Unholy Dying (21 page)

But when he got back to his car he found that the elimination of the Father Pardoe strand in the investigation was not immediately in the cards. That became clear when he got on his mobile and talked to headquarters.

“Coppin? I've just finished talking to Janette Jessel, and I'm on my way to talk to Mary Leary.”

“Right, boss. But before you do, I think there's something you ought to know. We've just got Horrocks's notebook from forensics.”

“And?”

“It has the name Leary in it.”

“Really? Male or female Leary?”

“No indicator. From a quick look at it I'd say it has the Father Pardoe story in note form right from the beginning. Want to come and take a look at it?”

“Very much. But I'd also like to talk to Mary Leary while I'm over here. Do you think you could fax a copy of the relevant pages to the Shipley station?”

“No problem.”

Oddie was developing a close and pleasant relationship with the Shipley uniformed policemen. Cooperation was his watch-word,
and he was not the type to pull rank or superior savvy. He was presented with four pages of fax as he came through the door, and five minutes later he was sitting in the station canteen stewing over a photocopy of scrawled but legible handwriting.

The fish is off, and so is the chicken.

Now she tells me she's getting off at Grantham.

PRIEST—SCANDAL.

Leary. Father Pardoe.

Derek, Julie Norris, Mary.

That was all quite interesting. Oddie cast his eye over the other two pages. An address for the Norrises.
Father Riley Fund
. Father Pardoe's address in Pudsey.
What is the Bishop up to?
Later on, when the notes were becoming more sketchy, probably because he had got the story firmly in his mind, there was
Who are the trustees? Who are the committee?
Interesting questions, thought Oddie. He might have conceived a grudging respect for Horrocks, if it weren't so abundantly clear that he had a mean, dirty little mind.

He felt, when he rang at Mary Leary's front door in the early evening sunlight, that he was much better equipped than he had expected. The front door was solid, the sort of wood that resists a modern saw, and the house was large, stone, a genuinely imposing Victorian residence. Someone had done pretty well for himself, Oddie thought. Or had had it done for him by an earlier generation.

“Yes?”

“Detective Superintendent Oddie.” He pushed his ID under her nose, but she barely glanced at it.

“Oh . . . well, you'd better come in.”

The voice attempted normality, but did not achieve it. He noticed she did not ask if it was her he wanted to talk to. She either assumed it or hoped that it was. Why should she do that, though? Because she thought she could conceal, gloss over, or put the best front on some inconvenient fact she was afraid might come up?

When he sat down in the handsome armchair, amid furniture that, though old, made a clear statement, either a class one or a financial one, he said, to make conversation, “Nice house.”

“The family one. Con's family,” Mary said neutrally.

They sat down, and Oddie stole a look at Mary in the sun-lit room. He was in fact more interested in the woman than in her surroundings. She was a healthy, bonny-looking woman, but the lines of her face were drawn and her eyes haunted. Sleeplessness and fear, Oddie diagnosed.

When he got on to the subject of the petition he sensed relief, and made a note to get off it as soon as possible.

“We all felt so sorry for Father Pardoe,” Mary explained. “We felt there had been undue haste, and that perhaps the Bishop had acted on parish tittle-tattle. Maybe we went a bit far.”

“Surely writing a letter hoping the matter was cleared up as soon as possible—I gather you didn't say much more than that—was hardly going too far.”

But Mary Leary was not backing down.

“We got a dozen or more signatures, making it look too much like a petition. The Bishop likes to be firmly in control. He doesn't like anything that seems to question his judgment or limit his powers.”

“A control freak?”

“I'm not sure I know what that means, but something of that,
I suppose. The picture of the two of them in the paper was rather unpleasant.”

“I take it that you have had second thoughts about what all of you had been doing.”

“I suppose I have. Not that I waver one iota in my support of Father Pardoe. I'm quite sure he is innocent of the charges. It's just a question of method.”

“Was your husband against this petition—let's call it that.”

She shook her head.

“No, not particularly. He rather leaves that sort of thing to me. I don't think he has views one way or another. Men are very cynical, though. They do tend to believe sexual allegations against priests.”

“What is your husband's connection with Cosmo Horrocks?”

Fear flushed through her eyes, then vanished.

“Connection? None that I know of.”

“Or your own?”

“None. I've never seen or spoken to him in my life.”

Oddie raised his eyebrows.

“The name Leary appears in his notebooks.”

“It's a common name.”

“True. But it appears in the section when he first gets wind of the Father Pardoe story. Does your husband know Janette Jessel's husband?”

“Oh, yes. They're quite friendly.” An unpleasant thought struck her. “You're surely not saying that Con and Derek gave him the story. I couldn't bear that. And if Con did he'd have come out more against our petition.”

“I'm not saying they gave him the story. Might your husband and Mr. Jessel travel together?”

A shadow flitted across her eyes.

“They do sometimes. They both have business in London now and then, and they try to arrange it at the same time. They might have a meal together, or do a show, and maybe travel home together.”

Her mouth was tight, her voice under strict control. She suspects they go to strip joints or brothels together, thought Oddie. That thought was interrupted by the sound of the front door, and through the sitting room door he saw a tall teenager dashing through the hall and hurrying down to the cellar. There was the sound of a cupboard door being opened, then the footsteps dashing back up again.

“You're home early, Mark,” his mother shouted, unable to hide the tension in her voice.

“Teacher's ill. I'm off to do some hurdles practice.”

The front door banged shut.

“Sports, sports, all the time,” complained his mother.

“Back to your husband,” said Oddie.

“Shouldn't you be talking to Con?”

“I will if necessary. Let me make myself clear: I'm not accusing your husband of anything, Mrs. Leary.”

“No, of course not.”

“I just want to get events straight in my mind. Has he been to London recently?”

“Not long ago. Maybe a fortnight or so ago.”

“Did he travel there or back with Derek Jessel, do you know?”

“I've no idea. It's not the sort of thing he'd mention.”

“Why on earth not?”

“He knows I'm not particularly fond of Derek.”

“Can you imagine them talking over the Father Pardoe affair, perhaps over lunch?”

“Yes. Yes, I can.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“It's the sort of thing men like talking about. . . . I'm sorry. I shouldn't say that to you.”

“Not at all. You interest me. You mean a subject like a priest having sex with a teenager?”

“Yes. They sort of gloat . . . leer.”

“Your husband and Derek Jessel?”

“Men.”

“And never women?”

“The women in the congregation were much more skeptical, and more understanding too.”

But it was a woman who had insinuated Pardoe's role in it, as one of Horrocks's reports in the
Chronicle
had made clear. Oddie edged his way forward, preparing to leave.

“So it could be—it's hardly a vital point—that overhearing your husband and Jessel on a train was the starting point for Horrocks's interest in this.”

“You can hardly blame them for that.”

“I don't. But beyond that your husband has no interest in the Father Pardoe story, except perhaps a salacious one, and no connection with Cosmo Horrocks?”

“None at all.”

“That you know of.”

“That I know of.”

“And your interest is just in the petition, which you now think may have been unwise.”

“Just that. Nothing more.”

Then why are you having to strain every muscle to stop your hands working together nervously, and why is there a nerve in your left cheek that refuses to bow to your will and twitches away at any question that seems to come close to the matter you
are nervous about? Oddie wondered. You saw the petition as a protest against male domination, yet you are straining every nerve to protect your man. Was that just the Tammy Wynette syndrome?

You are frightened, my lady, he thought, and riddled with doubts and fears.

And yet, he decided on the way back to his car, she hadn't bothered to hide her scorn for some of her husband's attitudes. And she had taken his questions, which were simply designed to establish how Cosmo had latched on to the story in the first place, as implying some guilty connection between her husband and the reporter, or between her husband and the Father Pardoe business.

He shook himself. Face anyone with a policeman asking questions and she will immediately think she or someone close to her is being accused of something. It's perfectly natural to jump to conclusions.

But she was nervous because she was already accusing her husband in her own mind, he thought. She was already sick with worry when she opened the door.

He sat in his car for a few minutes. At some stage he was going to have to talk to Leary and Jessel. But he couldn't see that it was urgent, couldn't see them as anything but catalysts. Julie Norris was more pressing, though she was a catalyst too—for the whole investigation of Father Pardoe. He himself could speak to her parents, and in a grisly way he rather looked forward to that, but he had no doubt that Charlie was the one who ought to speak to Julie. More her age, presumably more her outlook on life.

How is Charlie doing? he wondered, and reached for his mobile phone. At first he thought the reception was more than
usually terrible, then he managed to distinguish the sound of singing—a woman singing—and broken glass.

“Charlie!” he shouted. “Where are you? What are you doing?”

“Don't panic, boss” came the answer dimly through the racket. “Just getting things under control.”

Charlie made his way down the hall, registering the heavy sway of the woman in front of him, then through to the living room, a chaos of glasses, newspapers, computer printouts, and discarded clothes, which a young man was vainly trying to put into some order since hearing the doorbell. The woman stumbled across the room and sank into an armchair. She gestured toward two oversize bottles, one of red wine and one of white, and then seemed to feel her social obligations had been fulfilled: Her eyes glazed over, and she lost interest altogether in her guest, seeming to have been set off on some impenetrable reminiscence by something on the tape in the background, which Charlie guessed to be pop music from around the seventies.

“Terry Beale, I presume,” he said to the back and backside of the young man, who was still scrabbling around among the scattered paper and newsprint on the floor. He hurriedly got to his feet and peered at the identification that Charlie had pushed under his eyes.

“Yes. Oh, police. I was half expecting you.”

Like his mother he made a jerky movement, this time in the direction of a chair. Charlie ignored it.

“Is there anywhere we can talk?”

“We danced to this at the old Cellar Club, Harvey and I,” the woman suddenly announced. “Before I set eyes on that heap of cow dung. Thank God someone has done the decent thing at last. I wonder what took them so long.”

Terry Beale stepped forward and made some kind of shushing motion to persuade her to shut up. Then he stepped back again, acknowledging the futility of it.

His mother had not noticed him. Something in the music on the tape, which had changed to a song Charlie recognized, had caught her notice or tickled her fancy. “ ‘These boots are made for walking,' ” she spat out, as Charlie's mobile phone bleeped without her registering it, “ ‘and that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.' ”

She hurled her glass at the wall.

“Too late!” she howled. “Too bloody late!”

“Don't panic, boss. Just getting things under control,” muttered Charlie into his phone.

“Her sister's coming,” whispered Terry Beale in his ear. “She should be here any minute now. She's the only one who can handle her when she's like this.”

Charlie shouted, “Get back to you,” into his mobile, then turned to the young man.

“What are you going to do when she gets here?”

“Get a bus to the station, then a train back to Leeds. But you can drive me to the station if you want.”

“I can drive you back to Leeds if that's where you're going.”

As Terry nodded, there was a ring at the doorbell. While he was out of the room the woman stirred to life again.

“This should be the happiest day of my life,” she said, looking bewildered. “So why do I feel so rotten?”

Charlie was about to suggest that it was because she had drunk herself sodden when she made a lunge toward the kitchen and he heard retching sounds. The sensible-looking middle-aged woman who now came in with Terry raised her eyebrows and went through to the kitchen.

“There,” Charlie heard her say. “You'll feel better in a minute. No, you don't want another. No, you don't. I'm going to make some coffee now. . . .”