H&Y20 - Deliver Us from Evil (6 page)

It was Wednesday, 14.07 hours.

TWO

T
he immediate, and what was also to prove the lasting impression for Webster and Yellich was that the house and its owner had both seen better days; both were elderly in their own way and probably because of that both seemed to the officers to be ideally suited to each other. Both, as Webster had just that afternoon heard Mr Hemmings say to describe his late wife, were ‘beyond the first flush of youth’. Well beyond it.

The house was called ‘Lakeview’, oddly, thought Yellich, because any observation of the surrounding area or a glance at the map of the district did not show the presence of any body of water in the vicinity. It was situated on the B1363 near to Sutton-on-the-Forest, could be easily seen from the road and was probably, Yellich estimated, a quarter of a mile across open fields from the tarmac. It seemed to occupy a natural hollow in the landscape which Webster thought unusual because that part of the Vale of York he understood to be particularly prone to flooding. The grounds of the house seemed to be generous with the front gate of the property being much closer to the road than the house. The frost-covered grounds, whilst vast, were also overgrown and it seemed to both officers that they needed ‘rescuing’ rather than ‘tidying’. The traces of a landscaped garden could be clearly seen but the garden had, by the time Yellich and Webster called, largely been allowed to revert to nature. The building had been blackened by nineteenth century industrial pollution which had evidently been carried from the manufacturing areas of Leeds and Sheffield by the south-westerly winds. The house had an aged and worn look with the roofline at each side of the tall central chimney seeming to sag before being lifted up again at the gable ends. The house was of two storeys and, thought Webster, unlikely to have a cellar given the height of the water table in the area. The front door was set significantly to the right hand side of the building and enclosed in a wooden porch which, like the house itself, was decayed, with peeling paintwork and one or two broken panes of glass. The building was, he observed, potentially very interesting but had sadly been allowed to deteriorate to the point that it was, unlike the garden, clearly beyond rescue. It had been, by all appearances, crumbling for some considerable time and would continue to crumble until it was bulldozed into extinction, to be remembered only in the dim recesses of individual memories and old sepia prints which captured it in its heyday.

Yellich halted the car on crunching gravel in front of the misshapen metal gate and, without waiting to be bidden, Webster, the junior officer, left the car and walked to the gate. It was, he found, fastened to the drystone wall with only a loop of blue nylon rope which was noosed over a protruding stone in the top of the wall. He unhooked the rope which allowed the gate to swing on its hinges with a loud squeaking sound that seemed to penetrate the still silence and to do so deeply. He looked about him. The frost was obviously not giving up without a struggle and the sun had that day been unable to penetrate the grey cloud cover. The black of the house and the black of the leafless canopy of a stand of trees were the only other colours he could detect. Webster stood by the gate as Yellich drove the car slowly through the gateway. He then closed the gate and secured the loop of rope over the stone in the wall. Then there was only stillness and silence.

Webster rejoined Yellich in the car and Yellich approached the house, continuing to drive slowly, and – sensibly, thought Webster, very, very sensibly – sounded the horn as he did so. Rural dwelling people have a larger sense of personal space than the urban dwellers, so Webster had noticed and had also been advised, and do not care to be taken by surprise. A dog was heard to bark, clearly in response to the sound of the car’s horn. As the car approached the house the officers saw the lean-to, which had been hidden from view by shrubbery, and which sheltered two vehicles. One, very practically, thought Yellich, was a Land Rover, the other a Wolseley saloon, white, with a red flash, of 1960s vintage. The dog, when it appeared, was a large Alsatian, alert, well groomed and clearly well nourished. It had the run of the grounds and as Yellich halted the car it put its large, very large, paws up against the window of the driver’s side and barked and growled menacingly.

‘Nice doggy . . . good doggy,’ Yellich said with a smile. Beside him Webster chuckled and said, ‘After you, sarge . . . you go first . . . he seems to like you.’

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.’