The Cuckoo's Child (25 page)

The next morning, after leaving a message for Womersley, he paid an emergency visit to the dentist to have the broken tooth attended to, and made a call on Mrs Brocklehurst to leave a bunch of flowers, much to her delight and embarrassment, and finally presented himself at the Wainthorpe police station.

‘Don't say anything,' he warned as he entered, bracing himself for the jokes – and for the rollicking which was to come. The black eye Widdop had predicted had certainly materialized. He looked like a gargoyle fallen off a church roof and it was probably destined to get worse, but much more than that he felt a right muff for having lost what a policeman should guard with his life – his warrant card and his notebook.

‘Good afternoon,' Womersley remarked. Rawlinson let the sarcasm slide over him, and Womersley wisely resisted any further comment, other than a raised eyebrow at the sight of his sergeant's picturesque face, watching with interest as Binns held out his hand towards the young man. In it was Rawlinson's wallet.

‘What—?'

The photograph, the card and the notebook were still inside, although the ten-shilling note had gone.

‘Found chucked over a garden wall. The money was the only thing he was after. Either he didn't look at owt else – or more likely couldn't read what it was, any road.'

He still had to run the gauntlet of laughs and ribald calls about his spectacular black eye thrown out by the overalled women and girl machine minders as, early next morning, he and Womersley walked through from the ferociously noisy carding room and into the relatively less clamorous combing department at Cross Ings Mill. Trying to ignore the women's jeers and keep his dignity, he nearly made things worse by almost measuring his length on a floor that was inches thick in grease. You could have scraped it up with a spoon, the smell of sheep was overpowering. He only righted himself in time by grabbing on to a skep full of huge bobbins of wool, which unfortunately was on wheels and began a slow slide away from him. But Womersley, pan-faced, was there to save him from disaster with a strong hand. Trying to ignore the laughter, his ears glowing, he followed in the inspector's wake.

By contrast, the warehouse on the second storey, busy as it was when they arrived, was a haven of quiet. Heavy bales of raw wool were being loaded through the hoist door from a wagon which stood in the yard below. Swinging through the air and into the big opening, they were grabbed by men ready to unhook and manhandle them on to trolleys, before wheeling them to the giant weigh-scales and then stacking them in their designated places.

George Quarmby was easily spotted. He was the one with the brown smock, the flat cap and the battery of pencils in his top pocket, noting into a small, thick, greasy book the weights as they were called out in hundredweights, quarters and pounds. He still looked dour, his black brows drawn together, but less furious than he had appeared when he had stormed out of Whiteley Hirst's office on Saturday morning. When he spotted the two policemen, he gave a short nod. ‘With you in a minute or two.' Almost as he spoke, the mill engine was shut off. It was time for breakfast.

In the sudden quiet a lad arrived, staggering under the weight of a trayful of steaming pint pots of tea; men began to look around for a place to perch and Quarmby licked his pencil and wrote the last figures in his book. By this time Arnold, the lad from the office, he of the ginger hair, had also appeared and was standing aimlessly by, waiting for the books. Quarmby said sharply as he handed them over, ‘We're running a bit late, but tell Edwin Porteous I want ‘em back here by nine sharp, think on! Go on, frame thissen!'

The boy escaped, presumably for the figures to be transferred into office ledgers, and Quarmby beckoned Womersley and Rawlinson to follow him into his tiny, glassed-in cubicle, containing a high stool and a shelf, a big clock on the wall behind, and nothing else. Quarmby perched on the stool and unwrapped a bacon sandwich from a red-spotted handkerchief, shook some sugar from a small tin into his tea and stirred it with the pencil from behind his ear. ‘All right. Twenty-five minutes afore we start up again. What is it you're after?'

‘A few questions about the day Mr Beaumont died, that's all, Mr Quarmby.'

‘Oh, and why me?'

‘Why not? We'll be talking to a lot more before we've done.' Likely everybody in the mill, even the town, Womersley thought gloomily, seeing the unhappy task stretching before them.

‘Seeing as how he's been murdered, you mean?'

‘Who told you that?' Rawlinson asked.

‘No need to look so capped. Word gets round. But don't come looking at me.'

‘You were having a bit of an argument with Mr Hirst when we saw you last,' Womersley reminded him.

‘It's my job to have arguments with the bosses. It weren't the first and I doubt it'll be the last.' It looked as though he'd lost his taste for his sandwich. He threw them a sardonic look and folded up what was left of it into the red handkerchief.

‘You're strong in the Trades Union, shop steward, they tell me, Mr Quarmby.'

‘Do they? They'll have been telling you I'm a Labour councillor an' all, I don't doubt.'

‘Very commendable.'

Quarmby gave him a sardonic look. ‘I've had seven bairns with bellies to fill on subsistence wages. They're all grown up now, but I haven't forgotten what it were like. Bad old days, and not over yet by a long chalk. Them as owns the mills reckon they have their own troubles, but it's all relative.' He drained the pint pot in one long swallow. ‘Look, as far as it goes, Ainsley Beaumont weren't so bad. But they're all tarred with t'same brush, t'bosses. They're not in it for love, they're in it for what they can get out on it . . . more brass and t'biggest mill in t'Neller valley. Young ‘un up yonder,' he added, jerking his head in the direction of Farr Clough, high above the mill, ‘he'll be just as bad, now he's got some clout.'

Womersley took most of this with a large pinch of salt. Though it was an undeniable fact that there were millowners in the Neller valley – as elsewhere – who were regular tyrants, it would be ridiculous to believe that every one of them ground the faces of the poor – Womersley hadn't forgotten the plans for the row of houses in Ainsley Beaumont's desk, the deeds to the small tobacconist which provided Walter Thwaite with employment and income. He knew that most of the owners genuinely believed they treated their workers fairly, while they themselves acted within their own lights and worked hard, finding work to keep the mill going, often risking considerable amounts of their own money. They paid statutory wages, and did not lay workers off unnecessarily, but they one and all abhorred strikes and those who instigated them. They were wary, and with good cause, of the Trades Unions and men like Quarmby, with a chip the size of a tree trunk on his shoulder.

‘What time do you start work, Mr Quarmby?'

‘Half six, same as everybody else.'

‘Where do you live?'

‘Hanson's Fold, Bottom End, but I don't come in anent the dam, so I didn't see owt, if that's what you mean. You can look at my time sheet if you don't believe me, but any road, young Gideon'll tell you what time I came in. He got here same time as I did. His granddad were as keen on him keeping time as the rest on us. Lad only just made it afore th'engine started.'

‘It was Mr Beaumont's habit to stand in the yard as everybody arrived, wasn't it?'

‘Aye, to notice latecomers and see t'gate locked. After that you don't get in till after breakfast and lose a couple of hours. Once late and he had you in his sights.'

‘But not that morning?'

‘I don't reckon so.'

Womersley did not dismiss the idea that if Quarmby had believed anything warranted killing his employer, he would not have hesitated. On the other hand, although he swore he had not come to work via the path beside the dam that day, a lie cost nothing. A dour little man, small as a bantam cock, with bitter brown eyes, he was wiry and muscular, despite his small size. He was a warehouseman, accustomed all his life to manhandling heavy wool bales. He would have the strength to heave a man bigger than he over a wall and into the water, easily. But Womersley was inclined to believe what the man said about his relations with the management. He might have unresolved grudges, but killing his boss would have gained him nothing.

Quarmby was looking at them from under his beetling brows as if deciding whether to say more. At last he said, ‘Any road, I owed Ainsley Beaumont summat, never mind what differences we had. One of my lasses, my youngest, our Alice, were taken bad here, about six months since. Collapsed in front of her machine. He happened to be there and if it hadn't been for him getting her into the office right sharp – he carried her in hisself, and used his telephone to get the doctor – I reckon she wouldn't be here now.' His hand, where it rested on the scarred shelf, was bunched into a tight fist.

‘Go on, Mr Quarmby.”

‘He even helped one of the women tend her, and it were all over bar t'shouting by the time Dr Widdop got there. Doctors! You'd like to think they'd be used to a drop of blood, but he weren't. It right sickened him.'

He wasn't sickened over mine, Rawlinson thought, and it was more than a drop.

‘Well, right enough, but even doctors can be upset.' Womersley recalled the nervous rash on Widdop's hands. ‘Was it an accident with one of the machines?'

The engine started again. Quarmby slid from his stool and picked up his empty pint pot. ‘No,' he said. ‘She were pregnant. She were sixteen, and the lad responsible had tekken his hook and buggered off, so it were just as well she lost the bairn, weren't it?'

‘Well, Jack, what do you make of that?' They were standing in the mill yard, at the point where the path that ran alongside the dam joined the canal towpath.

Rawlinson had no time to answer. ‘Inspector!'

They turned to see Porteous, the clerk from the office, puffing towards them. For a fat man, he moved fast. Even so, he was not one made for exertion and by the time he reached them he was panting hard. ‘They're saying Mr Beaumont was murdered. Attacked. Is that true?' he said when he could manage it.

‘It looks as though he was attacked, yes.'

Porteous nodded sagely. Womersley waited. ‘Mr Porteous, is there something you want to tell us?'

Breathing more easily now, he said, ‘Aye, there is something you might like to know. That morning, the morning he was killed, I nipped out for a smoke. All right, I shouldn't have done, but we're not allowed to smoke anywhere in the mill, it's too dangerous with all that grease – careless match or fag-end and it'd go up like Bonfire Night. As a matter of fact, we're not supposed to smoke anywhere on the premises, but Mr Hirst had gone across to the bank, so I, well . . . I just nipped out to snatch a minute or two, like.'

‘And?'

‘I walked down here, towards the canal, where we are now, and I saw him.'

‘Who?'

‘The boss.'

‘Mr Hirst?'

‘No, no, the master, Mr Beaumont.'

He had their attention now. ‘Half past ten? He was dead by then,' Rawlinson said.

Porteous shook his head. ‘You're wrong there. He was still very much alive, on the far side, over yonder, in the park.' He pointed across the river. ‘With somebody else.'

‘Are you sure of this? At half past ten?'

‘Near enough.' Porteous began to pat his pockets, looking as though he was about to produce an illicit cigarette now. He restrained himself and added that yes, he was absolutely sure, even at that distance, that it was Mr Beaumont he had seen.

A man of keen sight, Edwin Porteous. Womersley and Rawlinson had both turned towards the municipal park, where it sloped upwards from the valley, the same park Rawlinson had walked through the previous night. The distance was not all that far, but Womersley doubted whether you would be able to distinguish anyone's features clearly enough to swear who it was from here. But Porteous was adamant that it was Ainsley Beaumont he had seen.

‘And the person with him?'

He was more evasive on that point. It had been a man, that was all he could say, a big man though, somewhere about the build of . . . Mr Hirst, say.

Womersley looked at him. ‘Are you saying it
was
Mr Hirst?'

‘Oh no, I couldn't be sure of that. Anyway, he was at the bank, wasn't he? He didn't get back until well after eleven.'

‘Well, thank you, Mr Porteous.'

Porteous's big doughy face was full of spite as he turned to go. ‘I'm right, you know.'

Womersley watched him waddle away. He did not take to Edwin Porteous. He did not like the heavy-handed hints about Whiteley Hirst. If the man had been so sure it was Ainsley Beaumont he'd seen, why hadn't he been as certain about the person he was with? But if his statement was true, about Ainsley at least, then it meant that the master of Cross Ings had not, after all, died shortly after leaving Walter Thwaite's shop. So where
had
he been between then and the time when Porteous claimed to have seen him? The park was not an inviting place to hang around in on a bleak and workaday morning. Unless you had an appointment with someone that you didn't wish to make too public.

‘If this is right, we shall have to start looking at things in reverse. We've been concentrating on who could have followed him from the Syke Beck Lane end – or met him coming the other way. Now we have to think t'other way round. Seems more likely now that it's him that would have come in at the far end, the Moortop Road end.'

‘And the person he was talking to in the park followed him.'