The Belting Inheritance (7 page)

I had been too thoroughly enthralled to think any such thing, but I said, “Yes.”

“I think so too. I was a fool. And I damned well loved Miles, can you imagine that. But you can’t help the sort of person you are, can you?”

If this was an appeal to me, I did not answer it. “So Miles hates David.”

“You’ve got it wrong, you don’t understand what makes that family tick. It’s all Mamma. Miles wouldn’t hate anybody, he’s not that kind of man. He wouldn’t even hate me. But he was tied to his mother like the rest of them, and when Hugh and David were posted missing he went back to her.”

“And David?”

“David was a nice boy, though he had no sense of humour, and could be awfully bitchy at times. Perhaps he’s changed.”

“But I mean – ” I lost track of what I had wanted to say, then rediscovered it. “ – I mean, don’t you think it’s terribly unlikely, David spending a year in Paris before coming home?”

She shook her bronze curls. “Very much in character I should say, making a feeble attempt to get free before going back to Mamma again. Before he started writing bad poems he painted bad pictures, you know that, I expect. What I don’t see is how I can help. Even if I wanted to.”

“I think what Uncle Stephen’s got in mind is that if – I mean, if David’s a fake, he won’t know who you are from Adam. Eve.”

“Uncle Stephen,” she said mockingly. “Creeping Jesus. He’s married, isn’t that so? I can’t imagine what sort of woman would marry him.”

“Breeds bull terriers, and looks like one.”

“It might be fun to see Miles again, at that,” she said as she paid the bill.

Out on the street I took in great gulps of air, but they acted on me like so much wine. I found my movements slightly uncertain on the way back to the gallery, and Betty took me by the arm. Her grip was like a man’s, strong and firm. The young man, John, raised his eyebrows when he saw us, but said nothing. Betty guided me through a side door, and up some stairs.

“Come on, you’d better sleep it off.”

I looked round. I was in a woman’s bedroom. I was sitting with Betty on a comfortable bed, with her face inches from mine. It was not her attractiveness that inflamed my senses, but the glimpse she had given me of a world infinitely distant and desirable. I leaned towards her and kissed her, felt the pressure of her breasts against me and her tongue enormous in my mouth. It was too much for me. My eyes closed, and I knew nothing more.

When I opened my eyes again I was alone. My head ached. My shoes and jacket had been taken off. I found a note in the jacket: “Don’t have much luck with gentlemen from Belting, do I? Had to go out, back about six. Come to The Fighting Cock for a drink if you’re around. Tell Brother Creep I’ll come and beard the villain, if he is one. Tomorrow or day after, should be fun. Betty.” There was a PS “Why doesn’t Creep try family dentist, fillings and all that. I’m sure they had a family dentist.”

I lurched downstairs and out. John stared at me with open hostility. I looked at my watch. The time was half past three.

“Yes, I have had a telephone call from your uncle. I couldn’t quite understand what he wanted, nor why he didn’t come up to London himself.” Doctor Foster’s gaze took in my youth and my (I dare say) rather wild appearance. It is possible, although I didn’t think of it at the time, that he smelt drink on my breath.

I began to explain. We were in his consulting-room, which seemed to be full of black leather furniture. He had said that he could spare me twenty minutes, and I had the feeling that it would not be extended to twenty-one. He sat behind his desk and I was on the other side of it, so that our positions were distinctly like those of doctor and patient. Doctor Foster was a very handsome man. He had dark thick hair beautifully cut and shaped, fine regular features, and long elegant hands. He wore a dark grey suit and a plain white shirt. The cuffs of the shirt shot beyond the jacket arms to reveal emerald cuff links, his one touch of ostentation. He listened to me attentively but with increasing surprise.

“What an extraordinary tale.” He played with a paper knife on his desk. “There surely can’t be any difficulty in settling whether or not it is David. His handwriting – ”

“I said that his right hand is injured.”

“So you did.”

“Then there’s the dentist,” I said boldly, using the idea so recently given me by Betty Urquhart. “I believe Uncle Stephen’s working on that.”

“Yes. There can be little doubt that the man is an impostor.”

I took a breath. There was something forbidding, or at least distinctly detached about Doctor Foster. “Suppose he isn’t.”

“What?” The word was sharply spoken.

“You might be able to help him prove his identity. I mean, he was your best friend, wasn’t he?”

“We were friends at Oxford.” He got up and went across to the window. “And we were at the same air station for a time during the war,” he said as if he were making a concession.

“If there was anything special, any incident that concerned just the two of you – ”

“David had an old appendicitis scar, a doctor could check on that. And when he wrote letters to me he used to begin ‘Dear Vof’ – my second initial is O. I can’t think of anyone else who would know that.”

The words came readily, yet it seemed to me that in some way he was evading questions. My head was aching. “Anything else?”

“When David came down – ” He stopped and looked at me. “It seems wrong that I should be telling you this, but in view of the letter I suppose there is no harm in it. I left Oxford some time before him, when I decided that I wanted to study psychiatry, and I saw nothing of him in his last year. Then one day I had a telephone call, saying that he wanted to see me urgently. We met in a teashop.” He said incredulously, “He wanted to borrow two hundred pounds.”

“What for?”

“That was the most outrageous thing about it. For a
gambling debt.
Horse racing. He owed the money to a bookmaker.”

“Were you able to lend it to him?”

He looked at me as though he would like to commit me to a mental hospital. “It was not a question of being
able
to. I shouldn’t do so as a matter of principle.”

I reflected that friendship did not go very far for Doctor Foster. “What happened?”

“I had nothing further to do with it, but I believe that David’s elder brother Hugh – you’ve heard of him?”

“Yes.”

“I think he saw the bookmaker involved, and induced him to settle for a percentage of the debt. Then he borrowed the money from somewhere. I can only hope the man who lent it got his money back. Hugh Wainwright was far from reliable.”

“He seems to have helped his brother.”

“And I didn’t, is that what you mean? You are too young to understand. I liked David, but he was a spoilt boy,
and often behaved like one. People ought to face the consequences of their actions. I thought so then, and I think so now. But there was something else.” He said slowly, “I was surprised to learn that David was interested in horse racing. He never had been when I knew him at Oxford. On the other hand, Hugh was always interested, and he had worked out some betting system. It occurred to me that David might have been placing bets for Hugh.”

“Why should he do that?”

He coughed. “It is possible that Hugh had – exhausted his credit with bookmakers, shall I say? Anyway, that was a thought that influenced me in making my decision.”

Again I sensed some kind of restraint, something that remained unsaid. “Why don’t you want to come down?”

He repeated in that sharp tone, “What?” It was not really a question. He came back to the desk, and sat down gingerly. “If it were really David – ”

“Yes?”

He made an irritated gesture. “I don’t know why on earth they sent you to see me. You’re only a boy, you know nothing about it. I suppose Miles may not know either, he was with some ghastly fifth-rate touring company, entertaining the troops.” He made it sound as if that were something indecent. “But Stephen was there.”

I had no idea what he meant. His secretary, a girl with heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, opened the door. “Mrs Wallbrand is here.”

“Tell her to wait.” Now the irritated gesture was made in her direction, and she was out of the door in a moment. He touched the grey wings of his hair. “When David went home on his last leave – ” He stopped, and began again. “I don’t believe he would have come back. If he has, the position may be awkward. For him.”

It was very much what Thorne had said, that there would be trouble. “I don’t know what you mean, but if you can clear things up you’d better come down, hadn’t you?”

He pressed a button on his desk, and the girl with horn-rims came in. “Miss Powers, I shall be going down to the country tomorrow afternoon. What appointments have I got?”

“Three-thirty, Mrs Slade. That’s all.”

“Fit her in some time the next day. All right. You can tell Stephen Wainwright that I’ll come down tomorrow afternoon.” He nodded dismissively to show that the interview was over.

I left his rooms in Harley Street seething with anger, a schoolboy who had been put in his place. I suppose I was a schoolboy, but that didn’t make it any better, especially after the man of the world, or rather woman of the world, way in which Betty Urquhart had treated me. All the way to Charing Cross I occupied myself by trying to make a variation on “Doctor Foster went to Gloucester.” I got no further than “Doctor Foster went to Belting. It was pelting cats and dogs.” I read Max to soothe myself all the way back home in the train.

Murder

There was a little station called Belting Halt only a mile from the house, but few trains stopped there, and I got out at Filehurst, a biggish village which was three miles away by road but half a mile less than that if you went across the fields. I decided to walk back, and crossed a stile just outside the village.

It was a fine evening, and as I walked in the air which had about it the softness and sweetness one often finds in the country after a warm day, I thought about the two people I had seen, and wondered what they would make of the man who said he was David Wainwright. Would Betty Urquhart exclaim immediately, “Go away, you’re not the man I slept with,” would Doctor Foster order, “Down with your trousers and let’s see that scar?”, or would they agree with Lady W that this was the man they had known? If I had been asked what I thought myself I should have been puzzled to know what to say. It seemed to me incredible that Stephen and Miles should be uncertain about whether this was their brother – but at that thought I reminded myself that they were not uncertain, they were sure he was an impostor. Put it another way then, could I believe that anybody as shrewd as Lady W would be deceived? I could not believe it really, yet I realised that she was dying and that her intelligence might be blurred. How had David known his way about the house? Well, there might be a dozen explanations for that. But what about all the other things he knew and remembered?

Thinking in this useless and roundabout way I had got about half-way back to Belting when I heard what I took at first to be a human being crying for help, and then knew for the whine of a dog or the cry of a trapped rabbit. I went towards the sound, along a track that led through some bushes, and at a gap in them saw Billy, a puppy that belonged to the house, fidgeting and whining over something partly hidden. When I held aside the bushes I saw that it was a body, the body of old Thorne. He lay very still, there was blood round his head and more blood on his jacket.

The reader of a book like this knows, or immediately suspects, that old Thorne had been murdered, but the much smaller number of readers who have come across a dead body are not likely to have thought of murder as their first reaction, and neither did I. I assumed at once that Thorne had met with an accident, and I pulled his body out of the bushes to see if I could help, Billy yelping at my heels all the while. The puppy was a favourite of Thorne’s, who often gave him scraps and protected him from Clarissa’s bull terriers. It was after I had pulled him out that I saw the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, between the eyes. The body was cool to the touch and if I had been able to think rationally I should have known that Thorne had been dead for some time. Instead I foolishly felt for the non-existent pulse, and it was not until I had wasted perhaps a minute that I fully realised that Thorne was dead and that somebody had shot him. As I straightened up from the body I saw that there was blood on my hands. I wiped them as best I could on the grass, and began to run for home. Billy, making a sound that was half-bark and half-whine, followed me.

I ran and trotted all the rest of the way back. The path I had taken led by the stream, the tennis court and, to the side of them, an old disused clock golf green. Here David and Markle were playing. They wore still the clothes they had come down in yesterday, and they looked incongruous figures in this English scene, David in his shabby town suit and Markle so obviously out of place in the country, holding the putter as though it were something that might explode in his hands. They turned towards me, David smiling and Markle looking at me with his habitual air of slight superciliousness, and their figures set against the green lawn and the stone mass of the house seemed to me for a moment not just incongruous but positively sinister.

“You look in a bit of a tizzy, Christopher,” David said. “What’s up?”

“Thorne. He’s dead. He’s been killed.” Even now I could not use the word
murdered.

David’s face turned white. He leaned on his putter as though for support, and his mouth moved, but he said nothing. I went into the house, saw Miles and Stephen, and told them. Their reactions were very characteristic. Miles ran a hand over his bald head, his mouth turned down, and he said something about there being no more thorns among the roses. Stephen snapped out four words. As I write them down they seem comic, but I did not think they were comic at the time. “This means the police.”

Now Clarissa appeared, with one of the inevitable dogs in tow, and Stephen snapped at her. “I’m going to call the police. That devil’s killed old Thorne.” As he strode away I became suddenly aware of overwhelming fatigue and sickness. Everything that had happened that day, the drinks with Betty Urquhart, the interview with Doctor Foster, the discovery of Thorne’s body, seemed to rise in my throat. I ran for the lavatory, and got there just in time.

When I came out Uncle Miles was waiting for me, full of concern. He suggested that I should go and lie down, saying that there was nothing like your Thomas Lovell after the kind of thing that had happened to me. He came upstairs with me, fidgeted round while I took off my collar and tie, and muttered something about giving me a drawing to go on my wall for my birthday. A couple of minutes after he had gone out I was asleep.

He’s a Vof,
somebody said, and then somebody else,
He’s not a Vof, he’s a Voffer.
The voices, with no faces attached to them, repeated,
He’s a Voffer, Voffer, Voffer.
What did they mean? I turned and twisted, trying to get away from them, and opened my eyes. Stephen was saying, “Christopher, Christopher.”

The curtains were not drawn. Outside I could see the velvety dark. I yawned. “What time is it?”

“A quarter to ten. I thought you might like a drink.” I saw the glass of lemonade in his hand, and realised that I was thirsty.

It was not like Stephen to be so solicitous, and even as I thanked him I understood the reason. He had not heard how I had got on in London. Now I told him.

He rubbed his hands. “Coming down tomorrow. By tomorrow night we’ll have him behind bars. But that’s not the only reason why I came up. The police are here and they’d like to see you. That is, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’m all right.” In fact, as I jumped out of bed and washed my face I felt extremely well and alert.

“You never told me Betty Urquhart had been Uncle Miles’ wife.”

He tossed his head in an almost girlish way. “Didn’t I?”

“I think you might have told me.”

“Oh well, I’m sorry.”

When I got down into the drawing-room I saw that Lady W had taken charge. She looked ill, her face yellow as a digestive biscuit and her eyes cloudy with pain, but she sat bolt upright in her own particular chair, and everybody else in the room seemed cowed by the mantle of authority that she had resumed. It might be Stephen who had telephoned the police, but it was Mamma who would deal with them. At my entrance she tapped the floor with a malacca stick beside the chair, a little like a conductor calling for attention.

“Christopher. This is Inspector Arbuthnot. He seems to think it necessary that he should question you. I said that I could not object if you were sufficiently recovered.”

I said that I had. I don’t know what the inspector would have done if I had said anything else. He was a large man, large but not fat, and everything about him was grey. He had grey curly hair, a greyish face, a grey suit, a grey tie and grey socks. I should like to add that he wore a grey shirt and grey shoes, but that would not be true. He listened to Lady W with no sign of impatience, and when I spoke gave me an encouraging nod. With him was Sergeant Hasty, whom I knew. He smiled sheepishly.

“Do you want to talk to him alone? Very well, you may use the morning-room.” She said it as if she were making a large concession to this member of the lower orders who by some unlucky chance had moved within her ken. “You will bear in mind that it is really very late.”

“I will, Lady Wainwright.”

“Anything else can be left until the morning, I hope.”

“I should like to talk to other members of the household,” the inspector said stolidly.

“Do you wish to talk to me? I have not seen Thorne today. If you wish to see me it must be in my room. I am going to bed.”

“I shan’t need to worry you tonight, Lady Wainwright.”

“Poor Thorne. He would be unhappy to know that he is causing so much trouble.” It was an epitaph. She rose. Stephen moved towards her, but she took David’s arm. There was silence until they had gone. Then Markle was on his feet.

“Look here, Inspector, I told you that I’m Mr David Wainwright’s solicitor. I came down with him because he thought there might be legal problems I could help with, but everything seems to be quite straightforward – ”

There was a protesting murmur from Stephen, but it was the inspector who spoke. “Somebody in this household has been murdered. Do you call that quite straightforward?”

Markle spread out his hands. “That’s nothing to do
with me.”

“I still have some questions, Mr Markle.”

“Then can’t you ask them now? I want to get back to London tonight.”

“I am afraid that may not be possible.”

“I don’t see why not.” There was anger in Markle’s voice. Then David came back and said quietly that he would like Markle to stay overnight. The solicitor subsided, grumbling.

The morning-room faced north and east and was a cold inhospitable kind of room with a lot of lumpy Victorian furniture in it. The inspector bestowed his bulk in a ladder-back chair and listened while I told him about finding Thorne’s body. He didn’t make any comment when I told him why I had moved it. Then he said, “You haven’t lived here very long, have you?”

“Six years.”

“Yes. You hadn’t met Mr David Wainwright before his present visit, then. That is, the gentleman who says he is Mr David Wainwright.” He was watching me carefully.

“No.”

“What do you think about him?”

“I don’t see that’s of any importance.”

“Oh, but it is,” he said in his quiet voice that had just a hint of country accent in it. “I gather there’s a difference of opinion about whether or not it’s Mr Wainwright. But then they may all be a bit, prejudiced, shall I say? For that matter I knew Mr David Wainwright myself, and I don’t know whether this is the same man. But your opinion would be, what shall I say, a fresh one, unbiased.”

“What has this got to do with Thorne?”

“Nothing perhaps. And then again, perhaps a good deal. Thorne was one of the people who recognised Mr Wainwright, wasn’t he? Supposing he’d seen something that made him change his mind, d’you see what I’m getting at? That’s why I’d like your opinion, d’you see?”

I said stiffly, “Lady Wainwright’s been very kind to me.”

He sighed, took out a pipe, looked at it and put it back. “I’m a patient man, but don’t try my patience too far, son. I hate coming to houses like this one, you know that? Houses where people think they’re better than their neighbours, and what’s worse the neighbours think so too. Houses where they let you in on sufferance and shut you away when you want to talk to people, as though you were a bad smell. I’ll tell you something. I came here once before, when I was a sergeant, and I was smoking my pipe and I’ve never forgotten the way Lady Wainwright told me to put it out. Not asked, mind you, told. So just don’t tell me how kind she’s been to you son, but answer my question.”

All this was said in a voice that impressed me by its very lack of passion. I had not realised before today that people could seriously dislike Lady W, as both Betty Urquhart and now apparently this policeman did. I saw Hasty, who was more my idea of a policeman, one who had a drink or a cup of coffee when he came in, shift uneasily.

“I can’t make up my mind,” I said. “I accepted him at first, but there have been one or two things that – well, I suppose they’re nothing really. Tomorrow, though, two people are coming down–”

As soon as I had spoken the words I knew they were a mistake. “What things?” he said. “And what people?”

I told him about David’s reaction when I mentioned his assumed name, and then about Betty Urquhart and Doctor Foster. This seemed to interest him, and he asked whether David knew anything of it.

“I certainly haven’t told him.”

“And I’ll be obliged if you’d say nothing. It may be interesting.”

He seemed to have nothing more to say, but I couldn’t quite let it go at that. I suppose that what Wilkie Collins calls the detective fever was working in my veins and had been doing so, although without my knowing it, ever since the two men had stepped out of the little beetle car in front of the house. Now that the shock of discovering Thorne’s body had faded, I was curious.

“He’d been shot, hadn’t he?”

He looked at me as though doubting whether he should answer. “Hit on the head and then shot, yes.”

“You haven’t – found the weapon?” In my hazy recollection of the few detective stories I had read, police were always finding the weapon.

“Weapons,” he amended. “We have not.”

“I don’t see why you’re so sure it’s to do with Uncle David coming back.”

“Coincidence,” Sergeant Hasty said, speaking for the first time. “The guv’nor doesn’t like coincidences.”

The inspector nodded. “One day the long-lost son comes home, next day this old man is murdered, d’you see? That’s a bit too steep.”

“But why?”

“I shan’t find that out talking to you, shall I? Or talking to the rest of ’em, I dare say. I had enough of that ten years ago. I wouldn’t mind if I never saw any of them again.”

“What were you investigating ten years ago?”

“A crime. Murder.”