Unholy Dying (3 page)

Mrs. Knowsley sat opposite him, and such was the warmth of her personality and concern for him that within five minutes of starting in on the pie and the roast potatoes, Father Pardoe
found himself telling her about his family background in the Irish Protestant ascendancy.

“Though they weren't particularly ascendant, you know. Not big landowners or anything grand like that. Lawyers, solicitors, doctors—professional people. Then my grandmother converted to Catholicism—that was a big step, particularly as it was not long after the Troubles. A very strong-minded woman she was, though I only remember her in her last years. The younger children converted with her, and then the elder ones did the same, one by one. She had six—a large family for a Protestant one. Only my grandfather stood out, but he was very good-humored about it. The story is my grandmother introduced a priest to his deathbed, but I don't know how true that is. So I was brought up a Catholic, though it may be that most of the Irish regarded me and people like me as neither fish nor fowl.”

The ice was broken. And so, momentarily, was the despair. He went on to tell her about his training at Maynooth, his first parish in Ireland, the almost inevitable transition to mainland Britain, first on the west coast of Scotland, eventually to Yorkshire. He had a second helping of pie, told her about some of his work in the parish: the rebuilding of the church hall, the formation of the youth club and the young mothers' circle, the strengthening of links with other churches. Mrs. Knowsley was collecting plates when he said, “And then this happened.”

Madge Knowsley paused in piling the crockery.

“I said you didn't have to talk about anything you didn't want to talk about,” she said, taking the pile into the kitchen and coming back with fruit salads in little glass bowls.

Christopher Pardoe began eating, his mind elsewhere. His training and experience told him to do nothing on impulse. Hitherto he had relied heavily on his judgment of people, but that had been shaken. However, in the end it was not the feeling
that the ice had been broken, not the warmth or the good food or the sheer relief of having someone to talk to that decided him. It was his judgment of Madge Knowsley as a person—Madge, who sat opposite him, not waiting, not hoping, but eating quietly, and there if he needed her.

He put down his spoon and told her the whole story.

 • • • 

The newsroom of the
West Yorkshire Chronicle
was in the throes of its midmorning frenzy, with stories for its late editions being hastily cobbled together and occasionally checked. In the middle of the scurrying hither and thither, Cosmo Horrocks's desk represented an oasis of calm. The story Cosmo was working on demanded consideration, even meditation. It was not for a day but for a week, a month—a long and satisfying time span in his world.

He had been thinking which of his Catholic acquaintances he should approach, and had come up with Brian Marris—a onetime reporter on the
Bradford Telegraph and Argus
who had gone into local government and was now someone of power in the Parks and Gardens Department. Not generally a person of any great use to Cosmo, but he was honest, and a Catholic, and he might be tricked into telling him what he wanted to know.

“Cosmo—long time, no see” came Brian's voice when his secretary put Cosmo through. The lack of bonhomie in the tone suggested he had not felt it as a deprivation.

“That's right, Brian. We must get together some lunchtime.”

“What can I do for you, Cosmo?”

Businesslike, that was Brian Marris.

“I'm just putting together a possible series of little pieces, Brian, on Victorian churches in the area.”

“Hmmm.
Chronicle's
going upmarket, isn't it?”

“Just something for the cubs and juniors to work on. If they do a good job it might see the light of day. Now, there's Leeds Parish Church, of course—”

“Just pre-Victorian, that.”

“We may be going upmarket, Brian, but we're not becoming pedants. We can say nineteenth century, anyway. Then there's that High Church place off the York Road that's going to rack and ruin, and the big barn of a place in Birstall. Now, I thought we ought to have a few Methodist or nonconformist places—that Baptist one halfway down the hill in Haworth, for example. And of course some Catholic ones.”

“There's one or two very fine ones.”

“Someone mentioned a St. Catherine's.”

“St. Catherine's in Shipley? I shouldn't have thought—” For a second or two there was silence at the other end. “Cosmo, are you up to your old tricks?”

“Old tricks, Brian? I don't know what you mean.”

From now on there were pauses every time it was Marris's turn to speak. He knew that with Horrocks every step had to be thought out in advance if you were not to find yourself treading in dung.

“Well, let's just say I'd be very surprised if any series on Victorian churches ever saw the light of day in your columns,” he said at last.

“I told you it was touch and go if it would. With the juvenile shower we've got at the moment, I'd say it was odds against. . . . So there is something going on there, is there?”

“I know nothing about it, Cosmo.”

“You know there's something going on, so that's a start. It's very seldom someone knows there's something going on without having some inkling of what it is.”

“Is it, Cosmo? I bow to your experience.”

“I gather Father Pardoe has suddenly taken a rest for spiritual renewal.”

“Has he? That's not unusual.”

“It is when it's a pack of lies and he's really under investigation by the Church.”

“I told you, I know nothing about it.”

“Come off it, Brian. You live at Greengates, just down the road. I can tell you've heard something.”

“When I say I know nothing about it, Cosmo, what I mean is I have no intention of talking about it to you.”

Cosmo let out a rich chuckle. That's what Brian thought!

“I rather interpreted it as that. Unfriendly, that's what I call it. You were always in the thick of things, Church-wise, Brian. I should think you even know the name of the bimbo concerned.”

Again there was silence at the other end. But he hadn't rung off.

“Well,” resumed Cosmo, in a reasonable voice, “would I be getting warm if I suggested Julie Norris?”

“Cosmo, if you know so much—”

“I'm guessing she isn't the sort of single mum who'll be in the telephone directory. I'd guess she lives in a grotty flat in a slum estate, full of nappy smells and greasy fish-and-chip paper—would I be right?”

“I'm not involved with the girl, Cosmo.”

“I'm not suggesting you are, Brian. Happily married as they come, aren't you? That little episode with Mandy Miller on the switchboard at the
Telegraph and Argus
is long behind you, isn't it? I shouldn't think your wife ever even got suspicious, did she? Lucky man, you are, Brian.”

He still hadn't rung off. Cosmo could almost hear the sound of thinking. In the end, the reply he wanted came.

“They say she lives on the Kingsmill estate. . . . God, you are a bastard, Cosmo. I pity your wife and daughters.”

Cosmo barked with laughter.

“Don't bother, Brian. You can't pity them more than they pity themselves.”

This time the phone at the other end was put down, and violently, but Cosmo's smile as he replaced his own receiver showed that he knew he'd won a famous victory.

Later that day, when the last editions were on the streets, Terry Beale and several of the other juniors on the paper—anyone, in fact, under the age of twenty-five—went to O'Reilly's, the nearby Irish-theme pub, which was about as Irish as Cleethorpes, and had a convivial pint, as they often did at the close of their day. Terry, though, stuck to his usual orange juice.

“What was old Cosmo up to today?” Carol Barr asked Terry. They had a common history of suffering at his hands.

“Cosmo? You mean apart from trashing my piece?”

“Don't make a big thing of that, Terry. We all know he trashes everybody's pieces.”

“True. I'm not claiming most-picked-on-victim status.” He thought for a moment, then added: “But the thing that hurts is that, from his point of view, and from the paper's point of view, he was dead right. What I finally turned out was a better
Chronicle
story.”

“That may be,” said Patrick De'ath. “But Cosmo and the
Chronicle
are things of the past. Cosmo lives in a world of scoops and ‘Hold the front page.' He's a bit pathetic, a dinosaur.”

“Oh, and has journalism got beyond all that?” asked Terry bitterly. “Gone onward and upward to better things? It's passed me by if it has. All I can see are British newspapers going further and further down into the sewers.”

“You're wrong, Terry,” said Patrick, draining his Guinness.
“The future isn't with the tabloids—that's why they're increasingly desperate and hysterical. The future is with the broadsheets. That's what people are turning to.”

“And could anyone say
The Times
and the
Guardian
are what they once were?”

“Cut the philosophical stuff,” said Carol. “I asked what Cosmo was up to after he'd savaged your piece.”

“How would I know?” Terry asked.

“Don't play the innocent with me, Terry. I saw you passing back and forth behind Cosmo's chair without good reason. It wasn't the attractions of his person that took you there.”

Terry thought, then grinned.

“I just like to know what the old bastard is up to.”

“And what was he up to?”

“A scoop of the most traditional kind, you won't be surprised to learn. Some vicar or priest and a bimbo.”

“The vicar of Stiffkey lives on,” commented Patrick.

“The vicar of
where
?” Terry asked.

“Stiffkey. Pronounced
Stookey
, spelled
Stiff-key
. Which is rather appropriate. His missionary zeal took him mostly among prostitutes, and he died in the lions' cage of a traveling circus.”

“I don't believe it!”

“Gospel truth. They used him as their Communion wafer. You can imagine what a field day the papers at the time had with
that
story.”

“When was this?”

“Back in the thirties.”

“And still it goes on. Vicars are still fair game.”

“I'm not sure that's so unfair,” said Carol Barr. “Anyone who sets themselves up as rather better than anyone else is asking for it if they show that in fact they're pretty much the same. There's the same interest in a bent copper.”

“Only bent coppers are always found not guilty by juries, unless they mistreat animals,” said Patrick De'ath. “Vicars are judged guilty by readers without a hearing.”

“So where is this vicar, then?” asked Carol, turning to Terry. “Local, presumably?”

“Presumably. Actually, I think it may have been a priest. I heard the word ‘Father' something or other. In other words, Cosmo is cobbling up the sort of traditional story that is thoroughly inaccurate and embarrassing and sells loads of copies.”

“That's what we're all meant to do,” said Carol.

“Don't defend the slimy little git,” said Terry, his voice becoming louder. “What he does—the sort of story he homes in on—is beyond the pale. He's what journalism has sunk to. It's what we all will sink to if we don't go after something better.”

If his friends were puzzled at the passion in his voice, they kept quiet about it. Patrick collected the glasses for a second round. And Carol Barr, meditatively chewing a bap that seemed to consist entirely of iceberg lettuce, wondered whether it was Cosmo, or Cosmo's story, or Terry's growing doubts about a career in journalism that had aroused something close to passion in the normally self-contained young man.

Julie Norris gazed out the window of her ground-floor flat in the Council house on the Kingsmill estate on the outskirts of Shipley, the part nobody visited or went through. Immediately opposite was a patch of dumping ground. The tenants of one half of the semidetached that used to be there had misguidedly bought their house when the Council offered it to them at a knockdown price. When one died and the other was taken into a nursing home the property proved impossible to sell. Before the place had been on the market a month the local youth had moved in, smashing first windows, then doors. Before long the place was a total wreck. In no time at all the house became such a local eyesore and scandal that the tenants next door had to be moved elsewhere, and the shell of the two homes eventually demolished. Now the space where they had been was the dumping ground for ragged armchairs and sofas, old televisions, bags of household and garden rubbish, and all the detritus of modern living.

Gary, playing on the floor in his usual boisterous manner,
caught his thumb in the door and started to howl. After a minute or two of hoping he would stop of his own accord, Julie turned, crouched down, and took him in her arms.

“ ‘Bye, baby bunting,' ” she crooned, remembering the old rhyme, “ ‘Daddy's gone a-hunting.' ”

But she didn't know what Daddy had gone a-doing, or, with absolute precision, who Daddy was.

That was one thing she had vowed would never happen again. That was a period in her life she felt very ashamed of. She did know exactly who was responsible for the current bulge in her belly, though she had little recent information about him. She had not seen him since the day she had told him her news.

God, she was a lousy picker!

When Gary had quieted down she put him back on the floor and went around dispiritedly picking up this and that from the chaos that was her living room. It was not a room that repaid tidy habits. Whatever you did, it never looked like anything but a dump. When she had collected a pile of things she was in a quandary: she could put the bits of underwear and toddler's clothing with the dirty wash, but all the other things defeated her, and she put them in a pile on the floor in the corner of the kitchen, where Gary would before long retrieve and redistribute them. A feeling washed over her, as it frequently did, that she had got herself into a situation that she was quite incapable of solving or making less depressing.