‘It’s been over two years now, confess it seems like it was yesterday. Damned woman . . . I feel that this house was contaminated by her.’
The address of the man who had employed Edith Hemmings née Avrillé and whose character reference Alexander Beattie described as a ‘work of convincing fiction’ revealed itself to be a large and a lovingly tended property set in its own grounds with stables adjoining the main building. Other outbuildings were visible, including a large greenhouse development. Upon halting the car on the gravel in front of the house and drawing back the metal ring pull by the front door, Yellich and Webster were greeted leisurely by an elderly butler. The man wore a dark jacket with grey pinstriped trousers and highly polished shoes. He was clearly a man with a serious attitude to his position and closely examined the IDs of both officers. He then invited Yellich and Webster into the house, showing them into a large wood panelled foyer in which a log fire crackled and burned welcomingly in a cast iron grate within a stone built fireplace. He then asked the officers to wait and excused himself. The fire seemed to speak to the officers of emotional warmth as well as of a very welcome heat. The foyer was further softened by two large, highly polished brass pots which stood either side of the door and within each of which a thriving yucca plant was established. The foyer smelled of wood smoke mingling with furniture polish.
The butler returned after an absence of about five minutes, Webster guessed, and he warmly and politely invited the officers into an anteroom softly but tastefully furnished with armchairs and a table surrounded by upright chairs. The room, Yellich and Webster noted, was smaller than the foyer but was similarly appointed with wood panelling and had an equally welcoming log fire burning in a cast iron grate. Oil paintings of rural scenes hung on the wall. The butler invited the officers to sit, saying, ‘Mr Rigall will be with you shortly.’
‘Shortly’ transpired to be very short. In fact no more than sixty seconds after Yellich and Webster were left in the room to await Mr Rigall, the man entered. He was tall, powerfully built, dressed in faded denim jeans and a blue shirt over which he wore a large, sloppy woollen cardigan. He was clean shaven, short-haired and he smelled of aftershave. Webster and Yellich stood as he entered the room and he waved them to resume their seats. Rigall apologized for keeping them waiting, explaining in a soft voice that he had been under the shower when they called. ‘I am a bit of a late riser,’ he added by means of explanation. ‘How can I help you?’
Webster explained the reason for their visit.
Rigall groaned and sank into a leather clad armchair. He then said, ‘It’s been two years now . . . confess it seems like it was yesterday. Damn woman.’
‘Tell us about her . . . please,’ Yellich asked, as Webster took his notebook from his jacket.
‘Where to start?’ He twisted his body and took a packet of cigarettes from his jeans pocket. ‘Sorry . . . do you mind?’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘Would either of you gentlemen like a cigarette?’
‘No, thank you, sir,’ Webster said as Yellich gave his head a brief shake, and added. ‘Thank you anyway, sir.’
‘Sensible. Wish I didn’t but with my wife no longer here to tell me off I have picked up quite a few bad habits, this being one such. I manage the estate and have some business interests but you know, I confess I quite enjoyed surrendering my everyday life to my wife’s control, it seemed to take the pressure off me when I came home . . . and she had a strict “no smoking” rule so I observed it. It was her house and she was the boss. It would not suit all men but it suited me.’ He lit the cigarette with an inexpensive blue coloured disposable lighter. ‘We were an odd couple in many regards. She was a small, quick woman who could be sharp-tongued and very quick-tempered when it suited her. I do not apologize for it, I am well built and much slower moving than she was, much calmer in my attitude. We were yang and yin. We were just like a hand and a glove.’ He drew deeply on the cigarette. ‘She died suddenly in a riding accident . . . sorry to ramble but I promise that it all builds up to explaining how the Canadian creature came to live here. It is the background.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Webster replied, gently sensing that Tony Rigall also needed to tell them the story for his own highly personal reasons.
‘No one saw the accident. Her horse found its way back to the stables whinnying in distress . . . snorting and neighing . . . heavens, the damn thing actually raised the alarm. She and her horse loved each other; there was a real bond there, a real relationship. Any other beast would have just stood there chewing the grass waiting for someone to lead it home, but “Scarlet” – her horse, she had a distinct reddish tinge on her flank, hence her name – Scarlet galloped home, back to the stables, and raised the alarm. Two of the estate workers followed her back to where my wife was lying motionless on the ground.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, she was DOA at the hospital. It was a blessing. There is such a thing as a “quality of life”. She was thirty-five, still a young woman. The fracture was high up on the spine near the base of the neck. One vertebra lower and she would have been a tetraplegic, paralysed from the neck down and with another forty plus years of life left to live. Trapped on a lifeless body, her head would have been perched on the top of a vegetable. She was very physical, horse riding, swimming, cross-country running, hill walking, you name it . . . all on top of managing the house. She had a way with the staff; she could inspire them to want to work for her, she was a natural leader. She ran a very peaceful and efficient home . . . she created a very happy ship.’
‘I am sorry,’ Webster offered. ‘That is tragic.’
‘Thank you, but life has to go on and I think of her as lucky dead, rather than dead lucky.’
‘Yes,’ Yellich spoke softly. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes, I think I do. We see life . . . police officers see life, it’s the nature of the beast . . . and I think I fear permanent severe disability more than I fear death. As you say, sir, there has to be a certain quality of life, a certain minimum quality to make life bearable.’
‘Yes,’ Tony Rigall smiled, ‘that’s a very good way of putting it. So there was, overnight, a huge gap in the house and it was shortly after that occurring that that woman arrived. That damned Canadian. No one could have replaced Amelia . . . no one . . . and I didn’t want to replace her on an emotional level, no one could have done that, as I said, but I did need someone to organize the house. We . . . I had a cook . . . I didn’t want her to cook in the kitchen and we had maids to clean, so I advertised for . . . for I don’t know what . . . a house manager, someone to run the place on a day-to-day basis in the way my lovely wife had done. Someone to keep the overview.’ Rigall leaned back in his chair and glanced upwards. ‘Big mistake . . . that was the story of Julia arriving . . . she had no references but no one else wanted the job and she impressed well at the interview.’
‘Where did she come from? Did she say?’ Yellich glanced upwards at the ornate ceiling.
‘Canada. She was newly arrived from Canada. She said that she was looking for a new start in life.’ Rigall drew heavily on the cigarette. ‘She seemed to settle in, seemed to be pleasant at first. Then our cook left without saying why she was leaving, and then the maids. I knew the maids would leave when cook left because the maids were . . . well, I don’t want to sound patronizing but by means of explanation I’ll describe them as “simple-minded”, and cook kept an eye on them. She was very protective towards them, motherly almost. She wouldn’t let anyone put upon them . . . but cook leaving was a shock, cook was really in with the bricks. It turned out that the Canadian female just irritated her; she just wouldn’t stay out of the kitchen, always interfering. In any house of this size the kitchen belongs to the cook and if you don’t know that, or don’t accept that, then you are in trouble. That’s the rule. It’s the cook’s kitchen. That’s it. So, it came to the point that cook had just had enough; she took off her apron, left it on the kitchen table and cycled home, never to return. The maids followed her. At that time I was out of the house most of the day attending to business. I never saw any of the friction developing, and eventually it was the head gardener who tipped me off. “I’d be off as well”, he said, “but I’m in the garden all day and I have my hut to go to when it’s wet, so I am away from the house, away from the Canadian female”.’
‘I see.’
‘So I let her go. I let the Canadian female go. I had to. Wretched woman. I gave her a reference that would get her started somewhere else, so that was unfair of me but I wasn’t inclined to defend a case for unfair dismissal in the county court. That could have been very costly.’
Yellich and Webster remained silent. Webster, who with Yellich had visited the Canadian woman’s next employer in his stone cold home, thought that ‘unfair’ did not adequately describe Rigall’s act of dumping his troubles on another unsuspecting person as a means of solving said troubles. Edith Hemmings, as she became, had left Rigall’s household to work for Alexander Beattie and whilst there had emptied the elderly man’s bank account and stolen his meagre possessions. ‘Unfair’ just wasn’t the word, thought Webster, just not the word at all. Then Rigall said something which made Webster’s attitude towards him soften.
‘Only when she had gone did I realize what she had done,’ he explained. ‘I gave her access to the money to buy food and fuel and found out later that the account had been cleared out. Not all my money . . . that is separate and safe . . . but the money I put into the account to run the house. The household budget account. Then I found out she had stolen my wife’s jewellery. I called the police but we didn’t know where she had gone; the cheques she had written were made out to cash. The jewels would have been sold for hard cash. I have now replaced my domestic staff and have appointed Lionel, the butler who opened the door to you, and he costs an arm and a leg. But the sense of loss remains.’
‘So what sort of woman was Julia, apart from being dishonest? Apart from rubbing people up the wrong way?’ Yellich asked.
Rigall smiled. ‘Well, what else can there be after that?’ He paused. ‘But I really can’t answer your question, she never let me get close to her, and I never wanted to, and so any conversation we had was always short and to the point.’
‘Did she tell you much about herself? Her background?’
‘No . . . no . . . she didn’t. She was quite private in that sense, quite a private person. She was recently arrived from Canada, that I did find out, but she never spoke about her family. She came from Quebec province, I believe, she did tell me that and also that she then moved to Ontario . . . lived near Toronto for a while, just before coming to the UK.’
‘Would you say she was hiding, or running from something?’
‘Yes . . . yes,’ Rigall smiled briefly and nodded. ‘You know you could say that, yes, you could. In fact, come to think of it, someone did come to look for her. A Canadian man – it’s all coming back now. I was a man obsessed with the theft of my money and of my wife’s jewellery and with the driving away of excellent staff . . . but yes, she was a person in hiding. She had strange hiding away habits now that you mention it . . . stayed indoors, in the house and the garden. She’d walk in the rear garden to take the air but never the front. Very infrequently she’d leave the house, just once a week perhaps, even once every two weeks, to buy provisions and cash cheques and sell Amelia’s jewellery. So, yes, in hiding, a woman in hiding. A very unpleasant character, and I am so pleased she has gone . . . it was a big mistake to hire her. So why all the interest?’
‘She was murdered,’ Yellich explained, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Rigall leaned forward and, resting his elbows on his knees, shook his head slowly. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me at all? I can understand that, I can really understand why someone would want to do her in. When was this?’
‘Recently, a few days ago.’
‘Where?’
‘Not too far from here.’
‘There’s been no mention of it in the media . . . that’s something I would have noticed.’
‘We decided on a news blackout . . . for now.’
‘I see.’ Rigall reclined in his chair. ‘Murdered you say? Well, well, well . . . why am I not at all surprised . . . ?’
‘Tell us more about the Canadian.’
‘The man you mean . . . the man who came looking for her?’
‘Yes, that man.’
Rigall paused. ‘He came very recently . . . a few months ago. He was on her trail though, he had her scent.’
‘What did he want . . . do you know? Did he say?’
‘Her . . . madam. He wanted her. I told him that she had left two years ago but that didn’t seem to disappoint him, in fact he smiled and said, “Getting closer. I am getting closer”.’
‘He came here?’
‘Yes. Walked up to the door and knocked on it. He was as bold as brass and as calm as you please. He spoke to Lionel who was unsure of him and asked him to wait outside . . . it was a little cold that day but Lionel did the right thing. He is very good like that. He came to find me . . . I was in here, in this very room, and so I went to the door and he was every inch a Canadian. To look at him you’d think “lumberjack”, broad-chested, powerfully built, trimmed dark beard, patterned jacket and a fur hat, a man’s fur hat . . . you know the type.’
‘Yes . . . yes.’
‘He asked for Julia Avrillé. It was then I told him she had left a few years ago. He asked where she had gone and I told him I didn’t know but I believed she had remained in the vicinity . . . she was somewhere in the Vale of York.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I saw her, saw her a few times driving an old car. It was the car that caught my eye, a mid 1960s saloon, a Wolseley or a Riley, white with a red flash down the side, a real classic. Lovely car. It’s the only one of its kind hereabouts, damn few left in all England and that is the only one in the Vale, of that I am certain. I have an interest in classic cars you see. So she drove past and then I saw it was her at the wheel, wearing her wig but it was her. Did I mention she always wore a wig when she went out?’