H&Y20 - Deliver Us from Evil Read online

  ‘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 officers 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.

  ‘Do you see what I mean?’ Beattie said triumphantly. ‘I mean about the French Foreign Legion Syndrome. Who would accept this accommodation unless they had to? She was on the run all right. It should have made both me and my son suspicious.’

  ‘Seems so.’ Yellich looked at the cell-like room in the isolated prison-like house. He thought Beattie to be correct. Only a very frightened person would accept live-in accommodation of this low standard. There was not even a lock on the door. He asked if anyone visited her.

  ‘No . . . not a visitor, no one called on her . . . but . . . since you mention it . . .’

  ‘But?’ Yellich pressed.

  ‘There was the large bearded man. I saw him a few times standing on the edge of the road, just looking at the house. I do not often look out of the house and so he was probably there more often than the three times I saw him.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’ Yellich spoke softly, looking out of the window of the room. ‘Was Edith . . . or Julia . . . in the house at the time, can you recall?’

  ‘It was about the time she left, a few months ago, come to think of it. I well recall I mentioned it to her, that is to say that I had seen a man standing by the road looking at the house. She seemed worried by the information. Then she left. But she was planning to leave anyway. She had been emptying my bank account for weeks before I saw the man for the first time. Perhaps his arrival was just coincidence. Perhaps she thought she had taken me for all she could and was going to make tracks anyway . . . but she did seem frightened when I described him to her.’

  ‘Can you describe him for us now? Can you remember his appearance?’

  ‘Well, the eyesight isn’t what it used to be. He was a large man, bearded, like I said, solidly built. He wore a fur hat.’

  ‘A fur hat?’

  ‘Yes. A man’s fur hat, like you see Russian soldiers wearing.’

  ‘I know the type.’

  ‘Light coloured. Not dark, so Arctic fox, not rabbit fur.’

  ‘And not frightened of being seen?’

  ‘No, he wasn’t, now you mention it. He did not seem to care if he was seen. Red jacket . . . tartan pattern.’

  ‘Seems like someone we ought to talk to; he obviously had some interest in the house.’ Yellich turned to Webster who nodded in agreement.

  ‘You could try my neighbour,’ Beattie suggested.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, he saw him once, driving past very slowly. He got a good look at him. He’ll be able to give you more details than I can.’ Beattie stepped into the room and opened a drawer in the dressing table. ‘We kept all the stuff about her in here.’ He took out the reference and read it. ‘Look at what he said, that fox hunter type, “Industrious and utterly trustworthy”. Tosh! But he got rid of her and here . . .’ he took another piece of paper from the drawer, ‘is the crime number I mentioned, given to me in respect of the theft of my money and valuables.’ He handed it to Yellich.

  ‘Malton Police.’ Yellich read the slip of paper.

  ‘Yes, that’s the local bobby shop around here. Still a fair few miles away but it’s the local cop shop.’

  ‘You don’t need it?’

  ‘No, I can’t claim for the lost money, I verified that with the insurance people, only for items, and she didn’t steal much from the house because there was little to steal. She took some of Mrs Beattie’s jewellery . . . that I would like back but the value of the other stuff was minimal. Valuable only in terms of sentimental value . . . but I refer to them as the “valuables”.’

  ‘He’s a tight-fisted old thing.’ Ben Tinsley stood defensively in the doorway of his house. ‘Dare say he has little good to say about me but do you know that in the wintertime he sleeps on a camp bed in his kitchen rather than have a heater in his bedroom, him and his wife also when she was with us? But we’re both getting on and we are neighbours, and so I keep an eye on him and he keeps an eye on me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Yellich smiled, ‘he told us the system you have of leaving a light burning to let each other know you are well. Also of moving his Land Rover about. A good idea.’

  ‘Not uncommon in the country. But do please come in out of the cold, gentlemen.’

  In contrast to Alexander Beattie’s home, Yellich and Webster found Ben Tinsley’s home was small, warm and dry. A settled coal fire burned gently in the grate.

  ‘Not legal,’ Tinsley pointed to the fire, and did so with clear embarrassment.

  ‘I know.’ Yellich read the room, photographs of family on the wall and mantelpiece, a compact television and a pile of magazines about walking in the country and coarse fishing. A physically fit widower, fond of his family, living within his means, enjoying solitary pursuits: nothing for the officers to be at all suspicious about. ‘But we won’t report you.’

  ‘Thank you. This is the country, I am not polluting anyone else’s breathing air and there is nothing like a coal fire. You just can’t beat coal for a home fire. Take it from me, you just can’t beat a coal fire. Do take a seat, please.’

  The officers sat in deep comfortable armchairs covered with flower patterned material.

  ‘So how can I help you?’ Tinsley sat on a matching sofa. ‘I saw you at Beattie’s house, house . . . mausoleum more like, if you ask me. I mean, what is he proving living in such cold conditions? He sees it as an achievement to get through the winter without heating, miserly old fool that he is. I tell you, he is the sort of man who would buy a poppy for one Remembrance Sunday, pay next to nothing for it and wear it for the next ten Remembrance Sundays until it falls apart, then he buys another one for a penny or two and wears that for the first week in each November until that too falls apart, and so on and so forth. That’s Beattie, claiming poverty but I bet he has a pile tucked away somewhere. Anyway I knew you were cops so I didn’t interfere.’

  ‘You knew?’ Webster asked.

  ‘Yes. You looked confident, were a pair and calling during the hours of daylight. Also you are both in good physical shape. But I took a few photographs of you anyway,’ Tinsley smiled.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes I did. Just in case. And I also made sure I got your car registration in one of the shots. I used a telephoto lens, you see, then I saw Beattie invite you into his house . . . so I relaxed.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘I’ll send prints of them to you when I develop the film. Malton Police Station?’

  ‘No. York. Micklegate Bar. But we’d still like to see them.’

  ‘Really? York Police, I mean . . .’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘All right. So, how can I help you?’ Tinsley sat back on the sofa, ‘I am intrigued.’

  ‘Mr Beattie advised us that once a bearded man in a fur hat and tartan patterned jacket seemed to paying a lot of interest in his house. This was a couple of years ago, or so. He also said you may have got a look at him.’

  ‘The Canadian? Yes . . . but that’s going back a good few months now, nearly two years, as you say . . . time flies so.’

  ‘Tell us about him, if you would,’ Yellich asked. ‘All you can remember.’

  ‘What is there to say?’ Tinsley sighed. ‘Little to tell,’ he paused as the clock in his hallway chimed the hour with the Westminster chimes. ‘I used to see him in the village, that is Stillington, closest village to here, I really knew him from there. He used to enjoy a beer in The Hunter’s Moon.’

  ‘The Hunter’s Moon in Stillington?’ Webster wrote in his notebook.

  ‘On the high street, you can’t miss it. It was Terry the publican who told me he was a Canadian; they had a chat now and again, you see. Terry’s good like that, he checks out strangers but does so in a friendly, chatty way. But yes, he was a Canadian. Tall, well built, beard, as you say, and yes, I saw him on the roadway just staring at Beattie’s ruin and also I saw as he drove past in his car. He was clearly hanging around the area. The building had some fascination for him, it really did. That house, Beattie could have bought an easily run, warm, comfortable house but they bought that . . . ruin . . . no wonder his wife didn’t last, but he seems to be sticking it out, stubborn old fool that he is. I tell you, if he were a plant he’d be moss which grows in the tundra, thriving in the cold. But the Canadian, he was a married man . . . I can tell you that.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Yes. High quality clothes, had a car . . . probably a hire car, it was the sort bought in large numbers by fleet operators. He hung around for a couple of weeks, so he must have stayed somewhere local and he didn’t look like the youth hostel type. He wasn’t frightened of being seen, that was something else about him, just standing there, as though he possibly even wanted to be seen.’

  ‘Intimidating? Would you say it was an intimidating gesture on his part?’

  Tinsley pursed his lips, ‘Yes . . . yes, I dare say that you could say that. Intimidating.’

  ‘But you never spoke to him?’

  ‘No. Drove past him so got a closer look . . . then later I saw him in the village once or twice . . . heard about him from the boys in The Hunter’s Moon. I’d try there if I was you.’

  ‘I think we will. Thank you . . . that’s very helpful.’

  ‘You might have to knock on the door.’

  ‘At this hour!’ Yellich grinned. ‘He’ll have been open since eleven a.m.’

  ‘He would if he was in the centre of York, but these are getting to be hard times, pubs in the country can’t pay if they open each day all day. Sometimes it’s weekend trade only . . . especially lately.’

  ‘I see,’ Yellich nodded his head slowly. ‘Well, thanks anyway. Enjoy your fire.’

  George Hennessey once again read the inscription beneath the names on the war memorial inside the doors of the central post office in York, ‘Pass friend, all’s well’, as he exited the building, and was once again moved by it. He stepped out into a mist-laden street and strolled along Stonegate to the Minster where he saw the tops of all three square towers were hidden from view, and the building itself seemed, in the diminishing light, to have taken on an eerie and foreboding presence. Foot traffic was light and seemed to Hennessey to be local people in the main, hurrying about their business, with just one or two very evident tourists staring in awe at the Minster, or in fascination at the Roman remains, or at the ancient buildings close by.

  In the shadow of the Minster two women played musical instruments for passing change. The first woman was in her early twenties, tall, slender, wearing expensive looking footwear and equally expensive looking outer clothing. She played a violin and to Hennessey’s ear did so impressively well. She had, Hennessey observed, been blessed with classical good looks and her blonde hair draped over her shoulders which moved slightly from side to side as her slender and nimble fingers danced along the neck of the violin and her other hand gently held the bow which she moved lightly, but at speed, across the strings. She was, by her countenance, utterly focused. The black bowler hat at her feet was, Hennessey noted, understandably full of coins and even one or two five pound notes. The second woman sat a few feet behind the violinist, in the doorway of a temporarily vacant shop unit. She huddled in a blanket and picked out ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music on a cheap tin whistle. The plastic cup in front of her contained few, very few, low denomination coins. Her demeanour was, assessed Hennessey, one of detachment. She played mechanically, he thought, but her mind was elsewhere. His urge was to place an appreciative coin or two in the bowler hat but he paused as he pondered the clear privilege of birth of the violinist. She seemed to him to be the product of an expensive education and certainly was busking to ease the financial burden of her university course, and York University, at that; one of England’s finest. Her clothing, her violin, the music stand, even the bowler hat on the paving stones at her feet all spoke of wealth. Hennessey found himself becoming intrigued by the drawn and haggard-faced tin whistle player and so he walked towards her and dropped a pound coin in her plastic cup. The woman’s eyes widened at his generosity and she looked up at him as if to say ‘Thank you’, to which Hennessey said, ‘Let me buy you a coffee.’

  The woman stopped playing. ‘A coffee?’

  ‘I could run to a late lunch. When did you last eat?’

  ‘Two days ago . . . and not much then . . . a cup of soup and some bread.’

  ‘Let’s get some hot food inside you. I think we’d better.’

  ‘Would you?’ she gasped her reply.

  ‘Yes, I would. You can leave your blanket here. If you fold it neatly no one will take it away.’

  The woman, who seemed to Hennessey to be in her mid to late thirties, struggled awkwardly to her feet, out of the blanket. She was dressed in damp looking denim with a red corduroy shirt and inexpensive looking and well worn running shoes.

  Hennessey took her to a nearby cafe and they sat at the window seat. The woman received a hostile look from the middle-aged waitress, which Hennessey noticed, and he replied to it with an angry glare which forced the waitress into a hasty retreat. She sent another waitress to take Hennessey’s order. ‘So,’ Hennessey said, ‘tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Where do I begin?’

  ‘Your name might be a good place.’

  ‘You sound like a cop.’

  ‘That’s probably because I am a cop.’

  ‘I thought you were.’

  ‘It’s written on my forehead, I know.’

  The woman smiled softly. ‘I have nothing to hide.’

  ‘I didn’t think you had.’

  ‘So why the meal?’

  ‘You are helping yourself. I am impressed. I respect that.’

  ‘Thanks, but I am not very good. I needed to play “three identifiable tunes”, that’s the rule . . . in order to get my street entertainer’s licence. I found the whistle in a charity shop for a few pence and learned to play ‘Edelweiss’, ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ and ‘Three Blind Mice’ . . . we had lessons on a recorder when I was at secondary school. It was good enough, just good enough to get my licence . . . so I play the three tunes over and over again and bank on the assumption that no one will walk past me twice so no one will hear the same tune from me twice.’

  ‘But good for you . . .’

  The conversation paused as the waitress brought two platefuls of shepherd’s pie and chips with a pot of tea for two.

  ‘Well, I tried to sell the flesh but I wasn’t very good at it . . . couldn’t go through with it.’

  ‘Good,’ Hennessey smiled, ‘I’m pleased you avoided that . . . never leads a girl anywhere but trouble.’

  ‘Hardly a girl, I was thirty-six when I tried it.’

  ‘Even so . . . anyway, you still haven’t told me your name.’

  ‘Tilly Pakenham.’