LITMIR.BIZ

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      “That is very extraordinary, surely? I mean, that you should be conscious of evil before anyone knew that it existed.”

      “That’s not so funny. They told me Chris was drowned. I knew Chris could swim like an eel. I knew that I had been out all night. And the sergeant was looking at me with a Who-are-you-and-what-are-you-doing-here expression?”

      “But the sergeant had no idea that the drowning was more than an accident. He had no reason to look at you in that way.”

      Then he decided to drop the subject of Harmer’s lie to the sergeant.

      “How did you know, by the way, where to find Miss Clay? I understood that she kept her retreat a secret.”

      “Yes, she’d run away. Gave us all the run-around, in fact, including me. She was tired and not very pleased at the way her last picture had turned out. On the floor, I mean; it isn’t released yet. Coyne didn’t know how to take her. A bit in awe of her, and afraid at the same time she’d put one over on him. You know. If he’d called her ‘kid’ and ‘chocolate’ the way old Joe Myers used to back in the States, she’d have laughed and worked like a black for him. But Coyne’s full of his own dignity, the ‘big director’ stuff, and so they didn’t get on too good. So she was fed-up, and tired, and everyone wanted her to go to different places for holidays, and it seemed she couldn’t make up her mind, and then one day we woke up and she wasn’t there. Bundle—that’s her housekeeper—said she didn’t know where she was, but no letters were to be forwarded and she’d turn up again in a month, so no one was to worry. Well, for about a fortnight no one heard of her, and then last Tuesday I met Marta Hallard at a sherry party at Libby Seemon’s—she’s going into that new play of his—and she said that on Saturday she had run into Chris buying chocolates at a place in Baker Street—Chris never could resist chocolates between pictures!—and she tried to worm out of Chris where she was hiding out. But Chris wasn’t giving anything away. At least she thought she wasn’t. She said: ‘Perhaps I’m never coming back. You know that old Roman who grew vegetables with his own hands and was so stuck on the result that he made the arrangement permanent. Well, yesterday I helped pull the first cherries for Covent Garden market and, believe me, getting the Academy award for a picture is nothing to it!’ ”

      Harmer laughed under his breath. “I can hear her,” he said, affectionately. “Well, I went straight from Seemon’s to Covent Garden and found out where those cherries came from. An orchard at a place called Bird’s Green. And on Wednesday morning bright and early Jason sets off for Bird’s Green. That took a bit of finding, but I got there about three o’clock. Then I had to find the orchard and the people who were working in it on Friday. I expected to find Chris straight away, but it seemed that they didn’t know her. They said that when they were picking, early on Friday morning, a lady passing in a car had stopped to watch and then asked if she might help. The old boy who owned the place said they didn’t need paid help, but if she liked to amuse herself good and well. ‘She were a good picker,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t mind paying her another time.’ Then his grandson said he’d seen the lady—or thought he’d seen her—one day lately in the post office at Liddlestone—about six miles away. So I found Liddlestone, but the post office regular staff was ‘home to her tea’ and I had to wait till she came back. She said that the lady who sent ‘all the telegrams’—seems they never saw so many telegrams in their lives as Chris sent—was living over at Medley. So I set out in the half-dark to find Medley, and ended by sleeping in a lane. And sleeping out or no sleeping out, that was a better piece of detective work than you’re doing this morning, Inspector Grant!”

      Grant grinned good-humouredly. “Yes? Well, I’ve nearly done.” He got up to go. “I suppose you had a coat with you in the car?”

      “Sure.”

      “What was it made of?”

      “Brown tweed. Why?”

      “Have you got it here?”

      “Sure.” He turned to a wardrobe, built in the passage where the sitting-room led into the bedroom, and pulled the sliding door open. “Have a look at my whole wardrobe. You’re cleverer than I am if you can find the button.”

      “What button?” Grant asked, more quickly than he intended.

      “It’s always a button, isn’t it?” Harmer said, the small pansy-brown eyes, alert under their lazy lids, smiling confidently into Grant’s.

      Grant found nothing of interest in the wardrobe. He had taken his leave not knowing how much to believe of Jason Harmer’s story, but very sure that he had “nothing on him.” The hopes of the police, so to speak, lay in Tisdall.

      Now, as he pulled up by the curb in the cool bright morning, he remembered Jason’s wardrobe, and smiled in his mind. Jason did not get his clothes from Stacey and Brackett. As he considered the dark, small, and shabby interior which was revealed to him as he opened the door, he could almost hear Jason laugh. The English! They’d had a business for a hundred and fifty years and this was all they could make of it. The original counters probably. Certainly the original lighting. But Grant’s heart warmed. This was the England he knew and loved. Fashions might change, dynasties might fall, horses’ shoes in the quiet street change to the crying of a thousand taxi-hooters, but Stacey and Brackett continued to make clothes with leisured efficiency for leisured and efficient gentlemen.

      There was now neither a Stacey nor a Brackett, but Mr. Trimley—Mr. Stephen Trimley (as opposed to Mr. Robert and Mr. Thomas!)—saw Inspector Grant and was entirely at Inspector Grant’s service. Yes, they had made clothes for Mr. Robert Tisdall. Yes, the clothes had included a dark coat for wear with evening things. No, that certainly was not a button from the coat in question. That was not a button they had ever put on any coat. It was not a class of button they were in the habit of using. If the Inspector would forgive Mr. Trimley (Mr. Stephen Trimley), the button in question was in his opinion of a very inferior make, and would not be used by any tailor of any standing. He would not be surprised, indeed, to find that the button was of foreign origin.

      “American, perhaps?” suggested Grant.

      Perhaps. Although to Mr. Trimley’s eye it suggested the Continent. No, he certainly had no reason for such a surmise. Entirely instinctive. Probably wrong. And he hoped the Inspector would not put any weight on his opinion. He also hoped that there was no question of Mr. Tisdall being in trouble. A very charming young man, indeed. The Grammar schools—especially the older Grammar schools of the country—turned out a very fine type of boy. Better often, didn’t the Inspector think so? than came from the minor public schools. There was a yeoman quality of permanence about Grammar-school families—generation after generation going to the same school—that was not matched outside the great public schools.

      There being, in Grant’s opinion, no yeoman quality of permanence whatever about young Tisdall, he forbore to argue, contenting himself by assuring Mr. Trimley that as far as he knew Mr. Tisdall was in no trouble up to date.

      Mr. Trimley was glad to hear that. He was getting old, and his faith in the young generation which was growing up was too often sadly shaken. Perhaps every generation thought that the rising one lacked due standards of behaviour and spirit, but it did seem to him this one . . . Ah, well, he was growing old, and the tragedy of young lives weighed more heavily on him than it used to. This Monday morning was blackened for him, yes, entirely blackened, by the thought that all the brightness that was Christine Clay was at this hour being transformed into ashes. It would be many years, perhaps generations (Mr. Trimley’s mind worked in generations: the result of having a hundred-and-fifty-year-old business) before her like would be seen again. She had quality, didn’t the Inspector think so? Amazing quality. It was said that she had a very humble origin, but there must be breeding somewhere. Something like Christine Clay did not just happen in space, as it were. Nature must plan for it. He was not what is known, he believed, as a film fan, but there was no picture of Miss Clay’s which he had not seen since his niece had taken him to view her first essay in a dramatic rôle. He had on that occasion entirely forgotten that he was in a cinema. He was dazed with delight. Surely if this new medium could produce

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