A Voice Like Velvet

by Donald Henderson

  Mr Bisham sat looking at a pleasant and witty-eyed man with an over-red face. He was probably nearly sixty. He was a bit short and a bit thickset. A human sort of man in an untidy brown suit. Brown socks, brown shoes, bowler hat on his knees. It was a childish face, but a shrewd face too, the whole covered by a small smile. Mr Bisham had the absurd notion that this shrewd old man was shy of him! He certainly didn’t feel the detective had come here with any sinister intent. Unless this quaint approach was … guile?

  Mr Hood started to make various remarks to Mr Bisham about being sorry to intrude when he was resting, but saying how very interested Mrs Hood would be when he got home to Shepherd’s Bush for lunch, and they listened to him reading the one o’clock news. ‘Oh, she’ll be quite tickled, Mr Bisham!’ Mr Bisham smiled politely, used to this sort of thing, but a trifle anxious, inwardly, that such remarks should come from him. Was he being genuine? ‘Though,’ Mr Hood went on, smiling, ‘to you it must be just a job.’

  ‘Quite right,’ smiled Mr Bisham economically.

  ‘I know the public likes to weave its own romances out of things, eh? The life of a detective is supposed to be the most exciting life!’ He laughed. ‘And so is the life of an announcer, Mrs Hood assures me of that,’ he laughed again. ‘And so is the life of a cat-burglar. Or so I suppose! I suppose the public will be very upset when the Man In The Mask is sent to prison! There’s something very unromantic about years of penal servitude!’

  Sitting rather still, Mr Bisham found himself staring politely at three little flattened bullets. They looked like florins that had been put on the railway line.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  MR HOOD, still looking rather shy, said you could have knocked him down with a feather when the gunsmith traced the bullets to Mr Ernest Bisham, the announcer. ‘I mean, only having seen you yesterday at the sale, Mr Bisham. And I said then, didn’t I, I felt sure we should meet again? And now I have the same feeling, I reckon we shall meet a third time—if you believe in threes?’ He smiled broadly.

  Mr Bisham’s smile was broad too, and carefully arranged.

  But he was just a shade hot under his collar for, as a matter of fact, he did believe in threes.

  Instantaneously, he made up his mind that the time was coming, if it had not already arrived, when he ought to call Finis to his little career as a cat-burglar. If his hand was showing signs of losing its touch—and there had been several little signs, these bullets, and these increasingly near squeaks—it might be wise not to tempt Fate’s mood once too often. The wise man was the man who knew when to stop. There remained, however, one intriguing adventure, concerning a diamond which would get into a match-box, and concerning a semi-eccentric and vain millionaire. He was called Commander Legge and he was down to broadcast shortly.

  And thinking of Commander Legge, even as Mr Hood discussed the habit of carrying revolvers, Mr Bisham then and there resolved that if this one further little adventure was successful, it would be his last. Then he need lie no longer to Marjorie. He had felt oddly unhappy about that, even though they were what he called white lies, and were designed to give her peace of mind. The affair of Commander Legge’s diamond, which was emphatically priceless, would, from the early sound of it, require exceptional nerve and skill. To start with, the Commander was a VC and probably went in for revolvers himself.

  ‘But I’ve never really had the revolver habit,’ he told Hood breezily. He told him quite frankly about his wife’s surprising conversation about revolvers. ‘She thought it was mine, of course. But it wasn’t.’

  ‘When was that?’ wondered Hood.

  ‘Oh, some little time ago …’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Do you think someone has been impersonating me at the gunsmith’s?’

  ‘It’s possible, Mr Bisham, I suppose,’ frowned Hood. ‘You’re a public figure.’ He pulled a piece of flimsy from his pocket. ‘But is this your signature, or not? It’s your name …’

  Mr Bisham felt rather pleased. He recognized the false signature which he had scrawled when purchasing the gun. It had been a useful piece of foresight, as it turned out.

  He presented Mr Hood with his pass. ‘There’s my signature,’ he said calmly. ‘And it hardly compares with this …!’

  ‘Who would be a detective?’ remarked Mr Hood.

  Mr Bisham was sympathetic. He said it was time for him to go to the news room, he always went there at a quarter past the hour. He took care not to mention his one lapse, this morning. Although, if the Inspector did find it out, it was nothing to go by, was it?…

  All the same, he’d sailed close enough to the wind this time.

  ‘I shall have to be a bit of trouble to you yet,’ Hood regretted. ‘I shall have to have a list of everyone who’s been to your house, Mr Bisham. After all, your wife saw a strange pistol, and it wasn’t yours. That’s not to say it fits these bullets, but it’s something to work on, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘Quite so …’

  ‘And a list of your friends and acquaintances here at the BBC’ He laughed ruefully. ‘That’ll keep me busy, no doubt. But it’s got to be looked into.’ He got up and put the bullets back into his pocket. ‘I’m sorry to drag your friends into this, so to speak. But you can rely on me to be careful in my investigations.’

  ‘I’m sure I can.’

  ‘You haven’t any enemies? Nobody with a spite? I mean, impersonations; it seems queer …’ He broke off, frowning again, and suddenly said: ‘What about the staff? At home, I mean? Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I came down to your place one day …?’

  Standing watching him go, Mr Bisham had the picture of a frowning man scratching the back of his head below his hat. What was Hood really thinking? Had he really fallen for that line about the revolver? But it seemed fatal to say he had bought it. Moreover, he still needed it. The work wasn’t quite over yet. And this time the risk would be the greatest ever. For, if he wasn’t actually suspected, Hood would quite likely keep an eye on his movements. He would call it routine.

  When lunchtime came—lunchtime was after the one, about twenty past—he went to get his hat. His diary said: ‘Commander Legge. Berkeley. 1.30 p.m.’

  Going briskly out of the building, police and commissionaires touched their caps to him.

  Announcers were the cream of the place, weren’t they?

  May the third dawned a beautiful day for Marjorie Bisham, wife of the famous announcer. It was gravely sad, she felt, that all days were not inevitably beautiful for everybody in all countries. It was not, for instance, beautiful for everyone in Poland, or Russia, or England even, largely remote though it was to many of the more harrowing possibilities of war.

  It seemed selfish to think about your husband’s birthday, and to go about the garden gathering flowers and singing.

  It was not a very beautiful day for Mr Jonas Wintle, however. He didn’t see daylight until three in the afternoon, if you excluded the artificial daylight used in the studios.

  Yet there was in his life now a light which kept him going at all hours. The light was changing him, and it was Annabella, and she was to come home with him for their days off. Moreover, the Bishams were expecting them to dinner. It was old Bisham’s birthday, or something of the sort, and there was a bit of a dinner, and afterwards people were coming in to dance. It would probably be thoroughly browning off, but Annabella would be there, and there would be sure to be plenty of hootch. Further, he might make another attempt to persuade Ernest Bisham to use his influence and get him made an announcer. At seven that morning Ernest Bisham had been rather preoccupied. He’d been late as hell and made everyone as annoyed as they dared to be. This dinner date would be a splendid opportunity. Jonas had been rehearsing his voice with Annabella, and she declared it was very much better. She said: ‘It’s resonant, Jonas, with just that touch of nasal trouble you want.’

  To Annabella, May the third did happen to be a beautiful day. But since she had first set eyes on Jonas, all her days had become s
trangely beautiful. True, he was nothing very much to look at, and when you’d discovered some of the things he’d done in the war, and suffered, you could scarcely believe it. It seemed impertinent to want to try and improve him. Yet the truth was, whatever he’d done, he was still only a boy and had grown up before his time. The first thing she did was to make him brush his hair differently so that it didn’t fall all over his eyes. Then she made him get rid of his shapeless flannel suit and get a pair of blue corduroy trousers. ‘Not brown ones, Jonas! Be different!’ Everyone else, she said, wore brown ones at the BBC. ‘Now,’ she said, proudly surveying him, ‘now you’ll be able to hold your own with Mr Mundy!’ And, indeed, he had almost at once transmitted a complicated disc programme about Brahms for Mr Mundy to the theme tune of ‘How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings Fair’. Mr Mundy had flung his arms heavenwards and logged a glowing report about Mr Wintle which, reaching Mr Black, had almost caused Mr Black to have a stroke, for he’d been looking after Transatlantic Call at the time, and there too everything had actually gone without a hitch. Annabella’s motherly attitude had at first irritated Jonas, for it savoured too much of what was dished out at home. However, he discovered other qualities in Annabella, remote from the maternal. There was something so calmly glamorous about her, and soothing. The way she kept her yellow hair so tidily in that net, and the way her long arms worked about above that cutting machine, and the calm way she told Mr Peat, ‘Well, if you don’t ever have a bath, I do, that’s all,’ and off she’d sweep dressed in her blue dungarees. All the girls she worked with looked rather like her, but none was quite so magnificent as Annabella.

  Today, preparing to leave, she felt very gay. She threw everything into a blue leather case and got her red hat. It was the size of a muffin and she shoved it on the back of her head. Then she went to say good-bye to a friend in the Control Room, and ’phoned another farewell to a friend up in glamorous Studio Bookings. Jonas rang down from the Disc Library saying that he was searching through tiers of discs for something Mr Black wanted, and said, ‘Must do everything I can for him, he’s been so decent; invalided out of the Navy, you know, that’s why he’s a bit out of sorts at times,’ to her extreme astonishment. ‘Hurry,’ she called. ‘I’ll meet you in the reception hall.’

  ‘Righto …’

  ‘I hope you realize I’m not bringing an evening dress, Jonas?’

  ‘Nobody dresses for anything till after the war,’ he said briefly, and rang off.

  She went to the front and waited for him. It was thronged with sailors and airmen and Commandos coming to do a broadcast. Both lifts were working overtime and small boys were dashing about with messages. A tall Indian wearing a sort of fez was singing ‘Pale Hands I Loved’ in a rather aggressive manner, as if he was rehearsing. Three of his male secretaries made a chorus and looked rather yellow and respectful. Everyone seemed pleased.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Jonas suddenly. He was carting a huge brown suitcase.

  He said ‘Hallo’ to the Indians, who he thought were a much nicer race than was generally realized.

  They got a carriage to themselves. At Waterloo he stared about, hoping to see Ernest Bisham, but there was no sign of him. Perhaps he was in already, and of course he would travel first class. Jonas said he would travel first class the moment he started reading the daily bulletins. He asked her if she thought announcing was more than just reading out loud, or whether it was better to be one of the chaps who wrote it all. Then he suddenly startled her by saying he’d been browned off by the idea of marriage for some time, but now he thought it was ‘quite a logical process to contemplate. Don’t you?’

  She turned pink.

  ‘If that’s a proposal, I’d rather you put it in more romantic terms—’

  ‘No,’ he chattered, interrupting. ‘But you know what I mean. I mean, it’s fatal for some people to marry. You can see that everywhere.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It’s fatal to marry a skinny woman, for instance, don’t you think?’

  ‘I haven’t thought about it,’ she stared.

  ‘I think the whole point about marriage,’ he said, pulling out fags for them both, ‘is to be able to have a snooze on Sunday mornings and read the papers in bed. And who wants to lean up against a skinny lizzy?’

  The train rattled along.

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve got to do the leaning,’ she complained tritely. ‘What about me leaning on you? You’re not so plump yourself.’ Later, she swayed about with the train and said quaintly: ‘I hope your mother likes me. I’m not exactly out of the top drawer.’ She said her mother and father ran a milk-round near Epping, and she gave her young, jerky laugh and her mouth shot open and showed red. She leaned her head back and said the Bisham affair was scaring her stiff. A little before Woking, after a great deal of chatter, she said: ‘Well, I suppose we’re practically engaged? Or what’s the line?’

  ‘Oh, I asked you to marry me in the mixer yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, was that what it was?’

  ‘And you accepted. During Jack Benny half-hour. I’ll come down to Epping, of course.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Dad’ll receive you in the dairy in his shirt sleeves!’

  ‘Father’s nearly always in his shirt sleeves,’ he answered her solemnly. ‘He’s all right, but he likes water weasels and things.’ He warned: ‘Be careful of our gin. I think it’s a bit phony. Somebody came the other day and went away quite squiffy …’

  They jumped out onto the platform and started looking for Ernest Bisham, in case he actually was on the same train. But there was no sign of him. The platform smelt of May blossom mingled with fish from scores of crates stacked up outside the waiting-room. It was hot.

  Marjorie Bisham often wondered how cooks withstood the heat of kitchens during spring and summer days. Perhaps the fact that they had to, contributed to their somewhat caustic front on cooking occasions. Mrs Leeman was in a singularly caustic mood about something, at any rate. Perhaps she didn’t like the idea of the mistress cooking the pheasant and making the trifle. It was very uncomfortable knowing that Mrs Leeman was standing about all the time, with her arms akimbo and that expression on her face. Mrs Leeman exuded an aura of the hypercritical, as opposed to the hypersensitive. She didn’t have to speak, or even look. Her presence in the smoky kitchen was more than enough. The kitchen smelt of pheasant and stuffing and roasting potatoes and boiling cauliflower. The trifle reeked strongly of wartime sherry. It was vinegarish.

  Mrs Bisham had spent most of the day in and out of the kitchen. She had bent over the kitchen table for hours slicing up bits of apple, Mrs Leeman saying coldly that she didn’t hold with the habit of putting apple into every blessed thing. And when Mrs Bisham started putting sliced onion into everything, she said she didn’t hold with that either, because of ‘’alitosis, madam’. She said, ‘Oh!’ whenever madam said how she cooked this and that, and she looked very bored when Mrs Bisham’s eyeblack started to run from the stinging onion-vapour. Mrs Bisham had had to go into the garden with tears streaming down both sides of her large nose.

  Mrs Bisham was in fact having a tremendous day, according to her ideas. And then, in the middle of it all, Leeman had answered the door to a most extraordinary visitor. It had given Mrs Leeman ‘a turn’. Leeman came into the kitchen and said a ’tec had called on madam.

  Mrs Leeman turned pale.

  ‘What …?’

  ‘Oh, pipe down! I recognized him at once,’ said her husband, speaking calmly, but visibly moved all the same. ‘It’s Hood, from the Yard.’

  ‘What does he want …?’

  ‘He forgot to tell me,’ said Leeman sarcastically, but he crept along to the hall to listen.

  But they’d gone into the garden.

  Leeman hung about, feeling quite certain Hood would send for him. He didn’t know why he felt it, he just did.

  But he was wrong. Hood didn’t send for him. Hood sunned himself for hours in the garden with madam. He see
med quite taken with her.

  ‘I’m sorry to miss your husband,’ Mr Hood said, regretting to have to lie. He knew Mr Bisham would not be here yet. As a matter of fact, quite against his will, he was having Mr Bisham watched. They’d insisted, at the meeting. Well, there was no harm in it, perhaps.

  The truth was his brain was being teased in a persistent and most extraordinary manner. It was this revolver business.

  Mrs Bisham was charming. She answered everything and was kindness itself. She offered to show him the house and everything. He hesitated at first, because he knew Leeman was watching. He was very interested in Leeman. Leeman’s fingerprints might be a good idea. Was he a man with the revolver habit? And what about Mrs Leeman? Mrs Bisham spoke fairly well of them both. Dunkirk, eh? H’m …! When Mrs Bisham did show him the house a rather convenient incident cropped up. She was called to the kitchen just as they reached the room she called ‘my husband’s den’. When her footsteps faded away, he stood listening for the other footsteps. They came all right, too. Leeman certainly seemed interested. He must have a bit of a think about Leeman. Leeman, Leeman? It didn’t touch any chords in his memory, but … He turned and peeped inside Mr Bisham’s room. It was inevitable that his eyes should alight on the new green safe. It was rather a big one, wasn’t it?

  At about the same time on this hot spring afternoon, Commander Bryan Legge, VC, ex-pugilist, ex-politician, was standing in the study of his home in St John’s Wood. He was cleaning a revolver. It was a hefty Service revolver, and bullets the size of one’s thumb were sprawled on the table. In marked contrast to it, there lay on the table a blood red diamond attached to a chain no thicker than a spider’s web. Seeing it lying around there, the Commander seized it with clumsy fingers and shoved it into his trousers pocket. Then he went on humming and cleaning his pistol. He had no particular use for a pistol, he’d just got the revolver habit.