Read Online Deliver Us from Evil by Peter Turnbull - Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜Mrs Hemmings . . . or Julia . . .’ Yellich pulled the conversation back on track, ‘the Canadian lady . . .’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Congratulations,’ Yellich smiled.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜No, thanks,’ Yellich said.
    Webster also politely declined.
    â€˜She spent most of her life in Barrie . . . so she told me.’
    â€˜Barrie?’
    â€˜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,