Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  “You realize you haven’t paid yet . . . sir?”

  That hurdle negotiated, Cosmo Horrocks went back to his seat, with a small part of his brain still fuming at the catering service, but the larger part full of satisfaction at a trail well started. He now had not just the two original names—Leary and Father Pardoe—but in addition, Derek, Julie Norris, and Mary, all down in his invaluable notebook, as well as St. Catherine’s. Father Pardoe was the vital one. Cosmo had Catholic contacts whom he could consult about this parish, so he wouldn’t have to go through the Leeds diocesan authorities. Once the parish had been identified, the name Julie Norris would be crucial. He had started by thinking that this was going to be a “Vicar elopes with cleaning lady” story, but in fact it was even better: Vows of chastity besmirched; a randy bimbo who could be portrayed as a cruelly wronged ingenue if necessary; and a financial angle to boot. A story like this could make his year.

  Cosmo Horrocks was never happy, did not have the innocence or optimism that such an uncomplicated emotion demanded. But as he sat back, eyes closed, for the rest of his journey to Leeds, he felt relish, anticipation, tinglings of excitement—all the familiar emotions of a born muckraker.

  CHAPTER 2

  Old Hand and New Hand

  Cosmo Horrocks sat at his desk in the newsroom of the West Yorkshire Chronicle meditating mischief. In his hand was the first draft of a story by one of the paper’s new recruits. That was merely an hors d’oeuvre: it would be so easy to savage it was hardly worth his while. No cub reporter had ever had a kind word from Horrocks, and this one had committed the additional sin of being a university graduate. Child’s play. But simultaneously he was meditating his next move in what had begun to be called in his mind the Priest and the Bimbo story. First identification, then establishment of basic facts, then stirring it. Cosmo’s ideal story was one in which the very newspaper coverage became part of the story. He was pretty sure this would be the case with the Priest and the Bimbo investigation.

  Terry Beale, twenty-two and looking nineteen, left his nook in the darkest and least salubrious part of the newsroom and came toward Cosmo’s desk for his verdict on his story with no expectation or anticipation on his face. Terry was bright, ambitious, and he knew his man: Cosmo boosted his own ego by being contemptuous of everyone around him.

  “This headline you suggest,” said Cosmo by way of opening the skirmish, tapping Terry’s printout with a long, bony finger: REPORT SLAMS FAILING SCHOOL.

  “Not very vivid,” said Terry. “But accurate.”

  “They’re ‘sink schools,’ especially in headlines. And when a school is in question they don’t slam, they ‘cane.’ ”

  “I looked up earlier reports on that school. We used ‘cane’ then.”

  Cosmo sighed theatrically.

  “Of course we did, you ape. Product recognition. The reader knows what sort of a story it’s going to be even before he starts to read it.”

  “Teachers haven’t caned pupils for years.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? People recognize the word, and it gives them a bit of a frisson. You use ‘cane,’ or if you want to vary it a bit, ‘thrash.’ . . . I don’t know. The greenhorns I get landed with. . . . So what’s the headline going to be?”

  “REPORT CANES SINK SCHOOL?”

  “You can’t cane a school, you dolt! It will be REPORT CANES SINK SCHOOL HEAD.”

  “It didn’t. She only took over three months ago, and the report said she’d done a good job in a limited time.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! What’s a headline aiming to do?”

  “Get people reading the story, I suppose.”

  “Exactly. Accuracy’s got nothing to do with it.”

  Then he started in on the piece, line by line, image by image, word by word. At the end there was practically nothing left of Terry’s original piece that hadn’t been subjected to Cosmo’s withering scorn. But Terry was not a pushover. He kept his cheerfulness and his humor remarkably well, though his was not a face formed for humor: it was pleasant-looking, but naturally thoughtful and withdrawn. Any jokiness was specially assumed for Horrocks’s benefit, and was undented even when he was sent away with a flea in his ear.

  “You Southerners think you own the bloody world,” yelled Cosmo at his departing back.

  “Midlander,” said Terry, not bothering to turn around. “Birmingham.” Cosmo’s geography was as rotten as everything else about him, he thought.

  But as he sat down there came over him a depressing sense that when he had gone through his story and done everything Cosmo had said he should, it would make a much better West Yorkshire Chronicle report than his own original piece. Less accurate, less responsible, less balanced, but horribly punchy. And it would have nothing in it of him at all. And this led to a very familiar path of meditation: What was he doing here? Did he want to be taught to sink to Cosmo’s level? Was journalism of this kind anything but literary prostitution? He cast in the man’s direction a look that was full of contempt and disgust, yet tinged with something else too: Disillusion, disappointment, a sense of wasted hope.

  The look was received by Cosmo from under his snakelike, hooded lids. His guts gave a silent chuckle. The lad was regretting he’d ever thought of journalism as a career. That was what he liked doing: knocking the stuffing out of them while they were still on the first rung of the ladder. He loved seeing on their faces the bewildered look of a mistreated puppy.

  • • •

  Mrs. Knowsley had made a decision. It showed in the force of her knock on the door of the upstairs bedroom. When she opened it Father Pardoe was already up and on his way to the little table on which she served his meals. His face showed surprise that she was not carrying a tray.

  “Father, please don’t get me wrong, but I’d like you to eat downstairs with me today. Just for this once, if it doesn’t suit. We needn’t talk about anything you don’t want to talk about. But we hardly know each other, and we’ve been living in the same house for three weeks and more. Now, will you come down to the dining room and we’ll eat together like Christians?”

  Father Pardoe hesitated. It was not the tone of voice in which he was accustomed to being addressed. But the sort of rebuke that he might once have used to reprove it was no longer in him. He turned back to the door.

  “Yes. Yes, I’d like that for once. Thank you very much, Mrs. Knowsley.”

  He followed her downstairs like an obedient schoolboy.

  The dining room was warm from a gas fire and from the midday sun that streamed in the window. The table had been set for two, with a white napkin beside each plate. As Mrs. Knowsley bustled back and forth to the kitchen, finally returning carrying a steak-and-kidney pie, which she set down beside the three tureens of vegetables, Father Pardoe had an agreeable sense of being back in time ten or fifteen years, to the era when priests usually had live-in housekeepers—widowed ladies, as often as not, who treated their employers as if they were incapable of doing the simplest household job. The dailies who had taken their place took a much more robust view of the priesthood. Progress, of course. . . . But still, the housekeepers had got a great deal of pleasure out of mothering grown men.

  Mrs. Knowsley sat opposite him, and such was the warmth of her personality and concern for him that within five minutes of starting in on the pie and the roast potatoes, Father Pardoe found himself telling her about his family background in the Irish Protestant ascendancy.

  “Though they weren’t particularly ascendant, you know. Not big landowners or anything grand like that. Lawyers, solicitors, doctors—professional people. Then my grandmother converted to Catholicism—that was a big step, particularly as it was not long after the Troubles. A very strong-minded woman she was, though I only remember her in her last years. The younger children converted with her, and then the elder ones did the same, one by one. She had six—a large family for a Protestant one. Only my grandfather stood out, but he was very good-humored about it. The story is my grandmother
introduced a priest to his deathbed, but I don’t know how true that is. So I was brought up a Catholic, though it may be that most of the Irish regarded me and people like me as neither fish nor fowl.”

  The ice was broken. And so, momentarily, was the despair. He went on to tell her about his training at Maynooth, his first parish in Ireland, the almost inevitable transition to mainland Britain, first on the west coast of Scotland, eventually to Yorkshire. He had a second helping of pie, told her about some of his work in the parish: the rebuilding of the church hall, the formation of the youth club and the young mothers’ circle, the strengthening of links with other churches. Mrs. Knowsley was collecting plates when he said, “And then this happened.”

  Madge Knowsley paused in piling the crockery.

  “I said you didn’t have to talk about anything you didn’t want to talk about,” she said, taking the pile into the kitchen and coming back with fruit salads in little glass bowls.

  Christopher Pardoe began eating, his mind elsewhere. His training and experience told him to do nothing on impulse. Hitherto he had relied heavily on his judgment of people, but that had been shaken. However, in the end it was not the feeling that the ice had been broken, not the warmth or the good food or the sheer relief of having someone to talk to that decided him. It was his judgment of Madge Knowsley as a person—Madge, who sat opposite him, not waiting, not hoping, but eating quietly, and there if he needed her.

  He put down his spoon and told her the whole story.

  • • •

  The newsroom of the West Yorkshire Chronicle was in the throes of its midmorning frenzy, with stories for its late editions being hastily cobbled together and occasionally checked. In the middle of the scurrying hither and thither, Cosmo Horrocks’s desk represented an oasis of calm. The story Cosmo was working on demanded consideration, even meditation. It was not for a day but for a week, a month—a long and satisfying time span in his world.

  He had been thinking which of his Catholic acquaintances he should approach, and had come up with Brian Marris—a onetime reporter on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus who had gone into local government and was now someone of power in the Parks and Gardens Department. Not generally a person of any great use to Cosmo, but he was honest, and a Catholic, and he might be tricked into telling him what he wanted to know.

  “Cosmo—long time, no see” came Brian’s voice when his secretary put Cosmo through. The lack of bonhomie in the tone suggested he had not felt it as a deprivation.

  “That’s right, Brian. We must get together some lunchtime.”

  “What can I do for you, Cosmo?”

  Businesslike, that was Brian Marris.

  “I’m just putting together a possible series of little pieces, Brian, on Victorian churches in the area.”

  “Hmmm. Chronicle’s going upmarket, isn’t it?”

  “Just something for the cubs and juniors to work on. If they do a good job it might see the light of day. Now, there’s Leeds Parish Church, of course—”

  “Just pre-Victorian, that.”

  “We may be going upmarket, Brian, but we’re not becoming pedants. We can say nineteenth century, anyway. Then there’s that High Church place off the York Road that’s going to rack and ruin, and the big barn of a place in Birstall. Now, I thought we ought to have a few Methodist or nonconformist places—that Baptist one halfway down the hill in Haworth, for example. And of course some Catholic ones.”

  “There’s one or two very fine ones.”

  “Someone mentioned a St. Catherine’s.”

  “St. Catherine’s in Shipley? I shouldn’t have thought—” For a second or two there was silence at the other end. “Cosmo, are you up to your old tricks?”

  “Old tricks, Brian? I don’t know what you mean.”

  From now on there were pauses every time it was Marris’s turn to speak. He knew that with Horrocks every step had to be thought out in advance if you were not to find yourself treading in dung.

  “Well, let’s just say I’d be very surprised if any series on Victorian churches ever saw the light of day in your columns,” he said at last.

  “I told you it was touch and go if it would. With the juvenile shower we’ve got at the moment, I’d say it was odds against. . . . So there is something going on there, is there?”

  “I know nothing about it, Cosmo.”

  “You know there’s something going on, so that’s a start. It’s very seldom someone knows there’s something going on without having some inkling of what it is.”

  “Is it, Cosmo? I bow to your experience.”

  “I gather Father Pardoe has suddenly taken a rest for spiritual renewal.”

  “Has he? That’s not unusual.”

  “It is when it’s a pack of lies and he’s really under investigation by the Church.”

  “I told you, I know nothing about it.”

  “Come off it, Brian. You live at Greengates, just down the road. I can tell you’ve heard something.”

  “When I say I know nothing about it, Cosmo, what I mean is I have no intention of talking about it to you.”

  Cosmo let out a rich chuckle. That’s what Brian thought!

  “I rather interpreted it as that. Unfriendly, that’s what I call it. You were always in the thick of things, Church-wise, Brian. I should think you even know the name of the bimbo concerned.”

  Again there was silence at the other end. But he hadn’t rung off.

  “Well,” resumed Cosmo, in a reasonable voice, “would I be getting warm if I suggested Julie Norris?”

  “Cosmo, if you know so much—”

  “I’m guessing she isn’t the sort of single mum who’ll be in the telephone directory. I’d guess she lives in a grotty flat in a slum estate, full of nappy smells and greasy fish-and-chip paper—would I be right?”

  “I’m not involved with the girl, Cosmo.”

  “I’m not suggesting you are, Brian. Happily married as they come, aren’t you? That little episode with Mandy Miller on the switchboard at the Telegraph and Argus is long behind you, isn’t it? I shouldn’t think your wife ever even got suspicious, did she? Lucky man, you are, Brian.”

  He still hadn’t rung off. Cosmo could almost hear the sound of thinking. In the end, the reply he wanted came.

  “They say she lives on the Kingsmill estate. . . . God, you are a bastard, Cosmo. I pity your wife and daughters.”

  Cosmo barked with laughter.

  “Don’t bother, Brian. You can’t pity them more than they pity themselves.”

  This time the phone at the other end was put down, and violently, but Cosmo’s smile as he replaced his own receiver showed that he knew he’d won a famous victory.

  Later that day, when the last editions were on the streets, Terry Beale and several of the other juniors on the paper—anyone, in fact, under the age of twenty-five—went to O’Reilly’s, the nearby Irish-theme pub, which was about as Irish as Cleethorpes, and had a convivial pint, as they often did at the close of their day. Terry, though, stuck to his usual orange juice.

  “What was old Cosmo up to today?” Carol Barr asked Terry. They had a common history of suffering at his hands.

  “Cosmo? You mean apart from trashing my piece?”

  “Don’t make a big thing of that, Terry. We all know he trashes everybody’s pieces.”

  “True. I’m not claiming most-picked-on-victim status.” He thought for a moment, then added: “But the thing that hurts is that, from his point of view, and from the paper’s point of view, he was dead right. What I finally turned out was a better Chronicle story.”

  “That may be,” said Patrick De’ath. “But Cosmo and the Chronicle are things of the past. Cosmo lives in a world of scoops and ‘Hold the front page.’ He’s a bit pathetic, a dinosaur.”

  “Oh, and has journalism got beyond all that?” asked Terry bitterly. “Gone onward and upward to better things? It’s passed me by if it has. All I can see are British newspapers going further and further down into th
e sewers.”

  “You’re wrong, Terry,” said Patrick, draining his Guinness. “The future isn’t with the tabloids—that’s why they’re increasingly desperate and hysterical. The future is with the broadsheets. That’s what people are turning to.”

  “And could anyone say The Times and the Guardian are what they once were?”

  “Cut the philosophical stuff,” said Carol. “I asked what Cosmo was up to after he’d savaged your piece.”

  “How would I know?” Terry asked.

  “Don’t play the innocent with me, Terry. I saw you passing back and forth behind Cosmo’s chair without good reason. It wasn’t the attractions of his person that took you there.”

  Terry thought, then grinned.

  “I just like to know what the old bastard is up to.”

  “And what was he up to?”

  “A scoop of the most traditional kind, you won’t be surprised to learn. Some vicar or priest and a bimbo.”

  “The vicar of Stiffkey lives on,” commented Patrick.

  “The vicar of where?” Terry asked.

  “Stiffkey. Pronounced Stookey, spelled Stiff-key. Which is rather appropriate. His missionary zeal took him mostly among prostitutes, and he died in the lions’ cage of a traveling circus.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Gospel truth. They used him as their Communion wafer. You can imagine what a field day the papers at the time had with that story.”