The Ka of Gifford Hillary (14 page)

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?’

To my relief Ankaret replied in a low but normal voice: ‘Johnny won’t be home for hours, and I came up here to see your Death Ray. Is it that thing on the table?’

He nodded. ‘Ah, that’s it. Explain it to you sometime; but not now. Get you downstairs, lovey, and do that letter; so that I can stick it in the pocket of his jacket and take that out to leave on the end of the pier. We’ll be in the clear then, and nought to fear from anyone. ‘Twould be wisest for us to wait a few months, but we can be married in the New Year.’

With the infuriating disregard for playing safe that women sometimes show at times of crisis, she said with a shrug, ‘We have plenty of time. I want to see how you operate your Death Ray machine. Show me how it works on the rabbit.’

‘By damn!’ he exclaimed impatiently. ‘I couldn’t now, even if I would. It needs recharging; and, look you, to prepare it for action is a long business and expensive.’

Her request that he should demonstrate the Death Ray to her on a rabbit, while one would have expected her mind to be still occupied to the exclusion of all else by tumultuous thoughts about his crime, had struck me as strange. But a moment later I jumped to the conclusion that, for some reason or other, she was playing for time; as, with equal irrelevance to their present situation, she remarked:

‘In that case it can’t be much good as a commercial proposition.’

‘No, indeed?’ His tone had changed from impatience to excited enthusiasm. ‘’Tis scarce past its experimental stage as yet; but there’s a fortune in it. ‘Twill need money, of course, to develop it into a long-range weapon with quick repeating action. But now Giff’s dead we’ll have plenty of that, and for every shilling we put into it the Government will later pay us back a pound. Bringing it to perfection will be just the thing to keep my mind busy till we can get married and I can go to bed openly with you at nights.’

Suddenly she swung upon him and cried: ‘I’ll not put a penny into it! And you can disabuse your mind once and for all of the idea that I’m going to marry you. Get out of here! Get out!’

He stared at her in amazement and his jaw dropped in dismay. But he recovered himself quickly and said in a
soothing tone: ‘You’re over-wrought, lovey; and I don’t wonder. You’ll feel different in the morning, be your sweet self again. In your bed you should be, with a good sleeping draught. But you must write that letter first. Come now, let us go downstairs and get it over with.’

‘I won’t,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll see you damned first!’

‘Then you’ll be damned as well as me, if you do not.’ The angry note had crept back into his voice, although he was obviously endeavouring to control it. ‘See now, how otherwise can Giff’s disappearance be explained, and his death, when his body is washed up? He’d not a worry in the world. He’d no reason to commit suicide, and we’ve got to provide one. Do we fail, and the police will start ferreting around. They’ll get your Mildred’s story of finding me in your room. Him being so heavy the wheelbarrow must have left a track. When they begin looking, they’ll find it. Ah, and once those human bloodhounds are on the trail there’s no knowing what they’ll unearth that may tell against us. Remember, he was dead before we put him in the Solent. Well and good, all will be if the letter is found in his coat. There the reason will be for his drowning himself, and drowned everyone will believe him should his body be fished out of the water. And do we not put suicide into their minds there’ll be postmortem! ‘Twill emerge that indeed he did not die by drowning whatever but by shock. They’ll search the place with fine tooth-combs, and there’ll be no pulling of wool over the eyes of the experts they send to examine this lab. ‘Twill be found that there’s a machine here capable of giving the heart of a man a shock strong enough to kill him. Then what with Mildred, and the barrow track, and maybe other things we’ve not thought of, ‘twill be plain to them that he was murdered here. Ah, and that guilty love being the motive it was yourself that helped me get him down to the shore. Have some sense, woman. Do you not write that letter, curtains it will be for both of us.’

Again Ankaret’s resolution gave way. After moistening her lips with her tongue she said harshly: ‘Very well, I’ll do it. But I never said that I would marry you, and you may as well know now that I never had the least intention of doing so. I suppose I must put up with your presence until this awful business has been straightened out, but I won’t for one
moment longer than I have to. As soon as the household has settled down you are to pack and go. That is an order. And if you make any trouble about going I’ll send for the police to eject you.’

She showed no trace of hysteria, and the sudden expression of consternation that came over Evans’s face made clear his realisation that she had both fooled and finished with him. For a moment his mouth worked furiously, then he burst out:

‘Eject me, is it? Cast me off after getting me to kill your man for you so that you could have your freedom. And I like a fool worshipping the ground you walked on. Who would have thought that behind that angel face of yours lies the mind of a double-crossing bitch. Ah yes, indeed, but it’s a big mistake you’ve made to think to play Owen Evans for a sucker. I’ve paid your price and I mean to have you. Yes, indeed! Saint or devil you’re going to be my woman for as long as I want you. Not yet for a while, maybe; but you’ll not spoil for a few months’ keeping. ’Tis true enough that I can’t stop you from having me turned out. Indeed, I’ll go without the least fuss, whatever. But I’ll be waiting for you, and you’ll either come to me or go to the gallows. I’ll take ship for South America. I’ll let you know where you’re to join me. I’ll have changed my name and the police will never get me. But they’ll get the lovely Lady Ankaret unless I’ve bedded her by Christmas Day. Fail you to come at my bidding, and a sworn statement goes to Scotland Yard telling how you tempted me into committing murder for you.’

Ankaret heard him out, then, as swiftly as a gangster could have pulled a gun, she snatched up a steel rod from the nearby bench and struck at him with it.

The stroke caught him full across the face, breaking the bone of his nose. As he staggered back blinded by pain, she struck at him again and gasped out:

‘You swine! You filth! You miserable fool! How dare you think that I would ever live with you.’

With a wail of agony he thrust up his hands to protect himself. Her second blow descended on the back of one of them. Uttering another screech he jerked it away, but attempted to run in and at her.

Side-stepping swiftly she lashed out at his head. The steel
rod sliced down on his ear, half tearing it from his head, then thudded on to his shoulder.

As she beat at him she was speaking all the time, her voice vibrant with hate and fury. ‘Take that, you beast! Had you been the last man on earth I’d never have let you have me! I am no angel! I’ve had a score of men, but never one like you! Women like me do not allow themselves to be defiled by the sweepings of the gutter.’

Her fourth stroke landed on his head. His knees gave and with a moan he fell upon them. But she did not mean to show him any mercy, and told him so as she continued to strike down with all her strength at his untidy mop of thick black hair and feebly flailing hands.

‘Take that for Giff! And that, and that! Tonight you killed the only man I’ve ever loved. A man whose boots you were not fit to lick. But two can play at murder. I’d have tried to kill you with your filthy Death Ray had it been working. This rod is better though, for you don’t deserve a sudden, painless death. Get down to hell where you belong, and stay there.’

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I have never been given to physical violence, but I must confess that the sight of Ankaret attacking my murderer aroused intense excitement in me and, in the early stages of the conflict, had I been able to do so I would certainly have given her my aid; for even after her first blow had deprived him of the full use of his wits, had he succeeded in clutching the steel rod he could easily have wrenched it from her, then, maddened with rage, frustration and pain, as he was, quite possibly have beaten her to death with it.

After the fourth stroke she had him at her mercy, and what followed was horrifying to behold; for she must in all have struck him not less than twenty times before he ceased squirming and lay, his head, face and hands a broken bloody mess, sprawled out on the floor. But her own admission while beating at him showed that before he returned to the laboratory she had already made up her mind to revenge my death;
so she could hardly have been expected to let up when well on the way to accomplishing her purpose.

Apart from the final agony that Evans must have suffered, I did not feel in the least sorry for him. He was a mean-spirited little man and capable of the greatest baseness, as had emerged in his threat to denounce Ankaret to the police should she refuse to go out and live with him in South America. Moreover, to satisfy his own lust he had killed a man who, far from doing him any injury, had given him employment when he needed it and had always treated him decently.

On the other hand any impartial person given full knowledge of the whole affair would, I feel sure, have considered that he had had a raw deal. Having been brought up in a poor home and spent his adult years in intensive study as the only way of making a career for himself, he had had neither the time nor means to travel or to mingle with what are still termed the upper classes. And the cinema is no real substitute for that, as it is only a temporary transportation to make-believe in which neither settings nor characters are real. In consequence, even the modest luxury of Longshot Hall, and the quiet but gracious life we lived there when entertaining guests over week-ends, must have seemed to him like entering another world.

It follows that in his eyes Ankaret must have appeared even more glamorous than she did to sophisticated men like myself, and utterly unobtainable. No doubt he had fallen for her in quite a humble way, and would never have dreamed of letting her know it, had she not so wickedly decided to amuse herself with him. Even if she had not actually said that she would marry him after they had got me out of the way—and the plan for that had been thought of by her only as in the nature of a plot for a thriller play—she must have given him grounds for believing that she would be willing; so there was no escaping the fact that she was fundamentally responsible for my death, as well as his.

All the same, while I felt intense umbrage against him for cutting short my life, I felt none against her. Perhaps that was partly because she had, in a sense, acted as my champion and proclaimed her love for me with such vehemence while striking him down; but much more it could be attributed to the old saying that to understand all is to forgive all, and
knowing and loving her as I did I could not wish her any ill for what she had done.

On the contrary, I was now intensely worried on her account. It appeared not only that she had forfeited her chance of clearing herself of having had a hand in my murder, but that there could be no escape for her from being convicted of that of Evans’s.

She could, of course, tell some version of the true story twisted as far as possible in favour of herself; then say that when she learned from Evans that he had killed me, maddened by grief and shock she had attacked him while temporarily out of her mind. Unfortunately that did not tie up with her having helped him to get my body down to the pier, and if her having done so came out few people would believe that after participating in such a cold-blooded act she had suddenly become the victim of a brainstorm. There was also the certainty that, unreasonable as it might be in this particular case, any jury would regard the fact of her having beaten Evans to death as a much more heinous crime than if she had simply shot him. To sum up, I feared that there could be little hope of a recommendation to mercy for her and that, unless she could get away with a plea of insanity, she might, just as Evans had threatened to make her, have to face the horror of being pilloried as another Lady Macbeth. It can, therefore, well be imagined with what distress I watched her at that awful moment.

Panting from the exertions, she threw the steel rod down on the floor and walked quickly out of the lab, across the landing, to her own room. There I expected her to be hit by the reaction to her terrible deed, and fall prostrate upon the bed. But she was made of sterner stuff than even I had thought. Pulling off the gloves she had been wearing for the past half hour, she again went into the bathroom and bathed her face.

When she had done she went downstairs to the drawingroom and from a drawer in her writing table got out a packet of letters, then she went through to my little library. Opening the bow-fronted cupboard where I kept glasses and our drinks, she poured herself a stiff tot of liqueur brandy and drank it off. Next she lit a cigarette; but after inhaling a few long pulls from it she took the butt into the drawingroom
and stubbed it out in an ashtray there. She then returned to my room, produced my keys from a pocket in her slacks and unlocked my roll-top desk.

I guessed then that she still meant to forge a letter purporting to have been written by me; but for the moment I could not see how it was going to help her, or that by it she could possibly account for Evans’s death as well as mine. As she took up my desk pen and drew a blank of sheet foolscap towards her, I watched over her shoulder with the greatest interest.