Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  Mark had spooned into his mouth the last helping of a calorie-rich cereal, and was standing up.

  “No way. I’ve got a history essay to write.”

  Mark was the traditional one in the family. He was going to do well at sports, well in exams, well at university. That was the male role, expected of him as the next generation in a traditional family. Whether Donna was going to be satisfied with the traditional female role was another matter. She was just beginning to look at how the family was run, how her father clung obstinately to the patriarchal role, how Mark was in training to carry it on—very conscious it was to his advantage—and she was just starting to say, if only to herself, “No way,” and “That is not for me.”

  When Conal Leary came down ten minutes later in a dark gray suit and claret-colored tie, ready to drive off to the electrical-goods firm he had inherited and expanded, his wife was washing up. He kissed her on the neck, murmured, “Bye, Mary,” but then lingered.

  “Seems like the children know all about Father Pardoe,” he said.

  “Then they know a great deal more than I do,” said Mary firmly. “Because I know practically nothing.”

  “I mean that he’s suspected and under investigation.”

  Mary’s mouth set firm.

  “The children liked Father Pardoe, and thought he did a good job,” she said. “I hope they keep an open mind when they hear talk.”

  “Oh, we’re all keeping an open mind. Still, there’s—”

  Mary’s voice became higher and sharper.

  “If you’re about to say, ‘There’s no smoke without fire,’ then save your breath, Con, because there frequently is. Rumors start in the silliest ways—because people have got the wrong end of the stick, or misheard something, or are just spreading malicious lies. As far as I’m concerned, Father Pardoe is an honorable man and a good priest, and I’ll be very surprised if I have to revise that opinion.”

  “Derek says—”

  “I don’t give tuppence for what Derek Jessel says!”

  “Well,” said Conal, turning away, “if Pardoe wants a defending counsel in front of the investigating committee, he’ll know where to come.”

  “I’m rather afraid he won’t be given the chance of having one,” said Mary Leary sadly.

  Conal went off to the office feeling vaguely dissatisfied. Ten years ago Mary would not have spoken out like that. Then she had acquiesced in all his decisions, including his use of birth control after the difficult birth of Donna. Often she must have had her doubts, but she had gone along with whatever he decided and had kept her feelings to herself. By and large she still did, but there came a point when she—the word “rebelled” came to his mind, but he substituted the phrase “stood her ground.” If she disagreed in certain vital areas, she made it plain. And Conal didn’t like it.

  Mary, starting on the usual rounds of household tasks, wondered if her husband had noticed how she had tensed up when he kissed her neck. It wasn’t often thus, but she knew the topic of Father Pardoe was going to come up, and it made her blood boil how Con had appointed himself judge and jury in that matter, and now to boot he had been spreading the word about what he was accused of among his pals in the parish. The hypocrisy of it was glaring. He had convinced her often enough in the past that—as far as he, Conal, was concerned—there was smoke without fire. That the ladies whose names were mentioned in tandem with his meant nothing to him, and that it was all ugly rumormongering. If Con did not make the connection with Father Pardoe’s case, then he was stupider than she had taken him for.

  Of course the connection was only a partial one, because she had never in her heart of hearts believed in Conal’s innocence.

  CHAPTER 4

  Happy Families

  When Cosmo Horrocks had got all he thought he journalistically could out of Julie Norris and out of the contemplation of her grotty flat, he legged it as fast as he could out of the Kingsmill estate. Once on the outside, however, he cast his eye around for the nearest pub, conscious that, since there were seldom any pubs on Council estates, the residents who liked a tipple would make for the closest watering hole outside. There it was—the Lord Gray. And there, heading toward it, was one of the women from the estate he had asked about Julie’s whereabouts. He nipped across the road, pushed open the door that led straight into a dismal and dirty bar, and went over and stood beside the woman.

  “I found Julie Norris,” he said. She turned and contemplated him with a dyspeptic eye.

  “Did you, now?”

  “Care for a drink?”

  She considered—a painful process.

  “Not a rent collector or a debt collector, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. Is that why you wouldn’t tell me where she lived?”

  “Course it was. Come on, you can buy me a sweet sherry.”

  “Pint of Webster’s, a sweet sherry, and a tuna sandwich, please. No, I’m not here to do her any harm. I thought she was a lovely girl. I’m here to do her a favor.”

  The woman nodded unsuspectingly.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it, because she could do wi’ one. Such a nice girl—pretty too, if she’d take the trouble.”

  “She would be a real stunner,” said Cosmo, with all the enthusiasm of a child whose greatest pleasure was tearing the wings off a particularly beautiful butterfly. She took his words at their face value, just glad to have someone to talk to.

  “Mind you, I blame the parents. You can’t justify throwing out a girl of that age, baby or no baby. Typical, though.”

  “You know them?”

  “Oh, I know them, or knew them. Used to live on the estate, didn’t they?”

  She had the odd north-country habit of imparting information in question form.

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “The posh end, o’ course.”

  “Posh end?”

  “That was when there was a posh end—over toward the Cottingley Road. Nowadays it’s all pretty much of a muchness. The Cape of No Hope, they call us. Too bloody right. We never had much, and now we’ve got none.”

  “How long ago was it when they lived here?”

  “Oh, matter of about twenty years, I suppose. They moved here when she was pregnant wi’ Julie. I mind seeing her as a baby screaming her heart out in her pram in the front garden. O’ course they moved out like a flash soon as they could. Anyone would. Said they wouldn’t want a child o’ theirs growing up on the Kingsmill. Snobby pair. Still, you could see their point, even then. It’s just that they’re so . . .”

  Cosmo didn’t supply her with a word. He intended to make his own judgment of Julie’s parents, and he didn’t expect it to be any more favorable than this woman’s.

  “So they moved away, did they?”

  “Oh, yes. He’d got a promotion, managing a menswear shop, so they took out a mortgage on a house in Beckham Road. They’d have got it for seven or eight thousand then. Be worth six or seven times that now. But then, some people have all the luck, don’t they. What I always say is—”

  But Cosmo, who had been shifting from leg to leg for some time, now made his thanks and beat a retreat to a table by the window. He didn’t enjoy talking to people, only milking them.

  “Here, what did you say you did?” called out the woman.

  Cosmo settled into a chair with his back to her and said nothing. Once settled down he sipped his pint and took a bite from his sandwich, then took from his pocket a list of the Shipley Norrises, which he had photocopied from the telephone directory, feeling pretty sure that Julie would not have changed her name either from choice or by marriage. His nicotine-stained finger went down the short list. There it was: S. Norris, 23 Beckham Road.

  Got you! he thought.

  The triumphant reaction was not due to any particular animus against the Norrises, still less from disapproval of their action in casting off their daughter. He would do the same to his daughter in the same circumstances, or with even less provocation. His exultation was
the result of a feeling that the Norrises were going to fit very nicely into what he in his own mind called (though no one else did) a “Horrocks story.” They somehow had the feel of stupid people who could be magnified into monsters.

  When his sandwich was eaten and his pint down to its last quarter, he took out his Bradford A to Z street directory and searched for Beckham Road. There it was: maybe ten minutes’ walk away. He downed the dregs of his beer, wrapped his mac around him, and set off.

  Beckham Road was without doubt several notches above Kingsmill Rise, but it was otherwise an unremarkable stretch of prewar and postwar detached and semidetached houses. Number twenty-three was detached, and decorated with the usual nailed-on bits of timber. Half of the front garden was a neat square of rosebushes, with the other half a graveled patch in front of the garage. Cosmo took it all in with his jaundiced camera-eye, labeled it with the word “unremarkable,” then rang the doorbell.

  The woman who opened the door had thick, round glasses, behind which her eyes glistened dully. Her mouth was so narrow it seemed inadequate to take a good bite with, and her nose was red and pointed. Her expression seemed to say that she had had experience of the world and its ways, and they were not her ways, thank God.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Norris? You won’t know me, but I’m Cosmo Horrocks of the West Yorkshire Chronicle.”

  “We don’t want to take out a subscription.”

  “You misunderstand me. I’m a reporter.”

  “We wouldn’t want to talk to—”

  “It’s about your daughter, Julie.”

  The door, which had been in the process of shutting, stopped. She peered at him, her expression more concentratedly vinegarish.

  “What about her?”

  “I really think you ought to talk to me, Mrs. Norris. Your daughter is in trouble.”

  “That’s nothing new.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen the . . . little one. But by trouble I mean she’s likely to be the subject of a story in my newspaper, and, so as not to be unfair in any way, I’d like your side to be heard too.”

  It was one of the oldest ploys in the book, and it worked. She was silent for a second in outrage.

  “My side. What’s it to do with me?”

  “You and your husband, really,” said Cosmo, smiling his piranha smile. “You were agreed about throwing her out of the family home, weren’t you? A lot of people are commenting on that. They think that’s where the trouble started. They’re saying you were hardly supportive when your daughter needed you most.”

  Mrs. Norris was clearly in waters deeper than she could swim in, and she knew it. After much thought she said, “I’d better ring my husband.”

  “Can I come in? I’m sure he’ll want to talk to me and explain your side.”

  The ploy worked again, and after a pause she nodded. He walked down the hall to the sitting room door, which she held open. He went just inside the room and stopped when he heard the phone being dialed. Her voice came in satisfactorily clear.

  “Says it’s about our Julie. Says she’s in trouble. . . . That’s what he said, but he says we’re being blamed. . . . Can’t you come back? Just to find out what it’s all about?”

  Her pleas seemed to hit home, because when she had put the phone down she poked her head around the door, said, “He’ll be here in five minutes,” then shut the door on him and went back to the kitchen. Cosmo sent his camera-eyes once again around his new environment, his temporary prison. The room was horribly clean and tidy, and it had a dank, cheerless air. There were one or two signs that it was used, but it seemed to have been disinfected after each use like an operating theater. On the sideboard was a photograph: a family group of three, but the youngster was a boy. Five minutes to the dot later, a Ford Fiesta drove up outside and a squat, chunky, peppery man marched down the drive, into the house, and then swung open the sitting room door.

  “Now, what’s all this?”

  “Ah, Mr. Norris. I’m glad you’ve agreed to talk to me.”

  “I’ve agreed to nothing,” the man barked. “I want to know what this is about.”

  “Shall we sit down?”

  “Not before you tell us why you’re here.”

  Mrs. Norris had drifted back down the hall to the doorway, a dimly disapproving presence who was now looking at her husband admiringly. They stood together confronting him. Cosmo was unabashed.

  “Right you are. Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard that Father Pardoe at St. Catherine’s is under suspension.”

  They shifted a little, looking embarrassed.

  “We hadn’t, no,” said Mr. Norris. “We’re not . . . not very in with the Church these days.”

  “Well, of course he’s your daughter’s priest as well.”

  That brought a reaction.

  “Julie’s priest?” barked Norris. “Don’t make me laugh. Any priest ought to run a mile from the likes of her.”

  “It does seem as though he would have been wiser if he had.”

  That took them aback. They came farther into the room, looked at each other, and sat down. Cosmo, smiling like a shark who’s had one leg and looks forward to the other, sat down facing them.

  “You mean Julie has—” Mrs. Norris ventured.

  “She’s pregnant again,” said Cosmo, who tried not to answer questions. “Did you know that?”

  “We wouldn’t,” said her husband. “We don’t keep in touch, do we, Daphne?”

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” said Daphne Norris.

  “I’m not saying it’s Father Pardoe’s,” said Cosmo. “But I am saying that the reason he’s been suspended is the relationship he’s had with your daughter.”

  “Well, I never,” said Norris. “I’ve never heard the like, have you, Daphne?”

  “Seducing a priest. She’d stoop to anything, that girl.”

  “We don’t quite know who did the seducing, do we?” Cosmo pointed out. “Or if either of them did. Takes two to tango, doesn’t it? So all this comes as a complete surprise, does it?”

  “If you’re any sort of reporter you’ll have noticed that,” said Mr. Norris, who had retained a shadow of his old aggression, apparently part of his personality.

  “Except,” put in Daphne Norris, “if a girl gets pregnant at seventeen, you know she’s on the slippery slide already and likely to go downhill fast.”

  “And if people are going to say we caused it by chucking her out, then I’d say they’ve got it the wrong way around,” said her husband. “We chucked her out because we could see it coming.”

  “The scandal will kill me,” moaned his wife. “And what are the other boys going to say to Leonard at school?”

  “Leonard?”

  “Lennie, our son,” said Mr. Norris, all aggression slipping away. “She resented him right from the start, didn’t she, Daphne? Saw what a bright, clever little chap he was, and resented it when people commented on it. She was a right obstinate baby, from the time she could walk and talk. Wouldn’t give up her room to Lennie when he needed the extra floor space for his train set. He had to make do with the poky one—hardly more than a box. Made my blood boil, didn’t it, Daphne? But like I say, she could be sullen and stiff-necked, and she really dug her toes in.”

  “Until she got pregnant, Simon. And then we’d really got her.”

  Cosmo turned his attention to Daphne Norris.

  “Got her?”

  “Got a hold over her,” she said, unembarrassed. “A lever. Before that she’d stood out against us like a mule.”

  “I see,” said Cosmo, though, rarely for him, he wasn’t quite sure that he did. “So when Julie got pregnant—”

  “We laid down a few ground rules,” said Simon Norris, “and when she didn’t agree to them, then out she went. So you can say to these people who say we caused her problems that we didn’t encourage her to get pregnant, and we didn’t make it easy for her to get pregnant. We were as strict with her as you can be these days. And when she told us she
was having a child, and when she still stood out against us—”

  “Were you encouraging her to have an abortion?”

  “We were not. We’re Catholic, as you know.”

  “Not practicing Catholics, though,” said Cosmo, making a little note in his book.

  “Well, no, not practicing. And if she’d wanted to have an abortion, we might not have stood in her way. But the point I’m trying to make, if you’d stop interrupting, is that she got pregnant, she wouldn’t play ball with us, so it was her doing if she had to leave here. She went to live with her boyfriend’s family, which was pretty daft because he denied he was the father. And then she badgered the Council, so I’ve heard, till they gave her a flat on the Kingsmill estate, of all bloody places.”

  “We know all about the Kingsmill,” said Daphne. Her husband frowned.

  “Well—er—we don’t need to go into that. Anyway, there she is, and there it’s my bet she’ll stay, and it’s her fault, especially if she still hasn’t got the wit to avoid getting pregnant a second time. And anyone who says it’s our fault doesn’t know their arse from their elbow, pardon my language, because she dug her own grave and she can bloody well lie in it.”

  “By loose behavior,” put in Daphne primly, in corroboration.

  “And I can quote you on that, can I?” asked Cosmo.

  “You can,” said Daphne. “It’ll be pretty self-evident to all who see her.” Her ears pricked up when she heard the front door. “That’ll be Lennie.”

  Lennie had clearly noticed there was company in the front room, because he stopped outside the door and then swung it open.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  He was dressed in the standard dress for thirteen-year-olds, a yellow-and-black anorak and Mitsu athletic shoes. His black hair was cut spiky and short, and his white face was pitted with acne around the jowls. He had the unendearing swagger of a child who knows he is the boss.

  “Oh, nothing, Lennie,” said his mother. “He’s just come about Julie.”

  “Julie? That slag?” He turned to Cosmo. “You’re not trying to persuade them to take her back, are you?”