Unholy Dying Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sink Estate

  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.

  There had been better days until recently. Father Pardoe—Christopher—had made a difference, made her look at herself in a better, more hopeful light. His kindness, his concern, his involvement had been so unexpected but, once she understood, so welcome that it had been like a little beacon of light. Now he was—somehow—no longer there, not in Shipley at all, so she had heard. She was aware that rumors were going around among the Catholic faithful, and though very few of the faithful lived on the Kingsmill estate, she was aware that rumors, less hushed in the telling, were going around here too. His visits had been observed by the neighbors. Of course they had been observed by the neighbors. Everything was observed by the neighbors. Especially by that cow at the back.

  The fact that Christopher was in trouble because of her was painful to Julie, whose conscience took unexpected forms but was definitely operative. People who were kind to her—consistently kind, not kind to get what they wanted from her—aroused feelings of intense gratitude. Her parents had thrown her out at seventeen, and had been looking for an excuse to do it since she was fifteen. Just like me, she thought bitterly, but looking tenderly at Gary, to give them one.

  She jumped when the doorbell rang. She very nearly didn’t answer it. What was the point? Any friends she had she met at usual places of resort—clinic, supermarket, Laundromat. For the most part she did not call on them and they did not call on her. Why leave your dump to go to another person’s dump? The ring at the door could only be a crank religionist or the more hopeless sort of door-to-door salesman. But when, after a second ring, she went to answer it, it turned out to be neither.

  “Are you Julie Norris?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Cosmo Horrocks. You may have seen the name in the local papers. I’m reporter in chief on the West Yorkshire Chronicle. I wonder if you’d like to comment on the rumors.”

  She looked at him in bewilderment. The man standing eye-balling her was of middle height, wiry of frame, wearing what she recognized from experience as cheap clothes in need of a dry-clean. His hair was meager, plastered across his pate, and his face was set in what was intended to be an expression of sympathetic interest, though even the inexperienced Julie could discern underneath the suppressed sneer. What sort of man was this? A more sophisticated person than Julie might have decided that he didn’t look like a chief-anything-at-all, but she was hardly aware what a reporter was. She took no newspaper, and her only contact with the press came when she cast her eye over the tabloid headlines in the newspaper racks at the supermarket.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She was a poor liar, at least in situations she was unused to. She had certainly pulled the wool over the eyes of benefits claims officials in her time, but this was unexplored territory.

  “Oh, you know all right,” said Cosmo, the sneer winning out easily over the sympathetic expression. “I can see it in your face. I’ll spell it out, shall I? I mean the rumors about you and Father Pardoe of St. Catherine’s.”

  The confirmation of her worst fears pulled Julie up short. She was suddenly conscious that this horrible little man’s foot was in the door. She might have thought Cosmo’s acting out of the clichéd behavior of newspapermen was funny, if she had known the cliché. Knowing nothing about newspapermen, she felt threatened. But she knew she had to be cautious, for Christopher’s sake, and she dredged up some of the verbiage from her childhood. Her home had been at least nominally Catholic.

  “Father Pardoe is my priest. He knows I’ve been going through a difficult time with the baby and . . . and all that, and he’s been helping me and giving advice.”

  “Oh, yes? Spiritual advice?” asked Cosmo with a leer.

  “Yes. Spiritual advice, and practical advice too, if I needed it.”

  “And what have you been giving him?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard. Have you been giving him something in exchange, like the rumors say?” He looked at her bulge. “I see there’
s another on the way.”

  Julie’s reaction was pure instinct. The flat of her palm flashed out at him, pushing hard on his chest so he fell backward off the step and onto the pathway. Midfall her heel went into his groin. She slammed the door shut.

  “I could sue you for assault!” came a shout from outside. But it didn’t sound like a threat, more like crowing triumph. “I only want to give you a chance to state your side of things, you know. I’m doing you a favor.”

  Julie knew enough about life to see through this. She knew that people never knocked at your door to do you a favor. She went back into the living room, and just to have clean human contact again she scooped Gary up from the floor and jogged him up and down in the crook of her arm. Immediately he was gurgling with laughter and putting his little fingers into her face. She was just regaining her cool when a reflection in the glass door into her kitchen sent her spinning around to the window.

  The foul-looking man was gazing through at her and the baby, and by the look of him noting every detail of her still-messy living room: the diaper on the chair, the toys left everywhere, the dirty towel draped over the back of an armchair. And when he saw he was observed he had the cheek to raise his hand in greeting and smile his knowing, triumphant smile. Julie felt like vomiting.

  If she had had curtains she would have drawn them, but she had them only in the bedroom. As it was, all she could do was take Gary through into the poky hallway, shut the door on the prying face, then sit down with her son on the uncarpeted floor and have a good cry.

  • • •

  By now Father Pardoe and Mrs. Knowsley were friends. It made all the difference in the world for him to have someone on whom any- and everything could be unburdened. Of course, he had friends in the parish. Had had. No one, apparently, had sent letters to the presbytery for forwarding to him. In any case, that was Shipley, this was Pudsey. He now had in his exile, his incarceration, someone who was in his confidence, on his side.

  It was a friendship without complications or tensions. Mrs. Knowsley almost never asked him anything, unless it was about the trivialities of day-to-day living, or unless it followed from something he had told her. This was not, Pardoe knew, because she was incurious, but because she was tactful. Anything she learned had to be told to her voluntarily.

  Pardoe still took some of his meals alone in his room, but he came down quite often for the midday meal, which was the main one of the day. Afterward, as a rule, he took an afternoon constitutional, which was a new departure. He never saw anyone whom he knew, and the fresh air was good. His prison was at least becoming an open one. He was losing his instinct to hide from the world.

  One day at the end of dinner Father Pardoe, pushing away a plate that had contained apple crumble, said, “I think I’ll take a little walk. I often find it gets my thoughts in order.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  “Though it’s difficult getting one’s thoughts in order when you have no idea what’s happening with the one thing that you want to think about.”

  Mrs. Knowsley hesitated, then said, “Hasn’t the Bishop kept you informed about what’s being done?”

  “I haven’t had a word.” He tried, out of habit, to put the best gloss on his superior’s actions, or lack of them. “He’s informed me that the matter is being investigated by a committee. I suppose he thinks that anything he writes before they’ve reported back may arouse false hopes or fears. . . . But it’s like living in a vacuum.”

  Mrs. Knowsley said nothing, and took the plates into the kitchen. She was often out when the post came—at the shops, or visiting her daughter half a mile away. But when she did take up the post to her lodger she had noticed that any letters he got generally came from Ireland.

  On an impulse she went out to him in the hall, where he was pulling on a mac, having looked out at the uncertain early-May skies.

  “Wouldn’t it be an idea,” she said tentatively, “tell me if I’m talking out of turn, to write to the Bishop giving an account of your dealings with this—”

  “Julie. Julie Norris.”

  “Right. With this Julie Norris from beginning to end. Just like you told me.”

  “I’ve assured him all our dealings were entirely innocent. That wasn’t enough for him.”

  “That’s not quite the same thing as saying exactly what they were, and how they came about.”

  She was holding her ground, being surprisingly firm. And her view made sense, as he knew from his dealings with his parishioners.

  “No. . . .” He was still dubious. “The question is, will it do any good?”

  “There’s another question too: Will it do you any good? I think it might make you feel better. Even if you never send it, it will get your thoughts in order, and you will have words and arguments in your mind that you may want to use when you go before this committee.”

  Father Pardoe nodded, thanked her for her interest, and went out into the spring drizzle.

  He was a man for whom writing had always been a pleasure, or at least a satisfaction: sermons, letters of sympathy, letters expounding a view or advocating a course of action. As he walked, forms of words came to his mind, ways of explaining some point about his relationship with Julie, or describing some action of his that might be misinterpreted. He had to tell himself that if he did write a full account, simplicity would be much the best literary approach to adopt.

  That evening he turned off his little television after the Channel Four news, poured himself a modest finger of Irish whisky, and took up his pen.

  “My Lord,” he began.

  I have decided to write for you a full account of all my dealings with Julie Norris and her family. Of course it will be for you to decide whether to pass it on to those people investigating my actions. I believe that if you do they will find my account entirely consistent with what they have discovered from any other reliable persons about the relationship.

  I have been conscious of Julie as a nice, bright child since I first came to St. Catherine’s, but for many years I hardly did more than swap greetings or trivialities with her. I became more immediately involved two years ago, when I heard to my distress that she was pregnant, and that her family were threatening to throw her out of the family home.

  I should say that I had never found her parents particularly congenial. They were at best occasional attenders at St. Catherine’s, so my acquaintance was little more than superficial. I was not surprised by their actions, but I did think they were deplorable. Julie was only seventeen, and such a response to her situation could well have made her contemplate abortion. I visited them in their home (which Julie had already left) and remonstrated with them, but they were adamant not only about the expulsion, but also in insisting they would have nothing further to do with their daughter. I soon heard that Julie had moved in with the family of the child’s father, though this turned out to be misleading: this was a temporary measure, while she waited for the Council to provide her with emergency accommodation. In any case, I gathered that the boy (he was scarcely more) disputed his paternity.

  I next saw Julie when she was wheeling Gary, her baby son, in an old pram through Shipley market. . . .

  Christopher Pardoe paused. A picture of Julie and all the circumstances of their meeting flooded his mind. She had seemed to him so incredibly lovely, and the memory of her appealing fragility still stopped his breath. He could say nothing of this to the Bishop, of course: he would stick doggedly to fact. But wasn’t this reaction the most vital fact of all?

  The next day he said to Mrs. Knowsley, apropos of nothing, “I’m not entirely ignorant about sexual matters, you know. The authorities at Maynooth winked at what went on when the seminarians went away for the weekend. They knew they got up to pretty much the same sort of thing as other young men who were let off the leash for a day or two.”

  “Now you are shocking me,” said Mrs. Knowsley, but quite calmly.

  “I expect they thought it enabled them to sow their wild oats ear
ly, and get rid of the tensions,” said Pardoe.

  But it didn’t get rid of them. It didn’t.

  • • •

  The Learys were a family that still had breakfast. Not something grabbed on the run or munched from a wrapper, but a sit-down meal, albeit often a hurried one. The Learys rather prided themselves on still doing things that other people no longer did, or Conal Leary prided himself on it, at any rate. The children’s expressions around the table did not suggest one hundred percent agreement. And bacon and eggs featured at these meals only on weekends when the children—Mark and Donna—did not have anything pressing to do. Otherwise, they ate whatever was fashionably deemed healthy by their generation. Their parents too had cut back to cornflakes or porridge, followed by toast and marmalade. Conal had been quite a sportsman in his time, and still played mean games of golf and squash. He believed in keeping in shape.

  “What are you two doing today?” Conal asked his children, the sort of traditional father’s question nowadays heard more in soaps than in real life. Donna shrugged, but Mark answered.

  “After school I’ve got nets practice.” The cricket season had just started, and Mark had been waiting for it all year, impatient to consolidate his burgeoning prowess. He was a first-rate sprinter and hurdler too, but the cricket season was the highlight of his year.

  “You, Donna?”

  She shrugged again. It was an expression of thirteen-year-old ennui in which she often took recourse.

  “Dunno. Hang around with me mates after school, I suppose.”

  “It’s youth club night at St. Catherine’s, isn’t it? Will you be going along?”

  “Shouldn’t think so. It’s hopeless now Father Pardoe’s gone.”

  “He’s not gone, dear,” said Mary Leary. “He’s just away for a period of spiritual refreshment.”

  A suppressed snigger greeted that, and then Donna said, “Anyway, his stand-in’s hopeless. A real wally. Something from another planet. There won’t be anyone there.”

  “Will you be going, Mark?”