Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  “And like us. That’s the really horrible part. Because we’re to blame as much as they are. If they wipe their feet on us it’s because we’re natural doormats.”

  “I know. And I saw it all at home, and yet I never thought for a moment it would be the same when I got married,” Mary said.

  “And yet it is. It’s like we never escaped from the Victorian age.”

  And so it went on, for more than half an hour. It was, especially for Mary Leary, a release, a transformation. They both realized that they had had this bond for years, but had never been brave enough to bring it out into the open. Now it was out, and they didn’t only feel better for it; they felt they had to do something about it. Together; as friends. And as women.

  • • •

  Cora Horrocks was trying to wind down before her husband came home. It was always best to be in a relaxed mood, because he would almost certainly wind her up, and if he did that when she was already tense the strain could become intolerable.

  Adelaide was upstairs preparing to go to bed, but Samantha was still out. Cora worried about Samantha. She had always been such a stable girl, whatever Cosmo might say or do. Yet there had been so many signs of pressure, of uncertainty, recently. She did hope Cosmo was not right about her and that teacher. In fact, Cora always hoped Cosmo was wrong, and was always sad when his nastier conjectures proved right.

  She had a lot to be grateful to him for, she knew that. He had in a sense rescued her. And if he seldom reminded her of that, it was always there between them—something unspoken because it did not need to be spoken. Her life with Alan was a memory so horrible that she needed no prompting to feel gratitude. For a long time after they had married she had even believed Cosmo to be a good man.

  She hadn’t believed that for a long while now. Nevertheless, she still felt some tiny vestige of that old gratitude, and tried not to put into words her feeling of how much happier she and the girls would be without him.

  She wondered if Samantha was with that teacher. She felt sure she went there much oftener than she actually told them about. Cora had always found Miss Daltrey very pleasant. Well, she would be pleasant to Samantha’s parents if . . . She wondered what people like that did. She wondered if she and Samantha were doing it now. That was Cosmo, working his way into her mind. Taking her over. Not as Alan had taken her over. Less brutally, more insidiously.

  She heard Cosmo’s key in the door. Immediately her shoulders went tense. Please God, he was tired, or dissatisfied with his day. When that happened he would most likely go straight to bed. She stood up as he came in and gave him the usual peck on the cheek. Before the kiss had landed her heart sank, because she saw from his smirking expression that Cosmo was very satisfied indeed with his day’s work.

  It would probably have comforted Cora if she could have known that this was the last time she would ever have to welcome Cosmo home.

  CHAPTER 9

  Cosmo Solo

  Cosmo left the offices of the West Yorkshire Chronicle late on Tuesday evening. It had been a day of hard, concentrated work, but a very satisfying one. The story was about to go national. This he was quite sure about. He had been faxed a mock-up of the next day’s Globe with Father Pardoe on page 5—not ideal, but good enough. His own name had been coupled in the byline with that of the Globe’s principal smut reporter, Garry Higgs. A very satisfying sight. And it wasn’t the end, not by a long shot. Jenny Snell’s article in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus had been interesting. His hunch about the Father Riley Fund had been right, and the Bishop would have a lot of explaining to do. The fund would probably suffice as the next stage of the story, and it could be a stage much more sympathetic to Father Pardoe. Cosmo intended to proceed in the classic manner that tabloids always adopted with royals and other notables: You built ’em up, then you smashed ’em down, then you built ’em up again, then you smashed ’em down again.

  Oh, yes. This one was going to run and run.

  The possibility that Father Pardoe was innocent of any financial wrongdoing led Cosmo to consider the possibility that he was equally innocent of breaking his vows with Julie. He considered this not out of any crusading desire for justice, still less for reasons of conscience concerning his own role in the story; he considered the possibility only insofar as it could be one further twist that prolonged it in the local and national media. Perhaps when the baby was born a DNA test could be done on Pardoe and the baby. That twist could possibly be followed by the revelation of the real father of Julie’s unborn child. Sex, followed by money, followed by sex again: a simple formula but an appealing one.

  Cosmo frowned as he remembered an incident earlier in the day.

  He had been looking over a story that Terry Beale had covered. Not an important one, naturally: it had been about a brawl at closing time in one of the central Leeds pubs between the discarded husband and the new lover of a woman from Armley. Cosmo had insisted on adding all the titbits and extras that the greenhorn reporter had left out: The fact that the woman was a “mother of two,” the fact that she had a long-ago conviction for soliciting. Eventually Terry had said, “All women are whores to you.

  “It’s called making a realistic assessment,” he had replied.

  Thinking over the incident now, Cosmo decided young Terry was getting above himself. He had never been respectful, let alone admiring, but now he was barely attempting to hide his contempt. Something would have to be done about Terry Beale. He would have to be put in his place, then squashed down in it. Still, loathing the boy did not lessen his self-satisfaction at his own sharp reply to the boy’s impertinence.

  True to his agenda of sex, then money, then sex again, Cosmo’s mind went back, as he turned off the Burley Road toward Armley, to Jenny Snell’s article in defense of Father Pardoe. His, Cosmo’s, hunch about the Fund had been based on the financial difficulties of the Catholic Leeds diocese. These went back a decade or more: they had overstretched themselves, and had found themselves in the position of having to sell whatever could be sold—unwanted nunneries, patches of land, even school playing fields. It had been that state of affairs, which was well known, that had led to Cosmo’s guess. Not, of course, that he actually believed the Bishop had done anything criminal, though it might be amusing to throw an insinuation to that effect into Thursday’s interview. He guessed he had taken over the running of it—the Bishop had to him the air of a control freak—so that he could siphon off the interest into the general fund to relieve the hard-pressed areas of expenditure. Or maybe he had gone further than that. Maybe the fund had simply been swallowed up.

  Oh, it was a lovely story, was the Father Pardoe one! He blessed the day he had overheard the talk in the train from London. He blessed the day he had had the phone call about Father Pardoe’s whereabouts. As he drove down Bramley Town Street he ruminated on the matter, and actually smiled to himself. It had concluded so satisfactorily, that offer of information, though not quite in the way the seller had anticipated. And the information had been cheap at the price, no question of that. In fact, everything about this story had worked out brilliantly. He could see so much flowing from it. The parish people of St. Catherine’s were almost untapped as yet, at least as far as gossip and possible ramifications were concerned. In his experience stories led to stories led to stories. You uncovered one after another at St. Catherine’s, and then you started to refer to it as a “troubled parish.” After that you could move from parish matters to private lives. Neither Christians in general nor Catholics in particular lived private lives of any greater purity or probity than did sinners like himself, thought Cosmo. Not much, anyway.

  That thought did not lead to any great introspection about his own standards. At least he wasn’t a frustrated divorcée with nothing better to do than spy on her neighbors, he told himself contentedly. As he drove down the hill into Rodley he laughed at his second chat with Doris Crabtree, which had taken place that afternoon. What a wizened old witch the woman was! He had got out of her what li
ttle he could about Julie’s “other” man friend—not much more than a shape in the dark, really. In spite of the fact that it was so little, he had flattered the woman about its value and his interest in it, had given her his card, had said he was always ready to hear anything she had to offer about goings-on in the Kingsmill. When the story and its offshoots had died the natural death that was the inevitable fate in journalism of even the best of stories, he would slap her down and tell her that grubby little stories about the grubby activities of grubby little people were of no interest outside their own grubby little patch. Build ’em up, smash ’em down: the twin imperatives of Cosmo’s life—of life itself, he thought.

  He came to the Wise Owl, then turned off left toward home. His house, bought when he had moved to the north with Cora in the first year of his marriage, was a thin, high, terraced stone house, insulated from noise in a way none of the jerry-built modern houses were. No garage, of course, so Cosmo had had to rent a modern garage at the end of his cul-de-sac, a minute away from his front door. He liked to keep his car safe from the attentions of marauding yobs. He drove in to the end garage of the four, leaned over and locked the passenger door, then got out and locked his own. Once the car door was shut he was in the dark, apart from a streetlight fifty yards down the road.

  It was while he was pulling down the door that he heard a sound from the empty lot beside and behind the garage. He secured the door, then put his head around the side, intent on shouting at any courting couple.

  The blow came with horrible force. He staggered, and croaked out a cry for help. He steeled himself for a further blow, but he felt himself gripped by the neck. He opened his eyes.

  “You,” he said.

  The only answer was a smile. Then he was dropped, and fell to the ground. He sensed his attacker raising his weapon, and Cosmo raised his hands, crying out, this time more strongly. If only it were not so late. If only it were not so dark. But it was late, it was dark. Then the black shape of the thing that his attacker held fell on him again, then again, then again, and the terrible pain was succeeded by numbness, then by a complete loss of feeling. But though he did not know it, the blows continued.

  CHAPTER 10

  Police Pressure

  The news of Horrocks’s murder, coming only two days after his sensational story about Father Pardoe in the Chronicle, came as a double blow to the congregation of St. Catherine’s. Those who heard the news on Radio Leeds repressed the instinct to phone around to friends who might not have heard. That would be akin to admitting that the two things were connected. The more they sat down, over a strong coffee, to think about it, the more they decided that where the police would be looking first of all would be at the man’s family. And in that they were right. But all of them had a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs that the police would quite soon be broadening their inquiries. Where would that leave them? What was to be their line if suspicion began to be directed at them?

  • • •

  Cora was glad she hadn’t wakened the children the night before. It had been not long after midnight when the uniformed policeman had rung the doorbell. A neighbor putting his car away had seen the figure recumbent at the side of the garage. At first he had assumed it was a drunken bum, but he had had the wit to take the flashlight he kept in his garage and investigate further. As soon as he had seen the blood and realized who it was, he had gone home and called the police.

  The constable who had called had been very good, Cora thought: matter-of-fact and low-key, which suited the situation perfectly. Her identification would be better than any neighbor’s could be, he said, and the best thing for her and everyone would be to get it over quickly. Cora was already in her nightdress, but she had slipped on a dressing gown and gone out to the garage, heart thumping, at the policeman’s side. When she saw the body, the state of the smashed skull, she had leaned against the wall and retched, though nothing had come up. She hoped that for the policeman it had been a convincing substitute for grief.

  Because when she had got back into the house and had sat for an hour and more over a cup of tea, she had realized that she had simply been reacting to the horror of the scene—the blood, the bone. She had felt no grief for Cosmo, no sense that his death was a blow to her. Surprise, yes, but nothing so personal or so strong as shock. Before long, she knew, she would be glad.

  Later she had had a couple hours of something that was nearly sleep. Then she had lain waiting for signs of life from the girls’ bedrooms. When they had begun their daily fight for the bathroom she had gone out and told them that they would not be going to school that day.

  “Why not?” asked Adelaide.

  “I don’t know how to . . .” She shook herself and looked at them both seriously. “Your father was found dead last night.”

  She could swear she had seen a flicker pass over Samantha’s face.

  “Dad?” said Adelaide.

  “Yes. The police came to tell me after midnight. I’m afraid he’s been murdered.”

  She was looking at Samantha as she said that, and her face was perfectly impassive. It was Adelaide who surprised her.

  “We won’t have another daddy, will we?”

  Cora flinched. Her middle-class decency had been affronted.

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “You won’t, like, marry again, so someone else is our daddy, will you? Can’t we be on our own?”

  Cora swallowed. How horribly quick the child was! And how exactly her thoughts chimed in with her own.

  “Yes. I’ll never marry again. We’ll always be on our own.”

  “But how shall we manage?” asked Samantha. “I mean for money.”

  “We’ll manage somehow,” she said firmly.

  Now, ranged around the sitting room, with the two policemen in the armchairs, she wondered if Samantha had been awake last night, had heard the doorbell, heard her go out and gone to a window to see. That would explain the flicker, her feeling that the news did not entirely surprise her. If she had talked to Adelaide, that would explain her quickness. The girls had been unusually noisy in the bathroom that morning, something that was sure to bring down Cosmo’s wrath on them. Was that because . . . ?

  She dragged her attention back to the present, and to the two policemen sitting opposite her, looking at her intently but covertly. The middle-aged white one—Oddie, he’d introduced himself as—was kindly-looking, but she wasn’t so sure about the younger black one: he looked big and formidable. Were they some kind of good-cop-bad-cop act?

  “I know this will come as a terrible shock to you,” Oddie was saying, looking at the girls, “but we do need to ask questions. Can you bear with me?” Both of the girls nodded. “Chip in with anything you think relevant if your mother hasn’t said it. Now”—turning to her—“your husband was killed near his own home. This makes us wonder about people in the vicinity here. Were relations with the neighbors good?”

  “Perfectly good. No quarrels with anyone.”

  “He didn’t really know them, except by name,” put in Samantha. “He worked such odd hours that he was hardly ever at home when they were. We all know them, and get on all right.”

  Cora nodded, but she felt worried. What Samantha had said was true and perfectly acceptable, but she was worried in case she was going to say too much, particularly about Cosmo as a father.

  “Your husband was a reporter, I know. What was he working on at the moment?”

  “It was a story about a priest, and his relationship with a young single mother.”

  “Yes, actually I did know that. We saw the Globe this morning.”

  “It would have been a big day for your husband, wouldn’t it?” asked the young black sergeant. “Seeing his name on a story in one of the big tabloids.”

  “Yes, it would, though it wouldn’t have been the first time. But, yes, he’d certainly have been pleased.”

  “You hadn’t seen him to talk it over with him?”

  “No, he went out early
as usual, and didn’t come back until—”

  Cora had been cultivating an entirely neutral tone in all her replies, as if she were talking about the most distant acquaintance, but her voice broke.

  “Was there anything else he was working on?” Oddie asked.

  “That story had taken him over,” put in Samantha quickly. “He’d thought about nothing else for the last two weeks or more, and hardly talked about anything else either. All sorts of people rang him up with information. He was dead excited.”

  “He may well have been working on something else as well,” said Cora, “because reporters always are. But this was currently his big story.”

  “So there could be a lot of fallout from that,” said Oddie. “The Globe report gave us the impression that this could be a story with a lot of angles.”

  “I suppose it could. But he hasn’t been walking about in fear of his life, or anything melodramatic like that.”

  “He is a priest, this chap he was after,” said Samantha. “Poor man.”

  “My old mum says there’s nothing more dangerous than a Christian who knows he’s in the right,” said the black policeman genially. “Because he’s so convinced of that he believes he’s justified in doing anything grubby or underhand.”

  Cora sensed that Oddie was not happy at having to listen to his sergeant’s mother’s reflections on religion and its moral effects, but she smiled at the younger man.

  “It’s a long time since I went to church,” she said.

  “Was your husband popular at work?” Oddie asked.

  “I really wouldn’t know. . . . He specialized in rather sensational stories. And he wasn’t a patient or naturally friendly man. That may have made him enemies.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Twenty-one years.” Aware that she had paused before she had said this Cora asked, “Do you think the girls could be spared this? It’s very distressing for them.”