Free The Ka of Gifford Hillary by Dennis Wheatley

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 oftime 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