The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons

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