"MacLean, Alistair - The Way to Dusty Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

"Please, Johnny."

"Well, I suppose that's better than "Oh, Johnny". In spite of all that's passed, I believe he still does. Please don't tell him that I told you because I said I'd tell no one. Promise?"

"Promise."

"Your father hasn't been very communicative in the past two months. Understandably. And I hardly felt I was in a position to ask him questions. No progress, no trace of her, no message since she left your Marseilles home three months ago?"

"Nothing, nothing." If she'd been the type to wring her hands she'd have done just that. "And she used to phone every day she wasn't with us, write every week and now we -- "

"And your father has tried everything?"

"daddy's a millionaire. Don't you think he would have tried everything?"

"I should have thought so. So. You're worried. What can I do?"

Mary briefly drummed her fingers on the table and looked up at him. Her eyes were masked in tears. She said: "You could remove his other main worry."

"Me?"

Mary nodded.

At that precise moment MacAlpine was very actively concerned in investigating his other main worry. He and Dunnet were standing outside a hotel bedroom door, with MacAlpine inserting a key in the lock. Dunnet looked around him apprehensively and said: "I don't think the receptionist believed a word you said."

"Who cares?" MacAlpine turned the key in the lock. "I got Johnny's key, didn't I?"

"And if you hadn't?"

"I'd have kicked his damned door in. I've done it before, haven't I?"

The two men entered, closed and locked the door behind them. Wordlessly and methodically, they began to search Harlow's room, looking equally in the most likely as unlikely places - and in a hotel room the number of places available for concealment to even the most imaginative is very limited. Three minutes and their search was over, a search that had been as rewarding as it was deeply dismaying. The two men gazed down in a brief and almost stunned silence at the haul on Harlow's bed -- four full bottles of scotch and a fifth half full. They looked at each other and Dunnet summed up their feelings in a most succinct fashion indeed.

He said, "Jesus!"

MacAlpine nodded. Unusually for him, he seemed at a total loss for words. He didn't have to say anything for Dunnet to understand and sympathize with his feelings for the vastly unpleasant dilemma in which MacAlpine now found himself. He had committed himself to giving Harlow his last chance ever and now before him he had all the evidence he would ever require to justify Harlow's instant dismissal.

"dunnet said: "so what do we do?"

"We take that damn poison with us, that's what we do." MacAlpine's eyes were sick, his low voice harsh with strain.

"But he's bound to notice. And at once. From what we know of him now the first thing he'll do on return is head straight for the nearest bottle."

"Who the hell cares what he does or notices? What can he do about it? More importantly, what can he say about it? He's not going to rush down to the desk and shout: "I'm Johnny Harlow. Someone's just stolen five bottles of scotch from my room." He won't be able to do or say a thing."

"Of course he can't But he'll still know the bottles are gone. What's he going to think about that?"

"Again, who cares what that young dipsomaniac thinks? Besides, why should it have been us. If we had been responsible, he'd expect the heavens to fall in on him the moment he returns. But they won't. We won't say a word -- yet. Could have been any thief posing as a member of the staff. Come to -that, it wouldn't have been the first genuine staff member with a leaning towards petty larceny."

"so our little bird won't sing?"