The lifestyle at his estate, Belle Ombre, is supported by Dickie Greenleaf's fortune, occasional fence work with an American named Reeves Minot and Derwatt Ltd. — an art forgery scheme that Ripley helped set up years before as a silent partner.

Years prior, after the painter Philip Derwatt disappeared and committed suicide in Greece, his friends — photographer Jeff Constant and freelance journalist Ed Banbury — began to publicize his work and sold a number of authentic paintings.

Worried that the lid is about to be blown on the whole scheme, Ripley decides to go to London and impersonate Derwatt, meet with Murchison and convince him that the paintings are genuine.

Ripley, as himself, invites Murchison to Belle Ombre to inspect his own Derwatt painting (also a fake) to try to dissuade him from taking the case to a Tate Gallery curator and the police.

Realizing that the argument is futile, Ripley comes clean on the entire scam, asking for mercy for Tufts' sake.

Ripley tells Tufts that he killed Murchison and, realizing his own terrible choice of a gravesite, asks him to help move the body.

When he returns to Belle Ombre, Tufts unsuccessfully tries to strangle Ripley, who feels pity for the disturbed man and does not retaliate.

Ripley manages to escape and returns to London to impersonate Derwatt for a second appearance, this time for Webster and Murchison's wife.

In the New York Times, Allen J. Hubin wrote that Highsmith's "portrayal of the police of two nations as louts eager to be flummoxed by her non‐hero's transparent machinations leaves me blank with incredulity.

"[1] Ian Hamilton felt the title character possessed "the relaxed panache of a contented psychopath as if Ripley's real inheritance from Dickie Greenleaf was not normality but the confidence to nourish and exercise abnormality".