"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 Bracken, 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 behavior 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 role. 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 material of this strength and richness one need not continue to regret Bernhardt and Duse.
Grant went out into the street, marveling at the all-pervading genius of Christine Clay. The mind of all the world it seemed was in that building at Golders Green. A strange end for the little lace-hand from Nottingham. Strange, too, for the world's idol. "And they put him in an oven just as if he were — " Oh, no, he mustn't think of that. Hateful. Why should it be hateful? He didn't know. The suburbanity of it, he supposed. Sensible, and all that. And probably much less harrowing for everyone. But someone whose brilliance had flamed across the human firmament as Clay's had should have a hundred-foot pyre. Something spectacular. A Viking's funeral. Not ovens n the suburb. Oh, my God, he was growing morbid, if not sentimental. He pressed the starter, and swung into the traffic.