Free Deliver Us from Evil by Peter Turnbull

these nights.’
    â€˜You don’t think this is cold, sir?’ Yellich felt the chill within the house reach his bones.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜No . . . not a visitor, no one called on her . . . but . . . since you mention it . . .’
    â€˜But?’ Yellich pressed.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Can you describe him for us now? Can you remember his appearance?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜A fur hat?’
    â€˜Yes. A man’s fur hat, like you see Russian soldiers wearing.’
    â€˜I know the type.’
    â€˜Light coloured. Not dark, so Arctic fox, not rabbit fur.’
    â€˜And not frightened of being seen?’
    â€˜No, he wasn’t, now you mention it. He did not seem to care if he