Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  He shook himself. He had begun the process of sorting this out in his own mind, but there remained the imponderable of Margaret. His instinct was to try not to thrash things through with her until the current crises—the inquiry and now the murder—were over. The danger was that they distorted everything. Crises, whether national or domestic and personal, always did distort things, so that one saw clearly only when one had come through them.

  He thought back to the crucial night. They had been going over the shocking events of recent days: the Bishop’s anger, the hideous public humiliation of the press photographer and reporter, the fact that now things were out in the open and worse would surely follow. He had become more and more distressed, his disillusion with the Bishop becoming a sort of code for his anger at his treatment, his doubts about how his Church organized itself and conducted itself in difficult situations. Then, as they prepared for bed, the kiss—the kiss that could no longer be put down to friendship, gratitude, other feelings. Then the walk up the stairs to Margaret’s bedroom, a journey when somehow each seemed to be supporting the other.

  He looked at the events for a clue to Margaret’s feelings, her attitude. He had to admit he did not know. Would it be best to ask her, bring it out into the open? He shrank from that, and told himself that Margaret had given no sign of wanting that.

  However, when he went downstairs and took his raincoat off the hook for a walk to the newsstand for a paper, Margaret came to the kitchen door and looked at him, trying hard to erase any suggestion of worry from her face.

  “You do realize, don’t you, Christopher, that the last thing I’d ever want is to put pressure on you? All I want, truly, is for you to be back at St. Catherine’s and a parish priest again.”

  He walked over and kissed her.

  “That’s in the lap of the gods, Margaret, if you’ll pardon a paganism.”

  • • •

  “I feel so bloody guilty,” said Charlie as he and Oddie got into the car and began the drive toward Shipley.

  “I don’t see why,” said Oddie. “Beyond the obvious fact that you dunnit.”

  Charlie was uncharacteristically roundabout in his reply.

  “Abortion is different when you’ve been partners for several years, isn’t it?” he said. “It’s not like some poor teenager who’s been ignorant and unlucky. I’d have been pretty unhappy if Felicity had wanted that, but of course she doesn’t.”

  “So?”

  “She says she’s not going to apply for this lectureship she’d have had a good chance of getting, by all accounts. Says the most she’ll do is the occasional teaching. She’s decided for the first few years she’s going to be a full-time mother.”

  “Unfashionable, or it would have been ten or twenty years ago,” commented Oddie. “Now it’s not so much unfashionable as uneconomic.”

  “She doesn’t say so, but I can’t help feeling that if I had a different job, a nine-to-five one, she wouldn’t have decided to make this sacrifice—because that’s what it is.”

  “At least with you becoming sergeant the financial pressures won’t be as great.”

  Charlie cast him a look.

  “You’re joking,” he said sourly. “And there’s another thing: she wants a church wedding.”

  “You were intending to get married anyway.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of a church wedding.”

  “So what did you want? An underwater one in the West Indies? A blessing on Haworth moors?”

  “Don’t be smart. I’m old-fashioned. I don’t see what’s wrong with a registry office.”

  “And she wants the white caboodle, with bridesmaids?”

  “I think she’s thinking in terms of pale blue. The trouble is, my mother will back her up to the hilt.”

  “I don’t think the mother of the bridegroom has much clout in all this.”

  Charlie shot him another look.

  “You’ve met my mother.”

  “True. Still, look on the bright side. It’ll be a day to remember. And you’ll make a handsome couple.”

  Charlie brightened a fraction.

  “Yes, we will,” he said complacently. “So what’s the order of the day, boss?”

  “It’s sorting out and weeding out. By the way, one we can weed out is Alan Russell. He might have been eligible for parole by now, but three years ago the woman who ran the educational program in his prison was won over by his highly deceptive charms. She planned an escape for him that was to end up with the pair of them making a new life in Spain. Which in Russell’s case would have been pretty much like his old life in Britain, I’d guess. Anyway, the result is he’s still got eighteen months to do.”

  “Good. Well, that’s him knocked off the suspect list. How about the others? Do I start with Julie Norris?”

  “I think so. More of her age, more of her mind-set, probably. Hey—you’ve got more common ground still: a baby on the way.” Charlie grunted. “I suspect you’ll do better without an oldie.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I was going to go and see the parents, but I think I’d rather have you with me. I get a whiff of an unusual and complicated situation there. How else to explain their behavior to their own daughter?”

  “It’s not as unusual as you make out,” protested Charlie. “A lot of parents are just itching to get rid of their children, but the kids just sit tight, on and on, because they’re allowed to do anything they want to at home.”

  “Julie was only seventeen.”

  “Well, yes, that’s a bit young. Anyway, I’d certainly like to get a look at them.”

  “So if you let me off on the Kingsmill estate before you get to Julie’s stately home, I’m going to look around to see if Julie and the priest were a subject of scandal over a long period, and what and who could have triggered the investigation of the man.”

  So when Charlie banged on Julie Norris’s door, trying to be heard over the squeaks of the Teletubbies, he was on his own, and glad to be. When the door opened, Julie was bent over clutching the paw of a child of about two, and it was only when she straightened to look at his ID that Charlie saw how pretty and appealing she was.

  “Is it about that creep from the Chronicle?” Julie asked. “I thought your lot might come. Don’t expect me to express any grief.”

  “You’d be out on your own if you did,” said Charlie cheerfully, following her through to the dark and messy living room. “I don’t think journalists set much store by being popular. Not his kind of journalist, anyway.”

  The Teletubbies were ending, and Julie switched the set off.

  “He really gave me the creeps,” she said, without waiting for a question. “It wasn’t just that he was pushing his way into my private life, though that was bad enough. It was—well, you can see I’m practically shivering at the thought of him, can’t you?” Charlie nodded, though “shuddering” was more the word. “He stood at the window there, looking in here after I’d shut the door in his face, and he just leered at Gary and me. You could see his horrible mind working, thinking how he’d describe how grotty this place is. His kind are like rats at a garbage pail.”

  “Was that the last you saw of him?”

  “Yes, thank God. Though I heard he paid a visit later on to Doris Crabtree out the back, her who landed poor Father Pardoe in it and started the whole business.” She jerked a thumb toward the back window and the house that could be seen through it. Charlie filed the name in his mind in case Oddie didn’t get to her.

  “We’ve wondered a bit how it all started,” he said. “Why should she do that?”

  “Because she’s a nosy old cow,” said Julie promptly. “Anything going on, she knows it, spreads it, and makes trouble if she can. If they’d known anything about this estate they’d have tossed her letter the moment they got it and thought no more about it.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The people in the Bishop’s office. That’s who she wrote to. She saw I was getting visits from a priest, an
d she saw the best way to make trouble about it. You wouldn’t think they’d take a mucky letter like that seriously, would you?”

  Charlie had to agree in his mind that he wouldn’t.

  “Maybe it’s the fact that you’re pregnant again,” he suggested. “She could have said that Father Pardoe was the father.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her, the lying cow. And in case you’re interested, he’s not. And he’s not Gary’s father either. He—the one I think is his father—was working in a bar in Toronto last I heard of him, which is nearly two years ago. We’ve had no contact since I moved out of his parents’ house and came here.”

  “I didn’t mean to pry. It’s no business of ours chasing errant fathers. I’m interested because I heard last night that I’m going to be a father.”

  She immediately relaxed, and smiled.

  “Oh, that’s nice. If it’s wanted.”

  “Oh, it’s that. A bit unexpected, but definitely wanted.”

  “I only seem to be able to pick blokes who don’t want to know. The father of this one”—she patted her stomach—“is nothing to do with all this, and I haven’t seen him since half an hour after I told him I was pregnant. They asked me who it was at the inquiry, and I told them to mind their own business.”

  “Was that the Bishop’s inquiry?”

  “Yes.”

  “So far you’re the only person we’ve interviewed who’s talked to them.”

  “A lot of good it did me, or Father. There were three of them. They were kind enough, I suppose. . . . Do you want my opinion?”

  “Very much.”

  “There were two stooges, and one who might be a bit more independent. He was the young priest.”

  “And who were the others?”

  “An older priest. He was a pretty strong-minded type, stern, almost, but he’d be a Bishop’s man. Believes in authority. Then an anonymous-looking chap, not a priest, who hardly said a word. If you were looking for a weak link, he’d be the one.”

  “Someone who could be bullied, you mean?”

  She smiled knowingly. “Yes.”

  “You’re very sharp. You should be using that brain.”

  “I am. I’m bringing up a kid.”

  Charlie sighed silently. He foresaw months of arguments with Felicity along the same lines. Arguments he would lose, as he just had. Julie saw she’d landed a blow under the belt.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything personal. I’m not saying what I’m doing is what I’ve always dreamed of doing. But you have to make do with what you’ve got, don’t you?”

  A bleak thought in a bleak room, Charlie decided.

  • • •

  Oddie got on to Doris Crabtree almost immediately. She had been cited but not named in the article in the Globe. He stopped and talked to a group of young women with toddlers and they turned out to be friends of Julie Norris’s, and immediately identified the “old cow” who had “landed her in it.” He was knocking on her door within ten minutes of having been dropped off by Charlie.

  “I’ve never been so shocked in all my life,” she announced, leading him through to the kitchen and pouring him a cup of heavily stewed and lukewarm tea. “One minute he’s sitting there just like you now and talking to me nice as pie and really interested, encouraging me to tell him everything I know; the next I hear he’s on the local news, murdered!” There was relish, but also more than a touch of regret in her tone.

  “So you’d talked to him about Julie Norris, had you?” Oddie asked.

  “O’ course we talked. That’s what he come for. He found out it were me wrote to alert the Bishop about what was going on. It was my duty, and I’ve always done that, whatever the cost. And there’s been young sluts around here shouting after me and calling me names, I can tell you.”

  “And what was going on, do you think?”

  “I don’t need to spell it out, do I? He’d arrive down Kingsmill Rise, he’d ring the doorbell and go in, and then the curtains would be drawn in the bedroom. And the few times they weren’t, they’d be in the kitchen where I couldn’t see ’em.”

  Oddie refrained from saying that she’d brought him into her kitchen, and it was a perfectly natural place for a chat.

  “So you suggested he might be the father of the child that’s on the way?”

  She sniffed.

  “I mentioned that fact, and let them draw their own conclusions.”

  “And the Fund that he’d been using apparently for her benefit?”

  “Don’t know about that. I’d seen her showing him the telly set once, and I wondered if he’d got it for her, but I couldn’t be sure, so I kept quiet. No, it was just the other I told them about, and that was enough. Makes me sick, that.”

  “What does?”

  “Him giving her money from this Fund. Her having televisions and washing machines and anything she asks for. I grew up when folk were lucky to be in work, and my dad weren’t one of the lucky ones. We lived off bread and drippings half the time.”

  The words should have made her a more sympathetic figure, but the sour expression, the obvious jealousy of one who, whatever the rise in national expectations since this woman’s childhood, was still near the bottom of the pile, nauseated Oddie. He suppressed a sigh.

  “So you think Father Pardoe may be the father of Julie’s forthcoming child.”

  “I’m not accusing him. But it seems pretty likely, doesn’t it?”

  “There’ve been no other men visiting her?”

  “Oh, I never said that! That’d be pretty surprising, young women being what they are today. A man’s only got to ask her and she pulls up her skirts.”

  Oddie suppressed another sigh, and put on an expression more alert than he thought this woman’s information justified.

  “Let me get this right, because it could be important: Are you accusing Julie of being a prostitute, or a part-time one?”

  She pursed her lips and thought before replying.

  “No, I’m not. Not at her house here, anyway.”

  “But you have seen men going there.”

  “Oh, yes. A man, anyway.”

  “One man?”

  “Aye. One man went there several times.”

  “What was he like?”

  “It were last winter. I couldn’t see what he was like. Lighting’s dismal around here, because the kids throw bricks at the bulbs and the Council doesn’t bother to replace them. He were taller than Father Pardoe—not so bulky. I could only see the outline of him as he come down the street.”

  “Last winter. How far gone is Julie’s pregnancy?”

  “Happen four or five months. You’re trying to say he’s the father of her child, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “You middle-aged men stick together, don’t you?”

  It was Oddie’s turn to feel he’d had a hit scored against him.

  • • •

  Father Pardoe felt a certain awkwardness that day in sitting down to lunch with Margaret, and he needed all his social arts to hide it. He told her about his walk, and the man in the post office who had come up to him and wished him luck because he always supported people who were being turned over by muckrakers.

  “That was brave of him. Did he know the man had been murdered?”

  “He did. Said it made ‘not a ha’porth of difference.’ And of course it doesn’t. I’m quite convinced his murder had nothing to do with my suspension and the story he made out of it. . . . There’s a bit of good news, by the way.”

  “Good news?”

  “I think it’s good. I got a letter today, asking me to meet the committee of inquiry. I think that’s a polite way of asking me to appear before it.”

  “That’s wonderful! Just what you’ve been wanting.”

  “Yes, it is. Odd how this business has made me suspicious, though. Once I got over the euphoria, I started wondering whether they would have heard my side of the matter at all if it hadn’t been for Horrocks’s m
urder.”

  Margaret considered this.

  “You mean the spotlight is now on them in a way it wasn’t before, and they’re being careful to be meticulously fair.”

  “Yes. Or to seem to be.”

  “That’s being doubly cynical!” said Margaret. “But take heart: if they are still bent on being unfair, it will be much more difficult with everyone’s eyes on them. I suppose that’s what made the Bishop so angry.”

  Pardoe pulled himself up.

  “We mustn’t find the Bishop guilty without his being tried. Forget what I said, and assume I will get, and always would have got, a fair hearing.”

  “It’s what you’ve been pressing for, and what you should have had weeks ago. . . . Christopher, you do realize, don’t you, that no one will ever know about—about what’s happened between us?”

  Pardoe looked at her and nodded.

  “Yes, I do. I’ve never trusted anyone more absolutely than I do you, Margaret. I’ve wrestled with it, but perhaps I don’t need to go into that. You will have guessed all that. I can’t see that it’s anything more than a sin like any other. I’ve been guilty—all priests have been guilty—of plenty of sins, and I hope I’ve been conscious of them, tried to face up to them. But since I came here, you’ve been a lifeline, been the most wonderful help and support in every way. I shall never forget what you’ve been to me.”

  “That’s all right, then,” said Margaret, smiling and getting up to go to the kitchen.

  But Christopher Pardoe, registering the warmth and friendliness of the smile, wished he had not discerned, intermingled with them, a brief shaft of pain.

  CHAPTER 16

  Dysfunctional

  Charlie was saying good-bye to Julie Norris on her doorstep when he saw Oddie come around the corner in the direction of the police car. He raised his hand to him and turned back to Julie.