calculating and safety-conscious of drivers, his impeccable standards had become eroded and his previous near obsession with safety dismayingly decreased while, contradictorily, he had consistently kept on breaking lap records on circuits throughout Europe. But he had continued on his record-breaking way, capturing one Grand Prix trophy after the other at the increasingly mounting expense of himself and his fellow competitors: his driving had become reckless and increasingly dangerous and the other drivers, tough and hardened professionals though they all were, began to go in fear of him for instead of disputing a corner with him as they would normally have done they had nearly all of them fallen into the habit of pulling well in when they saw his lime-green Coronado closing up on their driving mirrors. This, in all conscience, was seldom enough, for Harlow had an extremely simple race-winning formula-to get in front and stay there.
By now more and more people were saying out loud that his suicidally competitive driving on the racetracks signified not a battle against his peers but a battle against himself. It had become increasingly obvious, latterly painfully obvious, that this was one battle that he would never win, that this last ditch stand against his failing nerve could have only one end, that one day his luck would run out. And so it had, and so had Isaac Jethou’s, and Johnny Harlow, for all the world to see, had lost his last battle on the Grand Prix tracks of Europe and America. Maybe he would move out on the tracks again, maybe he would start fighting again: but it seemed certain then that no one knew with more dreadful clarity than Harlow that his fighting days were over.
For a third time Harlow reached out for the neck of the brandy bottle, his hands as unsteady as ever. The once-full bottle was now one-third empty but only a fraction of that had found its way down his throat, so uncontrollable were his movements. MacAlpine looked gravely at Dunnet, shrugged his heavy shoulders in a gesture of either resignation or acceptance and then glanced out into the pits. An ambulance had just arrived for his daughter and as MacAlpine hurried out Dunnet set about cleaning up Harlow’s face with the aid of a sponge and & bucket of water.
Harlow didn’t seem to care one way or another whether his face was washed: whatever his thoughts were, and in the circumstances it would have taken an idiot not to read them aright, his entire attention appeared to be concentrated on the contents of that bottle of Martell, the picture of a man, if ever there was one, who desperately needed and urgently sought immediate oblivion.
It was as well, perhaps, that both Harlow and MacAlpine failed to notice a person standing just outside the door whose expression clearly indicated that he would take quite some pleasure in assisting Harlow into a state of permanent oblivion. Rory, MacAlpine’s son, a dark curly-haired youth of a normally amiable even sunny, disposition had now a dark thundercloud on his face, an unthinkable expression for one who for years, and until only a few minutes previously, regarded Harlow as the idol of his life. Rory looked away towards the ambulance where his unconscious and blood-soaked sister lay and then the unthinkable was no longer so. He turned again to look at Harlow and now the emotion reflected in his eyes was as close to outright hatred as a sixteen-year-old was ever likely to achieve.
The official inquiry into the cause of the accident, held almost immediately afterwards, predictably failed to indict any one man as the sole cause of the disaster. Official race inquiries almost never did, including the notorious inquiry into that unparalleled Le Mans holocaust when seventy-three spectators were killed and no one was found to blame whereas it was common knowledge at the time that one man and one man only — dead now these many years — had been the person responsible for it.
This particular inquiry failed to indict, in spite of the fact that two or three thousand people in the main stands would unhesitatingly have laid the sole charge at the door of Johnny Harlow. But even more damning was the incontrovertible evidence supplied in the small hall where the inquiry was held by a TV playback of the entire incident. The projection screen had been small and stained but the picture clear enough and the sound effects all too vivid and true to life. In the re-run of the film — it lasted barely twenty seconds but was screened five times — three Grand Prix cars, viewed from the rear but being closely followed by the telescopic zoom lens, could be seen approaching the pits. Harlow, in his Coronado, was closing up on the leading car, a vintage privately-entered Ferrari that was leading only by virtue of the fact that it had already lost a lap.
Moving even more quickly than Harlow and well clear on the other side of the track was a works-entered fire-engine-red Ferrari driven by a brilliant Californian, Isaac Jethou.
In the straight Jethou’s twelve cylinders had a considerable edge over Harlow’s eight and it was clear that he intended to pass. It seemed that Harlow, too, was quite aware of this for his brake lights came on in keeping with his apparent intention of easing slightly and tucking in behind the slower car while Jethou swept by.
Suddenly, incredibly, Harlow’s brake lights went out and the Coronado swerved violently outwards as if Harlow had decided he could overtake the car in front before Jethou could overtake him. If that had been his inexplicable intention then it had been the most foolhardy of his life, for he had taken his car directly into the path of Isaac Jethou who, on that straight, could not have been travelling at less than 180 miles an hour and who in the fraction of the second available to him had never even the most remote shadow of a chance to take the only braking or avoiding action that could have saved him.
At the moment of impact, Jethou’s front wheel struck squarely into the side of Harlow’s front wheel. For Harlow, the consequences of the collision were, in all conscience, serious enough for it sent his car into an uncontrollable spin, but for Jethou they were disastrous. Even above the cacophonous clamour of engines under maximum revolutions and the screeching of locked tyres on the tarmac, the bursting of Jethou’s front tyre was heard as a rifle shot and from that instant Jethou was a dead man. His Ferrari, wholly out of control and now no more than a mindless mechanical monster bent on its own destruction, smashed into and caromed off the nearside safety barrier and, already belching gouts of red flame and black oily smoke, careered wildly across the track to strike the far side barrier, rear end first, at a speed of still over a hundred miles an hour.