The Ka of Gifford Hillary (12 page)

Although I could not feel the floor the force of gravity apparently still operated sufficiently to keep me in a normal relationship to it unless I exerted my will to impel myself forward. Then I rose slightly and drifted in the direction I wished to go, but only for a few yards, after which I became static again till I once more made a conscious effort to advance. The movement can best be likened to that of a toy balloon which, having been thrown with some force, bounces in slow graceful arcs across the floor. It was a most pleasant sensation and I recalled having on rare occasions experienced it in dreams.

I was, obviously, invisible to myself and also to Evans; for had my spirit been clothed with the tenuous outline of a ghost it is quite certain that he would have seen it and fled in terror.

He had already reached the door and was about to close it as I came up behind him. For a moment I feared that he would shut me in, but the next second I became aware that no material object was a barrier to me. My last quick forward impulse carried me through both the half-shut door and his forearm as he pulled it to.

While he locked it behind him I waited in his little office, wondering what he was about to do. My guess was that he would go down the back stairs to Silvers and tell the old boy that I had died as a result of a terrible accident; then they would telephone the police. As Evans had no apparent motive for murdering me there seemed quite a good chance that if he kept his head under cross-examination he would get away with an accident story, anyhow as far as a capital charge was concerned; but he would have to stand his trial for manslaughter and, as such an accident could have taken place only owing to crass carelessness on his part, the probability was that he would be sent to prison for a couple of years.

The cold-blooded little rat deserved far worse than that
and, while I am not normally vindictive, had I had the power to do so I would have seen to it that he paid the full price for his unscrupulous experiment. As it was I could be neither seen nor heard; so far as I could judge for the time being there were no means by which I could any longer influence the future of anyone.

However, it soon transpired that my speculations were right off the mark. Instead of making for the servants’ quarters, or down the main staircase to telephone the police, he walked straight across the landing to the door of the bedroom that I shared with Ankaret. Without even knocking, he flung it open and marched in.

As I followed, I saw that Ankaret was sitting up reading in her side of our big double bed. Sometimes she wore a little fluffy bed-jacket, but the night being warm she had on only a semi-transparent night-dress of pale blue chiffon. Its delicate colour was well chosen to throw up her Titian hair, big grey eyes and milk and roses skin. It was not to be wondered at that as Evans halted a few feet from the bed he gave a sudden gasp at the picture that she made.

I jumped to the conclusion that the little brute, lacking as he was in the finer feelings, intended to blurt out a story about my accidental death, instead of giving Mrs. Silvers a chance to break it to Ankaret gently. But again I was quite wrong. Next second he flung himself upon her, bearing her backwards and kissing her violently on the mouth.

Ankaret’s slender limbs concealed a surprising strength, and she was as supple as an eel. In a moment she had wriggled free and was thrusting him off. Her voice was tense with anger, but deliberately kept low, as she exclaimed:

‘Have you gone mad, Owen? Where’s Giff? If the two of you have finished in the laboratory he may come in at any minute. Should he find you here he’ll half kill you.’

Her words and tone shocked me profoundly. They had a conspiratorial air about them which conveyed as clearly as anything could that she was having an affair with Evans. She was angry with him not for having invaded her room and forced his kisses on her, but because she believed that he had taken an unwarrantable risk in coming there at a time when I might easily appear on the scene and catch them in
flagrante delicto
.

It flashed upon me then that Evans’s motive for killing me had little, if anything, to do with his desire to prove the capabilities of the scientific device he had invented. He had evidently been inspired to the crime by madness of quite a different kind—an insane jealousy of me as Ankaret’s husband.

That he should have fallen for her I could well understand; but what she could see in him passed my comprehension. It seemed utterly unnatural that so lovely a creature as Ankaret should willingly submit to, let alone welcome, the caresses of this little dark, morose, uncultured runt of a man. Yet in such matters women are incomprehensible, and I could only assume it to be a case of beauty fascinated by the beast.

Urgently, angrily, but still keeping her voice low, she repeated her command that he should leave her; then she endeavoured to scare him into doing so by swift graphic phrases depicting the explosion which was certain to take place if I came in and found them together.

After she had thrown Evans off he made no further attempt to grapple with her, but neither did he make any move to leave the room. Instead, pouting slightly, he perched himself at her feet, near the end of the bed, end, as soon as he could get a word in, said in his lilting Welsh voice:

‘That will do, now. No need to be fearing any more that Giff will surprise us. The job is done, look you. Worked like a charm, it did: could not have gone better.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she asked in a puzzled voice.

‘Why, of the plan we made to be rid of him.’

Ankaret jerked erect in the bed as though she had received an electric shock. Her mouth fell open, her big eyes widened to their fullest extent, her voice came in a hoarse whisper:

‘You … you don’t mean … you can’t mean that you’ve killed Giff?’

He nodded; then they exchanged a few swift sentences which gave me the key to what had been going on. It was not so much what they said, and Ankaret made no admission of the game she had been playing; but knowing her so well enabled me to fill in the blanks and reconstruct the psychological processes of the two of them which had led up to my murder.

Having been confined to the house for several weeks, owing to her injured leg, Ankaret had become so bored that she had encouraged Evans in his violent passion for her; but evidently she had not been attracted to him physically so had played a role which had enabled her to continue to amuse herself with him without giving way to his attempts to seduce her.

As he could have known nothing of her past amours, it had been easy for her to pretend to be a virtuous and faithful wife who was unappreciated and misunderstood; so might, in certain circumstances, be willing to leave her husband for a man she loved.

What those circumstances were did not emerge. She might have told him that I would never consent to divorce her and that she could not face the furtive life of living with him ‘in sin’. Or perhaps she had spoken sorrowfully of his inability to support an extravagant and idle wife. Anyway, she had evidently raised some such obstacle as a counter to his pressing her to run away with him; and it must have been this, coupled with his obsession to possess her whatever the cost, that had put into his head the idea of resorting to desperate measures.

To murder me provided a solution to whatever obstacle Ankaret might have raised. Not only would it free her without the difficulties and delays of a divorce, but he could be reasonably certain that she would inherit a large enough share of my considerable fortune to keep them both in comfort.

It seems that he must have first mooted his idea to Ankaret as a sort of day-dream. Possibly on some such line as ‘What a stroke of luck it would be for us if Giff met with a fatal accident. He might, you know, if some time he came into my laboratory and monkeyed about with some of the things I’ve got there. As a matter of fact, I was thinking only this morning that if I were in there with him I’d only have to give him a push in the right direction to send him marching up the Golden Stairs. I suppose that sounds pretty frightful, but I love you so terribly that there are few things I’d stick at to make you my own.’

That Ankaret had not taken him seriously was beyond question but, horrible as murder may be in actual fact, there
are few women who could help their most primitive emotions being stirred by the thought of a man loving them so desperately that he would even toy with the idea of killing another in order to get them for himself.

Together they had worked out how the job could be done and made watertight against suspicion even, as transpired shortly afterwards, to my apparently not having met my death in the laboratory but in quite different circumstances.

While they planned the crime Ankaret, I am convinced, was thinking of it as an entirely hypothetical case, and had not for one moment visualised myself as the victim. The horror and distress she now displayed were ample evidence of that. But she had played with fire once too often. The passion-crazed little Welshman had assumed that she was willing to become his accomplice and, without warning her that he was about to do so, staged the ‘accident’ that had so abruptly terminated my life.

While I was swiftly piecing this background of the crime together, the couple on the bed were hurling useless recriminations at one another.

Amazed and appalled at Evans’s deed, Ankaret gave free vent to her horror at it, and swore that she had not had the faintest idea that he really intended to carry out the role he had cast for himself in the nonsense they had talked together one afternoon a fortnight or so ago.

He, with equal intensity, declared that she was lying, and now attempting to back out of giving him the help she had promised in disposing of my body.

At that she cried: ‘I’ll see you damned before I do anything of the kind! In fact I mean to ring up the police.’

As she stretched out a hand for the bed-side telephone, he grabbed her wrist, and snapped: ‘Is it mad you are, woman? Indeed now, and you do that, we’ll both be in the dock; and like as not to hang, see?’

‘You may,’ she retorted. ‘I will not, for I am innocent, and no one can prove me otherwise.’

‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ he warned her. ‘You’re in this thing with me up to your lovely neck, see. Too late to job backwards now. Spare you I would, if I could. But your help I’ve got to have. Big man he was too! I cannot shift him alone. Do you come down now to give me a hand. Get him into the wheelbarrow we will. Then we’ll tip him into the Solent as we planned.’

‘I won’t. I won’t.’ Her voice rose to an hysterical note.

‘Do you listen, lovey,’ he strove to calm her by adopting a gentler tone. ‘We daren’t leave him in the lab, see; you know that. Didn’t we agree that if we said he’d had it through monkeying with some of my gear then the police would insist on my explaining just how? Clever lot of devils they are these days. For sure they’d call in one of their tame scientists to check up. And there is only one way, look you, he could have caused his own death in the lab: my Death Ray Machine.’

‘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: