The Ka of Gifford Hillary Read online

  ‘Death Ray?’ she repeated hoarsely.

  He nodded. ‘A new invention of mine. I used it on him. And no one knows of it so far. So no one can even suspect the real cause of his death. But did I have to show it to the police and there’s murder will be in their minds in a jiffy. That’s why we’ve got to get him out of the lab, see; make it look as if he drowned himself—just like we said.’

  Ankaret violently shook her head. ‘I tell you I’ll have no hand in this. It’s all too horrible—too frightful even to think about.’

  ‘Ah, and you will.’ He was sweating now, evidently from fear that her refusal to help him would lead to his having to pay the full penalty for his crime. Pulling a crumpled silk handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped his face with it, and went on more quickly.

  ‘Suspicious the police are! Ask questions without end they do. But stick to what we said we’d do, we can put ourselves in the clear about having fallen for one another. Deny it, see, and there’s rope enough to hang us both. I doubt but the Silvers have ideas about us, even if young Mildred Mallows kept her mouth shut. Anyhow, her walking in on us, and me sitting here on your bed last Wednesday evening when Giff was in town. For sure the police will have that out of her. And there’s the motive they’ll be seeking should they find Giff’s body in the lab and I have to show them the Death Ray. ‘Twill be all up with both of us then. Swear certain sure you are completely innocent; they’ll still charge you with complicity. Look you, help me is what you’ve got to do.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right, that I’m bound to be dragged into it,’ she admitted with an angry frown. ‘But at worst Mildred’s testimony could be taken only as evidence that you were my lover, and a woman can have a lover without inciting him to murder her husband.’

  He gave a heavy sigh and stared at her gloomily. ‘And maybe you’d get away with it if you had nought to answer but servants’ talk. ‘Twould not be quite like that though. I hate to force you to it, but it seems I must, for my own life now hangs on the help that only you can give me.’

  ‘Force me to it?’ she repeated. ‘What do you mean by that? You have no hold over me.’

  ‘Have I not? Think again. You’ll see I have.’ His voice rose a little and he spoke with sudden passion. ‘I had no quarrel with Giff. Treated me decently enough he did. I killed him only to free you from him. Or, if you will, to get you for myself. Anyway, by doing what I’ve done, I’ve won the right to you. Do you take me for a fool that I would now let you jeopardise that? Am I to hang because you’ve suddenly turned squeamish, and are trying to go back on your part of our understanding? No, lovey, no! You’re mine now and I mean to keep you. I’ll not go to my death and leave you behind to be bedded by some other chap. Either you’ll get up now and do your bit to put us both in the clear, or should I be charged with Giff’s death I’ll let on that it was you who urged me to kill him. Yes, indeed, and after the judge has heard young Mildred’s evidence he’ll be telling the jury that you’re a second Lady Macbeth.’

  Ankaret had gone white to the lips. For over a minute she remained silent, and I could sense the frantic working of her very able brain as it weighed up the chances in the horrible dilemma with which she was faced. At last she said:

  ‘All right, then. Go and make certain that the servants are asleep, while I get some clothes on.’

  A grin of relief spread over his dark face, and he exclaimed: ‘Land of my fathers, now! ‘Twouldn’t have been natural, mind, if you hadn’t been a bit upset, but you’ll soon get over that. If all’s quiet in the courtyard side of the house, I’ll get the wheelbarrow round to the back door of the hall.’

  As he spoke he stood up. Ankaret had never been particularly modest. In fact she took such delight in her beautiful figure that she often walked about her bedroom with nothing on, so that she could admire it in the mirrors. Now, with her thoughts obviously elsewhere, she flung back the bed-clothes and thrust her long legs over the side of the bed. The sight of the lovely body that he had committed murder to possess acted on Evans like a spark to kindling. Stooping suddenly he stretched out his arms again and threw himself upon her.

  This time she did not fight him off, but, up to a point, let him have his way with her. It was not until he had given her two long fierce kisses that she clutched at his hands, jerked aside her head, and said with a calmness which told me that he had entirely failed to rouse her:

  ‘No Owen, no. This is no time for love-making. You must be patient just a little longer.’

  ‘It’s early yet. The night’s all ours,’ he muttered thickly.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she countered. ‘If we leave … leave what we’ve got to do for too long Johnny may come in and catch us red-handed.’

  Rolling off her, he sat up, his mouth twitching and his eyes wild with fright. ‘Giff’s nephew! Staying here the night is he?’

  Ankaret sat up beside him and nodded. ‘Yes. He is dining with the Waldrons and when he does that he and Sue usually join some party or other to dance afterwards. The odds are he won’t be back till three or four o’clock in the morning, but we can’t afford to take any chances.’

  ‘Sospan bach!’ He smiled again. ‘Scared I was—for a moment; but we’ll be through with our job well before midnight.’

  Putting an arm round her shoulders, he drew her to him and added: ‘Just one more kiss before we get to work, and tell me you forgive me driving you to do your bit. Indeed I’d not harm a hair of your lovely head, but I had to rouse you up somehow.’

  She gave him the kiss and murmured: ‘Of course I forgive you. I behaved like a fool; but you didn’t give me even a hint that you meant to do it tonight, and the shock was so great it caused me to say all sorts of things I didn’t mean.’

  I felt certain that both of them were lying. Rather than lose her now Evans would have seen her go to the scaffold with him, and Ankaret knew it. That accounted for her change of attitude. She was playing along with him because she realised that to do so was the lesser danger; but I would not have given much for his chances of reaping the full rewards of his crime.

  So intrigued had I been by the revelations that had emerged during the battle of personalities, of which I had been the unseen witness, that for some time I had hardly given a thought to my own strange state. And even now, as Evans left the room, I thrust from me the tendency to start speculating on my future, because I was so anxious not to miss the smallest development of this gruesome drama in which my own dead body was the central figure.

  Evans had hardly shut the door behind him when Ankaret suddenly went limp. Uttering a low moan, she let herself fall back on the bed and lay there with closed eyes. After a few moments two large tears welled up from under her eyelids and ran down her cheeks.

  There was no escaping the fact that my death lay at her door. Had she not amused herself by leading Evans on he would never even have thought of using his Death Ray upon me. It was beyond dispute her vanity, egoism and complete lack of principle that had cost me my life. Yet, even so, I felt no trace of resentment against her. On the contrary, she was still to my generous, lovely darling, and I longed to comfort her.

  Moving over to the bed I brought my lips down on to hers. I couldn’t feel them and she made no response, but in silent words I said to her:

  ‘Take courage, darling. You must go through with this, then send that little knave packing as soon afterwards as you possibly can.’

  At that she murmured: ‘Oh Giff, dear Giff. What have I done to you?’

  Whether that was a spontaneous utterance of remorse, or in reply to my thought wave, I had no means of telling. Hoping that it was the latter, I said: ‘Don’t worry about me. It hurt only for a moment and I’m perfectly all right. Pull yourself together now, and do what you’ve got to do. But when the police come, for God’s sake keep your story simple and don’t budge from it by a word.’

  She gave no further indication that my efforts to console and counsel her might be getting through to her mind; so I was relucta
ntly forced to the conclusion that she was unconscious of my presence, and abandoned the attempt.

  For some five minutes she lay there motionless, then she rolled over, put her feet to the floor, and walked unsteadily into the bathroom. I remained where I was but the sounds of splashing water told me that she was bathing her face. When she emerged her mouth was firmly set, and the cleancut Le Strange jaw, that she had inherited from those ancestors of hers who had held many a fortress, stuck out with evident resolution. Slipping off her nightie she quickly got into her underclothes, pulled on over them a pair of slacks and a dark coat. Then, instinctively, I suppose, she sat down at her dressing-table to make up her face. She was still at it when Evans came back into the room.

  ‘All’s clear,’ he told her. ‘Not a light or a sound from the Silvers’s room or young Mildred’s. Had I not known they were all early-to-bedders I’d have waited a while before coming along to you; but I felt that the sooner we could get things over with the better.’

  As she stood up, he added: ‘Best put on a pair of gloves, lovey, so as not to leave any finger-prints, see. We can’t take too many precautions.’

  He already had rubber gloves on, and when she had done as he bid her they left the room together. I followed them across the landing to the lab, and on entering it I saw that he had had the forethought to tie his blue silk handkerchief over the face of my corpse, so that the sight of it should not upset her.

  As she looked down on the body her lips parted slightly, showing that her teeth were tightly clenched; but that was the only sign she gave of the emotions which I could guess would be harrowing her mind. The next quarter of an hour must have been an appalling ordeal to her, but her courage proved equal to it.

  ‘Need his jacket to put the suicide letter in,’ Evans muttered, ‘best take it off now and leave it here.’

  She made no move to help him as he turned the body over and wriggled the limp arms out of the sleeves, but when he had got it off she said: ‘He keeps his desk locked so I shall need his keys to get into it. You’ll find them in his right-hand trousers pocket.’

  Evans fished them out and gave them to her. Then he took the body by the shoulders and she picked up its feet. The dead weight of a big male corpse must be pretty considerable, They could only stagger awkwardly along with it, and had to let go for a breather twice before they got it down to the hall door. I suppose, at a pinch, Evans could have managed to drag it downstairs on his own, but that would have taken far longer and been a most exhausting business. However, it was not for that alone that he had counted Ankaret’s help essential if he was to get away with his crime. The really vital aid that he had to have from her was in providing evidence that I had committed suicide, as she alone was capable of producing that.

  Their mention of a letter to put in the pocket of my jacket, of the key to my desk, and of the fact that if they stuck to what they had originally planned it would put them in the clear about having fallen for one another had enabled me to guess the means by which they intended to create a false impression of how and why I met my death.

  Ankaret, as I think I have already mentioned, possessed artistic gifts of a very high order. Her ignorance of technique debarred her from making a name for herself as a painter, but she could probably draw as well as anyone in the kingdom. Quite apart from original drawings of her own invention her eye was so good that she could draw from life or copy any other work with extraordinary swiftness and accuracy. It was this latter ability which enabled her, if she wished, to forge other people’s handwriting with very little trouble.

  I knew nothing of this until, while on our honeymoon, I asked her one day how much she thought she could do on as a dress allowance. With a laugh she had replied: ‘Make it what you like, darling. If I get short I can always forge your name to a cheque and I’ll bet you any money that your bank will cash it.’ Then, without a second’s hesitation, she had written my name on the back of a magazine she was reading and handed it to me.

  Of course she was only joking, and had never forged my name to anything, but before marriage she had made use of this unusual gift as an adjunct to one of her hobbies. History was one of her chief interests and, in addition to two or three hundred volumes of memoirs, etc., that she had collected, she owned a big scrap-book. From time to time she had bought and pasted in it small etchings, colour prints and cartoons of famous people or incidents. Then, when staying for a while in London, she had spent a few mornings at the British Museum. There she would get one of the staff to hunt out for her some original letter or manuscript written by each of the people who appeared in the pictures she had recently bought. Selecting from them interesting passages, she would copy these out on separate sheets of paper, add the appropriate signature, and later paste them under the picture with which they were associated. Of course, from the paper on which they were written, an expert could have told at a glance that they must all be forgeries, but the ink gave them an apparent reality which no photographed facsimile could have done.

  I had not seen this historical scrap-book of hers for years, but either she must have dug it out and shown it to Evans or, while they were planning—as she thought—my hypothetical murder, she had mentioned to him her capabilities as a forger. It was that which must have given one of them the idea of the suicide letter. To write one in my hand would be easy for her, and if written on my private paper it would be even more readily accepted as genuine; that was why she had wanted the key of my desk.

  What she intended to put into the note I could not be certain, but I would have taken a good-sized bet that she meant to say on my behalf that I had found out that she was having an affair with Evans and was so cut to the heart that I meant to throw myself into the Solent. In my case neither ill-health nor financial difficulties would be regarded as a plausible motive for suicide, but no one was capable of assessing the depths of despair to which I might have been reduced on discovering that Ankaret was being unfaithful to me. Moreover, by conveying information of their guilty passion to the police in this way, and when questioned admitting it, they would forestall and render harmless any otherwise dangerous tittle-tattle that the police might pick up from the servants.

  If I was right in my surmise they had certainly thought out a most ingenious way of covering up the truth and, anxious as I was that my dear, wicked Ankaret should not have to pay for her folly with her life, I could not help feeling that it would be intensely interesting to see if the police accepted the false evidence at its face value or spotted some little detail that the murderer had overlooked and, with dogged persistence, gradually unravelled the whole plot.

  As yet, however, while I speculated on the ultimate stages of their plan, they were still occupied in getting my body through the door and arranging it in the wheelbarrow that Evans had brought round there. To do so satisfactorily was by no means an easy job as it may sound; for the load was weightier than the barrow was built to take and so awkward in shape that each time Evans started to wheel the barrow forward it tended to tip over.

  With a mutter of lilting curses and sweating under the strain he ran it down the path a few feet at a time, while Ankaret tried to keep it steady by walking alongside and hanging on to the shoulder of the corpse’s shirt. After progressing about twenty yards trial and error made the tricky business somewhat easier for them, and by a further five minutes of laborious effort they succeeded in getting the barrow down to the pier.

  On reaching the end of the pier, Evans tipped the body out so that it fell face downward, then stood beside it panting for a few moments. There was no moon but the sky was not overcast, so the stars gave ample light to see by. Ankaret had turned her back upon the corpse and was staring up at them. What her thoughts were at that moment, God alone knows; but I pitied her. As an accompaniment to Evans’s heavy breathing I could hear the constant slap-slap of the water as it lapped against the wooden piles. When he had got back his breath he retrieved his silk handkerchief from the corpse’s face, touched her on the ar
m and said:

  ‘Come, lovey, now to get done with it.’

  Evidently she had been screwing herself up against this gruesome moment, for she turned without hesitation, stooped down, and again took the corpse by the ankles. He took it by the wrists. Having lifted it they swung it between them, while he counted, ‘One! Two! Three!’ Then with a final heave they let go. Still face downward it hit the water with a loud splash; a moment later only a few flecks of foam, dimly seen in the starlight, showed where it had disappeared beneath the surface.

  Without a word Evans took the handles of the barrow and began to wheel it back towards the house. Ankaret followed, her face, as far as I could judge in the dim light, set and very pale, but quite expressionless. While he took the barrow back to its shed she went into the house and upstairs, but instead of going to her room and collapsing, as I expected, she went into the laboratory.

  The lights were still on and, apart from my velvet smoking jacket, which was lying across a high tubular stool, there was not a thing to show that just under an hour before a murder had been committed there. The rabbit, all unconscious of the evil deed that had been enacted in its presence, was still busily nibbling at its generous supply of lettuce, and the Death Ray machine looked no more malefic than would have some new scientific labour-saving device.

  Ankaret halted within a foot or two of the spot where I had fallen when struck down by the ray. There she remained, staring straight in front of her and making no sound. Her hands hung limply at her side: and her face was as blank as that of a white marble statue. I was beginning to fear that this terrible business had unhinged her mind, when Evans came in and said to her:

  ‘What are you doing up here, lovey? I thought to find you downstairs. Indeed but you must not delay in writing that letter. Maybe you’re right about Norton and his girl being out dancing most of the night; but say he came home early and caught us still up, how would we explain Giff’s disappearance?’