The Ka of Gifford Hillary (56 page)

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 shrugged. ‘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.’

Eddie shook his head. ‘It is not suggested that you did, Giff. The prosecution believe that you had an accomplice who came
by night, bringing you food and hot drinks to warm you up.’

I stared at him aghast. ‘You … you don’t mean they think that Johnny did that; then rescued me from my grave afterwards, knowing all the time that I was alive?’

He nodded. ‘That is what they think. It is unbelievable that you could have remained in your grave from Tuesday midday till Saturday night withour succumbing to cold or pneumonia. For that, and other incontestable reasons, it is clear that Johnny has been lying about it being Saturday night that he rescued you. Why he should have done so, and still sticks to it, I don’t know. But it was the fact that he lied about that which first made the police suspect the whole set-up.

‘See how everything fits in,’ Eddie went on, in swift bitter sentences that beat like a succession of hammer blows on my brain. ‘Johnny was staying at Longshot the night of the murder. He dined with the Waldrons, but left their house earlier than he would have done owing to his having quarrelled after dinner with the Admiral. He must have arrived back at Longshot soon after you had killed Evans. Everyone knows how devoted Johnny is to you. He agreed to help you save your neck. Having plotted the business between you, he went to bed and you spent the night in the beach-house. Early in the morning you lay down at the water’s edge and went into your first self-induced coma. He comes out as arranged and finds you. He suggests to Silvers that instead of taking your body up to the Hall they should put it in the beach-house, where it will be much easier for him to visit it later without being seen and questioned. The doctors make their examination and declare you dead. An hour or two later you come out of your coma. During the afternoon you lie there dozing. At night he comes to you with food and drink. In due course he tips you off when the body-washers will be coming to prepare you for burial. You then go into another coma. Through Sunday and Monday he keeps a watchful eye on you and brings you sustenance at intervals. On Tuesday he sees you into your coffin. As one of your executors he has seen to it that the clause in your will about the air-holes and the lid not being screwed down has been faithfully observed; so he knows you will be all right for a limited period.

‘Why he did not get you out on Tuesday night we don’t
yet know. Perhaps he got cold feet at the thought of what he had promised to do. It must have been lying there for twenty-four hours longer than you expected that turned your hair white. Anyhow, by Wednesday evening he must have known that if he left you there much longer you would be dead by morning. We know he went to the churchyard on that night because the village constable caught him there and sent him packing. He must have returned later, helped you out of your grave and taken you to Longshot. We have your own admission that, having procured clothes for you, on the Thursday he took you up to London, smuggled you into his rooms and hid you there. Why he broke prison to go down to Longshot again on Saturday night is another thing we do not know. But he could not have known then that you had already left his rooms. Probably you had told him before he left you on Thursday where he could find a wad of bearer bonds, or perhaps Ankaret’s jewels, or something else which could be turned into ready money. Anyway, who can doubt that the final stage of the plan was for him to help you get abroad so that you could make a new life for yourself under another name.

‘That it broke down was due in the first place to Johnny being arrested. In the second to your thirty-six hours in the tomb having proved too much for you. Your mind had become temporarily deranged. Instead of waiting where you were until he returned to you with a wallet full of bank-notes, you became obsessed by the idea that you must get Johnny cleared by Sir Charles. The fact that three days elapsed before you actually spoke to him is neither here nor there. By doing so you burst the whole outfit wide open, and put the rope round your neck.’

‘You are wrong!’ I cried desperately. ‘Utterly and entirely wrong. I mean about the part Johnny has played in all this. Where is he? What has happened to him?’

Eddie spread out his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘I didn’t want to add to your worries, so I’ve kept it from you as long as I could. At the request of the police, the charge against him of unlawfully interfering with a grave was held over; but bail was refused and he has since been held as a material witness in your own case. He is here in Southampton prison. This
morning he was charged with being an accessory to the murder of Evans, and having entered into a conspiracy with you to defeat the ends of justice. He’s in this thing up to his neck, and I doubt if he’ll get off with less than ten years.’

That night, when Eddie had gone, I knew the ultimate depths of despair. About my own fate I no longer cared; but the network of lies I had invented in an attempt to save myself had enmeshed the person whom, now that Ankaret was dead, I cared for more than anyone else in the world. And what a shameful return to make to poor Johnny for all the loyalty and courage he had shown in breaking one prison and risking a long sentence in another against the remote possibility that I might still be alive in my grave.

I felt so shattered that although Eddie stayed on with me for a while I could find little to say apart from reiterating my protests that Johnny was innocent. To have jobbed backwards and admitted that it had been on Saturday night that he had rescued me would have done no good; because I should not now be believed. They had proof that he had been in the churchyard on Wednesday night, and I had built up my own version of my resurrection too securely. Besides, the basis of the case the police were bringing against him was that, as I was capable of self-inducing comas at will, he had entered into a conspiracy with me from the beginning to succour me in secret while I was presumed dead, and later to rescue me. He had rescued me, and the date on which he had done so was not an essential point in the build-up which must bring about his ruin.

There were still a few minor discrepancies between the account Johnny had given the police and what they were able to prove; but, as Eddie gloomily pointed out, that was always so in murder trials. It was the weight of evidence which governed the verdict, and the case for the prosecution was overwhelming, both against me for murder and against Johnny for having afterwards endeavoured to prevent justice from taking its course.

When Eddie left me I continued to rack my poor brains for a way to save Johnny, but no ray of light came to relieve a darkness in my mind which was worse than it had suffered while in the tomb; but by morning I had taken a decision. Even though it stood no chance of being believed, I would prepare another statement, in which I would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about this extraordinary series of events of which I have been the victim.

My hand is mending well, but it will be many weeks yet before I can write with it again. In fact, I don’t suppose I ever will, as I shall before then have been tried, convicted and hanged by the neck until dead. So the prison authorities allowed me to have a tape-recording machine sent in, and for the past eight or ten days I have been dictating steadily into it. This occupation has done a lot to keep my mind off the wretched fate that awaits me; and when I am gone I intend that a copy of it shall be sent to the Society of Psychical Reseach for they, at least, should find it interesting.