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 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
