The Cuckoo's Child

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Let’s say about starting time, then, to be going on with. Wouldn’t there have been folk around?’

  ‘Not a lot use this way to get to the mill,’ Binns said. ‘They’re supposed to go in through the main gates to clock in at the time office, and any road, it’s gainer for most folks to use t’other way.’

  ‘So if it was quiet, you’d think he’d be aware of anybody looking for trouble.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Pike said, ‘he was very hard of hearing. He wouldn’t have heard.’

  Womersley thought about this for a while. ‘For anybody knowing that, then, it would have been easy to come up behind him, bash him over the head, lean him against the wall and tip him in.’ He pointed to a scrape that a steel-tipped boot heel might have made on one of the dam wall’s coping stones. ‘And look here.’ He pointed to black splotches on the wall, near the nettles sprouting at its base. ‘Blood, Doctor?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘We’ll need a search team. Where’s Rawlinson got to?’

  ‘He’s coming,’ said Binns.

  Detective Sergeant Jack Rawlinson, Womersley’s assistant, who had been sent into the mill office to make sure Mr Gideon Beaumont would be available to see them when they were finished here, loped around the corner and reported that Mr Gideon had already left. Whiteley Hirst, the office manager, would wait to see them, however.

  Rawlinson was young, and keen, and hoped to step into Womersley’s shoes when he retired. Womersley hoped so, too, and meant to help him on his way as much as he could. It was a promise he’d made to himself, though the lad’s enthusiasm for what he called ‘advanced’ police methods sorely tried his patience at times. He was a tall, gangling fellow with bony hands and feet, and stubbly, spiky light hair that wouldn’t be kept smooth no matter how much brilliantine he used. Despite this, he was something of a dandy – snappy suit, high collar, handkerchief in his top pocket. He was bright eyed and smart, young for the hoped-for inspector’s job, but despite his background he had a grammar school education behind him, plus intelligence, and was full of a nervous energy that admittedly sometimes got on Womersley’s nerves. The lad was never still. Even while he was listening as Womersley summed up for him what they had been discussing, he was bouncing up and down on his toes like a boxer, his eyes were roaming around the scene, and he could hardly wait until his inspector had finished before pointing a yard or two back along the path, to a depression in the trodden black beaten earth. ‘Looks to me like a rock was in that hole not so long since.’

  It was a jagged but clean-edged impression, as if a sizeable stone had been embedded in the dense, heavy soil and had only recently been prised out. ‘Could a stone that shape have fitted the wound in his head, Doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Possibly. Very possibly. More than likely, I’d say.’

  ‘We could get a plaster cast, Mr Womersley – that hole’s a perfect mould.’

  ‘Aye, I reckon it is, but we’ll need a bit more than that. Like the rock itself. And if he was hit with it, likely it’ll be down on the bottom of the dam along with a hundred or two others.’ They hadn’t been looking for a weapon, of course, but Womersley was mildly annoyed that he’d failed to spot what now seemed patently obvious. ‘But all right, lad, a plaster cast’s the next best thing.’ He nodded to the sergeant. ‘Get it seen to.’

  Rawlinson looked highly pleased with himself and Pike said unexpectedly, ‘They only had to wait, you know – whoever it was did this thing. He would probably have been dead anyway within the next six months. He had a brain tumour.’

  Womersley stared. ‘Is that right?’

  Rawlinson said, ‘Well, maybe they couldn’t wait that long.’

  ‘All the same. Hardly seems fair, poor devil.’

  Womersley looked at the sky and then at his watch. It was a dark, overcast day with no hint of sun. The valley seemed to have closed in on itself. A breeze ruffled the surface of the oily water and the smoke pall over the town seemed heavier than ever. ‘It’ll be dinnertime soon and they’ll be knocking off. We’d best go and see this Mr Whiteley Hirst, Rawlinson.’

  He walked back along the path, followed single file by the others, and once in the mill yard, they separated, the doctor and Sergeant Binns heading towards the town, while Womersley and Rawlinson walked towards the mill.

  ‘Before we go in,’ Rawlinson said, ‘especially in view of what we’ve just heard, I should tell you there was a dust-up in the office about a week back, a big row between Whiteley Hirst, Ainsley Beaumont and his grandson, Gideon – and a chap called Tom Illingworth that lives in yon house over there with his mother.’

  ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘Chief clerk, name of Edwin Porteous. He followed me out of the office and told me.’

  Womersley raised his eyebrows. ‘Now why should he bother to do that?’

  ‘Just what I asked myself,’ said Rawlinson.

  Seven

  Gideon and his sister had taken uneasy possession of the small formal parlour by the front door, rarely used except for company. They sat, unusually silent, as if that would allow them to believe the blow they’d received and still couldn’t credit. It was an obvious relief to both when they heard Jessie Thwaite answering the front door, and then the murmur of a voice they recognized as that of Tom Illingworth.

  Tom would know what to do. Ever since he’d taught Gideon to ride his first grown-up bicycle when he was ten, Gideon had looked up to him as the elder brother he had never had, and often sought his advice. Once, he had thought he might become more than brother, when Grandpa had decided he ought to marry Una. However, Tom’s patent lack of interest apart, Una had soon put a stop to that. She might look as fragile as one of the harebells on the moor, but she was tough, knew her own mind and had other ideas. Despite everything else he was feeling, there flashed across Gideon’s mind the question: what of those other plans of hers, now?

  Tom came into the room, asking, ‘What’s the matter with Jessie?’ As well he might, having seen the maid with her lips pressed tight together, her cheerfulness gone.

  He looked around the room, mystified. Una was sitting bolt upright, as if she were frozen into the position. Gideon was standing with his back to the fire, one hand shoved into his pocket. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘You haven’t heard, then? The accident, down at the mill?’

  ‘Accident, what accident? I’ve been in London for a few days and only just got back.’

  ‘Your mother hasn’t told you, then?’

  ‘She’s out. I didn’t wait to see her, I came straight up here. It’s not – it’s not my uncle – not Whiteley, is it?’

  ‘It’s not Whiteley Hirst, Tom, it’s Grandpa. He’s had an accident. He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘They found him floating in the dam, drowned, about dinner time yesterday.’

  ‘Good God. In the dam? I don’t understand.’

  ‘No one does,’ Gideon said tiredly. ‘They think he must have fallen in.’

  ‘What?’ Ainsley Beaumont had walked past the dam every day of his life since he was thirteen, and probably before that he had been one of the little daredevils who had balanced along the top of its wall. An accident was surely an impossibility. Even had he tripped on the path, it was unlikely he could have tumbled over the three foot wall which surrounded the dam.

  Gideon was looking like a lost, hurt and bewildered schoolboy, the confidence knocked out of him. The rudder had gone from his ship and he was off course. ‘What now?’ he asked in a dazed manner. ‘What do we do? Where do we start?’

  Tom clasped his shoulder. ‘One thing at a time. Just tell me, what happened?’

  ‘He left home for the mill as usual, but never arrived. They say he fell into the dam. I’d been in Leeds all day – to see Greenbaum’s about half a dozen pieces they claim were not up to snuff, which is a damn lie, of course, and I . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘I didn’t get back until mid-afternoon, after they’d found him.�
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  ‘Does Miss Harcourt know?’ Tom asked, surprisingly.

  Gideon exchanged a look with his sister, as if wondering for a moment who Miss Harcourt was. ‘Laura? Well, of course. Oh, here she is.’

  For a while Laura hesitated in the doorway. ‘I came to see if you wanted some tea.’

  Una shook her head. ‘Please come in, Laura.’

  Laura went to sit beside her and touched one of the cold hands, though she felt little warmer, herself. The news had shocked her. She had been here little over a week and scarcely more than met Ainsley Beaumont. Once or twice he had looked into the library and pronounced what she was doing as ‘champion’, but for most of the previous week he had been in London for something they called the wool sales. She was not even certain whether she had liked him or not, but in the face of such tragedy what did that count?

  Although the dusk was falling rapidly outside and the claustrophobic room felt to be closing in on them, no one had thought to light the lamps. Tom saw to them now and as the light bloomed, there was the sound of an engine, and on to the flags outside the house a motorcar drew up, a rather splendid vehicle from which a bulky figure emerged, goggled, capped and voluminously overcoated. A few moments later the family doctor, Dr Widdop, came in, bringing with him an unmistakable air of reassurance and solidity. Una’s face seemed to unfreeze a little and Gideon almost imperceptibly squared his shoulders.

  Having been divested of his protective gear in the hall, the doctor looked less bulky, though he was still an impressive and prosperous-looking figure in a good suit, the cloth of which might have been woven in Wainthorpe, but had certainly not been tailored there. His boots had that perfectly fitting, handmade look, and he wore a gold ring. He had a wise, worldly face.

  Nathan Widdop had in fact been born into a wealthy family of Neller valley textile machinery manufacturers, but having no interest in engineering, he had trained as a doctor, set up his practice in Wainthorpe and married the district nurse. When his father died he had sold his share of the business to his two brothers and continued to live among the local inhabitants, working harder, with longer hours, if the truth be told, than most of them. He had never, however, seen the necessity to divest himself of what he regarded as the small comforts of life, and though his native accent had been almost lost somewhere in the hospital corridors and medical schools where he’d received his training, and his clothes and his car were objects of ironic amusement to his patients, he remained a well liked, even loved, family doctor. He often gave untenable advice, but he didn’t press for his bills, and it was not unknown for a load of coal to be delivered when children were ill, or a few shillings to be left on the kitchen table for a needy family after one of his visits. Between them, he and his wife had brought into the world most of Wainthorpe’s babies, including Gideon and Una.

  ‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.’ He shook hands with Tom, and with Laura when introduced, giving her a shrewd look, then bent to kiss Una and put an arm around her shoulder. She shrank a little, as she was apt to do from bodily contact, but allowed his hand to remain. ‘My dear, this is a bad business, a bad business.’ He looked tired and uneasy. He had spent the night before last attending to a woman enduring a long and difficult labour in one of the poorer houses in the rabbit warren of narrow streets, yards and alleys at the end of the town, and then last night he had again been called out at midnight to the lingering deathbed of an eighteen-year-old lad suffering from TB. Conscious all the time of the abominable death of his old friend.

  ‘How could such a thing have happened, Dr Widdop?’ Gideon asked.

  The doctor looked from Gideon to his sister, ran his finger round his collar, where a faint rash showed, and rubbed at a similar patch on the back of his hand. ‘I think we should all sit down. There is something I have to say, which may . . . where’s your mother, Gideon?’

  ‘Upstairs. She’s been very upset since we heard – you know how she is – but Una’s persuaded her to lie down.’

  ‘Then we won’t disturb her. I’ll go up and see her later.’ They exchanged a long look and a nod. The doctor looked again around the circle of bewildered faces. ‘Do you have any brandy?’

  Gideon waved towards glasses and a decanter on the sideboard.

  ‘For all of us, then.’

  ‘I don’t want any brandy,’ Una said, with a shudder.

  ‘You need it, however. Shall we sit?’

  They waited uneasily until Gideon, glad of something to occupy himself with, had poured and dispensed the drinks and they had all taken their first sip – apart from Una, who drank hers off as if it were medicine. He then told them in a few short words that Ainsley had been seen by him in a professional capacity six months ago, that eventually a brain tumour had been diagnosed, and he had been told he did not have more than a possible six months to live.

  The silence when he had finished could have been cut with a knife. ‘But he told no one,’ Una whispered at last. ‘He didn’t seem ill. How could he have kept such a thing to himself?’ The brandy which she’d drunk too quickly had brought two spots of hectic colour to her pale cheeks and her eyes were over-bright.

  ‘That was what he wanted. No fuss. And perhaps in the end he found his own way of going.’

  With a sharp tap that was almost a bang, Gideon put the glass, which he had scarcely touched, on to the polished table by his chair. He stared at the doctor. ‘You are not saying what I think – that he did this thing deliberately?’

  Widdop said bleakly, ‘Gideon, he didn’t have much to look forward to. You know your grandfather and I, friends that we were, didn’t always see eye to eye, but I have to say that in this he may have had a point.’

  ‘What point? What point could there be in something so – so crass as that?’ He fell into a furious silence but brought out at last, in a sudden rush of anger, ‘Well, if it’s true what you say about a brain tumour, it could explain why he’s been acting in such a deuced peculiar way lately. But to drown himself . . . No! I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it. You know as well as anyone he was one to face up to things. He didn’t know the meaning of fear, and he would never have taken the coward’s way out. I don’t think the idea would even have occurred to him.’

  ‘None of us know how we would react to that kind of thing until it happens,’ Widdop said with weary experience.

  ‘He was an old man,’ Gideon went on as if the doctor hadn’t spoken, ‘and if he was as ill as you say, might he not have taken a sudden turn for the worse when he was walking along the dam-side, perhaps leaned against the wall for support, lost himself and toppled forward into the water?’ He was clutching at straws, but then he stopped. How likely was it that an old man like Ainsley, sick into the bargain, could have managed this acrobatic feat?

  Unexpectedly, Una put in her support. ‘Throwing himself into that filthy dam? Not Grandpa, not in a month of Sundays.’ She exchanged a look with Gideon. ‘My brother is right.’

  ‘Of course I am. For one thing, if he’d wanted to do such a thing deliberately, he would have stuffed his pockets with stones or something, to make certain, like that woman did last year, when she threw herself into the canal. I don’t care how unlikely it seems, an accident’s the only explanation.’

  The doctor said quietly, ‘It’s possible, you know, that he chose to take his life in a moment of aberration, or despair, not allowing himself time to think. However, accident or suicide, we shall have to wait for the autopsy.’

  ‘Autopsy?’ Una looked slightly sick.

  ‘A post-mortem. I’m afraid the coroner . . . in such cases . . .’ He paused. There seemed to be something else he was reluctant to say. But he remained silent and after a moment he rose stiffly. ‘I must see your mother before I go. Stay where you are, I know her room.’

  Eight

  The Cross Ings offices were squeezed into a corner of the main building and entered through a small lobby, off which opened a further two doors. From behind the larger came th
e busy clatter of the mill machinery. In the opposite door was a flap marked ‘Enquiries’. Rawlinson gave it a smart rat-tat, and after a moment it shot up and the head of a scrubby-haired adolescent lad with a pimply face appeared like a jack-in-the-box. ‘Morning. Oh, it’s you again!’

  ‘Tell Mr Hirst we want to see him, lad,’ said Rawlinson severely. The flap was shut; a minute later it opened again and they were told to come into what was evidently the general office.

  In a very small space was a little table with a typewriting machine standing on it and a chair in front, two large cupboards and a shelf on which was ranged a row of books, all of this leaving very little room even for the occupants to move around. At present, the clerks were seated on tall padded stools fitted with backrests at a high, sloping desk that stretched from wall to wall beneath a big window offering a view of a road winding up on the opposite hill towards the moors. It was a pleasantly wooded prospect in which several largish villas could be discerned; it was obviously the best side of the town, where many of the mill masters and other notables presumably lived, with the view of it unimpeded from this vantage point by any mill chimneys. It appealed to Womersley’s sardonic sense of humour to think its own view would necessarily overlook the town itself and the grimy Neller valley, though perhaps the satisfaction of knowing it was all theirs made up for this.

  In the office, an elderly man seated at one end of the desk was rolling an old-fashioned, round ebony ruler, rather like a piece of broomstick handle, down the columns in a ledger, then ruling them off in red ink, and didn’t bother to raise his head. The boy stood in the middle of the room, staring at them. The third occupant, a rotund man with curly black hair, probably in his forties, wearing a navy-blue serge suit, shiny at the seat and elbows, was busying himself at one of the cupboards. ‘Mr Hirst?’ said Womersley, extending a hand before he saw the man was grasping a hefty ledger marked ‘Daybook’ and was unable to respond.