‘You want me to start now?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Tour hours.’ Jacobson was curt, offence given and taken. ‘Six at the most.’
MacAlpine nodded, took Dunnet by the arm, prepared to walk away, then halted. Tracchia and Rory were together talking in low indistinct voices but their words didn’t have to be understood, the rigid hostility in their expressions as they looked at Harlow and his bottle of brandy inside the hut were eloquent enough. MacAlpine, his hand still on Dunnet’s arm, moved away and sighed again.
‘Johnny’s not making too many friends today, is he?’
‘He hasn’t been for far too many days. And I think that here’s another friend that he’s about not to make.’
‘Oh Jesus.’ Sighs seemed to be becoming second nature to MacAlpine. ‘Neubauer does seem to ‘have something on his mind.’
The figure in sky-blue racing overalls striding towards the pits did indeed seem to have something on his mind. Neubauer was tall, very blond and completely Nordic in appearance although he was in fact Austrian. The No. 1 driver for team Cagliari — he had the word Cagliari emblazoned across the chest of his overalls — his consistent brilliance on the Grand Prix tracks had made him the acknowledged crown prince of racing and Harlow’s eventual and inevitable successor. Like Tracchia, he was a cool, distant man wholly incapable of standing fools at any price, far less gladly. Like Tracchia, his friends and intimates were restricted to a very small group indeed: it was a matter for neither wonder nor speculation that those two men, the most unforgiving of rivals on the race-tracks were, off-duty, close friends.
Neubauer, with compressed lips and cold pale-blue eyes glittering, was clearly a very angry man and his humour wasn’t improved when MacAlpine moved his massive bulk to block his way.
Neubauer had no option other than to stop: big man though he was MacAlpine was very much bigger. When he spoke it was with his teeth clamped together.
‘Out of my way.’
MacAlpine looked at him in mild surprise.
‘You said what?’
‘Sorry, Mr. MacAlpine. Where’s that bastard Harlow?’
‘Leave him be. He’s not well.’
‘And Jethou is, I suppose? I don’t know who the hell or what the hell Harlow is or is supposed to be and I don’t care. Why should that maniac get off scot-free? He is a maniac. You know it.
We all know it. He forced me off the road twice today, that could just as well have been me burnt to death as Jethou. I’m giving you warning, Mr. MacAlpine. I’m going to call a meeting of the GPDA and have him banned from the circuits.’
‘You’re the last person who can afford to do that, Willi.’ MacAlpine put his hands on Neubauer’s shoulders. the last person who can afford to put the finger on Johnny. If Harlow goes, who’s the next champion?’
Neubauer stared at him. Some of the fury left his face and he stared at MacAlpine in almost bewildered disbelief. When his voice came it was low, almost an uncertain whisper. ‘You think I would do it for that, Mr. MacAlpine?’
‘No, Willi, I don’t. I’m just pointing out that most others would.’
There was a long pause during which what was left of Neubauer’s anger died away. He said quietly: ‘He’s a killer. He’ll kill again.’ Gently, he removed MacAlpine’s hands, turned and left the pits. Thoughtfully, worriedly Dunnet watched him leave.
‘He could be right, James. Sure, sure, he’s won five Grand Prix in a row but ever since his brother was killed in the Spanish Grand Prix — well, you know.’
‘Five Grand Prix under his belt and you’re trying’ to tell me that his nerve is gone?’
‘I don’t know what’s gone. I just don’t know. All I know is that the safest driver on the circuits has become so reckless and dangerous, so suicidally competitive if you like, that the other drivers are just plain scared of him. As far as they are concerned, the freedom of the road is his, they’d rather live than dispute a yard of track with him. That’s why he keeps on winning.’
MacAlpine regarded Dunnet closely and shook his head in unease. He, MacAlpine, and not Dunnet, was the acknowledged expert, but MacAlpine held Dunnet and his opinions in the highest regard. Dunnet was an extraordinarily shrewd, intelligent and able person. He was a journalist by profession, and a highly competent one, who had switched from being a political analyst to a sports commentator for.the admittedly unarguable reason that there is no topic on earth so irretrievably dull as politics. The acute penetration and remarkable powers of observation and analysis that had made him so formidable a figure on the Westminster scene he had transferred easily and successfully to the race-tracks of the world. A regular correspondent for a British
national daily and two motoring magazines, one British, one American — although he did a remarkable amount of free-lance work on the side — he had rapidly established himself as one of the very few really outstanding motor racing journalists in the world. To do this in the space of just over two years had been a quite outstanding achievement by any standard. So successful had he been, indeed, that he had incurred the envy and displeasure, not to say the outright wrath, of a considerable number of his less gifted peers.
Nor was their minimal regard for him in any way heightened by what they sourly regarded as the limpet-like persistency with which he had attached himself to the Coronado team on an almost permanent basis. Not that there were any laws, written or unwritten, about this sort of behaviour, for no independent journalist had ever done this sort of thing before. Now that it had been done it was, his fellow-writers said, a thing that simply was not done. It was his job, they maintained and complained, to write in a fair and unbiased fashion on all the cars and all the drivers in the Grand Prix field and their resentment remained undiminished when he pointed out to them, reasonably and with unchallengeable accuracy, that this was precisely what he did. What really grieved them, of course, was that he had the inside track on the Coronado team, then the fastest burgeoning and most glamorous race company in the business: and it would have been difficult to deny that the number of off-track articles he had written partly about the team but primarily about Harlow would have made up a pretty fair-size volume. Nor had matters been helped by the existence of a book on which he had collaborated with Harlow.
MacAlpine said: ‘I’m afraid you’re right, Alexis. Which means that I know you’re right but I don’t even want to admit it to myself. He’s just terrifying the living daylights out of everyone.
And out of me. And now this.’
They looked across the pits to where Harlow was sitting on a bench just outside the shelter.
Uncaring whether he was observed or not, he half-filled a glass from a rapidly diminishing brandy bottle. One did not have to have eyesight to know that the hands were still shaking: diminishing though the protesting roar of the crowd still was, it was still sufficient to make normal conversation difficult: nevertheless, the Castanet rattle of glass against glass could be clearly heard. Harlow took a quick gulp from his glass then sat there with both elbows on his knees and stared, unblinkingly and without expression, at the wrecked remains of his car.
Dunnet said: ‘And only two months ago he’d never touched the hard stuff in his life. What are you going to do, James?’
‘Now?’ MacAlpine smiled faintly. ‘I’m going to see; Mary. I think by this time they might let me in to see her.’ He glanced briefly, his face seemingly impassive, around the pits, at Harlow lifting his glass again, at the red-haired Rafferty twins looking almost as unhappy as Dunnet, and at Jacobson, Tracchia and Rory wearing; uniform scowls and directing them in uniform directions, sighed for the last time, turned and walked heavily away.