Money in the Bank (6 page)

CHAPTER VI

There was a brief pause. Jeff was too fully occupied in taking in the newcomer's many perfections to be capable of speech. His mind was in a sort of emotional welter, to the surface of which, like an egg shell in a maelstrom, there kept bobbing one coherent thought—to wit, that if this was the sort of girl who frequented the offices of private investigators, he had been mad not to have become a private investigator before.

It was true that almost anybody who did not look like Myrtle Shoesmith would have appealed to him at the moment, and Anne Benedick was supremely unlike Myrtle Shoesmith, but the thing went deeper than that. There was something about this visitor that seemed to touch some hidden chord in his being, setting joy bells ringing and torchlight processions parading through the echoing corridors of his soul. Romeo, he fancied, must have experienced a somewhat similar, though weaker, emotion on first beholding Juliet.

As for Anne, her reactions, if less ecstatic, were distinctly favourable. Halsey Court, and particularly the staircase of Halsey Buildings, had prepared her for something pretty outstandingly bad in the way of investigators—something, indeed, very like the Chimp Twist who might so easily have been there to receive her: and this agreeable, clean-cut young man came as a refreshing surprise. She liked his looks. She had also a curious feeling that she had seen him before somewhere.

"Good afternoon," she said, and Jeff pulled himself together with a strong effort. His fervour was still as pronounced as ever, but the first stunned sensation had begun to wane.

"Good afternoon," he replied. "Do sit down, won't you?" He seized a chair and started mopping it vigorously with his coat sleeve, as Sir Walter Raleigh would have done in his place. He regretted that the lax methods of his predecessor's charwoman should have rendered the action so necessary. "Quite a bit of dust in here, I'm afraid."

"There does seem to be a speck or two."

"One gets called away on an important case, and during one's absence the cleaning staff take it easy."

"I suppose they have heard so much about the importance of leaving everything absolutely untouched."

"It may be so. Still, there are too many rock cakes about, far too many rock cakes.
I
see no reason for anything like this number of rock cakes."

"You don't think they lend a homey touch?"

"Perhaps you are right. Yes, possibly they do brighten the old place up. There," said Jeff, exhibiting his handiwork,
"I
think that's better."

"Much better. And now would you mind dusting another. My uncle should be arriving in a moment.
I
thought he was coming up the stairs behind me, but he must have stopped to sniff at something. He has rather an enquiring mind."

As she spoke, there came from outside the door the slow booming of feet on the stone stairs, as if a circus elephant in
sabots
were picking its way towards the third floor: and as Jeff finished removing the alluvial deposits from a second of Mr. Twist's chairs, the missing member of the party arrived.

"Come in, angel," said Anne. "We were wondering where you had got to. This is Mr. Adair. My uncle. Lord Uffenham."

The newcomer, as the sound of his footsteps had suggested, was built on generous lines. In shape, he resembled a pear, reasonably narrow at the top but getting wider and wider all the way down and culminating in a pair of boots of the outsize or violin-case type. Above these great, spreading steppes of body there was poised a large and egglike head, the bald dome of which rose like some proud mountain peak from a foothill fringe of straggling hair. His upper lip was very long and straight, his chin pointed. Two huge, unblinking eyes of the palest blue looked out from beneath rugged brows with a strange fixity.

"How do yer do?" he said. "Haryer? I've been having a dashed interesting talk with a policeman, my dear. I noticed that he was the living image of a feller who took me to Vine Street on Boat Race Night of the year 1909, and I stopped him and asked him if he could account for this in any way. And I'm blowed if he didn't turn out to be my policeman's son. That's what you'd call a link between the generations, what?" He paused, and turned his glassy stare on Jeff, giving the latter the momentary feeling of having been caught in the ray of a searchlight. "You ever been taken to Vine Street?"

Jeff said that he had not had this experience.

"Decent little place, as police stations go," said Lord Uffenham tolerantly.

With which encomium, he lowered himself into a chair, with such an air of complete withdrawal from his surroundings and looking so like something which Gutzon Borglum might have carved on the side of a mountain that Jeff had an odd illusion that he was no longer there. He turned to Anne, to learn from her what was the nature of the business which had put her on J. Sheringham Adair's visiting list, and found her regarding him with a puzzled look.

"I can't help feeling I've seen you before, Mr. Adair."

"Really?"  said Jeff.   "I  wonder  where.   You---" He paused. He had been about to ask if she had been in court during the trying of the case of Pennefather
v.
Tarvin, but perceived in time that this would be injudicious. "You never came to Cambridge for May Week, did you?"

"No."

"Were you ever in Rome? Naples? Cannes? Lovely Lucerne?"

"Never. You seem to have travelled more than I have."

"Oh, well, you know, one's cases. They take one everywhere."

"I suppose so. I've never been about much, except just country house visits in England. But I ought to be telling you my business."

Lord Uffenham came suddenly out of his coma, and at once gave evidence that, though the body had been inert, the brain had not been idle.

"Hey," he said, once more subjecting Jeff to that piercing stare.

"Yes?"

"Do you know how you can tell the temperature?"

"Look at a thermometer?"

"Simpler than that. Count the number of chirps a grasshopper makes in fourteen seconds, and add forty."

"Oh, yes?" said Jeff, and awaited further observations. But the other had said his say. With the air of a man shutting up a public building, he closed his mouth and sat staring before him, and Jeff returned to Anne.

"You were saying---"

"I was about to disclose the nature of my business, only the Sieur de Uffenham got on to the subject of grasshoppers. You mustn't pay any attention to my uncle, Mr. Adair. He's liable to pop up like this at any moment. Just say to yourself that now you know how to tell the temperature, and dismiss the thing from your mind."

"The system would be a good one, mark you, if you had a grasshopper."

"And hadn't a thermometer."

"As might easily happen during a country ramble. The nature of your business, you were saying?"

"Well, to begin with, I have been sent here by Mrs., Wellesley Cork."

"I know that name."

"I thought you might."

"The big-game huntress?"

"That's right."

"Of course. I saw a photograph of her in some paper the other day, looking sideways at a dead lion."

"'Mrs. Cork and Friend.'"

"Exactly."

"I am her secretary. My name is Benedick. She has taken my uncle's place in Kent—Shipley Hail."

"Oh, yes?"

"And she wants to have a detective on the premises."

Once more, Lord Uffenham emerged from his waxworklike trance.

"Silly old geezer," he said, like Counsel giving an opinion in chambers, and passed into the silence again. Jeff nodded encouragingly.

"A detective on the premises ? You interest me strangely. Why?"

"To watch her butler."

"Worth watching, is he? An arresting spectacle?"

"She thinks so. And you were recommended by a Mrs. Molloy."

"Why does Mrs. Cork want her butler watched?"

"She has an idea he's dishonest. She keeps finding him rummaging in rooms."

"I see. Why doesn't she just fire him?"

"She can't. My uncle made it a condition of allowing her to have the house that the butler was to stay on and couldn't be dismissed."

"Didn't she object to a clause like that in the lease?"

"She didn't pay much attention to the lease. She left it all to me. She told me to get her a house within easy distance of London, and my uncle wanted to let his, so I fixed everything up. It seemed all right to me. You see, I know Cakebread."

"I don't. Who is he?"

"The butler."

"His name is really Cakebread?"

"Why not?"

"It sounds too obviously butlerine. As if he had adopted it as a ruse, to lure employers into a false confidence. You're sure he's all right?"

"Quite."

"As pure as the driven snow?"

"Purer."

"Then why does he rummage in rooms?"

"Well---"

"Yes?"

"I don't know."

Jeff permitted himself a moment's severity. It was, he felt, what J. Sheringham Adair would have done, had he been conducting this inquisition.

"Miss Benedick, do you ever read detective stories?"

"Of course."

"Then you will be familiar with something that happens with unfailing regularity in all of them. There is always a point, you will have noticed, where the detective turns a bit sniffy and says he cannot possibly undertake this case unless he has his client's full confidence.' You are keeping something back from me,' he says. Miss Benedick, I put it to you that you are keeping something back from me. What is it?"

He stared keenly across the desk. Anne had fallen into thought. A little wrinkle had appeared in her forehead, and the tip of her nose wiggled like a rabbit's. Very attractive, Jeff thought it, and so it was.

"I have just been working it out in my mind," said Lord Uffenham, rejoining them after having preserved for some five minutes the appearance of being one of those loved ones far away, of whom the hymnal speaks, "and I find that I could put the whole dashed human race into a pit half a mile wide by half a mile deep."

"I wouldn't," said Jeff.

"No, don't," said Anne. "Think how squashy it would be for the ones at the bottom."

"True," admitted Lord Uffenham, after consideration. "Yerss. Yerss, I see what you mean. Still, it's an interesting thought."

He ceased, and Jeff, who had waited courteously for him to continue, realising after a pause that nothing more was coming and that this was apparently just another of the
obiter dicta
which it was his lordship's custom to throw out from time to time in a take-it-or-leave-it spirit, like the lady in Dickens who used to speak of milestones on the Dover road, turned to Anne again.

"What are you keeping from me, Miss Benedick?"

"What makes you think I'm keeping something from you?"

"My trained instinct. I'm a detective."

"A very odd one."

"Odd?"

"You aren't at all my idea of a detective. I thought they were cold and sniffy, like solicitors."

"I know what you mean," said Jeff. Association with Mr. Shoesmith had taught him a lot about the coldness and sniffiness of solicitors. " But in my case you feel---? "

"—as if I could tell you things without you raising your eyebrows."

"Good Lord! Of course, you can. I may put the tips of my fingers together, but I wouldn't dream of raising my eyebrows. Confide in me without a qualm. I knew there was something on your mind, something that would throw a light on this butler business. You have special knowledge, have you not, which will bring faithful old Cakebread out of the thing without a stain on his character? Let's have the inside story."

"I wonder."

"Don't weaken."

"Tell him," boomed Lord Uffenham, abruptly coming to life in that surprising way of his. "You came here to tell him, didn't you? You brought me along, so that I could be present when you told him, didn't you? Well, then. Lord-love-a-duck, what's the use of coming thirty miles to tell a feller something and then not telling him?"

"But it makes you look such a chump, darling."

"It does not make me look a chump, at all. I acted from the first with the best and soundest motives, and this young feller is a broadminded young feller who will recognise the fact."

"Well, all right.  You could help us a lot, of course," said Anne, turning to Jeff. "I mean, I suppose, as a detective, you're always looking for things, aren't you?"

"Always. Clues, Maharajah's rubies, stolen treaties, anything that comes along."

"And you would have special ways of finding anything?"

"You'd be surprised."

"A sort of---"

" Technique."

"Yes, technique. At present, it all seems so hopeless. It's like hunting for a needle in a haystack."

 "What is?"

"It's so difficult to know how to start telling you. Well, first of all, Cakebread isn't Cakebread."

"Aha! Now we're getting somewhere."

"He's my uncle." Jeff blinked.

"You said---"

"Cakebread is my uncle."

"This uncle?" asked Jeff, indicating Lord Uffenham: who had once more become remote and was looking like a
recently unveiled statue.

"Yes. You see, we decided that the only thing to be done, if he was going to let the house—and he had to let the house, to get some ready money—was for him to stay on, in case he suddenly remembered. And the only way he could stay on was by being the butler. It's quite simple, really."

"Oh, quite. Remembered, did you say?"

"Where he had hidden it."

"I see. Yes, that explains it all. Er—hidden what?"

Anne Benedick gave a sudden laugh, so silvery, so musical, that it seemed to Jeff that his great passion, in the truest and deepest sense of the words, really dated from this moment. Ever since she had come in, shimmering across the threshold like the spirit of the June day, he had known, of course, in a sort of general way that the strange emotion she awoke in him was love, but this laugh—hitherto she had merely smiled—seemed to underline the facts and clarify his outlook. There was all Heaven in Anne Benedick's laugh. It conjured up visions of a cosy home on a winter's night, with one's slippers on one's feet, the dog on one's lap, an open fire in the grate and the good old pipe drawing nicely.