John Carr - The Reader Is Warned

PEGUIN BOOKS

THE READER IS WARNED

Carter Dickson

FIRST PUBLISHED 1939

PUBLISHBD IN PENGUIN BOOKS 1951

PART I

TWILIGHT

Concerning a Prophecy Made and Fulfilled

LETTER FROM MR LAWRENCE CHASE TO DR JOHN SANDERS

81, Soane Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields,

26th April, 1938

MY DEAR SANDERS,

What are you doing this week-end, the 30th? Whatever it is, I hope I can persuade you to put it off. We should very much like to have you with us at Fourways; and could you manage to bring Sir Henry Merrivale as well ?

Fourways, as you probably know, is Sam and Mina Constable's place. Sam is a sort of distant relative of mine, and in any case you'll have heard of Mina. They ask me to extend the heartiest invitation to you both. The reason is this: Mina has got hold of a mind-reader.

On my solemn word of honour, this is not a hoax or a joke. And let not your scientific soul be shocked. The fellow isn't a music-hall turn. He is a student of some kind. I don't think he is a fake; at least (so far as my somewhat dazed intelligence goes) I don't see how he can be a fake. Unassuming sort of chap, no fuss and feathers about him. But he really does seem to read thoughts in a way that will raise your hair. He's got some sort of theory that Thought is a physical force, which might be used as a weapon.

It will be a very small patty: just Sam and Mina; our friend the thought-reader, whose name is Pennik; Hilary Keen; and myself. Hilary Keen is a new gal, a great friend of mine - so no funny business, see?

Now have I intrigued you, or not? We are making the week-end from Friday, the 29th. Good train from Charing Cross, 5.30 to Camberdene. A car will meet you at the station. If you can manage it, drop me a line.

Yours,

LAWRENCE CHASE

p.s. - Is your fair lady, Marcia Blystone, still on that round-the-world cruise with her parents? I hear all is not well; hope nothing seriously wrong?

LETTER FROM DR JOHN SANDERS TO MR LAWRENCE CHASE

Harris Institute, Bloomsbury St., W.C.I,

27th April, 1938

MY DEAR CHASE,

Very glad to join you on Friday, but I am afraid it will be impossible for H. M. to be with us. He has to go north on some official business. But he is violently curious about your thought-reader, and promises to get back and at least look in by Sunday, if that will not be too late?

While reserving my own opinion until I have heard the evidence, I must say that if you have quoted him correctly your thought-reader appears to be talking scientific flapdoodle.

Many thanks to Mr and Mrs Constable. Charing Cross, 5.20 Camberdene.

Yours,

JOHN SANDERS

p.s. - I do not understand your reference to funny business. Nor to ‘all not being well'. Yes, Marcia is still on the cruise. Her last letter was from Honolulu; they have gone on from there to Jamaica; back home in June.

CHAPTER I

On the afternoon of Friday, April 29th, Dr John Sanders travelled down to Surrey by the recommended train.

He had no notion that he was on the eve of the criminal case which would turn the hair of the legal profession as grey as its wigs, and upset precedents of both law and medicine. But Sanders was not easy in his mind. Not even the brilliant spring afternoon, with a soft-wind and a clear-glowing sky, could allure him. The recommended train was crowded, so that he could not pull a certain letter out of his pocket and study it again as he might study a specimen through a microscope.

Of course, he had nothing to worry about. Marcia Blystone, though she might be six thousand miles away in Honolulu, was his fiancée. This world-cruise had been necessary because of a small scandal about her father arising out of the Haye murder case. She had not really been too keen to go, though Sanders could not blame her for her delight at the prospect. And she wrote frequently. Her letters were informative and sprightly j sometimes, he thought, a little too sprightly. He would have preferred something more on the sentimental side, or even impassioned side. Once - when she was in a sentimental mood, in Greece - he did get such a letter, and he walked about for days with his head in the air.

But it did not happen often. And what was actually beginning to gnaw at his imagination was the now persistent recurrence, in those letters, of the name of Kessler.

First the reference was casual. 'The passengers as a whole are a foul lot, but we have met one man who seems quite decent; Kessler, I think his name is.' Then presently: 'Mr Kessler has made this cruise four times, and is able to help us a lot.' And: 'You should have heard Gerald Kessler's description of his experiences with a camel in the Gobi.' Damn the Gobi and the swank that went therewith. It was always 'us,' but it became: 'Gerald Kessler was telling us,’ and finally, 'Jerry says.'

Sanders could trace the course of that acquaintanceship through every sea, as clearly as a ship's officer pins flags on a map to show the mileage from port to port. Kessler had begun to haunt him. Kessler's features remained vague, in spite of a snapshot of him with Marcia at Yokohama: showing him tall and lounging in white flannels, with a pipe in his mouth. He could not help endowing Kessler with vast accomplishments. Back to chilly England, in the days between December and March, came these tales of warm waters and coloured lanterns, where things seemed more spacious for being under the almond-blossom. Sanders - examining the innards of a corpse for the Home Office pathologist - was at times badly depressed. Faceless Kessler. Now they were at Honolulu. Sanders's notions of Honolulu were vague, being chiefly concerned with guitars and people throwing wreaths round other people's necks. But he could imagine that its effect on a girl like Marcia Blystone might be sinister.

Kessler, Kessler, Kessler! Or what about that other fellow, the one she barely mentioned? Mightn't Kessler be a screen?

Then again there were times when he wondered whether he might not be losing interest in Marcia. The sight of a letter beside his plate did not always produce the usual symptoms. There were times, as he read Marcia's sprightly and sophisticated descriptions, when he was almost tempted to say sadly, 'Light of my life, come off it.' His conscience pointed a stern finger at him for this; but there it was.

Such, then, was his state of mind when he went down to Fourways, Sam Constable's country house, for the weekend. It may have been partly responsible for what happened afterwards - he could never be quite sure.

It was a quarter past six when the train left him at a wayside station called Camberdene in the vast stillness of evening. He liked that stillness; he liked the feeling of being alone; for the first time he felt relaxed. The sky had that darkening clearness, with something of the quality of polished glass in it, by which everything seems large and fresh and new-washed. And the countryside smelled of evening as distinctively as it smelled of spring. No car had been sent to meet him, but he did not mind. A station-master, whose voice rose with hollow loudness along the platform, informed him that he could get no other conveyance there; and that Fourways was half a mile up the road. He set out to walk it cheerfully, carrying a heavy suitcase.

Fourways, when he found it, could not be called a gem of architecture. The one thing you could say about it was that it managed to look at once massive and yet squeezed together. It was Victorian Gothic: or, more properly, it started out in a smooth upward run of smooth dark-red brick, rose plainly to a narrow and massive height like the side of a ship, and then sprouted out into small pinnacle-towers, turrets, and gewgaw chimneys. Standing well back in the triangle formed by two sides of a cross-roads, its six or seven acres of ground were surrounded by a tall brick wall which itself must have cost somebody a fortune in the 'eighties.