The Mind Readers Read Online Free Page A

Fortunately he’s dead so nobody need know anything. Drop it. Now then, what else have we got? My God, this is thin!’
    â€˜There’s the dress show and the wedding,’ she said obediently. ‘I shall have to fall back on my teashop.’
    â€˜Who? Oh, that old pansy teashop keeper you’re always quoting. You eat there, don’t you?’
    â€˜I have my coffee and croissant there in the mornings instead of breakfast, he’s so near my flat. You can sneer at him if you like but it was my dear Mr Witty and his “pussums” who gave us the first whisper of the Coalhouse divorce.’
    â€˜Too clinical, my dear.’ The other voice dropped easily into the revived twenties vernacular. ‘Well, what had he got this morning?’
    â€˜Let me see, not a lot, but there might be something in it, if it was properly investigated. He was all on about a libel case pending between two masters—or a master and an examiner—in one of the public schools. The boys come home tomorrow for half term and he was going to hear more from one of the matrons and tell me. Shall we ’phone the School?’
    â€˜No. That’s not
us.
That’ll be a news story. We couldn’t touch that.’
    â€˜Oh, it’s nothing unpleasant. Neither Mr Witty nor his beautiful white cat would soil their claws with common dirt. You don’t know Mr Witty. He calls his teashop the Milestone and he’s always toying with the idea of changing his name to Whittington. . . . I think he sees himself as a principal boy! This is all about cheating in exams.’
    â€˜Is it? Well, there’s nothing there for us. Give me that corny Talking Tiger story news turned in.’
    Content in his corner, Peggie continued to doctor the article he was vetting for one of his young relatives who edited a technical journal round the corner at the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ Press.
    The Braithwaites were a family of journalists as closely knit as any of the country’s nuclei of born tradesmen; weavers, coachbuilders, masons or smiths. These were the families who had formed the Guilds and later inspired the birth of the trade unions. Powerful, obstinate, skilful men, they served their masters and earned their money but their greatest loyalty was always to the craft itself. Although Peggie was deep in his task he spared a secret grin at the inefficiency of the two next door. Gossip! They didn’t recognise gossip when they heard it. The school they were talking about was St Josephus, the preparatory side of Totham, and whatever the facts of the pending libel action it was a twopenny-ha’penny tale compared with the real story which had involved that establishment earlier in the week when
Panda,
the propaganda journal of the Eastern Powers, had trotted out one of their periodic fairy tales. This one had been too wild even for the news boys and Peggie himself had been able to inform the Editor of
The Daily Paper,
that volatile demon Rafael, that there was nothing in it. They had both regretted it, despite their headshaking; but it really was no good; they had had to agree that even the incredible Ludor would hardly stand for that little item. Peggie just had to laugh whenever he thought of it. ‘Guinea-pig public schoolboys’! The oriental propagandist was a performer on his own! Even Lord Feste himself, in the old days when his name had been Phil Jones, had not been quite in their class. Peggie dismissed the chatterers next door. They bored him and he closed his ears in the way he was trained to, finished his little job for the ‘young ’un’, and inserted a fresh sheet in his typewriter. Then he hitched his sleeves and settled down to the one utterly important task in his universe, the composition of his own authoritative Saturday Piece.
    The fifth tremor round the rising bud was in its own way the most momentous of all and yet it was no more than a reckless