Free The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons Page B

that this argument was not likely to affect me. He stared at one of the Japanese primitives, and turned away from it with distaste. “Christopher, I know this man is a fraud, and I am going to prove it. Miles and I are agreed that we should both stay here for the moment. We want you to go to London tomorrow and see two people who should be able to help. If you agree, I will write letters to both which you can take along, and I’ll telephone and tell them to expect you.”
    I had already decided to say yes when I asked, “Who are they?”
    “One is named Betty Urquhart, the other Vivian Foster.”
    “Hadn’t you better tell me why I’m going to see them?”
    He bit off the words reluctantly. “Foster was a great friend of David’s. He was a doctor. He’s in Harley Street now. Betty Urquhart was – she runs some sort of gallery – she was a friend of David’s too.”
    Something about his tone made me ask, “You mean she was his mistress?”
    “Yes, I believe so,” he said unwillingly, and with something odd in his glance. When I said that I would go he patted me on the shoulder and said “Good man” two or three times. He was a great one for old-fashioned slang, Uncle Stephen.

Chapter Five
    Betty Urquhart and Vivian Foster
     
    So it came about that just before midday the next morning I found myself outside the People’s Art Gallery, just off Leicester Square. I had seen Lady W, and told her that I had arranged to go up for the day to see a friend in London. A year ago she might have been annoyed that I was spending a day in London so soon after the beginning of the holidays, but now she was so completely occupied with David’s return that she hardly noticed what I was saying. The gaiety and vividness of the previous night had all drained away, and although she was cheerful I thought that she looked dreadfully ill. David and Miles had not appeared by the time I left, Clarissa was with the dogs, and so I was left with Stephen, who was looking even more pinched and near-strangled than usual. He gave me the letters, and said that he would ring both Betty Urquhart and Vivian Foster late in the morning.
    “We’ll spike this fellow’s guns,” he said as I left, a phrase which made me decide to add up the number of clichés he used and award myself some sort of prize when I’d reached twenty. It was only on the way to the station that I looked at the letters and saw that they were not only sealed but stuck down at the back with sticky tape, a reminder that Stephen was not simply a comic character but a mean one too.
    The door of the gallery clanged as I went in. Nobody appeared, so I walked round looking at the pictures. About half of them were abstracts and the other half were social realist, showing labourers with enormous muscles shifting great lumps of iron, that kind of thing. My own preference at the time was for the neat and finicky. Pretty well the only modern pictures I admired were surrealist paintings done with a fanatical, naturalistic attention to detail, and I didn’t like any of these very much. I was trying to decipher one of the artists’ names when a voice behind me said, “Yes?”
    I turned to be confronted with what seemed at first glance to be a thin young man. Only the first of these adjectives proved accurate, for in fact I faced a woman, wearing paint-stained trousers, who was of the same age as those I counted old, like Stephen and Miles. I had been deceived by the loose smock that concealed the breasts, by the trousers, and by the bronze curls that topped an eager, open face innocent of powder and lipstick. “You must be Christopher Barrington. I’m Betty Urquhart.”
    “How do you do?”
    “I do pretty well. I see you’ve been properly brought up. What do you think of Destrello? You were looking at his paintings.”
    “I don’t like them very much.”
    “No need to be so bloody cautious, if you think they’re no good, say so. He’s a genius.”
    “Is he?”
    “So the