The Ka of Gifford Hillary (53 page)

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.’

He shook his head unhappily. ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t expect me, of all people, to swallow that. I know your writing as well as I know my own, and I naturally got in touch with the police as soon as I heard of your arrest. They have shown me all the exhibits in the case. Much as I should hate having to do it, if I were called on in court to identify the writing in that letter I would have to swear to it being yours.’

‘Then you would be wrong. I tell you it was Ankaret who wrote it.’

‘What possible proof can you advance in support of this extraordinary statement?’

‘Unfortunately none; except that I know her to have been an expert forger.’

‘Ankaret a forger! So’s my Aunt Sally! Sorry, Giff, I didn’t mean to be rude; but really, old man … Still, go ahead. What sort of things did she forge? Have you any examples of her work that you can produce? How many people
can you bring to testify to this unusual activity of hers?’

I made a wry face. ‘That’s just the trouble. The only visual evidence we can produce lies in her drawings, which show the extraordinary ability she had for copying anything she set her mind to with minute exactness. She did have a scrap-book into which she copied the handwriting of a number of famous historical personages; but I haven’t seen that for years, and I’ve no idea what she did with it. As for people knowing about this peculiar talent that she had, we are little better off; because she had no occasion to use it. Her father and brother might, but I doubt if anyone else would. It is ages since the subject has even been mentioned between us, but when we were first married she used to joke about it. I remember her saying once that one day she might have to forge a really big cheque to get me out of a mess. Poor darling, she little thought then that her gift would land me with my head in a noose.’