Unholy Dying (20 page)

Charlie pulled himself up. He had looked into the eyes of the elder daughter of Cosmo Horrocks, and he had not seen a willing victim there. They had been troubled eyes, but they had been aggressive ones too.

He sent his mind back toward Cora. The fading of gratitude could be a gradual thing, and a final snap could therefore be explicable. At some point Cosmo could have done something that finally destroyed the last dregs of that gratitude and driven his wife to that most usual of crimes, a domestic: a spouse killing a spouse. What or who might it have been in this case? The younger one, Adelaide, most likely. The one least able to defend herself. Because the elder one could certainly have done that—and not just defended herself, but hit back. She was at an age on the border of childhood and adulthood—the age of passionate loves and hatreds, joys and tragedies. She certainly would have had the strength. He could well imagine she would have had the passion. Or could the mother have got in first, because she saw the way things were going?

When he got to the outskirts of Birmingham he pulled up outside a newsstand and bought an A
to
Z. He was expert these days in finding his way around strange cities, but Birmingham he found stranger than most. When, in early evening light, he found himself in Harborne, he stopped again to identify Terry Beale's home address: 10 Thornbush Farm Lane. Ho-ho, he thought. Fat chance of any remnants of a farm in this suburb. When he got there he found a stubby street, with two late-Victorian terraces separated from a similar, smaller terrace by a scruffy piece of wasteland. It was at the farthest end of the little street, the last of this group, that number ten was to be found. Charlie left his car, however, halfway along and walked toward the three-story, dingy, redbrick house. The place had an air of low expectations—an air he was used to in the immigrant areas of London and Leeds.

He heard the noise from fifty yards away. It was a woman's voice, singing: a fruity voice, no longer young, but carrying. It was a pop song she was singing, a long-ago one, but Charlie
recognized it because it was a Beatles number: “ ‘We all live in a yellow shubmarine, a yellow shubmarine, a—' ”

He was nearing the house now, and the obvious was unavoidable: the woman was drunk, and the noise came from number ten. She stopped in midtune and shouted, “ ‘Rejoice and be exceeding glad.' ”

A man's voice shouted back, “Mother!”

“What's the matter with you? I'll rejoice if I want to. I've got plenty to rejoice about. Raise high the fucking roof beams, carpenter. ‘I'm just a puppet, a puppet, a puppet on a string.' ”

The man's voice came again, and again it irritated her.

“Fuck off. I'll do what I frigging like. I'm shelebrating. Not every day I have shomething good happen to me.”

Charlie turned into the little scrap of front garden, up a couple steps to the front door, and rang the bell.

“I'll get it. I said
I'll get it
. My fucking house. What do I care what people
think
. They can think what they fucking
like
.”

The door opened.

Charlie saw first a glass, half full of brown liquid, then he saw the hand holding it, then his eye went up the arm to the crimson, blotchy face, crowned by a magnificent head of red hair.

“Who are you? Oh, don't bother to tell me. I won't remember. Come in and join the party. Come in and shelebrate that bastard's death.”

Oddie wondered what it was about Father Greenshaw that was so instantly dislikable.

With his customary coolness and sense of justice he mentally withdrew that last word and substituted “off-putting.” Then he wondered whether the kernel of the matter was that the man did not arouse trust. This had something to do with his plump face, the shininess of his black hair, the curving smile of his self-satisfied mouth. Somehow around this sort of priest the word “sleek” seemed to cling as the inevitable adjective.

“About the Father Pardoe matter I can make no comment,” he was saying, smiling ingratiatingly. “I'm sure you will understand. I earnestly hope he will be found to have acted with complete propriety in both matters that are the subject of the investigation, but of course I can't prejudge that. The inquiry is being conducted by a completely impartial committee of three. I can't see, to be quite truthful, why you think there might be any connection between those matters and this shocking murder.”

“It's merely a possibility,” said Oddie, stretching relaxedly in
his rather hard chair and trying to convey the impression that priesthood cut no ice with
him
. “The story of Father Pardoe's suspension breaks, the story is taken up by the national tabloids, the man who broke the story is murdered. Could be coincidence. Could be cause and effect.”

“Yes. . . . Yes, I suppose so. If there is a connection, I'm not sure that I can be of any help in your investigation. I'm simply the stand-in.”

“I realize that, but events
since
the suspension are of particular interest to us. I did wonder, for example, how far the truth—I mean that he is under investigation, and not at a retreat—had got around the parish.”

Father Greenshaw donned an expression of concern and compassion.

“Well, I'm afraid it
has
, little by little. It's been quite a while now, and priests very rarely go on a retreat of such duration. He's been seen in Pudsey. Yes, it has got around.”

“And I gather there has been some kind of appeal to the Bishop.”

“Ah, yes—the ladies, bless their hearts. Not always wise, but we'd love them less if they were, wouldn't we?”

Yuck, thought Oddie.

“So you thought it was unwise,” he said. “Was that because they assumed Father Pardoe was innocent?”

“Not
exactly
, though one should hardly prejudge an inquiry's conclusions, as I've already suggested. No, what was unwise, in my view, was that the letter cast doubt on the procedure, on whether he would get a fair hearing, implied the whole thing was based on gossip. Now, that last really was unwise! The Bishop is impeccably fair in all his dealings. That letter got up his nose, I can tell you!”

“You talk of ‘ladies' in connection with the letter.”

“That was because it was some ladies in the parish who were the moving spirits. They got some men to sign as well. It would have looked very odd if they hadn't.”

The man's smile and his smoothness were so catlike that Oddie wondered if he weren't purring.

“Why do you think the Bishop was annoyed?”

The priest frowned.

“I thought I'd made that clear. The letter seemed to challenge his authority.”

“I should have thought a petition to him
acknowledged
him as the ultimate authority.”

But Father Greenshaw did not seem to understand.

“It cast serious doubt on his judgment,” he said, the smile becoming strained. “We're old-fashioned in the Catholic Church: the Bishop's word goes.”

“I see. Were you aware of this letter before it was sent?”

“Certainly not! I would have moved heaven and earth—so to speak—to stop it if I had been.”

“But you know now who were the moving spirits?”

“Oh, yes. Mrs. Jessel, Mrs. Leary, and Miss Preece-Dembleby.”

“Did you learn that from parish talk?”

“From the Bishop himself. He has his sources of information. I came in for a tiny portion of his wrath. Luckily I was able to assure him that I was quite ignorant of what was going on. He's a very fair man.”

That was not quite how he was beginning to seem to Oddie.

“And it was Father Pardoe who came in for the lion's share of his wrath?”

“Is that surprising? To go to Mass at St. Anne's knowing the Bishop would be officiating. I can't think of anything more unwise.”

“Miss Preece-Dembleby tells me that Father Pardoe knew nothing of the petition.”

“Then we must hope that is true. But it was unwise whether he knew of it or not. While the investigation was going on, it was out of order to embarrass the Bishop by appearing at Mass in the Cathedral.”

“But he would need to go to Mass, would he not?”

“Of course. There are more than thirty churches in the Leeds area he could have gone to. It was a dreadful lapse of judgment and taste.”

Walking back to his car, Oddie decided that Father Greenshaw was stronger on taste than on judgment. He certainly wouldn't want to be in a position in which that young jar of holy oil was his spiritual adviser. He wondered, even, whether the truth about Father Pardoe's suspension hadn't been helped on its way around the parish by his stand-in.

There was something else that rather puzzled him about his talk with Greenshaw (he was reluctant any longer to “Father” him in his own mind). To him the letter to the Bishop had been an unwise—how often had he used the word?—attempt to preempt the findings of the investigating committee and question the Bishop's decision to set it up at all on such a very flimsy basis. He thought it was probably both of these things, but he had had the impression from Edith Preece-Dembleby that it was something else as well—a sort of generalized protest that embraced a multitude of grievances that had somehow been brought to a head by the persecution (as they saw it) of Father Pardoe. But on reflection he decided that it was perhaps not surprising if these grievances had passed over Greenshaw's head, as a new man in the parish. And as a man whose idea of wisdom was very much of this world.

He put the point to Janette Jessel, sitting in her conventional, overstuffed drawing room—a setting that seemed to him
at odds with her intelligent, sensitive personality, as if its decor had been chosen without reference to her own tastes. They went through the ostensible reasons for the petition, and finally Oddie said, “I get a feeling . . .”

“Yes?” He thought she tensed up.

“. . . of something more. Perhaps something Father Greenshaw didn't grasp. As if somehow the petition brought to the surface a whole ragbag of grievances and discontents.”

“Oh, it did!” The moment she had said this, she made an effort to put her rational, sensible self back in the driving seat. “Though it's not altogether easy to put into words what they were. It seems odd talking about them to a policeman.”

“Pretend I'm your priest,” said Oddie with a grin.

“It would be easier to pretend you're a woman,” said Janette, reciprocating the grin. “We found it—after initial hesitations—easier to talk about this with each other. It was as if the feminist revolution had come and passed everywhere else in the Western world, but had somehow slipped around us. Of course, that's not entirely true. Catholic practice as far as, for example, contraception is concerned has changed enormously in the last twenty or thirty years, absolutely in defiance of the hierarchy and of Rome. But I get the nasty feeling that it hasn't changed because women objected to being baby factories, constantly on the conveyor belt, but because a large family hits the husband's pocket.”

“The whole family's pocket,” Oddie pointed out.

“Yes. But I don't want to pin it down to an issue. The protest was really about the fact that all the decisions seem to be taken by men. And not just mainly, but exclusively. The woman's role is still a matter of flowers for the church, cakes for the bring-and-buy sale, brewing tea and buttering scones.”

“I understand. But why should that come to a head in connection with Father Pardoe?”

“Oh, sheer accident, I suppose. A matter of timing.” She frowned, trying to decide if there was anything more. “But it is typical: the Bishop gets wind of gossip.
He
decides to set up a committee; on that committee he puts only males, and they pontificate on a matter in which the other main player is a young woman. It all seems so archaic.”

There still seemed one factor missing in the equation, and Oddie took a chance.

“Were there personal dissatisfactions behind this as well? Domestic ones, perhaps?”

Janette thought, or hesitated, before she replied.

“Yes. I don't want to go into them, because they can't be relevant to your investigation, and because I wouldn't want you to think I was speaking for anyone other than myself. My husband, Derek, is not a bad man. But like most of the St. Catherine's husbands, his ideas are stuck in a time warp. It's the domestic equivalent of the Church situation. The woman stays home, she makes life comfortable for the man, she supports him in his decisions. Leaving him to do the interesting things, him to have the freedoms, him to be
less
involved in all the family matters, and yet boss.”

“And you think religion's a factor in this.”

“I'm sure it is. It provides the ideology and the practice that the husbands find so convenient. In other respects they leave it to the women to
do
religion for the family, while they're busy having the fun.”

Oddie decided against asking what she meant by “fun,” and simply said, “I suppose Miss Preece-Dembleby was a bit outside this part of the protest. You and Mrs. Leary must have felt most strongly about it.”

He immediately got the feeling of her tensing up again.

“I really wouldn't like to say anything about that. Those are personal things, aren't they, at least in part? I think you should talk to her about them, if you think it worthwhile. To be honest, I don't see how the Father Pardoe matter, or our letter, could have anything to do with that awful reporter's death, but you won't want me telling you your business.”

“If it's not relevant, we'll soon be on to other things; in fact, we already are. In any police inquiry, elimination is the main task in the early stages. Meanwhile, I'm grateful for your help. You've given me a lot to think about.”