The Mind Readers (2 page)

‘I hope not!'

‘So do I. Things are quite dear enough already. I only have to put my nose in the supermarket and I spend a pound. I saw Mrs Flooder by the way and heard a most extraordinary story. The poor wretched man could have died
and
burnt the house down.'

Avril did not rise to the bait but his eyes lost their introspection as a trickle of corrosive poison crept into his heart. She had reminded him of a silly incident and his own behaviour in it which had been careless and not even like him. He would not have believed he could have been so stupid.

‘She told me you saw her,' Miss Warburton continued in her instructive way. ‘You ran right into her, I believe, just as she was coming out of the shop. She nearly dropped her parcels and you changed the subject by telling her that her sister's boy had put up the banns at last.'

The Canon bowed his venerable head. It had not happened like that at all. The bison of a woman, maddened with acquisitiveness and laden with loot, had almost knocked him over, sworn at him for being in the way and turned to sycophantic mooing as she recognised her parish priest. It was then that the fatal statement had escaped him.

‘Why, it's Mrs Flooder. I've just been hearing your nephew's good news. A grand wedding in the family, eh?'

Before the final word was out of his mouth he had recognised his mistake. He had broken rule number one in his book; he had made trouble.

The news had crept into Mrs Flooder's intelligence visibly like a flame creeping up a fuse and the explosion was quite frightful.

‘Cat! My sister Lily's a cat. Never told me one bloody word! Hoping I'll stay away. Just you wait until I get hold of her. Dirty little lying cat. I'll drop in as I go past!'

Avril had seen her rush off with his heart full of self-loathing. The tasteless blunder had bothered him out of all proportion and all today he had been irked by it. He slid a little lower in his chair.

‘It was the first she'd heard of the marriage so she went straight to her sister's house,' continued Miss Warburton, relieved that she had interested him; at least he wasn't ill. ‘She told me to tell you she would never have dreamed of dropping in if you hadn't mentioned the white wedding and the hired hall. . . .'

‘I said no such thing!'

‘Never mind, it's a mercy if you did. Lily was out, you see, and Mrs Flooder found the poor man choking, smoke coming from under his door. It seems he'd fallen over and broken his hip—caught his foot in the cord of the electric bowl fire. He was too weak to shout by the time Mrs Flooder got there.'

Avril sat up in astonishment and concern.

‘
Who
was this?'

‘Lily's lodger—taken in to help pay for the wedding, I shouldn't be surprised. He could have burned to death if that woman Flooder hadn't broken in to look for her sister. She thought she was hiding up.'

‘I'd never heard of him.'

‘Nor had I. He moved in one evening and this happened the next morning. Mrs Flooder can't get over it. She said she'll always “take notice of a clergyman” because she'd “gone in to make a beastly row and before she knew it, there she was, a heroine!” There, I thought that would make you laugh so I'll leave you in peace. Have a little doze.'

As the door closed very softly behind her, presumably in case he had fallen asleep already, Avril tried to rearrange his mind so that the sense of insult which the story had aroused in him could be isolated and exorcised.

He was not in the least surprised by the coincidence. He spent his existence watching life's machinery and could hardly be expected to be astonished if he saw the slow wheels move, but he was startled by his grievance. What had so upset him was that it should be a weakness and not a strength of his own which had been graciously permitted to play its tiny part in assisting this unknown fellow-sojourner. He had caught himself thinking that surely he might have been allowed to make a kindly or constructive gesture instead of a vulgar breach of confidence. As the absurdity of his complaint crystallised he took himself in hand and his professional philosophy stirred itself to meet the tiny emergency.

At length he bent his head and folded his hands on his waistcoat; his eyes were bright and intelligent in the dusk. The question which had arisen so absurdly was, he saw, a vast one, beset with dangers. For the next half hour he proceeded through the spiritual minefield, his heart in his mouth. It was this, rather than the little coincidence which occasioned it, which was to be of such curious significance in the breakthrough.

The third of the five tiny incidents which seemed at first to be so slightly related to each other, was another private conversation which also concerned the vocation of the speakers, but this time of very different people.

While old Canon Avril was listening to Dot Warburton far across the Park, a black limousine with a custom-built body crept up the incline in Brick Street West, and stopped outside a small house whose windows were dark.

The shadow sitting in the back tossed a key to the chauffeur, who slid out of his seat to unlock the front door before returning to release his passenger who passed inside like a dark cloud. The chauffeur closed the street door behind him, faded back to the car and drove away, unaware that the visit was not quite the normal Thursday evening routine with the Boss in a black mood.

Within the house the vestibule was dimly lit and the grey walls and carpet gave no indication of the distinctive decor of the one big room which took up most of the first floor.

The thin woman who waited in it was a little too old to be so palely blonde but was still extremely good-looking. As soon as she heard the car door slam she rose and stood waiting, a trace of deference by far the softest thing about her. The apartment surrounding her was remarkable and achieved the effect at which the designer had aimed, both reflecting and opposing the painting which was its centrepiece.

Miss Merle Rawlins had bought the picture at the fabulously successful Louis Celli's first post-surrealist exhibition. She had indicated where it should hang on the long wall directly opposite the door and had left the rest to a young Frenchman who was becoming almost equally well known. The result was that most people entering for the first time found themselves shocked without understanding why, although Miss Rawlins and Bertram Alexander, first Baron Ludor of Hollowhill in Surrey and Chairman of UCAI, who paid for it, had no difficulty whatever.

The painting was called
Gitto
and was a lifesize portrait of the fully-grown male gorilla of that name in the Wymondham Zoo. Celli's realism, which was always so much more than ruthlessly photographic, had here achieved a passionate quality and the great black primate, standing in a lime-green jungle with one paw on a tortured tree stump and the other scratching a thigh of truly terrible muscle, had captured the black-ice tragedy of the brute.

The portrait had caused a sensation when it was first shown, for the stony face was strong enough for nobility and probably sufficiently intelligent to recognise that it was without hope of evolution. It met one as one arrived, unutterably sad, but dangerous and certainly not for pity. Merle Rawlins had bought the work of art because she adored it and the Frenchman had hung the wall behind it with a formal Florentine flock paper of black on grey, flooded the floor with cherry pile, and shrouded all the window end of the room with lime-green glass fabric. He had then subdued the furnishing to one twelve-foot curved couch in black leather and simulated monkey fur and the joke, such as it was, was over. Lord Ludor enjoyed it; he knew that whereas other people might snigger, if they were brave enough, at the likeness between himself and the portrait, Merle had certainly been crazy to get it and liked to live with it because it epitomised the terror and excitement he had always been able to kindle in her. She had been the finest secretary he had ever had and as a mistress she worked hard to please, studying him in all things, putting him first, soaking herself in his needs until, as on an evening like this, she came into her own and was irreplaceable. At his home in the Surrey town of Hollowhill Lady Ludor attended to the furnishings but here evidences of his own taste were everywhere. The only moving thing when he came in was the new toy which Merle had been given by the sales manager of a subsidiary in a more or less open attempt to capture Ludor's personal interest. It looked exactly like an orthodox television set, but showed film of a kind which even in these uninhibited days could not have been put out by any public broadcasting service in the world. She was running it without the sound because he expected her to be alone and might for a moment have mistaken the canned words for conversation and torn the house down. As it was, his heavy glance, which noted her and passed on without altering, came to rest on the screen and he stood for a second looking at its somewhat laborious salacity before he said: ‘Turn that thing off.'

She obeyed him at once, but without hurry because he disliked jerky movement, and he came forward on to the rug before the synthetic log fire and stood where he usually did, under the picture.

Even when one saw the two together there was a definite likeness, and not only in spirit. Indeed, the sight would not be comic and bearable until he was much older and less powerful than he was now at sixty. Today he was still nine-tenths of the force he had been at forty-five when the huge electronics combine, the Universal Contacts empire, was being won.

Merle recognised his mood as any of his close associates would have done but she was probably less alarmed by it than most. It was not that she knew how to dispel it, but because she understood that she would only be expected to do what she was told. Worry and decision and invention were not required of her; he would do all that.

He began at once. ‘Did you lay on all the calls without trouble?'

‘Not without trouble.'

‘But you got all three arranged? Person to person?'

‘Yes. They all want to speak to you so it was only technical delays. They are being put through for us at hourly intervals, starting at seven. No bother is expected except perhaps over Mr Kalek's, so I've made him last. He's at Lunea and there's no scrambler yet. Can you manage?'

‘I shall have to, shan't I?' He never wasted energy on the unalterable. ‘The Sheikh in clear would be more of a menace!'

‘Oh, he's all right. He's at the Winter Palace with all the aids. I spoke to the Prince but the old man was in the room.'

‘And Cornelius?'

‘He's in Lausanne in the nursing home. Hetty is still in Johannesburg.'

‘What about Daniels?'

‘Mr Daniels is there with Mr Cornelius. He's being called the Secretary now.'

‘I see.' He stood silent for a moment, hand on the back of one of the thin black chairs in unconscious imitation of the portrait, his face sombre.

‘Oh well. Not bad.' It was great praise. She felt it almost more than she deserved although she had been at the telephone for sixteen hours and had performed miracles without any other priorities than those she could call her own. It was only on these very rare occasions when the business was most secret that he used her lines. She kept them, and sometimes used them, for social contacts so that the records could never conceivably show anything unusual.

‘What's Kalek doing on that pimple in the Caribbean?'

‘Resting. He likes to be with his ceramics. You've got an island yourself, Bae.' It was not a pet name but the version of some of his initials used by those closest to him. He grunted:

‘I don't try to live on it! Perhaps I should. This wouldn't have happened if I had. Nor do I need rest all the time. Damn Kalek. He's the youngest and the weakest of us all.'

‘It's the world danger,' she said, edging to the door of the kitchen pantry because often, when he started to look about like this, he was hungry. ‘He feels he wants to look at his pieces while he can. He's still frightened of the Bomb.'

Ludor laughed but his eyes did not change. ‘He's old hat.' he said. ‘He'll be more frightened by what I've got to tell him. This could hit him. Right in the gelt-bag.'

She stood waiting by the door of the pantry, knowing that it would be unwise either to question or to disappear. She had known Ludor intimately for something over fourteen years and he was still a mystery, and, as an intelligence herself, she found the fact irresistible. His sudden change of subject surprised her.

‘Sanderton was buried today. You didn't send flowers, did you?'

‘You said not.'

‘Good. I don't want even a thought to go through any little mind in Fleet Street. He's got to be replaced by our new contact at once. His sudden flake-out took me by surprise; one never thinks of death at that age except on the road, and he was chauffeur-driven always. He ought to have told me about his blood pressure.'

Merle ventured a question which had been bothering her. She was a conventional soul and, in her own limited way, not unkind.

‘I thought I might telephone Mrs Sanderton? Not write, just telephone and say I'm sorry. She adored him and they were up here such a lot.'

‘I don't think I would. Not yet.' He was thinking about it, giving it the same consideration he afforded to every detail which could concern him or his great interests. ‘Wait until we have our new man functioning. I've got old “Pa,” Paling attending to it now. It's a little tricky because Lord Feste sees to it that they screen all their people so very carefully. He's nobody's fool and at this moment the old fox could surprise me any morning, which is damn dangerous! Leave it now and take the woman to lunch in a week or two and say you hadn't liked to intrude before. Then you need never see her again.'

She nodded but added: ‘I quite liked her.'

‘Did you? Predatory type. Nice line in dirt but fundamentally a clinger and a bore. Loyalish, I suppose.' He dismissed the subject and glanced at the clock face built into the ebony fitment which ran round half the room and was designed to contain the paraphernalia of modern living in much the same way as a Victorian work-box was arranged to hold crochet-hooks and bobbins.