Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  “That’s the part of the story that gives it its popular appeal,” said Janette. “Aren’t the English dreadful sometimes?”

  “Mostly, in my opinion.” Something struck Edith, and she let it distract her for a moment. “That poor girl. You know, I feel there must be something to her, for Father to take all that trouble with her. Maybe some of us should try to do something for her.”

  Janette looked sceptical.

  “I think most of the support will come from her own generation.”

  “I hope so. Girls of her generation, I would guess. But she may still need money, some kind of material help. I’m sure the girl feels hurt and betrayed by the newspaper interest, but one can’t, luckily, see a pregnant woman with a toddler lying in wait for this reptile and bashing his head in. The Norrises seem to have cooperated quite disgracefully with him, which rather rules them out, unfortunately. And, of course, Father Pardoe is out of the question. That leaves the other part of the newspaper interest: the Father Riley Fund.”

  “Yes,” agreed Janette. “You know, somehow I’ve never been able to take that seriously. I just can’t see him handing over large sums of money to the girl so she could go out and live it up. Not Father Pardoe.”

  “Nor did he do anything of the sort, I’m quite sure. Apparently she lives on the breadline, like most of these too-young mothers, and the most he did for her was get a few basic comforts and appliances, all of them secondhand.”

  “Of course you’d know, your brother being a trustee.”

  “Raymond has told me nothing—less than nothing,” said Edith Preece-Dembleby, with something of a judge’s sternness. “He’s clammed up on the subject. I learned what I’ve just told you from Mrs. O’Keefe, on the Kingsmill. Now, of course there’s a possibility that this was just an example of what was in fact a more widespread misuse of the Fund, but it’s a possibility I personally would ignore.”

  “Of course,” agreed Janette. “Anyway, from what I’ve heard, Father had given up control of the fund to the Bishop and the trustees.” She pulled herself up. “That brings it back rather close to home for you, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t be embarrassed, my dear. Yes, it does. You know, I’ve just been talking about it to Nora, my sister-in-law, and I got the awful idea that Raymond could have been squandering or misusing her money.”

  “Edith!” said Janette, shocked. “What gave you that idea?”

  “I don’t know . . . something furtive about Raymond when I raise the matter of the Father Riley Fund. I thought he might have got into financial difficulties.”

  “I’d never heard of his firm having problems. Derek says he’s got loads of clients.”

  “But Raymond’s always been one for a gamble at the races, and on the stock exchange too. . . . Oh, it was just a silly thought, and quite wrong, because Nora’s in full control of her own little fortune, so she says. But the question of what Raymond may have been doing with the Riley Fund remains. The problem is what we do next.”

  Janette took her time over that. She hadn’t taken kindly to the idea of going to the police, although thinking it over, she had to admit there was a kind of sense to it.

  “You know, if we did go to the police, or for that matter if they came to see us, it would make sense to edge them in the direction of the Father Riley Fund.”

  Edith’s face expressed distaste.

  “I couldn’t do it myself, not with Raymond being one of the ones involved.”

  “No. But I could.”

  “I shrink from it. I’m old-fashioned, and I do shrink from any scandal coming close to my family. I can talk about it to you, but—”

  “You must realize that, even if Raymond is involved, the person responsible is almost certainly the Bishop.”

  Edith looked even more anguished.

  “Oh, dear. Such a masterful man. And what you say would not be true if there was any . . . private peculation.”

  “In any case,” said Janette, “the police won’t need any direction to look at the Fund. It was a prominent part of the original story, and in the version in the Globe.”

  “Oh, dear, yes. Of course it will be in their minds anyway.”

  “Hadn’t we better consult Mary about this?” Janette said after a moment’s thought. “She was at least as active as either of us in deciding to write to the Bishop.”

  “Good idea. Why don’t you ring her?”

  Janette stood up, turned toward Edith, seemingly about to tell her something, then changed her mind and went to the telephone.

  “Mary? Janette. I’ve got Edith Preece-Dembleby here. . . . Yes, we’ve been talking over what we should do in the light of the murder of that awful journalist. . . . Well, actually Edith thought we should do something, because if it turns out to have something to do with our appeal to the Bishop, it will look better if we have approached the police first. . . . Oh . . . yes . . . yes . . . of course I see your point. . . . Yes . . . yes . . . I’ll talk it over with Edith.”

  When she had put the phone down she came back to the little group of easy chairs and sat down, very pensive.

  “I suppose you got the gist of that, Edith?”

  “She was against it.”

  “Yes. And not just that—quite shocked and disturbed by the idea. I think ‘agitated’ is the best word to describe it.”

  Edith chewed the matter over in her mind, then said, “You were going to tell or ask me something before you went to ring her, then decided not to.”

  “You’re very sharp. Yes . . . this will probably sound silly. I phoned Mary on Monday, after the story broke in the Chronicle. I wondered where that left our little campaign in support of Father Pardoe. One thing led to another in our talk—which was almost our first real, open conversation. It became—I don’t know—a sort of meeting of minds, an overflowing of emotions.”

  “What about, my dear?”

  “Basically marriage. Our marriages. The position of Catholic women, and the sort of marriage most of us find ourselves in.”

  “I see. I think I can guess the drift of what you were saying. I’m not quite the dried-out stick some people see me as, and I have my eyes and ears in good working order still. I sometimes wonder whether I’ve been—not wise, but at least lucky in not falling into that sort of marriage, as you said earlier. I do value my independence.”

  “I can see you understand. It seemed like we were saying things we’d wanted to say to each other for years, because our husbands are so similar, and are friends, but hadn’t said them out of some sort of misplaced loyalty to them. Anyway, she rang me yesterday and suggested we ought to talk. I was quite happy with that, and we agreed to meet for tea and horrid buns at the Fir Tree. As I say, she had sounded quite normal, eager to have a chat. But then . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “When she got there she was preoccupied. Sort of shut down. We went through the motions of talking about the things we’d talked about on Monday, but . . . there was nothing there.”

  “Her heart wasn’t in it anymore?”

  “More than that. She was not just preoccupied, I thought, but eaten up with worry. She could hardly think of anything else, and when she talked about marriage, or Father Pardoe, or whatever, she was always saying the wrong word—you know, a word close in sound, but not the one she wanted, like elderly people do. She was just going through the motions of having a conversation.”

  “Something had happened between her ringing you up, and her actually getting to the Fir Tree to meet you, you think?”

  “I think it must have.”

  “You didn’t ask her what it was?”

  “No. I didn’t like to pry. I hate it when people try to press me about Derek and his . . . habits. But more than that I had the feeling that what had happened, or what she had discovered, was so terrible, or dangerous, or distressing, that it was something she couldn’t tell me.”

  They chewed over the matter for a half hour or more, but in the end they decided there could be no question
of going to the police when Mary Leary was so decidedly against it. Their discussion, however, turned out to be quite academic, because when Edith Preece-Dembleby arrived home she found two policemen on her doorstep flashing their ID cards in her face.

  CHAPTER 12

  Roots

  When Mike Oddie and Charlie Peace got back in their car after talking to Miss Preece-Dembleby, Charlie sat slumped for a moment in the driver’s seat, apparently on another planet. He had been thoughtful since he’d clocked in that morning. Eventually Oddie recalled him to business by asking, “How did she strike you?”

  “Just thoughtful. Not depressed, but as if something was on her mind.” Then he jumped. “Christ! Sorry! You meant the old biddy in there.”

  “Whereas you were talking about Felicity. What do you think is on her mind?”

  “I’m afraid her father is proposing to come and live with us or near us, and use Felicity as a doormat again.”

  Charlie’s live-in partner, Felicity, had a father who wrote mediocre novels that unerringly failed to ring the bell with readers. He was recently widowed, and with a nice excuse for self-pity had written letters regretting that his daughter was not available to act as his housekeeper.

  “Felicity is long past the doormat stage,” said Oddie firmly, “thanks partly to you but mostly to herself. When you get home tonight, why don’t you sit down and ask her? Now, if you gave any part of your mind to it, what did you think of Miss Preece-Dembleby?”

  Charlie dragged his mind back to the job at hand.

  “At first the whole thing struck me as a bit of a comedy act,” he admitted. “I mean, this prim and proper old biddy sitting there with her hands in her lap and saying things like ‘It seems as if the women of the parish are waking up.’ It made me want to laugh.”

  “An unlikely Germaine Greer?”

  “Way over the top,” agreed Charlie. “Miss Marple leads the feminist revolution—thirty years after the event. But if you shut your eyes and listened to what was being said, it was very sharp. And if you looked at the face—the eyes, the mouth—you saw that she was noticing everything. She was talking about the parish, her brother, Father Pardoe, and so on, but all the time she was noticing us.”

  “We probably were a bit outside her experience.”

  “Way outside. Still, she was coping. Registering differences in age, background, wondering how we got on, wondering whether we formed some kind of good-cop-bad-cop act, which she’s probably heard of, registering as soon as I opened my mouth that I was a Londoner, wondering what I was doing up here. All in all I’d say she is a very sharp lady.”

  “So we take notice of what she said?” asked Oddie.

  “Absolutely. Father Pardoe is innocent, the victim of smears and perhaps a plot, possibly the designated fall guy for someone else’s financial misdeeds. And the women of the parish are on the warpath, sensing they’re still victims of a very old-fashioned sort of male chauvinism. And somehow these two things are connected, but I’m not sure I understand how.”

  “No . . . leave that for a moment. I’d go along with everything you say. But I do wonder how the feminine awakening in the St. Catherine’s parish is our affair. At the moment I can’t see that it is, though the Fund certainly bears looking into.”

  “There is one other thing,” said Charlie.

  “What’s that?”

  “In one respect she seemed muddled, and I don’t think she’s a muddled lady. She was willing to talk about the Father Riley Fund, but whenever she talked about her brother she tended to get more reserved, bottled up.”

  “We had to drag out of her the brother’s connection with the Fund,” Oddie replied.

  “Yes. I think she’d like it to be the Bishop who’s been playing hanky-panky with the capital, but she’s not sure, and she’s instinctively trying to protect the brother without having any great confidence in his honesty.”

  “Fair enough. I expect I’d be muddled in that sort of circumstance. What next, then? Maybe we should get on to headquarters and see what’s been happening back there.”

  But when they got back to Sergeant Coppin at Millgarth, who was coordinating the murder inquiry, they found he’d hit a snag.

  “This young chap you want to talk to—”

  “Terry Beale?”

  “Yes, him. Not at the Chronicle offices today, wasn’t in yesterday either, and no call in to explain his absence. He’s not at his digs at Kirkstall, and he didn’t sleep in his bed last night. No explanation given to his landlady.”

  “Not necessarily an unusual thing for a young chap,” said Oddie.

  “But it is for him, she says.”

  “He’s not from around here, is he?” Charlie asked.

  “No, from the Midlands. Place called Harborne—suburb of Birmingham, apparently. We’ve got a home address from his landlady, and confirmed it with the Chronicle offices. He’s with them on a one-year placement for aspiring journalists. He’s a graduate of Warwick University. That’s one of the things that irked Horrocks, apparently. He couldn’t stand graduates—they got on his nerves.”

  “Sounds like the police. Right. Many thanks. We’re going to have to consider sending someone down there, though there’s no guarantee that’s where he’s gone. Would you call the Chronicle and his landlady and tell them we need to know if he has any contact with either of them?”

  Oddie turned to Charlie in the seat beside him and looked at him speculatively.

  “What do you think?”

  “Is it sensible to go all that way with so little to go on? The only thing to connect him to the murder is the fact that the two disliked each other. On the other hand, Horrocks’s former job was down there. That mate of yours that sent you the cutting—where was he from?”

  “Coventry. The cutting was from the Coventry Evening News and they were cock-a-hoop, though they tried to pretend they were grieving. One of their former reporters had been murdered! Read all about it! It’s a funny old world.”

  “The lack of grief is unanimous,” Charlie replied.

  “Even among his family. I suppose that means that Cosmo’s gallant rescue of Cora Horrocks from the abuser took place in the Coventry area.”

  “Presumably. You think that should be looked into?”

  “Of course. That’s one known violent criminal in Cosmo’s history. Add to that that Cora herself had every chance to wait for her husband and bash his brains in. She had the advantage over most of the suspects in that she knew his habits and was on the spot.”

  “Looks to me like I’m being selected for a trip to the Midlands.” Charlie sighed.

  “You are. I’ll get them at headquarters to ring the Evening News there and find someone for you to talk to who was there in Cosmo’s time and knows all the dirt on him.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll dig deeper in the parish. I have a fancy to start with the stand-in priest.”

  “Miss Preece-Dembleby gave the impression she had a very jaundiced opinion of that one, didn’t she. Do you know where he lives?” Charlie asked.

  “There’s a presbytery close to the church. Father Pardoe’s home, of course. If the new priest hasn’t moved in or isn’t there, there’ll be someone who knows where he is.”

  “Right you are. I’ll drive you there and then be on my way.”

  So it was that, three and a half hours later, Charlie was ensconced in the late afternoon, at a time when ten years before most pubs would be closed, in The Blackbird, a journalists’ watering hole a few hundred yards from the offices of the Coventry Evening News, opposite Len Foxley, an aging journalist, currently editing the readers’ letters page, a man in his fifties with an ongoing thirst problem and a surprisingly sharp memory, considering the alcoholic haze through which his professional life must have been lived. Charlie, a sharp dresser, averted his eyes from the threadbare tweed sports jacket that looked as if it had been made for an ill-coordinated hippopotamus and from sports trousers that looked due for a dry-clean
the year Thatcher came to power. He concentrated on his notebook and his glass, which was being emptied at about a tenth the speed of Len Foxley’s.

  “He was a keen beggar, give him his due,” Len Foxley was saying, the due-giving obviously in preparation for the slaughter. “Went after stories like a terrier after a rotten bone. Dead eager to make his mark, because he’d set his sights on London and one of the big tabloids. That bothered a lot of people on the paper, but most of us knew he’d never make it, so we just laughed about it behind his back.”

  “He wasn’t liked?” suggested Charlie.

  “Liked? You’re joking! You haven’t got far in your investigation if you can even suggest that he might have been.” He downed the second third of his second pint. “Listen, young feller. You’ll get nowhere if you don’t take on board the fact that Horrocks was the pits. Standards of probity and fair play may not be very high in the world of journalism, but even by those standards Horrocks was a rat. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get a story, and no story so unappetizing or depraved that he wouldn’t go after it and revel in every sordid detail. He was mighty good at the tut-tutting too—the ‘it pains me to have to tell you this’ stuff that tries to make readers feel better about enjoying that sort of muckraking.”

  “Sounds to me as if he ought to have made it to the tabloids,” commented Charlie.

  “Going just by his stories and his presentation you’d be right. The reason he didn’t was that he was no good at brownnosing people. You’ve got to arse-lick the editors, the owner, all the powers that be on a paper if you’re to get a regular job on what used to be called Fleet Street papers. To give Cosmo his due, he tried it. But he was so convinced he was cleverer than anybody else in sight that the insincerity was blatant. You could see it even in the little world of the Evening News. While he was telling the editor what a brilliant journalist he was, his face and voice showed he knew the man was nothing but a second-rate provincial hack, because nobody but a hack would be hired to edit a paper like the Coventry Evening News.”