The Cuckoo's Child

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Didn’t strike me as that sort. To change his mind easily, I mean.’

  ‘We can but try.’

  The town was oddly quiet without the ever-present throb of machinery, the familiar grind of iron-rimmed cartwheels and the clatter of clogs on setts. Best boots and suits were the order of the day, for those who possessed them, Sunday clothes and Sunday school for the children. The streets had been cleared of Saturday night revelry, and the market place of the rubbish left behind yesterday, with only the hint of camphor from the stalls’ naphtha lamps lingering. Along Briggate, the strains of a rousing Methodist hymn issued from the chapel on the corner, and from the Temperance Hall came the mellow notes of the Wainthorpe brass band, practising for its first open air concert of the season in the park.

  Matthew Pike lived-in with Dr Widdop as his assistant, and Widdop’s house was situated on that side of the valley which faced Cross Ings Mill. A gleaming, dark red motor car stood outside the front door, and a notice directed patients to the surgery round the side of the house. Womersley ignored this and rang the brightly polished brass front door bell. A woman in a crossover pinafore, with iron-grey hair pulled back into a bun, answered the door. This must be the redoubtable housekeeper Sergeant Binns had warned them about. ‘Don’t take any old buck from Ada Crawshaw,’ he’d advised. ‘She’s an old maid, with a face like a wet weekend, but her bark’s worse than her bite. She’s looked after Dr Widdop champion since his wife died two year back.’

  She seemed to take great pleasure in informing them Dr Pike was not available, that he’d been called out. After which, she made to close the door.

  Anticipating this, Womersley already had a hand out to hold it open. ‘Dr Widdop, then?’

  ‘Don’t you know what day it is? Only day he’s allowed a few hours off? We don’t keep surgery hours on a Sunday, only emergencies.’

  Womersley replied that it was an emergency, and showed his card. She sniffed when she saw they were policemen, but after a minute gave in and reluctantly told them she would see if Dr Widdop would spare them a few minutes, though she left them on the doorstep, closing the door with a firmness just short of a bang, and giving the impression they shouldn’t hold out much hope.

  Rawlinson’s eyes travelled enviously over the polished vehicle at the foot of the steps while they were waiting. ‘A de Dion-Bouton,’ he said with awe. ‘I hear tell that one of these days every Force in the country’s going to have motors – not like this, of course, but still—’

  ‘One of these days pigs might fly. If transport’s what you’re after, you’d best go back to being a PC,’ Womersley said testily. ‘They’ll give you a pushbike.’

  Rawlinson accepted the rebuke without comment. The old man’s dyspepsia was obviously bothering him again.

  The housekeeper came back. ‘All right, he’ll see you. He’s in the surgery, you’d best come through this way. Wipe your feet.’

  The surgery was built on to the side of the house, with a corner of it partitioned off as a place where the doctors dispensed their medicines, revealing through the glass partition shelves stacked with jars and bottles of coloured liquids, powders and pills. There they found Widdop, rubbing calamine lotion on to his hands. ‘Physician, heal thyself,’ he remarked wryly, ‘only I can’t – nervous rash I get from time to time. Sorry, I can’t shake hands.’

  ‘Looks nasty,’ Womersley sympathized. The rash was also on his neck, above his collar, though not as red and raw-looking as it was on his hands. ‘What brings it on?’

  ‘Who’s to say? Overwork, sleepless nights? And one tends to worry about one’s patients . . . I lost one yesterday, father of a big family. Poor souls, what’s an itch compared with that?’ He looked down at his hands, where the lotion was drying chalkily. ‘And then again, when Ainsley Beaumont died, I lost a very good friend too,’ he said quietly. His face was momentarily drawn with grief but, professional that he was, he put it aside. ‘Which is why you are here, I suppose?’

  He waved vaguely towards the only other chair apart from his own desk chair, but Rawlinson’s long legs meant he could perch easily on the edge of the leather upholstered examination couch. He leaned against it and opened his notebook with a snap.

  The surgery did not match Dr Widdop himself, his elegant clothes, his cultivated vowels. He looked and sounded as though he ought to be in Harley Street rather than running a working class practice in a Yorkshire woollen town, in this tired looking room with its scuffed desk and the musty smells of medicine and disinfectant. But he was entitled to personal luxuries if he could afford them, and especially if he worked as hard as he was reputed to do. He had the sort of kindly and avuncular manner which invited confidences, and it struck Womersley that the shabbiness of the surgery might well be the result of a deliberate intention not to overawe or intimidate his patients.

  ‘I believe Mr Beaumont was also your patient, as well as being a friend?’

  ‘He was. Dr Pike informs me he’s told you about the tumour he had? Yes, well. He had been suffering from severe headaches for some time, though he’d neglected to come and see me for longer than he should have done.’

  ‘Dr Pike believes Mr Beaumont was murdered.’

  ‘So he does.’ Widdop looked at Womersley over the top of his spectacles. ‘Well, Matthew Pike’s a bright young feller, you know. For a southerner,’ he qualified, smiling at the mild jest. ‘And what do you think, Inspector?’

  ‘The pathologist’s first examination appears to back that up, so I see no reason to doubt it at this stage. I came here to see Dr Pike about one or two things, though I expect you can provide the answers just as well. But tell me, how was it possible Mr Beaumont could carry on with a tumour in his brain?’

  ‘Sheer willpower, for one thing – up to now. He refused to admit that’s what it was – insisted it was nothing more than bad headaches.’

  ‘How did he cope with the pain?’

  ‘Pills from me, plus aspirin, and quack remedies from the herbalist. Ate them all like dolly mixtures. I tried to get him to consider surgery, told him of the successes and advances with surgical techniques that are available nowadays, X-rays and so on, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He even waved away my suggestion of another opinion.’ He shrugged, looking troubled. ‘I told him he was a stubborn old fool, and he said he’d been told that often enough, but there were things he had to set right before he allowed himself to let go, as he put it. I suspect by that he meant satisfying himself that young Gideon would be able to carry on at the mill without him. He needn’t have worried. The boy’s a different cut of cloth to his father.’

  The housekeeper came in with a tray of coffee and banged it down. ‘We’ve only these few biscuits left,’ she announced, eyeing the two policemen as if they were there on purpose to eat the doctor out of house and home.

  ‘Never mind, I see you’ve given us a treat with your ginger snaps, Ada, so that’ll make up for it. Thank you very much.’

  She sniffed, but a rosy colour suffused her face, making her look quite human. ‘They’re right enough, I reckon.’ The door closed quite quietly after her.

  Widdop smiled. ‘She doesn’t mean anything. How do you take your coffee?’

  With plenty of milk and sugar was how Womersley, who rarely drank coffee and preferred tea, liked it. He waited until it was dispensed before he prompted, ‘What did you mean about Mr Beaumont’s son?’

  ‘Theo, oh yes, Theo. He died, still a young man, when his children were barely two years old. They’re twins, you know, Gideon and Una. It’s always a tragedy to lose a son, especially your only one, and one you expected to follow in your footsteps, even though Theo was a reluctant heir, as you might say. His mother was a Tyas, and so was he, through and through. She died when he was a child, but she lived long enough to have passed her own ideas on to him.’ Widdop leaned comfortably back. He didn’t appear to mind the interruption to his day of rest, indeed he seemed to welcome the chance for a bit of gossip, which was lucky – in Womers
ley’s experience casual gossip could often turn out to be more useful than answers to direct questions.

  ‘Theo was a likeable enough young chap,’ the doctor went on, ‘but when he grew up he made a fool of himself. Like his father, he married the wrong woman – though only because it was a case of having to.’

  ‘You’re saying Ainsley Beaumont’s marriage didn’t turn out well?’

  ‘It had been an understood thing that he was going to marry Sarah Illingworth, Sarah Hirst that was. They’d had some sort of a minor tiff and while he was still smarting, he met Charlotte Tyas, who made it plain she was very willing to marry him. It was a temptation, I suppose, one up on all his fellow millowners, going up in the world – the Tyas name and Tyas money. They were the aristocracy of the district, you know, and it blinded him so that he wasn’t as cautious as usual – nor as clever as he thought! He should have made certain of the money before he married her. Turned out her father was up to his ears in debt, so the boot was on the other foot. Ainsley bought Farr Clough House – which had been in the Tyas family for generations – from Sir Gideon, who went off with his wife to live in Scarborough on the proceeds.’

  ‘The woman Ainsley Beaumont was going to marry . . . Sarah Illingworth, I think you said? That would be Thomas Illingworth’s mother? Lives in the house by the mill?’

  ‘That’s right. After Ainsley left her for Charlotte, she eventually married Henry Illingworth.’ He paused and picked up a pipe, packed and lit it. ‘All water under the bridge. But then, what did Theo do but repeat his father’s mistake – only he married below rather than above himself, got one of the Wainthorpe lasses into trouble so he had to marry her; publican’s daughter from the Tyas Arms. Flighty young piece, Amelia was then. She’d have been a lot happier if she’d married Whiteley Hirst. He would have kept her feet on the ground.’

  ‘If that’s the manager at Cross Ings, we’ve met him.’

  ‘The same, Sarah’s brother. He was always after Amelia, still would be, if she’d give him the chance. But she was too dazzled by Theo. Big mistake on her part as well, to marry him; it left her like a fish out of water – neither one thing nor t’other. Some still say of her in Wainthorpe: “She’s nobbut Amelia Chadwick, what’s she got to be uppity about?” But she made the best of it – wouldn’t allow herself to be patronized by the Tyas set Theo mixed with, and managed to carve out for herself a respected position as Mrs Beaumont of Farr Clough, and I admire her for it. It means a great deal to her – at a cost. She was always highly strung and—’ He stopped abruptly. ‘I’m forgetting myself. Mrs Beaumont’s my patient, too, and I mustn’t talk about her.’

  ‘He died young, you said, her husband.’

  ‘Theo? Yes, lost his life in a terrible accident. A fire at Farr Clough, in the wing that he and Amelia lived in. He died saving his children.’

  Womersley waited for him to expound but Widdop, perhaps feeling he’d said too much, was not inclined to elaborate. Nothing he had so far heard had brought Womersley any nearer to answering the question of who might have disliked Ainsley Beaumont enough to attack him, and then tip him into the water, and Widdop was probably better able to give them that sort of information than Pike, a virtual newcomer to Wainthorpe, might have done, yet something told Womersley to call a halt. The doctor evidently enjoyed a certain amount of gossip, but he had also been a friend of the dead man, and maybe he’d only go so far.

  This did not seem to have occurred to Rawlinson. ‘What sort of a man was Mr Beaumont? Apart from being a successful businessman and a hard taskmaster?’

  Widdop lifted off his spectacles and steepled his chalky hands together while he thought for a minute. ‘Both of which he was. But anybody with influence has a responsibility to do things for the common good, however resented, even if it makes them unpopular, don’t you agree?’

  Womersley was not so sure that he did. He regarded it as a dangerous philosophy, to believe that the end always justified the means. ‘Such as what, exactly, Doctor?’

  Widdop smiled and shrugged, but his eyes were serious. ‘Well, he had no time for those he regarded as troublemakers, for instance. Certain folks tried to make him out as an unfeeling employer for this, which wasn’t true. He certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly, but there’s many in this town have reason to be grateful to him, though he never made a song and dance about what he did.’

  ‘Specifically?’

  Widdop picked up his pipe and tobacco pouch from the desk. ‘Oh, now, that’s not for me to say.’

  ‘Well, then, troublemakers, as you call them,’ Womersley prompted. It was Widdop who had broached this, after all. ‘Anybody especially who might have had it in for him?’

  ‘Again, not for me to say. But I’ll tell you one thing.’ He suddenly looked tired, and older. ‘My friend Ainsley had a bleak future to look forward to. Whoever killed him did him a favour.’

  The brisk climb up to Farr Clough House left Womersley with no breath for talking. If there was to be much of this sort of thing, in the absence of the sort of transport Rawlinson dreamed of, he’d have to see about hiring a pony-trap or something of the sort.

  He stood back and took stock of the house when they reached it. So this was the home of Ainsley Beaumont, and that blackened ruin the place where his son had lost his life. A tragedy now twenty years old, the doctor had said. Today it was tragedy of a different kind with which he had to face the family. ‘Come on,’ he grunted to Rawlinson, who could scarcely take his eyes off the ruin. ‘Let’s be having you, Jack. Get this lot over.’

  Gideon Beaumont, however, was still proving to be elusive. The request to see him elicited the answer from the buxom young woman in a starched apron who answered the door that he had gone out some time since.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘Dinner’s on the table at half past twelve.’ As if it were unthinkable that even the young master would dare to miss the appointed time for meals.

  ‘That’s not long to wait, then.’

  ‘That motor of his allowing.’ She had a strong, handsome face and a no nonsense air. ‘Miss Una’s in, though, and Mrs Beaumont.’

  ‘I’d rather wait to see Mr Beaumont, first.’ Womersley wanted to talk to them both, and to the servants, too, but rich aromas of roast meat were wafting through to where they stood on the step. He’d get no cooperation from anyone in the run up to serving the Sunday dinner. ‘Is there anywhere we can wait, Miss—?’

  ‘Jessie. Jessie Thwaite. You’d best come in.’

  She showed them into what was evidently a library, though not Womersley’s idea of what a library ought to be – they should have leather chairs drawn up to roaring fires, shaded lamps. This was a miserable room that wouldn’t encourage anyone to stay there and read. It looked as if there was some sort of clearing up job in progress. On most of the shelves the spines of the books were neatly lined up and seemed as though they might have received a recent polish, but more lay in dusty, untidy piles. Writing implements and folders containing papers were spread on the big table.

  He decided to give the heavy, uninviting armchair in front of the empty grate a miss. The other chairs were straight-backed, upholstered in some stiff, shiny black stuff with the horsehair emerging in places, and they looked hard, as he found they were indeed when he had drawn one to the window and lowered his comfortable frame. He popped in a mint and sat back, while Rawlinson, hands in pockets, bobbed about examining the books, grimacing. Apparently not to his taste. Womersley closed his eyes.

  Rawlinson found himself a chair at last, sat back with his legs stretched out, his hands stuck in his pockets. His position offered him a glimpse of that part of the house that was the ruined wing. There was a story there, about that fire, he was sure, a story behind the bare facts Doctor Widdop had been unwilling to go beyond. It had been a tragedy which was part of the background to Ainsley Beaumont’s life, and Rawlinson was determined to find out more about it. What he was, how he had acted, and why, must have contributed t
o the reason he was now dead by another’s hand. The old man’s death hadn’t come about arbitrarily, whatever Womersley might wish to think. The inspector professed himself not at all interested in the newfangled scientific tools which were being developed and used to solve crimes – he was barely convinced about fingerprints as evidence, for God’s sake! – much less in the psychology of criminology, the twists and turns of the human mind that caused one person to take the life of another. He was more at home with the sort of crime common in this neck of the woods: a fight between man and wife when one or other of them was hit with the poker or stabbed with the bread knife; or someone killed in a drunken brawl after a Saturday night booze-up, when bottles were thrown across the streets and anyone might get caught in the crossfire. Rough-houses like that were common enough, especially amongst the hard drinking Neller valley descendants of those fighting Irish who had come over the sea and provided labour to build the canals. All the same, he’d been a good copper in his day.

  The inspector sighed gustily, his chin sunk on his chest, his eyes closed. Rawlinson grinned affectionately and let him doze.

  Womersley, however, wasn’t asleep. He had the enviable facility of being able to close his eyes to his surroundings while sifting through his thoughts, without dropping off. Besides, the temperature of the room prevented any inclination to doze, not to mention the horsehair pricking him right through his trousers. After a while, some slight sound outside caused him to open his eyes just in time to see a young man, handsome in knickerbockers, tweed jacket and windblown hair, his cap in his hand, arriving by means of an agile leap over the garden wall. So it looked as though Gideon Beaumont hadn’t taken his car to get to wherever he’d been, after all. A strong, slim young man, his cheeks flushed with exercise, he came into the room a minute later.