The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons

people who know tell me, but if you think he isn’t, there you are. Perhaps you’re right.”
    “Do you work here?”
    “Work here? I own the place. I’m promoting Destrello because he’s a genius. Smoke?” She sat down behind a small desk, took some canvases off the only other chair and invited me to sit on it. I sat down, but refused the cigarette. I gave her Stephen’s letter. She tore it open, read it, struck a match on the heel of her shoe, lighted a cigarette, and made a face. “How do you get on with Stephen?”
    “I don’t like him much.”
    “I haven’t seen him for years, but he reminded me of a starving crow. I couldn’t make head or tail of what he was saying on the telephone, but this letter helps. My God, he’s a creep, that Stephen, don’t you think so?”
    I hesitated, then said “Yes.” We both began to laugh. She opened a drawer, took out half a bottle of whisky, reached behind her and found two small glasses. “Damnation to all creeps.”
    I had drunk whisky only two or three times before, and didn’t really want to now, but I felt that I might label myself a creep if I refused. So I drank damnation to creeps. She put her feet on the desk. “Now, perhaps you’ll tell me the truth about all this cock over someone coming along and pretending to be David.”
    I told her what had happened, about David’s return and Lady W’s acceptance of him, and his brothers’ scepticism. While I talked two or three people came in to look round the gallery. She paid little attention, simply telling them to look around, and handing a price list to a man who asked for it. They had wandered in, as people do in art galleries, and they wandered out again. When I had finished she poured more whisky into both our glasses, and drank half of hers at one gulp.
    “I don’t get it. What does Brother Creep expect me to do? Why should I care whether it’s David or not?”
    I hardly knew how to reply. “He thought you might be able to – to say it wasn’t David, I suppose.”
    She swung her legs off the desk. “God Almighty, they’re his brothers. If they can’t recognise him, how the hell can I?”
    “They do. I mean, they don’t. They’re certain he isn’t David.”
    She stared at me. “Well, then?”
    “But they want proof. After all, you were – you had an affair with him.” The whisky had gone to my head a little, or I would never have said such a thing. But she was not offended.
    “So I did.” She paused. “Did Miles know you were coming to see me?”
    “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
    “Perhaps not. But I guess Miles wouldn’t have wanted you to come, and Brother Creep kept it from him. And I can see he didn’t tell you the whole story. Miles was my husband.”
    I gaped. She got up, put what was left of the whisky back in the drawer and said, “Drink up. I’ll take you out to lunch.”
    Five minutes later she had yelled to a young man named John to come down and look after the shop, and we were in the first-floor restaurant of a pub called The Fighting Cock, just a few doors away. I should have liked to stay downstairs, where a good many young men in beards were talking to girls who wore jeans, but Betty (she had told me to call her that) said that if we didn’t go straight up we wouldn’t get a table. She ordered lunch for two, including a bottle of wine. Then she looked at me.
    “You’re not TT, are you? It’s a bit late to ask. So you don’t know a thing about Miles and me. Would you like to hear?”
    I said yes. It was true enough that I wanted to hear, and I could see that she wanted to tell me.
    “Miles was going to be an actor, I was going to be an actress, that’s how we met. We both had walking-on parts in a farce that made the West End, then flopped. Miles was young and handsome, anyway I thought so. I was fairly bowled over, I can tell you. Then he took me down to Belting to meet the family, and I stayed the weekend. My God, what a morgue.” She saw my look of