Unholy Dying (23 page)

“I may be young and a bit green, but I'm not stupid. She commented when I applied for the job on the
Chronicle
, and when I got up here I told her he no longer worked on the paper—I said I thought he'd gone to Glasgow.”

Charlie nodded and drove on. He tried to make his face totally impassive. Because he had realized, as no doubt Terry had too, that she could have had advance notice of the story in the
Globe
from some contact in the newspaper world. Someone who knew of her past involvement with Cosmo, someone who knew, even, that her son by him was currently working for the
West Yorkshire Chronicle
, someone who shared her rage at his past behavior, or someone who just enjoyed making trouble. She could then have found out his address quite easily enough from the telephone directories in the local library. Then she would have known her son had been lying to her.

Come to that, could much of what he had just been told be a lie? Could mother and son have been working together to kill the household's great figure of hate?

Charlie dropped Terry off at Kirkstall, then rang Mike Oddie to get an update on events. Then he went home for the night. His speculations on the Beales were brought to an abrupt end soon after, because his girlfriend, Felicity, told him she was going to have a baby.

Father Pardoe sat hunched in the easy chair of his bed-sitting room upstairs at Margaret's. It was not despair he now felt, as it had been in his first weeks there; it was uncertainty, almost bewilderment. And it was complicated by the fact that he didn't want Margaret to know he was sitting alone pondering, not for too long, anyway. It would worry her, make her feel guilty, seem to her, perhaps, as if he were betraying her with his doubts.

This is almost like being married, he thought.

Analyzing the nights since they had fallen into—into
sin
, he had to think of it as—there had been two nights when they had had sex together and he had gone back to his own bed and one when he had spent the night with her. It was clear how he ought, as a priest, to regard these nights. The last night spent on his own was the last one in which he had been faithful to his vows; the others were terrible lapses from them.

Only somehow, suddenly, he was unable to see them like that. To him those other nights seemed right—not necessarily right as a way of life, or right always for him in the future, but
right for him and for her in the particular circumstances they were in at this particular time. He had always tried to regard the sins of his flock with—not tolerance, perhaps, but with understanding. Was it wrong of him to exercise the same understanding on his own backsliding?

The bearing his new relationship had on his suspension he tried not to put in the forefront of his mind. Obviously, denying, truthfully, any impropriety with Julie Norris lost some of its force if at the same time he was having an affair—a love affair, a sexual relationship, whatever words were used—with Margaret. The cases were very different, of course, worlds apart, but in the eyes of the Church they were practically identical. The sin he was committing was the same as the one he was unjustly accused of. But that was not what he should be thinking of now. He should be trying to understand in what light he viewed the relationship, in what light Margaret must view it. Did she see it as the beginning of a permanent relationship, one involving, presumably, his leaving the priesthood? Did he himself see that as his future? And if it was not that, was it not simply casual sex?

He pulled himself up. What Margaret might or might not think was pure speculation. Best to start with himself. Then at least there was some chance of reaching the safe shore of certainty.

How
did
he regard it? Did his fall mean he could never again consider himself a true priest?

No, on reflection, he did not regard it as that. He got up and walked around the room, then sat down again, conscious that Margaret might be listening downstairs. He said to himself: ignore my feeling that this was
right
. Say I admit to myself that it was a lapse. Should I see it as quite different in kind from, say, a lapse in charity, or a lapse in truthfulness? Any priest has
such lapses; certainly he had had them himself, and many of them, since he dealt more than most men with a wide range of people who at times sorely tried his charity, and who needed to be handled in ways that sometimes stretched his devotion to the absolute truth.

And if he was honest he would have to admit that he suspected quite a lot of his fellow priests had occasional lapses in chastity, not just in their seminary days, when, as he told Margaret, blind eyes tended to be turned, but during their ministries. He wasn't talking mainly about men who turned out to have a regular mistress and illegitimate children going way back, like the Scottish bishop recently hounded by the tabloids. He was talking about men who effected a compromise with their sexuality by occasionally giving way to it. To adapt St. Augustine, they said: “O Lord, make me chaste, but not entirely.” Presumably they thought like Pardoe did: this was not a special falling, but a sin like any other sin.

He shook himself. He had begun the process of sorting this out in his own mind, but there remained the imponderable of Margaret. His instinct was to try not to thrash things through with her until the current crises—the inquiry and now the murder—were over. The danger was that they distorted everything. Crises, whether national or domestic and personal, always did distort things, so that one saw clearly only when one had come through them.

He thought back to the crucial night. They had been going over the shocking events of recent days: the Bishop's anger, the hideous public humiliation of the press photographer and reporter, the fact that now things were out in the open and worse would surely follow. He had become more and more distressed, his disillusion with the Bishop becoming a sort of code for his anger at his treatment, his doubts about how his Church
organized itself and conducted itself in difficult situations. Then, as they prepared for bed, the kiss—the kiss that could no longer be put down to friendship, gratitude, other feelings. Then the walk up the stairs to Margaret's bedroom, a journey when somehow each seemed to be supporting the other.

He looked at the events for a clue to Margaret's feelings, her attitude. He had to admit he did not know. Would it be best to ask her, bring it out into the open? He shrank from that, and told himself that Margaret had given no sign of wanting that.

However, when he went downstairs and took his raincoat off the hook for a walk to the newsstand for a paper, Margaret came to the kitchen door and looked at him, trying hard to erase any suggestion of worry from her face.

“You do realize, don't you, Christopher, that the last thing I'd ever want is to put pressure on you? All I want, truly, is for you to be back at St. Catherine's and a parish priest again.”

He walked over and kissed her.

“That's in the lap of the gods, Margaret, if you'll pardon a paganism.”

 • • • 

“I feel so bloody guilty,” said Charlie as he and Oddie got into the car and began the drive toward Shipley.

“I don't see why,” said Oddie. “Beyond the obvious fact that you dunnit.”

Charlie was uncharacteristically roundabout in his reply.

“Abortion is different when you've been partners for several years, isn't it?” he said. “It's not like some poor teenager who's been ignorant and unlucky. I'd have been pretty unhappy if Felicity had wanted that, but of course she doesn't.”

“So?”

“She says she's not going to apply for this lectureship she'd have had a good chance of getting, by all accounts. Says the
most she'll do is the occasional teaching. She's decided for the first few years she's going to be a full-time mother.”

“Unfashionable, or it would have been ten or twenty years ago,” commented Oddie. “Now it's not so much unfashionable as uneconomic.”

“She doesn't say so, but I can't help feeling that if I had a different job, a nine-to-five one, she wouldn't have decided to make this sacrifice—because that's what it is.”

“At least with you becoming sergeant the financial pressures won't be as great.”

Charlie cast him a look.

“You're joking,” he said sourly. “And there's another thing: she wants a church wedding.”

“You were intending to get married anyway.”

“I wasn't thinking of a church wedding.”

“So what did you want? An underwater one in the West Indies? A blessing on Haworth moors?”

“Don't be smart. I'm old-fashioned. I don't see what's wrong with a registry office.”

“And she wants the white caboodle, with bridesmaids?”

“I think she's thinking in terms of pale blue. The trouble is, my mother will back her up to the hilt.”

“I don't think the mother of the bridegroom has much clout in all this.”

Charlie shot him another look.

“You've
met
my mother.”

“True. Still, look on the bright side. It'll be a day to remember. And you'll make a handsome couple.”

Charlie brightened a fraction.

“Yes, we will,” he said complacently. “So what's the order of the day, boss?”

“It's sorting out and weeding out. By the way, one we can
weed out is Alan Russell. He might have been eligible for parole by now, but three years ago the woman who ran the educational program in his prison was won over by his highly deceptive charms. She planned an escape for him that was to end up with the pair of them making a new life in Spain. Which in Russell's case would have been pretty much like his old life in Britain, I'd guess. Anyway, the result is he's still got eighteen months to do.”

“Good. Well, that's him knocked off the suspect list. How about the others? Do I start with Julie Norris?”

“I think so. More of her age, more of her mind-set, probably. Hey—you've got more common ground still: a baby on the way.” Charlie grunted. “I suspect you'll do better without an oldie.”

“What will you do?”

“I was going to go and see the parents, but I think I'd rather have you with me. I get a whiff of an unusual and complicated situation there. How else to explain their behavior to their own daughter?”

“It's not as unusual as you make out,” protested Charlie. “A lot of parents are just itching to get rid of their children, but the kids just sit tight, on and on, because they're allowed to do anything they want to at home.”

“Julie was only seventeen.”

“Well, yes, that's a bit young. Anyway, I'd certainly like to get a look at them.”

“So if you let me off on the Kingsmill estate before you get to Julie's stately home, I'm going to look around to see if Julie and the priest were a subject of scandal over a long period, and what and who could have triggered the investigation of the man.”

So when Charlie banged on Julie Norris's door, trying to be heard over the squeaks of the Teletubbies, he was on his own, and glad to be. When the door opened, Julie was bent over
clutching the paw of a child of about two, and it was only when she straightened to look at his ID that Charlie saw how pretty and appealing she was.

“Is it about that creep from the
Chronicle
?” Julie asked. “I thought your lot might come. Don't expect me to express any grief.”

“You'd be out on your own if you did,” said Charlie cheerfully, following her through to the dark and messy living room. “I don't think journalists set much store by being popular. Not his kind of journalist, anyway.”

The
Teletubbies
were ending, and Julie switched the set off.

“He really gave me the creeps,” she said, without waiting for a question. “It wasn't
just
that he was pushing his way into my private life, though that was bad enough. It was—well, you can see I'm practically shivering at the thought of him, can't you?” Charlie nodded, though “shuddering” was more the word. “He stood at the window there, looking in here after I'd shut the door in his face, and he just leered at Gary and me. You could see his horrible mind working, thinking how he'd describe how grotty this place is. His kind are like rats at a garbage pail.”

“Was that the last you saw of him?”

“Yes, thank God. Though I heard he paid a visit later on to Doris Crabtree out the back, her who landed poor Father Pardoe in it and started the whole business.” She jerked a thumb toward the back window and the house that could be seen through it. Charlie filed the name in his mind in case Oddie didn't get to her.

“We've wondered a bit how it all started,” he said. “Why should she do that?”

“Because she's a nosy old cow,” said Julie promptly. “Anything going on, she knows it, spreads it, and makes trouble if
she can. If they'd known anything about this estate they'd have tossed her letter the moment they got it and thought no more about it.”

“Who's they?”

“The people in the Bishop's office. That's who she wrote to. She saw I was getting visits from a priest, and she saw the best way to make trouble about it. You wouldn't think they'd take a mucky letter like that seriously, would you?”

Charlie had to agree in his mind that he wouldn't.

“Maybe it's the fact that you're pregnant again,” he suggested. “She could have said that Father Pardoe was the father.”

“I wouldn't put it past her, the lying cow. And in case you're interested, he's not. And he's not Gary's father either. He—the one I think is his father—was working in a bar in Toronto last I heard of him, which is nearly two years ago. We've had no contact since I moved out of his parents' house and came here.”

“I didn't mean to pry. It's no business of ours chasing errant fathers. I'm interested because I heard last night that I'm going to be a father.”