Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 121, No. 2. Whole No. 738, February 2003

The Voice of the Turtle by Neil Schofield

A finalist for the 2001 EQMM Readers Award, Neil Schofield produced several top-notch stories for us in 2002. His lead tale for 2003 takes a look at a little-known part of the theatrical world in which the actor is simply a voice. “In my time, I’ve worked with many ‘voices,’ ” he explains, “all of whom were extremely hard-working and talented artists. But in this, as in any profession, often there is someone like [this story’s] Victor lurking around the fringes. He is not typical.”

Victor was sitting in the dark, getting drunk. Sitting on one of the leather sofas in the reception area, drinking from a bottle of scotch, and thinking, I don’t have a murderer’s voice, that’s the problem, but how can that be? I have every kind of voice. I am the voice of them all. I am Victor the Voice. I must have a murderer’s voice somewhere in me. He was passing through the maudlin stage now, sitting on the leather sofa in the pitch dark and knowing that if he didn’t move now, get up and leave and go to his car, he’d be here all night. And that had happened more than once.

And then very quickly, as often happened, maudlin was gone and he reached the angry stage. A rage took hold of him, boiling but icy in its intensity. He was going to kill Harry Phoenix. He was going to wait for Harry, wait for him in the alley outside the studio doors, and leap on him when he came down. Batter his head against the pavement, kick his teeth out with the heel of his shoes. He was making little jerking movements now, playing out the savage scene. But no. Harry Phoenix, he remembered now, was one of those aikido freaks. Victor was much older than the little sod and he’d lost a lot of weight recently. Harry would have Victor’s tripes out and on the pavement in no seconds flat. But there had to be something. He’d find a way. For all that he was, and all that he was going to do, Harry Phoenix deserved to die. Especially after he had killed Victor stone-dead. Just now. Up there.

The woman was trying to scramble away up the bed, away from the axe that was clearly visible in the foreground of the shot. She was trembling, the bed was trembling, the axe was trembling, everything was, because the image had been frozen on the monitor in front of Victor. The next frames, Victor knew, because he had seen this a dozen times, would be a cutaway shot of the axe being raised high in the air, a tight shot of the woman’s terrified screaming face, and then, what an original idea, another cutaway to the wall above the bed on which spatters of blood were landing.

Victor was desperately trying to keep his eyes on the monitor. That wasn’t really difficult, because suddenly he was identifying strongly with the terrible actress on the bed. A trapdoor had suddenly opened up in his stomach, his ears were singing, and he had a sense of vertigo exactly as if he were looking into eternity. His eyes were fixed on the image because he didn’t dare look to his left towards the soundproof window between where he was, in the voice-over booth, and where they were, in the control room. And his ears were burning. Because through the headset, the talk-back which Tony had carelessly left open was relaying to him the things Harry Phoenix was saying to Beattie and the things she was saying back to him. Harry and Beattie were sitting at the long production desk, and Tony, the engineer, was diplomatically fiddling with the controls on the mini-disc machine with his back turned to them, pretending not to listen, ha-ha, a sound engineer who didn’t listen, pull the other one.

So Victor watched the frozen woman on the bed. Lit by the reading lights on his table, his face was reflected in the monitor, nicely superimposed on the woman’s frozen image. Symbolic, he thought distractedly. Because the conversation he was listening to, and that was bringing curiously ice-cold beads of sweat bursting out on his forehead, was your real, honest-to-God axe-job.

Small, bearded, in fact small-bearded, Harry Phoenix, the producer from hell, owner and proprietor of Phoenix International Productions, was speaking to Beattie. And get that International. A tin-pot production company that had sprung up like mold, as they do every other day in this business, existed for what, six months, and it was already International. My arse. And the titular head of this mega-enterprise was saying, “You’re going to bugger this up, Beattie, if you go on with this old has-been, and I’m not going to let you bugger it up. This is a one-hour special for Channel Four, let me remind you. I’ve been selling this for a year. If it gets the ratings, and it will, there are another twelve lined up. Jake’s come up with some of the best footage I’ve ever seen, anyone’s ever seen, for God’s sake, and now you’re going to naus it all up by laying a voice track that they wouldn’t risk on Playground."

Playground. The comment was even more biting for Victor, since he had been one of the first voices, one of the very first, on Playground. He had been the voice of Gerry the Gerbil, that hideous green felt monstrosity, for seven years. Thousands upon thousands of ankle-biters had glued themselves to their tellies three times a week to watch and listen to the rib-tickling Gerry the Gerbil. Seven years of that, he’d done. In the end, he’d turned it in. No, be honest, they’d given Gerry the deep six, why, he didn’t know. All right, he did know. But a couple of times late for the voice-laying sessions didn’t merit junking an entire character, did it? A couple of times, all right, most of the time in the last year of Gerry’s life.

Hang on, Beattie was saying something. “I know Victor’s had problems, Harry, but he really is doing a good job on this. I truly think you’re exaggerating a bit.”

Oh, nice one, Beattie, thanks for your support.

Harry said, “Exaggerating. Am I, am I just? Well, truly have a good listen to what you’ve laid so far, darling. All right, once upon a time, maybe, he was the dog’s bollocks, but look, kid, this series, or what will be a series if you can get this right, is called Through a Killer’s Eyes not John and Jane at the Seaside. I could find better than Victor in any third-rate repertory company in Widnes. Tony, go to the top, would you, heart, and let’s hear it wild.”

Tony punched a couple of buttons on his computer because that’s all you had to do these days with digital technology, none of this winding back, none of those brown shoelaces they used in the old days, and then the takes Victor had already recorded began to roll through the headphones.

Victor began marking the script in front of him with meaningless hieroglyphics, very carefully because he didn’t want the slightest sound to go back through the talk-back and let Beattie and Harry know he was listening. He had to hear this. He took out his large silk pocket handkerchief and wiped his forehead. The handkerchief gave him something to do, but it had actually become suddenly a little stuffy in here. Normally the voice-over booth was cool, air-conditioned, but today, for some reason, the air conditioning had developed a vibration inaudible to human ears, but which Tony the engineer had insisted was going to turn up in the background of the voice track. He’d tried to prove it to Victor and to Beattie, the director of this epic. Neither of them could hear it, but Tony said it was there, and in here, Tony was the boss. He had ears like a bat.

Victor’s mind was wandering off again. That was another problem that had afflicted him recently. Remarked on by more than one producer. Not unkindly, but even so. He thought: I knew a man who could hear the cry of bats./How do you know he could?/Because he told me so. Or something. The Cocktail Party. Three weeks of repertory with the Eliot play, and what was the other? Chekhov. Ivanov, that was it. How long ago was that? Twenty years? Time flies, dear, when you’re having fun, that was what they had always said to each other, sitting in the dingy dining rooms of grim, grimy, theatrical digs in Warrington, and Worksop, and yes, Harry, thank you, Widnes. Of course, they could be brave and gay because this was something they were only doing pro tem, until the call came, until the night the Big Agent happened to be out front or a teleseries came along or the West End Part or the Film Part or Something. Something was going to come along, wasn’t it? Well, no, sadly it wasn’t, actually, for most of them, and most of them knew it. And so, to quell the desperation, it had to be made to be Fun.

But if you did it long enough, it became not quite so much Fun, and finally it stopped being Fun at all.

Victor had often shivered at the thought of the future that could have been his if he had not been in the right place at the right time. He had been thirty-two, a dangerous age for an actor, just on the cusp, when you know it’s going to be all right, or it’s not. In Salford it was Death of a Salesman, playing one of the Loman sons, he couldn’t now remember which one. A good, meaty part, but you can mess it up. But he hadn’t messed it up, and out front there was, not the legendary Big Agent, but just as good, a television producer who had seen in Victor exactly what he needed for the new character he was introducing into his twice-weekly soap. He’d told Victor quite frankly, he wasn’t engaging him for his looks, because let’s be honest, Victor, you’ve got character, but you’re no matinée idol. But Victor had a good Voice.

And there you were, the legendary Big Leap, from three-weekly rep to the Big Time, network television, and instant fame. Hardly instant, be honest; it takes a bit of time for a character to encrust itself on the half-empty minds of the hopeless drabs who watch Pluckett’s Alley, a heartwarming, twice-weekly (daytime), slice-of-life chronicle of life up there in black-pudding and whippet country.

But it had happened eventually, a measure of fame had started to come along; there were winsome little articles in Woman’s Own and TV Times, there was a modest amount of fan mail, and, most important, there was an agent. Frank Porteous was that dreamed-of thing, a West End agent. All right, be honest, he was on the eastern marches of the West End, West Kensington if not, indeed, Hammersmith, but he did the business, did Frank. The first thing he had done was to persuade Victor to come and live in London, and to commute to Manchester. All right, be honest, that wasn’t too difficult, though it did piss Victor off a bit having to get up at five twice a week to get the first train up to the studios.

He had to drag his mind back quickly from Manchester, because they had finished playing the takes over there in the fish tank.

“See what I mean?” Harry’s voice was high. He was pulling fretfully at that silly little non-beard. “Where’s your drama? Where’s your edge-of-the-seat? What you’ve got there, Beattie, is your cosy. We don’t want cosy.”

Beattie said, “You’re not being fair, Harry. Victor’s one of the best voices in the business. All right, was one of the best voices. But he’s still got it. He’s still a voice. He’s known, and he’s respected and liked.”

“Not by me, Beattie, he isn’t. What he’s got is a whisky and Benson and Hedges voice. Has he, by any chance, had a drink tonight? Because there was a fluff in there, wasn’t there — on the word slaughter? Perhaps I’m losing my touch, or is it you? And, I mean, Beattie, just look at him, will you. Has he slept in that suit or what?”

Victor avoided looking down at his suit. Yes, it did perhaps need a bit of a press, a thorough cleaning, in fact, but it was Gieves and Hawkes just the same, bought back then, when his star was bright. But never mind that, the horror was continuing in there, piped to him red-hot through the cans.

“Beattie, this is docudrama, this is a high-quality, minutely-researched, factually-dramatised examination (And just how, Victor thought irrelevantly, can you have a factually-dramatised anything, pray?) of the psyche of a particularly brutal maniacal murderer. I don’t want the voice that launched a thousand potato chips to be saying, what’s the line you’ve got there (rustling of paper), ‘For three endless seconds, Gladys Morgan looks eternity in the face.’ Crap line, by the way, but we can get away with it if the voice is right. And the voice isn’t right. All I hear is (he did a horribly accurate imitation of Victor), ‘And when your serial killer comes home, Mum, what does he want to find on the table for his tea? That’s right, Crispy Codburgers.’ ”

Beattie breathed out loudly. Victor, without looking, could tell that she was glancing at him, immobile, waiting in his little cell. She said, “Play us that section again, Tony, will you?” Victor could hear a tone in her voice that said she was fighting a losing battle but was at least trying to claw back a little authority.

And Tony had said, “Sure.”

Victor, sitting half-drunk now in the half-dark, hot with the remembered embarrassment, was trying to claw back a little of the rage he had felt at that moment. He didn’t want to lose it, he had to hang on to it, because now it was all he had. Up there, Harry Phoenix had, unknowingly, all right, but all the same, flayed him alive. Every single nerve ending in his body was now open to the air and hurting atrociously. Harry had killed him. To be thrown off a job, that was death. When this got out, and it would get out, believe it, he would be dead. He might as well open his veins right here on the sofa and save everyone the time.

He took another swig from the now nearly empty bottle. Of course, that was it. He had a bottle. Wait for Harry outside, hit him with the bottle. No, those Aikido nuts had lots of cute ways of dealing with bottle-wielders, especially half-drunk bottle-wielders, even in the dark.

But he was in Soho, for God’s sake. There must be a dozen pubs within a hundred yards where he could buy a gun. All he had to do was walk into a pub and — and do what, exactly? “Double scotch, please. Oh, and a .357 Magnum, if you have one.” What did he know about buying guns? He just didn’t have the contacts. He groaned. There must be something, some way. Wait a minute. Didn’t Harry have a kid who went to school in Hammersmith somewhere? Perhaps that was it. Yes, kidnap the kid, you could work it out, collect him one afternoon, your father asked me to pick you up, no, no, no, that was no good, either, he was losing his mind.

He slumped back on the leather sofa. And just what was wrong with Crispy Codburgers anyway? That campaign had added a full seven points to the client’s share of the market. Codburgers. Strange. It was on this very sofa, in exactly this position, that his first big chance had come.

He had been waiting here for what was her name, that dizzy blond creature that he’d met in Manchester, a presenter on one of those dizzy daytime magazine programmes. She’d come down to London to do a voice-over, pantyhose, something, and he’d met up with her, taken two days off which they spent in his penthouse flat in the Barbican, hardly leaving the bedroom, hardly leaving the bed, for that matter. Two of the most exhausting days of his life, he remembered.

And he’d been here on this sofa, waiting for her to finish her session and come to lunch, when the door from the stairs up to the studio level was thrown open and Adrian Ryland came in, or rather boiled in. Adrian Ryland was a very fat and very in director of television commercials whom Victor had briefly met in Frank’s office. Met was putting it a bit strong, perhaps. Frank had tried to introduce Victor as one of his up-and-coming stars, but Adrian had been in a hurry to leave, always was in a hurry to leave, and had said, “Send me a demo. I’ll be in touch.” They’d sent him a demo tape and he hadn’t been in touch and that was that.

But now Adrian Ryland was boiling into the reception area, red in the face and clearly livid. Like a lot of his breed, he was taking it out on the receptionist, a feisty temp who didn’t know what was going on, but she did know that it wasn’t her fault that his bloody voice artist hadn’t turned up, nor was it her fault that his bloody commercial was slotted for tonight on Thames, and she told him so.

Adrian Ryland wheeled around in desperation and his eye fell on Victor. He stopped wheeling. His eyes narrowed in an attempt to dig out Victor’s name from some internal filing system, and then he came across.

“Vernon,” he said.

“Victor, actually,” said Victor.

“Victor,” said Adrian Ryland without missing a beat, “you’re one of Frank’s, aren’t you? Come with me. You’ve got a strapline to do for me, and if you mess it up, you’ll never work again, got it?”

A strapline turned out to be the last telling line at the end of a TV commercial which summed the whole product concept up. And this had been for, for what the hell was it, oh yes, a female deodorant called Trust™, for God’s sake. Just where did they dig up those names? And where did they dig up the people who dug them up?

"All it takes is — Trust.” That was the line. And they had done seventeen takes in the tiny Soho studio before that tiny, infinitesimal pause before the word “Trust” was absolutely right, and the intonation on the word itself was perfect. The pause and the intonation, of course, were implying all sorts of things, because the images on the screen were of a man and a woman obviously on the point of Doing It, and the word Trust had to come just at the point where She looked up at Him with a sickeningly Audrey Hepburn under-the-eyebrows look and an equally stomach-churning little smile. But at the end it was perfect.

Adrian had stood up, put on his camouflage jacket, and said, “All it takes is a sick-bag. Thanks, everybody, that’ll do me. Victor, very nice. Very nice, indeed. Be in touch.”

And, wonder of wonders, so he had. And after that, so had they all been in touch. All because of those five words. Victor had never seen the dizzy presenter from Manchester again, although he had seen and experienced plenty like her since.

From Trust™ Victor had gone to Frutigums, from Frutigums to Swish (kitchen cleaner), from Swish to Smist (air freshener) to Grobbles (God knows) to the famous Crispy Codburgers, and thence through a hundred, a thousand products whose names looked as if they were cheating moves on a Scrabble board or small towns in Serbia.

Victor became a Voice. One of the Few, the happy Few. He was up there with the Allens, the Jarvises, the Tates, and the Barkworths. You saw them chasing from Soho studio to Soho studio, with a shoulder bag full of scripts, one after the other, sit down in the voice booth, lay the script out, do a voice check, do a couple of dry runs to get the tone right to the director’s satisfaction (or more likely that of the client, the Frozen Pea man or the Toothpaste man or the Grobbles man, sitting on the sofa behind the director out of the light), and then Bob’s your uncle, one take and it’s done. On to the next.

Voice was a small community. In London, there were really, if you were honest, only a couple of dozen. The ones who got the work day after day, who could walk into a studio on five minutes’ notice, take a piece of mawkish drivel and in one take, all right, say two, give it the crushing authority of a pronouncement by St. Paul.

Mind you, let’s remember that the audience for this stuff consisted of people who thought that the First Letter to the Ephesians would probably run: “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ephesian, Thanks very much for the socks you sent me. Remember me to the Galatians when you see them next. Love, St. Paul.”

It was all probably a load of bollocks, whatever the marketing people trumpeted. But even so, there was a certain satisfaction in taking some copy so saccharine that if you listened to it twice you were diagnosed diabetic, written by some wet-behind-the-ears Media Studies graduate, and making it sound just like English. Not, perhaps, as much satisfaction as your real acting, but the money was just great.

For eight years, he’d done both, commuting twice a week to do the acting, record the soap, and the rest of the time he was running around town, doing four, five, six, seven scripts a day. Television commercials, radio commercials, documentaries, spotty audiovisual work for spotty conference producers, even dubbing the occasional foreign film, although that was something like work.

One hilariously hectic day, he did eleven sessions, and if you’d asked him to name just one of the products he’d worked on, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you. They’d all run into one.

Eventually he gave up the Soap of the North, or it gave him up. They got a bit fed up of him turning up at the last minute before recording with, at best, a sketchy idea of his lines. So they wrote him out in a spectacular multi-car pileup, some thousands of teary Northern mums wrote teary letters to the producer, there were jokey little items in the TV columns, and that was that. He was free. Free to concentrate on the Voice.

And he’d done a lot of work along the way: what his drama teachers would call, in that weird phrase, “honing your craft,” which had always sounded to Victor like some grave, seamanlike ritual performed by pipe-sucking Torbay fishermen when it was simply too rainy to go out in their little boats.

So he had all the standard accents, and he had his character voices. Gerry the bloody Gerbil, for example. Later on, he’d pulled an occasional booking on a late-night radio satire show. And when he gave up the Northern soap, the producer brought him in as a permanent. He did a very good impression of the Prime Minister, a reasonable Margaret Thatcher (contradiction in terms), and the writers had latched onto his gay archbishop character straightaway and wrote him a one-minute sketch every week.

He was Victor the Voice and the microphone loved him.

But Harry Phoenix didn’t love him; Harry Phoenix hated him. And he hated Harry Phoenix. Lying back on the sofa which had been the cradle of Success, and which was now the coffin of Failure, he wondered fuzzily just how he could get back at Harry. The trouble was, Harry was armoured. Harry was more than Harry. Harry was a symbol. He was the flag bearer for a whole new generation of smart, cunning, get-rich-quick bastards who were the media equivalent of a futures trading-floor. Face it, he told himself, Harry’s too much for you. They all are. Victor the Voice is no match for Harry Phoenix, the Highflier. The Flame-Bird.

The slick, streetwise producer was stronger than the ex-Victor, ex-Voice. And now, there was more to worry about, here in the black night of the reception area. Because at the glass doors, there had appeared a huge insect, black and iridescent, which was staring through the doors with its one enormous glistening black eye. I’m worse than I thought, Victor said to himself. Now it’s the DTs. The End. He let his head roll back against the leather cushions and sighed a long sigh. The end of Victor the Voice. Harry had been right, up there in the studio, when he was finishing Victor off with the ice-cold efficiency of a professional hit man.

Harry Phoenix had said, “And don’t give me that Victor the Voice crap, Beattie, because it doesn’t wash anymore. He was Victor the Voice, now he’s just another broken-down voice man who does everything the same. Everybody’s heard everything he can do, we’ve all heard it all, and I want something different. This is a true-life — well, drawn from true life — story about shocking, bloody murder, for crying out loud. Jake and Wally gave it a narrative treatment, with a voice-over, because we don’t want to risk being over-sensational. (God forbid, thought Victor, that you should ever be thought that.) But the voice has to have fear and murder in it. I want to hear bloody slaughter coming through every syllable. And Victor can’t hack it. If you want to give him something, let him do the radio announcer’s voice, or read the tabloid headlines, if you like. There are lots of little bits in there. If you love him so much, let him do the sound bites.”

Beattie said, “I’m sure Victor can come up with the right tone of voice if we ask him. And anyway, this is not really the time to be having this conversation, Harry. With respect. We’ve got half the voice in the can and now you come in and tell me you don’t like it.”

Harry’s voice was full of razor blades. “With respect, Beattie, the only reason we’re having this conversation now is because I wasn’t told you were playing housemother to washed-up old voice merchants. Why I wasn’t told we can talk about some other time. But the fact is that we are having the conversation now, and I’m telling you the voice isn’t right.”

Beattie tried to speak, but Harry wasn’t having it. “Beattie, this is my baby. I’ve spent a good bit of my life bringing it up and you’re not going to kill it now. You’re not going to kill my baby. We’re late already on this thing. Transmission’s two bloody weeks away. The commissioning editor loves the rough cut, but we’re late. The lab’s biking everything round tonight, because I thought, I thought, you’d be ready to do a final sound mix. And you’re not. I tell you, Beattie, I’ve got a lot hanging on this. You let me down, and I’m dead. But then, if I am, love, so are you.”

Victor was barely conscious of this. He was trying to keep his red-hot ears from flashing like hazard lights.

Sound bites? Is that what Harry had actually said? Let him do some sound bites? He felt a wash of rage sweep over him. Who was this little arsehole anyway? A jumped-up little nothing who’d squeezed his way into the networks with a series of two-for-a-penny pop videos, had managed to sell this half-baked series idea to some half-witted commissioning editor, and now he thought he was Jack Warner or somebody.

Bastard. Frank had been right.

“A bit of scarcity, Victor,” Frank had cautioned. “Don’t do everything. You know what they’re like. They’re fickle bastards. You’re flavour-of-the-month one minute and then suddenly you can’t get arrested.”

He wondered when it had started to happen, his not being able to get arrested. Two, three years ago? Or perhaps it was during the recession. When advertising spending was the first thing to go, and suddenly the Swish people and the Grobbles people found that not advertising didn’t make any difference. Perhaps that was when the never-ending gush of work had slowed down and, almost overnight, become a trickle. The worst was that the trickle was work of a kind he would never have touched when he was Victor the Voice. Two-line radio commercials for regional stations, some industrial-training-film work. A talking book, for God’s sake.

He’d given up the flat in the Barbican and moved to Fulham, telling himself that it was the smart move. Retrench and reform. He’d sold the car. Who needed a car in the city anyway?

But the deeper problem was, when you were running around town from studio to studio, you needed something to give you a bit of a bump start in the morning, and then several somethings throughout the day, between sessions, to keep you going. Because after fifteen years of it, it was all so bloody boring. Mindless, even. So, he’d got into the habit of having a large scotch as a heart-starter before his first session, usually in the Intrepid Fox in Dean Street, and then several more as the day went on. And you can’t go on like that for long before it’s noticed.

“Easy on the sauce, Victor,” Frank Porteous had said several times. “I had a comment the other day. Nothing naughty, but you ought to watch it.”

Easy for Frank Porteous to say sitting in an office counting his twelve-and-a-half percents. He wondered how Frank was. He hadn’t seen him for years. Having an agent was one of the things that had given him up.

Evidently, Frank had been right, because the ratio of time in the voice sessions to time in the pub began to tilt in the pub’s favour. Come on, fair dos, he thought, we all like a drink occasionally.

At that moment, sitting there listening to his career, his life, being dissected, the thought of a drink reminded him that there was the bottle of scotch in the bag at his feet under the table in the voice booth, and he’d give anything to be able to reach down and take a belt. Just to liven him up or calm him down. Or something. Perhaps he could make some excuse and go to the men’s room?

No, wait a minute, Beattie had turned to him. At last. They were going to talk to him directly. Tony flicked the talk-back switch, glanced at it again, and then looked at Victor oddly. He knows, thought Victor. He knows I was listening. Well, sod him.

Beattie said brightly, too brightly, “Victor, love, we’ve got a bit of a problem with the script. Harry’s not entirely happy with some aspects. So I’m going to wrap it for tonight, if that’s all right by you. We’d almost done the two hours anyway” — she glanced at the clock which now stood at five to twelve, midnight — “so we wouldn’t get much more done. Okay, love? And I’ll be in touch for the next booking.”

I’ll bet. Victor thrust the script into his bag and stood up creakily. He went through the double-door air lock into the control room. Beattie smiled at him, and Harry nodded in a friendly way, the hypocritical little bastard.

“All right, Victor?” he said. “Plenty of work coming in?”

“Oh, you know, keeping the wolf from the door,” said Victor.

“That’s the way,” said Harry. Victor wanted to go across and say to him, “Why don’t you either shave or grow a proper beard, you horrible little sod?” But he didn’t.

As he was leaving, Harry and Beattie had already turned back to each other. Now it begins, he thought, the real battle. This was going to go on for a long time. But Beattie would lose. Beattie would always lose against Harry, because Harry gave out the work. And so, he had trudged down the darkened stairs to reception, with the only encouraging thing the bottle in his bag.

And that was where he still was, trying to work out the perfect, foolproof way of killing Harry Phoenix, getting absolutely nowhere and facing a future as black as the night outside the glass doors. Now, to cap everything, outside those glass doors there was this giant insect, peering in with its feet cupped around the great single eye. He sat up. No there wasn’t. What there was, was a motorcycle courier outside in a black crash helmet and black leathers.

The Creature stamped its feet and pressed the buzzer on the auto-porter as though it was something he’d done too many times already.

Victor stepped across unsteadily, in the dark, to the receptionist’s desk. He looked at the entryphone with its single light blinking at him.

Without even thinking, he picked it up, and said, in his best receptionist’s voice, right out of the Essex borders, fluty but with a snap in it, “Ye-es?”

“Chrissake, how long am I supposed to keep standing out here? Got some stuff for a Beattie someone.”

Beattie, Victor thought. Then he thought again.

Then he trilled, “Just leave it on the doorstep, heart. Someone’ll be out in a tick.”

“Need a signature.”

“No you don’t. Sign it yourself. You’ve done it before. Just put Beattie Ransom. We’re all a bit tied up at the mo, heart. Do us a favour.”

The insect shrugged its shoulders and hauled out several large film cans from its panniers, placed them on the doorstep, and, with a 750cc roar, was gone.

Victor crossed to the door, pressed the button to open the electric lock, and went outside. He gave a quick look up and down the street. No one. He let the door close quietly, put his bag on top of the film cans, picked up the whole lot, and walked unsteadily to his car, where he threw everything into the backseat. Then he went home, wondering, as he drove to Fulham, what exactly he had.

At the flat, he soon found out.

After that he sat in his sparsely furnished lounge for a long, long time with a large glass of scotch in his hand, looking out over the darkness of Fulham, listening to the faint traffic sounds become fainter as the town went home. Finally, with a heave, he got up and pulled down from the cluttered shelves the portable cassette recorder he had used for rehearsing his lines, once upon a time, when he was Victor the Voice and not just a washed-up old voice merchant.

He put in a brand-new cassette and sat at his desk with the recorder in front of him. Right. Let’s see. He pressed REC and said, “This is—” He pressed PAUSE and thought for a moment. Yes, why not? It kind of summed the whole thing up, didn’t it? Harry wouldn’t get it, ignorant little bastard, but then what the hell. He rewound and began recording again: “This is The Turtle with a message for Harry Phoenix. We’ve got something that belongs to you. We’ve got the A and B rolls. We’ve got the music and effects tracks. We’ve got the work print and we’ve got every single foot of negative. If you want Through a Killer’s Eyes to go out, you’ll get fifty thousand ready in small bills. If not, it’ll all go up in smoke. We’ll be in touch. Be ready, or your baby dies. And so do you.”

The thing was that the voice was one he had never used, couldn’t even remember developing. He didn’t know where he dragged it up from. It was a horrible voice, was the voice of The Turtle. It was low, rasping, and guttural, churning up from somewhere deep, deep in his throat, but with a weird sort of chilly nasal whistle running under and through it. He wasn’t sure how he was doing that, but it was dreadful to listen to. There was murder in there, and sheer, stark evil. It sounded, even to him, like the breath of Hell. God knows what it would sound like to Harry Phoenix.

Victor listened to it once. And a second time. Then he sat back and smiled. Well now, there’s a Voice for you, Mr. Phoenix, and pick the bones out of that.

He thought he’d let it stew for thirty-six hours. So when the cassette finally arrived through the post, Harry would be good and ready. In the meantime, he would have to work out a foolproof way to collect. But, given the situation, that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Sound bites. Wasn’t that what Harry had said? Give the sodden old has-been some sound bites, if you like.

Victor leaned back, sipped some more scotch, smiled some more, and thought about that.

Sound bites.

Yes, he thought. Yes, it does, doesn’t it?

Copyright © 2002 by Neil Schofield.