Free The Girl in Blue by P.G. Wodehouse Page A

not “Yus?”. I’ve had to speak to you about that
before.’
    She was
gone some twenty minutes. Returning all tuned up and ready for another spell of
sitting and thinking of nothing, she was pleased to see Percy at his post. Full
of tea, buns and the milk of human kindness, she might have patted him on the
head, had it not been for the peculiarly repellent brand of hair oil which he
affected.
    ‘Any
calls?’ she asked, and Percy replied that there had been only one.
    ‘For Mr
Scrope?’
    ‘Yus.’
    ‘I hope
you didn’t say “Yus”. Who was it?’
    ‘Sounded
like Bile. He was drunk.’
    ‘What!’
    ‘You
heard. He was as stewed as a prune.
    ‘Why do
you think that?’
    ‘Because
of what he said. I wasn’t on to him at first. He was all right when he asked
for the boss, didn’t hiccup or anything. I said the boss had hopped it and
would he care to leave a message. Then guess what.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘He
said “Yus, tell him I put Minnie Shaw in the middle drawer of the desk”.’
    ‘Percy,
you’re making this up.’
    ‘Honest
to God I’m not. That’s what he said. I wrote it down.’
    ‘Minnie
Shaw?’
    ‘Yus.’
    ‘Put
her in the middle drawer of the desk?’
    ‘Yus.’
    ‘How do
you put a girl in the middle drawer of a desk? There wouldn’t be room.’
    There
would if you chopped her up first. But I could see it was just the drunken
babble of someone who had been mopping it up all day like a vacuum cleaner, so
I dismissed the thing from my mind.’
    ‘Well,
it certainly takes all sorts to make a world, doesn’t it,’ said Mabel
disapprovingly. ‘Imagine anyone getting into such a state. I’m not going to
bother Mr Scrope with nonsense like that when he comes back; it wouldn’t mean a
thing to him. Just forget it, Perce.’
    And
Percy agreed that that was the only thing to do.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
     
     
     
     
     
    In  English villages as small as Mellingham-in-the-Vale, which was so
small that the post office sold sweets and balls of worsted and there was only
one oasis, the Goose and Gander, where you could get a drink, the man who
matters is always the owner of the big house. It is he who, even if he is a
Crispin Scrope, is supposed to have a head wiser than the ordinary; it is to
him that the residents bring their problems and grievances.
    As
Constable Ernest Simms, the local police force, was about to do on the day
following Crispin’s return from London.’ He trudged up the drive of Mellingham Hall,
an impressive figure well calculated to strike terror into the hearts of
evildoers, and was admitted by Crispin’s butler, at whom he cast a stony look,
returned with one even stonier.’ They were not on good terms.’
    ‘Hullo,
ugly,’ said the butler. ‘And what might you be wanting?’
    ‘Not
any of your impertinence,’ was the frigid reply. ‘I wish to see Mr Scrope.”
    ‘Does
he wish to see you,’ said the butler, ‘that’s the question.’ All right,
go on up and spoil his day. He’s in the library.”
    The
library was on the second floor, a large sombre room brooded over by hundreds
of grim calf-bound books assembled in the days when the reading public went in
for volumes of collected sermons and had not yet acquired a taste for anything
with spies and a couple of good murders in it.’ It had always oppressed
Crispin, but it had this one great advantage, that it was never invaded by
paying guests. Once there, a man could meditate without fear of interruption.’
    A
recent financial venture from which he was hoping that large profits would
result had provided Crispin since his return with much food for meditation.
Inflamed by Barney’s enthusiasm for its prospects and telling himself that if
you do not speculate you cannot accumulate, he had placed one hundred pounds of
his brother Bill’s two hundred and three pounds six shillings and fourpence on
the nose of the horse Brotherly Love in the coming two-thirty race at
Newmarket.
    He had
told Barney that he