The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons Page B

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