Much disappointed I made my way back to the main road and got on a bus that took me to Regent Street. At the last stop before Piccadilly Circus I left it and went up Vigo Street to the back entrance of Albany. It was there I meant to take my next call, and one Laurie Bullingdon, if at home, was to be the unwitting object of my attentions.
Laurie was another very old friend of mine, and one of the finest people I had ever met. While still a young man he had come into a considerable fortune and apart from serving for a few years in the Guards—and of course rejoining for the period of the war—he had never done anything. But no one ever blamed him for that because he was always doing things for other people—including lending them money which he rarely got back.
Apart from the fact that he dressed extremely well, collected beautifully-bound books, and loved to give the friends who went to dine with him the finest wines obtainable, he was not extravagant personally. Those tastes were typical of the man; for he detested this hustling modern world and quite clearly ought to have lived a century and a half ago. It was therefore most fitting that he should live in Albany, that strange enchanting relic of Regency days—probably the first flats ever built in London but still lying hidden and unchanged between Vigo Street and Piccadilly—in which the Bucks and Bloods had held their bachelor revels.
His ‘set’ as the flats are called was a ground-floor one on the right near the Piccadilly end of the covered way. When I came to it I saw him through the filmy curtain of the sitting-room seated at his desk. Having no need to enter by way of the stone-flagged hall I went straight in through the broad window.
The two main rooms of each set are beautifully proportioned and much loftier than those of modern flats; so they lend themselves admirably to housing a collection of books. There were shelves from floor to ceiling and when I had last been there, some six months before, each wall, with its serried rows of gilt-tooled morocco, vellum and calf bound volumes, had formed a warm, subdued background. Now, much to my surprise, more than half the shelves were empty.
Turning towards Laurie I saw that he was not writing at his desk but simply leaning forward staring with taut expressionless face at some sheets of foolscap that lay upon it. Looking over his shoulder, I took in the grim fact that they conveyed. He had got out a statement of his financial position, and he was insolvent to the tune of several thousand pounds.
One sheet showed his annual commitments. Had these been limited to his personal expenses he would still have been comfortably solvent, but they included many hundreds of pounds in allowances to relatives, and several hundreds more to charities which, presumably, he had been paying for years and had not been able to bring himself to reduce. Income Tax and Super Tax had caught up with him, and now formed a liability more than four times as great as all the others put together.
Poor Laurie. One may say that according to present-day standards he had been reprehensibly unbusiness-like in handling his affairs, that he had been a fool to keep on giving away money for the benefit of the poor when he contributed so much in taxes to their care by the Welfare State, and that when he went to Carey Street the law would undoubtedly call him to account for having piled up debts that he could not pay. Yet he had done the very thing that I had failed to do, and this was his reward.
Sadly I left this simple, kind and generous man to brood unhappily over the plight to which he had reduced himself. More at a loss than ever to comprehend the strange laws by which humans were, presumably, expected to conduct their lives, I went out through the courtyard entrance to Piccadilly.
By this time it was close on eight o’clock, so it seemed probable that by then Johnny would be finishing his paper and shortly be returning to his rooms in Earls Court. I knew that he went up and down from them to his office every day by Underground, so he would have to go out there to collect his suit-case and car if he meant to drive down to Longshot that night; and I wanted to go with him in order to attend my own inquest in the morning. Accordingly I went to Piccadilly Tube Station, drifted down the moving stair, took a train to Earls Court, and propelled myself round the corner into Nevern Square, where Johnny had his rooms.
Apart from breakfast, which was provided for him by the comfortable body who owned the house, he fed out; so he had only two rooms and a bathroom on the second floor, but they were roomy and comfortable ones. I floated up to his sitting-room and, finding that he was not yet back, settled myself there.
It was past nine when he returned. Going straight to a cupboard he got out a full bottle of whisky and put it in his brief-case. I wondered why in the world he should feel it necessary to take his own drink to Longshot; but that was not his intention. Instead of starting to pack his suit-case he went downstairs out of the house and round the corner to the station. I kept beside him and we got into a west-bound tube. At Hammersmith he got out and I followed him through several streets until we reached an old-fashioned, rather dingy block of flats. There was no lift and he plodded up three flights of stone stairs, then rang a bell beside a door the upper half of which had hideous panels of coloured glass let into it.
The door was opened by a young woman in a négligée. She was blonde, blue-eyed and, I should think, still on the right side of thirty. Raising a pair of skilfully-pencilled eyebrows, she exclaimed:
‘Well I never! Fancy it being you! It’s such weeks since you’ve been to see me I thought you’d been posted out of London—or else given me the go-by.’
‘No.’ Johnny gave her a friendly grin and, evidently feeling it best to tell the truth and shame the devil, added: ‘As a matter of fact, Daisy, I’ve become engaged to be married. That’s why I stopped going to the Club or making dates to spend Sunday evenings with you here.’
Daisy’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘So that’s it, eh! Why are you honouring me this evening, then? I suppose your girl’s got scruples, and you can’t wait for the wedding night; so you thought you’d work it off on me. If that’s the case you’d better think again.’
‘It’s not that,’ Johnny assured her. ‘But we’ve had a quarrel and I’m feeling pretty browned off about it. I thought I’d take a chance I might find you alone, and that you would let me spend an hour just chin-wagging with you to cheer myself up. I’ve brought along a bottle of Scotch in case you were short of liquor.’
Her big generous mouth broke into a smile and she said: ‘If that’s the case, come right in, Big Boy. It’s a bit of a laugh, though, that by turning shirty your fiancée has driven you to spend your evening with a tart. I bet she’d be livid if she knew.’
‘I’ve told you before not to speak of yourself like that,’ he said severely, as he followed her inside. ‘You’re not a tart. You haven’t a tart’s mentality.’
She shrugged. ‘What’s the difference, ducks? No girl who isn’t kept by her family can earn a decent living just by dancing near-nude six nights a week in Cabaret. There always has to be a steady in the background to ante-up the rent cheque. And if I happen to meet someone in the Club that I take a fancy to who says “What about it?” Well, why not? I’ve never made any pretence of being the faithful kind.’
‘I know that; but you don’t go to bed with every Tom, Dick and Harry, or lie and cheat like lots of girls who are much better placed than you are. The fact is, Daisy, that you’re a darn good sort and wouldn’t accept money at all if you didn’t have to. So stop talking nonsense.’
She threw an arm round his shoulders and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘You’re nice, Johnny. It’s good to see you again. You’re a real gentleman, I always did say.’
‘Nonsense!’ He gave her a friendly pat on the behind, then went into the kitchen to fetch a couple of glasses and a syphon. As he poured out the drinks I looked round Daisy’s living-room with considerable surprise; it seemed to have been furnished by two persons with about as strongly contrasting interests as one could find.
A big divan piled with none too clean cushions and several gaudy dolls was pure cabaret girl, but above it in a long glass
frame hung an original Egyptian papyrus depicting the weighing of the heart of a dead person against the Feather of Truth before the god Osiris. Photographs of film stars alternated on the walls with pictures of Karnak, Abydos and other Temples on the Nile, while on two occasional tables cheap china souvenirs of seaside holidays in England jostled amulets and little idols retrieved from the ancient past. Later I was to learn the explanation of this strange medley.
Meanwhile Johnny and Daisy had settled themselves on the divan, and she was asking him about his quarrel with Sue. Naturally he refrained from giving her any details, and simply said that they had come to loggerheads over a question that concerned his job. Then he told her that he had been greatly upset by another matter, and asked her if she had seen any mention of my death in the papers.
She had, but apparently it had been only a brief announcement and she had not connected it with him, so he said: ‘Well, it’s a shocking business, but it’s all bound to come out, so I may as well tell you about it.’ And during the next quarter of an hour he gave her an account of the double tragedy.
Daisy’s blue eyes grew ever rounder with excitement as he proceeded and she interrupted him only now and again to ask him to elucidate a point. When he had done, she exclaimed:
‘My! What a business! That Lady Ankaret must have been off her chump to go after the little Professor when she had a nice fellow like your uncle for her husband.’
Johnny nodded. ‘I don’t think she’s quite normal where men are concerned. And I’m convinced that she knows more about how my uncle met his death than she will admit.’
‘Really!’ Daisy’s blue eyes popped again. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘One or two little things that I must keep to myself for the moment. I’m hoping that something may come out at the inquest tomorrow morning. Anyhow, I’m sure we haven’t got to the bottom of the matter yet. My Uncle Giff wasn’t the type of man to commit suicide, and I mean to do my damnedest to clear his name of such a stigma if I can.’
For a few moments they were silent then he said: ‘Daisy, you are psychic, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, dear.’ She inclined her blonde head. ‘But why do you ask? I gave that sort of thing up ages ago. At one time I used to tell people’s fortunes, but they’re misfortunes mostly, and several times I hit the nail on the head. It scared me stiff, it did, but I don’t think it right to lie to people about the future one sees for them. That’s why I gave it up. Pour me another drink, there’s a duck.’
Johnny refilled their glasses and enquired: ‘How did you come to find out that you had psychic powers in the first place?’
‘I was born that way. My old Mum was a real wow at it. Besides being fey herself she learnt no end of things by studying under an Egyptian mystic when she was out there and Dad was doing his excavating. I was only a kid then, and when we came home she kept us all by telling fortunes for a living, until Dad drank himself to death.’
After pausing to take a drink Daisy went on: ‘He came of a good family, you know, and was ever so clever; but he just couldn’t keep off the bottle. Mum worshipped the ground he walked on and his death broke her up. It broke up our home too. She put me and my sister to a dancing school, then went into a decline and died herself.’
‘I know; you told me once before. I mean about your losing both your father and mother when you were only ten. That was a rotten break.’ Johnny looked his sympathy; and it crossed my mind, as it had once or twice on previous occasions, that for a normally impassive man he had an unusual ability for conveying his feelings in a look.
Daisy shrugged. ‘Oh, I’m not one to complain. It would have been nice to have been brought up at a posh school; and I might have been if Dad hadn’t taken to the bottle. But nothing really matters if your health keeps good. That’s what I always say.’
‘I was wondering,’ Johnny said after a moment, ‘if you could help me to get at the truth about my Uncle’s death. I believe there have been cases in which occultists have helped the police to get a line on a murderer. Do you think that if I brought you something belonging to Uncle Giff—something he had been wearing at the time of his death—you might be able to tell me if he really committed suicide or was killed by someone else?’
‘Mother could have done that,’ Daisy replied with conviction. ‘You only had to give her a ring or a glove, or something, and she’d describe the person it belonged to, then tell you the state of mind they’d been in when they last wore it. Whether I could, I don’t know. I used to do a bit of that sort of thing at one time, and it was really queer how I’d get a picture of someone I’d never seen. I’ll try if you like, but you mustn’t be disappointed if I don’t get anything at all. Anyway, if your uncle was murdered I wouldn’t be able to describe the fellow that did him in. At best I’d only be able to tell you if he was frightened when he died, or in a temper, or just sort of quiet and resigned.’
‘All the same, I’d be very grateful if you’d have a cut at it,’ Johnny told her. ‘The funeral is on Tuesday morning; so I can get back to London early in the evening. How about my coming in for a drink with you before you have to go to the Club?’
‘Fine, ducks. Do that and I’d be glad to oblige. That will be much better than after the show, too, because I’ll be nice and rested; and there’s nothing like a rest beforehand for getting results.’
Daisy’s agreement to try her hand at psychic detection was anything but welcome to me. I thought it most unlikely that she would get anywhere near the truth, but there was always the chance that she might provide Johnny with a new line for his dangerous speculations; and, grateful as I was to him for his laudable desire to clear my name, I would much rather that my friends should have been left with the belief that I had committed suicide than that he should unearth some bit of evidence which might lead the police to conclude that I had been murdered. As things were Ankaret had only to sit tight and say nothing, but few people can maintain a convincing structure of lies in the face of long and skilful questioning. A full investigation might well end in her being brought to trial, and even the thought of that happening filled me with acute distress.
For some half-hour longer Johnny and Daisy sat on talking together, but mainly about the doings of friends of hers in the same floor show, and other subjects which held no interest for me. Then he said:
‘I think I ought to be getting along now, as I’ve got to make an early start in the morning.’ And a few minutes later he took his departure.
Now I knew for certain that he did not intend to drive down to Longshot that night, there was no particular point in my leaving with him; so I thought I would stay on for a while with Daisy. As she had openly confessed to living, at least in part, on her immoral earnings, in spite of Johnny’s protests to the contrary, she was unquestionably a superior type of whore; but all the same, she was a most likable young woman, and at heart a very much better one than most of the people into whose private lives I had had a peep during that long day. Moreover she radiated such warmth and cheerfulness that I felt happier in her presence than at any time since I had died.
When Johnny had gone she tidied up the room, washed the glasses, then threw off the loose négligée she was wearing and began to practice some complicated dance steps. Now that she had on only her undies I saw that as well as a pretty face she had a lovely figure, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching her antics. I also derived some amusement from thinking how surprised she would be if she knew that she had an unseen audience for her private cabaret show.
It was this thought which gave me the idea that, as she was supposed to be psychic, if I could will it strongly enough, I might make her realise my presence and, possibly, even communicate with her. But just as I started to make the attempt she ceased her pirouetting and high-kickingand went over to her dressing-table. Unwilling now to give up the chance of trying out my new project, I followed. As she sat down, I took up a position just by the window, so that I could still see her face, and focussing on it I willed her
to look up and see me.
She did not take long to brush her hair and put cream on her face, so I was able only to get in a few minutes’ concentration before she stood up and went into the bedroom. As soon as she came back I tried again, but she showed not the least indication that she was in any way affected, and began to take off her undies. Still I kept on silently throwing out the command: ‘Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!’ with all the force I could muster.
Suddenly she turned her head and stared in my direction. She showed no fright but a frown of annoyance appeared on her pretty face. I felt certain then that I had now done the trick and that she could see me. A second later she confirmed my belief by demanding sharply:
‘What do you want?’
Greatly elated I essayed the next step and formed in my brain the words. ‘Please tell me if you can how long I am likely to remain earth-bound.’
To my amazement she replied at once: ‘You’re not earth-bound, you’re dreaming, silly; and just trying to get a cheap thrill by watching me undress. I’ve often seen night-walkers like you. Go on! Hop it. Get back to bed.’
7
Monday 12th September
On the Monday morning I was aroused to renewed consciousness of my problems by the shrilling of an alarm clock. It came from Johnny’s bedroom, and he had evidently set it to ensure his waking in time to make an early start for Longshot. I was next door in his sitting-room, to which I had returned after my exciting but abortive contact with Daisy.
Disregarding her command to ‘hop it’, I had flung a dozen telepathic questions at her, imploring her to tell me more about my state; but, to my distress and chagrin, she had ignored them, jumped into bed and switched out the light. For a quarter of an hour or more I had remained there endeavouring to induce her to answer, but it was no good; she had turned her face to the wall and, apparently, shut her consciousness against me.
The Ka of Gifford Hillary Page 20