Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  “I’m grateful to you for your help,” he said. “I hope all goes well with you and the new baby.”

  “Yours too. It must be wonderful to look forward to a birth.”

  Charlie looked around him, taking in the garbage dump on the vacant lot opposite.

  “Why don’t you try and get the Council to find you something better than this . . .”

  “Dump. Say it. What’s the point? I’ve got me mates around here now. Anyway, you could say it’s coming home. It’s where I was born.”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows.

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Nor did I. It’s on my birth certificate as my parents’ address. I insisted on having it when I moved my things out. Thought I might need it, dealing with the Benefits people and that. When I commented on it to my mother she just said: ‘You started life in a slum, and you’ll be there for the rest of your life.’ ”

  “She sounds a real charmer.”

  Julie shrugged, refusing to be cast down.

  “I’ve had to find friends to replace my parents. Not just since Gary came along, but always. My aunt Becky was always nicer to me than they were. And Father Pardoe was the best of them. OK, it’s pretty depressing here, but one thing I’m never going to do is take it out on the babies. It’s not their fault if their mother’s been a bit of a slut, is it?”

  “You’re not a slut, Julie. Don’t think like that.”

  She smiled wanly.

  “Bring Father Pardoe back for me, will you?”

  “You know I can’t do that. I’m not the Catholic Church.”

  “What I really mean is: bring him safely through all this. Get justice for him. He’s a good man, one of the best. And I didn’t do him much good, I’m afraid.”

  “We’ll do our best. Keep fighting.”

  Back at the car he said to Oddie, “That was an interesting titbit.”

  “What was?”

  “Julie was born on the Kingsmill.”

  Oddie’s eyebrows went through the roof.

  “Really? I suspect that’s not something the Norrises go around telling people.”

  “No. Might give us an interesting topic for small talk when we go visiting them on Beckham Road.”

  “Which I think we should do now.”

  Modest though Beckham Road was, they both recognized the decisive step up the Norrises had made when they moved from the Kingsmill. The house seemed dead, though, whereas the Kingsmill was alive, if depressingly so, teeming with dubious life bent on the struggle for survival. It took some time for the door to be answered to their ring, but Oddie had observed a shape in an upstairs’ window and told Charlie to keep on ringing. When the door was opened, Mrs. Norris ushered them inside with not a glance at their identification. Oddie and Charlie had long realized that they looked like a police team, and were thought to “look bad” in neighbors’ eyes. It was something they could live with. It certainly got them inside houses and business premises quickly.

  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” said Mrs. Norris almost ingratiatingly. She was watery-eyed, and her voice had a griping quality that Charlie in particular found unsympathetic. “Come through. You’ve come at the right time. Simon will be home for his lunch in five minutes. He’s found that in the places he usually goes to, he’s getting funny looks at the moment. That’s what being in the news does for you, isn’t it?”

  She seemed not to have made up her mind whether this was ungenteel or rather exciting.

  “Sometimes,” said Oddie genially, letting an armchair embrace him like an elderly lover. “It’s not always nice to be looked at. Those articles by Cosmo Horrocks didn’t do you any service.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Daphne Norris quickly. “He was very fair, we thought. He just wanted to make sure our side of things was presented. We were grateful to him.”

  Both men repressed the skeptical jeer they felt.

  “I see,” said Oddie. “As far as you were concerned he was perfectly fair in his reporting.”

  “Oh, yes. We’d no complaints at all. What can you say when your daughter’s been having an affair with a priest and is expecting his child?”

  “Julie categorically denies both these things,” Charlie put in. He received a sour look for his pains.

  “Well, she would, wouldn’t she? What I say is, you reap what you sow in this world; God sees to that. And Julie’s reward is to be stuck in that hellhole of an estate with two screaming kids. She’ll not get any sympathy from me.”

  Mrs. Norris had not learned anything about the art of getting the listener on her side since she had been interviewed by Cosmo Horrocks, Oddie thought. He said, “I’d have thought you might have been sympathetic. After all, you’d been in a similar position yourself, hadn’t you?”

  She looked at him in venomous outrage.

  “What’s she been saying? You don’t know what you’re talking about. I was a married woman. Simon and I were newly wed, and we hadn’t the funds for anything better. We soon got out of the Kingsmill, I can tell you. . . . There’s Simon now.”

  She scurried out into the hall, and they could hear a whispered but intense confabulation at the front door before Simon Norris came in. Oddie knew his type at once. He’d had an inspector when he first joined CID who’d had that neat-mustached and spitfire-delivery approach. He had had to take a decidedly early retirement.

  “I hear you’ve been talking to our Julie—”

  “She’s not ‘our Julie,’ ” his wife interjected. “Never was.”

  “She’ll say anything to bring the family down. No pride, no pride at all. Yes, we had a brief spell on the Kingsmill. We were just married then, and had to take what we could get. Fortunately, a relative helped us buy this place. That was the happiest day of our lives, when we could wipe the dust of that place off our shoes.”

  They seemed more upset by the slur on their social standing than by any attempt to involve them in the Horrocks murder. Oddie decided to backpedal and get to the real matter at hand.

  “Well, well, that wasn’t what I came here to talk about,” he said, resuming his geniality. “Can I ask you what you were doing on Tuesday evening?”

  Both of the foxy faces became suspicious.

  “That’s the night Mr. Horrocks was killed, wasn’t it?” Simon Norris asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what you think you’re—”

  “Just answer, please.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Well, we were here.”

  “Alone? Anyone to vouch for you?”

  “Well, Lennie. He was here too. And we talked to Aunt Becky later on.”

  “How later on?”

  “Oh, well after ten.”

  “Who rang who?”

  “She rang us here. What is—”

  “And did she talk to both of you?”

  “Yes.” The tone of the replies had sunk into a sullen hostility.

  “Can we have her number, please?”

  “My God! We’re really suspects!” It was a reaction Oddie and Charlie were used to. From feeling slightly uneasy at being questioned, the interviewees gradually accumulated a monstrous grievance: they, respectable they, were being treated as possible criminals! Didn’t the police recognize sterling citizens when they saw them?

  “A lot of people are being investigated,” he explained patiently. “It’s a very large investigation. A reporter is a man with many aspects, and he usually has many irons in the fire. That Father Pardoe story was only the most sensational at the time he was killed.”

  “But why pick on us? We had no quarrel with him. He let us put our point of view very fairly.”

  Oddie raised his eyebrows quite theatrically in his direction.

  “And did you get no feeling that people in general would consider that you came out of that article rather badly? That Horrocks’s intention was to let you condemn yourselves by your own words?”

  They looked at e
ach other, but neither would back down. Simon then looked back at Oddie, belligerently.

  “No! . . . Well, Daphne did come in for a little unpleasantness at the butcher’s a few days ago. But that’s just people’s ignorance. They don’t know what it’s like, having a daughter pregnant at seventeen.”

  “It’s something quite a lot of people experience these days. Now, the phone number of your aunt.”

  Oddie passed across to Simon Norris a sheet of his notepad, and reluctantly Simon took a pen from his pocket and began writing—talking, nagging at his grievance the whole time.

  “Seems to me you’re going at this in a right arse-over-tip manner. Who’d kill a man because of a newspaper story he wrote? Make more sense if he was killed about a story he still hadn’t published. But it stands to reason what you should be looking at is his family. Isn’t it true that most murders are domestics?”

  “A lot of them are,” said Oddie, holding out his hand for the slip.

  “There you are, then.”

  “And do you know a lot about Horrocks’s family?” asked Oddie, handing the slip to Charlie. Expecting a confession of total ignorance, he was surprised by the reply.

  “I know his daughter is having it off with her history teacher,” Norris all but spat. “Female history teacher. Doesn’t it make you sick? If Lennie knows about it, the whole school probably knows about it. And nobody does a thing. If it was a male teacher and a girl pupil, he’d be out on his ear, and quite right too. But with perverts they use kid-bloody-gloves!”

  Charlie paused at the door to raise an eyebrow in Oddie’s direction, then went into the kitchen, taking out his mobile as he went.

  “Have you seen your daughter since she moved out?” asked Oddie conversationally.

  “We have not, not beyond her coming back to collect her things. She wouldn’t be welcome here.”

  “I’ve seen her in the distance in Shipley,” said Daphne Norris, “and went the other way.”

  “And if you think that’s heartless, we don’t give a stuff,” said her husband. “A girl who’s pregnant at seventeen and can’t with certainty name the father isn’t fit to live in a respectable family home. I wouldn’t have her near our Lennie, and that’s a fact.”

  “But that wasn’t when things went wrong between you, was it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just guessing, but from the way you talk, you’ve always regarded your daughter as a problem.”

  “That’s because she’s always bloody well been a problem.”

  “Right from the time she was born,” put in Daphne Norris, the whine in her voice becoming more pronounced. “That birth was the most horrendous experience of my life. The labor went on and on, the most appalling pain you could imagine. Then to have to take her home to the Kingsmill—sitting in that miserable hole of a flat day after day, listening to her crying—she never stopped. I began to hate the sight of her.”

  “Sounds to me like postpartum depression,” said Oddie.

  Norris’s mouth twisted into a sneer.

  “Oh, they give everything high-sounding names these days,” he said. “Keeps the trick-cyclists in business.”

  “Did you talk about it with your doctor?”

  “Course not,” said his wife. “What could he do about our living on the Kingsmill?”

  “Postpartum depression is a clinical condition. Something can be done about it.”

  “We cured that by moving,” she said complacently. “Aunt Becky helped us with the down payment on this place—all paid back by now. It was like finding ourselves in heaven after a year in hell.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, Julie would have been about six months old. We’d had a year or more in that place, like I said. Never been back there—wouldn’t set foot in it.”

  “But after you moved, you didn’t get on much better with your daughter?”

  Neither took his question as implying criticism.

  “Not much,” Simon Norris said. “And then, when Lennie came—we waited until we were really well established before we had him—when Julie was six, she was such a cow about him, resented him to that extent, that we just knew we’d had a bit of bad luck with the one kid and a bit of good luck with the other. It never does any harm to face the facts, does it?”

  Oddie stirred uneasily in his chair. He felt he was entering uncharted, rather frightening psychological territory.

  • • •

  Charlie, in the kitchen, was talking to Aunt Becky.

  “So you phoned them on Tuesday, when you got home.”

  “Oh, yes. I knew they’d be waiting for the call, so I had to ring, though it was late.”

  The voice was cheery, fruity, outgoing. Charlie could imagine Julie preferring her aunt to her parents.

  “How late, in actual fact, was it?”

  “Maybe half ten, maybe a quarter to eleven. Something like that. I’d rung them several times while I was on the retreat, gave them all the gossip, but they’d want to know that I was safely home.”

  “Of course. And you spoke to both of them?”

  “Simon answered, then he put Daphne on.” She’d been talking away happily, but now she paused. “What exactly is this all about?”

  “We’re investigating the death of Cosmo Horrocks.”

  “Who’s he when he’s at—Oh! That was the journalist who published all that stuff about Julie and the priest.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Simon and Daphne sent me the story. Well! So you’re investigating them! They won’t be pleased. That’s another mess that girl has landed them in.”

  “It may well be there’s nothing in the story at all. You can’t believe all you read in the papers.”

  “No. Still . . . mind you, I always liked Julie.”

  “I’ve just been talking to her. I liked her very much indeed.”

  “You’ll think I’m old-fashioned but I’m afraid when I heard she didn’t know for certain who the father of her child was, I washed my hands of her. Maybe I was unfair. It could be how it was told me. I know she’s had a raw deal in the past, with her parents so taken up with Lennie as if he’s God’s gift, but I felt there were limits.”

  “I don’t think it would have been put to you so that Julie showed to the best advantage, do you?” Charlie strayed from his terms of reference and said persuasively: “I think she could do with a friend now. My impression is that Father Pardoe became a sort of parent to her, gave her help and advice, but of course now she’s lost him too.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t know. Simon and Daphne would be furious. And this about the priest . . .”

  “I don’t think there’s anything in that.”

  “I should hope not. What’s your motive in this, young man? I can hear you are young. Why should a policeman bother his head about whether Julie has any friends or not?”

  “I’m not talking as a policeman,” said Charlie, coming clean. “I’ve just heard I’m going to become a father. That’s frightening enough. To hear you’re going to become a mother, on your own, with another kid to look after, and not yet twenty—if I was in her shoes I’d be terrified.”

  There was a silence, then an ungrudging admission.

  “Yes. I see that.”

  “I can give you her address.”

  “I’ve got her address. I send her a card at Christmas.”

  “You said you’d washed your hands of her.”

  “Yes . . . well, I suppose in the back of my mind there’s always been the feeling that I’d only heard Simon and Daphne’s side of the story. And they’ve never had a good word to say about Julie. Never.”

  • • •

  When Charlie slipped back into the Norrises’ sitting room, Oddie was back on the subject that interested him.

  “You mentioned Horrocks’s daughter—Samantha, I presume. Is your son a friend of hers?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Daphne quickly. “She’d be quite a lot older than Lennie.�
��

  “How did the subject of her come up, then?”

  “It came up when the story came out—Monday, was it? Lennie saw the story, saw the reporter’s name for the first time, and said his daughter was at his school.”

  “And that she was . . . involved with her history teacher.”

  “Yes. No, I think it was the next day he told us that. The story was all around the school by then, the story of Julie and the priest, I mean, because of course Julie had been a pupil there not so long ago, and the older kids would remember her. We so hoped that wouldn’t become common gossip, for Lennie’s sake: he’s terribly sensitive. Anyway, Lennie had been talking about the story and how he met the reporter with one of the older boys, and that’s how he found out. There’s a lot of whispering about that teacher in the upper forms. Of course when Simon heard about it, he went through the roof.”

  “Do you bloody wonder?” Simon replied.

  “What I wonder is whether her father had heard this rumor,” Oddie mused.

  “If he had, he wouldn’t be very happy about it, would he?” Norris exploded. “It’s what I said: you’re looking in the wrong places. You don’t get murdered for writing newspaper stories. Look closer to home. That’s where you’ll find a motive strong enough for murder.”

  Later, walking back to their car, Charlie muttered, “I should bear it in mind: there are worse parents than my mother.”

  “Not many better, if you ask me,” said Oddie. “She kept you on the straight and narrow.”

  “Yeah, even if she never stayed there herself,” said Charlie. “What’s the betting Mrs. Norris was in the family way, as they used to say, when they got married and set up home on the Kingsmill?”

  “I thought that. The whole situation somehow works better that way. Then the postpartum depression after the birth, the failure to recognize it or treat it, combined with the virulent hatred of where they were living.”

  “Aunt Becky, who got them out of there, sounds a much cheerier soul,” said Charlie. “She confirms their story, by the way.”

  Oddie sighed.

  “Pity. They’d make lovely culprits—people it would be a pleasure to arrest. But of course what he said about looking closer to Cosmo’s home, though it was pure self-interest on his part, trying to turn us away from him and Daphne, was quite right. It’s time we started looking at the family—and friends too, if there are any.”