“Aunt Fran will cope,” said Terry, as if Charlie were blaming him for running off. “She’s the only one who can. I somehow get it wrong—always have.”
“I take it this is an occasional thing, rather than a habitual one?”
Terry nodded, his hands nervously clasping and unclasping themselves.
“It is now. I believe it was once a constant problem, and I was taken into care, when I was too young to remember. It was the shock of that that brought her out of it. We had some pretty rough patches when I was growing up, but on the whole it’s just at crisis points that she gets tipped over the edge. To tell you the truth, I sometimes think she welcomes the crises as excuses. But that’s mean of me. She hasn’t been a bad mother. There’s many worse.”
Charlie got into the car and leaned over to open the passenger-side door. He pressed buttons on his mobile, then gave Oddie the message that he was on the way back to Leeds with Terry Beale. Then he pushed his key into the ignition.
“Do I take it you came down to try and prevent this?” he asked as they started away.
“That was the idea. I should know better, but I never do. I heard the news on Wednesday morning—that’s yesterday, isn’t it?—on Radio Leeds, about seven o’clock. I stuffed some things into my holdall and got a bus to the station. There wasn’t a train to Birmingham until nine-forty, so I was kicking my heels for an hour or more, and I made the mistake of ringing Mum to tell her I was on my way. She smelled a rat, and wheedled out of me what had happened. So by the time I got to Birmingham she was soaking it up and in what I call the first stage, which is being maudlin. Not about Cosmo’s murder, but about what might have been if he hadn’t come along. I rang Aunt Fran, but she was on a quick visit to my gran’s in Plymouth. The rest has been just coping with her, getting a few hours’ sleep, then coping all over again.”
“Let’s get this straight, just for the record. Harvey is what might have been; Cosmo is what actually happened; and you are the result, after which he ditched you both.”
“Spot on,” said Terry, becoming more cheerful. “You can forget about Harvey, though. He’s a bit of Mum’s private mythology. The boyfriend before Cosmo, and probably no better or worse than most of the men she’s taken up with. She’s not a tart, but when she does take up with a man she always gets hurt, never seems to learn.”
“What does she do for a living? Anything?”
“She’s a freelance journalist. That probably sounds like nothing, but actually she’s pretty good, she gets commissions, she gets good ideas of her own, and usually what she writes gets into print. She earns a living, and she has done so since she climbed halfway up onto the wagon.”
“Well, that’s something she owes to Horrocks, I suppose,” said Charlie. Terry Beale grimaced. His hands resumed their convulsive claspings.
“Cosmo was an all-right journalist by his own murky lights, but he wasn’t interested in teaching anybody. For him the teaching process was just a way of putting people down. I found that out the hard way, by being put down in my turn.”
“You’d better tell me about Cosmo and his relationship to you and your mother—the whole caboodle, right from the beginning.”
“I don’t know the whole caboodle. I was part of it from early on, but not really of an age to take notice. He left Birmingham when I was four months old. He’d more or less shaken Mum off a couple of months before that, so anything I know about those times I learned from Mum, who is hardly an impartial witness.”
“I’ll make allowances for that.”
“According to Mum she took up with him after meeting him in a pub or bar. She was a stringer on one of the local free sheets at the time. According to her the agreement was that he’d get her on at the Coventry Evening News, or at least one of the OK papers in the region. Probably he didn’t put it into so many words. Or maybe he did. He was a lying toad. Anyway, she got more and more demanding and aggrieved—you’ve seen her, not at her best, but you can guess—but when she got pregnant he had the ideal excuse for not doing anything about it. Probably he didn’t have the power anyway. He was a tolerated, not an influential figure, or so I’d guess. By the time I was born, Cosmo was one hundred percent taken up with a new story about a serial abuser of women. He dumped Mum and went off with one of the women in the story—went off literally, because he got the job in Leeds.”
They were speeding toward Derbyshire, and Charlie shifted in his seat, feeling they’d jumped the first hurdle.
“Right. That’s got the outline. It backs up what I was told by a journalist in Coventry. I hardly need to ask you about your mother’s feelings for Cosmo.”
“No. Vitriolic. The most cherished hatred of her life.” He shot a quick look at Charlie. “That doesn’t mean she killed him. In fact, I suspect she will be lost without him.”
“You say she’s had a series of men in her life. You’d think Cosmo would have been replaced at some point as the cherished hatred of her life.”
“Would you? I think the first big betrayal always rankles the most. Anyway, why should she have replaced him? None of the later ones registered anywhere near Cosmo on the Richter scale of human awfulness.”
“We are getting the feeling that he was a man without a friend, or even an ally,” Charlie admitted.
“He was. And that was how he preferred to be. The phrase Mum always uses about him is ‘He made me feel so small.’ That makes it sound very trivial—”
“Not necessarily. Not sustained over a long period.”
“No, I suppose not. I pity the man’s family. I realize now he was incapable of a relationship of equals. He had to put you down, rob you of confidence or self-esteem, humiliate you as publicly as possible. I’ve known people who are incapable of praising anyone. This was something else: a need to degrade and hurt.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t get some inkling of this from your mother’s bitterness—something that might have warned you against making contact with him. Because that is what you did, isn’t it? It could hardly be mere coincidence.”
“Oh, that’s what I did, all right. The only coincidence was the Chronicle offering a scheme to train rookie journalists. When I saw that I shoved in my application pronto. . . . Yes, I suppose I should have realized, not just from what Mum said about him, but from the fact that contact between us and him was zero. But children don’t, do they? They always seem to dream of meeting up with their absent parent.”
“Not in my case,” said Charlie. “My absent parent is a blank in the chronicles of my mother’s bedmates. I don’t think she has the first idea herself who he was, or rather, which one it was.”
“I suppose that simplifies matters,” said Beale.
“Maybe,” said Charlie. “I think it hurt when I got into my teens and started wondering.”
“That’s how it was with me. Wondering whether my mum was really telling the truth.”
“One consequence of seeing my mother’s emotional messes has been I’ve tended to stick with girlfriends. I’ve been with my present partner six years.”
“An eternity by present-day standards,” said Terry. “Anyway, I got one of the jobs, got a bed-sit in Leeds, and when I started I angled to get Cosmo as my minder. That wasn’t too difficult. The others had registered that he was the one to avoid. I’d registered that myself.”
“I’ve been given the idea that things didn’t go too smoothly.”
“We loathed each other. Maybe that’s not as disastrous as it seemed to me at first. Plenty of people loathe their parents. But in my mind the personal dislike took on another dimension, and he came to embody for me all that is wrong with British journalism: The tone of jeering, of raucous disbelief in any notion of probity or idealism, the conviction that everyone’s on the make, that everyone’s having it off with someone on the side, that anyone with beliefs and ideals has to have feet of clay.”
“The great tabloid culture, in fact,” said Charlie. “I gather Horrocks had ambitions to get on a national tablo
id, but wasn’t good enough at the arse-licking.”
“That figures. If you denigrate everyone you come into contact with, you need to be a very good actor if you start sucking up to anyone.”
“It’s ironic that Cosmo got into the tabloids the day after he died.”
“Isn’t it? Good enough to make you believe in God. I gather he had had stories in the nationals before, but this was big-time. I’d had inklings of this story when I passed his desk and he was on the phone. I knew it was something big, something juicy. Boy, I hope this priest he was gunning for is innocent. I’d hate Cosmo to be proved right in his last big story.”
“You sound as if you may be disillusioned with journalism.”
Terry Beale thought.
“I’m not sure I had illusions. I grew up with newspapers and magazines and journalists around me, so I knew what I was getting into. I’m not interested in molding readers’ opinions to suit myself, nor in entertaining them with prominent people’s sex lives. But I am very much concerned about informing them. I think there’s a culture of keeping people in ignorance of things, and I think it’s a matter of ‘us’ who are fit to know of such things, and ‘them’ who aren’t. We keep people uneducated, breed up Sun readers, so as to have an ample supply of ‘them’ to feel superior to. If I find there’s a place for someone who just wants people to be given all the facts, then I’ll stay in journalism. If there isn’t anymore, then I’ll find something else to do.”
They drove on for some time in silence, then Charlie said, “Horrocks never suspected who you were, did he?”
“Never. One of the unsatisfactory men Mum took up with actually married her, and we both took his surname. Three months later he was gone. I suspect if you’d asked Cosmo what his son’s Christian name was, he’d have been pushed to remember.”
“So you were never tempted to blow your own gaff and have it out with him.”
“No. What would be the point? He would never have felt guilt, shame, any emotion like that. In fact, it would just have given him yet another weapon to use against me. By the time he died all I wanted was to have as little as possible to do with him, and move on to another job somewhere else—nowhere near him, and not too near my mum. I think it’s time, don’t you, that I took my conception for granted and stood on my own two feet?”
“Emotionally as well as financially?”
“Exactly.”
“I think you’re right. You seem to get less and less nervous the more the miles separate you from your mother.”
“Hmm.” Terry Beale shot him a glance of admiration at his sharpness. Charlie thought they were getting rather too young-men-together.
“What were you doing on Tuesday night?”
“The night of the murder? I was at the Grand Theater, covering Opera North’s Arabella. I was expert reviewer for the occasion, having seen all of five operas in my life before that one.”
“Did you go back to the Chronicle’s offices later?”
“No, I went back to my digs. What is this? It said on the news that Cosmo was killed near his home.”
“You could have followed him there. They suggested in the offices at the Chronicle that you might need to do research there to write your review.”
“I did it before I went. I photocopied bits of Kobbé and the Viking Book of Opera. And during the interval I hovered around the real critics picking up little bits and pieces. They all go into the small stalls bar at intermission to avoid mingling with the hoi polloi and hearing what they think.”
“What time did the opera finish?”
“About half past ten, I think. I was home by eleven.”
“Did your landlady see you?”
“No. I’ve got a key. She would be in bed by then.”
“What did you do?”
“Cobbled together a review then faxed it to the office.”
“Your landlady has a fax machine?”
“I have my own.”
“Do you have a car?”
“No, but I’ve a license. When I need to, I have a car from the Chronicle’s pool.”
“But you didn’t have one on Tuesday night?”
“No. I got a bus back to Kirkstall. There are plenty, even at that hour.”
That would probably not be true if he had wanted to get out to Rodley, Charlie suspected. But he could have borrowed a car or taken a taxi. Dangerous, but . . .
“And on Wednesday morning you took off for the station early, and rang your mother from there. So presumably she was at home.”
“Of course she was at home. It was about eight-thirty.”
“You wouldn’t know what she was doing on Tuesday evening?”
“You’ll have to ask her when she sobers up—if she remembers. I do know she went around to my aunt Fran’s to leave something for her to take to Gran, a birthday present. Beyond that . . .”
Charlie registered that to “leave” something didn’t mean that the two sisters necessarily saw each other. In fact, both mother and son were still possible suspects. Terry Beale looked at him as they sped past Sheffield and the Meadowhall Centre, and he read his thoughts accurately.
“Mum didn’t know Horrocks still lived in Leeds, and certainly didn’t know his address.”
“You hadn’t told her anything about your relationship with him?”
“I may be young and a bit green, but I’m not stupid. She commented when I applied for the job on the Chronicle, and when I got up here I told her he no longer worked on the paper—I said I thought he’d gone to Glasgow.”
Charlie nodded and drove on. He tried to make his face totally impassive. Because he had realized, as no doubt Terry had too, that she could have had advance notice of the story in the Globe from some contact in the newspaper world. Someone who knew of her past involvement with Cosmo, someone who knew, even, that her son by him was currently working for the West Yorkshire Chronicle, someone who shared her rage at his past behavior, or someone who just enjoyed making trouble. She could then have found out his address quite easily enough from the telephone directories in the local library. Then she would have known her son had been lying to her.
Come to that, could much of what he had just been told be a lie? Could mother and son have been working together to kill the household’s great figure of hate?
Charlie dropped Terry off at Kirkstall, then rang Mike Oddie to get an update on events. Then he went home for the night. His speculations on the Beales were brought to an abrupt end soon after, because his girlfriend, Felicity, told him she was going to have a baby.
CHAPTER 15
Dilemmas
Father Pardoe sat hunched in the easy chair of his bed-sitting room upstairs at Margaret’s. It was not despair he now felt, as it had been in his first weeks there; it was uncertainty, almost bewilderment. And it was complicated by the fact that he didn’t want Margaret to know he was sitting alone pondering, not for too long, anyway. It would worry her, make her feel guilty, seem to her, perhaps, as if he were betraying her with his doubts.
This is almost like being married, he thought.
Analyzing the nights since they had fallen into—into sin, he had to think of it as—there had been two nights when they had had sex together and he had gone back to his own bed and one when he had spent the night with her. It was clear how he ought, as a priest, to regard these nights. The last night spent on his own was the last one in which he had been faithful to his vows; the others were terrible lapses from them.
Only somehow, suddenly, he was unable to see them like that. To him those other nights seemed right—not necessarily right as a way of life, or right always for him in the future, but right for him and for her in the particular circumstances they were in at this particular time. He had always tried to regard the sins of his flock with—not tolerance, perhaps, but with understanding. Was it wrong of him to exercise the same understanding on his own backsliding?
The bearing his new relationship had on his suspension he tried not to put in the fore
front of his mind. Obviously, denying, truthfully, any impropriety with Julie Norris lost some of its force if at the same time he was having an affair—a love affair, a sexual relationship, whatever words were used—with Margaret. The cases were very different, of course, worlds apart, but in the eyes of the Church they were practically identical. The sin he was committing was the same as the one he was unjustly accused of. But that was not what he should be thinking of now. He should be trying to understand in what light he viewed the relationship, in what light Margaret must view it. Did she see it as the beginning of a permanent relationship, one involving, presumably, his leaving the priesthood? Did he himself see that as his future? And if it was not that, was it not simply casual sex?
He pulled himself up. What Margaret might or might not think was pure speculation. Best to start with himself. Then at least there was some chance of reaching the safe shore of certainty.
How did he regard it? Did his fall mean he could never again consider himself a true priest?
No, on reflection, he did not regard it as that. He got up and walked around the room, then sat down again, conscious that Margaret might be listening downstairs. He said to himself: ignore my feeling that this was right. Say I admit to myself that it was a lapse. Should I see it as quite different in kind from, say, a lapse in charity, or a lapse in truthfulness? Any priest has such lapses; certainly he had had them himself, and many of them, since he dealt more than most men with a wide range of people who at times sorely tried his charity, and who needed to be handled in ways that sometimes stretched his devotion to the absolute truth.
And if he was honest he would have to admit that he suspected quite a lot of his fellow priests had occasional lapses in chastity, not just in their seminary days, when, as he told Margaret, blind eyes tended to be turned, but during their ministries. He wasn’t talking mainly about men who turned out to have a regular mistress and illegitimate children going way back, like the Scottish bishop recently hounded by the tabloids. He was talking about men who effected a compromise with their sexuality by occasionally giving way to it. To adapt St. Augustine, they said: “O Lord, make me chaste, but not entirely.” Presumably they thought like Pardoe did: this was not a special falling, but a sin like any other sin.
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