The Ka of Gifford Hillary (42 page)

After two months of wonderful weather there had been some rain during the past few days, but now another fine spell seemed to have set in. The warmth of summer still lingered in the evening air, and the silence was broken only by the chirruping of birds in the surrounding woods. It certainly was a perfect spot for two public men burdened with great responsibilities, and perpetually harassed for decisions
on one thing or another during every hour of their long working days, quietly to talk over their affairs.

As soon as they had settled down they got on to the subject of Egypt and the threat to the security of the vast British-built installations on the Suez Canal, owing to Colonel Nasser’s having entered into friendly relations with the Iron Curtain countries in order to secure armaments from them. This was very much Sir Charles’s province, and I would greatly have liked to listen to his views. But I felt that I ought to lose no further time in attempting to get through to him, so I had to give my thoughts entirely to willing him to see me.

For ten minutes or more I remained stationary in front of him, but he talked on without showing the slightest reaction. Moving round the table I spent a further ten minutes opposite his companion, but with equally barren results. So I had to conclude that if either of them were psychic, his mind was much too fully occupied at the moment for me to break in on it.

I knew that Sir Charles was a widower; but he had two daughters in their teens, and on the way down to the car I had hoped that one of them might, perhaps, prove a sensitive. As Maria had made no preparations for serving a dinner it was clear that they were either out for the evening or living elsewhere; so Maria herself became the next object of my attentions.

Leaving the garden for the house, I soon found her kitchen and set about tackling her. But I had been concentrating on her only for a few minutes when she left it and went into the sitting-room. After a quick glance out of the window at the two men on the far side of the lily pool, she picked up the telephone and dialled a number.

When she was answered she asked if Mr. Klinsky was in. There was a pause, presumably while Mr. Klinsky was being fetched, then she said: ‘Is that you, Jan? It is Maria. He is here. And at last you have luck. He has brought his big friend with him. I give dinner to them in twenty minutes.’

Replacing the receiver she went through to a small dining-room and laid the table for two; then she returned to the kitchen and began to make the omelette. Recalling my recent experience with Daisy during her culinary operations I decided that to make a further attempt on Maria for the moment
would be to tire myself to no purpose; so I took the opportunity to have a look round upstairs.

Apart from Maria’s room there were only three bedrooms, and none of them had the appearance of being regularly lived in, so that settled the question of Sir Charles’s daughters. They were not out but living elsewhere, and Maria was evidently the only permanent resident at the cottage.

Hearing her call to her master that the omelette was ready, I went down to the dining-room hoping that during the meal I might have better luck. But unlike Daisy, who had eaten alone, the thoughts of Sir Charles and his friend did not drift. They continued an animated conversation which blocked any chance of my impinging on the consciousness of either, even had both been sensitive to psychic phenomena. By the time Maria put the cheese straws on the table I had resigned myself to awaiting again a more favourable opportunity and, having ceased to concentrate, I was free to listen to what they were saying.

I had taken in the full import of only a few sentences when I realised that they were now deep in the controversy of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Looks; and that it was to tackle his visitor on the matter without fear of interruption that Sir Charles had brought him down to the cottage.

To them the arguments on both sides were too well known for either to need to go into any details, and I gathered that the visitor had already made it clear that he was not prepared to give an opinion on the present strategic value of the Royal Navy; so the discussion revolved mainly round the possibility of amalgamating the three Services into a Royal Defence Force. Sir Charles not only pressed for it, but argued that the Government might be called to account later if it delayed too long in taking this first step towards a general readjustment of forces rendered necessary by the introduction of thermonuclear weapons. The other pointed out that many adjustments were already taking place, that others had been agreed on, and that if any such sweeping reform was proposed without preparing the country for it the results might prove disastrous to the Government.

Having agreed about that, Sir Charles said with a smile that he had had a private plan for pushing public opinion in the right direction, but that unfortunately it had broken down;
so, in view of the urgency of the matter, he had felt that without further loss of time he must make an attempt to bring matters to a head through orthodox channels.

Seeing the wretched situation in which his ‘private plan’ bad landed Johnny, I would have liked to curse him roundly for ever having departed from ‘orthodox channels’; but it was no good crying over spilt milk, and I waited with deep interest to learn how the conversation would develop.

In that I was fated to be disappointed. At that very moment my glance was caught by a queer outline low down on the door which gave on to a short passage leading to the kitchen. To my sight it was like the shadow of a kneeling man whose head was on a level with the door knob. Marshalling my powers of concentration, I stared at the door and, sure enough, on the far side of it a man was kneeling down peering through the keyhole.

‘Spy’ was the word which instantly flashed through my brain. Here was the sort of situation which one read of in thrillers—the secluded cottage in the depths of a wood, the Minister of Defence entertaining privately the man who could aid or counter his efforts to revolutionise our entire defence policy, their free discussion of the most vital secrets over a bottle of wine and a good meal together, and the agent of a foreign power, who had somehow gained access to the house, eavesdropping in order to report their decisions to his paymasters.

I had often enjoyed reading of such scenes, but always afterwards had the slightly cynical feeling that they never took place in real life. Yet here, incontestably, I was faced with one. The man beyond the door was listening at its keyhole. What possible reason could he have for doing so other than to obtain illicit possession of official secrets? Swiftly I passed through the door and stared down at him.

He had red hair and looked to be in his middle thirties. There was no suggestion about him of the suave ex-officer secret agent of fiction, who moves freely in the highest society, traps the wicked mistress of the enemy Chief-of-Staff into giving away the plans that have been confided to her and ends up with the soft arms of his own Ambassador’s daughter round his neck. On the contrary, this fellow looked like a working man. His hands were rough, his suit ready-made
and his heavy shoes unpolished. Yet his apparently lowly status made him no less of a menace; and it seemed much more likely that for active operations the Russians employed men of this sort rather than untrustworthy crooks who were capable of passing themselves off as ex-public-school men.

Once again the fact that I was both invisible and inaudible made it impossible for me to do anything. I could only hover there, an intensely worried spectator, while the spy alternately peered through the keyhole and listened to a discussion which might ultimately result in a complete change in the system of defence of the whole of the Western Powers.

Through the door I heard Sir Charles urging the importance of reaching a decision before the meeting of the Foreign Ministers at Geneva in October, and stressing how greatly the adoption of his proposals would strengthen our hand at the Conference. Then a sound behind me made me turn. The door at the other end of the short passage had opened and Maria stood framed in it.

‘Hist!’ she made the sharp warning noise from between her teeth and, frowning, beckoned to the kneeling man to come away. He turned to glance at her, but shook his head and once more applied his eye to the keyhole.

I was so agitated that I could no longer put such snatches of the conversation as I caught into their right context. But a few minutes later I gathered that something had been settled, as I heard Sir Charles say:

‘Well, I’m glad we agree to that extent. I have brought down in my brief-case a copy of the report by the Committee of Inquiry and when you have read that I feel pretty confident that you will give me your full backing. Anyhow, that is as far as we can go for the moment. Now; how about some coffee?’

As the bell rang in the kitchen, the spy swiftly tiptoed back into it. Maria had already retreated, and a minute or two later re-emerged carrying the coffee tray. Having delivered it she rejoined her red-headed friend, who had perched himself on the kitchen table with his short legs dangling from it.

They exchanged several swift sentences in a foreign tongue. She was obviously upbraiding him and he was laughing at her. At the language they were speaking I could only guess. From her greeting to Sir Charles’s friend I had naturally supposed
her to be an Austrian; but now it seemed certain that she was a Czech, an Hungarian or, perhaps, even a Russian.

Now that I had a chance to study the man more closely I could see that he came of peasant stock, but had probably improved himself by education; and his quick dark eyes, on either side of a long thin nose, showed him to have plenty of shrewd intelligence. It occurred to me that he had a faint resemblance to Maria; so it was possible that they were members of the same family, and had been working together for a long time, or that he might have some hold over here.

When they had finished their argument, he produced a small glass bottle of colourless liquid from his waistcoat pocket. After holding it up to the light, he wagged his finger at her several times while evidently impressing upon her how it should be used, then thrust it into her hand.

She seemed loath to take it, and again they entered on an argument which was to me unintelligible gibberish. But several times he pointed to a big ginger cat that was sleeping on a rug in front of the fire-place.

At last she left him, went into the larder and returned with a saucer of milk. Into it she put a couple of drops of the liquid, then set the saucer down in front of the cat. It was a big, heavy animal, and even when she woke it by stroking its back it seemed too somnolent to be interested. Lifting the saucer a little so that it was within a few inches of the cat’s face, she splashed the milk about gently with her finger. The cat’s pink tongue came out. It gave two laps, was shaken with a violent convulsion, went rigid for a moment, then rolled over dead.

The man sitting on the table smiled and spread out his hands as if to say: ‘You see how quick and simple it is.’

The woman shrugged resignedly, picked up the saucer and washed the remains of its contents carefully away in the kitchen sink.

With growing horror the meaning of the scene I had just witnessed dawned upon me. The Soviet Secret Service was said to be extremely efficient. They must have found out that Sir Charles was the key man in the battle to bring about the New Look, which would so enormously strengthen our power to defend ourselves in the event of Russian aggression. The killing of the cat had been a try-out. Maria was a pawn in
the hands of Britain’s enemies and had been ordered to murder her master.

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Appalled by the conclusion, I asked myself if I could possibly be right. From time to time Presidents and Ministers are assassinated on the Continent; but not in law-abiding England. One moment though. In 1923 Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson had been shot dead in Eaton Square, and attempts had been made on the life of both Lloyd George and King Edward VIII. Moreover, during the past few years the Western Powers had lost several of their strongest supporters among the national leaders of the Near East through Communist-inspired assassinations. Why, if the dividend were deemed high enough, should the long arm of Moscow strike its secret blows repeatedly in the Moslem countries and refrain from doing so in Surrey?

The excellence of our Immigration and Police systems no doubt explained the general immunity enjoyed by our leading statesmen; and in London or while travelling each had the protection of a private detective specially trained to act as his bodyguard. But here there was not even a policeman within a mile, and as the murder was to be committed by poison no shots would alarm any neighbours. If the deed were done when Sir Charles was alone in the house with Maria many hours might pass before his death was discovered. The extremely capable organisation for which she was acting would have ample time to whisk her away to an airport, provide her with a forged passport, and on a pre-arranged passage get her out of the country.

The more I thought of it the more convinced I became that I was right. She had surreptitiously summoned the man Klinsky, before dinner; so he was living somewhere in the neighbourhood and evidently visited her frequently. Sir Charles had brought his brief-case with him and left it in the hall, so that was doubtless his custom. He would of, course, keep it locked, but Maria would have had many opportunities of taking an impression of its key when he was in his bath. The odds were that when he had finished looking through the papers in it he left it down in the sitting-room for
the night. What could have been simpler than for Maria to telephone Klinsky and for him to pay the house a nocturnal visit for the purpose of photographing its contents? In that way his masters would have learnt all about the New Look and his resolve to press the Cabinet to agree to its adoption. Should Sir Charles be eliminated the interests opposed to it might secure a postponement of the issue for many months. For our enemies no man’s life could pay a higher dividend. I could no longer doubt that I had stumbled on a plot to murder him.