Unholy Dying (15 page)

The constable who had called had been very good, Cora thought: matter-of-fact and low-key, which suited the situation perfectly. Her identification would be better than any neighbor's could be, he said, and the best thing for her and everyone would be to get it over quickly. Cora was already in her nightdress, but she had slipped on a dressing gown and gone out to the garage, heart thumping, at the policeman's side. When she saw the body, the state of the smashed skull, she had leaned against the wall and retched, though nothing had come up. She hoped that for the policeman it had been a convincing substitute for grief.

Because when she had got back into the house and had sat for an hour and more over a cup of tea, she had realized that she had simply been reacting to the horror of the scene—the blood, the bone. She had felt no grief for Cosmo, no sense that his death was a blow to her. Surprise, yes, but nothing so personal or so strong as shock. Before long, she knew, she would be glad.

Later she had had a couple hours of something that was nearly sleep. Then she had lain waiting for signs of life from the girls' bedrooms. When they had begun their daily fight for the bathroom she had gone out and told them that they would not be going to school that day.

“Why not?” asked Adelaide.

“I don't know how to . . .” She shook herself and looked at them both seriously. “Your father was found dead last night.”

She could swear she had seen a flicker pass over Samantha's face.

“Dad?”
said Adelaide.

“Yes. The police came to tell me after midnight. I'm afraid he's been murdered.”

She was looking at Samantha as she said that, and her face was perfectly impassive. It was Adelaide who surprised her.

“We won't have another daddy, will we?”

Cora flinched. Her middle-class decency had been affronted.

“What—what do you mean?”

“You won't, like, marry again, so someone else is our daddy, will you? Can't we be on our own?”

Cora swallowed. How horribly quick the child was! And how exactly her thoughts chimed in with her own.

“Yes. I'll never marry again. We'll always be on our own.”

“But how shall we manage?” asked Samantha. “I mean for money.”

“We'll manage somehow,” she said firmly.

Now, ranged around the sitting room, with the two policemen in the armchairs, she wondered if Samantha had been awake last night, had heard the doorbell, heard her go out and gone to a window to see. That would explain the flicker, her feeling that the news did not entirely surprise her. If she had talked to Adelaide, that would explain her quickness. The girls had been unusually noisy in the bathroom that morning, something that was sure to bring down Cosmo's wrath on them. Was that because . . . ?

She dragged her attention back to the present, and to the two policemen sitting opposite her, looking at her intently but covertly. The middle-aged white one—Oddie, he'd introduced himself as—was kindly-looking, but she wasn't so sure about the younger black one: he looked big and formidable. Were they some kind of good-cop-bad-cop act?

“I know this will come as a terrible shock to you,” Oddie was saying, looking at the girls, “but we do need to ask questions. Can you bear with me?” Both of the girls nodded. “Chip in with anything you think relevant if your mother hasn't said it. Now”—turning to her—“your husband was killed near his own home. This makes us wonder about people in the vicinity here. Were relations with the neighbors good?”

“Perfectly good. No quarrels with anyone.”

“He didn't really know them, except by name,” put in Samantha. “He worked such odd hours that he was hardly ever at home when they were. We all know them, and get on all right.”

Cora nodded, but she felt worried. What Samantha had said was true and perfectly acceptable, but she was worried in case she was going to say too much, particularly about Cosmo as a father.

“Your husband was a reporter, I know. What was he working on at the moment?”

“It was a story about a priest, and his relationship with a young single mother.”

“Yes, actually I did know that. We saw the
Globe
this morning.”

“It would have been a big day for your husband, wouldn't it?” asked the young black sergeant. “Seeing his name on a story in one of the big tabloids.”

“Yes, it would, though it wouldn't have been the first time. But, yes, he'd certainly have been pleased.”

“You hadn't seen him to talk it over with him?”

“No, he went out early as usual, and didn't come back until—”

Cora had been cultivating an entirely neutral tone in all her replies, as if she were talking about the most distant acquaintance, but her voice broke.

“Was there anything else he was working on?” Oddie asked.

“That story had taken him over,” put in Samantha quickly. “He'd thought about nothing else for the last two weeks or more, and hardly talked about anything else either. All sorts of people rang him up with information. He was dead excited.”

“He may well have been working on something else as well,” said Cora, “because reporters always are. But this was currently his big story.”

“So there could be a lot of fallout from that,” said Oddie. “The
Globe
report gave us the impression that this could be a story with a lot of angles.”

“I suppose it could. But he hasn't been walking about in fear of his life, or anything melodramatic like that.”

“He is a
priest
, this chap he was after,” said Samantha. “Poor man.”

“My old mum says there's nothing more dangerous than a Christian who knows he's in the right,” said the black policeman genially. “Because he's so convinced of that he believes he's justified in doing anything grubby or underhand.”

Cora sensed that Oddie was not happy at having to listen to his sergeant's mother's reflections on religion and its moral effects, but she smiled at the younger man.

“It's a long time since I went to church,” she said.

“Was your husband popular at work?” Oddie asked.

“I really wouldn't know. . . . He specialized in rather sensational stories. And he wasn't a patient or naturally friendly man. That may have made him enemies.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Twenty-one years.” Aware that she had paused before she had said this Cora asked, “Do you think the girls could be spared this? It's very distressing for them.”

As she said it she wished they looked more distressed. They were wide-eyed, bewildered, shocked, but not—not even Adelaide—distressed.
However, the senior policeman nodded. She thought he had probably registered the pause.

“Go to your room,” said their mother. “I'll be up when I can.” Turning back to the policemen when they had slipped rather reluctantly out of the room, she said: “I think it's best if I tell you about Cosmo, and I can't be entirely honest if they're in the room.”

“Of course. We understand,” said Oddie.

“Not that I'd want to pretend we were a loving family. Cosmo needed a victim, and quite often it was one of his children. I'm trying to be as honest as I can, because I expect it's well known in their schools. And there was another side to Cosmo.”

“Yes?”

“I'll always be grateful to him. Before I met him I was in a relationship with a man”—she actually shivered at the memory—“someone so dreadful, so vicious . . .”

“Where is this man now?”

“I don't know. I know he was given a long prison sentence about seven years ago. He could still be in, though they get out so early these days, don't they?”

“What was he jailed for?”

“Violence against a woman. Just like with me. He could be so charming, but when it came to it, what it always led up to was violence. He could be so savage, you wouldn't believe it. That's what Cosmo rescued me from.”

“In what way rescued?”

“He exposed him in the paper he was working on then. This man—Alan Russell his name was, or is—had a long history of it: Women who wouldn't prosecute, women who went to the police but found they weren't interested, cases that went to court but he just got a fine or a suspended sentence because he was so plausible, so reasonable and charming.
IS THIS BIRMINGHAM'S
MOST VIOLENT MAN
? was one of Cosmo's headlines. It didn't get any action from the police, but it kept him away from me, and when the climate of opinion about that sort of thing changed, the police knew their man.”

“And you and Mr. Horrocks were married by then?”

“Yes, we married, and quite soon after we moved up to Yorkshire. I'll always be grateful to him.”

It was a statement that begged quite a lot of questions. And Oddie wondered how it fitted with her earlier one that Cosmo needed a victim.

 • • • 

Father Pardoe turned the radio off. It was John Humphrys interrupting people in the public interest on the
Today
program. Not at all what he needed. He went on with the washing up, which he was doing, after much protest from Margaret, because he knew she wanted to get off into town. A visit to Leeds was a big matter to her, and she liked to get in early and get back to Pudsey before the shops got crowded. He found washing up restful, almost therapeutic, and he could think through what his immediate course of action should be, as well as his long-term aims.

He found that the questions divided themselves up into two in his mind: What it would be politic to do, and what it would be morally right to do. The answers were usually diametrically opposed. For example, in the matter of the Bishop of Leeds's action in his case, the politic thing to do was to backtrack, apologize, defer; but since he was convinced that the Bishop had behaved unfairly as well as unwisely since the rumors first surfaced, the morally right thing to do was to question, oppose, press his case. On meditating things through, he came to the conclusion that he really didn't have any choice. He was too far
down the second route to backtrack now. So far down, in fact, that the Bishop would require more in the way of backtracking, apology, and deference than he could stomach giving.

At ten o'clock he switched on Radio Leeds for the local news. Keeping up with parish pump events was something he had always found necessary when he was a functioning priest, and it was something he had resumed as soon as the shock of his suspension had worn off. He was, after all, still the priest of St. Catherine's. He was pulled up short by the second item on the bulletin.

“The body of a man found battered to death last night in a vacant lot in Rodley has been identified as that of Cosmo Horrocks, a journalist on the
West Yorkshire Chronicle
. A spokesperson for Northern Newspapers, who own the paper, said, ‘We are devastated. It is difficult to take in. Cosmo Horrocks was a journalist to his fingertips. He will be much missed.' ”

Pardoe sat heavily down on the nearest kitchen chair, his mind blocking out the rest of the bulletin—blocking out too all his thoughts about his predicament. Was this Pelion heaped on Ossa? Was this something he would be involved in? It could be murder for the contents of the man's wallet, it could be domestic, or the result of some row or feud at work or in his neighborhood. One of those, surely, was what it would prove to be. He remembered Cosmo Horrocks's face, standing there beside the photographer in Cookridge Street. A mean face—a face of petty grudges and low ambitions. The face of someone who had to have the whip hand. He could imagine the man hated in his family, hated at work. Surely it was in the home or in the workplace that the culprit would be found. Probably it would be the sort of murder that solved itself practically at once. Please God, it was so. Please God, this would not be something that dragged
him down with it, involved him in all the head-shaking that police questioning always led people to indulge in. People like his parishioners.

This led him to another thought: please God, he didn't have to tell anyone what he was doing last night.

The doorbell rang. With a heavy heart and his feet also feeling like lead, he dragged himself down the hall and opened the door on a middle-aged white man and a youngish black one, both of them brandishing cards in his face.

 • • • 

Simon Norris heard the news from a customer—or rather from one of those people who came into his shop ostensibly to buy but actually to get a look at him from behind the racks and shelves. Simon called his wife at once.

“Daphne? Have you heard the news?”

“No.”

“That Cosmo Horrocks, the one who wrote up the story. He's been murdered.”

“He hasn't!”

“Oh, but he has. It was on the local news, apparently. Customer just told me. By ‘eck, Julie's landed herself in a pile of muck, all right. The police'll be wanting to talk to her.”

“Will they? I don't know. . . . Simon?”

Something in her voice alerted him. It wasn't something he would normally have been sensitive to, but he did get the impression that she had been crying.

“Daphne, has something upset you?”

“Yes, it has, rather,” his wife said. “Nothing to do with this murder. I went to the butcher's about nine, and I thought he was a bit stifflike—reserved, you could call it. But then this woman came in, someone I only know by sight, and she looked at me in a very sniffy way and I thought, I don't know what
you've
got to
be sniffy about. Then after a minute or two she came out with it. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,' she said.”

“Ashamed of ourselves? What the ‘ell have we got to be ashamed about?”

“She said: ‘Throwing out a daughter like that, just when she needed you most.' ”

“Well, our Julie should have thought of that first, shouldn't she?”