The Ka of Gifford Hillary (11 page)

There were not many requiring immediate payment; so writing the cheques and envelopes, and a letter of condolence to a friend who had lost his wife a few days previously, took me only about twenty minutes. When I had done I locked the desk, then went over to the drinks cupboard in the corner, mixed a Dry Martini, and took it through to Ankaret.

While we had our cocktails I told her about the meeting that afternoon. Of course, she knew nothing of my interview with Sir Charles, and I did not even hint to her that anything more than my own convictions had led me to take the line I had. In fact, when she said that she thought having forgone a handsome profit on ethical grounds did me great credit, I felt distinctly embarrassed; but I swiftly slid away from that aspect of the matter by making her laugh with a description of Admiral Waldron’s indignation.

In due course I went up to have my bath and put on a smoking jacket; then, at eight o’clock, we went in to dinner. It was during the meal that I mentioned that Johnny would
not be leaving first thing in the morning but going up late on Saturday night; and Ankaret asked:

‘How is his affair with Sue Waldron going?’

‘I don’t really know,’ I replied. ‘But he seems as keen as mustard about her; and as he is a determined type of chap I should not be surprised to hear at any time that they’ve become engaged.’

‘It would be a good match for him; Sue is quite an heiress, isn’t she?’

I nodded. ‘That may prove a snag, though. You can bet that the Admiral has been hoping she’ll marry someone with a place, or anyhow a chap who can afford to keep her in better style than could a Wing Commander with little but his pay. The old boy may dig his toes in; and I don’t think she’s got any money of her own.’

‘Oh, she’ll marry him if she wants to, and make her father give her an allowance into the bargain.’

Somewhat surprised by Ankaret’s declaration, I glanced across at her. When we are alone we always sit at the sides of the table, so that we can see one another between the two candelabra. Against the dark background of the room, her pale face with its aureole of gently curling Titian hair, the richness of which was brought out by the candlelight, looked more than ever like a painting by an old master, come to life.

As she caught my glance, her beautifully curved mouth broke into a slow smile, then she asked: ‘What are you looking so surprised about?’

‘What you just said. Sue is an attractive little piece; well educated, nice manners, no fool and with plenty to say for herself. But she’s only just twenty, and I’ve never seen any indication in her that she has a particularly strong character.’

Ankaret’s grey eyes showed her amusement. ‘What poor judges of women you men are, Giff. You never look beyond the obvious. Just because Sue is small, inclined to be plump, and has a merry eye in her rather highly-coloured little face, you write her off, beyond granting her the intelligence normal to any girl with her upbringing, as a “smack bott for Uncle”.’

‘Not this Uncle,’ I grinned. ‘I prefer them blonde and blue eyed.’

She had been moulding a bread pellet, and she flicked it at me. ‘I know what you prefer, darling; or I wouldn’t be
here. I mean I would have left you long ago if you hadn’t taken the trouble to get to understand me; and that can’t have been easy. But I’m the only woman you ever have understood. You didn’t know a thing about your first wife, and you haven’t a clue about Sue.’

‘Tell me about her, then.’

‘I like her. That is, as much as I am capable of liking her sort of person. She is unimaginative, honest, reliable, and would go a long way out of her way to help her friends; but woe betide anyone who gets up against her. Next time you see her forget the pretty pink cheeks and take a look at her side face. You’ll see a replica of the Admiral’s battleship chin. Then look at her hands. They are firm and square with short square-tipped fingers. If that is not enough, I’ve once seen those merry eyes of hers go as hard as agates. Given the natural cunning of the female in addition to all that, I bet you she’ll make rings round her father.’

I made a grimace. ‘If you’re right about all this, and Johnny gets her, I hardly know whether to be glad or sorry for him now.’

‘Oh, you needn’t worry on that score. If she loves him enough to marry him she’ll be on his side; and Johnny has quite enough personality to hold his own with her. Given a little money, and with her behind him, he can hardly fail to become an Air Marshal.’

‘Well, here’s good health to them,’ I said, raising my glass of hock, and Ankaret joined me in the toast.

When we had finished dinner we took the Benedictine bottle into the drawingroom, so as not to delay Silvers clearing away and finishing with his work for the night. Until nearly half-past nine we talked of those trivial common interests that are the staple conversation of married couples and give them an occasional laugh; then I said it was time for me to go along to Owen Evans.

Ankaret knew that his experiments were more or less secret; so she never asked me about them. And, as she had not the faintest interest in science, I don’t think she would have anyway. She said that she had just started a very witty travel book called
Blue Moon over Portugal
that had come in with the latest batch of library books, so she would go early to bed and read; but she hoped that I wouldn’t be too long.

She preceded me upstairs, a tall graceful figure with the voluminous skirts of her ‘shocking-pink’ house-coat swishing about her heels. I locked the front door and those of the rooms that gave on to the hall, put out the downstairs lights, and followed. Up on the broad landing she had turned left. I turned right and went through the connecting door to the Prof’s domain.

Beyond the door was a sort of antechamber, which he used as an office. It held a small desk, with a telephone, and was fitted up with shelves to hold his reference books and files. A further door led into the laboratory, which from there ran to the end of the wing. By removing the roof and substituting one of glass I had ensured a maximum of light during the daytime, without spoiling the appearance of either the front or back of the house, and the windows on both sides had been covered over inside with asbestos sheeting. The glass of the roof was frosted, to prevent glare, so at night nothing short of strong moonlight came through; but the long room was made bright as day by neon strip lighting.

A broad bench, on which stood a variety of scientific instruments, ran all down one side of it, and at the far end, in the middle of the floor, there was a four-foot square table. On it was a conglomeration of lenses, brackets, screws and levers, which, as Evans was tinkering with the contraption, was evidently his new toy.

Having given me a curt nod, he continued working on it for some minutes; then he brushed his hands together, as though to cleanse them of invisible dirt, frowned at me from under his thick black eyebrows, and said in the superior voice that a school-master might have used to a newly joined pupil who had only just managed to scrape through his entrance exam:

‘Naturally, Sir Gifford, it would be too much to expect you to understand a detailed description of the processes that I’m proposing to demonstrate to you this evening; but you might get the broad principle of the thing—that is if I use simple language.’

‘It will have to be very simple,’ I smiled, ‘but I’ll do my best to follow you.’

He launched out then into a maze of technicalities, in which I endeavoured to show intelligent interest but was soon completely
lost. His lecture lasted for a good twenty minutes, but all I had really gathered at the end of it was that he had been playing around with radio-active forms of various elements, and that these isotopes, as they were called, could be used to bring about important changes in the physical properties of both inanimate materials, such as plastics, and living bodies. As far as the latter were concerned, he claimed that at short range his machine, if directed on an animal, would have the effect of stopping its heart.

When he had said his say he, literally, produced the rabbit. It was a nice fat Belgian hare, in a fair-sized cage, happily chewing away at some leaves of lettuce. Lifting the cage from the floor, he set it on a broad shelf which ran along the end wall of the laboratory and was about on a level with the table.

Beckoning me forward, he asked me to stand up against the table, so that by looking straight over his apparatus I had the best possible view of the rabbit. Standing on the left of the table he made some final adjustments to the machine. While he was doing so I heard the old clock over the stables strike ten. Then he made a sign to me to look at the rabbit, and pressed a button.

Instantly I felt a fierce pain pierce my heart. Next moment my whole body was contorted with agony. It was so excruciating that it paralysed all thought and movement so that I could not even let out a shout. But the torture ceased almost as swiftly as it had begun. My nerves refused to register further and my mind became a blank.

After what cannot have been more than a few seconds, my brain began to function again; but I no longer felt even a suggestion of pain, or the breathlessness that should normally have been its aftermath. In fact I felt no physical sensations at all.

I was still standing up against the table with Evans’s apparatus just in front of me. Staring straight over the top of it I saw the rabbit in its cage still happily nibbling away at the lettuce leaves. Then, without any particular reason for doing so, I glanced down towards my feet. My mind positively reeled at what I saw.

Where my feet should have been a body sprawled upon the floor. And it was mine. I had not a shadow of doubt about
that. The face was half hidden by an outflung arm, but it had my neatly-brushed brown hair, the burgundy-coloured velvet smoking jacket I had been wearing, and the evening trousers with the double braid stripe, which should correctly have been worn only with tails, but were a pair that, as one wears tails so rarely these days, I was knocking out.

It flashed upon me then that I must be dead. Evidently, through some frightful oversight, Evans had got his apparatus reversed, so that its ray had been focused on myself instead of on the rabbit. Looking up at him I expected to see his face distraught with consternation, and that in a moment he would fling himself down on his knees beside my body in a wild effort to revive it.

But that wasn’t how things were at all. He had not moved from beside the table, and he was looking down upon what had been me. On his lean face there was no trace of panic or distress, but a faint smile of elation. I knew then that I really was dead, and that he had deliberately murdered me.

*
          
*
          
*
          
*

My feelings were extraordinarily mixed. Shock, horror, amazement and dismay jostled one another in my whirling mind. It was still striving to grasp the idea that it had suddenly become disembodied; yet no other explanation fitted the facts. Although I no longer had feeling in any part of myself the conscious ‘me’ was still standing beside the table, while sprawled on the floor lay my corpse.

Evans’s reactions to my collapse showed beyond doubt that he had planned to make me the victim of his infernal machine. Why, I had not the faintest idea. The most likely explanation seemed to be that, all unsuspecting, I had been employing a madman; but in these frantic moments my distraught brain was far more concerned with the implications of being dead.

Like most people, I had never been afraid of death; only of the pain which is generally inseparable from it, or, worse, the failure of some vital faculty by which a man may be reduced to an unlovely caricature of his former self and must suffer a long drawn out dependence on others before his end. I had often expressed the hope that I might escape such agonies or
ignominy by a sudden death. Now, apparently, my wish had been granted; yet I was very far from being happy about that.

As a healthy man only just entering on middle age I had expected to live for a long time to come. There was still a lot of things I wanted to do and places I wanted to see. I had, of course, made a will, but there were many matters that I would have tidied up had I only had a little warning. Absurdly enough, two quite trivial things flitted across my mind—a begging letter from an old friend fallen on evil times that I had left unanswered, and my intention to increase the pension of Annie Hawkins, the long-since retired nurse of my childhood.

Then it was suddenly borne in upon me that I would never now read Grey’s
Elegy
, or see that masterpiece of Moorish architecture, the Alhambra at Granada, or witness from Stonehenge the sunrise on a midsummer’s morning—all things that I had vaguely meant to do at some time or other. I had left it too late. Yes, ‘too late’, the saddest words, as someone once remarked, in the English language.

These thoughts all raced through my mind in a fraction of the time it takes to set them down, and I was still staring at Owen Evans. As I watched him with mingled bewilderment and anger the smug little smile of self-congratulation faded from his face, and he began to tremble.

After all, it is one thing to contemplate killing a man—even if obsessed with the desire to secure the final proof of the effectiveness of a new scientific weapon—and quite another actually to do it. Apparently, the realisation that he had allowed his disordered imagination to lead him into committing a terrible crime had suddenly come home to him. His face went as white as a sheet and, although he was quite well shaved, the incipient stubble on his chin showed blue in sharp contrast with it.

For a moment I thought he was going to be sick; but he got hold of himself, stooped down, grasped my body by the shoulder, and shook it. As he let go, the rolling head became still again and the arm flopped back, without a quiver, into immobility. Drawing a sharp breath he turned and walked towards the door of the laboratory.

It was then, for the first time since the ray had exerted its deadly effect on me, that I attempted any form of movement.
Naturally I supposed that, as a disembodied spirit, I should be able to flit from place to place without effort and, having no weight, I—or rather the mind of which I now solely consisted—could remain poised high up in the air or sink to any more convenient level as I desired. But it did not prove quite like that.