"No, but they can't do anything to help us. What they are looking for is corroboration of the girl's story."
"Well, that's not very likely, is it? For them to get, I mean."
"No. But you see the spot we are in. Unless we can find out where the girl was during the weeks she says she was at The Franchise, the Sharpes will be in the position of being permanently convicted of a thing they haven't even been accused of!"
"Well, if it's the girl in the green hat-and I'm sure it is, sir-I'd say she was what is known as 'out on the tiles, sir. A very cool customer she was for a girl that age. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth."
"Butter wouldn't melt in her little mouth," the tobacconist had said of the child Betty.
And "on the tiles" was Stanley's verdict on the pictured face that was so like "the bint he had had in Egypt."
And the worldly little waiter had used both phrases in his estimate of her. The demure girl in the «good» clothes, who had come every day by herself to sit in the hotel lounge.
"Perhaps it was just a childish desire to be 'grand'," the nice side of him prompted; but his common sense refused it. She could have been grand at the Alencon, and eaten well, and seen smart clothes at the same time.
He went in to have lunch, and then spent a large part of the afternoon trying to reach Mrs. Wynn on the telephone. Mrs. Tilsit had no telephone and he had no intention of involving himself in a Tilsit conversation again if he could help it. When he failed he remembered that Scotland Yard would most certainly, in that painstaking way of theirs, have a description of the clothes the girl was wearing when she went missing. And in less than seven minutes, he had it. A green felt hat, a green wool frock to match, a pale grey cloth coat with large grey buttons, fawn-grey rayon stockings and black court shoes with medium heels.
Well, at last he had it, that setting-off place; that starting-point for inquiry. Jubilation filled him. He sat down in the lounge on his way out and wrote a note to tell Kevin Macdermott that the young woman from Aylesbury was not such an attractive brief as she had been on Friday night; and to let him know, of course, — between the lines-that Blair, Hayward, and Bennet could get a move on when it was necessary.