Unholy Dying (24 page)

She immediately relaxed, and smiled.

“Oh, that's nice. If it's wanted.”

“Oh, it's that. A bit unexpected, but definitely wanted.”

“I only seem to be able to pick blokes who don't want to know. The father of this one”—she patted her stomach—“is nothing to do with all this, and I haven't seen him since half an hour after I told him I was pregnant. They asked me who it was at the inquiry, and I told them to mind their own business.”

“Was that the Bishop's inquiry?”

“Yes.”

“So far you're the only person we've interviewed who's talked to them.”

“A lot of good it did me, or Father. There were three of
them. They were kind enough, I suppose. . . . Do you want my opinion?”

“Very much.”

“There were two stooges, and one who might be a bit more independent. He was the young priest.”

“And who were the others?”

“An older priest. He was a pretty strong-minded type, stern, almost, but he'd be a Bishop's man. Believes in authority. Then an anonymous-looking chap, not a priest, who hardly said a word. If you were looking for a weak link, he'd be the one.”

“Someone who could be bullied, you mean?”

She smiled knowingly. “Yes.”

“You're very sharp. You should be using that brain.”

“I am. I'm bringing up a kid.”

Charlie sighed silently. He foresaw months of arguments with Felicity along the same lines. Arguments he would lose, as he just had. Julie saw she'd landed a blow under the belt.

“Sorry. I didn't mean anything personal. I'm not saying what I'm doing is what I've always dreamed of doing. But you have to make do with what you've got, don't you?”

A bleak thought in a bleak room, Charlie decided.

 • • • 

Oddie got on to Doris Crabtree almost immediately. She had been cited but not named in the article in the
Globe
. He stopped and talked to a group of young women with toddlers and they turned out to be friends of Julie Norris's, and immediately identified the “old cow” who had “landed her in it.” He was knocking on her door within ten minutes of having been dropped off by Charlie.

“I've never been so shocked in all my life,” she announced, leading him through to the kitchen and pouring him a cup of heavily stewed and lukewarm tea. “One minute he's sitting
there just like you now and talking to me nice as pie and really interested, encouraging me to tell him everything I know; the next I hear he's on the local news, murdered!” There was relish, but also more than a touch of regret in her tone.

“So you'd talked to him about Julie Norris, had you?” Oddie asked.

“O' course we talked. That's what he come for. He found out it were me wrote to alert the Bishop about what was going on. It was my duty, and I've always done that, whatever the cost. And there's been young sluts around here shouting after me and calling me names, I can tell you.”

“And what was going on, do you think?”

“I don't need to spell it out, do I? He'd arrive down Kingsmill Rise, he'd ring the doorbell and go in, and then the curtains would be drawn in the bedroom. And the few times they weren't, they'd be in the kitchen where I couldn't see 'em.”

Oddie refrained from saying that she'd brought him into her kitchen, and it was a perfectly natural place for a chat.

“So you suggested he might be the father of the child that's on the way?”

She sniffed.

“I mentioned that fact, and let them draw their own conclusions.”

“And the Fund that he'd been using apparently for her benefit?”

“Don't know about that. I'd seen her showing him the telly set once, and I wondered if he'd got it for her, but I couldn't be sure, so I kept quiet. No, it was just the other I told them about, and that was enough. Makes me sick, that.”

“What does?”

“Him giving her money from this Fund. Her having televisions and washing machines and anything she asks for. I grew
up when folk were lucky to be in work, and my dad weren't one of the lucky ones. We lived off bread and drippings half the time.”

The words should have made her a more sympathetic figure, but the sour expression, the obvious jealousy of one who, whatever the rise in national expectations since this woman's childhood, was still near the bottom of the pile, nauseated Oddie. He suppressed a sigh.

“So you think Father Pardoe may be the father of Julie's forthcoming child.”

“I'm not accusing him. But it seems pretty likely, doesn't it?”

“There've been no other men visiting her?”

“Oh, I never said that! That'd be pretty surprising, young women being what they are today. A man's only got to ask her and she pulls up her skirts.”

Oddie suppressed another sigh, and put on an expression more alert than he thought this woman's information justified.

“Let me get this right, because it could be important: Are you accusing Julie of being a prostitute, or a part-time one?”

She pursed her lips and thought before replying.

“No, I'm not. Not at her house here, anyway.”

“But you have seen men going there.”

“Oh, yes. A man, anyway.”

“One man?”

“Aye. One man went there several times.”

“What was he like?”

“It were last winter. I couldn't see what he was like. Lighting's dismal around here, because the kids throw bricks at the bulbs and the Council doesn't bother to replace them. He were taller than Father Pardoe—not so bulky. I could only see the outline of him as he come down the street.”

“Last winter. How far gone is Julie's pregnancy?”

“Happen four or five months. You're trying to say he's the father of her child, aren't you?”

“It's a possibility.”

“You middle-aged men stick together, don't you?”

It was Oddie's turn to feel he'd had a hit scored against him.

 • • • 

Father Pardoe felt a certain awkwardness that day in sitting down to lunch with Margaret, and he needed all his social arts to hide it. He told her about his walk, and the man in the post office who had come up to him and wished him luck because he always supported people who were being turned over by muckrakers.

“That was brave of him. Did he know the man had been murdered?”

“He did. Said it made ‘not a ha'porth of difference.' And of course it doesn't. I'm quite convinced his murder had nothing to do with my suspension and the story he made out of it. . . . There's a bit of good news, by the way.”

“Good news?”

“I think it's good. I got a letter today, asking me to meet the committee of inquiry. I think that's a polite way of asking me to appear before it.”

“That's wonderful! Just what you've been wanting.”

“Yes, it is. Odd how this business has made me suspicious, though. Once I got over the euphoria, I started wondering whether they would have heard my side of the matter at all if it hadn't been for Horrocks's murder.”

Margaret considered this.

“You mean the spotlight is now on them in a way it wasn't before, and they're being careful to be meticulously fair.”

“Yes. Or to seem to be.”

“That's being doubly cynical!” said Margaret. “But take heart:
if they are still bent on being unfair, it will be much more difficult with everyone's eyes on them. I suppose that's what made the Bishop so angry.”

Pardoe pulled himself up.

“We mustn't find the Bishop guilty without his being tried. Forget what I said, and assume I will get, and always would have got, a fair hearing.”

“It's what you've been pressing for, and what you should have had weeks ago. . . . Christopher, you do realize, don't you, that no one will ever know about—about what's happened between us?”

Pardoe looked at her and nodded.

“Yes, I do. I've never trusted anyone more absolutely than I do you, Margaret. I've wrestled with it, but perhaps I don't need to go into that. You will have guessed all that. I can't see that it's anything more than a sin like any other. I've been guilty—all priests have been guilty—of plenty of sins, and I hope I've been conscious of them, tried to face up to them. But since I came here, you've been a lifeline, been the most wonderful help and support in every way. I shall never forget what you've been to me.”

“That's all right, then,” said Margaret, smiling and getting up to go to the kitchen.

But Christopher Pardoe, registering the warmth and friendliness of the smile, wished he had not discerned, intermingled with them, a brief shaft of pain.

Charlie was saying good-bye to Julie Norris on her doorstep when he saw Oddie come around the corner in the direction of the police car. He raised his hand to him and turned back to Julie.

“I'm grateful to you for your help,” he said. “I hope all goes well with you and the new baby.”

“Yours too. It must be wonderful to look forward to a birth.”

Charlie looked around him, taking in the garbage dump on the vacant lot opposite.

“Why don't you try and get the Council to find you something better than this . . .”

“Dump. Say it. What's the point? I've got me mates around here now. Anyway, you could say it's coming home. It's where I was born.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows.

“I didn't realize that.”

“Nor did I. It's on my birth certificate as my parents' address. I insisted on having it when I moved my things out. Thought I might need it, dealing with the Benefits people and that. When I commented on it to my mother she just said: ‘You started life in a slum, and you'll be there for the rest of your life.' ”

“She sounds a real charmer.”

Julie shrugged, refusing to be cast down.

“I've had to find friends to replace my parents. Not just since Gary came along, but always. My aunt Becky was always nicer to me than they were. And Father Pardoe was the best of them. OK, it's pretty depressing here, but one thing I'm never going to do is take it out on the babies. It's not their fault if their mother's been a bit of a slut, is it?”

“You're not a slut, Julie. Don't think like that.”

She smiled wanly.

“Bring Father Pardoe back for me, will you?”

“You know I can't do that. I'm not the Catholic Church.”

“What I really mean is: bring him safely through all this. Get justice for him. He's a good man, one of the best. And I didn't do him much good, I'm afraid.”

“We'll do our best. Keep fighting.”

Back at the car he said to Oddie, “That was an interesting titbit.”

“What was?”

“Julie was born on the Kingsmill.”

Oddie's eyebrows went through the roof.

“Really? I suspect that's not something the Norrises go around telling people.”

“No. Might give us an interesting topic for small talk when we go visiting them on Beckham Road.”

“Which I think we should do now.”

Modest though Beckham Road was, they both recognized the decisive step up the Norrises had made when they moved from the Kingsmill. The house seemed dead, though, whereas the Kingsmill was alive, if depressingly so, teeming with dubious life bent on the struggle for survival. It took some time for the door to be answered to their ring, but Oddie had observed a shape in an upstairs' window and told Charlie to keep on ringing. When the door was opened, Mrs. Norris ushered them inside with not a glance at their identification. Oddie and Charlie had long realized that they looked like a police team, and were thought to “look bad” in neighbors' eyes. It was something they could live with. It certainly got them inside houses and business premises quickly.

“I'm sorry to keep you waiting,” said Mrs. Norris almost ingratiatingly. She was watery-eyed, and her voice had a griping quality that Charlie in particular found unsympathetic. “Come through. You've come at the right time. Simon will be home for his lunch in five minutes. He's found that in the places he usually goes to, he's getting funny looks at the moment. That's what being in the news does for you, isn't it?”

She seemed not to have made up her mind whether this was ungenteel or rather exciting.

“Sometimes,” said Oddie genially, letting an armchair embrace him like an elderly lover. “It's not always nice to be looked at. Those articles by Cosmo Horrocks didn't do you any service.”

“Oh, I don't know about that,” said Daphne Norris quickly. “He was very fair, we thought. He just wanted to make sure our side of things was presented. We were grateful to him.”

Both men repressed the skeptical jeer they felt.

“I see,” said Oddie. “As far as you were concerned he was perfectly fair in his reporting.”

“Oh, yes. We'd no complaints at all. What can you say when your daughter's been having an affair with a priest and is expecting his child?”

“Julie categorically denies both these things,” Charlie put in. He received a sour look for his pains.

“Well, she would, wouldn't she? What I say is, you reap what you sow in this world; God sees to that. And Julie's reward is to be stuck in that hellhole of an estate with two screaming kids. She'll not get any sympathy from me.”

Mrs. Norris had not learned anything about the art of getting the listener on her side since she had been interviewed by Cosmo Horrocks, Oddie thought. He said, “I'd have thought you might have been sympathetic. After all, you'd been in a similar position yourself, hadn't you?”

She looked at him in venomous outrage.

“What's she been saying? You don't know what you're talking about. I was a married woman. Simon and I were newly wed, and we hadn't the funds for anything better. We soon got out of the Kingsmill, I can tell you. . . . There's Simon now.”