Unholy Dying (7 page)

“Of course you're right. It's pure malice. I'm sure that's the conclusion they'll come to.”

“Whoever
they
are.”

Their eyes, leaving the boys, lighted on their husbands, now chatting together nearby. But on that subject they never talked, prevented either by their loyalty or their shame. Feeling awkward about their silence, they soon separated and made their way home.

Father Greenshaw was talking to Miss Preece-Dembleby, one of the parish stalwarts. He was impressed by the double-barreled name, and skimmed over in his mind the fact that it was the sort of improbable double-barrel that Prince Charles seemed to have a penchant for. The word “ladylike” might have been coined for Miss Preece-Dembleby. She was by social class
perhaps not a lady—the upper classes being thinly represented in Shipley—but she was very like one, and was generally treated as one.

“A truly lovely service,” she was saying, in her clipped, beautifully enunciated tones, “and beautifully conducted. But of course that goes without saying, doesn't it? Beautiful services don't come about of their own accord, do they?”

Father Greenshaw cast his eyes down to survey the soil. “They have to be led,” he said.

“Of course they do. You make sure everything is fitting and reverent and grateful to the eye.”

“Your appreciation is very valuable to me.”

“And how is the youth club coming along?” Miss Preece-Dembleby suddenly asked. “One wouldn't want Father Pardoe's good work to decay while he is in retreat.”

“Oh, quite nicely,
quite
nicely. . . . I must go and have a word with—”

And he hurried away. He was very fond of Miss Preece-Dembleby, but she did have a habit of asking inconvenient questions out of the blue. Older and wiser parishioners could have told him that he had been deceived by her etiolated figure and prissy manner, and had failed to notice the spark of shrewdness in her eyes.

Miss Preece-Dembleby, her mouth and eyes thoughtful, watched him dither as to which of his congregation he had to have a word with, then turned and left the churchyard to take the road home. Her way coincided for two streets with Janette Jessel's, and she soon caught up to her.

“He won't do,” she announced as she came up beside her. As with Mary Leary, Janette knew at once who she was talking about.

“No, he won't,” she said.

“He's simply a lightweight, to put it at its kindest. No earthly good in a parish like this.”

“I'm afraid he reminds Mary Leary of Marco at Snip 'n' Set.”

They both laughed.

“I hope you have absolute faith in Father Pardoe being cleared of those wicked slurs?” Miss Preece-Dembleby demanded.

“Absolute!” her companion averred. “Provided . . .”

“Yes?”

“Provided they really try to get to the bottom of them. Provided they really want to find out the truth.”

“Why would they not?”

“Because after so many nasty cases, they might just be running scared at the thought of sexual misconduct.”

“But Father Pardoe is a man of
substance
, a man one can trust,” Miss Preece-Dembleby said indignantly. “They would be going against the whole wisdom of the parish, our knowledge of him over a decade and more, if they simply assumed the worst. But I do understand your feeling that the affair is being mishandled.”

“Why is it taking so long?” Janette demanded. “And why do we know of no one in the parish who has been questioned?”

“Why indeed?” Miss Preece-Dembleby agreed, nodding vigorously. “And
who
is looking into the matter, and why all the secrecy? It's pulling the parish apart, you know.”

“It's so . . . unusual,” said Janette. “I've never been in a parish where anything like this has happened. Who should one go to?”

Miss Preece-Dembleby thought.

“We have so little scope in our church for the involvement of the laity. I have a shrewd suspicion that if we tried to make our opinions felt through Father Greenshaw, they would get no further, whatever he might say.”

“Yes. It's awful to mistrust a priest, but—”

“But,” agreed Miss Preece-Dembleby, “that being so, I suppose the only course is to approach the Bishop.”

They both thought about this unusual step.

“A petition might be too radical,” said Janette. “It would smack of rebellion.”

“Yes, we couldn't have that. The Bishop would be very angry.” Miss Preece-Dembleby thought. “Perhaps a letter. With a note at the bottom saying it had been read to so-and-so and so-and-so, and they agreed with its contents.”

“That's a
really
good idea,” said Janette. “Sort of like a petition but not actually one. You would write it, wouldn't you? I would be hopeless.”

“I could have a try.”

“And we'd need to get some men on the list as well as women. It would look bad otherwise.”

Miss Preece-Dembleby screwed up her mouth in distaste.

“Oh, dear—men,” she said.

 • • • 

It was much later in the day, after three drafts and three phone calls to Janette had resulted in a letter she regarded as tolerable, that Miss Preece-Dembleby let her thoughts stray to earlier in the day and to two persons of the male sex. As she had emerged from church she had seen the Norris boy arriving at the churchyard, down the street that led from his home. Later she had seen, in the farther reaches of the churchyard, him and Mark Leary deep in conversation, and she had been puzzled by the sight. Thinking it over, sipping a glass of sherry, she decided there were two things that were somehow not quite right about it: their disparate ages and their disparate tastes.

 • • • 

Cosmo Horrocks had never gone in for “at home” pieces, and if he had been any sort of celebrity he would never have invited a
journalist to bear witness to him in his domestic role. Too risky by half. You never knew what children would say. Most of the time they just blurted out the truth. However hard you'd borne down on them, however well you'd kept them under your thumb, somehow they wriggled out from under if there was the stimulus of visitors.

Sunday lunchtime at their Rodley home was one of the few times that the Horrockses functioned as a family. It usually began with Cosmo in unusually good humor. Sometimes he let it end like that too. Predictability was not the name of his game. Still, he engineered a storm often enough for his elder daughter to have given up working to keep the peace. The tension in his wife's mouth and eyes, the sometimes white-knuckled grip she had on plates and tureens, showed that she never took his mood for granted. And if today he was unusually sunny of disposition, she knew that must be because he was on to a good story. She had met him first when she was part of such a story, and had married him in the afterglow of his good mood. Sometimes she wondered how she had stood it for twenty-one years. Early on she had been grateful to him, believed he had “rescued” her. But to rescue someone, you have to bring him or her to something better.

“Very good,” said Cosmo, pushing away his plate of roast beef with all the traditional trimmings. “As good as Mother made. Except that my mother was a lousy cook, made the worst cup of tea in London, and could even spoil a mug of Nescafé if she put her mind to it. No, I wouldn't compare you to my mother.” He turned to Samantha and Adelaide. “You'll be judged against your mother's standards when you grow up and have families of your own.”

Adelaide nodded with the solemnity of a twelve-year-old, but Samantha, in a neutral tone that did not conceal the scorn in
her voice, said, “Women aren't judged by their cookery anymore. They've got more things in their lives than that.”

Samantha was of an age when she would, in her words, take no more crap from her father, not even to please her mother, not even for the sake of domestic peace. What can he do to me? she asked herself. You can't spank a seventeen-year-old girl and get away with it. She'd be down to the police station like a shot—having kneed him in the groin first.

“Oh, swipe me!” sneered Cosmo. “I've been put down by Rodley's Germaine Greer. If women aren't judged by how they do household duties then more's the pity, I say. They should have clung to the things that they can do and not gone hankering after the things they're hopeless at and always will be.” He turned to his wife, his good humor apparently reasserting itself. “She's been listening to that daft teacher of hers, whatever her name is.”

“We can hardly tell her not to take any notice of her teacher,” said Cora, her face a mask, her hands gripping the plates she was taking out to the dishwasher.

“Can't we?” Cosmo shouted at her back. “With the sort of mentally subnormal types who go into teaching these days, it's the best thing we could do. Most of them are only doing the job because nobody else would employ them.”

“Miss Daltrey is a very good teacher,” said Samantha sulkily. “You wouldn't know because you never go to parents' evenings. She's the best in the school—everybody says so.”

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.”