I have found already that dictating this account helps to take my mind off the harrowing and unnerving vision of myself standing in the dock at Winchester and the Judge putting on the black cap to sentence me. So, while continuing to adhere to the strict truth in everything, instead of confining myself to bare facts as I had originally intended, I shall give free rein to the tendency to be discursive—where the matter warrants it—as indeed, it seems that I have been already to some extent; and so by this occupation may stave off the morbid contemplation of my only too well-founded fears. To resume my narrative.
During the war poor old Southampton took a terrific pasting and our offices were among the many buildings destroyed in the blitz. For several years we suffered considerable inconvenience in a higgledy-piggedy collection of prefabs, but at last we got a rebuilding permit and were able to erect a fine modern glass and concrete block. The new Board-room is on its top floor overlooking our yards and with a vista of Southampton Water.
At two-thirty on the Friday the Directors of Hillary-Compton assembled there, and before going any further I had better give some account of them.
Our Managing Director is James Compton. His father started in the firm at the age of ten, in the bad old days of child labour, and by hard work, initiative and ability progressed right to the top. As a reward for his long and valuable services my grandfather made him a junior partner a few years before the concern was turned into a Company. James has not only benefited by a proper education but inherited the old man’s drive and knowledge of our craft; so my father took him on the Board in his early thirties. He is now just over sixty, and the mainstay of the firm. He knows far more about the practical side of the industry than I do, handles our labour problems with firmness and tact, and has his whole heart in the business. In matters on which his opinion differs from mine he fights me tooth and nail; but on the majority of questions we see eye to eye, and no man could have a more loyal and honest partner.
Angus McFarlane is our Chief Engineer. He is a tall thin bachelor, who says very little and, I believe, spends most of his leisure poring over his stamp albums. But he is a first-class technician, and I have never known him advise us wrongly about types of engines for our speed boats and motor launches. When he had been with us for some years we decided to give him a seat on the Board as being more convenient than having to summon him so frequently to it.
Charles Toiller is the Secretary of the Company and has been with it since my grandfather’s time. He is a Chartered Accountant and has all the Company’s financial affairs at his finger tips. In addition the little man carries all our principal transactions for many years past in the egg-shaped dome of his bald head. He is getting on now, as he was nearly sixty when my father died; and it was then that James Compton and I decided to promote him to a Directorship.
Admiral Sir Tuke Waldron, K.B.E., D.S.O., etc., has, since his retirement from the Navy, been our Sales Manager; but his connection with the Company goes much further back than that. His father was related to mine by marriage, and when our business was floated as a Company he took a large block of shares in it. By inheriting them, the Admiral became, after myself, the largest shareholder. As we are boat-builders to the Admiralty, he was naturally precluded from holding a Directorship during his service career, but it had for long been understood that on retirement he should join the Board.
He was retired as Vice-Admiral, so is still only in his middle sixties. To look at, he is the choleric type of sea-dog, with a red face, bushy white eyebrows and an apparently unlimited capacity for despatching pink gins; but he is far from being a stupid man, and has a most likeable personality. I do not, of course, suggest that Admiralty contracts can be obtained by taking people out to lunch, but in securing any business the personal touch does count where tenders are equal; and he has many friends in the right places. He had not been long on the Board before he began to produce results; so in due course we made him our Chief Salesman, and in the five years he has been with us we have never had reason to regret it.
The Right Honourable Annibal William Fitz-Herbert Le Strange, 14th Earl of Wiltshire, Viscount Rochford and Baron Blackmere, known to his friends as Bill, is my father-in-law. The only serious row I have ever had with James Compton was due to my insistence that Lord Wiltshire should join our Board. At the time I was so ashamed of foisting a ‘guinea-pig’ on to my colleagues that I tried to sell them the story that as he had always been a keen sailing man it was intended that he should join the principal yacht clubs round the coast, and so would be able to bring us a lot of business; but the truth is that landing him a Directorship was part of the price I had to pay for Ankaret.
The Le Stranges are one of those very old families which have seen lots of ups and downs. At present they are in a ‘down’ from which I think it unlikely that they will recover. One of them had come over with the Conqueror, and they had done very well for themselves in Norman times. Under the Plantagenets a line of Barons Blackmere had been possessed of great estates, and held numerous castles for the Crown. But they backed the wrong horse in the Wars of the Roses and for a hundred years or so wilted into little more than country gentry. Under Henry VIII they had popped up again, as they were close connections of Sir Thomas Boleyn.
Sir Thomas’s principal claim to fame was that Bluff King Hal, having seduced both his daughters, became so crazy about the younger of them that he divorced his wife and made her Queen. Papa’s reward for his complaisance was to be created first Viscount Rochford then Earl of Wiltshire, upon which the lady’s brother took by courtesy the lesser title. The cousins Le Strange were brought to court and secured some valuable pickings. But their luck did not last, as the lively young Queen was accused of jumping into bed with several gay sparks, among them Rochford. So both sister and brother had their heads chopped off on Tower Hill, and the rest of the family fell into disgrace.
Yet in the long run the Le Stranges got a big boost as a result of the King’s amour and the incest of which Anne Boleyn was accused. By the first they had become kinsmen of Anne’s daughter, afterwards Queen Elizabeth, and by the second the Earl of Wiltshire was left heirless; so that on his death the peerage fell into abeyance. Half a century later another handsome Le Strange persuaded the Virgin Queen to revive both titles in his favour, and, in addition, wheedled some very profitable monopolies out of her.
For the next fifty years the family were in clover; but when the Great Rebellion broke out they naturally sided with the King, so they lost everything and had to go into exile. Charles II restored most of their lands to them, but on his death they once again backed the wrong horse by siding with Monmouth against James II; and two generations later they made another blunder by joining Bonny Prince Charlie in ’45; so from 1685, for about a hundred years, they were very much under the weather.
Then there had come a sudden revival, obviously due to the Earl of the day having married the daughter of a Sheffield Alderman. This heiress brought into the family not only a considerable fortune but also business acumen. Her son cashed in on the industrial revolution and by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne the Le Stranges were once more immensely rich. But by the middle of the century, probably without realising it themselves this time, they had begun to go downhill again.
To all the extravagances to which the more empty-headed of the Victorian nobility were prone they took like ducks to water. Scores of servants, a plurality of houses, ceaseless entertaining, grouse moors, yachts, villas in the South of France, cards, horses, and secret establishments for pretty ladies, reduced them in three generations from great landowners to titled people of only modest fortune.
Courage they had never lacked; so two of them fell in the 1914 war. The double death duties administered the final blow to the already crippled estate. The family seat, the town house and the last acres all had to go. In 1918, at the age of eighteen, Bill came into the title. Of course, he had been educated at Eton and was already an ensign in the Life Guards; so his friends were mainly young men with extravagant tastes who did not have to worry much about money. In the circumstances one can hardly blame him for having dissipated, during the early twenties, the few thousands that had been saved from the wreck.
In 1923, as a means of averting bankruptcy, he had married an American heiress; but he was much too transparent a character to disguise for long that his heart was not in the match. He must have been extremely good-looking. I’m told that when it was discovered at Eton that his first name was Annibal, his school fellows had nicknamed him ‘handsome Annie’. Anyhow, women had fallen for him like ninepins and he had had scores of affairs; yet the fact remained that the only person he had ever really loved was a second cousin of his, the lovely Lady Angela Chippenham, and she was just as much in love with him.
The young American wife soon tumbled to the situation, and she was not prepared to keep her coronet at that price. One cannot blame her, but I think she might have been a little less malicious about it. Not only did she throw her Earl out on to the pavement from their flat in Grosvenor Square, but nothing could persuade her to refrain from citing Lady Angela.
Actually I don’t think Lady Angela minded, because it meant that she would get Bill for keeps. Proud as they make ’em, she refused to deny the charge and said some pretty cutting things about plain little girls who thought they could buy love with dollars. As soon as the divorce came through Bill made an honest woman of her; but her family were by no means wealthy, so he had to leave the Guards and try his hand at commerce.
As a peerage was still something of an asset for shop-window dressing in the business world of those days, he managed to keep himself afloat; but only just, because he was too lazy to make the best of his opportunities, abhorred routine, and got so bored with his jobs that he chucked most of them up after a few months.
Meanwhile, his wife had presented him with a son and daughter. Fortunately in 1928 Lady Wiltshire was left by an aunt the income for life on quite a tidy sum. It was anyhow sufficient for her to meet the expenses of a medium-sized house in one of the streets off Belgrave Square and to educate the children; but in 1946 she died from injuries received in a car smash, and her income reverted to another member of her family.
The four years that followed proved far from easy ones for Bill. His boy, who enjoys his second title, Rochford, and is known as Roc, was then nineteen, and Ankaret was two years younger. From 1928 onward Bill had been quite content to let his wife foot the household bills, while he devoted such money as he could pick up to shooting, fishing, a little mild racing and such other pastimes as he had been brought up to enjoy. At her death he suddenly found himself up against it.
Roc was far from being a young man of promise. He had all his father’s bad points and few of his good ones. In fact he has turned out to be about as decadent a specimen of the British aristocracy as one could find if one raked the shadier West End night-clubs for a month.
To do his National Service he was, of course, put into his father’s old regiment, the Life Guards; but he failed to get a stripe, much less graduate for a N.S. Commission. When he came out Bill got him a succession of jobs in the City; but he could not hold down any of them and, as his father could afford to give him only a very small allowance, he took to downright dishonesty.
For a time he got along by sponging on his friends and borrowing all he could from them without the least prospect of being able to pay them back. Having exhausted all such sources, he then got engaged to a rich widow twice his age and pawned her jewels without her knowledge, counting rightly on the fact that she might throw him over but would not face the humiliation of bringing an action. Next, he got in with a set of rogues and lent himself to a little bogus company promoting. He escaped from the results of that only because he had the luck of the devil; and twice, since I married Ankaret, I have had to come to the rescue financially to save him from being sent to prison. Recently he seems to have become a bit more canny and is now picking up a living at some sort of job in the film industry; but one never knows from one day to another when we shall suddenly be told that he had started issuing dud cheques again.
After Lady Wiltshire’s death the house had to be given up, and Bill had Ankaret left on his hands. But his problem about what to do with her was solved by the ‘family’ rallying round. One of her aunts undertook to present her, and, while none of her relatives could afford to give her a permanent home, they agreed to have her to stay in turn for long visits until Bill could make some suitable arrangement for her to live with him.
Even if he could have earned enough money, I don’t think he would have attempted to do that; because having unloaded Ankaret suited him very well. He settled down in a small bachelor flat and salved his conscience by occasionally buying her a few clothes or sending her a cheque for pocket money. In consequence, after her coming-out season the poor child had practically to live in her boxes, mostly at country houses but occasionally in London.
Being young and healthy she took it quite philosophically; but from one point of view it was most regrettable. She has a real flair for art and four years of this unsettled existence deprived her of all chance to study it properly. Had she spent them at the Schools I am sure that by now she would have made a name for herself; as it is she can draw really beautifully, but her paintings lack something which only a mastery of technique can give. That apart, such a life is far from being a good background for a girl of her age and temperament, as no one was really responsible for her, and, providing she behaved tactfully, the different relations with whom she stayed all allowed her to do more or less as she liked.
Being Ankaret, she soon started to make the most of her chances; and, as she told me sometime after we were married, there had been quite a number of occasions on which, between visits, she had spent week-ends with young men at discreet country pubs without her relatives ever getting to know of it.
I imagine that most girls in such a precarious situation would have done their damnedest to hook the first likeable man who came their way and was in a position to give them a comfortable home of their own. No doubt, too, in view of the devastating effect that Ankaret had on men her relations had never anticipated that her rounds of visits to them would continue for as long as they did; but until she was over twenty-one, and met me, she never became even temporarily engaged.
I suppose that fairly frequent changes of scene and company, coupled with her self-taught painting and her clandestine love affairs, kept her reasonably contented. Anyhow, expensive clothes, jewels and rich furs were no temptation to her, because she had everything a woman needs without them; and she never bothered her beautiful head about the future. I well remember that if on parting I ever said to her ‘God bless you, darling’ her invariable reply was, Thanks; He will.’
What she saw in me that she had not found in other men I have no idea; but she did not take very long about making up her mind after I’d asked her to marry me. She asked only one night to think it over; then next morning in the garden of Ewefold Priory, where we were both staying, she said:
‘I’m not a woman’s woman, so sooner or later it is quite possible that you may hear catty remarks to the effect that I have a past. I shall neither admit nor deny them; so you must believe them or not as you like. But one thing I don’t think anyone will accuse me of is being a gold-digger. All the same, I feel that I have certain obligations to my family.’
She told me then, perfectly frankly, about her father and brother, and went on: ‘I’m afraid that any attempt to turn Roc into a respectable citizen would prove quite hopeless; so all I ask for him is that should he land himself in further messes you will do what you can, within reason, to save him from being sent to prison. Daddy, on the other hand, is a very different matter. It isn’t altogether his fault that he has been reduced for some years past to living on a shoe-string; and as he gets older his situation is bound to get worse instead of better. He has never even hinted that I could help him by marrying a man with money; but I have always felt that if I did have a rich husband I ought to ask him to make the old boy an allowance of a few hundred a year. He has become used now to living quite modestly but I would like him to have enough not to have to worry where his next quarter’s rent, or the subscriptions to his Clubs, are coming from.’
The night before she had admitted that she loved me, and now she added that she felt differently about me from any other man she had met; so it must be that she was really in love for the first time, and she did want to marry me. But if, after what she had said about her family, I would prefer to forget that I had asked her, she would perfectly understand.
In view of the very special feeling that I had aroused in her, it seems most unlikely that she was making any mental reservations about being unfaithful to me later on; so the way she put matters to me could hardly have been fairer and I willingly agreed to do something for Bill.
Had we been living in pre-war days I could, with my present income, quite well have afforded to give him five hundred a year without embarrassment. But the coming of the Welfare State has made a difference to men in my position that few people of moderate incomes realise. In the 1930’s, ten thousand a year meant everything for which one could reasonably wish. Now, Income and Super Tax bring it down at one fell swoop to the three thousand five hundred mark; and as a pound today buys less than six and eightpence did then, the actual purchasing power remaining is less than twelve hundred.
Even that must sound pretty good to most people; but there is not much to spare if one has a largish house to keep up and an ex-wife and two children to provide for. In addition I was about to marry again; and to a girl who had not a penny of her own.
Nearly all my capital is tied up in my own Company, and I certainly did not feel like selling out a large block of my shares to form a Trust fund for Bill. The obvious way out was to put him on the Board, which would net him five hundred a year in Director’s fees. Perhaps that was slightly dishonest, because I knew he couldn’t really pull his weight; but that is what I did, and how he came to be there.
I feel that I have devoted a lot of space to my father-in-law, although he played little part in the events that follow. But it has enabled me to give an account of Ankaret’s background, and that is important.
Now for the last, and most junior, of our Directors: my nephew, Wing Commander Johnny Norton. He is the only child of my half-sister, Betty, and she was the only child of my father’s first marriage. As she was fourteen years older than myself and ran away from home when she was twenty, I have only the vaguest memories of her.
I gather she was rather a hoydenish young woman with neither beauty nor charm, and that her one passion was motor racing. Apparently this led to her spending a great deal of time with my father’s chauffeur, who was also an enthusiast, and in his off duty hours was jigging up an old car that he had bought with a view to doing a little amateur racing himself. They became secretly engaged and when they broke it to my father that they intended to get married there was hell to pay.
Not unreasonably, perhaps, as Betty was such a plain girl, he assumed that Norton was after her for what he could get out of it; so he sacked him on the spot. Betty declared that she meant to marry him anyhow; and her papa said that if she did her husband could keep her, for he certainly would not, and that if she even saw Norton again he would cut off her allowance. She made a pretence of giving in, but one morning about a month later her room was found to be empty, and a few days after that she wrote from an address in London to say that she had become Mrs. Norton.
It was natural enough that my father should have been averse to his only daughter marrying a working man, but I am sure that in threatening to cut her off he believed that he was protecting her from an adventurer; for he was by no means hard-hearted by nature. He told me himself, years later, that, if at the end of a year she was still happy with Norton, he had meant to forgive and forget, buy them a house and take Norton into the business at a decent salary. But he felt that their having to make do for twelve months on a chauffeur’s wages first would prove a real test for both of them; although as far as they knew he was through with Betty for good.
Unhappily, Fate forestalled my father’s good intentions. Ten months after her marriage Betty died in giving birth to Johnny. When my father was informed by Norton of her death, he was terribly upset by the thought that she had died in some poor lodging, and might not have died at all had they had the money for her to have the baby in a nursing home attended by a Harley Street gynaecologist. He wrote to Norton bitterly upbraiding him for not letting him know that Betty was about to become a mother, but offering to take full responsibility for the baby; and Norton wrote back with equal bitterness, asserting that his wife’s death had been due to her father’s snobbery and meanness. He added that as her father had done nothing for her while she was alive he need not expect to have any share in her son now she was dead, and that he was quite capable of bringing the boy up without any assistance from his Hillary relatives.
Later, my father made an attempt to patch matters up with Norton so that he might at least arrange for his grandson to receive a good education. It was learned then that Norton had come into a little money, so had returned to his native town of Huddersfield and opened a garage in one of its suburbs. Johnny had been there since an infant in the care of Norton’s mother; and I have since learned that the garage business prospered to a degree that enabled his father to send him to a Grammar School and give him a very respectable middle-class upbringing. But Norton remained adamant in his refusal to accept any assistance from my father, or even to let him see the boy.
As far as I was concerned the whole affair was one of hearsay and dim memories; so I had virtually forgotten that I even had a nephew when, by pure chance, I was introduced to Johnny some three years ago. I met him while having drinks before dinner at the Royal Air Force Club with another regular R.A.F. officer with whom I had become friends during the war. He is what used to be considered a naval type; fair-haired, intensely blue-eyed and with a square chin having a slight cleft in its centre. He is nearly as tall as I am, but slimmer and, again like the naval type, has that quiet good-humoured manner of the man of action who makes little fuss but sees things through.
Our names, of course, rang bells in one another’s minds, and as both our fathers were by then dead we saw no reason whatever to prolong the family schism. Moreover we took to one another at once, so I asked him down for the weekend. My sister having been so much older than myself he would really have fitted better into the role of a younger brother than a nephew, and during that first week-end we came to like each other a lot.
Before he left on the Sunday night he said that sometime he would like to see over the family business; so I asked him down again and took him round the yards. James Compton knows the family history as well as I do, and being twenty years older remembered much more about poor Betty’s affair than I did myself; so naturally he was most interested to meet Johnny, and he went round with us.
Both James and I were greatly impressed by the intelligent questions Johnny asked, and the shrewd comments he made on this and that; and this tour of the yards he had made with us set me thinking. James had no sons and my own boy is set on becoming a chartered accountant; so there is no one to take the place of either of us should one of us drop out. When the routine flying days of R.A.F. officers are over quite a high proportion of them have to be axed, and Johnny was already a Squadron-Leader; so in a few years’ time he might be only too glad of the chance to go into business. Moreover, ours was his own family concern, and but for circumstances over which he had had no control he would have been given the chance to go into it as a youngster. Had he done so he would by then have been far better off than he was, as he had not even been mentioned in my father’s will, and the proceeds from selling his own father’s garage brought him only a little over a hundred a year; so he was practically dependent on his pay.
The more I thought about it the more I felt that, having been left nearly the whole of my father’s fortune, it was up to me to do something for Johnny. When I spoke to James about it he agreed at once that Johnny would be an asset to the business, and had at least an ethical right to some share in it. We agreed, too, that even if he was not prepared to leave the R.A.F. right away, we might, with future possibilities in mind, run him in by making him a Director.
When I put it to Johnny, he said that he wanted to go on in the R.A.F., but that as he had recently returned from two years in Malaya, and previously to that done a tour of duty at Gibraltar, all the odds were on his being stationed at home for the next few years; so he should be able to attend most of our monthly Board meetings. He was keen as mustard about the idea; and most charmingly grateful when I told him that he need not sell out any of his capital to buy qualifying shares, as I meant to make over to him five hundred of mine.
During the past three years he has more than fulfilled his promise, and now has an excellent grasp of all the Company’s affairs. Whenever he attends a meeting he always spends the night at Longshot Hall, and we are no longer like uncle and nephew, but the closest friends.
These, then, were the six men whom I had to do my best to persuade to join me in refusing a valuable order for what I was convinced were patriotic reasons, but might well appear to some of them to be very far-fetched ones.
As I took my seat at the head of the table I felt inwardly excited and a little nervous. It was not that I lacked confidence in myself; but I knew that I was in for a battle, and the thought that what I was about to do might even lead to an open quarrel with men I liked and respected was a far from pleasant one.
On glancing down the agenda, I saw that ‘Sales report by Admiral Sir Tuke Waldron’ was item number five. That meant that I would have to control my patience for at least an hour; for, much as I should have liked to plunge into the matter of the E-boats right away, and get it over, I had to wait until he told us about the new contract. To have done otherwise would have given away the fact that I had previous knowledge of it, and it was of the utmost importance to avoid giving them grounds for suspecting that I had been put up to the line I meant to take by anyone associated with the Government.
The clock ticked round with maddening slowness to three-forty, while I strove to concentrate on the normal affairs of the Company; but, at last, I was able to call on the Admiral for his report. Even then a further ten minutes elapsed while he told us about the past month’s activities by his sales staff. Evidently he was saving his own coup for a bonne bouche, and, at length, with pardonable satisfaction, he produced it.
A murmur of congratulation ran round the table, then I said: ‘To have landed us this order is a fine feat, Admiral; and you certainly deserve the thanks of the Board. But recently I have been giving a lot of thought to this question of E-boats, and I have come to the conclusion that we ought not to accept contracts to build any more of them.’
It would have been more truthful to say that for the greater part of the past forty hours I had been wondering how the Board would take my bombshell, and rehearsing in my mind what I should say in an endeavour to bring as many as possible of its members round to my view.
They reacted much as I expected. Toiller, McFarlane, Lord Wiltshire and Johnny all stared at me in swift surprise. The Admiral exclaimed: ‘Lord alive, man; why ever not?’ And the good solid James, who was seated on my right, said: ‘I haven’t a clue what’s in your mind, Giff; but perhaps you’ll enlighten us?’
Looking at old Toiller, I asked: ‘As Secretary of the Company, would you say that its financial situation is a satisfactory one?’
‘Why, yes, Sir Gifford,’ he replied after a second. ‘You must know yourself how well we’ve been doing since the Conservative Government brought prosperity back to the country, and that during these past few years we have been able to put large sums to reserve. Our affairs are in better shape now than they have been for a very long time.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and turned to James. ‘Will you tell the Board how we stand about work to keep our people going for the next twelve months or so?’
He shrugged. ‘We’ve plenty of that; and the demand for small boats is still on the up and up. My problem is to get enough skilled labour.’
‘What’s all this to do with it?’ the Admiral exclaimed impatiently.
He was on my left, and glancing at him I replied: ‘It is just that I wished to have recorded in the minutes what we all already know. Namely that the financial position of the Company will not be seriously impaired, or a number of our people thrown out of employment, should the Board decide to decline this Admiralty contract.’
‘But why should we?’ he asked in a puzzled voice. ‘What the devil are you driving at?’
I gave him the works then. My heart was beating a little faster but I said quite calmly: ‘No doubt you have seen a lot of the articles that have appeared in the papers in recent months, stating that in any major war our only hope of victory lies in the use of thermo-nuclear weapons and that in order to develop them to the maximum extent we must sacrifice everything which in a nuclear war would prove obsolescent. Personally I accept that view. But it means that, among other things, the whole of the Naval building programme should be scrapped.’
Naturally, that put the fat in the fire. His rubicund face went two shades redder, and he burst out: ‘What; scrap the Royal Navy! Good God, man, to advocate such an idea comes damn near to treason! Those scribblers you’ve been reading ought to be locked up. I’m amazed that anyone of your intelligence could take them seriously. They are talking through their hats, and don’t know the first thing about such matters. Neither do you.’
I had been expecting something of the sort, so I proceeded to say the piece I had mentally prepared for the occasion. It was, of course, a brief résumé of the arguments in the papers I had read, to the effect that we could not hope to defeat the Soviet colossus with orthodox weapons, and that the country’s finance would break under the strain if we continued the present policy of trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
Only the good manners that were natural to Sir Tuke enabled him to hear me out without interruption. The moment I had finished he burst forth into a swift series of denials, assertions and general counterblast.
‘It was nonsense to say that we could not face up to the Russians if they used only orthodox weapons; and that was the type of war it would be. Fear of reprisals, and of much heavier stuff than they had themselves being launched from the United States, would deter them from starting a nuclear war. And anyway, if they did, it would not be all over in a few weeks, as some of these morons who wrote in the papers predicted. Whatever happened, we should fight on, just as we had always done. But the country must be fed, and our convoys could not survive without naval escort. In either type of war the Navy would play a leading role. The Soviet Fleet was not the second largest in the world. Only by increasing our numbers of aircraft carriers, submarines and E-boats could we hope to prevent it from blockading us. The Fleet Air Arm, based on the carriers, would be both the eyes of our intelligence and the modern equivalent of big guns. The carriers and many other types of vessel would also prove far less vulnerable than land sites for launching guided missiles. The whole matter had been gone into with the greatest thoroughness and eighteen months ago a White Paper had been published on it. The Army, of course, had had to accept considerable weapon cuts, but the Navy had been fully vindicated, and an increased building programme authorised. These more recent attempts to upset those decisions were little short of criminal, because they were playing into the hands of the enemy. The Prime Minister and his advisers were not a pack of fools. During the past year or so there had been no major new development to cause them to alter their last publicly-expressed opinions; and on matters of Service policy it was up to all decent people, whatever their politics, loyally to support the nation’s leaders.’
In my turn I heard him out. Then I made the blunder which was later to have such serious repercussions. Having said my piece, I should have stood my ground. I should simply have replied that I counted myself just as patriotic as himself, but could not agree with him; and that it was upon those very grounds of patriotism that my conscience would not allow me to accept the contract. As I had never had any hope of winning him over, and could look for backing only to some of the other members of the Board, I ought, as a next move, after letting him blow off steam, to have asked them for their opinions.
No doubt I was influenced by the vigour with which he had spoken, and a fear that the confidence he showed in his case would deprive me of the support I had hoped for from the others. Anyhow, I fell into the error of endeavouring to counter his arguments; and I was now speaking without the book.
By that I mean that whereas my first speech had been carefully thought out, this was extempore and discursive. It so happens that I am a very fluent speaker, and at times that can prove a mixed blessing. Pleasant as it is to have the most telling expressions trip off one’s tongue without having to search the mind for them, it tends to make one talk far too much and, occasionally, get carried away by one’s own eloquence to the point of saying things without giving due weight to their import.
Sir Charles had given me more or less carte blanche to use the ammunition with which he had provided me; so, having prefaced my remarks by saying that I must request the Board to consider anything which was said during this discussion as highly confidential, and not repeat it to anyone outside, I launched forth into facts and figures about the Soviet forces and our own. Short of actually describing secret weapons which were still in the development stage, I gave them everything I’d got.
I had been talking without interruption for a good ten minutes, while they all sat round obviously fascinated, when the Admiral pulled me up.
‘Excuse me for breaking in, Gifford,’ he said sharply, ‘but where did you get all this?’
Collecting myself quickly, I replied: ‘I didn’t get it from anywhere. Everything I have said could easily be deduced by anyone with a little common sense from facts that have been published in the press.’
His blue eyes bored into mine with an icy stare, and his voice had the snap in it that must have made midshipmen jump the length of the quarter-deck, as he retorted: ‘I do not agree! And if the press was your only source why should you have warned us not to mention to anyone else these things you have just been saying?’
That was a nasty one; but I countered it smartly. ‘Because I believe my guesses to be so near the real mark that public discussion of them might put ideas into the heads of our enemies.’
‘They cannot all be guesses,’ he snapped back. ‘I insist on knowing who it is that has supplied you with this information.’
I shrugged. ‘You are right, of course, that I didn’t get all of it from the newspapers. I have quite a number of friends who are now fairly high up in the Services. You know as well as I do that while such men are invariably security-minded about their own spheres of activity, they are often open to discussing more general problems with a responsible person like myself. They know what they say will go no further, and in my case it certainly would not have done, had it not been for our present divergence of views. That is the real reason why I asked the Board not to repeat any part of the discussion. As for giving you the names of my friends, I shouldn’t dream of it. What is more, it would get you no further if I did, as I can’t even remember now which of them told me this fact or that. I must ask you to accept it that my conclusions are based upon considerable reading spread over several months, backed by a certain amount of reliable information picked up here and there, but arrived at independently by myself.’
This lie spiked his guns for the time being and enabled me to secure the reactions of the others. On the sound principle of Courts Martial—that the junior member should be asked to give his opinion first—I looked across at Johnny and said:
‘Well, Johnny; what is your view about this?’
He had, all the time, been eyeing with me growing surprise and a highly speculative look. Now he massaged his square cleft chin with his hand for a moment, then replied: ‘If it comes to a vote, I’m with you, Sir. But in view of my present job on the Joint Planning Staff, I’m sure you will excuse me from giving my reasons, or entering into any discussion on the subject.’
The Admiral grunted, and I said: ‘Mr. McFarlane, what about you?’
With true Scottish caution the Engineer performed a skilful hedging operation. ‘There’s much to be said on both sides, Sir Gifford. However sound the Company’s financial situation may be it would be a sad pity to throw away such a valuable order. Against that, if the country’s interests are really at stake I’m sure none of us would be influenced by the thought of profits. But I’d be glad to hear what Mr. Compton has to say before committing myself; for maybe it would help to clarify my mind.’
I called next on Bill Wiltshire. His Lordship had arrived at the meeting in a far from good humour, as he was spending the week-end with friends near Winchester and to attend had necessitated his having to make do with a sandwich lunch after abandoning a day’s shooting half way through. Had he been summoned to a business meeting while in London, he would have turned up impeccably dressed in conventional City attire; but he was still wearing aged tweeds and had mud on his boots. Thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket, and tipping back his chair, he stared at me with an uncertain look in his slightly protuberant blue eyes, and muttered:
‘You’re putting us in a devilish awkward situation, Giff. Of course, I can see how strongly you feel about this, and you’re not the sort of chap who is given to getting bees in his bonnet; but, well, I mean—we couldn’t scrap the Navy, could we? That would be going a bit too far.’
‘Either that, or in another five years’ time we may see the whole country scrapped for us by the Soviets,’ I remarked sharply. ‘And, personally, I prefer the lesser evil.’
Lowering his head, he placed both his palms against his temples, so that his fingers temporarily hid a good part of his slightly wavy, sandy hair, and remained like that for a moment. Whether he still had a hangover from the previous night, or was endeavouring to cudgel the few brains he had, remained uncertain. Looking up, he said with a sigh:
‘I should have thought, myself, that Admiral Waldron knew best. Still, if you put it like that. Anyway, it was you who got me on to this Board, Giff; so it’s not for me to let you down. I’ll vote the way you want me to.’
Inspired by loyalty though it was, he could hardly have made a more embarrassing admission that he was a ‘guinea-pig’. So with a hasty word of thanks, I quickly looked down the table at Charles Toiller and asked his opinion.
Knowing that the old boy guarded the Company’s resources like a dragon, I had thought it likely that he would prove most averse to agreeing that we should forgo the handsome profit to be made out of two E-boats, for what might seem to him an exaggerated fear about the future. But I was right off the mark.
Holding up his left hand, from which two fingers were missing, he said: ‘That’s what I got out of the 1914 war, gentlemen, and I was one of the lucky ones. Half the voung men of my generation died in the mud of Flanders. Last time, as some of you will remember, I was an Air Raid Warden. No one who hasn’t done it knows what it’s like to drag mangled bodies and screaming children out from underneath beams and rubble, often with fires raging nearby, night after night, week after week, month after month. And if there’s another war it will be a hundred times worse. So, short of surrendering without a fight, it is up to all of us to do everything in our power to prevent it happening.
‘Most of my life has been spent in totting up figures; but there’s little point in doing that unless you can make them show you a picture when you’ve assembled the results. Those Sir Gifford has given us of the Russian forces as compared to those we could send against them make a very clear picture to me. In an old-fashioned war we wouldn’t stand a hope; and in either kind of war it looks as though it will be the end of Britain.
‘For years past, Sir Winston and Sir Anthony Eden have been telling us that our only chance of survival is by making ourselves so strong that the Russians will not dare to start anything, and I believe they are right. Well, if we can’t muster anything near the number of troops and ships and planes that they can, we’ve got to try to get the lead of them some other way, haven’t we?
‘Again and again this country has been near defeat by evil men, but God has held His hand out, and given us time to save ourselves. In the sort of war we are thinking of it looks as if we should need more than that to save us, so I believe that this time He is giving us our chance in advance. It is only by the development of these new weapons that we can hope to become stronger than our enemies, and He has given us the means of doing that. Even if the refusal of this order meant running the Company into financial difficulties, I would still vote for its rejection; because I believe that everything else should be sacrificed for this one hope of protecting ourselves from being conquered and made slaves.’
I think we were all moved by the old man’s reference to the way in which God has so often saved Britain from the logical consequences of her unreadiness and blunders, and the faith he showed in His continuing to do so. I know I was; and having thanked him I turned to James Compton.
Addressing me directly, he said: ‘I was going to go against you, Gifford, but I must admit to having been a bit shaken by what Charles Toiller has just said. Still, we’ve got to consider the full implications of the decision you and he are urging us to take. If we refuse this order and our reasons for doing so get out, it will be the end for us as far as the Admiralty is concerned. They will never give us another.’
‘Huh!’ grunted the Admiral. ‘It’s good to hear someone talking a little sense at last.’
Ignoring the interruption, James went on. ‘So it is not just a question of our financial situation at the moment, and our work programme for the next twelve months. We have to think of next year, and, much further than that, to how we might find ourselves placed in five or ten years’ time.
‘By then, the Socialists might have got back into power. We all know what that would mean because they’ve told us themselves—increased Welfare State benefits at the expense of the middle classes. They call it a policy of further levelling incomes; but call it what you like, to take the jam off the bread of those with the brains or the guts to earn it means a return to austerity for all. Now, we can hardly keep pace with the demand for small boats; but within a year of the Socialists getting back we’d have to turn off half our workpeople. God forbid that they should, but they might; so can we afford to throw overboard the one big customer that neither booms nor slumps affect, and whose orders for naval craft could be counted on to keep us going?’
‘That is all very well, James,’ I replied. ‘But in ten years’ time …’
‘I know, I know.’ He held up his hand. ‘If the present Government fails to take the steps you advocate we may by then have all long since been blown into the middle of next week. I’ll admit that to be a very real and terrible danger. But I don’t quite see why we should have to be the people who stick their necks out in order to give it a lead.’
I shrugged. ‘Someone must; and there are not many firms in the kingdom as well placed as ourselves to do so.’
He nodded. ‘That’s true; and on the broad issue I am inclined to agree with you. But I feel this is much too big a thing for us to decide here and now. We’ve no call to send a formal acceptance or rejection of the order right away. How about taking the week-end to think it over, and meeting again same time on Monday?’
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t manage that,’ said Johnny, ‘but I have already given my opinion, and nothing anyone could say would alter it.’
The others nodded, except for the Admiral, who snapped: ‘I’ll be here, of course; but I warn you, Gifford, that should the Board accept this monstrous proposal of yours on a show of hands, I shall ask for an Extraordinary General Meeting to be called so that the matter can be put to the shareholders.’
His threat caused me no concern. If James came over to me, our holdings, together with the qualifying shares held by Johnny, Toiller, and Bill Wiltshire, would be more than sufficient to render the calling of a General Meeting pointless. But if James sided with the Admiral and a meeting had to be held, the result of the voting was of little consequence. My address to the shareholders would send the balloon up. The Press would get hold of it and make it front page news in no time; so by that means I should equally well achieve all that Sir Charles had asked of me.
With our minds still on the big issue we felt little inclination to spend long over the last three items on the agenda, and as soon as they were despatched the meeting broke up.
Since the early summer Johnny had been taking a lively interest in Sue Waldron, the Admiral’s daughter; so although he was staying with me, he had a date to dine with them that evening over at Beaulieu.
He had come down from London in his car and it was parked at the far end of the yard; but, as we left the building together, instead of making for it at once, he walked a little way in the opposite direction with me. As soon as we were out of earshot of the others, he said in a low voice:
‘Of course, you’re absolutely dead right about this business. But who on earth let you in on all that Top Secret stuff you were spouting?’
‘Was it Top Secret?’ I pretended surprise. ‘Well, that’s news to me. I’ve only picked up bits here and there these past few months from various people I know; the rest was simply putting two and two together. Are you going to be late tonight?’
‘Not very. Sue and I are not going dancing; so I expect I’ll be back around midnight. Still, best leave the key under the mat as usual. If you have gone to bed before I get back I’ll see you in the morning. I was due for forty-eight hours, so I haven’t to start back to London at crack of dawn tomorrow.’
He certainly saw me in the morning, but in most unexpected circumstances. Poor Johnny. If only he had set out for London first thing, as he had after attending most of our other Board meetings we had held since he had been posted to a job there, he would not now be in a cell charged with complicity in murder.
* * * *
Johnny turned away and I walked on towards the firm’s private pier. Lepe lies just outside Southampton Water, a mile or so along the coast to the west, whereas the city is situated near the top of the estuary but on its eastern side. To go round by road entails a twelve-mile run and it is less than half that distance by water; so, unless the weather is exceptionally bad, I always go back and forth in my motor launch.
Young Belton, who also acts as my chauffeur, usually pilots the launch, as that leaves me free on our trips to and fro to think of what I am going to do, or have been doing, during the day. He is a rather uppish young man, but good with the engines, and one can’t expect everything these days. As I came down the steps he said:
‘We’ve got another passenger this afternoon, Sir. The Prof’s in the cabin.’
It was typical of Belton that he should refer so casually to Professor Evans as ‘the Prof’, although I will admit that Evans has neither the age nor the personality to inspire much respect. He is in his early thirties, a short, dark, hairy little man who buys his clothes off the peg, and without them would be hardly distinguishable from those Celtic ancestors of his who fought the Romans to a standstill in the wild Welsh mountains.
Like many of his race he had a mystic streak and, coupled with genuine brilliance in higher mathematics, it seemed to get him the answers to all sorts of problems; some, but only some, of which had a commercial value. That, of course, was the trouble; he was erratic, pig-headed and only with difficulty could be persuaded to work for his employers’ advantage rather than on the things that suddenly caught his own interest. Had he been more amenable he might have done very much better for himself with some great industrial corporation; but then we could not have afforded to employ him, as the problems connected with boat building are not numerous enough to warrant the retention of a highly paid scientist.
I had come across him eighteen months before in connection with some experiments concerning the resistance of various metals to corrosion by sea-water. He had then been out of a job and, on learning by his own admission the reason, I had offered to take him on at a nominal salary but with quarters and board found. The result, as far as the Company was concerned, had proved moderately satisfactory; as he had produced a paint to which barnacles appeared to be allergic, a solution which lengthened the life of ropes, and several other products which, although expensive, we had found worth using ourselves, and had also marketed in limited quantities at a profit.
However, I must confess that I had been led to suggest the arrangement in the first place by a private interest. I have already mentioned that out of an income of ten thousand a year seven thousand now goes in taxation; and after having been married to Ankaret for five years I was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet.
It is not that she was unreasonably extravagant; but I naturally made her a fairly generous allowance and paid for her winter holidays abroad, and I still had to weigh out for my first wife and the children; so running a fair-sized house and doing quite a bit of entertaining there had begun to make me scratch my head when I had to pay the bills. I could, of course, have sold a few hundred of my shares every year without seriously depleting my income, but I am old-fashioned enough to be averse to spending capital, and for some time I had been wondering if I could not put a part of Longshot Hall to a use which would enable me to reduce the cost of its upkeep.
The secrecy with which, in these days, all scientific experiments are conducted fully justified my installing Owen Evans in my home instead of at the Company’s yards; and by making over about a third of the house to his use I was able to save that proportion of rates, heating, light, etc., without having to partition it off or in any way surrender my rights over it. Had he proved a flop I should have felt it incumbent on me to reimburse the Company; but that was a gamble I had taken, and it had come off.
Stepping down into the cabin of the launch, I nodded a greeting and sat down opposite him. A wharf-hand threw the painter down on the forward deck. Belton gave a twist to the wheel and we were nosing our way out into the channel; but it was not until he had the engine going full throttle that Evans leaned towards me and said in a voice that only I could hear:
‘I have got it.’
My mind was still dwelling on the meeting I had just left, and, anyway, for quite a long time I had not given a thought to his activities; so I replied both absently and ungrammatically, ‘Got what?’
The dark eyes beneath his bushy black brows were bright with excitement, as he answered impatiently: ‘The ray, of course.’
That made me sit up. During the early summer he had been working on a fog-solvent; his theory being, as I understood it, that if certain rays could be projected into fog they would so agitate the mist particles as to cause them to change their structure and disappear. To maintain such a ray for considerable periods over a big area, such as an airfield, would, he had believed, prove too costly; but he thought that it might be developed in a small apparatus with a range of perhaps twenty yards which, if flashed only at intervals, could be brought within the means of the owners of large motor launches and the more expensive makes of car. I had naturally encouraged him to go ahead, as I saw great possibilities in the idea if it could be made a commercial proposition. The public would be certain to demand that buses should be fitted with it, and City Corporations might adopt it for use in beacons at main street crossings.
But, one evening late in June, Evans had told me that, for the time being, he had abandoned work on the fog ray, because the principles involved had given him a line on a much more fascinating problem, and he now hoped to produce a death ray.
I was far from pleased; for whereas I had seen the prospects of a lot of money for my Company out of his first idea, I saw little prospect of making anything out of his second. There is already, I believe, a ray which will form a barrier over an open window and kill any insect that flies into it, and although Evans asserted that his would be powerful enough to kill cattle at a limited range I could think of no practical use for it; except perhaps as a humane killer. It was, of course, just possible that the Ministry of Defence might take it up, but it would obviously be much too dangerous to leave about as a sort of ‘dumb sentry’ and the limitation of its range would render it of little use as an offensive weapon. In consequence, I had tried hard to get him back on to fog dispersal; but he had become sullen, dug his toes in, and flatly refused to be diverted from following up his latest inspiration.
Realising that he must now be referring to his death ray, I was considerably taken aback. After all, it is one of the things that scientists have been endeavouring to discover for several generations, so a great feather in his cap. Moreover, sub-consciously I had formed the impression that he was only wasting his time and would never achieve practical results; so I exclaimed:
‘D’you really mean you’ve found a way to kill …’
He silenced me with an angry gesture, swivelled his eyes warningly towards Belton, who was at the wheel only some six feet from us, then nodded vigorously.
‘Have I got it, man? No real cause had I to come into Southampton this afternoon; but took the chance to do a bit of shopping, so as to come back with you. All evening I doubt but you’ll be with Lady Ankaret, and I’ve no wish to speak of this in front of her. I thought, though, maybe you’d like to see a demonstration; so this would be as good a way as any to get you alone and ask. Then what about this evening, after dinner, eh?’
‘Fine,’ I agreed at once. ‘It is a great feat to have pulled this off; and I shall be immensely interested. What sort of—er—dish do you propose to cook?’
‘Rabbit,’ he replied tersely.
I nodded. ‘I’ll come through to your lab at about half-past nine, then.’
We fell silent, and soon afterwards the launch was turning west past Calshot Castle. Another five minutes and Belton shut off her engine to glide silently in alongside the jetty that juts out from the private beach below Longshot Hall.
The greater part of the house consists of a solid two-storey block. On the ground floor the principal reception rooms look out over the Solent, and upstairs, in addition to what the Americans term ‘the master suite’, there are two double guest rooms and an extra bathroom. The kitchens and the servants’ quarters are at the back. That is ample accommodation for most people in these days, but there would not have been in the era of large families; so my forebears had built on a wing containing a number of smaller, less lofty rooms, and it was this which I had, more or less, turned over to Owen Evans.
I say ‘more or less’ because I had reserved the right to put up single guests in two of the bedrooms on the ground floor if I wished, and to use another as a store-room; but Evans had three rooms for his private use and the greater part of the upper floor had been gutted, then roofed over with glass, to make him a laboratory.
Even had he had more in common with Ankaret and me, to have had him with us all the time would have become very irksome; so it had been agreed that he should have his meals sent through to him on a tray from the kitchen and, fearing that he might find such a life lonely, I had also offered to foot the food bill if from time to time he cared to have a friend to stay. But he seemed to be one of those solitary types to whom work is also wife and friends, for he had never made use of his guest room.
On entering the hall we gave one another a vague smile and parted. I got rid of my outdoor things and went into the drawingroom. Ankaret was there curled up on the sofa reading a book. She was wearing a ‘shocking pink’ silk house-coat, and looking very seductive. But she always does; and even after having been married to her for five years there were still times when I felt my pulses quicken at the sight of her.
As I bent over her from behind she tilted back her head, threw an arm round my neck, and pulled my head down. I gave her a long kiss on the mouth, then asked what sort of a day she had had.
‘Oh, all right,’ she shrugged. ‘But I get bored to tears all by myself here.’
‘Now that your leg is no longer painful, you should have asked someone down for the week-end,’ I told her. ‘I did suggest it.’
‘I know you did, Giff, and I ought to have. I’m afraid having done damn all for five weeks has made me terribly lazy.’
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ I said with a smile.
‘No; I suppose not. I really must make an effort and snap out of it now I can get about again. We’ll ask the Wyndhams or the Beddinghams for next week-end. But what about tonight? Let’s ring up Hugh and Margery, or General John, and ask ourselves over for drinks after dinner.’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry, darling, but the Prof has just completed a new toy, and I’ve promised to look into the lab to see him work it. The little man is no end excited about his success, so I’m afraid he’d be terribly upset if I let him down. But tomorrow and Sunday I’m all yours, so make any arrangements you like.’
Ankaret was never sulky or unreasonable, and she shrugged philosophically. ‘Oh, never mind, then, I’ll fix something for tomorrow. How did your meeting go? From what you said this morning I gathered that it was rather a special one.’
‘It was. It didn’t go too badly. I’ll tell you about it over dinner; but I must leave you now to get down to my Friday chores.’
My Friday chores were the wages, and the payment of bills for the running of the place which lay outside the regular list of Ankaret’s household accounts. The awful spade-work of figuring out tax deductions and proportions of contribution to insurance stamps was done for me by my secretary at the office; so I really had only to see to it that the staff got the wage packets she made up for me by passing them on.
Silvers was my butler-valet, and his wife was our cook. Ankaret had known them since childhood and, hearing that their late mistress had died, had got them to come to us soon after we were married. I had blessed her for it, as it is far from easy to get servants even to consider taking a place at Lepe. The trouble is that this little corner of Hampshire is right off the beaten track. There is not a High Street or a cinema within ten miles of us. But the Silvers were elderly and did not seem to mind that. They adored Ankaret and were dependable old-fashioned servants whom it was a pleasure to have about the house.
Besides them we had only one girl living in, a well-grown eighteen-year-old named Mildred Mallows. She was a local who had not yet found her wings; or perhaps was temporarily enmeshed by the glamour of maiding Ankaret, which was for her the jam on the bread and butter of ordinary housemaid’s work. But, of course, we also had two daily women in to help both her and in the kitchen. There was, too, the outdoor staff: old Eagers, who had once been head gardener of six, but now had to make do with a buxom land-girl and a boy; but the garden produce that was sold paid nearly half their wages. And Belton, of course, was carried by the firm. All the same it was quite enough to have to pay out every week.
Silvers was in his pantry, and having given him the wage packets for the indoor staff I took the others out to Eagers. In return the old boy handed over to me the week’s takings, which were falling off now that most of the fruit was over; but he told me that he hoped to do quite well with his grapes and chrysanthemums later in the year.
After ten minutes’ chat with him about the garden I returned to the house and went into my library. It hardly justifies the name, as it is quite a small room at the corner of the house and only one of its walls is lined with books; two of the others have windows in them and the fourth a doorway that leads into Ankaret’s drawingroom.
On Saturdays I don’t usually go to the office, but I often bring work home, and if there are people staying in the house I can shut myself up in the library secure from interruption. I have a big old-fashioned roll-topped desk there, which is not a very elegant piece of furniture but highly practical; as I can just slam the top down and lock it at any time without having to tidy up the papers on which I have been working. Opening it up, I put the garden money in the petty-cash box, emptied my brief-case of the papers I had brought back with me, and set to work on the bills.
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.
Although I could not feel the floor the force of gravity apparently still operated sufficiently to keep me in a normal relationship to it unless I exerted my will to impel myself forward. Then I rose slightly and drifted in the direction I wished to go, but only for a few yards, after which I became static again till I once more made a conscious effort to advance. The movement can best be likened to that of a toy balloon which, having been thrown with some force, bounces in slow graceful arcs across the floor. It was a most pleasant sensation and I recalled having on rare occasions experienced it in dreams.
I was, obviously, invisible to myself and also to Evans; for had my spirit been clothed with the tenuous outline of a ghost it is quite certain that he would have seen it and fled in terror.
He had already reached the door and was about to close it as I came up behind him. For a moment I feared that he would shut me in, but the next second I became aware that no material object was a barrier to me. My last quick forward impulse carried me through both the half-shut door and his forearm as he pulled it to.
While he locked it behind him I waited in his little office, wondering what he was about to do. My guess was that he would go down the back stairs to Silvers and tell the old boy that I had died as a result of a terrible accident; then they would telephone the police. As Evans had no apparent motive for murdering me there seemed quite a good chance that if he kept his head under cross-examination he would get away with an accident story, anyhow as far as a capital charge was concerned; but he would have to stand his trial for manslaughter and, as such an accident could have taken place only owing to crass carelessness on his part, the probability was that he would be sent to prison for a couple of years.
The cold-blooded little rat deserved far worse than that and, while I am not normally vindictive, had I had the power to do so I would have seen to it that he paid the full price for his unscrupulous experiment. As it was I could be neither seen nor heard; so far as I could judge for the time being there were no means by which I could any longer influence the future of anyone.
However, it soon transpired that my speculations were right off the mark. Instead of making for the servants’ quarters, or down the main staircase to telephone the police, he walked straight across the landing to the door of the bedroom that I shared with Ankaret. Without even knocking, he flung it open and marched in.
As I followed, I saw that Ankaret was sitting up reading in her side of our big double bed. Sometimes she wore a little fluffy bed-jacket, but the night being warm she had on only a semi-transparent night-dress of pale blue chiffon. Its delicate colour was well chosen to throw up her Titian hair, big grey eyes and milk and roses skin. It was not to be wondered at that as Evans halted a few feet from the bed he gave a sudden gasp at the picture that she made.
I jumped to the conclusion that the little brute, lacking as he was in the finer feelings, intended to blurt out a story about my accidental death, instead of giving Mrs. Silvers a chance to break it to Ankaret gently. But again I was quite wrong. Next second he flung himself upon her, bearing her backwards and kissing her violently on the mouth.
Ankaret’s slender limbs concealed a surprising strength, and she was as supple as an eel. In a moment she had wriggled free and was thrusting him off. Her voice was tense with anger, but deliberately kept low, as she exclaimed:
‘Have you gone mad, Owen? Where’s Giff? If the two of you have finished in the laboratory he may come in at any minute. Should he find you here he’ll half kill you.’
Her words and tone shocked me profoundly. They had a conspiratorial air about them which conveyed as clearly as anything could that she was having an affair with Evans. She was angry with him not for having invaded her room and forced his kisses on her, but because she believed that he had taken an unwarrantable risk in coming there at a time when I might easily appear on the scene and catch them in flagrante delicto.
It flashed upon me then that Evans’s motive for killing me had little, if anything, to do with his desire to prove the capabilities of the scientific device he had invented. He had evidently been inspired to the crime by madness of quite a different kind—an insane jealousy of me as Ankaret’s husband.
That he should have fallen for her I could well understand; but what she could see in him passed my comprehension. It seemed utterly unnatural that so lovely a creature as Ankaret should willingly submit to, let alone welcome, the caresses of this little dark, morose, uncultured runt of a man. Yet in such matters women are incomprehensible, and I could only assume it to be a case of beauty fascinated by the beast.
Urgently, angrily, but still keeping her voice low, she repeated her command that he should leave her; then she endeavoured to scare him into doing so by swift graphic phrases depicting the explosion which was certain to take place if I came in and found them together.
After she had thrown Evans off he made no further attempt to grapple with her, but neither did he make any move to leave the room. Instead, pouting slightly, he perched himself at her feet, near the end of the bed, end, as soon as he could get a word in, said in his lilting Welsh voice:
‘That will do, now. No need to be fearing any more that Giff will surprise us. The job is done, look you. Worked like a charm, it did: could not have gone better.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she asked in a puzzled voice.
‘Why, of the plan we made to be rid of him.’
Ankaret jerked erect in the bed as though she had received an electric shock. Her mouth fell open, her big eyes widened to their fullest extent, her voice came in a hoarse whisper:
‘You … you don’t mean … you can’t mean that you’ve killed Giff?’
He nodded; then they exchanged a few swift sentences which gave me the key to what had been going on. It was not so much what they said, and Ankaret made no admission of the game she had been playing; but knowing her so well enabled me to fill in the blanks and reconstruct the psychological processes of the two of them which had led up to my murder.
Having been confined to the house for several weeks, owing to her injured leg, Ankaret had become so bored that she had encouraged Evans in his violent passion for her; but evidently she had not been attracted to him physically so had played a role which had enabled her to continue to amuse herself with him without giving way to his attempts to seduce her.
As he could have known nothing of her past amours, it had been easy for her to pretend to be a virtuous and faithful wife who was unappreciated and misunderstood; so might, in certain circumstances, be willing to leave her husband for a man she loved.
What those circumstances were did not emerge. She might have told him that I would never consent to divorce her and that she could not face the furtive life of living with him ‘in sin’. Or perhaps she had spoken sorrowfully of his inability to support an extravagant and idle wife. Anyway, she had evidently raised some such obstacle as a counter to his pressing her to run away with him; and it must have been this, coupled with his obsession to possess her whatever the cost, that had put into his head the idea of resorting to desperate measures.
To murder me provided a solution to whatever obstacle Ankaret might have raised. Not only would it free her without the difficulties and delays of a divorce, but he could be reasonably certain that she would inherit a large enough share of my considerable fortune to keep them both in comfort.
It seems that he must have first mooted his idea to Ankaret as a sort of day-dream. Possibly on some such line as ‘What a stroke of luck it would be for us if Giff met with a fatal accident. He might, you know, if some time he came into my laboratory and monkeyed about with some of the things I’ve got there. As a matter of fact, I was thinking only this morning that if I were in there with him I’d only have to give him a push in the right direction to send him marching up the Golden Stairs. I suppose that sounds pretty frightful, but I love you so terribly that there are few things I’d stick at to make you my own.’
That Ankaret had not taken him seriously was beyond question but, horrible as murder may be in actual fact, there are few women who could help their most primitive emotions being stirred by the thought of a man loving them so desperately that he would even toy with the idea of killing another in order to get them for himself.
Together they had worked out how the job could be done and made watertight against suspicion even, as transpired shortly afterwards, to my apparently not having met my death in the laboratory but in quite different circumstances.
While they planned the crime Ankaret, I am convinced, was thinking of it as an entirely hypothetical case, and had not for one moment visualised myself as the victim. The horror and distress she now displayed were ample evidence of that. But she had played with fire once too often. The passion-crazed little Welshman had assumed that she was willing to become his accomplice and, without warning her that he was about to do so, staged the ‘accident’ that had so abruptly terminated my life.
While I was swiftly piecing this background of the crime together, the couple on the bed were hurling useless recriminations at one another.
Amazed and appalled at Evans’s deed, Ankaret gave free vent to her horror at it, and swore that she had not had the faintest idea that he really intended to carry out the role he had cast for himself in the nonsense they had talked together one afternoon a fortnight or so ago.
He, with equal intensity, declared that she was lying, and now attempting to back out of giving him the help she had promised in disposing of my body.
At that she cried: ‘I’ll see you damned before I do anything of the kind! In fact I mean to ring up the police.’
As she stretched out a hand for the bed-side telephone, he grabbed her wrist, and snapped: ‘Is it mad you are, woman? Indeed now, and you do that, we’ll both be in the dock; and like as not to hang, see?’
‘You may,’ she retorted. ‘I will not, for I am innocent, and no one can prove me otherwise.’
‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ he warned her. ‘You’re in this thing with me up to your lovely neck, see. Too late to job backwards now. Spare you I would, if I could. But your help I’ve got to have. Big man he was too! I cannot shift him alone. Do you come down now to give me a hand. Get him into the wheelbarrow we will. Then we’ll tip him into the Solent as we planned.’
‘I won’t. I won’t.’ Her voice rose to an hysterical note.
‘Do you listen, lovey,’ he strove to calm her by adopting a gentler tone. ‘We daren’t leave him in the lab, see; you know that. Didn’t we agree that if we said he’d had it through monkeying with some of my gear then the police would insist on my explaining just how? Clever lot of devils they are these days. For sure they’d call in one of their tame scientists to check up. And there is only one way, look you, he could have caused his own death in the lab: my Death Ray Machine.’
‘Death Ray?’ she repeated hoarsely.
He nodded. ‘A new invention of mine. I used it on him. And no one knows of it so far. So no one can even suspect the real cause of his death. But did I have to show it to the police and there’s murder will be in their minds in a jiffy. That’s why we’ve got to get him out of the lab, see; make it look as if he drowned himself—just like we said.’
Ankaret violently shook her head. ‘I tell you I’ll have no hand in this. It’s all too horrible—too frightful even to think about.’
‘Ah, and you will.’ He was sweating now, evidently from fear that her refusal to help him would lead to his having to pay the full penalty for his crime. Pulling a crumpled silk handkerchief from his pocket, he wiped his face with it, and went on more quickly.
‘Suspicious the police are! Ask questions without end they do. But stick to what we said we’d do, we can put ourselves in the clear about having fallen for one another. Deny it, see, and there’s rope enough to hang us both. I doubt but the Silvers have ideas about us, even if young Mildred Mallows kept her mouth shut. Anyhow, her walking in on us, and me sitting here on your bed last Wednesday evening when Giff was in town. For sure the police will have that out of her. And there’s the motive they’ll be seeking should they find Giff’s body in the lab and I have to show them the Death Ray. ‘Twill be all up with both of us then. Swear certain sure you are completely innocent; they’ll still charge you with complicity. Look you, help me is what you’ve got to do.’
‘I suppose you’re right, that I’m bound to be dragged into it,’ she admitted with an angry frown. ‘But at worst Mildred’s testimony could be taken only as evidence that you were my lover, and a woman can have a lover without inciting him to murder her husband.’
He gave a heavy sigh and stared at her gloomily. ‘And maybe you’d get away with it if you had nought to answer but servants’ talk. ‘Twould not be quite like that though. I hate to force you to it, but it seems I must, for my own life now hangs on the help that only you can give me.’
‘Force me to it?’ she repeated. ‘What do you mean by that? You have no hold over me.’
‘Have I not? Think again. You’ll see I have.’ His voice rose a little and he spoke with sudden passion. ‘I had no quarrel with Giff. Treated me decently enough he did. I killed him only to free you from him. Or, if you will, to get you for myself. Anyway, by doing what I’ve done, I’ve won the right to you. Do you take me for a fool that I would now let you jeopardise that? Am I to hang because you’ve suddenly turned squeamish, and are trying to go back on your part of our understanding? No, lovey, no! You’re mine now and I mean to keep you. I’ll not go to my death and leave you behind to be bedded by some other chap. Either you’ll get up now and do your bit to put us both in the clear, or should I be charged with Giff’s death I’ll let on that it was you who urged me to kill him. Yes, indeed, and after the judge has heard young Mildred’s evidence he’ll be telling the jury that you’re a second Lady Macbeth.’
Ankaret had gone white to the lips. For over a minute she remained silent, and I could sense the frantic working of her very able brain as it weighed up the chances in the horrible dilemma with which she was faced. At last she said:
‘All right, then. Go and make certain that the servants are asleep, while I get some clothes on.’
A grin of relief spread over his dark face, and he exclaimed: ‘Land of my fathers, now! ‘Twouldn’t have been natural, mind, if you hadn’t been a bit upset, but you’ll soon get over that. If all’s quiet in the courtyard side of the house, I’ll get the wheelbarrow round to the back door of the hall.’
As he spoke he stood up. Ankaret had never been particularly modest. In fact she took such delight in her beautiful figure that she often walked about her bedroom with nothing on, so that she could admire it in the mirrors. Now, with her thoughts obviously elsewhere, she flung back the bed-clothes and thrust her long legs over the side of the bed. The sight of the lovely body that he had committed murder to possess acted on Evans like a spark to kindling. Stooping suddenly he stretched out his arms again and threw himself upon her.
This time she did not fight him off, but, up to a point, let him have his way with her. It was not until he had given her two long fierce kisses that she clutched at his hands, jerked aside her head, and said with a calmness which told me that he had entirely failed to rouse her:
‘No Owen, no. This is no time for love-making. You must be patient just a little longer.’
‘It’s early yet. The night’s all ours,’ he muttered thickly.
‘No, it’s not,’ she countered. ‘If we leave … leave what we’ve got to do for too long Johnny may come in and catch us red-handed.’
Rolling off her, he sat up, his mouth twitching and his eyes wild with fright. ‘Giff’s nephew! Staying here the night is he?’
Ankaret sat up beside him and nodded. ‘Yes. He is dining with the Waldrons and when he does that he and Sue usually join some party or other to dance afterwards. The odds are he won’t be back till three or four o’clock in the morning, but we can’t afford to take any chances.’
‘Sospan bach!’ He smiled again. ‘Scared I was—for a moment; but we’ll be through with our job well before midnight.’
Putting an arm round her shoulders, he drew her to him and added: ‘Just one more kiss before we get to work, and tell me you forgive me driving you to do your bit. Indeed I’d not harm a hair of your lovely head, but I had to rouse you up somehow.’
She gave him the kiss and murmured: ‘Of course I forgive you. I behaved like a fool; but you didn’t give me even a hint that you meant to do it tonight, and the shock was so great it caused me to say all sorts of things I didn’t mean.’
I felt certain that both of them were lying. Rather than lose her now Evans would have seen her go to the scaffold with him, and Ankaret knew it. That accounted for her change of attitude. She was playing along with him because she realised that to do so was the lesser danger; but I would not have given much for his chances of reaping the full rewards of his crime.
So intrigued had I been by the revelations that had emerged during the battle of personalities, of which I had been the unseen witness, that for some time I had hardly given a thought to my own strange state. And even now, as Evans left the room, I thrust from me the tendency to start speculating on my future, because I was so anxious not to miss the smallest development of this gruesome drama in which my own dead body was the central figure.
Evans had hardly shut the door behind him when Ankaret suddenly went limp. Uttering a low moan, she let herself fall back on the bed and lay there with closed eyes. After a few moments two large tears welled up from under her eyelids and ran down her cheeks.
There was no escaping the fact that my death lay at her door. Had she not amused herself by leading Evans on he would never even have thought of using his Death Ray upon me. It was beyond dispute her vanity, egoism and complete lack of principle that had cost me my life. Yet, even so, I felt no trace of resentment against her. On the contrary, she was still to my generous, lovely darling, and I longed to comfort her.
Moving over to the bed I brought my lips down on to hers. I couldn’t feel them and she made no response, but in silent words I said to her:
‘Take courage, darling. You must go through with this, then send that little knave packing as soon afterwards as you possibly can.’
At that she murmured: ‘Oh Giff, dear Giff. What have I done to you?’
Whether that was a spontaneous utterance of remorse, or in reply to my thought wave, I had no means of telling. Hoping that it was the latter, I said: ‘Don’t worry about me. It hurt only for a moment and I’m perfectly all right. Pull yourself together now, and do what you’ve got to do. But when the police come, for God’s sake keep your story simple and don’t budge from it by a word.’
She gave no further indication that my efforts to console and counsel her might be getting through to her mind; so I was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that she was unconscious of my presence, and abandoned the attempt.
For some five minutes she lay there motionless, then she rolled over, put her feet to the floor, and walked unsteadily into the bathroom. I remained where I was but the sounds of splashing water told me that she was bathing her face. When she emerged her mouth was firmly set, and the cleancut Le Strange jaw, that she had inherited from those ancestors of hers who had held many a fortress, stuck out with evident resolution. Slipping off her nightie she quickly got into her underclothes, pulled on over them a pair of slacks and a dark coat. Then, instinctively, I suppose, she sat down at her dressing-table to make up her face. She was still at it when Evans came back into the room.
‘All’s clear,’ he told her. ‘Not a light or a sound from the Silvers’s room or young Mildred’s. Had I not known they were all early-to-bedders I’d have waited a while before coming along to you; but I felt that the sooner we could get things over with the better.’
As she stood up, he added: ‘Best put on a pair of gloves, lovey, so as not to leave any finger-prints, see. We can’t take too many precautions.’
He already had rubber gloves on, and when she had done as he bid her they left the room together. I followed them across the landing to the lab, and on entering it I saw that he had had the forethought to tie his blue silk handkerchief over the face of my corpse, so that the sight of it should not upset her.
As she looked down on the body her lips parted slightly, showing that her teeth were tightly clenched; but that was the only sign she gave of the emotions which I could guess would be harrowing her mind. The next quarter of an hour must have been an appalling ordeal to her, but her courage proved equal to it.
‘Need his jacket to put the suicide letter in,’ Evans muttered, ‘best take it off now and leave it here.’
She made no move to help him as he turned the body over and wriggled the limp arms out of the sleeves, but when he had got it off she said: ‘He keeps his desk locked so I shall need his keys to get into it. You’ll find them in his right-hand trousers pocket.’
Evans fished them out and gave them to her. Then he took the body by the shoulders and she picked up its feet. The dead weight of a big male corpse must be pretty considerable, They could only stagger awkwardly along with it, and had to let go for a breather twice before they got it down to the hall door. I suppose, at a pinch, Evans could have managed to drag it downstairs on his own, but that would have taken far longer and been a most exhausting business. However, it was not for that alone that he had counted Ankaret’s help essential if he was to get away with his crime. The really vital aid that he had to have from her was in providing evidence that I had committed suicide, as she alone was capable of producing that.
Their mention of a letter to put in the pocket of my jacket, of the key to my desk, and of the fact that if they stuck to what they had originally planned it would put them in the clear about having fallen for one another had enabled me to guess the means by which they intended to create a false impression of how and why I met my death.
Ankaret, as I think I have already mentioned, possessed artistic gifts of a very high order. Her ignorance of technique debarred her from making a name for herself as a painter, but she could probably draw as well as anyone in the kingdom. Quite apart from original drawings of her own invention her eye was so good that she could draw from life or copy any other work with extraordinary swiftness and accuracy. It was this latter ability which enabled her, if she wished, to forge other people’s handwriting with very little trouble.
I knew nothing of this until, while on our honeymoon, I asked her one day how much she thought she could do on as a dress allowance. With a laugh she had replied: ‘Make it what you like, darling. If I get short I can always forge your name to a cheque and I’ll bet you any money that your bank will cash it.’ Then, without a second’s hesitation, she had written my name on the back of a magazine she was reading and handed it to me.
Of course she was only joking, and had never forged my name to anything, but before marriage she had made use of this unusual gift as an adjunct to one of her hobbies. History was one of her chief interests and, in addition to two or three hundred volumes of memoirs, etc., that she had collected, she owned a big scrap-book. From time to time she had bought and pasted in it small etchings, colour prints and cartoons of famous people or incidents. Then, when staying for a while in London, she had spent a few mornings at the British Museum. There she would get one of the staff to hunt out for her some original letter or manuscript written by each of the people who appeared in the pictures she had recently bought. Selecting from them interesting passages, she would copy these out on separate sheets of paper, add the appropriate signature, and later paste them under the picture with which they were associated. Of course, from the paper on which they were written, an expert could have told at a glance that they must all be forgeries, but the ink gave them an apparent reality which no photographed facsimile could have done.
I had not seen this historical scrap-book of hers for years, but either she must have dug it out and shown it to Evans or, while they were planning—as she thought—my hypothetical murder, she had mentioned to him her capabilities as a forger. It was that which must have given one of them the idea of the suicide letter. To write one in my hand would be easy for her, and if written on my private paper it would be even more readily accepted as genuine; that was why she had wanted the key of my desk.
What she intended to put into the note I could not be certain, but I would have taken a good-sized bet that she meant to say on my behalf that I had found out that she was having an affair with Evans and was so cut to the heart that I meant to throw myself into the Solent. In my case neither ill-health nor financial difficulties would be regarded as a plausible motive for suicide, but no one was capable of assessing the depths of despair to which I might have been reduced on discovering that Ankaret was being unfaithful to me. Moreover, by conveying information of their guilty passion to the police in this way, and when questioned admitting it, they would forestall and render harmless any otherwise dangerous tittle-tattle that the police might pick up from the servants.
If I was right in my surmise they had certainly thought out a most ingenious way of covering up the truth and, anxious as I was that my dear, wicked Ankaret should not have to pay for her folly with her life, I could not help feeling that it would be intensely interesting to see if the police accepted the false evidence at its face value or spotted some little detail that the murderer had overlooked and, with dogged persistence, gradually unravelled the whole plot.
As yet, however, while I speculated on the ultimate stages of their plan, they were still occupied in getting my body through the door and arranging it in the wheelbarrow that Evans had brought round there. To do so satisfactorily was by no means an easy job as it may sound; for the load was weightier than the barrow was built to take and so awkward in shape that each time Evans started to wheel the barrow forward it tended to tip over.
With a mutter of lilting curses and sweating under the strain he ran it down the path a few feet at a time, while Ankaret tried to keep it steady by walking alongside and hanging on to the shoulder of the corpse’s shirt. After progressing about twenty yards trial and error made the tricky business somewhat easier for them, and by a further five minutes of laborious effort they succeeded in getting the barrow down to the pier.
On reaching the end of the pier, Evans tipped the body out so that it fell face downward, then stood beside it panting for a few moments. There was no moon but the sky was not overcast, so the stars gave ample light to see by. Ankaret had turned her back upon the corpse and was staring up at them. What her thoughts were at that moment, God alone knows; but I pitied her. As an accompaniment to Evans’s heavy breathing I could hear the constant slap-slap of the water as it lapped against the wooden piles. When he had got back his breath he retrieved his silk handkerchief from the corpse’s face, touched her on the arm and said:
‘Come, lovey, now to get done with it.’
Evidently she had been screwing herself up against this gruesome moment, for she turned without hesitation, stooped down, and again took the corpse by the ankles. He took it by the wrists. Having lifted it they swung it between them, while he counted, ‘One! Two! Three!’ Then with a final heave they let go. Still face downward it hit the water with a loud splash; a moment later only a few flecks of foam, dimly seen in the starlight, showed where it had disappeared beneath the surface.
Without a word Evans took the handles of the barrow and began to wheel it back towards the house. Ankaret followed, her face, as far as I could judge in the dim light, set and very pale, but quite expressionless. While he took the barrow back to its shed she went into the house and upstairs, but instead of going to her room and collapsing, as I expected, she went into the laboratory.
The lights were still on and, apart from my velvet smoking jacket, which was lying across a high tubular stool, there was not a thing to show that just under an hour before a murder had been committed there. The rabbit, all unconscious of the evil deed that had been enacted in its presence, was still busily nibbling at its generous supply of lettuce, and the Death Ray machine looked no more malefic than would have some new scientific labour-saving device.
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.’
* * * *
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.
After several false starts she drafted a letter in her own hand which apparently satisfied her. It was a fair length but, I suppose, as short as she could make it if she was to put over all the essential points which would explain the two violent deaths without involving herself in either. It was addressed to herself, and ran:
Ankaret, my love,
At first I could not take seriously your confession that you have been flirting with Owen Evans. I thought you possessed better taste. But I was compelled to believe you this evening when you were driven to admit it by the necessity of asking me to get rid of him, because he assaulted and attempted to rape you when I was in London last Wednesday night.
When I charged him with it in the lab he had the impudence to deny that it was assault. He boasted that you were a willing party, and maintained that you had told me of your affair with him only because you feared that the servants might forestall you in doing so, and that if I learned from them that he was your lover I might kick you out of the house.
I suppose I was a fool to believe him. But the thought of him and you together drove me into a frenzy. I snatched up a steel rod and the next thing I knew was that I had killed him.
There is not a hope if I stay and face my trial. At the very best it would mean a ruined life dragged out at Broadmoor. So I’ve decided to end it. I have kept some dope from the days when I was in India that is supposed to rev up the heart. If I swallow the lot and chuck myself into the Solent that should ensure me a pretty swift finish.
If you keep your mouth shut, the reason that I killed Evans may not come out. So you had better destroy this. But I wanted you to know that now I’m in my right mind again, I’m sure that he lied to me about you.
And that I still love you.
Giff
Her brain had been several jumps ahead of mine, and I thought her skilful elaboration of the original plan truly masterly; particularly the new line about my having taken an overdose of some heart dope before diving off the pier. Actually I had never had any such stuff, either in India or elsewhere; but no one would be able to prove it, and this brilliant bit of improvisation would account for the lungs not being full of water if my body was recovered from the Solent. I began to have hopes that, after all, she would get away with it.
I could see now that the packet of letters she had brought in were from myself. Opening it up she began to glance through them, evidently with the object of refreshing her mind on the details of my calligraphy. Now and then she paused to read a passage, and after some minutes one of special tenderness so upset her that her face twisted grotesquely. I feared for a moment that she was about to break down and find herself unable to go through with the job, but she got quickly to her feet, poured herself another brandy and tossed it off. The neat spirit made her gasp and shudder, but it did its work, and with new resolution she sat down to the desk again.
Taking some sheets of the paper that I use for my private correspondence, she began to copy her draft letter in my own hand. At her fourth attempt she completed one that had it been produced in court would have been sworn to without hesitation by anyone familiar with my writing. Having written her own name and ‘Personal’ on an envelope she slipped the letter into it and stuck down the flap.
It was at that moment I heard a slight noise from the direction of the drawingroom. She had heard it too and, quickly pocketing the letter, turned to stare apprehensively in that direction. The door, which she had left ajar, was pushed open and Johnny walked in.
Instantly, it struck me that here was one of those unforeseen occurrences that are said so often to wreck the most skilfully-laid plans and bring murderers to the scaffold. Ankaret believed that Johnny had gone out dancing, so would not come in before three or four o’clock in the morning. As he had told me his plans, I knew that he would be in much earlier; but when she mentioned to Evans that Johnny was staying in the house I had still supposed that they would have a clear field until well after midnight. Yet here he was, although it was not yet half-past eleven. If I had had any breath to hold I would certainly have held it as I waited to see how his untimely arrival would affect Ankaret’s chances of clearing herself.
I have already mentioned that I retained my big roll-top desk, in spite of its being rather ugly, because I could always pull the roller down and so save myself the bother of keeping it tidy. As usual it was littered with papers, some of which Ankaret had pushed aside to make a space to write on. As the door opened, in order to hide her draft letter and the three first forgery try-outs, she swiftly shuffled some of my papers over them. Then, evidently feeling that to be insufficient protection for the evidence of her guilt, she pulled the roller down and locked it.
Catching sight of her gesture as he entered, Johnny said politely, ‘I hope I haven’t disturbed you. I came in for a nightcap.’
‘No; not a bit.’ Her voice held a slight quaver, but I don’t think he noticed it, as he was looking somewhat distrait; and she added quickly, ‘Do help yourself. I only came down to hunt out an address that Giff said I would find here; and I’ve just come across it.’
With a word of thanks he walked over to the drink cabinet, fixed himself a large whisky and soda, and plumped down into the arm-chair near it, as she remarked:
‘You don’t usually get home from your evenings with Sue Waldron as early as this.’
‘No,’ he replied non-committally; and, stretching out his long legs, he stared with a worried frown at his feet.
Having recovered from her fright she gave him a puzzled look and asked: ‘What’s the matter? Have you quarrelled with Sue?’
‘No,’ he repeated, and I formed the impression that although he was in some sort of trouble he had no intention of telling her what it was. Until the previous autumn he and Ankaret had been on excellent terms, but from the beginning of last winter, while her attitude to him had not changed, I had thought on several occasions that he had become a trifle stand-offish with her. His present uncommunicativeness confirmed the change that I had noticed and I wondered what could have caused it. In due course I was to learn.
After knocking back a good half of his drink, he asked:
‘Where’s Giff?’
‘Up in the lab with the Prof,’ she replied promptly. ‘They are trying out some new gadget. It’s something to do with photography, I think. Anyhow he said that it might be a long session, and that if anyone rang up they were not to be disturbed, as if the door was opened the light would get in and ruin everything.’
Again I metaphorically took off my hat to her for producing such a fast one, while Johnny said: ‘I see,’ in a disappointed tone. Then, finishing his drink, he asked: ‘May I have another?’
She nodded. ‘Of course; finish the bottle if you like. But Johnny, dear, what is wrong? You seem to be frightfully upset about something. Won’t you tell me what it is; then perhaps we’ll find some way in which I can help you.’
That was typical of Ankaret and the sort of thing that, despite her faults, made her so lovable. No woman could conceivably have had more on her mind than she had at the moment, yet she would not allow it to prevent her trying to comfort a friend who was in trouble.
Johnny helped himself again, gave her rather a shame-faced look, and said: ‘Well, I haven’t exactly quarrelled with Sue but I’ve had one hell of a row with her father.’
‘What about?’ Ankaret enquired.
He passed a hand worriedly over his fair, rather rebellious, hair. ‘It arose out of the Board Meeting that we held this afternoon. Giff sprang a pretty startling piece of policy on us, and in support of it he produced a mass of facts and figures connected with Defence. After dinner, over the port, the Admiral tackled me about it, and as good as accused me of having put Giff up to this idea then briefed him for the meeting.’
‘And you hadn’t?’
Johnny’s blue eyes opened wide. ‘Good Lord, no! This stuff is dynamite—Top Secret and known only to a few dozen people outside the high-ups. But the devil of it is that I might have, because as a member of the Joint Planning Staff I am one of those few dozen. It’s our job to do the spade-work for the Chiefs of Staff, so we have to be in on all their secrets.’
‘Where did Giff get it, then?’
‘I haven’t a notion. There must have been a colossal leak somewhere; and to let half the things he said out of the bag would mean cashiering if it could be brought home to whoever did brief him. It is owing to the field being such a narrow one that makes the Admiral suspect me; and the old boy was hopping mad about it.’
Ankaret nodded. ‘One can hardly be surprised about that, seeing that if Giff’s proposal was adopted it might lead to the dissolution of the Navy.’
‘You know what took place at the Board Meeting, then?’ Johnny said, raising his eyebrows.
‘Yes. Giff told me about it before dinner.’
‘Then you’ll appreciate what a jam I’m in with the Admiral. He knows that, whether I briefed Giff or not, as an airman I am one hundred per cent behind what he plans to do. To the old boy that is little better than High Treason. After saying that he had half a mind to put the Security people on to enquiring into my reliability, he ordered me out of the house and forbade me ever to enter it again.’
‘Poor you. What rotten luck,’ said Ankaret sympathetically. ‘Does Sue know about this yet?’
‘Yes. Before leaving I collected her and we went out and sat in my car. We spent well over an hour together while I tried to explain matters. She accepted my word for it that I knew nothing of Giff’s intentions, but the Navy means nearly as much to her as it does to her old man; so she took mighty badly my admission that I would help to get it scrapped if I could. She just wouldn’t listen to reason, and before we parted she told me that she would prefer not to see me again until I was willing to leave Navy matters to men like her father, who understood them.’
‘Don’t worry too much,’ Ankaret endeavoured to console him. ‘That she believes you is what really matters. The woman isn’t born yet who would sacrifice her lover for a question of strategy. I’m sure she’ll come round before long. Anyhow, you can talk it over with …’
I felt sure that now submerged in his problem her mind had temporarily blacked out about the events of the past two hours, and that she had been about to say ‘talk it over with Giff in the morning’. As it was she suddenly went deathly white and substituted’… we can talk it over again tomorrow.’
Fortunately he was once more staring unhappily at his feet, so he did not see the blood drain from her face; but when she added quickly: ‘Now, what about getting to bed,’ he looked up again, and replied:
‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather accept your offer of a third noggin of Scotch, and sit here for a while. I want to try to think out if there is not some way by which, without letting my side down, I could patch matters up with old Waldron.’
Ankaret glanced at the locked desk. It was evident to me that she was most reluctant to leave the room without retrieving the evidence of her forgery; but I could also see that she was just about all in. Forcing a smile, she said: ‘Good night’ to Johnny and walked through the drawingroom to the hall.
There she took the forged letter from her pocket and looked about her uncertainly. Perhaps she had momentarily forgotten the original plan to put it in the pocket of my smoking jacket and leave that, as though I had thrown it off before jumping into the water, on the end of the pier. Or perhaps she decided that with Johnny about it was too great a risk for her to leave the house again. Anyhow, after a moment’s hesitation she walked to the front door and put the letter in the letterbox.
Slowly and wearily she went upstairs. On the landing she paused for a moment to stare at the closed door leading to the laboratory; but she did not go in to collect my jacket, and had she done so I hardly know where she could have left it to better advantage, short of taking it down to the pier. After all, I would not have been likely to have thrown it off in the house before going out to commit suicide, but I just might have done so before attacking Evans.
At last the terrible strain that Ankaret had been through was taking its toll of her. The effort required to appear normal during her ten minutes’ talk with Johnny, had exhausted her last reserves of will-power and control. Within a few moments her face had become drawn and haggard. Her steps were faltering as she reached her room and closed the door behind her. Still fully dressed she flung herself face down on the bed. For a while she remained silent and motionless. Then she stretched up a hand and switched out the light; but the blessed forgetfulness of sleep was as yet a long way from being granted to her. In an agony of distress she moaned:
‘Oh Giff, darling Giff; what shall I do without you?’ And after that anguished cry she began to choke with such awful rending sobs as one could expect to hear only from a woman whose heart is broken.
My own heart, or rather its spiritual counterpart, was so wrung that, since I was debarred from comforting her, I could not bear to remain in the room any longer. Withdrawing from it I passed downstairs and through the garden door out into the night.
At last I was alone. Now that the actions of others, fraught with such potent possibilities, and anxious speculations about the way their minds were working, no longer fully occupied my attention, I had become free to consider my own situation.
There could be no escaping the fact that I was dead, and although a witness to all that had passed, a silent and unseen one. There was no way in which I could help Ankaret during the ordeal which she must still go through when the deaths of myself and Evans were discovered. I could only pray for her. I now had no more power to influence the lives of the living than the stones of the terrace a few feet above which I floated; yet for some reason that I had no means of guessing, apart from the fact that I no longer had a body, I felt no more dead than I had two hours before.
The moon was now up and by it I could see the silent prospect of the Solent as clearly as if I had still been living. Like most people, I had always assumed that to die was to solve the great mystery, yet to me death had so far revealed nothing. All the same, I found it impossible to believe that I should continue in my present state for long; and as I heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike midnight, I wondered a little grimly what strange experience the new day would hold for me.