Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  “Did you suspect whatever it was that was missing had been used by your husband? Is that it?”

  “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t know anything. But I do know all about Con and women, I know someone had connected him with this Julie Norris, and that he’d been talking about the Pardoe case and Pardoe’s connection with her on the train, and somehow I thought—well, I just jumped to the conclusion he must be involved in some way. He usually is. I thought it might be financial too, because Con is up to any trick going. Of course I wondered about Mark, but I couldn’t think of any connection at all between him and this murder.”

  “Right,” said Charlie as she came to a halt. “You have a choice, Mrs. Leary. Either I phone the local station and we get a couple of uniformed helpers and we take everything from the sports cupboard for forensic examination. Or you take me down there and you point out what went missing and has now been put back. It’s up to you.”

  Mary sat there, her hands clasped, her head bent—sat there, it seemed, for an age. Donna came in with a tray, and suddenly her mother got up, looking away from her daughter to shield her eyes from her, then led Charlie down the hall to a little door under the stairs. She switched on a light, then led the way down bare wooden steps. As they came to the bottom Charlie saw a snooker table, bodybuilding equipment he recognized from his days as a gym attendant, and a cheerful mess of sporting this and thats: a putter, wicket-keeper’s gloves, a punching bag. Mary Leary led the way across the basement, bumping into things, her eyes were so full. Then she threw open a cupboard door, and Charlie saw shelves of sports clothes, a golf bag bulging with clubs, cricket bats, and a snooker cue. Mary Leary pointed to the murky depths of the cupboard’s interior.

  “The Indian clubs?” Charlie asked. “Don’t see them much these days.”

  “No. They’ve just sat there for years. They were Con’s father’s, or grandfather’s, I don’t know which.”

  “And one of them was missing?”

  “Yes. What can you do with one Indian club?”

  “But it’s back now.”

  “Yes. It was put back yesterday. But there . . . seem to be stains on it. And I’ve been so afraid that Con, with his temper, and having been involved with that woman—that Horrocks was on to it, and . . .”

  Charlie didn’t voice the suspicion that Mary Leary had got the whole thing very muddled, and that when she found out who was actually involved with Julie Norris, her present worry and fear were likely to be redoubled.

  • • •

  In the car taking him to the Shipley police station, Mark Leary remained silent. His face, Oddie could see out of the corner of his eye, was working, and behind the eyes there was the tendency to cry. Poor blighter, thought Oddie: pity he can’t come right out with it and sob his heart out. Probably in his family it’s thought to be unmanly. He could sense that Mark was aching to say something, ask him something. Possibly he was afraid that if he did he would reveal some aspect of his multifarious wrongdoing that the police hadn’t already caught on to. Oddie had had time for only the briefest of conversations with Charlie, but it was already clear that the boys were into so many scams—and worse—that they would put to shame the average small-time shyster and petty criminal in the Leeds area.

  Oddie pulled into the small parking lot of the Shipley station.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you processed.”

  He always tried to keep things as neutral as possible with the more vulnerable suspects. It seemed to help them, and there were limits to the amount of involvement in a case that the investigating officer should allow himself. Of course, the fact that Mark was still a boy did not in itself guarantee vulnerability. Children these days grew up and became streetwise horribly early. What Mark had done, he suspected, had been totally unchildlike.

  He led him through the back door of the station and into the reception area. As they went through the door he felt in the boy’s body a sharp intake of breath. Going through the far door to the cells was an even younger lad, and Oddie recognized Mark’s playground companion of earlier that day.

  “Lennie!” called Mark. The younger boy swung around and slipped from the guiding hand of the uniformed constable leading him and ran up close before the man caught him again. His sharp, near-adult face was twisted into a sort of grin, and his dark eyes gleamed.

  “Tell it like it was, Mark,” he shouted, and then was led away.

  The processing took some time. Five minutes into it and Oddie was told that Mark’s father was in the station’s waiting area; twenty minutes after that he heard the mother had arrived too. He took the opportunity to have a word with Sergeant Bingle about Lennie Norris.

  “I picked him up at the end of school,” the young man said. “It wasn’t how I wanted it to happen, just how the timing turned out. I didn’t want him to go home, that was the main thing. After a lot of initial bluster he seemed to think the whole thing would give him enormous prestige, and he came along without protest.”

  “Kids—I’ll never understand them,” muttered Oddie.

  “This is one you wouldn’t want to,” Bingle said. “When he got to the station he demanded a lawyer, and said he didn’t want his parents—‘those two no-hopers,’ he called them—sitting in on the interview.”

  “He’s inherited the family charm.”

  “In spades. Do you or your sergeant want to sit in on the interview?”

  “I don’t know. What I want now is to talk to young Mark Leary on the Horrocks business and surrounding matters. Then we could hand him over to you for the drugs and the other things. He’s the obvious ringleader, but I’ve got to go carefully because, though he doesn’t look it, he’s still a minor.”

  Bingle nodded. “Here’s your sergeant now,” he said, and stood by while Oddie and Charlie talked.

  “What Mary Leary was worried about was a possible murder weapon,” Charlie explained. “An Indian club. One was missing from the cupboard in the basement for a day, though no one in the house has used them for years. We’ll take it to forensics. Looks to me as if there’s blood on it.”

  “But why did she straightaway jump to that conclusion?” pondered Oddie. “It seems a massive jump.”

  “She knew, or thought she knew, that her husband was or had been involved with Julie Norris. She thought Horrocks might have been on to him.”

  “And was the unlovable Con having it off with her?”

  “It’s my guess it was the son. You may not have heard, but Mark immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was to do with her when I flashed my ID at him. Probably saw us as an arm of the Child Support Agency.”

  “The father of the forthcoming child, then?” asked Oddie.

  “I think so. Julie said she prefers younger men, so it fits. She hadn’t seen or heard from him since she gave him the news. Seems like a really caring type. Caring for his own skin.”

  “I’m quite looking forward to seeing what makes him tick. Do you want to sit in on Bingle’s interview with young Norris?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’d welcome any clue as to how that family got into the psychological mess they are in.”

  Oddie sat opposite Mark in the interview room, a uniformed Shipley policeman by his side, Mark’s father by his son’s. It was a long time before Oddie could get Mark beyond that care for his own skin that Charlie had mentioned, and that perhaps didn’t make him much different from most teenagers. Mark seemed determined to put his worst foot forward.

  “You thought when you found out we were police officers that it was the Julie Norris connection we were on to you about, didn’t you?” The boy nodded. “Why that?”

  “They chase up the fathers these days, don’t they?” He pulled himself up, from an instinct, perhaps athletic, of conceding nothing. “If I am the father. I’ve only got that slag’s word for it, but they’ll probably believe her.”

  “How did this heartwarming teenage romance start?”

  “Are you being sarc
astic?”

  “Yes. Answer the question.”

  Mark’s father’s hand went to Mark’s arm, and the boy sat back in his chair.

  “She came to the youth club, the one Father Pardoe started. He thought it would give her an outside interest, but she felt like a fish out of water, so she told me. Like having a baby, living on her own like that, made her feel quite different from us. She felt she was mixing with children again. I walked her home and showed her she wasn’t.”

  He tried to hide the smirk on his face, but it forced its way there. Oddie felt he was being told the story just in the way Mark had told it to his mates at school. Probably over and over.

  “How long did the relationship last?”

  “A few weeks. One night my dad and mum were going to be away overnight, and I stayed over with her, and we got careless and . . .” Con Leary hid his face in his hands. Oddie thought it was a sort of gesture, that he was not in the least ashamed of the boy. Mark gave him a glance, then went on: “When she told me, I couldn’t believe she would refuse to get rid of it. But she did. You’d think she would have learned after the first time, wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe. Perhaps you both should have known more than you did. Was it a factor in the relationship that she is the sister of your—let’s call him your friend, Lennie Norris?”

  Mark gave a man-of-the-world shrug.

  “No. Why should it be? The family had chucked her out a couple of years before, and she seemed to prefer it that way. It was nothing to do with Lennie. She was just a good lay. I can have anyone I want of my own age, but she had more experience. I liked her. I might have known she’d turn out to be a gold digger like all the rest.”

  “In fact, Julie refuses to name the father. Us coming after you has nothing to do with her.” The boy remained silent, either skeptical, or fearful of what was to come. “Let’s start with Andraol.”

  “That’s Lennie’s scam.”

  “Come off it. It’s you who’s the athlete.”

  The boy reddened with indignation.

  “I don’t take the stuff! Test me and you’ll find that out. I’m hoping for a trial for the Yorkshire Under-eighteens cricket eleven. I’d be mad to take anything that would show up on a test.”

  “Are you saying you don’t take it but you push it?”

  “No, I’m not. Ask Lennie about it. It’s his scam.”

  “Come off it. You’re sixteen, he’s thirteen. You’re the great athlete, the sort who gets to know about things like performance-enhancing drugs. You’d know the potential market as well, wouldn’t you?”

  The boy was silent, not knowing how much to tell. Then he said, “There’s plenty that are interested.”

  “And you could supply them.”

  “I’m not saying any more about that.”

  His father, a shadow of his former self, felt he had to chip in at that point.

  “Have you any evidence my son is supplying drugs?”

  “That’s really a matter for the Shipley police,” said Oddie. “I’m sorry if I’ve got in first, but I’m really interested in the relationship between these two boys. Because a close friendship between an older and a younger boy might mean two things. And since your son is undoubtedly heterosexual, that leaves one: he’s using him. Using him to store the pornographic videos he’d got hold of, for example, because Lennie has got his parents terrorized and you and your wife keep a much sharper—but not sharp enough, I’d say—eye on what your children are up to. I would guess those videos found a market at the school. As to the other scams—minor blackmail, protection, and so on—maybe the two boys were on a more equal footing. Maybe in the cheap-designer-label-wear scam Lennie used some of his father’s dodgy contacts. All this is up to the Shipley police. What I’m interested in is the Father Pardoe matter.”

  The boy’s face fell.

  “Did that stupid nerd put that in his book?”

  “Father Pardoe’s temporary address, yes.”

  “All that was Lennie’s business. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Really? Yet Lennie’s family were hardly more than nominal Catholics, whereas yours are prominent ones, with a strong interest in the parish and influence too. I think it was you who found out the address.”

  “He couldn’t have from me,” said Con Leary.

  “Yes, I did,” said Mark, turning on him. “You told Mum, coming out of church one Sunday. I skipped school and went over and kept watch there in Pudsey. When he came out to go on a walk I knew the exact street number. That was one up on Lennie. He’s such a smartarse, with such a high opinion of himself. I had something to tell him for a change. All the rest was up to him. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Oddie leaned back in his chair, looking at the discomfited father and the whiter-than-white cricketing hero. It was a very uninviting prospect.

  CHAPTER 20

  Favorite Son

  It seemed to Charlie, sitting silently through Sergeant Bingle’s interview with him, that Lennie Norris did not have “downcast” in his repertoire of emotions. It was as if his arrest was what he had been aiming at all along, a true climax to his grubby, nefarious activities. He sat there oozing self-approbation, a smirk never far from his lips. Attempts by his lawyer to advise him or enforce the discipline of silence were brushed aside with a gesture worthy of a Gladstone interrupted in full flow in the House of Commons, and he himself was never far from taking complete control of the session.

  “Now I want this clear,” he said, wagging a finger in the direction of Sergeant Bingle. “These were my schemes, all of them. My ideas—got that?” He shrugged off his lawyer’s hand on his arm. “I brought Leary in on the Andraol, because he had all the contacts and went to sports meetings with other schools. I don’t waste my time on that sort of crap. But I got the supplies, I held the purse strings. Leary tried to nose his way into other things as well, and I let him if I needed a bit of muscle. But I thought up all the scams, and I was the brain behind them all.”

  “Right,” said Bingle quietly. “So the sums of money you got out of your fellow schoolkids for not blabbing their little secrets—”

  “Blackmail. It’s called blackmail, thicky.”

  “—that was your idea?”

  “Yeah.” Lennie grimaced. “It tailed off after a time. People got cagey. And you need to hear things right at the beginning, before anybody else gets wind of whatever it is, otherwise it’s useless. I was thinking of having a go with Miss Daltrey over her pash for Samantha Horrocks, but before I could work out how to approach her they were tittering about it all around the school.”

  “Tough,” said Bingle, his irony doomed to go undetected. “And the designer-goods business?”

  “Mine. I used Leary with some of the sporting stuff, but I never let him in on anything else. Why should I? That was a much bigger earner. Those clothes brought in real money.”

  “Where did you get them from?”

  Lennie put up his hand in an adult gesture that looked comic coming from him.

  “Never reveal sources of supply. Of course, a lot of them were not real designer goods, but those kids are too dumb to realize that, and most of their parents too. Tell people they’re getting something cheap and they lose all common sense. My dad told me that. About the only thing that no-hoper ever did teach me.”

  “When did you realize there might be something for you in the Father Pardoe story?”

  A shade of caution came over his face, but it could not entirely obliterate his bumptiousness.

  “Right from the start. That was my idea too, don’t let anyone tell you anything else. I brought Leary into it because his family is in the thick of all that Catholic Church stuff, but he worked at my direction. I thought it was a potential earner right from the word go. Catholic priests and young chicks—bound to be a chance for blackmail there. I set Mark on to pumping the girls at the youth club, but he was useless. Got nothing at all. But I knew there had to be something; it stood to reason. I
f he was having it off with one, there had to be others, sure as eggs.”

  Charlie touched Bingle’s arm, and the sergeant nodded his permission for him to intervene.

  “Didn’t it help that Mark had been having it off himself with your sister?”

  “Don’t call her my sister!” said the boy with whiplash fierceness. “That hopeless cow’s nothing to do with my family anymore. I wouldn’t nod in the street to a pathetic slob like her—I’d be afraid of catching a whiff of baby’s pee. And it didn’t help, not one bit. Don’t you understand the principle, you black thicky? Once a thing’s generally known it’s no use anymore. Anyway, Mark wasn’t even willing to go and talk to her. She’s preggie again, the stupid git, and he was afraid he’d get handed the bill for the maternity clothes and the little knitted things. He’s dead ordinary, Mark, and a bit of a coward. If it’d been me I’d have chucked the bill in her face. Who knows how many men she’s been going with? Half Shipley, if I know her.”

  “But it was Mark who came up with the information about where Father Pardoe was living, wasn’t it?”

  Lennie gave an ugly grimace.

  “Oh, yes. Just happened to overhear it from his prick of a dad. Clever big boy even went and checked it out over at Pudsey and came to me with it, like it was an egg he’d just laid. Hadn’t the first idea what to do with it. Thought we might be able to screw money out of Pardoe not to spread it around. I’ve hardly been to church, but I know he isn’t the type to let himself be blackmailed about a little thing like that. Chicks was a possibility; an address, never.”

  “So it was your idea to approach Cosmo Horrocks?”

  “Who else’s? I tell you, Leary’s just brainless muscle. I had the idea, and I made the phone calls. I’d done it before with the boys I’d screwed money out of. Sort of whispered, half-male, half-female voice, with a lot of menace in it. It disorients them. Scares the life out of them.”

  His self-love was apparently undentable. Charlie said, “I don’t suppose you scared the life out of Cosmo Horrocks.”

  “Had him guessing, though,” said Lennie with a catlike smile. “Didn’t quite know who or what he was dealing with.”