Money in the Bank by P. G. Wodehouse Read Free Book Online Page B

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