The Ka of Gifford Hillary (52 page)

He nodded. ‘Yes; that sort of thing does happen. But I think it most unlikely in this case. Upon what do you base this extraordinary charge?’

I told him then how on Thursday night, soon after he had
arrived at his cottage with his distinguished guest, Maria had telephoned to Klinsky; how Klinsky, kneeling at the key-hole of the dining room door, had listened to their conversation, and how the poison had been tried out on the cat.

After staring at me for a moment, he shot out: ‘How do you know all this?’

‘Because I was a witness to it,’ I replied. ‘Of course, it was entirely by accident that I stumbled on this plot. I came down to your cottage because Norton had been arrested that afternoon and it was my intention to ask you to intervene on his behalf.’

‘Then why didn’t you do so?’

His question was the first snag I had met with in telling my story. If I had replied by stating the truth he would never have believed me; and if he once got the idea that I had only been imagining things it was certain that he would ignore my warning. He would pack me off to a private nursing-home, then drive down to the cottage and to his death. I had no alternative but to lie to him, and I said:

‘Finding you to be engaged with such an important visitor I didn’t feel that I could interrupt you.’

‘He left quite early. Why didn’t you wait until he had gone and come in to me then?’

I took refuge in a half-truth. ‘Because I thought it important to find out where Klinsky lived. I followed him home and could not find my way back to your cottage afterwards.’

‘Since you were so concerned about Norton, why didn’t you come to see me here the following morning?’

The following morning I had been lying in my grave. I shuddered at the recollection, as I replied a little lamely: ‘I have already told you that I have been ill—desperately ill. Between then and now it has been impossible for me to get here—or even to ring you up.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, nobody could contest your assertion that you have been ill; and that is the root of the matter. Your brain has become temporarily unbalanced during your illness. Now you are recovering that is nothing to worry about. It often happens when people have been under a great nervous strain, and you will soon be all right again. But in the meantime you have been building up fantasies in your mind with Soviet agents and myself as the central theme. I suppose you
must have been down at my cottage on Thursday night to know about Maria and that I took a certain person down to dine with me there. But it is quite impossible for you to have seen all the happenings that you say you did. You couldn’t have done without being seen yourself. They are simply figments of your imagination.’

Just as I feared, he was set upon rejecting my testimony because I could not tell the truth, and if I failed to convince him of his danger he would be on his way down to the cottage as soon as he had got rid of me. A little bitterly I said:

‘All right, then. If you choose to believe that Maria is an angel and that Klinsky is only a product of my disordered brain, how about this?’ Then I repeated to him a disparaging remark about one of their colleagues that his guest had made while they were sitting at dinner.

He sat back and his blue eyes goggled at me through the thick lenses. After a moment he said: ‘Damn it; if you overheard that you must have been there. All right. I’ll not go down tonight, and I’ll have M.I.5 put tabs on Maria. But there’s a lot that I don’t understand about this yet. I think you had better begin at the beginning, and tell me how it is that while everyone believes you to be dead you are still alive.’

My efforts to convince him of his danger had taken a lot out of me. I was again very tired and I had not so far had a chance to think out how I was to account for my resurrection; so I took refuge in the obvious gambit and muttered

‘I don’t really know myself. As I told you, I have been very ill. For one thing, I was in a car smash. I lost my memory, and have been wandering for a week.’

‘Oh come!’ he protested. ‘Things can’t have been quite like that. When you came down to my cottage on Thursbay evening you played the part of an observer remarkably well, and your memory must have been perfectly sound then for it to register so clearly all that you saw and heard. If your mental collapse occurred last week-end that would account for your not being able to explain why all the papers reported your death. On the other hand if it occurred after your visit to my cottage that would explain your not having come here to warn me about Maria on Friday or Saturday. But you can’t have it both ways.’

‘I… I had more or less recovered by Thursday,’ I stammered wearily. ‘But afterwards I had a relapse.’

On Sir Charles’s face there was now no trace of the famous school-boy grin, and even if he still reminded one of a white-crested owl, it was no longer a benevolent one. He said harshly:

‘Hillary, you are lying to me. You are hiding something. I want the truth. If you had lost your memory you would not be here now. Where have you been during the past week? Why were you reported as dead when you were not?’

Racked with fever and pain as I was, my brain proved unequal to producing even a remotely plausible explanation; but it did grasp the fact that sooner or later a part, at least, of the truth must come out; so I explained desperately:

‘Very well then! Since you insist, everyone was misled into believing me dead by my having fallen into a coma. On Tuesday last I was buried alive.’

‘Buried alive!’ he gasped, starting forward in his chair. ‘Do … do you really mean that?’

‘Look at me!’ I retorted bitterly. ‘Look at me. Just now you said I had aged twenty years in a week. Can you think of anything more likely to do that to a man?’

‘Good God, how terrible!’ he sank back in his chair. ‘But how … how did you escape from your grave?’

‘Norton was never quite satisfied that I was dead. The thought preyed on his mind until he felt that he must make certain. He came to the churchyard at night and got me out of my coffin.’

For a moment Sir Charles stared at me in silence, then he said: ‘It must have been ghastly for you, Hillary. It just doesn’t bear thinking about. For how long were you actually buried?’

That was a question which it was impossible for me to answer truthfully. I had given him incontestable proof that I had been at his cottage on Thursday night. If I told him that I had remained buried from Tuesday midday till Saturday midnight, and that it was not my physical self but my Ka that had been a silent witness to Maria poisoning the cat, and all the rest of it, he would never have believed me. I took what I felt to be the only possible course, and replied with a half-truth, back-dating my ordeal by two days.

‘I was in the grave for thirty-six hours. Norton got me out on Wednesday night.’

At once he seized upon the weak point in my story. ‘If that is so, where were you all Friday and Saturday? You had recovered sufficiently by Thursday evening to come down to my cottage, and you were perfectly sane then. Why didn’t you come here to warn me about Maria the following morning?’

I was at the end of my tether. Grasping the arm of the chair with my good hand, I levered myself to my feet and cried in protest: ‘Damn it all! I have warned you! Isn’t that enough? As for the rest, I’ve been ill! I don’t know! I’ve forgotten!’

Sir Charles got to his feet. Moving round the desk he took me by the arm and led me through a door into the next room. A youngish man was working there on some papers. He stood up as we came in, and Sir Charles said to him:

‘Geoffrey, this is Sir Gifford Hillary. I want you to look after him for the next quarter of an hour or so. He is very ill, so don’t let him leave you; otherwise he might injure himself.’

The young man pushed forward a chair and I sank into it. Sir Charles returned to his own room. My temperature had mounted while I was talking and my mind began to wander again. The young man shot me a covert look of interest then resumed his work. The quarter of an hour and more drifted by. I was not thinking of myself, but of Johnny, and that everything had been made all right for him and Sue, when a buzzer sounded on the desk. My silent companion stood up, opened the door and nodded. Then he said to me:

‘Sir Charles would like to see you again now.’

Getting to my feet, I walked slowly forward. The door closed behind me. With Sir Charles there were now two other men. They were standing in a little group in front of the desk.

As I advanced, Sir Charles said: ‘Please don’t think I am ungrateful, Hillary, for the warning you have brought me. But as a Minister of the Crown—or for that matter as an ordinary citizen—there are certain things which it is obligatory on me to do.’

The bulkier of his companions stepped forward. He had
Detective Inspector written all over him, and he said gruffly:

‘Sir Gifford Hillary. It is my duty to take you into custody in connection with your own signed confession to the murder of Professor Owen Evans.’

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.’