Free The Ka of Gifford Hillary by Dennis Wheatley Page A

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