But this chap seemed to know his onions, he was keeping well back. He’d got the Maybee diamond too; well, he needn’t think he was going to get away with that!
Commander Legge peeped at him in the mirror there, by the grandfather clock. He seemed to be a big chap. He was all dripping mackintosh and hat. All you could see was the shadow of his eyes. And all you could feel was outraged indignation and a damned gun sticking into your back. Was it a gun? It was devilish to know it just might be his thumbnail …
He decided to play for time. Discretion was the better part of valour.
Where the hell was everyone? The house was chock full of servants; where the devil were they?
Mr Bisham decided it was time to back away again, and that it would be best to return to the study where he knew there was an exit. No more self-locking doors for him!
‘Count ten before you do anything silly,’ he whispered to Commander Legge—and he dived for the study.
But he hadn’t got through the window before Legge plunged through the door after him and took a pot at him. The bullet smashed the window-pane above his head into a thousand pieces. There was no time to wonder where he had found a gun, and he darted under cover of the ledge towards the greenhouse. It seemed the safest thing to do. But as he went two bullets shattered the greenhouse roof.
He scrambled into the greenhouse, looking for the exit on the other side.
CHAPTER XX
COMMANDER LEGGE congratulated himself on his gun habit. If it was convenient to have a telephone in every room, it was even more convenient to have a gun in every drawer. And in the hall chest of drawers there were two six-chambered revolvers. He darted round to the far end of the conservatory, letting fly as he went. He drilled a few holes in the boarding where he guessed the man might be crouching. Then he took cover beneath the far door and took two pots through the window-pane above his head. There was a shower of glass and he got a brief glimpse of the mackintoshed figure crouching within. Screeching pigeons and sparrows flew up in the air and two colossal reports answered him.
Mr Bisham took care to aim above the Commander’s head. He was no murderer, but there seemed to be every point in making the Commander think he was. It was bluff, and by it alone could he hope to cover his retreat and make a get-away. He let fly again, and then started to slither backwards along the greenhouse floor on his haunches. Then he twisted over onto his knees, keeping as flat as possible, and started to make for the door by which he had entered.
Commander Legge, swearing like a trooper, kept down under cover of the wooden skirting and took three more pots through the lowest glass panel. He splintered a flower-pot and another pane, and in the distance voices started to clamour excitedly.
Mr Bisham pulled his collar up and his hat down and came to the conclusion that the Commander’s eyesight wasn’t as good as it had once been. He fired again and ran out of the greenhouse. Seeing strange figures approaching from garden and road, he dived for the nearest house window. It happened to be the one he had entered and left once already. As he clambered through it Commander Legge popped up and saw him. He took another pot at him. He missed again but split the window into fragments. In a shower of glass, Mr Bisham fell head over heels into the room and knocked over a globe of the world. Two maids were now in the room, but they let out feminine cries of terror and Mr Bisham darted past them. He rushed through the hall, keeping his collar well up, and found himself bounding at a Chinese butler with a pigtail. He dodged him and dashed up the steep staircase. As he did so, Commander Legge, having rushed round the front of the house and in by the front door, came roaring into the hall like a maniac. Mr Bisham plunged up the stairs just as two bullets shattered the chandelier above his head. There was a shower of crystals from it as if it was raining jewellery. He turned and took a pot at a picture above the Commander’s head. Both slid to the floor. Mr Bisham then became aware of an elderly woman in a dressing-gown who was on the landing taking careful aim at him with a double-barrelled gun. Fascinated by this apparition, he stared at her stupidly. Then he dived at her.
It was Mrs Legge, and she fired a second too late.
There was a roar like a five hundred pound bomb hitting an arsenal. But she fell flat on her back, and suddenly there was no sign of the man in the mackintosh. He vanished through a bedroom door in a cloud of acrid smoke, and locked it.
Commander Legge told himself he hadn’t had such excitement since Jutland. He had reloaded and was standing in front of the bedroom door roaring out: ‘Stand back, everyone,’ and he let fly at the lock.
The house re-echoed to the shattering aftermath. Pictures and plaster fell to the floor. Mrs Legge got up off the floor and started to reload her twelve-bore. The whole thing made her think there was a bit of life in the place after all. Imagine if you were married to a civil servant!
The stairs and the hall were now thronged with figures. The staff had appeared like magic. The baker, postman and milkman had appeared. Two small boys had appeared, holding scooters.
Several passers-by had dropped in, telling themselves they’d often heard the Legges were ‘unorthodox’.
The only people who didn’t seem to be there were the police, but they had been telephoned for.
When the door at last flew open, the Legges both roared out:
‘Stand back and keep low—he’s armed!’ But both rushed into the room without a thought for themselves or their own safety.
The window was wide open in there.
They rushed to it.
‘There he goes!’ shouted Commander Legge excitedly. ‘And he’s got my diamond, the Maybee diamond!’ He took careful aim at the figure running across the garden in the rain. The figure reached the distant wall.
But Mrs Legge, taking careful aim herself, jogged him at the psychological moment.
The net result was a white cat and two chimney pots belonging to the house opposite. All three slid noisily down the slippery tiles and crashed into the street.
The figure in the mackintosh got over the wall and disappeared from sight. They heard his footsteps pattering swiftly along the distant road.
Cursing, the Legges rushed for the nearest of their telephones to communicate with Scotland Yard. Where were the police, damn them? They were always at your elbow when you were doing a spot of speeding, but they were never about when they were really wanted.
Mr Bisham came safely into the main road and dropped into a brisk walk. He felt pleased and safe as he hopped into another taxi and said, still slightly breathless: ‘Charming weather? Waterloo, if you please, my friend …’ It had been an exhilarating adventure; bullets whizzing about, people shouting and converging from all directions; altogether a mighty close shave! But his luck had held and this was his last job. It was a fitting and worthy finish. He was satisfied he had not been watched or followed when he left Broadcasting House, and he was satisfied he was not being followed now. The truly magnificent Maybee diamond was now in his own left-hand trousers pocket. Tonight, Leveson was coming to the little birthday dinner party Marjorie had planned, and he would be given the parcel of jewels. Leveson was a dull old stick, but he was an old acquaintance, if not exactly friend, and he was going to Russia tomorrow night, by submarine, on a special Admiralty mission. He had already agreed to take ‘a brown paper parcel, not exceeding twenty pounds in weight’, and of course it would not be anything like that; and it would be addressed simply, ‘To The Russian Government In Moscow’. Leveson had asked few questions; he knew Bisham, and he also knew the Russian Government. Further, he promised Bisham lifelong secrecy. Leveson was a man whose bald head contained more secrets than the heads of a hundred men added together. They would all die quietly and unobtrusively with him. ‘Only a matter of some twenty-four hours or so,’ thought Mr Bisham, jogging up and down restfully in the taxi and suddenly became aware, to his mortification, that both his mackintosh and his trousers were badly torn in a quite impossible place. He screwed himself round, trying to estimate the true exten
t of the damage, as the taxi bounded up the incline into Waterloo station. And who should open the door for him but Lord Sudbury! Fortunately, Lord Sudbury always concentrated on the matter in hand, and the matter of the moment was just to grab anybody’s taxi; it didn’t matter at all whether he’d met the present occupant before or not, life was full of bally coincidences of that sort. Mr Bisham, nevertheless, kept his back view in the direction of the station hotel, and his front view in the direction of his lordship. His lordship looked ruddy and stooping, and as if he had just returned from examining his crops in some southern part of the country. He had on a little green hat with a pheasant’s feather in it, and chamois gloves. He blared: ‘Have you done with this thing?’ meaning the taxi and went on: ‘Ah, it’s you, how do! They haven’t caught the scoundrel,’ he said at once, ‘they call the Man In The Mask, yet! I don’t know how that feller Hood spends his time, I’m sure! I wonder if he ever thinks of the taxpayer,’ his lordship proceeded to grumble at some length.
‘I don’t suppose they ever will catch him,’ said Mr Bisham in a burst of confidence, but partly for something to say. He became aware that his lordship was staring at him strangely.
‘What the devil have you done to your face?’ enquired Lord Sudbury sharply. He stared at it.
Mr Bisham had been just about to enquire after Bardner. He felt a little conscience-stricken on behalf of Bardner, and would not like to think he had got him the sack.
‘My face, Lord Sudbury?’ he said, startled, and forgetting Bardner’s existence.
‘It looks as if it is covered in soot, sir!’ Lord Sudbury sounded as if there was quite enough wrong with our announcers as it was, without having to see their sooty faces into the bargain. ‘If you’ll forgive my mentioning it!’
There was then the picture of ruddy Lord Sudbury, sitting forward in the departing taxi, looking in continued astonishment up and down one of England’s leading announcers, who was standing rather apologetically with one hand held curiously behind his back, and with a sooty face, and with a wet mackintosh which appeared to be daubed with plaster or paint. In the folds of his hat there were strange fragments of glass and chandelier crystals.
‘Mad!’ muttered Lord Sudbury to himself. ‘Stark mad! Altogether too much glass and paint at Broadcasting House! I suppose the fellow’s been indulging in one of those BBC quarrels …!’
Ernest Bisham then became aware that he was cutting an exceptionally curious figure and that people were staring at him.
He turned, holding his torn trousers, and hurried into the station hotel. He couldn’t possibly go home like this.
Immediately he got into the hotel, another voice hailed him. One always met simply everyone at Waterloo.
And it would have to be Bess!
She exclaimed at once, and at the top of her voice:
‘Ernest! Good gracious!’ and demanded to know if he had been run over by a taxi or a bus, seeming inclined to favour the latter.
He told himself, as he had done on many former occasions, that there was just that something about his sister’s aura which so readily caused him to feel—and appear—so irritated with her. It was in her aura, which was the colour of khaki, and in her masculine face, which was the colour of sunburned chalk, and it was in her intonations and her masculine manner. And then she had this knack of always appearing at the wrong moment, as now, when it was difficult to keep either dignity or temper. All he wanted, he said, was the temporary use of a room, and, he said, putting it badly, the temporary use of the hotel housekeeper, with her needle and thread and clothes brush.
He said so at high speed to the only official apparently available, a very old gentleman with no jacket and a long white beard.
But the old gentleman appeared to be foreign.
‘Don’t I make myself clear?’ Mr Bisham said to him with vanishing patience. The old gentleman wasn’t foreign, but merely a product of wartime. ‘I want a room for a few minutes, perhaps an hour. And the use of your housekeeper … That is—’
‘Here,’ Bess interrupted, in her parade ground voice, ‘let me have a go at him.’
She was satisfied that both men were a little dazed, the one through honourable age, and the other through having been run over in the skiddy road by a bus. She explained stolidly: ‘We want a room, please. My brother has been run over by an omnibus …’
‘I have not been run over by an omnibus!’ Why did she always say ‘omnibus’, when everybody else said plain ‘bus’? ‘Leave me to handle this, Bess.’
‘You’re not capable of handling anything in your present condition. Nobody would dream you’re … who you are, Ernest. You haven’t been drinking?’ she suddenly wondered. ‘You used not to,’ and it was suddenly possible to see her deducing hideous scenes at Tredgarth, Marjorie appearing with black eyes at breakfast, and the public never dreaming of the true character of their favourite announcer. ‘You must get cleaned up,’ she said, ‘and your clothes mended. Then we’ll have lunch and catch the next train.’
The aged hotel official started to tick over.
Oh, the lady and gentleman wanted a room? Well, then, he’d go and find the receptionist.
‘That will be something,’ said Miss Bisham tritely.
He shuffled slowly along the red carpet.
In the train, Ernest sat resolutely behind his Evening Standard. He offered no explanation to Bess as to his odd appearance; one didn’t, to sisters. She seemed to think he had had a tumble, and that was good enough. For the rest, she sat in her khaki, with her grey, bobbed hair looking mannish, and with her legs crossed. She wished him ‘many happy returns of the day, I haven’t got a thing for you, I thought of a tie, but no coupons,’ enquired after Marjorie and marriage with her usual suspicion. ‘I ’phoned her from Ipswich. She sounded rather quiet. Is she?’
‘Quiet …?’
‘Has she got a cold, perhaps?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Well, perhaps it was the line.’
‘Perhaps.’
She said: ‘Who’s coming to dinner?’ and when he said he hadn’t the faintest idea, she sniffed and said: ‘Typical!’ She was thoroughly au fait with invasion developments and details, and dark about them, completely confident and full of post-war plans—worldly and personal. Indeed, the trend of her conversation really seemed to have left the war; the war was rather like sand which still clung to her fingers, but which had almost run safely through.
‘And how’s the old BBC?’ she wondered chattily. ‘Any excitements lately? But of course you’re really rather a dull crowd up there, aren’t you?’
CHAPTER XXI
ALL the same, her remarks about the end of the war had made him thoughtful; what of his own future, with Marjorie?
When he stood alone in his study, the diamond in his hand, he felt a premonition of gladness that his exotic escapades were indeed over, and that something strange and indefinable, unallied to fear, had cured him, if cured was the word. Also, he thought he knew what it was. It was something that would be rather difficult to put into words, or even clear thoughts; it was something to do with Marjorie; something to do with having been obliged to lie to her. Indeed, there was a strange new feeling about her, a new tension. Just now, coming in with Bess, he had felt positively shy of Marjorie. Shy of your wife? Why? It wasn’t anything Bess had said—and she had said a great deal about the incident at Waterloo, ‘and there he was, my dear, and I made him sprawl over the housekeeper’s knee, he simply refused to take off his trousers—being who he is, I suppose!’ Marjorie took to the idea of an accident, with due sympathy and concern for him, and so there was another lie. And Marjorie had said Hood had been on the prowl and seemed to be interested in Leeman—and so there was another lie, in essence, for he had had to allow Leeman to reside in shadows of suspicion which really belonged to himself.
He put the Maybee diamond in the safe and relocked it. He suddenly longed for the morrow, when jewels and gems would belong to the murky past. He wou
ld sell the safe …
As he straightened his back, Bess came striding in.
There was a truly astounding incident.
She was curiously flushed.
‘Ernest!’ she cried. And she suddenly gave him one of her rare kisses, rather like a woodpecker. ‘My dear—why didn’t you tell me? And I suppose you hope it will be a boy …!’
He stood stunned.
She didn’t stay; news of this kind always sent Bess Bisham to a telephone without delay. Coupons would no longer present the slightest difficulty. They would be found somewhere and somehow. Meanwhile, she would rush about the house pulling open strange cupboards and drawers in search of long-forgotten garments and enormous knitting needles.
When he found the use of his legs, Bess was to be heard thumping about up in the spare room.
He stood on the landing and called:
‘Marjorie …?’
His immaculate voice sounded strangely hoarse. He felt ridiculously and intensely shy and suddenly knew what was the matter with him. Love was a queer thing, especially when it got you after forty.
‘Marjorie, my dear?’ He called her again.
His voice echoed through their gingerbread house.
She had fled down the garden.
She hadn’t meant to tell Bess. She hadn’t meant to tell anyone until she’d told Ernest. But, a little faintness … And you couldn’t possibly hide anything from Bess.
When he found her, she was bending over the new chicken coop. She had taken to rearing chickens, on the advice of Shorter, who declared it would help see the local hospital through eggs next winter, ‘if handled right’, and, trying desperately hard to ‘handle it right’, so that Ernest wouldn’t see the rush of colour to her face, she gave the chickens fresh food and water. They were streaky yellow and brown, with white little beaks.
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