The Ka of Gifford Hillary (43 page)

What could I do? How could I save him? How get a warning to him? My only hope lay in finding someone like Daisy. There must be quite a number of people who possessed psychic powers equal to hers; but how was I to find one? Urged to it by my anxiety for Johnny, I had sought out Sir Charles in the hope that he, or someone close to him, might prove a medium; but I had known that to be an outside chance, and so far my efforts had got me nowhere.

As I racked my brain for a means of preventing Maria from accomplishing her nefarious design, I saw that Klinsky had picked up the dead cat and was preparing to depart. It flashed upon me that I ought to find out where he lived; so that if I could get a message through the police would be able to lay him by the heels or, perhaps, through him get a line on the whole of his section in the Soviet espionage network.

He and Maria exchanged a few more sentences in their own language, then, still carrying the cat, he slipped out through the back door. It was now dark outside; but I had no difficulty at all in following him, and he naturally had not the slightest suspicion that he was being shadowed.

Taking a path through the wood he followed it for about two hundred yards, then threw the dead cat into the bushes. A little further on the wood ended, and crossing a stile he stepped down into a lane. For another ten or fifteen minutes he walked on at a smart pace until he came to a cart-track and turned up it. At its end there was a house with a few outbuildings which I at first took to be a farm, but on closer inspection it proved to be only a fair-sized cottage of the sort inhabited by small-holders who keep pigs and poultry and cultivate a few acres.

Crossing the barnyard Klinsky pushed open the front door
and entered a narrow, lighted hall. At the sound of his arrival a door on the right was opened by a young woman of about nineteen. She was not bad-looking but had a heavy body, her hands were calloused with rough work, and her ill-dyed fair hair was none too tidy.

Giving him a reproachful look, she said: ‘So there you are! I do think it was mean of you to insist on going down to the pub for a drink on the night I persuaded Mum and Dad to go to the pictures.’

He grinned at her and replied in heavily-accented English: ‘We have plenty of time yet, little naughty one.’

‘Not much,’ she objected. ‘They’ll be back in half an hour.’

‘Plenty of time,’ he repeated, following her into a small untidy sitting-room. ‘I soon show you.’ Upon which he threw his arm round her, buried his mouth in her neck for a moment, then pushed her backwards on to the couch.

The situation needed little adding up. As I had judged, Klinsky came of peasant stock. With labour so short he would have had small difficulty in getting himself taken on as a helper for his board and keep and a bit over, and he had made the robust daughter of the place his mistress. What cover could have been better for a spy allocated the task of keeping Maria up to scratch and reporting all that could be learned about Sir Charles.

Leaving the unsavoury couple to indulge in their animal propensities, I hastened back to Sir Charles’s; but, to my fury, I took a wrong path in the wood and lost my way for some minutes, so something over an hour elapsed between my leaving the house and re-entering it.

Maria was in the kitchen and had just finished washing up the dinner things. Sir Charles and his companion had not moved from the dining-room and were still engrossed in talking, now about Mr. Butler’s latest proposals for checking the drain on our gold and dollar reserves. Feeling that, at the moment, it would prove a waste of time to attempt a further effort to make either of them see me, I cast about for some less direct means of conveying a warning.

I then remembered Sir Charles’s chauffeur; so I passed out of the window and round the bend of the drive to the building I had seen through the trees. As I expected, it was a garage with a flat over it. Upstairs in the living-room the chauffeur—a
dark, curly-haired young man—was sitting in his shirtsleeves with one arm carelessly thrown round the shoulders of a skinny peevish-looking girl wearing an apron over her cotton dress, presumably his wife.

To my annoyance they were both watching television; and their idiotically-blank but absorbed expressions told me that I stood little chance of impinging on either of them. Nevertheless, I placed myself in front of the screen and did my best. It was no good; neither of their faces altered by as much as the flicker of an eyelid.

I was just about to leave them when a whining cry of ‘Mum … ee!’ penetrated through the voice of the comedian which was being thrown out by the television set.

‘There’s the child again,’ said the man.

‘Oh shut up,’ replied the woman testily. ‘I want to watch this bit. Isn’t he a scream? She’ll go off to sleep in a minute.’

As they settled down again I passed into the room from which the cry had come. The darkness there being no bar to my sight, I saw that in a cot beside a double bed a small girl of about four was sitting up. She had kicked off all her bedclothes, was shivering with cold, and large tears were running down her cheeks. Unquestionably she saw me at once.

She stopped crying, her eyes grew round, for a moment she stared at me in silence; then she let out a piercing yell.

The door was flung open and her mother flounced into the room. ‘Stop it, you wicked girl! Stop it,’ she shrilled, ‘or I’ll give you something to shout about.’

‘The man, Mummy; the man!’ howled the child.

‘What man? There’s no man here ‘cept your father.’

‘I seed him come through the door.’

I was then beating a retreat through it, but I heard the mother exclaim: ‘So it’s lies you’ve started to tell now, is it? I’ll teach you to tell wicked fibs to me, Miss!’

There came the sound of two sharp pats, rather than slaps, but they were followed by another outburst of yelling, and coming to the door the man protested:

‘Oh let her be, Gloria. You’ll only make her worse.’

At that moment the telephone shrilled, cutting through the combined noise made by the child and the loopy-looking man on the T.V. screen. The chauffeur answered it, reached for his tunic, and called to his wife:

‘I’ve got to take the Big Shot back to town, dear.’

The child’s yells had subsided into muffled sobs. Gloria came out of the bedroom, pulled its door to behind her, and complained: ‘Oh, that’s too bad! Their sort have no consideration for other people.’

The man shrugged. ‘What’s the use of belly-aching. Most chaps have to work harder than I do for less pay. Anyway I told you the odds were against me being able to stay the night.’

‘Yes but I was hopin’ you would. Why couldn’t he have his own car sent down to fetch him?’

‘Ask me another. Got something else to think about perhaps. There’s places called Cyprus an’ Egypt, you know; and how many votes it’s going to cost him if ‘is pal Butler slaps a bigger tax on cars.’

‘Still, it’s early yet, Bert. They might have let us see the telly programme out.’

‘He’s not going to his dowdy bed, don’t you fret yourself. When he gets home there’ll be a stack of red and green boxes like I sometimes see in the boss’s office, with all sorts of conundrums in them for him. I wouldn’t have his job for a packet. Where the hell are my driving gloves?’

Gloria picked them up from behind the television set, handed them to him and enquired: ‘And what about Sir C. Will he be going up with you?’

‘Don’t expect so. He likes a night in the country, whenever he can get it.’

‘Then you may be down first thing to fetch him, and wanting breakfast?’

‘I doubt it. Most like he’ll do as he done when he brought Monty down here for the evening and sent me up with him. He’ll drive himself up in the little Morris.’

They kissed perfunctorily and Bert ran downstairs. I accompanied him round to the house in the car, then got out. Almost as soon as he had rung the bell the front door opened, Sir Charles gave the chauffeur his instructions, then stood aside for his friend, who turned to him before entering the car and said:

‘Thank you for this evening, Charles. It made a delightful break for me. I’ll study that paper carefully and arrange for a Cabinet to be called to discuss it next week. Thursday
would be the best day, I think. We’ll get Dickie to come along to it, and hear what he has to say.’

I knew that Earl Mountbatten’s intimates always called him ‘Dickie’, so the reference was obviously to him. Although the part I had been designed to play in Sir Charles’s battle for the co-ordination of our defences had broken down, it looked as if he was making very satisfactory progress without me.

When the car had driven off I followed him back into the house. Collecting his brief-case he took it into the sitting-room, unlocked a secretaire there and settled down to work. Not very hopefully I gave a little time to trying to attract his attention, but it was no good; so I went again to the flat over the garage.

It had occurred to me that psychic powers are said to run in families, and that the seventh child of a seventh child is always fey. There was no reason to suppose that Gloria was a seventh child and even less to suppose that she had herself had six children before her little daughter; but as the child had supernatural vision there was anyhow a chance that she had inherited it from her mother.

When I arrived the lights of the living room were out, and in the bedroom the extraordinarily ill-named Gloria was undressing. The child, I noted with relief, had sobbed herself to sleep. As Gloria took off her underclothes. As soon as she was in bed I presented myself with all my consciousness and willed her to see me. She picked up a film magazine and began to flick through its pages. For ten minutes I kept it up, then she yawned, threw the paper aside and switched out the light. I remained at the foot of her bed, my gaze unwaveringly fixed upon her eyes, but after a moment she turned on to her side and drew the bed-clothes up.
Five minutes later she was giving vent to a gentle snore.

Angrily as I was at my waste of effort I tried to consider my next step as calmly as I could. To seek for a medium in the nearest village was the obvious course; but every attempt on each individual would cost time and loss of energy. I must pick my subjects carefully. Not that there was likely to be any outward clue indicating that one was more probably psychic than another; but it would more than double my chances of getting a warning to Sir Charles if I could contact some upper class neighbour of his, rather than a cottager who would be scared of going to see him.

One thing was certain; Maria had the poison, and had been given a practical demonstration of how quick and effective it could be. She might not use it until next time Sir Charles came down to his cottage, as that would give her a whole night in which to make her get-away. But if Klinsky realised that a delay of a week might now render the crime almost useless he would have pressed her to seize the present opportunity. It was, therefore, quite on the cards that she might give Sir Charles the poison with his breakfast in the morning. If I failed to find a means of warning him that night, within nine hours he might be dead.

Never have I spent such a desperate and exhausting night. For tension, and a call upon my ultimate resources of endurance, nothing I had experienced in the war approached it. One blank session after another occasionally interspersed with wild hopes that made the disappointment with which they ended only the more bitter.

In one a small boy with a bandaged head, with whom his mother was sitting up, asked who the man was who had just come through the window, and kept pointing at me; but his mother lacked his supernatural sight, and assuming he was delirious told him that I was a good angel come to make him well.

Twice slightly older children screamed on my appearing to them, but one tiny tot laughed and held out her arms, inviting me to play. The sight of her was like a draught of water in a wilderness. In spite of the frightful urgency of my quest I could not forbear from spending a few minutes with her; passing my hands which were visible to her gently over her head I willed her to become drowsy, soon she snuggled down in her cot and, still smiling, fell asleep.

Her up in café … Barcelona. You ever go … Barcelona?’

There was lots more to it. Plenty of rambling reminiscences but no indication at all that he had grasped the story I was so anxious that he should tell over the telephone once he got into his house. My efforts to induce him to concentrate on letting himself in proved equally futile, and eventually he sat down on the door step. Time was flying and we were getting nowhere; so I reluctantly decided that I must leave him there.

It was about three hours later that I at last came upon a genuine psychic. I had spent the greater part of that time in the village and already done most of the more prosperous-looking houses in it when, at its far end, I came upon a small Georgian mansion set a little way back from the road. Advancing up the garden path I went in under the Adam fan-light.

Even in the dark I could see that the place had recently been redecorated. Up a few steps inside the door an arch-way
supported by fluted pillars glistened with fresh white paint, as too did all the woodwork of the square hall and the charming semi-circular staircase at its far end.

Mounting to the first floor I entered a spacious bedroom, furnished in excellent taste and gay, to my eyes, with new hangings. In it were twin beds placed side by side. One was occupied by a youngish man who was fast asleep; the other by a woman who was wide awake. She looked to be in her middle twenties, was dark, striking looking in a slightly foreign way, and was lying on her back staring at the ceiling. As I hovered over her she saw me almost at once, and sitting up, said quite calmly:

‘What do you want with me?’

Elated almost beyond belief at having found someone to whom I could give my message, I told her.

She seemed to take it in; so having asked her to warn Sir Charles I went on to give her a second message for him about Johnny’s arrest, with the reason for it, and requesting him to intervene at once.