Put on by Cunning by Ruth Rendell

becoming a reading man. It was even said, though Wexford refused to believe it, that Burden and Jenny read aloud to each other in the evenings, that they had got through Dickens and were currently embarking on the Waverley novels.
    Wexford picked up the book. It had been, as he expected, published by Carlyon Brent, and was a reappraisal of the notorious nineteenth-century Tichborne case in which an Australian butcher attempted to gain possession of a great fortune by posing as heir to an English baronetcy. Shades of the tale he had been told by Dinah Sternhold . . . The coincidence of finding the book there decided him. For a little while before lunch he and Burden were alone together.
    ‘Have you read this yet?’
    ‘I’m about half-way through.’
    ‘Listen.’ He repeated the account he had been given baldly and without digressions. ‘There aren’t really very many points of similarity,’ he said. ‘From what I remember of the Tichborne case the claimant didn’t even look like the Tichborne heir. He was much bigger and fatter for one thing and obviously not of the same social class. Lady Tichborne was a hysterical woman who would have accepted practically anyone who said he was her son. You’ve almost got the reverse here. Natalie Arno looks very much like the young Natalie Camargue and, far from accepting her, Camargue seems to have rumbled her within half an hour.’
    ‘“Rumbled” sounds as if you think there might be something in this tale.’
    ‘I’m not going to stomp up and down raving that I don’t believe a word of it, if that’s what you mean. I just don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing. I expected you to have shouted you didn’t believe it long before now.’
    Burden gave one of his thin, rather complacent little smiles. In his domestic circle he behaved, much as he had during his first marriage, as if nobody but he had ever quite discovered the heights of marital felicity. Today he was wearing a new suit of smooth matt cloth the colour of a ginger nut. When happy he always seemed to grow thinner and he was very thin now. The smile was still on his mouth as he spoke. ‘It’s a funny old business altogether, isn’t it? But I wouldn’t say I don’t believe it. It’s fertile ground for that sort of con trick, after all. A nineteen-year absence, an old man on his own with poor sight, an old man who has a great deal of money . . . By the way, how do you know this woman looks like the young Natalie?’
    ‘Dinah Sternhold sent me this.’ Wexford handed him a snapshot. ‘Camargue was showing her a family photograph album, apparently, and he left it behind in her house.’
    The picture showed a dark, Spanish-looking girl, rather plump, full-faced and smiling. She was wearing a summer dress in the style known at the time when the photograph was taken as ‘the sack’ on account of its shapelessness and lack of a defined waist. Her black hair was short and she had a fringe.
    ‘That could be her. Why not?’
    ‘A whitely wanton with a velvet brown’ said Wexford, ‘and two pitchballs stuck in her face for eyes. Camargue said the eyes of the woman he saw were different from his daughter’s and Dinah told him that eyes fade. I’ve never heard of eyes or anything else fading to black, have you?’
    Burden refilled their glasses. ‘If Camargue’s sight was poor I think you can simply discount that sort of thing. I mean, you can’t work on the premise that she’s not Natalie Camargue because she looks different or he thought she did. The pronouncing of that name wrong, that’s something else again, that’s really weird.’
    Wexford, hesitating for his figure’s sake between potato crisps, peanuts or nothing at all, looked up in surprise. ‘You think so?’
    The thin smile came again. ‘Oh, I know you reckon on me being a real philistine but I’ve got kids, remember. I’ve watched them getting an education if I’ve never had much myself. Now my Pat, she had a Frenchwoman