Unholy Dying

by Robert Barnard

  As the congregation trooped out, Pardoe encountered a former parishioner whose wife had been killed in a horrendous road accident on the motorway near Skipton. The man had moved into a small flat in The Calls to be near his place of work, but most of all out of an instinct to put his former happiness behind him. Now he was thinking he’d made a big mistake. He was eloquent on the loneliness of a big city, the cheerlessness of flats where businesspeople perched rather than lived their lives, his nostalgia for the community at St. Catherine’s, where people really did know one another.

  “Unlike here,” he said, nodding around the interior as they made their way through the main door and out into the street, “where people just come on Sunday then scatter to the four winds.”

  All the time, and now out in the warm, fresh air, Pardoe listened sympathetically, as he was used to doing, but part of his brain was saying, “He doesn’t know” and his eye was following the movements of the Bishop, greeting his flock on that pleasant Sunday, being the local pastor whom everyone was happy to have a word from. Pardoe was making his farewells to his friend when he sensed the robed figure coming up behind him.

  “If I may have a word, Father.”

  Pardoe turned. The tone of the Bishop’s voice had been soft, and the set of his face was neutral and perfectly amiable.

  “Of course, Bishop. It was a very fine service.”

  An infinitesimal pause.

  “I am not sure it was wise of you to come. Or considerate.”

  Pardoe swallowed, but kept his voice similarly low.

  “I’ve been going to Mass at a variety of places on Sunday. It seemed like an ideal opportunity.”

  He got a tiny shake of the head in reply. Then: “But nevertheless you would not deny that you had other motives in first sending me your letter, then in coming here?”

  Pardoe took a deep breath.

  “No, I wouldn’t deny that. I seem to be stuck in limbo in Pudsey. No one communicates with me, I get no whisper of what is going on. A committee is investigating these foolish rumors: I have no idea who they are, what they are doing, how long they are likely to take. I have simply been stuck in this horrible position and left here.”

  “What is there to tell you before the committee has reached a decision?”

  “Quite a lot, I should have thought, as I’ve already suggested. And I would have liked the assurance that the committee will talk to me, that my side will be heard.”

  “That is of course up to them.”

  “If I were not heard it would be grossly unjust to me, and also to the congregation at St. Catherine’s.”

  Thus far the interview had been conducted in low tones, with the utmost apparent amiability. Now the Bishop’s expression twisted into hostility, and the low tones took on the character of a hiss.

  “I should have thought that your congregation was already making doubly sure that their voice was heard.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t tell me you are ignorant of this—this letter of support, what is in effect a petition.”

  “I am totally in ignorance. I have, alas, had no connection whatever with any member of the congregation since I was suspended. I have wondered, in fact, if letters are being forwarded as they should be. I know nothing about any petition.”

  “I should like to believe you, because this is emphatically not the way we do things in our Church.”

  “Perhaps the way we do things is changing, Bishop. I hope you’d agree, in any case, that denying a man accused of serious misdemeanors the right to be heard is also not the way we should be doing things in our Church.”

  The Bishop’s head rose arrogantly.

  “I have no doubt that the committee will consider the matter in the way that best serves the well-being and reputation of the Church. It is not my intention to interfere. You, of course, may make any representations to them that you choose. In the meanwhile”—he turned full on him a face that was no longer merely stern, but angry—“I would ask you not to embarrass me or place me in a false position by coming to Mass or any other service here at St. Anne’s.”

  “You are not suggesting I cease going to Mass, are you, Bishop? It is all right, I suppose, if I embarrass Father Connell at Christ the King, or Father Wishart at St. Joseph’s?”

  “You are being impertinent and sarcastic. You are doing your cause no good at all. There are unpleasant rumors that the press is on to the story. I would strongly advise you—”

  He pulled himself up, looked across Cookridge Street, and something like a snarl came over his face. He had heard clicking, and now, feet away from him, he saw a photographer. Father Pardoe, following his gaze, saw the man too, and saw that beside him stood the unappetizing man whom he had noticed on the bus journey in. The cameraman was clicking for dear life, the camera shielding his face, but the other man was standing by with unconcealed relish in his eyes and the set of his mouth. The Bishop, signally failing to wipe the anger from his face, turned on Pardoe.

  “Your doing, I suppose? Your behavior throughout this unfortunate matter has been absolutely deplorable. Whatever the outcome I shall hope never again to have you in a position of trust in this diocese.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Black Monday

  The West Yorkshire Chronicle hit the streets around midday on Monday. A story involving a Leeds United footballer brawling in one of the town’s nightspots was the page-1 lead story, but Cosmo had got his piece nicely positioned on page 3.

  THE PRIEST AND THE TEENAGE MUM ran the headline. Mothers were always Mums to the Chronicle, even if they had murdered their children or were on the streets. Underneath, the story began.

  A Roman Catholic priest from Shipley is being quizzed by his Church over his relationship with a teenage mother on the notorious Kingsmill estate in the town.

  Julie Norris, nineteen, in an interview with our reporter, said, “He is my spiritual adviser.” However, the Bishop of Leeds has set up a committee to look into the relationship between Father Pardoe, priest at St. Catherine’s Church, and Julie, who is pregnant with her second child. They will also investigate claims that money from the charitable bequest, the Father Riley Fund, intended for parishioners going through difficult times, has been used to fund Julie Norris’s lifestyle. Father Christopher Pardoe unexpectedly attended Mass at St. Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds yesterday, where a confrontation occurred between him and the Bishop in Cookridge Street.

  Julie’s parents, in an interview with this paper, said there was “nothing new” about their daughter being in trouble, and that she had been “on the slippery slope” since becoming pregnant at seventeen. They had thrown her out of the family home at that time, and now take the view that she has dug her own grave. Mr. Simon Norris, manager of Shipley’s smart Bettaclothes store, said, “Anyone who says it’s our fault doesn’t know their —— from their elbow.” His view was shared by his wife. A neighbor of Julie’s . . .

  And so it went on. The picture was masterly. It showed a snarling Bishop in close proximity to Father Pardoe’s face. Anyone who didn’t know Cosmo Horrocks might have thought he was trying to gain sympathy for the suspected priest.

  “It’s cunning,” said Terry Beale, sitting on Carol Barr’s desk in the early afternoon, holding the early edition. “You’d probably find it was true in its way, except for the description of Mr. Norris’s shop as ‘smart.’ ”

  “I didn’t know you knew Shipley.”

  “I don’t. But if it was smart it wouldn’t be called Bettaclothes.”

  “But the rest you guess is true?”

  “Trueish. I wonder exactly what Julie Norris’s ‘lifestyle’ is. But when a case like this comes up, people tell all sorts of lies and let slip all sorts of things that incriminate them in a minor way, and all you have to do is quote them. Mind you, I’d guess that Julie’s family are a pretty foul bunch, going by this.”

  “Aren’t you jumping through Cosmo’s hoop, making exactly the judgments he wants you to make?
”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Terry, stung. “After all, they threw her out.”

  “Maybe. On the other hand she could be the sort of slut no parent would want living at home.”

  “Now who’s jumping through Cosmo’s hoop?”

  • • •

  Doris Crabtree gazed out her sitting room window across the neat but sparse expanse of her back garden to the rear view of Julie Norris’s ground-floor flat. Nothing to see there these days. The view through the gap made by the demolition of the derelict Council house opposite gave her no sight of Father Pardoe approaching on foot or by car down Kingsmill Terrace, then turning into Kingsmill Rise, then, five minutes later, the curtains being drawn in the bedroom of the lower flat at number five. It just never happened now. Doris Crabtree was a victim of her own success.

  Doris had been christened sixty-five years before, among the last of the Dorises, in the Anglican faith, though that had subsequently meant less than nothing to her. The christening had been a gesture by her factory-worker father that, in those years of Depression, he had kept his job while all around him others were losing theirs. The next year he had lost his too, and never had regular work again until the war restored full employment. Though he was thereafter in work until he retired, he was an eternally embittered man, and Doris had grown up in an atmosphere of sour idleness and pinched living, the air full of recrimination. It had proved to be her natural environment.

  Doris had never loved in her life, nor been loved, though which was cause and which was effect would have needed a Solomon to decide. Her life for thirty-five years, since her husband had taken off with another woman who made him equally unhappy, had been as the gossip of the Kingsmill estate. No woman misbehaving with another woman’s husband had had her errancy unnoticed or undisseminated by Doris. No man living beyond his income because he was fiddling the till receipts at work escaped speculation on “how he did it on his paycheck.” In the old days she had stood at street corners or at her gate with others of her kind, often in apron and hair curlers, acting as the modern equivalent of a town crier. She had, in her way, enjoyed her life.

  But she had been overtaken by late-twentieth-century morality. The facades of life had broken down. Everyone seemed to be sleeping around, from dole recipients to government ministers and members of the royal family. If everyone was doing it, it was difficult to work up the outrage that was an essential ingredient of her brand of gossip. Departure from an accepted norm was interesting, conformity to it was not. She remained a chronicler, but her function as moralist had slipped away from her. The tabloid press faced the same sad falling-away.

  That was why the story of Julie and Father Pardoe had been such a godsend to her, as it was to prove also to Cosmo Horrocks. Amid the wreck of sexual morality, when even Anglican vicars divorced and remarried and kept their parishes, the Catholic priesthood remained, in theory and by their vows, inviolately chaste. The pope was extremely hot, if that was the word, on celibacy. The falls from grace of individual priests kept the power to shock.

  It had pleased her in the past few days that Julie, whenever she had gone into the back garden to hang out washing, had seen her standing as she habitually did at her window and had raised two fingers in her direction. It was a sort of acknowledgment of her influence, and confirmed in her mind her conviction that Julie was a young woman of no morals, no shame.

  “You’re getting your comeuppance, my girl,” she had said to herself, with a satisfied smile.

  It had been a story that she had realized from the beginning was too big for the estate. Talk there had been there—she had made sure of that, and had had some foul words shouted at her for her pains by some of the younger women housed there, girls of Julie’s type. But the talk was a mere means to an end, and the end had been the letter—signed, for she knew from experience that anonymous letters were usually ignored—that she had written to the office of the Bishop, with dates and durations of the visits to Julie, the detail of the drawn curtains, and the fact of the second pregnancy. Writing the letter had been a matter of trial and error over a week, and had given her great satisfaction in a life not rich in such feelings.

  On the Monday the story broke she heard the familiar sound of Mrs. Mortlake’s bang on the door. When she opened it on her avid face, Florrie pushed a paper into her hands.

  “It’s come out at last!”

  Florrie was Doris Crabtree’s Goebbels: the spreader of her word, her closest rival in the thirst for information, the one who most nearly approached her in understanding that knowledge is power.

  “No! Already?” Doris said, appropriately delighted. “What page?”

  “Page three.”

  Doris pulled Florrie inside her kitchen, and they both sat at the table while Doris folded the paper open, laid it on the table, then began a voracious read of the article, which was followed by a close scanning of the picture.

  “Well, I never!”

  She had sat back in her chair, looking in the direction of the ceiling.

  “They’ve done you proud, Doris,” said her friend, who knew Doris needed her meed of worship.

  “I never expected anything quite like this. Though the reporter did say it was a wonderful story.”

  “It’s a public service you’ve done, Doris. There’ll be two people will be ashamed of themselves today, thanks to you.”

  “If they’ve any shame left. . . . You know, Florrie, I feel quite proud. Like it’s my finest hour.”

  “It is, Doris. Enjoy it now. You’ll never do a better piece of work than you have with those two.”

  • • •

  Peter Frencham, headmaster of Bingley Road Comprehensive, walked through the playground to fetch the packet of sandwiches for his lunch that he’d left in the car, through the roar of the usual recess rumpus. Out of habit he noticed all the pupils who were trouble, and any who were problems of a different sort. Ben Hayman, a new boy, might have been one of those, but obviously he wasn’t. He was playing an improvised game of some sort with five or six of his classmates, making a great deal of noise but causing no trouble. He had given him a “minder” for his first few weeks of his new school—because it was usual to, not because Ben was black—but it obviously had not been necessary. Ben had made his own group right from the start, and Mark Leary, his minder, was nowhere to be seen.

  Frencham still recalled with amusement his interview with Ben on the boy’s first day. His parents had just moved to Shipley, and Ben was starting, without any obvious nervousness, three weeks into summer term.

  “And what does your father do?” he had asked the boy.

  “He’s a drug pusher, sir, but I’m aiming at something a bit more legit myself.” When his own jaw had dropped Ben had waited a second or two, then burst out laughing. “Got you there, sir.”

  Now, suddenly, there was Ben’s cheerful face looking down at him from the great height of a very gangling fifteen-year-old.

  “Sir. Could I ask you something?”

  “Of course, Ben. Things going all right?”

  “They’re going fine, sir. It’s a good school; I like it. I just wondered: Have you heard of Andraol?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Should I have? Or is this another of your leg pulls?”

  “Would I do that, sir? Well, maybe I would, but it’s not. Andraol is a performance drug used by sportsmen, banned by the AAA and all other sporting authorities. Not just because it’s like cheating, but because of potential side effects.”

  “I see. So why are you telling me about it?”

  “Just thought you ought to know, sir.”

  And Ben dashed off back to his unidentifiable game with his mates. Peter Frencham resumed his trudge back to his office. One more problem to add to his worries about Cassie Daltrey. And when his secretary came in with the just-arrived copy of the Chronicle folded to page 3, put it in front of him, and tapped with her finger the name on the byline, he realized as soon as he read it that she was not only point
ing out that this was a story that centered on one of the school’s ex-pupils; she was reminding him that one of the pieces in the Cassie Daltrey problem had a father who was a determined and ruthless muckraker.

  • • •

  On Monday morning Father Pardoe wrote once more to his bishop. He decided to make this letter respectful but not obsequious, but as he worked at it he found that even respect was hard to achieve. He had to tell himself that he respected the office, if not any longer the man. He tried also to stick to fact, and to put into the letter as little as possible of argument or pleading for himself.

  I think if you ask yourself who has most to lose by the case becoming a cause célèbre, who will be most grievously hurt by newspaper publicity, you will see that your charges yesterday were unjust. All I was hoping to achieve by writing to you were two things: first that I be kept fully informed about what is going on in my case; and second that at some point in the committee’s deliberations my side of the story will be heard. I think these are modest and reasonable requests, and I beg that you will reconsider your position as a mere observer in this matter and try to ensure that they are met. I believe—it could hardly be otherwise—that we both have the reputation and well-being of the Church at heart, even if we may differ in minor details as to how that is best maintained and strengthened.

  He was at this point in the letter when Margaret came in with the West Yorkshire Chronicle.

  He had half expected it, had steeled himself against it, but the sight of himself on page 3, the teasing headline (not actually saying very much), and the tone of the report when he started to read seemed to him to spell a sort of death. How was he ever to be the simple parish priest of St. Catherine’s again? How was his name ever to come up without the identifying addition of “You know, the priest there that all the publicity was about”—or, worse, a wink or leer? He had been skewered, he was wriggling on a pin, and the pin was something that had never happened, something he had never done.