Unholy Dying (19 page)

But when they got back to Sergeant Coppin at Millgarth, who was coordinating the murder inquiry, they found he'd hit a snag.

“This young chap you want to talk to—”

“Terry Beale?”

“Yes, him. Not at the
Chronicle
offices today, wasn't in yesterday either, and no call in to explain his absence. He's not at his digs at Kirkstall, and he didn't sleep in his bed last night. No explanation given to his landlady.”

“Not necessarily an unusual thing for a young chap,” said Oddie.

“But it is for him, she says.”

“He's not from around here, is he?” Charlie asked.

“No, from the Midlands. Place called Harborne—suburb of Birmingham, apparently. We've got a home address from his landlady, and confirmed it with the
Chronicle
offices. He's with them on a one-year placement for aspiring journalists. He's a graduate of Warwick University. That's one of the things that irked Horrocks, apparently. He couldn't stand graduates—they got on his nerves.”

“Sounds like the police. Right. Many thanks. We're going to have to consider sending someone down there, though there's no guarantee that's where he's gone. Would you call the
Chronicle
and his landlady and tell them we need to know if he has any contact with either of them?”

Oddie turned to Charlie in the seat beside him and looked at him speculatively.

“What do you think?”

“Is it sensible to go all that way with so little to go on? The only thing to connect him to the murder is the fact that the two disliked each other. On the other hand, Horrocks's former job was down there. That mate of yours that sent you the cutting—where was he from?”

“Coventry. The cutting was from the
Coventry Evening News
and they were cock-a-hoop, though they tried to pretend they were grieving. One of their former reporters had been murdered! Read all about it! It's a funny old world.”

“The lack of grief is unanimous,” Charlie replied.

“Even among his family. I suppose that means that Cosmo's gallant rescue of Cora Horrocks from the abuser took place in the Coventry area.”

“Presumably. You think that should be looked into?”

“Of course. That's one known violent criminal in Cosmo's history. Add to that that Cora herself had every chance to wait for her husband and bash his brains in. She had the advantage over most of the suspects in that she knew his habits and was on the spot.”

“Looks to me like I'm being selected for a trip to the Midlands.” Charlie sighed.

“You are. I'll get them at headquarters to ring the
Evening News
there and find someone for you to talk to who was there in Cosmo's time and knows all the dirt on him.”

“What will you do?”

“I'll dig deeper in the parish. I have a fancy to start with the stand-in priest.”

“Miss Preece-Dembleby gave the impression she had a very jaundiced opinion of that one, didn't she. Do you know where he lives?” Charlie asked.

“There's a presbytery close to the church. Father Pardoe's home, of course. If the new priest hasn't moved in or isn't there, there'll be someone who knows where he is.”

“Right you are. I'll drive you there and then be on my way.”

So it was that, three and a half hours later, Charlie was ensconced in the late afternoon, at a time when ten years before most pubs would be closed, in The Blackbird, a journalists' watering hole a few hundred yards from the offices of the
Coventry Evening News
, opposite Len Foxley, an aging journalist, currently editing the readers' letters page, a man in his fifties with an ongoing thirst problem and a surprisingly sharp memory, considering the alcoholic haze through which his professional life must have been lived. Charlie, a sharp dresser, averted his eyes from the threadbare tweed sports jacket that looked as if it had been made for an ill-coordinated hippopotamus
and from sports trousers that looked due for a dry-clean the year Thatcher came to power. He concentrated on his notebook and his glass, which was being emptied at about a tenth the speed of Len Foxley's.

“He was a keen beggar, give him his due,” Len Foxley was saying, the due-giving obviously in preparation for the slaughter. “Went after stories like a terrier after a rotten bone. Dead eager to make his mark, because he'd set his sights on London and one of the big tabloids. That bothered a lot of people on the paper, but most of us knew he'd never make it, so we just laughed about it behind his back.”

“He wasn't liked?” suggested Charlie.

“Liked? You're joking! You haven't got far in your investigation if you can even suggest that he might have been.” He downed the second third of his second pint. “Listen, young feller. You'll get nowhere if you don't take on board the fact that Horrocks was the pits. Standards of probity and fair play may not be very high in the world of journalism, but even by those standards Horrocks was a rat. There was nothing he wouldn't do to get a story, and no story so unappetizing or depraved that he wouldn't go after it and revel in every sordid detail. He was mighty good at the tut-tutting too—the ‘it pains me to have to tell you this' stuff that tries to make readers feel better about enjoying that sort of muckraking.”

“Sounds to me as if he ought to have made it to the tabloids,” commented Charlie.

“Going just by his stories and his presentation you'd be right. The reason he didn't was that he was no good at brownnosing people. You've got to arse-lick the editors, the owner, all the powers that be on a paper if you're to get a regular job on what used to be called Fleet Street papers. To give Cosmo his due, he tried it. But he was so convinced he was cleverer than anybody
else in sight that the insincerity was blatant. You could see it even in the little world of the
Evening News
. While he was telling the editor what a brilliant journalist he was, his face and voice showed he knew the man was nothing but a second-rate provincial hack, because nobody but a hack would be hired to edit a paper like the
Coventry Evening News
.”

“But that's what Cosmo always was too.”

“Always. We laughed when he got the job in Leeds. It was a step up all right, but not a very big one, and not the one he craved. And that's where he stopped for the rest of his life.”

He downed the final third and handed his glass to Charlie. It looked as if it was going to be an expensive session.

“His present wife—did you ever meet her?” Charlie asked, coming back with the refill.

“Not that I remember. Married her just before or just after he left here. She was one of his stories, you know.”

“Yes, she told us.”

“And it was a genuine story, not like some of his. The man this woman was with—what's her name now?”

“Cora.”

“That's it. The man she was shacking up with was a monster. He got his kicks from—well, from kicks. And punches, wounding, you name it. And plausible as you wouldn't believe. Up before the magistrate or a judge, he would make them believe he was a much-wronged man, put-upon for years, who suddenly snapped when it all got too much for him. Had juries eating out of his hand. Of course, police were different then.”

“So the old hands tell me.”

“None of . . . your sort in the force, or not so you'd notice.”

Charlie directed one of his ferocious looks at him, but he was hidden behind his beer mug. “More to the point, they were mostly working-class chaps who took a bit of domestic violence
in their stride. Grew up with it, and not averse to a bit of it themselves from time to time. So it took a while—and it took a string of articles by Cosmo—for the penny to drop. This man was way out of the league of men who occasionally punched their wives. In actual fact the violence wasn't just against Cora. There was a string of women—occasional partners, one-night stands, former girlfriends. Cosmo really went at it, tracked them all down, went to court records, discovered aliases. He should have been a private detective or a policeman.”

“No, thank you,” said Charlie.

“Anyway, he built up a dossier on this bloke such as you wouldn't believe. Names, dates, places, court hearings, the lot. And incidentally it was pretty damning as far as others were concerned: Police, social workers, probation officers, judges. When it broke it made one of the longest-running stories I can remember.”

“When he was doing all this digging, was Cora living with the man—what was his name?”

“Alan Russell. Oh, I don't think so. Out of the question, I should have thought, because she'd have been dead meat if he'd got so much as a whiff. Quite early on, if my memory serves me, Cosmo got her away and into hiding. I suppose things were building up between her and him, though Cosmo had a girlfriend—a gorgeous redhead we saw him with now and then—and a new baby.”

Charlie considered this.

“You mean he was having it off with the two of them?”

“Wouldn't know. None of us knew. No one at the
News
got more than a toehold in his private life. The mind boggles, frankly. All we know is that about the time he left for Leeds—the Alan Russell story having netted him the job there—he and Cora were an item. I believe he had a kid or kids by her later.
Poor little buggers. Cosmo and kids just don't go together. You'd have thought he'd have insisted they be exposed on some bleak Scottish mountain. Anyway, that's what happened. Look, lad, my glass has been empty more than three minutes.”

Charlie chewed over this new information while he collected a fresh pint. His doubts found expression as he sat down again.

“It never struck me, looking at the body, that Horrocks was likely to be a ladies' man.”

“Being a bit looks-ist, to coin a phrase, aren't you?” said Len Foxley roguishly. “It's not the handsome hunks always pull in the birds. For all I know Casanova was an ugly little runt.”

“It's often power pulls them in,” conceded Charlie. “Politicians use that.”

“Well,” said Foxley, “journalists have a sort of power.”

“Or influence, as much as power,” Charlie went on. “Sleeping with the boss beats taking a course in management any day.”

“And you're forgetting gratitude. I'd be grateful to any man, even if he was an ugly dwarf, if he'd rescued me from Alan Russell.”

“True enough. But we've shifted around to seeing it from Cora Horrocks' point of view. Cosmo may have been as randy as a cock sparrow, but if he
wasn't
, then there was presumably something about Cora that drew him.”

Len Foxley shrugged.

“Who can get to the bottom of that kind of thing? I have my ideas. . . .”

“And what are they?”

“There was this notion around at the time—one of the things people were talking about, arguing over—that women who were abused by men asked for it, wanted it, went unconsciously after the men likely to do it. So the woman's no sooner escaped from
one relationship where the man has beaten her up than she gets into another with the same sort of man. It was some woman who ran a hostel for abused women who started the idea.”

“The notion's still around,” said Charlie. “But I haven't any impression of Horrocks as a man who was violent toward women.”

“I wasn't really thinking of that,” said Foxley. “There's different ways of skinning a cat, you know. Cosmo's forte was verbal skinning. He was a sadist with the tongue, using words to humiliate, torment, rob people of their confidence and their self-respect. Come to think of it, it's a damned good job he never became a schoolmaster. You could drive a kid to suicide with a tongue like his.”

“What you're saying is that he saw Cora as a natural victim, and took her on as someone it would be a pleasure to victimize, in particular when her expectations must have been of someone benevolent who had acted as her deliverer?”

“Something like that. Worms turn, though, don't they?”

“It's taken this worm an awfully long time to turn,” commented Charlie.

“There's always the final straw,” returned Len, who could wield the powerful cliché. “Anyway, I wasn't only thinking of her. There's the child too, isn't there?”

“Two of them.”

“That household could have been a hellhole of resentment and rebellion. Were the kids of an age to strike back?”

“One of them was,” said Charlie thoughtfully. And in truth Len had given Charlie plenty to think about. The next time he went up for a refill he got one for himself as well.

 • • • 

Three quarters of an hour and a lot of journalistic gossip later, Charlie was in his car and on the way north to Birmingham, still
mulling over the information that Len Foxley, at a liquid price, had provided him with.

It was suggestive, that was for sure. Charlie had had recent experience of how bitterness could destroy. He had talked to the black mother, still young, of a boy who had died in police custody. He had been a schizophrenic, there was no doubt he had killed himself, but equally no doubt that he had been handled insensitively, and with massive ignorance of his problem. Charlie had every sympathy for the mother, but he could see with dreadful clarity how her massive, corrosive bitterness, two years after the death, was destroying her life and poisoning her personality.

Could gratitude do the same? Or at any rate gratitude that was gradually undermined, shown to be misplaced, corroded by being directed at a nature that showed itself wholly unworthy of it?

Say Cora had married Horrocks out of genuine gratitude, and to give herself a home and a protector. The gratitude was quite natural: he had led a campaign against the man who had made her life a hell of fear. Then say she had found out, over the years, that the basis of her marriage was a sham: the man she regarded as her protector had regarded her plight merely as a ploy in one of his usual pieces of self-serving muckraking, and had married her because, like Alan Russell, he had seen her as ideal victim material. And if, as her children grew up, he began to mold them similarly into potential victims, would she not, at some point, snap? Seize any chance of ridding herself of the man and starting again?