The Ka of Gifford Hillary

by Dennis Wheatley

  With those points in mind I had thought it a good bet that, although I had been prevented from tipping him off, he would spontaneously corroborate my statement. That he had not done so could, I felt, probably be put down to his having failed to appreciate that once my having visited the cottage in the flesh was called into question everything else would be. It was on that account that I had no alternative but to stick to my guns. But I asked with an anxiety that I did my best to conceal:

  ‘Did he say anything about having consulted someone with psychic gifts on whether I was dead or alive, before he decided to go and find out for himself?’

  ‘No; why? Did he?’ Eddie replied.

  I shook my head. ‘Not as far as I know. It was just a thought that he might have; but I think I only imagined he had in one of my nightmares. Anyhow whether he did or not is immaterial.’

  Eddie’s innocent reply was, to me, far from immaterial. I knew by then that he was acting for Johnny as well as for myself, and it told me as plainly as an answer to a straight question could have done that Johnny had said nothing about my Ka. As matters stood my case seemed to me a pretty clear-cut one; but if he had brought the supernatural into it that would have upset the whole apple-cart, and I should have found myself up to my neck in a morass of lies and contradictions. My relief that he had kept his own counsel about that can be imagined.

  During the three days that followed Eddie came to see me four or five times, and on two of his visits he brought that fat, hairy, dynamic and most eminent Q.C., Sir Bindon Bullock, with him.

  Sir Bindon made no secret of the fact that he did not like the case on account of my insistence that the defence should be based on the letter having been forged by Ankaret. He would have much preferred me to plead that I had beaten Evans to death during a fit of insane jeolousy, and put my trust in him to get me off with a life sentence, or perhaps only seven years. But I dug my toes in and told him to take it or leave it.

  That he did take it was, I have no doubt, on account of the immense publicity he would get out of the case. On the evening of my committal for trial banner headlines had appeared in the papers—

  SIR GIFFORD HILLARY RETURNS FROM GRAVE—NOW ACCUSED OF MURDER

  and although the police had so far refused to issue a statement the press was rife with speculation. When my trial came on and the full story broke there could be no doubt that it would prove a cause célèbre, and the temptation to be well in the centre of the limelight had proved irresistible to Sir Bindon.

  I was still pretty groggy; so I was being treated with every consideration, and I had been put into a single-bed cubicle, so that I could consult with my legal advisers in private. Sir Bindon’s bulk half filled the free space in the little room, and, seated on a chair which I felt might give way under his weight at any moment, he fired innumerable questions at me.

  It was an exhausting business, but I stuck to my story in every particular and, I think, eventually persuaded him that it was the truth. Eddie studiously refrained from saying anything, for the time being, which might shake the great man’s growing faith in me, but I knew that he was much more worried than he appeared to be.

  He told me at one of our private sessions that there was a time when the beans would have to be spilled to counsel but for the moment he thought it best to leave well alone. Then in that, and other talks we had, he disclosed to me the many nasty hurdles which one by one would be erected against us by the prosecution.

  From the servants at Longshot the police had verified the fact that Ankaret had been having an affair with Evans. Mildred had actually come upon them together in Ankaret’s bedroom, so it was supposed that matters had gone further than I thought. That did not worry me as I knew that they hadn’t; but the next item did.

  They had found out about Ankaret’s previous affairs, and from someone like Desmond Chawton that I had played the part of a complacent husband. That being so, they argued, why should I have been so enraged with Evans? I had not endeavoured to beat up any of Ankaret’s other lovers, so why him? In the letter I was alleged to have written it was stated that she had confessed to flirting with him, then asked me to get rid of him. Surely, in view of her past, my normal reaction would have been to tell her that I would do so, but that she had brought his assault on herself. If so, I should have gone quite calmly to the lab with the intention only of giving him the sack; so it must have been some taunt he had flung at me while there which had caused me to go berserk and murder him.

  Further doubt was cast upon my story that I had lured him down to the beach with the intention of thrashing him by the fact that as I was far the stronger it seemed unlikely that I should have come off worst in the encounter.

  That might have been ill-luck; but I had said that he had thrown the chair at me, not struck me with it. The furnishings of the beach house at Longshot had been inspected. The chairs were of two kinds only; full length mattress-covered lounges—which were much too heavy and cumbersome for Evans to have picked up—and collapsible canvas and wood affairs; so it must have been to one of the latter that I had referred. Seized by a leg and wielded it could have made a moderately dangerous weapon, but thrown defensively, almost at random and on the spur of the moment, it was so light that it could have been knocked aside; so the odds were all against its having done me serious damage.

  Johnny, Silvers, Dr. Culver, the Police Surgeon and the Undertaker’s people had all been asked if they had noticed a cut, bruise or abrasion on either of my temples. None of them had.

  That was a particulary nasty one.

  Evans was a small man, while I was a large and heavy fellow. From the beach house to the end of the pier was a good hundred and twenty yards. Experiments with a dummy figure loaded to my weight and dragged by a man of Evans’s size had shown that such a feat was possible only by most desperate efforts and with frequent rests.

  When that point was put to me I remembered, only too well, how Evans had pleaded with and finally threatened Ankaret because her help was so essential to him in carrying my body downstairs; and how they had had to use a wheelbarrow to get it down to the beach. I ought to have said in my statement to the police that I had meant to give Evans a ducking so before going for him had lured him to the end of the pier. But it was too late to think of that now.

  Why, they asked too, if he had dragged my body so far across the beach and over the rough planks of the pier had my clothes not sustained the smallest tear, or my face and limbs showed any trace of bruising—and the woman who had washed my corpse had declared that there was not a blemish on it.

  The police had timed their experiment with the weighted dummy and the little man, and it had taken close on an hour. That ruled out my suggestion that, hearing the noise of the quarrel, Ankaret had come down to the beach at once and arrived just in time to see Evans pushing my body off the end of the pier. If she had heard nothing, would she not have gone up to bed and waited for me to join her there? Why, anyhow, should she have gone with Evans into the laboratory? Yet, if I was right about it being she who had killed him, she must have done so.

  Why had my velvet smoking jacket been found in the laboratory? It would have been natural enough for me to take it off down by the beach house if I had intended to fight Evans. But its being found in the lab implied that I had taken it off before going for him there—and with the steel rod, instead of with my fists.

  Was it really believable that Ankaret had beaten Evans to death? She had been a slender girlish woman weighing only seven stone ten. He, although small compared to myself had been a well set-up little man, and certainly no weakling. It was regarded as unlikely that she had laid him out with her first stroke as, had she done so, to inflect his other injuries she would then have had to prop him up, and it was highly improbable that her anger, however great, would have led her to such an act of vicious brutality against an unconscious body. Yet, if her first stroke had not knocked him out, surely, being so much the stronger, he would have been able to wrench the rod out of he
r hand overcome her.

  Again, his head had received such a battering that the experts declared it impossible for a comparatively frail woman to have inflicted it unless abnormal strength had been lent her by madness. Admitting that Ankaret had possessed abnormal strength while carried away by a frenzy, was it conceivable that within an hour or so her brain would have been restored to the cold calculating calm needed to plan the letter, and her hand been under the absolute control required to forge it? The prosecution would argue that I could not have it both ways.

  As my Ka had been a witness to the whole business, and this part of the theory I had advanced was an exact description of what had actually happened, it seemed hard that it should be disputed. But I had to admit that these arguments stood a good chance of being accepted by a jury.

  On the question of the all-important letter I fared no better. Eddie collected from Longshot a score of Ankaret’s beautiful drawings which were line perfect copies of famous originals, but it was argued that they were no proof at all that she was capable of forging handwriting; and, as I feared might prove the case, the historical scrap-book she had shown me years ago could not be found.

  With Bill the police got in before Eddie had a chance to get at him. When questioned he said that Ankaret had been marvellous at copying anything, but he had never known her to go in for forgery. He had then hindered rather than helped by adding, with unconscious facetiousness, that as a little girl she had astonished everyone by being so good at her pothooks and hangers.

  Ankaret’s brother, Roc, was found to have left England for Africa at the beginning of the month with a Film Unit; so could not be got hold of.

  The handwriting experts were equally unhelpful. The Scotland Yard specialist was ready and willing to go into the box and swear that the writing was mine. Of the best half-dozen outside men to whom Eddie submitted the letter with samples of my writing only two expressed any doubt about it, and neither of those was prepared to stake their reputation by appearing for the defence and declaring in court that the letter was a forgery.

  Not content with a most thorough investigation of Evans’s murder and my own presumed death, the police were also busily delving into the contradictory accounts given by Johnny and myself of his rescue of me, and the account I had given of my movement afterwards.

  Apparently Johnny had succeeded in getting back undetected into the camp at Uxbridge early on Sunday morning; and, until he had been called on by the police to make a statement describing his rescue of me, no one had suspected that he had ever left it. That he had he was able to prove by his having knocked up Silvers in the middle of the night. But Silvers could only say he had collected some papers and made himself coffee in the kitchen. There was no evidence at all that I had been in the garage while he was in the house; or that it had been then that he had collected some of my clothes. He might equally well have taken them for me on the Wednesday night.

  Again, he could produce no proof that it was on Sunday that I had spent some ten hours in his rooms, or that I had been in them after his arrest. As he had brought me there very early on Sunday morning and left again by six-thirty, and I had left during the quite of Sunday after noon, no one had seen either of us come or go.

  That he had taken me there to recuperate I confirmed in my own statement; but I had said that we had arrived on Thursday at midday and that I had left again that evening. That we had not been seen arriving could be accounted for by Johnny having waited to smuggle me in until he had a good chance to do so unobserved. That Wing Commander Tinegate had not seen me when he had come there in the afternoon could be explained by his having remained in the sitting-room while Johnny packed his bag. The note that he had left on Saturday, on the sitting-room mantel-piece, for Mrs, Burton had not been dated; and as he had told her when leaving on Thursday with Tinegate that he did not expect to be back for some days, she had not been up there until Monday, when the police came to interview her. So it might have been there four days.

  No one, apparently, had so far thought of checking up on the taxi that had taken me to the Ministry of Defence and, even if they did, I could say that my mind still not being fully recovered from my two days’ black-out must have lapsed again after my arrival at Waterloo; so that unknown to myself I had gone down to Nevern Square with some vague idea of seeing Johnny, then realised that he would not be there and taken a taxi to Whitehall.

  The police check on my own fictitious movements during Friday and Saturday had naturally produced nothing. No car ditched by its driver had been reported on the Thursday night within many miles of Sir Charles’s cottage. But its driver might have recovered consciousness, succeeded in getting it out of the ditch and, if he had not had far to go, driven it home. Plausibility was given to such a theory by my having said that he was drunk. The accident could have sobered him enough to do so, and to realise that with his breath smelling strongly of drink he would be in for very serious trouble unless he could cover up his accident.

  Neither the staffs at any of the cafés in Godalming nor at the station there recalled having seen a bedraggled figure answering to my description on Sunday morning; but that proved nothing. It was, however, thought surprising that during my visit to Sir Charles’s cottage no one had even caught a glimpse of me, although the account I had given of the scenes that had taken place there showed that I must have moved freely about in it.

  That, of course, remained the crux of the whole issue. If I had not been there, and been there on the Thursday night, how could I have possibly repeated to him a part of his conversation with his distinguished guest? For me to have been in league with Maria or Klinsky and had it from either of them was altogether too far fetched. For one thing, if I had, why should I have denounced them? For another, I was the last sort of person to have been a member of a Soviet spy ring. For a third my anxiety to get Sir Charles to clear Johnny provided a perfectly sound reason for my having gone down to the cottage.

  As far as the date of my resurrection was concerned the evidence was, therefore, overwhelmingly in my favour. I was sorry to have to make Johnny appear a liar; but, as I saw it at the time, he had nothing to lose, whereas I had all to gain, for only so could I give a plausible explanation of having been at the cottage; and, had I failed to do so, my veracity on every point would at once have become suspect.

  It was not until the end of the week that the line I had taken came back upon me like a boomerang.

  Eddie, I could sense, was far from sanguine about my chances; but out of consideration for me he did his best to conceal that and on the whole succeeded very well. I was, therefore, considerably alarmed when on his ninth—or it may have been his tenth—visit, he arrived looking really gloomy.

  Before I could ask him the reason he opened fire on me about my having taken up Yoga in India. Apparently the doctors had agreed that the best explanation for my having been accounted dead by two of their fraternity was that offered by myself; and Eddie wanted to know how often I had gone into self-induced comas; how frequently; for how long at any one time; the degree of completeness of suspended animation; if I had kept up the practice after leaving India; if I had ever fallen into one by accident, and so on.

  Once the practice had cured my nervous disorder I had given it up, and as that was now some twelve years ago I was a little hazy about details, but I gave him such particulars as I could and told him that at the end of my training I had been able to remain in a state of suspended animation for up to four hours at a stretch.

  When I had done he shook his head and said sadly: ‘I hate to have to tell you so, Giff, but our case has been going from bad to worse, and this Yoga business about puts the lid on it.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It has nothing whatever to do with how Evans met his death.’

  ‘No; but it might have a very great deal to do with what happened afterwards.’

  ‘Surely you are not suggesting that I put myself into a coma and had myself buried alive deliberately; are you?’

  He s
hrugged. ‘It had not occurred to me; but that, as I learned this afternoon, is exactly what the prosecution are suggesting.’

  ‘Then they must be crazy!’ I exclaimed. ‘Any such idea is utterly fantastic!’

  ‘Is it?’ he eyed me gravely. ‘Our line that Ankaret forged the letter has proved a complete wash-out. They are a hundred per cent convinced that you beat Evans to death with that steel rod. They are now of the opinion that afterwards, as the only chance of escaping from being hanged for murder, you decided to pretend that you were dead. They are going to suggest that after writing your suicide letter you fixed things so that you should be found apparently washed up on the beach in the morning; that it was your intention, after the doctors had assumed you to be dead, and you had been buried for a few hours, to emerge from your grave, a free man to start life again under another name.’

  ‘No, Eddie; no!’ I cried. ‘That doesn’t make sense. It is the wildest nonsense. Even if I had been able to fool Johnny and Silvers, and had succeeded in keeping it up for another two or three hours so as to get past the doctors, I couldn’t have carried it through. Damn it, man, my body was lying in the beach house from early Saturday morning until midday Tuesday. Whatever Indian Fakirs may do, no European could have suspended his animation and gone without food or drink for all that time.’