A Voice Like Velvet

by Donald Henderson

  Commander Legge was supposed to have broadcast last evening after the six o’clock news. In common with others, he had had a vague notion that you just went along to the BBC, with what you wanted to say written down on the back of an envelope, and you met one of those announcer chaps, who took you to a studio. A red light went on, or perhaps it was a green one, and then you started. If you said anything rude, some unseen hand cut you off until you got back on the tracks again.

  He’d looked forward to the broadcast very much. Commander Legge was retired, and fabulously rich, and he spent many of his days trying to persuade the Admiralty to give him something worth while to do. They did now and then, and on this occasion they’d rung him up suddenly and said the BBC wanted somebody to give a talk about these new aircraft carriers. It sounded a novelty and so he said he would be very pleased. He sat down at once and seized a few old envelopes and started writing his views about the new carriers. He was so carried away he used up about forty envelopes, some of them income tax length, and chased about the house looking for more.

  He had had a dull time recently, the only excitement being that he had at last concluded a deal over the Maybee diamond, now perhaps the most sought after diamond in the world, by those still in a position to search after diamonds. He didn’t really want it; he wanted to say he’d got it, and quite likely he would sell it at a loss before long, when he was bored with it. When the new excitement of a broadcast cropped up, he shoved the diamond in his trousers pocket and forgot it. And he remembered how, when he was in the Mediterranean, he’d heard that chap Ernest Bisham’s voice booming aristocratically out over the ether during a pretty exciting engagement. And he’d thought again what a wonderful thing the radio was. There was a man placidly sitting in a London studio—and here was his voice and personality dancing about in the gunfire above the blue water. One day he’d meet Bisham and tell him he’d heard him reading out the football scores one Saturday when all the guns in the ship were plastering the daylights out of the enemy! It might amuse him! And the first thing he did after the Admiralty telephoned him, not knowing any better, was to ring up Ernest Bisham. However, he’d sounded pretty passable and they’d fixed a lunch date. Bisham had congratulated him on his purchase of the Maybee diamond, it was in the papers that morning. In fact, Bisham had mentioned it on the air. Nice of him, Legge supposed, not knowing how decisions were reached about what should comprise the news.

  When he had finished covering the backs of envelopes, the Commander grabbed a telephone in his impulsive manner. Another of his crazes was telephones. He had one in almost every room.

  He got through to the BBC and started to harangue them in his peppery manner. He had the knack of flying into a temper at the least sign of being crossed, and now here were chaps telling him which department he had to speak to, it was nothing to do with Mr Bisham, and telling him envelopes were no good at all, things had to be typed, and things had to be no longer than three minutes, and things had to be recorded first. ‘Recorded?’ roared the Commander, and stood, an old yachting cap on the back of his white head, glowering into the telephone. A tinny voice told him, in effect, he must come up and make a gramophone record of his talk, and that it must be censored. He roared: ‘I shall come up in person at six o’clock, or you can get somebody else!’ However, at six-twenty or so, he heard them put out another talk, about the habits of seagulls, and he roared upstairs to his wife, ‘Am I to be outdone by a damned seagull?’ and rushed to a telephone again. This time he was told he could do the talk straight into the microphone if he insisted, but it would have to be censored, and it would have to be no longer than three minutes. Feeling that he had won on points, he stumped upstairs to tell his wife.

  Mrs Legge was in bed. She slept during the day and played cards with her husband and one or two friends during the night. In wartime all their friends were fighting somewhere or other, so she spent a lot of time in her bedroom. She rarely listened to the radio. She said she thought there should be two broadcasting stations in England, rival concerns, then we might get something good now and again. She only liked ‘Marching On’, and because of the music links. She was an astute old woman and favoured bed-caps. She was a withered-looking person, rather Chinese in appearance, from so much travelling. She had always been jogged around on ships, or in rickshaws, or on bony mules, and it was a relief to be able to spend the rest of her days in bed. She had a house fairly full of strange servants, none of them English, and all having to report to the police at regular intervals. The house itself was rather like a vast pagoda.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE slightly eccentric figure of Commander Legge was quite a usual sight in any studio. There had been many worse; novelists, for instance, who were all very curious.

  And he arrived in a very usual way, hurried and aggressive through nervousness, and abundantly curious.

  He was met and taken to the talks department, during which brief journey he learnt that the Home News Talks department was a separate entity to the news department, and to the announcers, and to the Sunday Postscript, and even to Home Talks, and to a wealth of other departments and programmes. Startled and a little at sea, for he had thought the whole affair was rolled up into one, he allowed himself to be conducted to a thin gentleman who stood in a small room surrounded by other thin gentlemen and three secretaries, one and all using telephones and coping with questions concerning censorship, release dates, forthcoming talks and dispatches from the fronts. Commander Legge was invited to produce his script, and he pulled out of his pockets his wad of old envelopes. There was a curious stillness for several seconds.

  The next half hour was a confusion of noise and argument. In spite of the Commander’s roaring, his envelopes were taken from him, patched up into shorthand, rattled down on a typewriter, and dictated to the Admiralty on the telephone for censorship. He demanded to see Mr Bisham, who he still thought was ‘head of the firm’, and he was suddenly hurried along to a studio and offered a glass of water. This seemed to be the crowning insult. ‘Water?’ he bellowed, like a cornered bull. He declared he never drank anything less than Napoleon brandy, and never would, and he again demanded to see Mr Bisham. ‘Mr Bisham is through the wall,’ said the thinnest gentleman firmly.

  ‘Through the wall?’

  ‘But we’re on Point Nine, so you will be able to hear the news coming through on this loudspeaker, and you will hear your cue. I’ll wave my hand for you to begin. But you can watch for the red light, if you like.’

  The Commander thumped into the chair facing the microphone. As he did so, six pips were to be heard coming from the loudspeaker in the corner. Mr Ernest Bisham could be heard saying it was the six o’clock news, and that he was the person who was reading it.

  The thin gentleman sat on a high chair and craned his neck upwards to watch for the red light. A cue sheet pinned in front of him said: ‘And now to end the news, here’s Commander Edward Legge, VC, who’s going to talk about the new aircraft carrier mentioned for the first time in Parliament two days ago. Commander Legge is a veteran of the Battle of Jutland, when he won the Victoria Cross. In this war he has seen service in Africa and the Mediterranean, where he was temporarily blinded during an engagement with the enemy. Commander Legge has since recovered the use of his sight.’

  Commander Legge’s script began with determination:

  ‘I may as well say at once I can see perfectly well or I shouldn’t be sitting here. I never used glasses and I never will. Well, the first time I saw one of these aircraft carriers was about a month or so ago. As a matter of fact it was the day Mr Churchill returned from his trip to …’

  The typescript in front of the Commander was slightly blurred, his eyesight being erratic only when he was unusually excited.

  Listening to the Commander, in his own studio, Mr Bisham sat waiting to say:

  ‘You have been listening to Commander Edward Legge, VC, who has been talking about the new aircraft carrier now being used by the Royal Navy. And that is
the end of the news.’

  As he waited, a pencilled note was put in front of him which said that Commander Legge was anxious to meet him.

  And when at last he was free to meet him, he took him along to the Duty Room, where the Duty Receptionist gave him a mahogany coloured whisky and soda. Left to themselves, it was not long before the Commander’s wide conversational powers brought the topic round to the subject of his own life. A vain man, thought Mr Bisham. Unusual in a VC. But an interesting man; he didn’t exactly pose. He was tough, and he was brave, but he was inordinately full of the idea that he was so much tougher and braver than the next man. That there were sporting instincts mixed up in this attitude was undeniable. But on the whole Mr Bisham found it difficult to like the Commander. He boasted too much. He talked too much altogether. He didn’t know an audience could tire. All the same, he had his moments, had he not? And it was a great moment when he put his hand casually into his left-hand trousers pocket and produced the Maybee diamond. That was a pose, of course. To cart a hundred thousand pounds around like that. And it was a sort of challenge.

  Mr Bisham had never seen such a wonderful sight as the diamond lying in his hand.

  Suddenly tense, he turned again to study its present owner. There was something of the eccentric, little doubt, but he was a man to reckon with for all that, perhaps because of it. There he sat, with his hairy wrists, his dusty uniform and his old yachting cap, and with his fair skin and his sea-green eyes so full of challenge, boast and attack. By comparison with such toughness, Mr Bisham felt flabby.

  Discussing their proposed lunch date on the morrow, May the third, the Commander insisted on Mr Bisham coming along to his house in St John’s Wood. ‘I want to show you some of my cups.’ Thinking quickly, Mr Bisham said he would accept the invitation, but he must catch the three-eighteen at Waterloo.

  ‘I shall expect you about one,’ said the Commander. He put the diamond back in his trousers pocket.

  Accepting, Mr Bisham remarked that it seemed a very unsafe place for such a valuable diamond.

  The Commander looked even more challenging, and said conceitedly:

  ‘I’d like to meet the man who’d take a diamond off me!’ He said he always carried a new gem about with him for at least a month, ‘just to get the feel of it’. He started a long conversation about the various purchases he had made in his day, diamonds, yachts, ’planes and cars.

  That night, Mr Bisham slept rather fitfully in his bunk. His mind was over-active. He intended this to be his last little journey, and he intended it to be successful. He had an appointment with Mr Leveson soon too, who was soon going to Russia. Mr Leveson was staying at the Dorchester. Yes, for Marjorie’s sake, he was going to give up his little hobby. And he could feel he had done a little extra something for the war; he had indeed given of himself.

  In the darkness, he saw the diamond, blood red.

  Sometimes he saw it lying on Marjorie’s bosom.

  Throughout the seven and eight it seemed to be lying on the papers before him. He was not reading the one, but he had told Marjorie about the lunch engagement with Commander Legge, and he would catch the three-eighteen.

  Today was his birthday party.

  It had started to rain.

  Mr Bisham had bought himself a new mackintosh for the spring. It had an exceptionally high collar and hid most of his face. Looking at himself in the mirror, he had seen something pleasingly dramatic about the effect created by the addition of a low-brimmed slouch hat pulled well down over the forehead.

  You could really only see a pair of eyes.

  He wore his tight fitting gloves and went out into the rain, thinking: ‘I shall soon see if I’m being followed.’ He called a taxi.

  He had had a strong feeling lately that he was being followed by a young man in a grey trilby hat. He peered back through the small window, but there was nothing following him. His taxi made for Baker Street and turned right. There was nothing following him.

  Yet, had he but known it, there was a small police car sitting round the corner from Broadcasting House. In it sat a young man in a trilby hat named Detective Inspector Hanbury, attentively listening to ‘a selection of gramophone records, chosen by Mr Ernest Bisham, who is here to announce them’. The young man in the trilby hat was not to know that, due to an unusual error, it had not been announced that he was listening only to a recording.

  Mr Bisham, unobserved, bowled along towards St John’s Wood in the rain, thinking:

  ‘I shall be at the house at a quarter to one. At that moment the Commander will be getting my telephone message saying I can’t come, and that I’m going to write and explain—pressure of duties, you know.’ He might possibly be in a position to hear the telephone ringing. What sort of a house was it? Something of a fortress, no doubt. Yet the Commander was too conceited to feel he needed any fortification but himself! It would probably not be too difficult, and it made a change doing a daylight job. It might be exciting.

  Mr Bisham was not of the order of cat-burglars which planned in advance to the minutest detail. That was for a very different type of mind as well as motive, and it implied accomplices. To work alone was to think alone, and he believed so greatly in chance. And yet, while he thought what was to be would be, he also persistently thought Fate played a fair game with anyone who was brave enough to play daringly with her. He was bearing these things in mind as he sat back in the taxi and saw the rain splashing the pavements. It had started out such a beautiful day, by all accounts, and now it had turned to a deluge. It was May rain and would be wonderful for Marjorie’s flowers, he thought.

  When he reached St John’s Wood he stopped the taxi and dismissed it. It was raining over-heavily and had grown rather dark. The taxi splashed away and he asked a woman for the street where the Commander’s house was, and when she went scurrying off in the rain he hurried towards the broad street with the lime trees. All the houses were big here, and they stood back behind large, hidden gardens and stone walls.

  Commander Legge’s house was large and Oriental. Red, white and sprawling, it stood between the cold care of two huge poplars. The pagoda effect was largely robbed by modernism, and rain slithered down the dirty windows and brown walls in frustrated attempts to get down the leave-choked guttering. Thick tentacles of ugly ivy clung under most of the windows and choked the place of any delicacy or beauty. Mr Bisham kept his hat well down and his collar well up and without hesitation darted through the broken gate to the wall of the house. The wet streets were deserted and the only sound was the melancholy sound of the rain and the purposeful sound of his own footsteps on the gravel. He moved quickly round the blind side of the house, avoiding an angular front window. He came to another window and peeped through. Commander Legge was pottering about in there—he was cleaning a pair of pistols. Mr Bisham stood back against the wall and waited. After a little while, the Commander left the room, taking a pistol with him. Mr Bisham at once tried the window. It slid upwards silently. As it did so he heard the telephone ringing. He climbed quickly into the room and closed the window after him.

  Mr Bisham was thinking that things might have turned out a better gamble if he had accepted the Commander’s invitation to lunch and decided upon his tactics then; but the fine point still remained—could you rob a man who had asked you to his house like that? It would be biting the hand that fed you, and it would hardly be the act of a gentleman, least of all an announcer. No, things looked a bit tricky this time, but he felt queerly confident. Yet, remembering how confident he had felt just before Bardner’s self-locking door had closed upon him, he remained keyed up and alert. There was something tremendously stimulating, like a drug, to be standing, a man in a mackintosh, in a strange room in a strange house. It was quite desperately thrilling. A clock was ticking creakily. (There was always a clock.) The furniture was heavy and they went in for stuffed birds in glass cases, red tablecloths with tassels, a Buddha and a painted Chinese screen. And there were rows of the Commander’s silver c
ups on the high black mantelpiece. In the firegrate was a huge spreading fern. Marjorie liked a fire until May was out, if it was only a wooden one. There was no sign of the Maybee diamond. Needless to say, it would be in the old boy’s left-hand trousers pocket. It was a good place for it, wasn’t it? Probably better than a safe, really. All the same, he’d have to disgorge it; it was promised to Russia. Who else lived in the house? There didn’t appear to be a sight or a sound of anyone. Eerie, but satisfactory. He tip-toed across to the half-open door. Through the crack, he saw the Commander standing at the telephone in the hall. He wore the same old uniform as yesterday, his yachting cap on in the house and pulled skew-whiff over his white hair. He bawled into the telephone in the deafening way he had. ‘What? Can’t he? Well, damn him, then; I’d got hold of a chicken, curried chicken. Never mind, never mind …!’ Without further hesitation, Mr Bisham left the study and moved quickly up behind him. ‘Touch the wall with the palms of your hands,’ he said in an urgent whisper. The Commander’s hands went up after only a fractional pause, and Mr Bisham reached for the revolver lying beside the telephone. It wasn’t loaded, but he tossed it onto a chair. It was an old rocking chair and he saw the chair swinging gently to and fro. You noticed everything at such times. Then he frisked him. He took care to start at his top pockets so it should not appear he must have known where the diamond was. He found it in the left-hand trousers pocket and put it in his own left-hand trousers pocket.

  Commander Legge stood stock-still, listening to the sound of the mackintosh. In the shadowy mirror almost opposite he saw only a pair of eyes. He kept his hands up in the air rather as if he was too old to keep them really upright. In his utter astonishment his mouth had fallen wide open. The last time anyone had dared to do this to him had been in Singapore, when a damned native had hustled him for his wallet. But the native had made the mistake of underestimating his elbow power, and he’d come too close altogether! A sharp jab from the elbows and the fellow had been quickly disarmed, and well, what he’d done to him then was nobody’s business! A man wasn’t a VC for nothing.