Unholy Dying (14 page)

“Yes. I suppose it will last, won't it? He will need local support more than ever now.”

“We've been very discreet, but perhaps too discreet. Now the whole thing has gone public, probably we should go public too.”

“It will make us very unpopular with the Bishop.”

There was a moment's thought at the other end.

“Do you care?”

“No.”

“I would have cared six months ago,” said Mary, “but I don't now. I think the powers that be have been disgracefully unsupportive. You wouldn't expect them to act on pure tittle-tattle.”

“I think they've been running scared because of all those horrible cases in Ireland, and here. . . . Boys usually.”

“It's always horrible when there's children involved, isn't it?” said Mary. “That makes it so much more important that everyone realizes that the
women
are supporting him. We wouldn't be if there was any question of . . . of
that
.”

“It's a good job we do support him, because he doesn't get much in the way of support from the men.”

“Not a scrap,” said Mary, her voice sharpening. “Basically they think a celibate priest is an unnatural thing.”

“They think it's an impossibility. They judge everyone by themselves. It makes me
mad
when Derek sneers and leers and tries to suggest that Father Pardoe is on his level.”

It was as if she had opened a floodgate.

“Oh, I'm so glad you said that. Con is exactly the same. He wants to drag everyone down to his grubby moral standards. Someone like Father Pardoe makes him uneasy, so he jumps for joy if he thinks he's been exposed as a sham.”

“They're two of a kind, your husband and mine,” said Janette. “That's probably why they're such pals. They're both horribly self-satisfied, aren't they? Do you know I once heard Derek talking on the phone about one of his women, and when the person on the other end mentioned me he said I had a ‘good Catholic marriage.' And then he laughed. They both did—you could tell.”

“It was probably Conal on the other end. That's exactly how he thinks. They've given us children—
given
us!—and once they've done that they can go off and do exactly as they please, while we have the privilege of bringing up the next generation to be exactly like them.”

“And like us. That's the really horrible part. Because we're to blame as much as they are. If they wipe their feet on us it's because we're natural doormats.”

“I know. And I saw it all at home, and yet I never thought for a moment it would be the same when I got married,” Mary said.

“And yet it is. It's like we never escaped from the Victorian age.”

And so it went on, for more than half an hour. It was, especially for Mary Leary, a release, a transformation. They both realized that they had had this bond for years, but had never been brave enough to bring it out into the open. Now it was out, and they didn't only feel better for it; they felt they had to do something about it. Together; as friends. And as women.

 • • • 

Cora Horrocks was trying to wind down before her husband came home. It was always best to be in a relaxed mood, because he would almost certainly wind her up, and if he
did that when she was already tense the strain could become intolerable.

Adelaide was upstairs preparing to go to bed, but Samantha was still out. Cora worried about Samantha. She had always been such a stable girl, whatever Cosmo might say or do. Yet there had been so many signs of pressure, of uncertainty, recently. She did hope Cosmo was not right about her and that teacher. In fact, Cora always hoped Cosmo was wrong, and was always sad when his nastier conjectures proved right.

She had a lot to be grateful to him for, she knew that. He had in a sense rescued her. And if he seldom reminded her of that, it was always there between them—something unspoken because it did not need to be spoken. Her life with Alan was a memory so horrible that she needed no prompting to feel gratitude. For a long time after they had married she had even believed Cosmo to be a good man.

She hadn't believed that for a long while now. Nevertheless, she still felt some tiny vestige of that old gratitude, and tried not to put into words her feeling of how much happier she and the girls would be without him.

She wondered if Samantha was with that teacher. She felt sure she went there much oftener than she actually told them about. Cora had always found Miss Daltrey very pleasant. Well, she would be pleasant to Samantha's parents if . . . She wondered what people like that
did
. She wondered if she and Samantha were doing it now. That was Cosmo, working his way into her mind. Taking her over. Not as Alan had taken her over. Less brutally, more insidiously.

She heard Cosmo's key in the door. Immediately her shoulders went tense. Please God, he was tired, or dissatisfied with his day. When that happened he would most likely go straight to bed. She stood up as he came in and gave him the usual peck on
the cheek. Before the kiss had landed her heart sank, because she saw from his smirking expression that Cosmo was very satisfied indeed with his day's work.

It would probably have comforted Cora if she could have known that this was the last time she would ever have to welcome Cosmo home.

Cosmo left the offices of the
West Yorkshire Chronicle
late on Tuesday evening. It had been a day of hard, concentrated work, but a very satisfying one. The story was about to go national. This he was quite sure about. He had been faxed a mock-up of the next day's
Globe
with Father Pardoe on page 5—not ideal, but good enough. His own name had been coupled in the byline with that of the
Globe's
principal smut reporter, Garry Higgs. A very satisfying sight. And it wasn't the end, not by a long shot. Jenny Snell's article in the
Bradford Telegraph and Argus
had been interesting. His hunch about the Father Riley Fund had been right, and the Bishop would have a lot of explaining to do. The fund would probably suffice as the next stage of the story, and it could be a stage much more sympathetic to Father Pardoe. Cosmo intended to proceed in the classic manner that tabloids always adopted with royals and other notables: You built 'em up, then you smashed 'em down, then you built 'em up again, then you smashed 'em down again.

Oh, yes. This one was going to run and run.

The possibility that Father Pardoe was innocent of any financial wrongdoing led Cosmo to consider the possibility that he was equally innocent of breaking his vows with Julie. He considered this not out of any crusading desire for justice, still less for reasons of conscience concerning his own role in the story; he considered the possibility only insofar as it could be one further twist that prolonged it in the local and national media. Perhaps when the baby was born a DNA test could be done on Pardoe and the baby. That twist could possibly be followed by the revelation of the real father of Julie's unborn child. Sex, followed by money, followed by sex again: a simple formula but an appealing one.

Cosmo frowned as he remembered an incident earlier in the day.

He had been looking over a story that Terry Beale had covered. Not an important one, naturally: it had been about a brawl at closing time in one of the central Leeds pubs between the discarded husband and the new lover of a woman from Armley. Cosmo had insisted on adding all the titbits and extras that the greenhorn reporter had left out: The fact that the woman was a “mother of two,” the fact that she had a long-ago conviction for soliciting. Eventually Terry had said, “All women are whores to you.

“It's called making a realistic assessment,” he had replied.

Thinking over the incident now, Cosmo decided young Terry was getting above himself. He had never been respectful, let alone admiring, but now he was barely attempting to hide his contempt. Something would have to be done about Terry Beale. He would have to be put in his place, then squashed down in it. Still, loathing the boy did not lessen his self-satisfaction at his own sharp reply to the boy's impertinence.

True to his agenda of sex, then money, then sex again, Cosmo's
mind went back, as he turned off the Burley Road toward Armley, to Jenny Snell's article in defense of Father Pardoe. His, Cosmo's, hunch about the Fund had been based on the financial difficulties of the Catholic Leeds diocese. These went back a decade or more: they had overstretched themselves, and had found themselves in the position of having to sell whatever could be sold—unwanted nunneries, patches of land, even school playing fields. It had been that state of affairs, which was well known, that had led to Cosmo's guess. Not, of course, that he actually believed the Bishop had done anything criminal, though it might be amusing to throw an insinuation to that effect into Thursday's interview. He guessed he had taken over the running of it—the Bishop had to him the air of a control freak—so that he could siphon off the interest into the general fund to relieve the hard-pressed areas of expenditure. Or maybe he had gone further than that. Maybe the fund had simply been swallowed up.

Oh, it was a lovely story, was the Father Pardoe one! He blessed the day he had overheard the talk in the train from London. He blessed the day he had had the phone call about Father Pardoe's whereabouts. As he drove down Bramley Town Street he ruminated on the matter, and actually smiled to himself. It had concluded so satisfactorily, that offer of information, though not quite in the way the seller had anticipated. And the information had been cheap at the price, no question of that. In fact, everything about this story had worked out brilliantly. He could see so much flowing from it. The parish people of St. Catherine's were almost untapped as yet, at least as far as gossip and possible ramifications were concerned. In his experience stories led to stories led to stories. You uncovered one after another at St. Catherine's, and then you started to refer to it as a “troubled parish.” After that you could move from parish matters to private
lives. Neither Christians in general nor Catholics in particular lived private lives of any greater purity or probity than did sinners like himself, thought Cosmo. Not much, anyway.

That thought did not lead to any great introspection about his own standards. At least he wasn't a frustrated divorcée with nothing better to do than spy on her neighbors, he told himself contentedly. As he drove down the hill into Rodley he laughed at his second chat with Doris Crabtree, which had taken place that afternoon. What a wizened old witch the woman was! He had got out of her what little he could about Julie's “other” man friend—not much more than a shape in the dark, really. In spite of the fact that it was so little, he had flattered the woman about its value and his interest in it, had given her his card, had said he was always ready to hear anything she had to offer about goings-on in the Kingsmill. When the story and its offshoots had died the natural death that was the inevitable fate in journalism of even the best of stories, he would slap her down and tell her that grubby little stories about the grubby activities of grubby little people were of no interest outside their own grubby little patch. Build 'em up, smash 'em down: the twin imperatives of Cosmo's life—of life itself, he thought.

He came to the Wise Owl, then turned off left toward home. His house, bought when he had moved to the north with Cora in the first year of his marriage, was a thin, high, terraced stone house, insulated from noise in a way none of the jerry-built modern houses were. No garage, of course, so Cosmo had had to rent a modern garage at the end of his cul-de-sac, a minute away from his front door. He liked to keep his car safe from the attentions of marauding yobs. He drove in to the end garage of the four, leaned over and locked the passenger door, then got out and locked his own. Once the car door was shut he was in the dark, apart from a streetlight fifty yards down the road.

It was while he was pulling down the door that he heard a sound from the empty lot beside and behind the garage. He secured the door, then put his head around the side, intent on shouting at any courting couple.

The blow came with horrible force. He staggered, and croaked out a cry for help. He steeled himself for a further blow, but he felt himself gripped by the neck. He opened his eyes.

“You,” he said.

The only answer was a smile. Then he was dropped, and fell to the ground. He sensed his attacker raising his weapon, and Cosmo raised his hands, crying out, this time more strongly. If only it were not so late. If only it were not so dark. But it was late, it was dark. Then the black shape of the thing that his attacker held fell on him again, then again, then again, and the terrible pain was succeeded by numbness, then by a complete loss of feeling. But though he did not know it, the blows continued.

The news of Horrocks's murder, coming only two days after his sensational story about Father Pardoe in the
Chronicle
, came as a double blow to the congregation of St. Catherine's. Those who heard the news on Radio Leeds repressed the instinct to phone around to friends who might not have heard. That would be akin to admitting that the two things were connected. The more they sat down, over a strong coffee, to think about it, the more they decided that where the police would be looking first of all would be at the man's family. And in that they were right. But all of them had a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs that the police would quite soon be broadening their inquiries. Where would that leave them? What was to be their line if suspicion began to be directed at them?

 • • • 

Cora was glad she hadn't wakened the children the night before. It had been not long after midnight when the uniformed policeman had rung the doorbell. A neighbor putting his car
away had seen the figure recumbent at the side of the garage. At first he had assumed it was a drunken bum, but he had had the wit to take the flashlight he kept in his garage and investigate further. As soon as he had seen the blood and realized who it was, he had gone home and called the police.