Money in the Bank, Page 5

  "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 l
ike 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.

  "I'm not telling this story very well, am I?" she said. "The word 'it' refers to a small packet of extremely valuable diamonds representing the combined Uffenham and Benedick fortunes. My uncle hid them somewhere on the premises of Shipley Hall, and now hasn't the slightest recollection where."

  Inside the spacious cupboard, Chimp Twist, for all that he realised the imperative need of keeping his presence undetected, found it impossible to repress a startled snort. The thought of diamonds lying around loose in a country house—a country house, moreover, in which were established those old allies of his, Mr. and Mrs. Soapy Molloy, was one that spoke to his very depths. If this was not money in the bank, he did not know such money when he saw it. So he snorted.

  Fortunately for his aims and objects, Jeff had snorted simultaneously on his own account, and with such abandon that the Twist contribution passed unnoticed. The idea did, indeed, cross Lord Uffenham's mind that there was a curious echo in the room and set him musing dreamily on acoustics, but that was all.

  "That surprises you?"

  "It does."

  "It surprised me, too, when he told me. I had always known that he had an original mind, but I hadn't been prepared for that."

  Jeff had recovered somewhat. He was even able, though a little feebly, to place the tips of his fingers together again.

  "Let me get this clear," he said. "He put the entire family funds into diamonds?"

  "Yes."

  "And hid them?"

  "Yes."

  "And then forgot where?"

  "Yes "

  "Like a dog with a bone?"

  "Exactly like a dog with a bone."

  "Yes," said Jeff, expelling a deep breath. "'Original' is correct. No need to consult the Thesaurus. You've got the right word."

  "You see," said Anne. "I told you it would make you look a chump. Mr. Adair is stunned."

  As far as such an action was within the scope of a man weighing two hundred and sixty pounds, Lord Uffenham bridled.

  "I refuse to admit," he said stiffly, "that it makes me look any such dashed thing. My motives, as I told you before, were fundamentally sound. Lord-love-a-duck, what's wrong with diamonds ? One of the few good investments left in a world where everything else seems to be going to hell. It was only after considerable thought, after I had been shocked by the fall in value of some dashed railway shares to about half the value of waste paper, that I faced the problem squarely and made my decision."

  "Oh, there was a certain amount of method in your madness, I suppose."

  "What d'yer mean, madness?"

  "There always is, bless him," proceeded Anne, addressing Jeff with the air of an indulgent parent discussing the eccentricities of a favourite child. "When he explains any of these weird doings of his, you find yourself nodding appreciatively and feeling that he has taken the only possible course."

  "Diamonds are always diamonds," said Jeff, for the defence.

  "Not if you can't find them."

  "It's nice, of course, to be able to find them."

  "Full many a gem of purest ray serene the dark, un-fathomed caves of ocean bear, and a lot of good they are to a hard-up old peer of the realm and his impoverished niece. This also applies to gems which may or may not be stuffed up the chimney in the second housemaid's bedroom."

  "I don't think they are there," said Lord Uffenham, having considered the suggestion.

  "They may be."

  "True."

  "You haven't the slightest notion where they are."

  "At the moment, no. I keep getting what seem to be encouraging gleams of light, but they haven't led anywhere."

  Jeff touched on a point which, he felt, would not have escaped the attention of Sheringham Adair.

  "Why didn't you put these diamonds in a safe deposit vault?"

  "I don't believe in safe deposit vaults."

  "Ask him why he didn't buy a safe of his own?" said Anne.

  "Why didn't you buy a safe of your own?" enquired Jeff obediently.

  "I don't---"

  "—believe in safes."

  "Well, I don't," said Lord Uffenham, stoutly. "A safe simply affords an indication to a burglar where to start looking. It gives the foul feller a sort of official assurance that if he is prepared to take a little trouble, he will find something to his advantage."

  "You are a deep reasoner, Lord Uffenham."

  "Always have been."

  "Doesn't he remind you a little," said Anne, with a niece's candour, "of the White Knight in Alice Through The Looking Glass? When he passes into those trances of his, I always feel that he's thinking of a way ... I forget how it goes, but a way of doing something or other quite different from anything anybody else would have thought of. Safe deposit vaults? No. He doesn't believe in them. Safes? Not for the Last of the Uffenhams. Coal scuttles, yes."

  "Coal scuttles?"

  "He tells me he once hid them in the drawing-room coal scuttle. He used to think of a different place every night."

  "It amused me," said Lord Uffenham. "I found it an entertaining test of my ingenuity."

  "Which, of course, has rather complicated things. His memory has got back to what you might call the fitful stage, and he keeps remembering clever places he once thought of. And then he goes and rummages there. So now you will understand how all this anti-Cakebread feeling started. Every time he rummages, somebody always comes in while he is half-way through. You can see what he's like—rather a large man—tall, broad, lots of firm flesh. If you come into a room where he is hunting for diamonds, you can't miss him."

  Jeff nodded. He quite saw how the other would catch the eye.

  "Very embarrassing."

  "Most."

  "And how did you—er—get this way, Lord Uffenham?'*

  "Mr. Adair means," interpreted Anne, "how did you lose your memory? You tell him. I want to see if it sounds as funny as it did when you told me."

  Lord Uffenham exhibited a certain testiness.

  "You will exaggerate so, my dear. There's no question of my having lost my memory. All that's happened is that it's a bit uncertain for the time being, owing to that motor accident of mine."

  "You aren't telling it nearly as well this time, darling. My Lord Uffenham," explained Anne, "is a man who will never just accept conventions. He likes to brood over them and examine them, and if they seem to him unreasonable, he takes a resolute stand against them. He was driving on the right of the road, taking a resolute stand against the English convention of driving on the left, and an orthodox thinker in a lorry came round the corner. When they let Uncle George out of the hospital, the places where the stitches had been were healing up nicely, bat his memory was a blank. The doctors said it was a most interesting case. They loved it."

  "It was a happy thought of yours, considering Lord Uffenham's views, to install him in the house as a butler, and not a chauffeur."

  "Ye
s. Though I'm afraid he's not very pleased."

  "I am not," said Lord Uffenham decidedly. The subject was evidently one to which he had devoted much brooding thought. "I hate cleaning silver. I dislike waiving at table. It irks me to be thrust continually into the society of a cook who insists on telling me about the state of her inside, going into a wealth of detail which is quite uncalled for. And I particularly resent having to answer to the name of Cakebread."

  "Tell me," said Jeff, "did it take you long, thinking up that name?"

  "Oh, no," said Anne. "It came in a flash."

  "You are a very exceptional girl."

  "Thank you. With quite a fairly exceptional uncle, don't you think? Well, will you help us?"

  "Of course."

  "It will make all the difference in the world. I mean, nobody can object to a detective nosing about. It's what he's there for. Uncle George can give you his selections for the day, and you can try them out. Sooner or later, we're bound to strike oil."

  "The mere process of elimination."

  "Exactly. There's just one thing. I'm afraid you won't enjoy being at Shipley. The place is run on the strictest vegetarian lines."

  "This is grave news."

  "Mrs. Cork is a fanatic on the subject. In the course of a recent expedition into Africa, she was greatly struck by the glowing health and simple, unspoiled outlook of a tribe called the Ugubus, who, except for an occasional missionary at Christmas, live entirely on fruit and vegetables. She took Shipley with the idea of making it a sort of nucleus or cell for propagating the Ugubu doctrines throughout England. The programme calls for high thinking, tribal dances and, above all, vegetarianism. I just want you to know what you are letting yourself in for."

  "No exception is made in the case of visiting detectives?"

  "Of course not. Naturally, you will have to pretend to be an ordinary member of the colony, so as to deceive Cakebread."

  " I see. Still, you will be there."

  "Yes, I shall be there."

  "Then say no more."

  "Well, that's fine. And, anyway, if you find it getting too much for you, you can always drop in on Uncle George in his pantry, and he will give you a glass of port."

  Jeff cast a grateful eye at this lifesaver.

  "Will he?"

  "Certainly," said Lord Uffenham. "The cellar's full, and it all belongs to me. Swill till your eyes bubble."