Unholy Dying by Robert Barnard Page B

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, thoughwhich 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 hadraised 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.
    â€œYou’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