The Belting Inheritance

by Julian Symons

  “How are you? Fairly rotten, I expect.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you had fun, you had a good time?”

  “It was a good time while it lasted.”

  Pasquin had unlocked the drink cupboard, and I was afraid that he was going to offer us Armagnac, which I should have had to refuse. But when he turned he was holding a glass containing a pinky-white liquid. “For you.” I looked at it doubtfully. “You know what Percy used to say, ‘This is the pick-me-up that never lets you down.’ That is a joke.”

  “Yes.” I held the glass in my hand, then raised it to my lips and determinedly drained it. The result was touch and go. My stomach seemed to revolt against it, then revolt was succeeded by acceptance and a grateful warmth spread through me. Pasquin watched, then patted my shoulder again. “Now you are better.”

  “Much better.”

  “You go and find Percy now, and when you find him you bring him back here.”

  I said we would. But we never brought Percy back to Pierre Pasquin.

  The sunlight outside made me doubtful of my recovery, and my condition was not improved by the sight of Uncle Miles on the pavement. He looked distinctly greenish, but had the air of a man prepared to do his duty. He was accompanied by Betty, her hair brassy as ever. She was wearing what looked like the identical paint-stained trousers that she had on when I first saw her.

  “I’ve come to take you back,” Uncle Miles said firmly, although with a restraint that suggested he might give way to sickness at any moment.

  With equal firmness I said, “No.”

  He put his hand to his head. “Christopher, please. I am really not up to argument this morning.”

  “Then come on.” A taxi was passing. When we were all inside I said, “This won’t take long. At least, I hope not.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the rue Peter Paul.”

  “I don’t think I can bear it.” Uncle Miles was referring to the motion of the taxi, which was erratic. He put a hand on his stomach.

  Betty patted his knee. “You can’t believe what a relief it is not to be with a genius who’s got a stomach made of brass.”

  “What I don’t see,” Elaine said, for her almost hesitantly, “is, do you know what Fallon meant when he talked about a magician?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it some sort of code?”

  “No. He was talking about a magician.”

  “Please.” Uncle Miles was still holding his stomach. “I am not up to smart talk this morning, I am just not up to it. Please.”

  “Do you expect to find him with Blakeney?” Elaine asked.

  “I don’t know. But Blakeney will have gone to him, I know that.”

  As soon as we stepped out of the taxi we saw the ambulance. It had stopped outside a house half-way down the street, and we joined the dozen people clustered around. I told Elaine to ask them why they were there, but this proved unnecessary. They were bringing the body out of one of the mean, picturesque houses as we came up to it. The blanket covering it slipped aside as they were lifting it into the ambulance, and I saw the face of the man who had called himself David Wainwright. Uncle Miles saw it too, gasped, and turned away. The dead man’s face was worn, but he looked more peaceful than I had seen him look in life. There was a neat hole almost in the middle of his forehead. Perhaps it is true that one becomes quickly habituated to death, for I felt none of the disgust and horror that had moved me when I saw Thorne’s body, nothing but a sense of pity. Policemen began to push back the onlookers. Elaine looked at me questioningly.

  “Ask where the body was discovered. And try to find out where the magician is, Monsieur Magique. Tell them you’re a reporter. After all, it’s the truth.”

  Betty looked at me with mock-admiration. “You are masterful.”

  Elaine began talking to a slatternly woman standing in a doorway. Soon there was a group of half a dozen people, all talking at once. A few minutes later she came back.

  “He was found this morning in the hall of that house, by the concierge. They seem to think he was killed last night.”

  “And Monsieur Magique?”

  “He lives in the house. He has a puppet show which he does twice a day. It’s somewhere in the Luxembourg Gardens.”

  I ran to the end of the street, and we took another taxi. It put us down in the rue de Vaugirard, by the gate on the east side of the Palais du Luxembourg. As we entered the gardens I stood staring at the palace.

  “You won’t find anybody giving puppet shows there,” Elaine said.

  But I was checked, overwhelmed by the associations the palace must have for anybody with my kind of romantic feeling for French revolutionary history. In this mock palazzo Tom Paine had been imprisoned when he voted against the execution of the King, here Hebert, Danton and Camille Desmoulins had been kept before their trial, here David had drawn his first sketch for the painting of the Sabine women – I could go on, but at some cost to the pace of my narrative. Ahead of us stretched a terrace and a long avenue lined with statues, to our left was the traffic of the Boulevard St Michael, to our right were dusty lawns. Uncle Miles pointed with a shaking hand in this direction and said that he remembered a puppet theatre over there. We crossed these lawns on which children played, as they do in England, but with a polite, shy formality that you will not find here. We came to tennis courts where young men lazily knocked a ball over a net, a café, and the theatre of Uncle Miles’ recollection, but this was a long-established marionette theatre, and it made no mention of Monsieur Magique. We had crossed almost the whole gardens from east to west when we found it. In the part of the gardens opposite the rue Auguste Comte there stood a kind of marquee. A dusty signpost pointed to it: “Monsieur Magique.”

  There was a small cubbyhole saying that the price of admission was Fr. 15, but nobody was there to take money. We pushed open a flap like the flap of a tent, and went inside. Monsieur Magique was on the stage.

  In a sense the effect was one of anti-climax. The audience was composed of children and their parents, and the entertainment, or the last few minutes of it that we saw, was in the plane of that provided by a moderately talented conjurer. To be fair, I learned afterwards that the early part of the show was more original, containing puppet variants of fairy tales like The Sleeping Beauty and The Little Match Girl. But while we were there Monsieur Magique, dressed as a pierrot, called children up to him and drew eggs from their noses, discovered a moth-eaten rabbit beneath a boy’s pullover, changed water into fizzy lemonade.

  “I don’t see why the hell you’ve brought us here,” Betty said in a loud voice. Then she stopped. Something, it must have been one of the conjurer’s movements or gestures, had caught her attention. She sat staring at the stage. I whispered, “Look at Miles,” to Elaine. He was sitting on the other side of Betty, with his mouth turned down, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles as though be were a small boy. He glanced once at me, shook his head unbelievingly, and went on staring at the figure on the stage.

  That Monsieur Magique had heard Betty’s words was made evident only by the slight jerk of his head. Just for a moment he seemed to look over the heads of the children to us at the back of the tent. But he went on to perform what was evidently the main feature of the show, as he put a small boy into a cabinet, made him disappear, and brought him back again to the accompaniment of a magnesium flash. This act was obviously familiar to a considerable portion of the audience, and was a tremendous success. Monsieur Magique bowed and disappeared behind a curtain. The children filed out happily, asking their mothers how it had been done. Within a couple of minutes we were left alone under the canvas, dusty grass beneath our feet. Betty and Uncle Miles said nothing, but as though pulled by a magnet we walked slowly up towards the stage. The stillness was odd, after the clamour of children’s voices. Elaine put her hand on my arm and shivered.

  “He’s gone.”

  I shook my head. “He has nowhere left to go.”

  As
we neared the front of the stage the back curtain parted and Monsieur Magique appeared again. He had taken off his pierrot’s dress and bobbled hat and most of the greasepaint, and he was recognisable. Elaine cried out. “Ulfheim.” And then, with that instinct for self-justification I had come to recognise, she added: “I told you he came from France.”

  “You were perfectly right.”

  The man on the stage made a mocking bow to us all, and vanished again behind the curtain. Uncle Miles called out something unintelligible. Betty and I stepped up on to the stage, and as we did so heard the sound of the shot.

  Behind the curtain there was a tiny dressing-room, with a few improvised shelves, some boxes of tricks, clothes on hangers, a cracked looking-glass in front of a battered dressing-table. He lay on the floor with the revolver beside his hand still smoking, and a hole in his head as neat as that in Blakeney’s.

  “The end of Ulfheim,” I said. “The dead who won’t awaken.”

  Betty stood with her hands in her trouser pockets, looking down at him. Uncle Miles had turned away, a handkerchief to his eyes. His shoulders were shaking.

  “It was clever of you to guess,” Elaine said. “I don’t see now how you did it.”

  “He left clues. Not so much clues as jokes, really. Like Stiver and Strawman and Ulfheim. In the play Ulfheim is a landowner.”

  “Oh. But how did you know it was David?”

  “Not David,” I said. “Hugh.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Treasure Island

  “A special sense of humour,” I said. “The Wainwright sense of humour you might call it. Hugh was devoted to Ibsen. When he was looking for a new name to give Blakeney, Stiver seemed to him a good joke, and it must have seemed a better one still, when he was talking to us at Folkestone to use the name of a character in a play called When We Dead Awaken. He couldn’t resist making the whole thing a kind of puzzle to which we could guess the answer if we understood the rules. In that way he must have been rather like you,” I said to Miles.

  It was the afternoon. The four of us were sitting – at last – in the Deux Magots drinking coffee, after a long session with the police and a visit to Hugh’s room in the rue Peter Paul where we saw his few possessions. It had been decided by Uncle Miles, for once assuming the burden of responsibility, that Hugh should be buried in Paris, and Miles had decided also that he would wait until we returned to Belting to tell the rest of the family the truth. Betty now said in response to my last words, “He was nothing like as nice.”

  “So Ibsen struck one chord in my memory, if you like to call it that. And then last night when Fallon talked about the magician, going back to the magician, it struck another chord. I remembered how Monsieur Magique had had a booth on the beach at Folkestone and that he’d left it unexpectedly, and I understood too what it was that I had seen when Ulfheim opened his case in the restaurant that day. The wires and figures were those of puppets. So I knew this morning that we were looking for Monsieur Magique, and that he would be Hugh.”

  “You’ve been very clever,” Elaine looked distastefully at a bearded man who was drinking Russian tea from a saucer.

  “What I still don’t understand in my addled way is this,” Betty said, bobbing her bronze head. “What was the reason for this whole elaborate fandango? Why wasn’t Hugh’s family told he was still alive, and why didn’t he come back when the war was over?”

  “That’s easy.” I looked at Elaine. “It wasn’t David who killed your uncle. It was Hugh. Arbuthnot hinted that to me, but I didn’t understand him. You must have known he was suspected, Uncle Miles.”

  “You must remember I was away at the time, and when I came back Hugh and David had both been killed. That is, we thought they had. Mamma didn’t encourage anything being said about that other regrettable affair.”

  I sipped my coffee, which was black and sweet. “The way it worked out must have been something like this. Hugh and Sullivan were partners in this firm of estate agents. You remember, Elaine, how surprised your father was that no money was left when the firm was wound up, that the winding-up was in the hands of Lady W – Lady Wainwright – and that she was quite generous about it and that your father got his money back. I think there was a good reason for that. Hugh had been cheating Sullivan. Sullivan found out, they had a row outside the pub that night and Hugh killed him. Isn’t it right – about Hugh cheating Sullivan, I mean?” I asked Miles. “Stephen must have known.”

  He coughed unhappily. “Mamma did mention something about it, although not in those words. She said money was missing and that she had made it up. After that she didn’t refer to it.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t. Now, before Sullivan’s body was found, Hugh had gone overseas and had been reported missing, believed dead. In the meantime the police must have discovered that Hugh had been robbing Sullivan, perhaps they even had a witness who saw them together that night. But though they may have been satisfied that Hugh was the murderer, what could they do about it? Hugh was dead, killed in action. The natural thing was to let the case drop. They must have satisfied themselves that David had nothing to do with it. In the report of the trial I read it was the coroner who asked David awkward questions, not the police. Now do you see why Hugh couldn’t come back? He would have been arrested for Sullivan’s murder.”

  I paused and asked for more coffee. When it came I continued. I really felt like a detective.

  “I don’t suppose we shall ever know what happened to Hugh in 1944. He must have known that his position was desperate, that at any time he might be ordered back to England to be questioned about Sullivan. The official story was that he had got separated from his platoon and was never seen afterwards. My guess would be that he managed to surrender to the Germans, and then worked for them. In fact it’s more than a guess, if you remember that snap.” The snap was among Hugh’s meagre effects. It showed him wearing the uniform of the Free British unit that the Germans had tried to organise, a cap stuck on the back of his head, his arms round the shoulders of two SS officers. “When the war was over he must have managed to slip back to France like a lot of others, and there assumed the name of Roger Lorraine.” It was under this name that Hugh had been living in the rue Peter Paul. “I dare say he had half a dozen other names before that.”

  Uncle Miles sighed. “It’s a most distasteful story. I must telephone Mamma to let her know that we are coming back. I suppose one can telephone from this place.”

  “Wait a minute.” I raised a finger, combining the role of detective with that of the Ancient Mariner. “There isn’t much more. We don’t know what Hugh did for a living, except that the police told us he became Monsieur Magique three years ago, and that he’d got no criminal record. The idea of substitution must have occurred to him when he met Blakeney, and learned that Blakeney was a survivor from the plane in which David had been killed. He knew his mother had adored David, he knew she was likely to accept anybody who came back and produced reasonable credentials. Of course the deception couldn’t be maintained indefinitely, and he must have told Blakeney that it wouldn’t have to last long. Once the will had been changed, Blakeney could say that he just wasn’t able to settle down again at Belting. He would go off, assisted if he was lucky by an allowance from his mother. When she died he would return to claim the money and then go off again, splitting the money with Hugh. All he had to do was to pass muster for a week or two and with the intensive training Hugh gave him, plus his own knowledge of David, that shouldn’t be impossible. It was a wild scheme perhaps but the stakes were high, and after all what had they got to lose? Markle was hired to give Blakeney a bit of moral support, and in case he ran into real trouble he could refer to Hugh, who had managed to get an engagement in Folkestone as Monsieur Magique.

  “The scheme came unstuck, we know, but not because of Blakeney. He couldn’t have lasted out much longer probably, but he played his part well. The trouble came because Hugh was reckless enough to stay in Filehurst, where Thorne recognised him.
He killed Thorne, but of course that brought the police down on Belting, and once they’d started to investigate, Blakeney was certain to be exposed. Hugh came back to Paris and Blakeney followed him. He must have threatened Hugh with exposure, so Hugh killed him too. But he knew the game was up, really.” I said the thing that had been in my mind ever since I saw the body in the little room at the back of the marquee, the mouth still set in its mocking smile. “I wish I’d known him. He must have been an interesting man.”

  Miles looked at me, sighed again, and went away to telephone.

  Elaine said, “I think he was horrible.”

  “Christopher’s a romantic,” Betty remarked, rather as she might have said that I was an Albanian. We looked out at Paris flowing past us. On my left inside the café two Americans were arguing about existentialism. My stomach was quiescent. I was proud of my detective skill. Life seemed very good. I hardly looked up when a voice said hallo. It was Norman Beaver. He spoke to Betty. “I’ve been looking for you all over, Bets. There’s a Yugoslav painter I want you to meet – ”

  Betty shook her bead. “Nix on Yugoslavs. I’m going back to England.”

  “You are? What for?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  “Who to?”

  “My ex. We settled it last night.”

  “You did?” Norman did not seem surprised, but his interest in Betty noticeably diminished.

  “It’s time I settled down.”

  “I expect so. And the best of luck to you both.”

  He was gone. I said congratulations. Betty looked at me with a considering eye. “Why don’t you two get married?”

  Elaine and I began to laugh together, as we had laughed last night. Elaine said, “I was waiting for him to reach the age of consent.”

  “I was meaning to ask you,” I said, “But I’ve been too busy.”

  Somehow a bottle of champagne appeared. I goggled at Betty. “Don’t tell me you own this place too.”