Unholy Dying (6 page)

“I'm not saying it's Father Pardoe's,” said Cosmo. “But I am saying that the reason he's been suspended is the relationship he's had with your daughter.”

“Well, I never,” said Norris. “I've never heard the like, have you, Daphne?”

“Seducing a priest. She'd stoop to anything, that girl.”

“We don't quite know who did the seducing, do we?” Cosmo pointed out. “Or if either of them did. Takes two to tango, doesn't it? So all this comes as a complete surprise, does it?”

“If you're any sort of reporter you'll have noticed that,” said Mr. Norris, who had retained a shadow of his old aggression, apparently part of his personality.

“
Except
,” put in Daphne Norris, “if a girl gets pregnant at seventeen, you know she's on the slippery slide already and likely to go downhill fast.”

“And if people are going to say we caused it by chucking her out, then I'd say they've got it the wrong way around,” said her husband. “We chucked her out because we could see it coming.”

“The scandal will kill me,” moaned his wife. “And what are the other boys going to say to Leonard at school?”

“Leonard?”

“Lennie, our son,” said Mr. Norris, all aggression slipping away. “She resented him right from the start, didn't she, Daphne?
Saw what a bright, clever little chap he was, and resented it when people commented on it. She was a right obstinate baby, from the time she could walk and talk. Wouldn't give up her room to Lennie when he needed the extra floor space for his train set. He had to make do with the poky one—hardly more than a box. Made my blood boil, didn't it, Daphne? But like I say, she could be sullen and stiff-necked, and she really dug her toes in.”

“Until she got pregnant, Simon. And then we'd really
got
her.”

Cosmo turned his attention to Daphne Norris.

“Got her?”

“Got a hold over her,” she said, unembarrassed. “A lever. Before that she'd stood out against us like a mule.”

“I see,” said Cosmo, though, rarely for him, he wasn't quite sure that he did. “So when Julie got pregnant—”

“We laid down a few ground rules,” said Simon Norris, “and when she didn't agree to them, then out she went. So you can say to these people who say we caused her problems that we didn't encourage her to get pregnant, and we didn't make it easy for her to get pregnant. We were as strict with her as you can be these days. And when she told us she was having a child, and when she still stood out against us—”

“Were you encouraging her to have an abortion?”

“We were not. We're Catholic, as you know.”

“Not practicing Catholics, though,” said Cosmo, making a little note in his book.

“Well, no, not practicing. And if she'd wanted to have an abortion, we might not have stood in her way. But the point I'm trying to make, if you'd stop interrupting, is that
she
got pregnant,
she
wouldn't play ball with us, so it was
her
doing if she had to leave here. She went to live with her boyfriend's family,
which was pretty daft because he denied he was the father. And then she badgered the Council, so I've heard, till they gave her a flat on the Kingsmill estate, of all bloody places.”

“We know all about the Kingsmill,” said Daphne. Her husband frowned.

“Well—er—we don't need to go into that. Anyway, there she is, and there it's my bet she'll stay, and it's her fault, especially if she still hasn't got the wit to avoid getting pregnant a second time. And anyone who says it's our fault doesn't know their arse from their elbow, pardon my language, because she dug her own grave and she can bloody well lie in it.”

“By loose behavior,” put in Daphne primly, in corroboration.

“And I can quote you on that, can I?” asked Cosmo.

“You can,” said Daphne. “It'll be pretty self-evident to all who see her.” Her ears pricked up when she heard the front door. “That'll be Lennie.”

Lennie had clearly noticed there was company in the front room, because he stopped outside the door and then swung it open.

“What's he doing here?”

He was dressed in the standard dress for thirteen-year-olds, a yellow-and-black anorak and Mitsu athletic shoes. His black hair was cut spiky and short, and his white face was pitted with acne around the jowls. He had the unendearing swagger of a child who knows he is the boss.

“Oh, nothing, Lennie,” said his mother. “He's just come about Julie.”

“Julie? That slag?” He turned to Cosmo. “You're not trying to persuade them to take her back, are you?”

“No, I'm not,” said Cosmo, who would have preferred to kick him in the face.

“Because she's not coming back here and pushing me out of my bedroom. You don't want her back, Mum, do you?”

“No, Lennie darling. There's no question of that. Julie's in some kind of trouble—”

“Well, that's no surprise. But it's not our business. Have you told him that?”

“Yes, we have, Lennie.”

“And you got the message?”

“Yes,” said Cosmo obediently.

“Well, that's all right then.”

And he banged the door shut and went up the stairs two at a time. Mr. and Mrs. Norris looked at each other, apparently pleased with themselves. They'd done what Lennie wanted. Cosmo was used to the extremes of human oddity and perverseness, and he was beginning to get the idea that Julie had been thrown out of this house so that her kid brother could have a room big enough for his train set. He, schooled in the tabloid gutter, could believe such an absurdity. It was another piece in what was proving to be a very interesting little jigsaw puzzle.

 • • • 

“Just fetching something I'd forgotten,” shouted Derek Jessel as he came through the front door and scaled the stairs.

The fact that the something he'd forgotten was condoms he did not mention. When he had slipped a packet into his briefcase, he dashed down again, but paused at the sitting room door. Then he poked his red shock of hair through the door and said to his wife, “Heard something about your Father Pardoe today.”

Janette Jessel sighed. She was eating soup and a roll, as she generally did at lunchtime, and she did not look up.

“He's no more mine than he is yours,” she said, “but go on, tell me, because you will anyway.”

“A priest is always a woman's rather than a man's person. He's all the women's pet. Anyway, Ben Lucas has been going regularly to this quack in Pudsey, acupuncture or something, and he's seen him twice, walking off his midday meal. Apparently that's where he's holed up: Burton Avenue.”

“Well?”

“Odd place for a spiritual retreat.”

Janette Jessel turned away and looked out her back window in irritation.

“It's pretty generally known there's some kind of inquiry going on. That doesn't mean he's guilty. I'm absolutely sure he's not—and that's based on knowing him a lot better than you do.”

“Oh, I wouldn't quarrel with that. Still, it's pretty funny spreading a lie like that, isn't it? The Church and all that?”

“That sort of thing happens when you're trying to be kind. If you'd been caught cooking the books, you'd be quite happy if they spread the story that you'd been overworking and needed a rest, wouldn't you?”

“No chance of that,” said Derek, a false heartiness in his voice. “Straight as a die, you know me.” But he thought it was prudent to take himself off before she could reply.

Left alone, Janette put the spoon down beside her half-finished soup and wiped the corners of her eyes. It was the hypocrisy and double-dealing of her husband that she . . . she nearly thought “hated” but substituted in her mind the word “despised.” There must be some sort of jealousy of Father Pardoe based on women making a lot of him, fussing over him—above all looking up to him and respecting him. That's what must rankle: the respect. When she thought about Derek's own personal conduct—his lying, his women, the dodginess of his business dealings—then the contrast with Father Pardoe made it even more stunningly clear that he
must
have been wrongfully accused.

She had once been in the house when Derek had thought she was absent, and she had heard him talking on the phone to Conal Leary, his fellow adulterer and bullshit artist, a man absolutely after Derek's own heart. She'd heard Derek talking about one of his women—she couldn't now remember which, and it really didn't matter. After a bit Leary must have mentioned her, because Derek, laughing, had said, “Janette? What can she do? Anyway, she's got nothing to complain about. She's got a good Catholic marriage.”

The phrase had gone through her like a knife—still did when she thought about it.

Sunday Mass at St. Catherine's was drawing to a close. Father Greenshaw, standing in for Father Pardoe as he had for the past four weeks, thought it had gone beautifully. He was a slim man in his late twenties, with dark curly hair and plump cheeks that gave him the look of a cherub. His religion was for him a thing of beauty—of sights and sounds that plucked aesthetic chords, aroused pale, earthly intimations of future heavenly experiences beyond human understanding. The church at Shipley—mid-Victorian Gothic at its least inspired—gave few such intimations of itself, but Father Greenshaw was conscious that the way he orchestrated and led the worship there was providing his flock with an experience superior to anything they had known under the leadership of Father Pardoe.

For Father Greenshaw was ambitious not only for the greater glory of God, but for the advancement of himself. In fact, the two things inevitably went together in his mind: it followed that, for the Lord's praise to be magnificently conducted, he himself must gain advancement to a position of influence. At
his age a permanent position at a parish as important as St. Catherine's was hardly to be thought of, and yet . . . and yet . . . the shortage of new priests was chronic and endemic. God's ways were beyond scrutiny. And what a good thing it would be for the parish!

He advanced a few steps to give the blessing, like a Victorian prima donna preparing to sing the final rondo.

“Silly bloody pillock!”

Conal Leary, on one of his occasional attendances at church, hissed the words to his wife. Mary Leary hushed him, and suppressed that part of her mind that agreed with him. The disloyal thought had occurred to her earlier in the Mass that Father Greenshaw reminded her of a camp hairdresser. She thought it must be Marco at Snip 'n' Set, a few years back. He hadn't lasted long. Not at all suitable for Shipley. She shut her eyes to obliterate the picture of Father Greenshaw and to concentrate on the words.

Mass over, the congregation moved toward the main door, the Leary family toward the rear, having sat as usual near the front in a pew that Con's father had considered his own private property.

“Current laddo's a bit of a ponce,” muttered Con Leary in his wife's ear. She agreed, but gave the tiniest of nods. “Not a patch on Father Pardoe.”

“No.”

“Currently holed up in Burton Avenue, in Pudsey, so Derek Jessel tells me.”

Mary Leary made no reply, not even a shadow passing over her face. But as they slowly advanced, greeting friends, she thought she heard the name Leary, and then definitely heard the words “involved with the Norris girl too,” whispered but distinct.
This time an expression of pain did briefly come into her eyes, but she put it from her. Probably the sort of silly rumor that was accumulating around Julie Norris's name. And even if it were true, rumors about her husband had reached her so frequently that she had developed a hard carapace to cope with them.

Father Greenshaw was quick to leave the church by the back door and mingle with a selected few among the faithful in the churchyard. The young he had given up: he knew he did not go down well with hormone-happy teenagers, and he did not regret it. It was their parents and grandparents who mattered in the parish: they were the people with the clout. And it was the men, ultimately, who mattered most, and he tried hard with them, though he had to admit in his innermost heart that he found things easier with the women, particularly the older ones.

“He tries hard, poor lamb,” said Janette Jessel to Mary Leary, standing in the nearly warm sunlight. It wasn't necessary to specify who she was talking about. They looked in his direction: he was talking to Conal Leary.

“He tries a bit too hard,” said Mary Leary. “During Mass I suddenly thought of Marco at Snip 'n' Set. He'll get nowhere with Conal, I'm afraid.”

“He doesn't take to him?”

“Not a bit. Nor the children either.”

Janette shook her head.

“He should be in a small parish at his age. Learning what it's all about. Shipley isn't exactly the deep end, I know, but he's out of his depth.”

“But you can't get the priests these days, can you? There's so few have the vocation.”

“No, it's sad.” Janette took a deep breath and voiced her fears. “I sometimes think that Father Pardoe may be the last of the old-style priests we have.”

Mary's face twisted into a grimace.

“Please God, that isn't so. And please God, he comes back to us, and soon.”

Mary's eye was caught by activity in a far corner of the churchyard; her son, Mark, was talking to Lennie Norris. Janette's eyes followed hers.

“I didn't see the Norrises at Mass. It'll be the first time in months if they were there.”

“It wouldn't worry me if it was months before we saw them again. Personally, I blame them for . . .”

She didn't need to say what she was thinking. Janette took a tougher line.

“I
would
blame them if I thought there was anything in it. But I'm sure there isn't.”