Caution sensibly being observed, Yellich and Webster sat inside the car for, they later estimated, two or three minutes, until an elderly man appeared, exiting the ancient house via the decaying wooden porch. He stood looking suspiciously at the officers. Yellich held up his ID and wound the window down an inch and yelled, ‘Police’. The elderly man nodded and called the Alsatian back to where he stood and, as it reached him, bent and ruffled its ears as Yellich heard him say, ‘Good boy, good dog’.
‘Police,’ Yellich said again as he and Webster stepped out of the car.
‘Yes. . I gathered.’ The man was stooped with age and walked with the aid of a gnarled wooden stick which he gripped tightly in an equally gnarled hand. Both officers had the impression that the man had once been powerfully built and athletic. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked, speaking with a cultured voice of received pronunciation without any trace of a regional accent.
‘We hope so, sir. Is this the house of Mr Beattie?’ Yellich asked.
‘It is.’
‘Mr Alexander Beattie?’
‘It is,’ the man held eye contact with Yellich, ‘I am he. Confess I have not been called Alexander for a while though, Alex is usually it. It’s been Alex for a long time now. . an awful long time.’
‘Yes, sir. Can we have a word with you, please?’ Yellich replied with a smile. ‘We just need some information; it’s nothing for you to worry about.’
‘I’m eighty-three,’ Beattie responded with a similar smile. ‘It’ll have to be pretty damned serious for me to be called on by the police for something I’ve done amiss. .’ he laughed softly and warmly. ‘Mind you, the company in jail would be welcome. . no. . no. . probably not, but do come in. Don’t mind the dog, he’s got a loud bark, but he’s got failing hind legs. He can’t stand for very long before his hind quarters give way. . a bit like his owner really. . it’s a design fault in Alsatians, so the vet once told me. You could even probably outrun him. Well, one of you would get away anyway and his bite ain’t what it used to be. None of us is getting any younger. It seems the way of it is that some of us just have to hang around the old place longer than others but nobody’s clock goes backwards. Do come in.’ He turned his back on the officers and walked slowly towards the house. He wore brown cavalry twill trousers, a bright yellow cardigan and black shoes. Despite being stooped with age Yellich guessed Beattie was probably still six feet tall, and that he would have cut a fine figure in his day.
Yellich and Webster followed Beattie into his house and saw that the interior was as original and as tired as the exterior. The porch gave directly on to a large kitchen with an unevenly stone-flagged floor and a large, solid table covered with a green cloth. To the left, as the officers entered, was an ancient cast iron range. The rear door of the kitchen gave way to a scullery with a door with a glass pane which looked out on to the overgrown rear garden and to the white-coated hills beyond. Beattie took a kettle and filled it from the taps of a galvanized iron sink which stood beyond and beside the range. The taps seemed to Yellich to be original and were clearly attached to lead piping which, he thought, would throw the health and safety people into apoplexy, but they had evidently done Alexander Beattie little harm and he doubted that the cup of tea they were going to be kindly offered would similarly be harmful to either him or Webster. He glanced round the kitchen and suddenly felt himself to be in a time capsule. He searched for some precise indication of the date of the building and, finding none, he settled for ‘about two hundred years old, early, very early nineteenth century’. The elderly Alsatian had walked slowly to a blanket in the corner by the scullery door and had collapsed resignedly upon it, no longer being concerned by Yellich and Webster’s presence.
‘So how can I help you?’ Beattie struck a match, held it to a ring on top of the range, and the gas of the stove ignited with a loud ‘woosh’ sound. He put three mugs on the table and took a bottle of milk from a bowl of water in the sink and put it beside the mugs. He then put the kettle atop the gas flames.
‘It’s about a lady called Edith Hemmings,’ Yellich said.
‘Edith Hemmings?’ Beattie looked puzzled. ‘Sorry. . gentlemen, oh do please take a seat by the way. Edith Hemmings. . I am sorry, I can’t place that name.’
‘We believe that she used to work here.’
‘I have had a few helpers. . companions so-called, all employed by my son. . Edith. . but no Edith. That is an old and quite an unusual name in fact — I knew one girl of that name in my youth. I’d remember another Edith. I am sure I would.’
‘A Canadian lady,’ Yellich prompted.
Beattie groaned. ‘Oh, her. .’ a note of anger crept into his voice. He leaned back against the range. ‘That damned female!’
Yellich and Webster glanced at each other. Yellich said, ‘I see we are in the right place.’
‘Yes,’ Beattie moved to his right and rested against the sink. ‘If it is about her, then yes, you certainly are in the right place. Must be all of two years since she left, probably a little more. I didn’t know her as “Edith” though; it was “Julia” when she was here.’
‘She lived here?’
‘Yes, as you see, this house is too remote for a daily help, so yes, she had a room here. All my companions did. My son appointed her, dare say he meant well. He’s retired now. . and. . well, he has his family and health issues, so he planted her here to look after the old boy so he wouldn’t have to worry about him, just as he planted other women here before Julia. She was a daily help. . a housekeeper. . a companion all rolled into one. Very few want to live here, and none who are prepared to do so ever remain very long. You know over the years I have come to realize that the sort of women who are prepared to live and work here are those who do so for the same reason that men join the French Foreign Legion. Running away, d’you see? They want a place to hide. . or a place to forget their past.’
‘Interesting.’
‘She was the last companion I had. Prefer it alone now anyway. . me and Ben Tinsley, we keep a watchful eye on each other. His house is that way.’ He pointed to the wall behind him as the aluminium kettle began to whistle. ‘We each leave a light on, a specific light in each of our houses, it’s on all night. If his isn’t on when I retire for the night I phone him and if he doesn’t answer I will phone you good people and ask you to check on him, if you can. If you say you can’t, for any reason, I check on him the next morning and he does the same for me. He’s a curmudgeonly old billy goat. . dare say he thinks the same of me but we are useful to each other. I also move my Land Rover, take it out of the shed and leave it at the front of the house, then put it under cover again at night just to let him know I’m alive during the day. He does the same thing with his Land Rover. Haven’t moved it yet so I’ll do that when you’ve gone or he’ll be phoning me. It also helps to keep the burglars away, some movement makes the house look lived in. Nothing to steal anyway.’ He slowly and carefully poured a little boiling water from the kettle into a large china teapot, rinsed it out, holding it with both hands, then reached for a packet of loose tea. He put four generous teaspoons full of tea into the pot and then poured in the remainder of the steaming water from the kettle.
‘Mrs Hemmings. . or Julia. .’ Yellich pulled the conversation back on track, ‘the Canadian lady. .’
‘She wasn’t a lady,’ Beattie responded quickly and indignantly. ‘And she was Canadienne,’ Beattie spelled the word, ‘or so she claimed. A French Canadian female, le Canadienne yclept “Julia”. I did believe her on that point because Mrs Beattie, by coincidence, was also Canadian. You see, in the days when all the UK seemed to be emigrating to Canada and Australia and New Zealand, she emigrated east to the UK, bless her soul, to search for her fortune. We found each other and had a long and very happy union.’
‘Congratulations,’ Yellich smiled.
‘Yes. . I. . we were very fortunate and I am not ungrateful, not ungrateful at all. I have sat on the sidelines of some very bloody divorces in my time,
and yes, we were a lucky pair. Ours was a good marriage. A very good one. I do not worry about Mrs Beattie now, she is safe. I would have worried greatly about her if I had gone before. She never did well on her own but I am a much more independent spirit than she was.’ He poured the tea from the pot into the mugs and invited the officers to help themselves to milk. Both did so. ‘So, the Canadienne,’ Beattie sat at the table with Yellich and Webster, ‘well, she came from French Canada, so she said, a small town called Montmorency which is near Quebec City. I looked it up once and it is there, right where she said it would be, on the banks of the St Lawrence, a few miles downstream from Quebec. She left the town when she was five, so she told me, and she hinted at a bit of a tough life. . poverty, orphanage. . that sort of thing. She didn’t talk about her early life much but she definitely was Canadian. Having lived with one for the best part of half a century, I should know, she was the real thing, believe me. “The real deal,” as my great grandson might say. . he has a strange way of talking. . children seem to these days. Sugar, gentlemen?’
‘No, thanks,’ Yellich said.
Webster also politely declined.
‘She spent most of her life in Barrie. . so she told me.’
‘Barrie?’
‘Yes,’ Beattie spelled the name, ‘so Barrie in Canada, not Barry in South Wales. It’s a town, beside a lake, if not a city, of generous size to the north of Toronto in Ontario province. Mrs Beattie actually came from Toronto and we used to visit her family for extended holidays, usually over Christmas, always damned cold it was. I would often say I would not be dreaming of a white Christmas this year, I am going to see one.’ His chest heaved with suppressed laughter as he gripped his mug in large, reddened hands. ‘Occasionally we’d go across in the summer but usually we visited at Christmas; my in-laws liked to have their family around them at Christmas. It was a bit of a tradition with them. Well she, the Canadienne, the one you know as Edith and I knew as Julia, knew Toronto very well, very well indeed, like she was a native of the city. She and I would talk about it, the city, and she knew the place, she knew it all right, knew little streets and bars and parks in the suburbs, but she always insisted that Barrie was her home. She might have been born in Montmorency but her roots were in Barrie. It’s about an hour’s drive north of Toronto which is close in Canadian terms. Very close, believe me. In fact one of my brothers-in-law used to drive two hours to work and two hours back again. He thought nothing of it, which astounded me.’
Webster groaned. ‘Astounds me also, sir.’
‘Yes,’ Beattie glanced at him, ‘hardly bears thinking about, does it? Up at six, leave for work at seven, back home again twelve hours later having driven over four hundred miles. . five days a week. He spent the weekend recovering and then was up again at six on Monday morning and off he’d go. I used to commute from Beverley to Hull — I was a buyer for a shipping line until I retired twenty years ago — and my brother-in-law once said he thought my journey to work was like a walk to the bottom of the garden and back.’
‘Edith. . Julia,’ Yellich appealed.
‘Yes. . sorry.’
‘Do you know how or why she came to be living in the UK?’
‘No, I don’t, she never said why. She came to me from a fox-hunting family in East Yorkshire. It turned out that the glowing reference she came with was a piece of convincing fiction. Fellow wrote it to get rid of her. Now I know why.’
‘We’ll have to visit him. Can you let us have his address?’
‘Yes. No problem. . I have it filed away.’
‘So what did she do in this house?’
‘In terms of her employment or her crimes?’ Beattie raised his eyebrows.
‘Both.’
‘She arrived carrying just one suitcase. . and quickly settled in, seemed to be quite pleased, quite content. She seemed to have a no-one-can-get-at-me-here sort of attitude. You remember the French Foreign Legion Syndrome I mentioned? She was escaping; she was running away. . that was a strong impression I had and my old and remote house seemed to suit her purpose, admirably so.’
‘Yes. . you said, it appears to be a significant observation.’
‘So, she was supposed to be a daily help and a companion, a housekeeper all rolled into one. No precise job description. She used the car to go shopping — the Wolseley, she couldn’t handle the Land Rover, so she used the Wolseley. I gave her an allowance for that, to buy petrol and food for the both of us, and she was a little liberal with it, more than a little liberal if truth be told.’
‘Oh?’ Yellich sipped his tea.
‘For example, she left at three p.m. to drive to the village to buy some food for the old boy,’ Beattie tapped his chest, ‘and she would return at midnight smelling of alcohol and the old boy went without his supper.’
‘I see.’
‘That tended only to happen latterly. She was here for about six months and she tended to stay out late drinking the food money only in the last week or two. But by the time she left my bank account had been plundered.’
‘How did she manage that?’
‘She had access to the cheque book for my current account. She forged my signature and bought things by mail order which she then pawned or sold for a fraction of their true value, or so my son believed when he looked into the matter. I never knew about it because she would take delivery of the parcel when it arrived. We found a lot of pawn tickets in her room and it was my son who then put two and two together.’
‘Did you report that to the police?’
‘Oh yes. . yes, we did straight away, of course we did, but the police said they couldn’t do anything until she “surfaces”, as they put it. But she had gone deep; I wasn’t going to get any money back nor was I going to recover the valuables she stole from the house. She was very cavalier in her attitude. She was the “Cavalier Canadienne”. She pursued her own agenda, didn’t seem to take anything seriously apart from her own survival, of course. . laughing at me as she bled me dry. . she was aloof. . she was distant. . she was. .’
‘Cavalier,’ Yellich finished the sentence. ‘Yes, we get the picture. We grasp the character. “Cavalier” seems just the word, the very word.’
‘But worried,’ Beattie added, ‘she was also worried. Exploiting me but also was always glancing over her shoulder. Sleeping, it seemed, with one eye open. There was something, some person in her life that she wasn’t cavalier about. She was afraid of being seen, I mean afraid of being recognized.’
‘You believe so?’
‘Yes. You saw my lovely old Wolseley, 1968 model?’
‘We did notice it. Nice car.’
‘Yes. I like it. It’s the only one in the Vale. . a classic.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well. . Old Ben, the grumpy old boy who looks for my light each night as I do for his, he told me a few times that he had seen a blonde woman driving the car. It transpired to be madam with a wig upon her head. That we pieced together after she had gone.’
‘We?’
‘My son and grandsons.’
‘I see.’
‘Did she leave anything behind?’
‘Nothing at all of any value.’
‘I have a note of the crime number the police gave me together with the address of the fox-hunting lowlife that gave her such a glowing reference that caused my son to appoint her. That’s all that remained of Julia Ossetti.’
‘You could take action against him, sue him, for example.’
‘What with?’ Beattie forced a smile. ‘I have no money, hardly anything in the bank, just a small pension trickling in, no valuables in the house. Just me and T-Rex here.’ He pointed to the elderly Alsatian which slowly and briefly wagged its tail in recognition of its name and then settled back on to its blanket with a deep sigh.
‘Can we see her room, please?’
‘Certainly,’ Beattie stood slowly and invited the officers to follow him. He led them along a long narrow corridor to a flight of wooden stairs. Both office
rs felt that the house could only be described as ‘depressing’. It was dark, cold, and had decades-old wallpaper peeling from the walls. It seemed to the officers that the deeper Beattie led them into the house the more depressing it became.
‘It’s a matter of pride,’ Beattie explained as, with evident difficulty, he climbed the stairs.
‘What is, sir?’
‘Not giving in to the cold. I just wear thermal underwear all the time, sometimes two layers. It does the job pleasingly well. Mrs Beattie felt the same. In the depths of winter we would put up camp beds in the kitchen, the old cast iron range we used for cooking retained its warmth well into the night, you see; warmer than being upstairs in the bedroom. Very efficient. I still use the same method to get through the cold days. Not cold any more. . winter has gone. . I sleep in my bedroom these nights.’
‘You don’t think this is cold, sir?’ Yellich felt the chill within the house reach his bones.
‘No. . nowhere near, the cut-off point is when your breath condenses in the house; we are a long way from that point. We just have to get through this late frost and then it will be spring.’ He turned at the top of the staircase and led Yellich and Webster along a narrow corridor of creaking bare floorboards with a single window at the end of it; a naked light bulb hung forlornly from a black entwined electric cable just inside the window. ‘That’s the light I keep on to let the old boy who lives across the fields know that I am still alive. I’ll switch it on when it gets dark.’ He stopped by a door and opened it. ‘This was her room.’ He stepped aside.
Yellich and Webster entered the room and saw that it was spartan in the extreme. It contained a single metal framed bed with a hard looking mattress, a small wardrobe of perhaps the 1930s in terms of its age and a chest of drawers of what seemed to the officers to be of the same vintage. There was also a dressing table with a mirror attached to it and an upright chair in front of it. The floorboards, like the corridor outside the room, were without covering. The room was illuminated by a single light bulb which, similar to the light bulb in the corridor, was naked and hung from the ceiling at the end of a length of entwined electric cable of the type used in houses prior to the Second World War. There was no source of heating in the room. The window looked out across the fields at the front of the house to the road and to the hills beyond the road.
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