Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  As she said it she wished they looked more distressed. They were wide-eyed, bewildered, shocked, but not—not even Adelaide—distressed. However, the senior policeman nodded. She thought he had probably registered the pause.

  “Go to your room,” said their mother. “I’ll be up when I can.” Turning back to the policemen when they had slipped rather reluctantly out of the room, she said: “I think it’s best if I tell you about Cosmo, and I can’t be entirely honest if they’re in the room.”

  “Of course. We understand,” said Oddie.

  “Not that I’d want to pretend we were a loving family. Cosmo needed a victim, and quite often it was one of his children. I’m trying to be as honest as I can, because I expect it’s well known in their schools. And there was another side to Cosmo.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll always be grateful to him. Before I met him I was in a relationship with a man”—she actually shivered at the memory—“someone so dreadful, so vicious . . .”

  “Where is this man now?”

  “I don’t know. I know he was given a long prison sentence about seven years ago. He could still be in, though they get out so early these days, don’t they?”

  “What was he jailed for?”

  “Violence against a woman. Just like with me. He could be so charming, but when it came to it, what it always led up to was violence. He could be so savage, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s what Cosmo rescued me from.”

  “In what way rescued?”

  “He exposed him in the paper he was working on then. This man—Alan Russell his name was, or is—had a long history of it: Women who wouldn’t prosecute, women who went to the police but found they weren’t interested, cases that went to court but he just got a fine or a suspended sentence because he was so plausible, so reasonable and charming. IS THIS BIRMINGHAM’S MOST VIOLENT MAN? was one of Cosmo’s headlines. It didn’t get any action from the police, but it kept him away from me, and when the climate of opinion about that sort of thing changed, the police knew their man.”

  “And you and Mr. Horrocks were married by then?”

  “Yes, we married, and quite soon after we moved up to Yorkshire. I’ll always be grateful to him.”

  It was a statement that begged quite a lot of questions. And Oddie wondered how it fitted with her earlier one that Cosmo needed a victim.

  • • •

  Father Pardoe turned the radio off. It was John Humphrys interrupting people in the public interest on the Today program. Not at all what he needed. He went on with the washing up, which he was doing, after much protest from Margaret, because he knew she wanted to get off into town. A visit to Leeds was a big matter to her, and she liked to get in early and get back to Pudsey before the shops got crowded. He found washing up restful, almost therapeutic, and he could think through what his immediate course of action should be, as well as his long-term aims.

  He found that the questions divided themselves up into two in his mind: What it would be politic to do, and what it would be morally right to do. The answers were usually diametrically opposed. For example, in the matter of the Bishop of Leeds’s action in his case, the politic thing to do was to backtrack, apologize, defer; but since he was convinced that the Bishop had behaved unfairly as well as unwisely since the rumors first surfaced, the morally right thing to do was to question, oppose, press his case. On meditating things through, he came to the conclusion that he really didn’t have any choice. He was too far down the second route to backtrack now. So far down, in fact, that the Bishop would require more in the way of backtracking, apology, and deference than he could stomach giving.

  At ten o’clock he switched on Radio Leeds for the local news. Keeping up with parish pump events was something he had always found necessary when he was a functioning priest, and it was something he had resumed as soon as the shock of his suspension had worn off. He was, after all, still the priest of St. Catherine’s. He was pulled up short by the second item on the bulletin.

  “The body of a man found battered to death last night in a vacant lot in Rodley has been identified as that of Cosmo Horrocks, a journalist on the West Yorkshire Chronicle. A spokesperson for Northern Newspapers, who own the paper, said, ‘We are devastated. It is difficult to take in. Cosmo Horrocks was a journalist to his fingertips. He will be much missed.’ ”

  Pardoe sat heavily down on the nearest kitchen chair, his mind blocking out the rest of the bulletin—blocking out too all his thoughts about his predicament. Was this Pelion heaped on Ossa? Was this something he would be involved in? It could be murder for the contents of the man’s wallet, it could be domestic, or the result of some row or feud at work or in his neighborhood. One of those, surely, was what it would prove to be. He remembered Cosmo Horrocks’s face, standing there beside the photographer in Cookridge Street. A mean face—a face of petty grudges and low ambitions. The face of someone who had to have the whip hand. He could imagine the man hated in his family, hated at work. Surely it was in the home or in the workplace that the culprit would be found. Probably it would be the sort of murder that solved itself practically at once. Please God, it was so. Please God, this would not be something that dragged him down with it, involved him in all the head-shaking that police questioning always led people to indulge in. People like his parishioners.

  This led him to another thought: please God, he didn’t have to tell anyone what he was doing last night.

  The doorbell rang. With a heavy heart and his feet also feeling like lead, he dragged himself down the hall and opened the door on a middle-aged white man and a youngish black one, both of them brandishing cards in his face.

  • • •

  Simon Norris heard the news from a customer—or rather from one of those people who came into his shop ostensibly to buy but actually to get a look at him from behind the racks and shelves. Simon called his wife at once.

  “Daphne? Have you heard the news?”

  “No.”

  “That Cosmo Horrocks, the one who wrote up the story. He’s been murdered.”

  “He hasn’t!”

  “Oh, but he has. It was on the local news, apparently. Customer just told me. By ‘eck, Julie’s landed herself in a pile of muck, all right. The police’ll be wanting to talk to her.”

  “Will they? I don’t know. . . . Simon?”

  Something in her voice alerted him. It wasn’t something he would normally have been sensitive to, but he did get the impression that she had been crying.

  “Daphne, has something upset you?”

  “Yes, it has, rather,” his wife said. “Nothing to do with this murder. I went to the butcher’s about nine, and I thought he was a bit stifflike—reserved, you could call it. But then this woman came in, someone I only know by sight, and she looked at me in a very sniffy way and I thought, I don’t know what you’ve got to be sniffy about. Then after a minute or two she came out with it. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,’ she said.”

  “Ashamed of ourselves? What the ‘ell have we got to be ashamed about?”

  “She said: ‘Throwing out a daughter like that, just when she needed you most.’ ”

  “Well, our Julie should have thought of that first, shouldn’t she?”

  “ ‘And then talking to the papers about her as if she was nothing but a slut,’ this woman said. ‘You must be some kind of monsters. I wouldn’t wish parents like you on any young kid.’ I couldn’t help it, Simon. I just burst into tears.”

  “Daphne, you’re not to take on. This woman’s got to be wrong in the head.”

  “I don’t think she is, Simon. There were two others came in while she was speaking, and they both nodded. I think people got the wrong idea from that article. I wonder whether that Horrocks person didn’t double-cross us—pretended to be presenting our side of the story, but really . . .”

  There was silence on both ends of the line for a moment.

  “Well, if he did he’s bloody paid for it,” said Simon Norris.

/>   • • •

  Father Greenshaw was told the news by phone as soon as he got back to the presbytery after the early morning service. It was the Bishop’s secretary, and she said that the meeting set up later that day for himself, the Bishop, and the trustees of the Father Riley Fund could now be canceled. Father Greenshaw made an appropriate response to the news: He seems to have been a frightful fellow, was the burden of his remarks, but of course this was a shocking event. He took no pains, however, to make his voice anything other than perfectly calm and collected.

  When he put the phone down he sat in the armchair next to it and tried to order his thoughts. How would this affect his position, his hopes? Would this sensational twist to the Father Pardoe saga be the final blow to any hope the man still had of returning to St. Catherine’s? Would the police be connecting him to the murder, interviewing him, involving him in a third strand of shady or shameful transactions? Would the interest in the Father Riley Fund now cease, or would the national tabloids seize on the story with redoubled curiosity? The Bishop seemed to assume not, but Father Greenshaw was less sure. He was perfectly confident in his world of ceremonial and parish matters of a straightforward nature, and especially so in the matters of prayers, retreats, observances of all kinds. In the world of human frailties, tabloid values, and police investigations he felt himself quite at sea.

  His mind was a chilly one, accustomed to setting out the ramifications of any matter in a manner that resembled a statement of accounts, with pluses and minuses and a balance at the end. In the matter of murder, and of publicity, he felt more at sea, more uncertain in his accounting. When he had given it some prolonged thought, he decided that the press was certainly not going to lose interest in the matter, and that press coverage had done Father Pardoe hitherto no good at all, and was unlikely to do him anything but harm in the future.

  When he got up from the chair he was smiling.

  • • •

  “I only saw him properly once,” said Father Pardoe to the two serious men sitting opposite him. “That was after Mass at St. Anne’s last Sunday. He had his photographer with him, taking pictures of me talking to the Bishop. You may have seen the picture in the local paper.”

  “We did,” said the black detective. “But at the time it wasn’t a story we thought would be of any interest to us.”

  “Maybe you were right.”

  “Did you know in advance that the press was getting interested in your story?” asked the white one.

  “I had a hint of it from the Bishop. But that was just before the photograph appeared.”

  “How had he heard?”

  “I’ve no idea. I am told nothing by that source. Word could have got around among the St. Catherine’s congregation that this reporter had been in the area talking to people. The way it was written up makes it obvious that he had—the Norrises, poor Julie, her neighbors.”

  “But he hadn’t talked to you.”

  “No, he hadn’t. He’d followed me to St. Anne’s on the bus last Sunday, and he was among the reporters waiting outside here on Monday. I suspected that approaching me and saying he wanted to present ‘my side’ would be his next ploy. I preempted that by going to the woman from the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. I would certainly never have talked to Horrocks.”

  “You feel strongly about him?” asked Charlie Peace, the black detective.

  Father Pardoe shifted in his chair.

  “About the British press in general, to tell you the truth. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, given the circumstances, but morally they’re a sewer. They trade in human misery and degradation. The reporters and editors remind me of vultures, circling in the air looking for carrion. It’s a national shame that people want to read that kind of thing.”

  “Could you tell us what you were doing yesterday evening, Father?”

  It was Peace again. The one with sharp eyes. Father Pardoe tried very hard not to shift again in his chair.

  “Yesterday evening? Well, I went for a walk. Normally I would do that in the afternoon, but there had been reporters outside all day, so I couldn’t go for my usual constitutional. I realized about nine o’clock that they’d all gone, probably slipped off to one of the nearby pubs. When I got in—”

  “How long were you out?” Oddie asked. Before he could reply Pardoe heard a key in the front door.

  “About an hour or so.” He wondered whether to raise his voice for the next sentence, but decided his interviewers were not stupid, so he kept it at its usual low tone. “After I got in Mrs. Knowsley and I were discussing things—the newspaper stories, the Bishop’s reaction, and so on—until quite late.”

  At this point Margaret came into the sitting room. The men got up and the visitors were introduced. The moment they all sat down Oddie put the same question to her.

  “Could you tell me when Father Pardoe came back from his walk, and what you did afterward?”

  “Oh, yes. He got back somewhere around a quarter past ten. And then we sat up talking about the case—his suspension, that is. I’ve got very partisan since Father Pardoe came as my lodger. It was around eleven forty-five when I went to bed, and I heard him come up about ten minutes later.”

  Pardoe realized with a shock that he felt glad that she had told the lie that he had been careful not to tell.

  • • •

  Doris Crabtree was so flabbergasted by the news as relayed by Look North on the television at eleven o’clock that she trailed all the way along Kingsmill Close, Kingsmill Rise, Kingsmill Crescent, and then the whole length of Kingsmill Grove to Florrie Mortlake’s little first-floor flat, to sit in her kitchen and give expression to her shock. Over and over again.

  “I can’t get over it,” she said. “There was him, just yesterday, sitting in my front room large as life and nice as pie, and now today, gone. He was that friendly, you wouldn’t believe, said how useful what I’d told him had been, and how he’d be interested in anything I might happen to hear in the future. It hits you, doesn’t it, something like this. ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ Well, this drives that home, doesn’t it? There’s no justice about it either. Because a nicer chap you couldn’t hope to meet. . . .”

  Thus Doris Crabtree, at inordinate length, illustrated the truth that anyone who has ever studied the media must learn: that the carrier of news is often the worst possible interpreter of it.

  • • •

  The editor being busy at a summit meeting with the newspaper’s proprietors, it was Marcia Moore who received the two detectives when, at her suggestion, they called at the Chronicle’s offices when the last edition had been put to bed.

  “I have more to do with the newsroom than the editor,” she said as they marched, Marcia leading the way, from her office in its direction. “So I can probably tell you more.”

  “Good,” said Oddie. “Now, we haven’t got a time for the murder. He was found just after midnight, but he could have been lying there a fair while. We shan’t get the result of the autopsy until tomorrow, if then, so it would help us if we could know when he left here last night.”

  “Yes, I realize that,” she said. “Though, of course, he didn’t necessarily go straight home.” She had a newsperson’s instinct to teach her grandmother to suck eggs. “I’ve asked the night security man. He’s a dozy individual. He didn’t see Cosmo go out, but he thinks there was still someone in the newsroom when he came on duty at nine.”

  “Not too helpful,” said Oddie. “We could try to find out if any of these people were still around at that time,” he said as they walked into the newsroom.

  “You can try. There’s not usually many by late evening. They have to come on duty early in the morning. If Cosmo was around so late he was probably stewing over his priest-and-bimbo story.”

  They were standing by the door, and the black policeman’s eyelid twitched. She looked at him boldly.

  “You didn’t like him?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t stand him. In fact, I’m glad to h
ave seen the last of his leering face, glad I shan’t have to smell his foul little cigars, glad I shan’t have to have any more rows with him about his bogus expenses claims. I’m not alone. You won’t find much grief for him here. Correction: any grief.”

  And no grief was what they got when they separated and went around the newsroom. Cosmo was not loved, that everyone made clear, and would not have wanted to be loved. The adjectives varied, but they were mostly within the range used by tabloids for contemporary monsters. They didn’t get much either on when Cosmo had left the office.

  “He wasn’t here—at least not in the newsroom—when I slipped in and out at ten-fifteen because I’d left my house keys in a drawer,” said Carol Barr to Charlie Peace as he perched on the side of her desk not occupied by her computer. “He could have been in the loo, of course, or in the library, or anywhere else in the building. I didn’t notice that his screen was showing anything, but that’s probably not significant. Cosmo was basically a notebook-and-pencil man.”

  “And there was nobody else here?”

  “No. I thought Terry Beale might be, but he wasn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “One of the arts team was off, and Terry was covering an Opera North first night. He felt a bit unsure of his territory, thought he might need the library if he wasn’t to make a fool of himself. Probably the opera wasn’t over by then.”

  “But they could, say, both have been in the library?”

  “Oh, yes. But if Terry killed him it would have been on impulse, there and then. You’d have found the body in the stacks, or by his desk there. He wouldn’t have followed him home and done it.”

  “Terry didn’t like him?”

  “Terry loathed him. We all did.” She paused as if wondering whether to say what was on her mind, and after a second she did. “With Terry it was very strong, almost personal. We could never see why it should be.”

  “Is Terry here now?” asked Peace, looking around the newsroom.

  “No. India’s playing Pakistan in the World Cup at Headingley, and they’re expecting crowd trouble. I think he’s probably covering that, because I haven’t seen him all day.”