Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  Cosmo twisted his mouth into a sneer.

  “When everybody says something it’s got to be wrong. She sounds like Miss Jean Brodie to me: gets the girls thinking they’re all God’s gift to humanity, and uses her position to fill their minds with poisonous bullshit. That’s the most dangerous sort of teacher there is.”

  “She doesn’t do anything like that,” said Samantha, matching him in contempt. “She makes us so interested in history that we want to work hard at it and get books out of the library to follow things up. Then we make our own judgments.”

  “If she’s got you working hard it’s a wonder she hasn’t had her union on her back. Kids working hard is the last thing they want. It might mean teachers having to take home some grading.”

  “So what’s the story you’ve got in the pipeline?” his wife asked, cutting the apple turnover she had brought in from the kitchen. Cosmo hardly bothered to show that he registered the attempt to change the subject.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “You won’t get anything out of me about that. It’s about a person in a position of trust who has abused that trust, with some unsavory goings-on with a much younger person. Hmm. Sounds familiar. More I shall not say, except that it’ll give the people of West Yorkshire something very juicy to mull over with their Barnsley chops of an evening. And perhaps not just Yorkshiremen. It could be something the nationals will be interested in too.”

  Cora Horrocks was just about to say it sounded like something the Sun or the Mirror would snap up when the telephone rang. Cosmo got up to take it in the hall. It would be for him. It always was. Cora had no circle of her own, and the girls’ friends had been put off from phoning them by some choice words from Cosmo when he was home. All the women in the dining room sat listening, looking down at their plates as if saying grace.

  “Yes. . . . Yes, it is. . . . Yes, I am. . . . Pardoe, yes . . . yes, I would be interested.”

  Cora Horrocks had registered the name with a blink. She had picked up snippets of information about Shipley since Samantha had started going to school there. Quite a lot of Samantha’s schoolmates were Catholics, and she had had a crush on Mark Leary at one time, before either despair or disillusionment had set in. Then Cora realized, at a harrumph from her husband, that his tone was about to change.

  “Look, don’t you play games with me. There’s many have had their fingers broken trying to do that. . . . I didn’t say I wasn’t willing to pay for information, I said I wasn’t willing to be played with. You’re getting right up my nose, do you know that? . . . Suit yourself. I’ll be here or at the Chronicle’s offices.”

  When he had banged the phone down they heard him press four digits: 1471, no doubt, to find the caller’s number. If he got one it did not give him satisfaction. He came back into the room fuming.

  “B-loody hell! I don’t know what things are coming to.”

  “Who was it?” asked Samantha.

  “Never you mind. I don’t. I’ll get the information whether he comes clean with it or not.” He sat at his place, the remains of the apple turnover staying uneaten. “If anyone rings me later, let me know straightaway and keep him talking. If it is a he. They’re crafty—they leave you not quite sure.” He lit up a cigarette and puffed smoke at them. Frustrated by the call, his mind reverted to an earlier topic, but this time in more sulfurous mode.

  “By heck, teachers have got a lot to answer for. They don’t teach facts anymore, not information, let alone standards of behavior. Oh, no. They just perform for kids, scatter their personalities before them, give them the beautiful example of their own ego-crazed selves. Like that Miss Daltrey of yours,” he added, turning to Samantha.

  “I thought we’d get back to her. She doesn’t do anything like that. You don’t know a thing about her.”

  “What’s the betting she’s a lesbian?” he said, turning to his wife. She intensely disliked his parading his muckraking instincts when his daughters were present.

  “Cosmo! Give it a rest. Not in front of the children.”

  “That’s exactly who it should be in front of,” he snarled. “They’ll be her victims. If it hasn’t happened already.” He turned back to his elder daughter. “Well, has it? Has she made advances? Are you sleeping with her—is that where you go? Or is it nothing more than a grope behind the bicycle sheds so far?”

  “What’s Daddy talking about, Mummy?” asked Adelaide.

  “Just a joke, dear.”

  “This is no joke. I’ll have her, if there’s anything going on. She’ll think twice if she knows a journalist’s on to her. So you can tell her that: I’ll have her.”

  “I won’t tell her because there’s nothing going on,” said his daughter, standing up. “And I don’t know why you’re pretending to get so hot under the collar about it. You wouldn’t care if I was fucking Mick Jagger—except you’d like that because you’d get a good story out of it.”

  • • •

  Father Pardoe finished the letter to his bishop after five attempts, all of which he read to Mrs. Knowsley. Madge, he called her now, though she was unable to call him anything but Father Pardoe, or just Father. She was not much use when he read her the first attempt, confining herself to assent and enthusiasm and then agreeing to his self-criticisms. But she gained in confidence, and when she heard the later attempts she would, eventually, when she had thought about it, tell him about the passages that she’d had doubts about. Often her criticisms were shrewd.

  Eventually they had reached a point where a draft satisfied them both, convinced them that all the necessary points had been covered, and that they had been presented in the most honest and convincing words. Above all the tone had been right. Pardoe had always been careful to get the tone right when addressing different congregations and groups. He thought he should be equally sensitive when addressing his superiors in the Church.

  He tapped out the letter on the decrepit manual typewriter he had brought with him. When Madge looked it over she said it was fine, except that it looked rather dirty, with the holes in the d’s, g’s, e’s, and a’s all clogged up with dirt. A trip to the stationers in Leeds in search of a cleaner convinced Pardoe that they regarded electric typewriters as ridiculously passé and manual ones as prehistoric. Mrs. Knowsley took the letter for her daughter, sworn to total silence on the subject, to put on her grandson’s word processor. So there was someone else who knew. Pardoe took the letter out with him on his walk the next day and popped it into the nearest mailbox.

  “So that’s off at last, Madge,” he said to Mrs. Knowsley. He saw her hesitate.

  “Would you mind very much if I asked you to call me Margaret?” she said out of the blue.

  “Not at all. Why should I?”

  She smiled, oddly nervous.

  “Madge started at school, but I’ve always hated the name. My parents were Scottish, and they named me after Saint Margaret.”

  “Wife of Shakespeare’s Malcolm. A good choice of name. So—I’ll always call you Margaret, Margaret.”

  They both laughed. It was a bond between them, making relations not more formal but less. He knew all her friends, such as Mrs. Cordell, called her Madge, and now he knew she didn’t like it but wouldn’t tell them so. It meant that just by naming her, he was doing something special, and something private for them.

  On the third day after he had mailed his appeal, he collected the post and said, “Nothing from the Bishop, Margaret. He’s obviously not going to be rushed.”

  “Do you think,” she began hesitantly, “that you should—not go and see him—”

  “No, I couldn’t do that. Not straight after writing.”

  “—but put yourself in his way? So he has to say something, or make some gesture.”

  Pardoe frowned.

  “Oh, I don’t know—”

  “It’s just a suggestion. I saw in the local paper that he is going to Greengates for a service blessing the new church hall there, and it occurred to me—well, there’s no reason why yo
u shouldn’t turn up there, is there? Maybe you’d have gone anyway, if things had been normal, Shipley being so close.”

  “I probably would have been there.”

  She left the suggestion with him, with her usual tact. When he thought it over, Father Pardoe saw all sorts of reasons not to return to his own area to encounter the Bishop. He was supposed to be on retreat, and though word must certainly by now be spreading, his return there would cause all the wrong sort of gossip and whispering, which his counterpart in Greengates could well resent as a distraction from the celebrations. But he needed to go to Mass, had done so unobtrusively in Pudsey and elsewhere since he had left Shipley. He could see no reason why he should not attend it next Sunday in Leeds. From his own bishop. There surely couldn’t be any reason against his doing that.

  CHAPTER 6

  Confrontation

  When Julie Norris got the letter from the Bishop’s office asking her to give evidence to the committee investigating Father Pardoe—not in those terms, but in terms less calculated to scare her off—her first thought was that this was trouble, and that trouble was something she had had more than enough of. Her second thought was that the trouble was Christopher Pardoe’s, not her own, and that ignoring the summons would hardly help him. She went back and read the letter again, registering that they were offering her ten pounds to cover her travel expenses to Leeds. A quick calculation told her that this could net her a profit of nearly eight pounds. Julie’s life since she first got pregnant had been largely composed of a similar mixture of generous impulses and sordid calculations.

  The letter suggested a day and a time, and asked her to phone and arrange an alternative time if the first was not convenient. Any day was equally convenient for Julie, and equally inconvenient, granted the existence of Gary and the bulge in her tummy that she had to think of as a human being lest she be tempted to get rid of it. The day was Thursday of that week. She desperately wanted to think through what she should say—not what the truth was, because that she was quite sure about, but how she should present it to the sort of person likely to be on a bishop’s committee. She also wanted to talk it over with her friends—the girls situated similarly to herself living on the Kingsmill estate. It being Monday she could rely on there being someone to talk to at the Laundromat. That was a cycle of activity that had survived in something like its traditional form in the wreckage of working-class habits that had come about in the eighties.

  The Kingsmill estate had no shops. Council estates never did. If by any chance some were built, they soon declined into takeouts, then into vacancy and dereliction. The nearest row of shops and services was ten minutes’ walk away, north of the estate and to the south of the town center. In that row could be found the single mother’s lifeline: a corner shop, a newsstand, a Chinese and a pizza takeout, a sewing repair shop–cum–dry cleaner’s, and the Laundromat that called itself the Washeteria.

  “Hi, Tracy, hi, Vicky.”

  She dumped Gary down with them and went with her washing to the machine, she as much on autopilot as the machine itself. She washed her big items there—the same things in the same way for the same money every week. When she had stuffed her load in and set it to the right program she went back and sat with Vicky and Tracy. Vicky had a little girl of one whom she cradled in her arms, Tracy a four-year-old who would play around the floor with Gary until someone complained.

  “I had a letter this morning,” she said, launching straight into the matter that was occupying her thoughts. They turned to look at her. A letter was sufficiently unusual in their lives to arouse interest.

  “The Social cutting your benefits, I suppose,” said Tracy.

  “No. From the office of the Bishop.”

  “The what?”

  “The office of the Catholic Bishop, in Leeds.”

  “Didn’t know the Catholics had bishops,” said Vicky.

  “What’s a bishop when he’s at home, anyway?” asked Tracy.

  “He’s a high-up in the Church, ignorant,” said Julie.

  “Oh! It’s about your priest bloke!” said Vicky. “You said he was in trouble.”

  “Yeah, it’s him. They want to talk to me about him. And they’ll pay me ten quid for my travel expenses to Leeds.”

  The other girls chortled.

  “They must be crazy,” said Tracy, contemptuous of all open-handedness, though accepting it herself. “Go for it, girl. It’s one-eighty on the train.”

  “I know. I’ll have to go. Can’t pass up the chance. But what’ll I say?”

  The other two girls’ experience of life was if anything even more limited than Julie’s. But it gave them set answers to every situation.

  “Lie and lie again, like you was in court,” said Tracy.

  “I don’t mean that. I don’t have to. He’s innocent.”

  The other two just laughed.

  “We believe you. Thousands wouldn’t,” said Vicky.

  Julie turned on them, genuinely irritated.

  “Nothing happened. I don’t go for older blokes. You know who fathered my two.”

  “We know what you’ve told us,” said Tracy. “Haven’t had the pleasure of either of the young men. I haven’t met them either.”

  This time they all three laughed.

  “I go for young blokes. Anyway, even if I had wanted to, he’s a priest. Catholic priests don’t.”

  “What d’yer mean, ‘don’t’?”

  “They don’t have sex.”

  “And birds don’t fly,” said Vicky. “And politicians always tell the truth. And them down at the Social just want us to get everything we’re entitled to.”

  “They don’t. I mean, priests don’t. They’re celibate. It’s part of their oath, like.”

  “Well, if all priests were celibate, what’s this inquiry about that they’re paying you to go and lie your socks off at?”

  Julie caught a glint in the eye of one of the older customers at the Washeteria. Friend of that cow Doris Crabtree. She blinked at the other girls, and the subject was changed until, when they had all finished and were on their way home, Tracy said, “Come in and have a coffee,” and in Tracy’s flat, which bore a depressing similarity to her own, they sat around the kitchen table and looked at Julie.

  “So what am I going to say at this inquiry?”

  By now the other girls had had their laugh and treated the question seriously.

  “If what you say is right, then you just tell the truth. As they say: ‘You’ve nothing to fear.’ ”

  That was Vicky, who still had wisps of naïveté left.

  “But you know what they do in court,” protested Julie. “They throw questions at you, and tie you up in knots, and make out you’ve said the opposite of what you meant to say. That’s why I don’t nick things in shops—I’d rather die than land in court. It’d be like having my dad going on at me all over again.”

  “But this isn’t a court, is it?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Julie, scrabbling in her pocket for the letter. “They call it a committee—investigating allegations against Father Pardoe of St. Catherine’s. But you can see it, can’t you? A long row of boring old farts just waiting to twist everything I say.”

  “I suppose so,” said Vicky, who like all of them was acquiring a distrust of anything that represented authority. “But if you tell the truth, and the truth is like you say, what can they do?”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” said Julie unhappily.

  “No, it’s not,” said Tracy, who had been in court several times.

  “I mean, what if they say, ‘Are you fond of him?’ The truth would be to say yes, because I am. He’s a good bloke, he’s taken an interest in me, done me lots of favors, got me things I needed, given me help. Yes, I am fond of him, but not in that way.”

  The other girls thought about this.

  “If they ask you that,” Tracy said at last, “you ask them exactly what they mean by ‘fond.’ And then if they say something fairly mild,
you say ‘Yes, I am fond of him like that, but I’m not fond of him romantically or sexually.’ ”

  Julie perked up a little.

  “That sounds good,” she said. “I suppose I could say that.”

  “And if they do try to twist things you say, just tell them you’re not answering any more questions.”

  “But what if they say they won’t give me the ten pounds?”

  “Get it before you go in,” said Tracy.

  • • •

  Terry Beale was beginning to recognize the signs in Cosmo Horrocks—the signs that he was making progress with his Catholic priest story. There was a something that came into his eyes (newspaper cliché would call it a glint), and his mouth set firmer and his shoulders squared. All those signs were visible when Cosmo received a phone call on Tuesday morning, and, slipping from his desk, Terry found urgent business to do at the coffee machine situated a few feet away from Cosmo’s desk.

  “Now you’re talking,” he was saying, oozing satisfaction, but not letting it get into his voice. Terry examined the intricate set of buttons for with or without sugar and milk. “What I said was I wasn’t going to be played with, and I’m not. . . . Money, I’m prepared to pay. That’s usual. . . . Right, now I’ll tell you what I want. Takes two to make a bargain. . . . Oh, yes, you’ve got the information, but I’ve got the money.”

  Cosmo took from his pocket a packet of small, foul cigars. Smoking was banned in the newsroom. He lit one.

  “Now, what I want is the address, street, number, area, written out for me, and I want your name on the back. Don’t try any silly buggery, and don’t feed me a false name. I know where you come from, and I tell you your life won’t be worth living if you try to play the smartarse with me. . . . Make it a hundred and we’ve got a deal. . . . Right, now where? I want it reasonably private, but not solitary. . . . That sounds satisfactory. And when?”

  Cosmo was busy writing on the pad in front of him. Now he nodded, tore the leaf out, and put it in his inside pocket.