Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  She hadn’t meant to, but as the big policeman got off her desk, nodded, and moved away, she realized that she had landed Terry in the middle of trouble.

  • • •

  By midmorning the news was beginning to get around to the parishioners of St. Catherine’s. Edith Preece-Dembleby heard it on Aire Waves, a commercial station that had a nostalgia hour midmorning with regular news updates. She rang Janette Jessel first, being careful to switch the radio off, because she would have died rather than admit to listening to old Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton records to opera-loving Janette. When she had retailed the gossip in a thoroughly efficient and genteel manner to her, she called Mary Leary and did the same. Then she sat down and wondered whether she should ring her brother.

  After the call and a pause for coffee Mary continued to iron Wednesday’s wash, but she was thinking hard. She still had the conviction that the parish activists were getting—no, had got—into things deeper than they understood. She tried to tell herself she was being stupid. A priest is suspended, a journalist gets on to the story, the journalist is murdered. It seemed like a simple progression of events, and if it was that simple, it had the appearance of implicating Father Pardoe or his parishioners at St. Catherine’s. But that was absurd: the dead man presumably had a private life, a professional life. Both spheres could probably produce a better motive than the Father Pardoe story could. And then, he apparently had been battered to death. This suggested some kind of mugging. People these days got killed just for the contents of their purses or wallets. The streets held the equivalent of the eighteenth-century highwaymen. That was probably the most likely explanation of all.

  But in spite of deciding that, in spite of telling herself that she had not been regretting getting involved in the movement of support for Father Pardoe, there still niggled at the back of her mind a feeling that they had sailed into dangerous waters, and that those waters had turned out to be much choppier and murkier than they had banked on.

  She put the last of the ironing, Mark’s cricketing and gym gear, down on one of the several piles that sat on the kitchen table beside the ironing board. Suddenly she felt a rare need: someone to talk to, someone to swap conjectures with. She rejected Edith Preece-Dembleby as too prim and buttoned-up, and got on the phone to Janette Jessel.

  “Janette? You’ve heard, of course.”

  “Yes. Miss Preece-Dembleby rang. Isn’t it horrible?”

  “I find it—I don’t know—bewildering. I wondered if we could meet for tea and cakes. Have a talk.”

  “Love to. I feel the need to, to tell you the truth,” said Janette.

  “Me too. Where?”

  “The Fir Tree? Not much option, really.”

  “Not really. I resent paying to eat cakes so much nastier than any I would ever make myself.”

  “True,” Janette agreed. “But that’s not really the point, is it?”

  “No, of course it’s not. See you—when? Four o’clock?”

  “See you then.”

  Mary Leary collected her washing and began going around the various rooms upstairs distributing it—first Donna’s untidy bedroom, then Mark’s much more organized one, then the marital bedroom, from her wardrobe to Conal’s, then to the chest that had drawers for both of them. It was a routine, a dance she did every week, where any variation in the steps would irritate.

  Then she went down to the basement and the games room there. Its big cupboard was where Conal and Mark insisted on keeping all their sporting stuff, including the gear they were both rather particular about. She put Conal’s golfing shirt on a pile of similar ones, then put Mark’s cricketing shirt and his gym shorts and vest on their appropriate piles. She was about to shut the door when something struck her.

  There was something wrong, something different about the cupboard. Something that was not there. She stepped back to survey it, and then realized what it was. But why? What use—?

  It hit her like an exploding grenade.

  She shut the door and leaned the back of her head against it. She wished with all her heart that she had not arranged to have tea and cakes with Janette Jessel. How on earth was she going to seem natural? How on earth could she manage to put up any sort of convincing pretense? How could she think of anything except what that space signified?

  CHAPTER 11

  Feminine Unease

  Edith Preece-Dembleby set out from her home on Thursday morning with the intention of calling on her brother at his office. The nagging anxiety she had that he was involved in something had only grown since their conversation on the telephone, and it had coalesced with her general uneasiness about the parish that she loved, the priest she respected, and the priest she did not respect, adding up to a general feeling that somehow things were out of joint. Edith was essentially a watcher, a cataloger of life’s ills and follies, but there were times when she felt imperatively the need for action, and at such times she could be decisive.

  Halfway to her brother’s office, however, she changed her mind. Walking had clarified her thinking, as it often did. If she visited Raymond, and even if he was unencumbered with a client, she would be subjected to exactly the same line as he had taken on the telephone: This was not her business, not women’s business at all, it was a parish matter, confidential to the two trustees and the Bishop, and he wasn’t willing to say one syllable more. She was perfectly capable of dealing with her brother on a personal, domestic, psychological level, and would quite often have the better of any disagreement of that sort. On the professional work level of his life she was at a disadvantage, having no education or training beyond her sixteenth year, and in any case liable to be put in the wrong, as anyone would be, by the plea of confidentiality.

  She determined instead to visit her brother’s home, an imposing late-Victorian dwelling not unlike the one she had shared with him for years, just over the border of Shipley and Saltaire. He had bought it as a bargain when he was married, pleased to stick with the sort of house he knew, and had then spent a fortune bringing it up to his standards of comfort and suitable middle-class elegance. She shook her head, in fact, at the amounts he had spent on central heating, decorating, and overly plush furnishings. She did the four-minute walk briskly, her mental clock ticking away the whole time. When she arrived there the door of the house on Elmtree Lane was opened by her sister-in-law, her smile expressing genuine pleasure.

  “Edith—this is a surprise.”

  “Hello, Nora. Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course. I’ve got coffee on. Come in.”

  “This isn’t really a social call, but—”

  Nora waved any protest aside, and in a matter of minutes they were in the living room, with its bulky and conventionally handsome furniture, and Edith was ushered into one of the cretonne-covered chairs, while Nora bustled back to the kitchen to fetch a tray of coffee with Marie biscuits on a delicate silver stand. Nora was, on the surface, as conventional a person as her second husband, but Edith felt she had never got to know her well enough to judge whether this was anything more than a facade.

  “Was it the June bazaar?” she asked now, settling back into the embrace of her own armchair.

  “No, it was—well—more personal than that,” Edith said, feeling something close to a flush rising to her cheeks. “It’s very difficult to put into words but it’s something that has been troubling me very much. Nora, have you had the feeling that Raymond has been worried recently?”

  Nora frowned.

  “He’s seemed a bit harassed—put-upon, you might say. I haven’t thought too much about it. I don’t generally ask about his work, and with that kind of thing you’re bound to have problems and uncertainties now and then, aren’t you? It’s a difficult time, everyone says so. My own money isn’t earning half the interest it was a few years ago.”

  “How long have you sensed he’s been worried?”

  “I suppose it’s been coming on gradually. Let me think: two or three months, maybe?”

 
“And you thought it was the general economic climate, or perhaps problems with one of his clients?”

  “Well, it’s not personal. And I’ve never had any sense that his business is falling off.”

  “No. That doesn’t leave very much. . . . Does he ever mention the Father Riley Fund?”

  Nora looked at her sharply, her still-handsome brow again creasing.

  “I think I’ve heard of it from him—maybe when he’s off to a meeting or something. He’s certainly not mentioned it recently. But I have heard of it recently. Now where—?”

  “In the papers, maybe.”

  “Oh, of course,” she said, her face closing. “Poor Father Pardoe. Now that’s a nasty business, don’t you agree?”

  “I do.”

  “And do you know I can’t get Raymond to agree with me,” her sister-in-law said, not greatly to Edith’s surprise. “In fact, I can’t get so much as a whisper out of him on the subject.”

  “They’re saying that Father Pardoe misused the Fund for this poor creature, the daughter of those odious Norrises,” said Edith, abandoning any pretense of neutrality. “I talked to Mrs. O’Keefe who lives on the Kingsmill estate at church last Sunday. She says the girl is living in abject poverty. He can’t have misused much, can he?”

  “Surely he can’t.”

  “And it sounds like exactly the sort of case the Fund is meant to be used for.”

  “It does.” She thought, and then added: “Though Father Riley, whoever he was, was maybe not as used to Catholic girls being unmarried mothers as we are.”

  Edith leaned forward in her chair.

  “The fact is, Nora, I was under the impression that the Fund had been taken over by the Bishop and the trustees.”

  “I know nothing about that.”

  “I suppose if Raymond had been really worried he would have discussed it with you.”

  Nora shook her head vigorously.

  “That he would not. We never talk about such things because I’ve no interest in them whatsoever. I’m a farmer’s wife, or widow—I took a keen interest in the farm, the animals, even the crops, and I could cope with the ups and downs of prices and what the livestock market was doing. But the sort of high finance Raymond’s work involves him in, that means less than nothing to me.”

  A sudden, uncomfortable thought struck Edith, prompted by something Nora had said earlier. It was a thought difficult to put into words.

  “Nora, you said your money wasn’t making what it used to. You do still keep control of it, don’t you?”

  She was heartened when she saw her sister-in-law looking at her pityingly.

  “Edith, we’re not living in the nineteenth century, you know. I have heard of the Married Women’s Property Act, and I do know the sort of thing that makes for friction in a marriage. Handing over control of money would come pretty near the top of the list.”

  Edith felt rebuked for her lack of experience in marital matters, yet elated too.

  “So Raymond never suggested that he might manage your investments?”

  “He may have hinted he could give me advice. If he did I took no notice. I’m not so green as I’m cabbage-looking. For better or worse I decide where my money goes, so the blame rests with me if it does less than brilliantly. And if I decided I wanted advice, I’d go to someone else. We have a perfectly satisfactory marriage, Edith, but sometimes my greater experience has to rescue Raymond from his ignorance of the state. Rest assured: I’m a woman who manages her own affairs.”

  Walking home, Edith felt a wave of gratitude flood through her that there was no question of Raymond appropriating and misusing his wife’s money. The drama of that, if it ever came out, or if it even was suspected, would have been hard to bear. Yet when she thought about it, the fact that she could even consider the possibility of that happening said something about Raymond’s character, or her view of it: He was weak, easily led, fell into things because he had no clear or strong system of morality built into his makeup.

  And that thought left the worry about the Father Riley Fund very strong in her mind. Had he misappropriated funds, perhaps in cahoots with his fellow trustee? That was Gerald Sooter, from Bingley. A picture of him—long, gangly, runny-eyed—came into her mind. He was only an occasional communicant at St. Catherine’s, and Edith had exchanged words with him on barely more than one or two occasions, but she had heard someone describe him as a “genetically modified twerp.” Edith liked the phrase and thought it fitted. Though she herself would never use language like that, she rather relished it when other people did. Now the memory of the description added enormously to her disquiet. Why on earth had a man like that been made a trustee?

  The home of Janette Jessel was only two minutes away. Edith considered whether she ought to drop in on her: She liked her, and she had been to her house more than once on parish business, but they were not on terms where she would consider herself justified in calling without some sort of specific business. Though Edith lived her life by a pattern of rules, many of them antiquated, some of them ridiculous, she had never regarded any of them as totally binding: circumstances altered cases, she was well aware, and exceptional situations called for bold behavior. She decided to go out of her way and call.

  The Jessels’ house was a recent one, part of a small estate built on the playground of a Victorian primary school that had outlived its usefulness in an era of declining births. This was not a jerry-built estate of homes where everyone peered over the tiny apron of back garden that their neighbors had and heard the television programs and lovemakings indulged in next door as clearly as if they were in the next room. These were rather more substantial, with three bedrooms, and looking out in a row onto an older street. Even so, Edith did not regard them with favor. The newer the house the worse built, she believed, and the new estates of the past twenty or thirty years were the slums of the early twenty-first century. She had no doubt that buying this house was Derek Jessel’s decision. In fact, she suspected that most decisions in the household were his.

  When Janette opened the door the expression on her face was surprised but welcoming.

  “Miss Preece-Dembleby! Come in. Tea or coffee?”

  “Neither, thank you. I’ve just had coffee with Nora, Raymond’s wife. Are you alone?”

  “Of course,” said Janette, ushering her through to the rather cramped sitting room. “With Bill at university and Jack at college in Leeds all day and most of the evening, I usually am.”

  “You’re not looking forward to your brood flying the nest, then?” Edith asked, sitting down in an armchair.

  “It’s as if they’ve flown already. Maybe it would have been different if we’d had a daughter. . . .”

  “Daughters fly the nest too, you know,” said Edith. “Though I never did.”

  “Perhaps you were the wise one,” said Janette.

  Edith felt that, judging by the expression on Janette’s face, they were getting into painful waters, so she came right out with her preoccupation.

  “It’s the murder.”

  “I thought it must be. It’s terrible. I feel so bewildered. If only one knew it had nothing to do with—”

  “But we don’t, not yet at least. And of course one worries. It sounds silly to suggest that anything we did in support of Father Pardoe could have led to that dreadful smut merchant who was hounding him being killed, but . . . oh, Janette, I’ve been getting such upsetting ideas and fancies!”

  “I know. I’m the same. And, Edith—may I call you that?”

  “Of course, my dear.”

  “I’ve had a phone call from Roger Malley—do you remember him? His wife was killed in a car accident, and he moved to Leeds to be nearer his work.”

  “I remember. Quite tragic. I never knew him well.”

  “We did, and I was very close to his wife. He was at St. Anne’s last Sunday,” explained Janette, “and spoke to Father Pardoe on the way out, not knowing anything about the trouble he’s in. Anyway, he was close to Father
and the Bishop when they were, well, having the row that the photographer got the picture of. He says that the Bishop was accusing Father of organizing what was virtually a petition from the congregation, and he was clearly very angry.”

  Edith looked worried. She had always been so strong in her support of those in authority in the past.

  “The Bishop was? Oh, dear. We seem to have done more harm than good.”

  “Yes,” agreed Janette. Then she thought. “Though we’ve no reason to think Father Pardoe is annoyed about it. If only we could speak to him.”

  Edith considered this.

  “The place where he’s staying hasn’t actually been named in any of the newspapers, has it? Anyway, we might compound the harm we’ve done if we try to do that. The thing that was in the back of my mind as a possibility was getting in contact with the police investigating the case.”

  Janette Jessel’s face showed her surprise.

  “Oh? But wouldn’t that be practically asking them to make a connection?”

  Edith shook her head, but not entirely confidently.

  “Not necessarily, I don’t think. You see, Janette, the thing I dread most is opening my front door and finding the police there, flashing their little cards. It would make me feel so guilty. Then they’d demand to come in, and they’d be questioning me on their terms. If we were to contact them, say that we’d done this and that, and that we were worried that quite inadvertently we might have contributed to a situation that conceivably had led to murder, then if they decided it was worth talking to us they’d be doing it on our terms.”

  “Ye-e-es,” conceded Janette, rather reluctantly. “I suppose so. But wouldn’t we be focusing their minds on Father Pardoe, when really it should be on something else—the awful man’s domestic situation, for example, or his colleagues on the Chronicle?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Edith more firmly. “With the story breaking and being in the national gutter press as well as the local ones, it’s something they’re bound to have very much on their minds. Let’s try thinking this through, shall we? The story, as the press has got hold of it, is a two-pronged one. On the one hand there are the allegations about Father Pardoe and Julie Norris.”