The Ka of Gifford Hillary

by Dennis Wheatley

  15

  18th to 30th September

  They took me down to Brixton Prison in an ambulance and put me to bed in the infirmary there. The doctors stuffed me full of M and B, so saved me from pneumonia, and I had a narrow escape from brain fever; but my good constitution and normally placid mind saved me. After three days I was pronounced out of danger.

  During that time I was not allowed any visitors. For all of Monday and a good part of Tuesday I was under drugs, and such thoughts as I had were mostly nightmarish memories of the hours I had spent in my coffin. But by Wednesday I was able to think clearly again and that evening I faced up to the task of deliberating on how I could best endeavour to free myself from the deadly web in which I had become entangled.

  Next morning a Detective Inspector Watkins came to see me and asked if I was willing to make a statement. I replied that I was not until I had consulted my solicitor.

  He smiled and said he had expected that would be the case, and that a Mr. Arnold had notified them that he wished to see me as soon as I was up to receiving visitors; so they would let him know that he could come along that afternoon.

  At about three o’clock Eddie arrived. The sight of my old friend cheered me a lot. His short plump figure and lively brown eyes still recalled the fine airman he had proved himself in the war, and I knew the good brain that lay under his broad forehead.

  He could not conceal the shock he got at the first sight of my sunken cheeks and snow-white hair; but, quickly recovering, he took me by both hands and cried:

  ‘Dear old Giff! What a wonderful thing to know that we have not lost you after all. I can’t tell you how overjoyed I was when I first heard that you were still alive.’

  I smiled rather ruefully. ‘Thanks, Eddie. But the question now is can you manage to keep me so.’

  ‘I know.’ His forehead wrinkled as he sat down beside my bed. ‘Of course, this frightful business of your having been buried alive gives the whole thing the flavour of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tales of Mystery and Imagination”; but there are certain basic facts connected with your presumed death that we can’t get away from. I hope you haven’t yet made a statement to the police?’

  ‘No. I said I must consult you first.’

  ‘Good I think we’ll have to give them something, though. Innocent people rarely refuse to talk at all; so now you have had a chance to recover from the shock, and your mind is clear again, it would not be good policy just to dig your in and keep on saying “I don’t remember”. Unless, of course, that is the truth.’

  ‘I remember everything only too damn well,’ I admitted. ‘But I am in favour of taking that line. If I do and say that I have had a complete black-out right from the beginning, you might get me off on a plea of insanity.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t like it, Giff. As your friend I was delighted to find that you have come through this horrible experience so well; but as your solicitor I can’t ignore the fact that you are now as sane as I am. The doctors can tell the symptoms of anyone who has recently been out of their mind for a week. You would never be able to pull that one on them. Besides, although you haven’t made a statement to the police, I understand that you talked to Sir Charles.’

  ‘I said nothing to him about what happened at Longshot on the night of the tragedy.’

  ‘No; but you did about going to his cottage last Thursday evening. And by all accounts you were perfectly sane then. That makes it impossible for you to maintain that you have no idea what you have been up to all this time.’

  ‘Am I bound,’ I asked, ‘by everything I said to Sir Charles?’

  ‘Not necessarily. You are known to have been very ill when you saw him; so we could say you did not know what you were talking about. A judge would accept that and rule that it should not be admitted as evidence. But you must remember that he repeated to the police all that you said to him within a quarter of an hour of you saying it; so although we can prevent them from using it we can never expunge it from their minds, and if you go back on it they are less likely to believe anything else you may say. But don’t put too much weight on that. The really important thing is that the statement we are about to put in should be as watertight as possible.’

  I had asked the question because I had told Sir Charles that it was on Wednesday night that Johnny had got me out of my grave, and I had not definitely made up my mind—that is if I made any statement at all—whether to stick to that or tell the truth about it having been Saturday. As it was only by sticking to Wednesday that I could explain having been a witness to the events at Sir Charles’s cottage the following night, I had already all but decided—should I find myself compelled to talk—to do so; and what Eddie had just said finally decided me on that course.

  While I was silently settling this highly-important point, Eddie had been going on: ‘I’m sure it would be best to wash out any idea of pleading insanity. If the crime of which you are accused had been committed after you had been buried alive that would be very different. Such a frightful experience might have driven anyone off their nut. But it wasn’t. You were not put into your coffin until many hours after Evans was dead.’

  Still clinging to the belief that my best hope lay in pretending that my mind had gone blank, I said: ‘The ordeal I have been through might have robbed me of my memory.’

  He shrugged. ‘It might; but it hasn’t. And unfortunately I am not the only person who knows that. The fact that we can prevent Sir Charles from testifying in court to what you told him makes no essential difference. Through him the police know that you were in full possession of your faculties when you were down at his cottage on Thursday night, and that was twenty-four hours after Johnny Norton had rescued you. As you still knew what you were up to then no one is ever going to believe that you have lost your memory since. The police are up against that sort of thing every day of their lives. They have ways and means of dealing with it; and it is a certainty that they would catch you out in no time. Honestly, Giff, I’m sure your best course would be to tell me the whole story of what led up to your killing Evans, and leave it to me to do my damnedest to save you from the worst by pleading extenuating circumstances.’

  With a pale smile, I said: ‘I didn’t kill him. He killed me; or thought he had.’

  Eddie’s eyes opened wide. ‘D’you really mean that?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the way it was. Cross my heart.’

  ‘But … but,’ he stammered, ‘how about that letter? You confessed to killing him in it, and said you meant to commit suicide. Look here, old man, if I’m to be of any help you really must put me in the picture.’

  He had convinced me now that to play dumb would not save me, and might even make my case worse. Tempted as I was by the idea, I had feared it might prove so; and, in consequence, during the past twenty-four hours I had thought out a story which, with a little luck, might be accepted.

  It was obviously out of the question to tell them the truth. Evans’s death ray machine had been totally destroyed in the fire, and nobody would believe that it had ever existed. Far less would they believe that while my body had remained inert, and dead enough to deceive the doctors, my Ka had been floating about observing all the major events which had followed on the tragedy. In planning my story I had had entirely to exclude the supernatural, and to bear in mind that I should have known nothing of events which had taken place between the Friday night when Evans ‘killed’ me and the Wednesday night when Johnny got me out of the grave—except for the main outline of events, which he would obviously have told me. To Eddie I said:

  ‘All right. Here goes. I’ll come to the letter in due course. On the seventh of this month, a Wednesday, I went to London. By a previously-made arrangement I met Sir Charles that evening at the flat of a mutual friend. We had a long discussion on future strategy; and having informed me that a contract to build two more E-boats was being offered to the Company he persuaded me to get my board to reject it.

  ‘That, of course, is neither
here nor there; except for the fact that on that Wednesday night I was away from Longshot and Evans seized on my absence to make a pass at Ankaret. And when I say a pass that does not adequately describe it. He got into her room after she had gone to bed and begged her to let him sleep with her. When she tried to turn him out he tore her night-dress off and did his damnedest to rape her.

  ‘I thought her manner a bit constrained when I got back on Thursday; but I knew nothing of what had happened until Friday evening. After we had had dinner together she asked me to give Evans the sack. Naturally I said I wouldn’t unless she could give me a reason. Then it all came out. She admitted that while she had been laid up with her broken leg she had been so bored that she had entered on a mild flirtation with him; but nothing that could possibly justify his brutal attempt on her. She said that she had had the devil’s own job to fight him off, and that nothing would induce her to stay another night in the house alone with him except for the servants.

  ‘Well, I saw red. I don’t mean with her. Of course it was silly of her to encourage him in the first place, and she ought at least to have formed some idea of the passion she was arousing in time to pour cold water on it before it came to a head; but you can be certain of one thing—she never had the faintest intention of taking a little runt like that as a lover. No. The thing that made me see red was the mental picture of Evans in my bed struggling to overcome Ankaret.

  ‘Don’t run away with the idea, though, that I meant to kill him. Such an idea never even entered my mind. You must know, Eddie, that I’m not that sort of chap. And when I say that I saw red you mustn’t get the impression that I didn’t know what I was doing. I mean only that I made up my mind that before sacking him I would give him a lesson it would take him a long time to forget.

  ‘Outwardly I was perfectly calm. Having kissed Ankaret’s tears away, I went up to Evans and suggested to him that as it was a nice night we should take a stroll on the beach while he told me what he had been working on recently in his lab. All unsuspecting he agreed, so out we went. My intention, of course, when I got him down by the beach pavilion was to give him a darn’ good hiding. But things didn’t pan out quite that way.

  ‘When we reached the shore I told him that Ankaret had spilled the beans to me and exactly what I thought of him. Like the little rat he was he squealed at that, and swore that she had led him to expect that she would give him all she had got, and was only waiting for the chance to do so. That led to a slanging match. For a few minutes we shouted abuse, calling one another every filthy name we could think of.

  ‘Then I hit him. He staggered back against the veranda of the beach house. The edge of the boards caught him behind the knees and he went over on to them. I dived after him to yank him up and hit him again. But he was too quick for me. Rolling over he scrambled to his feet, grabbed up a folding chair and flung it at me. One of its wooden arms caught me a crack on the temple. I saw stars, then everything went black and I folded up.’

  On that dramatic note I ended, feeling that I had told my story well, and waiting with interest for Eddie’s reactions. They were not long in coming, and it was obvious that he believed me.

  He let out a low whistle. ‘What rotten luck! Fancy that little devil getting the better of you. But what happened then?’

  I gave him a smile which I flatter myself was as enigmatic as one of Ankaret’s. ‘How should I know? From that moment my mind was a complete blank until some half hour after Johnny got me out of my coffin. About what followed, your guess is as good as mine; or nearly so.’

  ‘But the letter,’ he protested, ‘How do you account for the letter?’

  ‘I have a theory about that,’ I told him. ‘and in my own mind it amounts to a certainty. Of course, as both Evans and Ankaret are dead no one will ever learn the full truth about what happened after I was knocked out. But as I was so close to her, the way her mind worked, her character and her capabilities were an open book to me; so my speculations have probably brought me nearer to the truth than anyone else will ever get.’

  ‘Let’s hear them, Giff,’ he said eagerly.

  ‘Ankaret was the great love of my life and I was the great love of hers. You may perhaps have heard rumours that when she went abroad for winter holidays on her own she had affairs on the side. She did, but I knew about it and condoned them. Naturally that gave me a lot of pain when I first found out about it, but when I learned that they were entirely physical I accepted the situation, just as one might have on finding that one’s wife was a victim of kleptomania, occasional bouts of secret drinking, or some other neurosis. The fact that I did so made her love me even more profoundly. Without me she would have drifted from man to man, and God only knows what would have been the end of her. But I was her sheet anchor—the one person who brought out all that was best in her and gave her life some purpose. To appreciate the sort of shape events must have taken after Evans knocked me out, you must keep that central fact in mind.

  ‘Now Evans. Consider the situation in which he found himself. Two nights before he had done his damnedest to force Ankaret and now, as he must have thought, he had killed me. If he reported to the police what he had done, what hope would he have had? He could plead self-defence, but could not prove that it was I who had attacked him and not he who had attacked me. Had our quarrel had some other cause he might have got away with manslaughter; but not in this case. There isn’t a jury in the country that would have shown him mercy after Ankaret had gone into the box, as she would have done and described how he had tried to rape her. As he stood there on the beach looking down at my body he must almost have felt the hangman’s rope round his neck.

  ‘I haven’t the least doubt that he decided that his only chance of not being convicted of murder lay in his making my death appear an accident. He must have carried my body to the end of the pier and pushed it off into the water.

  ‘What happened next we shall never know. It is possible that Ankaret heard us shouting abuse at one another before I went for him, and came down from the house to try to intervene. If so she might have arrived in time actually to see him push me off the end of the pier. If that was not so, he must have been in a shocking state of nerves and funk when he got back to the house; so he may have broken down and confessed to her. Again, he must have known that she was expecting me to return shortly and go up to bed with her; so when I failed to return up she would institute a search and later, fearing I had met with an accident, call the police in. He seems, from what he said during our quarrel, to have believed quite mistakingly that she really had a soft spot for him; so fearing that he would not be able to stand up to questioning that night he may have told her the truth and begged her to take no action till the morning. Anyhow, one way or another Ankaret must have learned that he had killed me.

  ‘Why she should have gone with him to the lab I have no idea; but by then she must have been seized with a fit of uncontrollable grief and rage at the thought that he had robbed her of me, grabbed up the steel rod and bashed his head in.’

  Eddie gave me a puzzled look and asked: ‘As you were to all intents and purposes dead, Giff, how is it that you know where and how he met his end?’

  For a second I was caught off guard; but I recovered quickly enough to set his mind at rest by saying: ‘Johnny Norton told me that had taken place, after he rescued me.’

  ‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘Stupid of me not to have realised that he would. Well, go on.’

  ‘Next, then, we have to reconstruct Ankaret’s reactions after she had done in Evans. Just think of what the poor girl was faced with when she recovered from her frenzy, believing my dead body to be somewhere out in the Solent and seeing the Prof’s lying a bleeding mess on the floor. There could be no passing his death off as an accident, or suicide. He had been murdered; there was no escaping that. And only two people could have murdered him—she or myself.

  ‘Most women would have collapsed and let matters take their course. But what would have happened if she had? It
would probably have come out that she had been having an affair with Evans, and someone would have dug up all the dirt about her affairs in the South of France. Moreover she could not plead that she killed Evans in self-defence, because she had not just knocked him out, but had struck at him again and again until his head was a pulp. She must have known that she would be reviled as a sort of Messalina, who took lovers and had not stopped at murder when she wanted to get rid of one. It is pretty certain they would have hung her, or at least given her a life sentence, which for a girl like her would have been worse.

  ‘That she did not collapse may seem surprising; but Ankaret came of a long line of tough aristocrats, most of whom had been born and bred to fight in England’s wars and face up to every sort of dangerous situation. From them she had inherited tremendous guts. Once she had regained full control of herself she must have decided that the only way to save herself was to father Evans’s death on me.

  ‘After all, she believed me to be dead, who can blame her? She must have gone downstairs and …’

  ‘Surely, Giff,’ Eddie cut in, ‘you are not going to suggest that Ankaret forged that letter?’

  ‘I certainly am,’ I assured him.

  ‘No, old man; no. I’ve followed your theories so far with the greatest interest, and to me they sound quite plausible. Evans’s having been scared into trying to cover up his crime in the way you suggest is entirely in keeping with human nature. Ankaret’s killing of him afterwards is less so; although having regard for the great love she bore you it is by no means improbable. So far we would be on pretty sound ground but for one thing—the letter. And that blows the whole of the rest sky high. You couldn’t have written it before he knocked you out, because the premises for what is in it did not exist, and to have fabricated them would have been completely pointless.’

  ‘But I didn’t write it; Ankaret did.’