Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  “But that’s what Cosmo always was too.”

  “Always. We laughed when he got the job in Leeds. It was a step up all right, but not a very big one, and not the one he craved. And that’s where he stopped for the rest of his life.”

  He downed the final third and handed his glass to Charlie. It looked as if it was going to be an expensive session.

  “His present wife—did you ever meet her?” Charlie asked, coming back with the refill.

  “Not that I remember. Married her just before or just after he left here. She was one of his stories, you know.”

  “Yes, she told us.”

  “And it was a genuine story, not like some of his. The man this woman was with—what’s her name now?”

  “Cora.”

  “That’s it. The man she was shacking up with was a monster. He got his kicks from—well, from kicks. And punches, wounding, you name it. And plausible as you wouldn’t believe. Up before the magistrate or a judge, he would make them believe he was a much-wronged man, put-upon for years, who suddenly snapped when it all got too much for him. Had juries eating out of his hand. Of course, police were different then.”

  “So the old hands tell me.”

  “None of . . . your sort in the force, or not so you’d notice.”

  Charlie directed one of his ferocious looks at him, but he was hidden behind his beer mug. “More to the point, they were mostly working-class chaps who took a bit of domestic violence in their stride. Grew up with it, and not averse to a bit of it themselves from time to time. So it took a while—and it took a string of articles by Cosmo—for the penny to drop. This man was way out of the league of men who occasionally punched their wives. In actual fact the violence wasn’t just against Cora. There was a string of women—occasional partners, one-night stands, former girlfriends. Cosmo really went at it, tracked them all down, went to court records, discovered aliases. He should have been a private detective or a policeman.”

  “No, thank you,” said Charlie.

  “Anyway, he built up a dossier on this bloke such as you wouldn’t believe. Names, dates, places, court hearings, the lot. And incidentally it was pretty damning as far as others were concerned: Police, social workers, probation officers, judges. When it broke it made one of the longest-running stories I can remember.”

  “When he was doing all this digging, was Cora living with the man—what was his name?”

  “Alan Russell. Oh, I don’t think so. Out of the question, I should have thought, because she’d have been dead meat if he’d got so much as a whiff. Quite early on, if my memory serves me, Cosmo got her away and into hiding. I suppose things were building up between her and him, though Cosmo had a girlfriend—a gorgeous redhead we saw him with now and then—and a new baby.”

  Charlie considered this.

  “You mean he was having it off with the two of them?”

  “Wouldn’t know. None of us knew. No one at the News got more than a toehold in his private life. The mind boggles, frankly. All we know is that about the time he left for Leeds—the Alan Russell story having netted him the job there—he and Cora were an item. I believe he had a kid or kids by her later. Poor little buggers. Cosmo and kids just don’t go together. You’d have thought he’d have insisted they be exposed on some bleak Scottish mountain. Anyway, that’s what happened. Look, lad, my glass has been empty more than three minutes.”

  Charlie chewed over this new information while he collected a fresh pint. His doubts found expression as he sat down again.

  “It never struck me, looking at the body, that Horrocks was likely to be a ladies’ man.”

  “Being a bit looks-ist, to coin a phrase, aren’t you?” said Len Foxley roguishly. “It’s not the handsome hunks always pull in the birds. For all I know Casanova was an ugly little runt.”

  “It’s often power pulls them in,” conceded Charlie. “Politicians use that.”

  “Well,” said Foxley, “journalists have a sort of power.”

  “Or influence, as much as power,” Charlie went on. “Sleeping with the boss beats taking a course in management any day.”

  “And you’re forgetting gratitude. I’d be grateful to any man, even if he was an ugly dwarf, if he’d rescued me from Alan Russell.”

  “True enough. But we’ve shifted around to seeing it from Cora Horrocks’ point of view. Cosmo may have been as randy as a cock sparrow, but if he wasn’t, then there was presumably something about Cora that drew him.”

  Len Foxley shrugged.

  “Who can get to the bottom of that kind of thing? I have my ideas. . . .”

  “And what are they?”

  “There was this notion around at the time—one of the things people were talking about, arguing over—that women who were abused by men asked for it, wanted it, went unconsciously after the men likely to do it. So the woman’s no sooner escaped from one relationship where the man has beaten her up than she gets into another with the same sort of man. It was some woman who ran a hostel for abused women who started the idea.”

  “The notion’s still around,” said Charlie. “But I haven’t any impression of Horrocks as a man who was violent toward women.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking of that,” said Foxley. “There’s different ways of skinning a cat, you know. Cosmo’s forte was verbal skinning. He was a sadist with the tongue, using words to humiliate, torment, rob people of their confidence and their self-respect. Come to think of it, it’s a damned good job he never became a schoolmaster. You could drive a kid to suicide with a tongue like his.”

  “What you’re saying is that he saw Cora as a natural victim, and took her on as someone it would be a pleasure to victimize, in particular when her expectations must have been of someone benevolent who had acted as her deliverer?”

  “Something like that. Worms turn, though, don’t they?”

  “It’s taken this worm an awfully long time to turn,” commented Charlie.

  “There’s always the final straw,” returned Len, who could wield the powerful cliché. “Anyway, I wasn’t only thinking of her. There’s the child too, isn’t there?”

  “Two of them.”

  “That household could have been a hellhole of resentment and rebellion. Were the kids of an age to strike back?”

  “One of them was,” said Charlie thoughtfully. And in truth Len had given Charlie plenty to think about. The next time he went up for a refill he got one for himself as well.

  • • •

  Three quarters of an hour and a lot of journalistic gossip later, Charlie was in his car and on the way north to Birmingham, still mulling over the information that Len Foxley, at a liquid price, had provided him with.

  It was suggestive, that was for sure. Charlie had had recent experience of how bitterness could destroy. He had talked to the black mother, still young, of a boy who had died in police custody. He had been a schizophrenic, there was no doubt he had killed himself, but equally no doubt that he had been handled insensitively, and with massive ignorance of his problem. Charlie had every sympathy for the mother, but he could see with dreadful clarity how her massive, corrosive bitterness, two years after the death, was destroying her life and poisoning her personality.

  Could gratitude do the same? Or at any rate gratitude that was gradually undermined, shown to be misplaced, corroded by being directed at a nature that showed itself wholly unworthy of it?

  Say Cora had married Horrocks out of genuine gratitude, and to give herself a home and a protector. The gratitude was quite natural: he had led a campaign against the man who had made her life a hell of fear. Then say she had found out, over the years, that the basis of her marriage was a sham: the man she regarded as her protector had regarded her plight merely as a ploy in one of his usual pieces of self-serving muckraking, and had married her because, like Alan Russell, he had seen her as ideal victim material. And if, as her children grew up, he began to mold them similarly into potential victims, would she not, at some point, snap? Seize an
y chance of ridding herself of the man and starting again?

  Charlie pulled himself up. He had looked into the eyes of the elder daughter of Cosmo Horrocks, and he had not seen a willing victim there. They had been troubled eyes, but they had been aggressive ones too.

  He sent his mind back toward Cora. The fading of gratitude could be a gradual thing, and a final snap could therefore be explicable. At some point Cosmo could have done something that finally destroyed the last dregs of that gratitude and driven his wife to that most usual of crimes, a domestic: a spouse killing a spouse. What or who might it have been in this case? The younger one, Adelaide, most likely. The one least able to defend herself. Because the elder one could certainly have done that—and not just defended herself, but hit back. She was at an age on the border of childhood and adulthood—the age of passionate loves and hatreds, joys and tragedies. She certainly would have had the strength. He could well imagine she would have had the passion. Or could the mother have got in first, because she saw the way things were going?

  When he got to the outskirts of Birmingham he pulled up outside a newsstand and bought an A to Z. He was expert these days in finding his way around strange cities, but Birmingham he found stranger than most. When, in early evening light, he found himself in Harborne, he stopped again to identify Terry Beale’s home address: 10 Thornbush Farm Lane. Ho-ho, he thought. Fat chance of any remnants of a farm in this suburb. When he got there he found a stubby street, with two late-Victorian terraces separated from a similar, smaller terrace by a scruffy piece of wasteland. It was at the farthest end of the little street, the last of this group, that number ten was to be found. Charlie left his car, however, halfway along and walked toward the three-story, dingy, redbrick house. The place had an air of low expectations—an air he was used to in the immigrant areas of London and Leeds.

  He heard the noise from fifty yards away. It was a woman’s voice, singing: a fruity voice, no longer young, but carrying. It was a pop song she was singing, a long-ago one, but Charlie recognized it because it was a Beatles number: “ ‘We all live in a yellow shubmarine, a yellow shubmarine, a—’ ”

  He was nearing the house now, and the obvious was unavoidable: the woman was drunk, and the noise came from number ten. She stopped in midtune and shouted, “ ‘Rejoice and be exceeding glad.’ ”

  A man’s voice shouted back, “Mother!”

  “What’s the matter with you? I’ll rejoice if I want to. I’ve got plenty to rejoice about. Raise high the fucking roof beams, carpenter. ‘I’m just a puppet, a puppet, a puppet on a string.’ ”

  The man’s voice came again, and again it irritated her.

  “Fuck off. I’ll do what I frigging like. I’m shelebrating. Not every day I have shomething good happen to me.”

  Charlie turned into the little scrap of front garden, up a couple steps to the front door, and rang the bell.

  “I’ll get it. I said I’ll get it. My fucking house. What do I care what people think. They can think what they fucking like.”

  The door opened.

  Charlie saw first a glass, half full of brown liquid, then he saw the hand holding it, then his eye went up the arm to the crimson, blotchy face, crowned by a magnificent head of red hair.

  “Who are you? Oh, don’t bother to tell me. I won’t remember. Come in and join the party. Come in and shelebrate that bastard’s death.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Awakening Women

  Oddie wondered what it was about Father Greenshaw that was so instantly dislikable.

  With his customary coolness and sense of justice he mentally withdrew that last word and substituted “off-putting.” Then he wondered whether the kernel of the matter was that the man did not arouse trust. This had something to do with his plump face, the shininess of his black hair, the curving smile of his self-satisfied mouth. Somehow around this sort of priest the word “sleek” seemed to cling as the inevitable adjective.

  “About the Father Pardoe matter I can make no comment,” he was saying, smiling ingratiatingly. “I’m sure you will understand. I earnestly hope he will be found to have acted with complete propriety in both matters that are the subject of the investigation, but of course I can’t prejudge that. The inquiry is being conducted by a completely impartial committee of three. I can’t see, to be quite truthful, why you think there might be any connection between those matters and this shocking murder.”

  “It’s merely a possibility,” said Oddie, stretching relaxedly in his rather hard chair and trying to convey the impression that priesthood cut no ice with him. “The story of Father Pardoe’s suspension breaks, the story is taken up by the national tabloids, the man who broke the story is murdered. Could be coincidence. Could be cause and effect.”

  “Yes. . . . Yes, I suppose so. If there is a connection, I’m not sure that I can be of any help in your investigation. I’m simply the stand-in.”

  “I realize that, but events since the suspension are of particular interest to us. I did wonder, for example, how far the truth—I mean that he is under investigation, and not at a retreat—had got around the parish.”

  Father Greenshaw donned an expression of concern and compassion.

  “Well, I’m afraid it has, little by little. It’s been quite a while now, and priests very rarely go on a retreat of such duration. He’s been seen in Pudsey. Yes, it has got around.”

  “And I gather there has been some kind of appeal to the Bishop.”

  “Ah, yes—the ladies, bless their hearts. Not always wise, but we’d love them less if they were, wouldn’t we?”

  Yuck, thought Oddie.

  “So you thought it was unwise,” he said. “Was that because they assumed Father Pardoe was innocent?”

  “Not exactly, though one should hardly prejudge an inquiry’s conclusions, as I’ve already suggested. No, what was unwise, in my view, was that the letter cast doubt on the procedure, on whether he would get a fair hearing, implied the whole thing was based on gossip. Now, that last really was unwise! The Bishop is impeccably fair in all his dealings. That letter got up his nose, I can tell you!”

  “You talk of ‘ladies’ in connection with the letter.”

  “That was because it was some ladies in the parish who were the moving spirits. They got some men to sign as well. It would have looked very odd if they hadn’t.”

  The man’s smile and his smoothness were so catlike that Oddie wondered if he weren’t purring.

  “Why do you think the Bishop was annoyed?”

  The priest frowned.

  “I thought I’d made that clear. The letter seemed to challenge his authority.”

  “I should have thought a petition to him acknowledged him as the ultimate authority.”

  But Father Greenshaw did not seem to understand.

  “It cast serious doubt on his judgment,” he said, the smile becoming strained. “We’re old-fashioned in the Catholic Church: the Bishop’s word goes.”

  “I see. Were you aware of this letter before it was sent?”

  “Certainly not! I would have moved heaven and earth—so to speak—to stop it if I had been.”

  “But you know now who were the moving spirits?”

  “Oh, yes. Mrs. Jessel, Mrs. Leary, and Miss Preece-Dembleby.”

  “Did you learn that from parish talk?”

  “From the Bishop himself. He has his sources of information. I came in for a tiny portion of his wrath. Luckily I was able to assure him that I was quite ignorant of what was going on. He’s a very fair man.”

  That was not quite how he was beginning to seem to Oddie.

  “And it was Father Pardoe who came in for the lion’s share of his wrath?”

  “Is that surprising? To go to Mass at St. Anne’s knowing the Bishop would be officiating. I can’t think of anything more unwise.”

  “Miss Preece-Dembleby tells me that Father Pardoe knew nothing of the petition.”

  “Then we must hope that is true. But it was unwise whether he knew
of it or not. While the investigation was going on, it was out of order to embarrass the Bishop by appearing at Mass in the Cathedral.”

  “But he would need to go to Mass, would he not?”

  “Of course. There are more than thirty churches in the Leeds area he could have gone to. It was a dreadful lapse of judgment and taste.”

  Walking back to his car, Oddie decided that Father Greenshaw was stronger on taste than on judgment. He certainly wouldn’t want to be in a position in which that young jar of holy oil was his spiritual adviser. He wondered, even, whether the truth about Father Pardoe’s suspension hadn’t been helped on its way around the parish by his stand-in.

  There was something else that rather puzzled him about his talk with Greenshaw (he was reluctant any longer to “Father” him in his own mind). To him the letter to the Bishop had been an unwise—how often had he used the word?—attempt to preempt the findings of the investigating committee and question the Bishop’s decision to set it up at all on such a very flimsy basis. He thought it was probably both of these things, but he had had the impression from Edith Preece-Dembleby that it was something else as well—a sort of generalized protest that embraced a multitude of grievances that had somehow been brought to a head by the persecution (as they saw it) of Father Pardoe. But on reflection he decided that it was perhaps not surprising if these grievances had passed over Greenshaw’s head, as a new man in the parish. And as a man whose idea of wisdom was very much of this world.

  He put the point to Janette Jessel, sitting in her conventional, overstuffed drawing room—a setting that seemed to him at odds with her intelligent, sensitive personality, as if its decor had been chosen without reference to her own tastes. They went through the ostensible reasons for the petition, and finally Oddie said, “I get a feeling . . .”

  “Yes?” He thought she tensed up.

  “. . . of something more. Perhaps something Father Greenshaw didn’t grasp. As if somehow the petition brought to the surface a whole ragbag of grievances and discontents.”