Free Unholy Dying by Robert Barnard

children.”
    â€œThat’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?”
    â€œWhat’s Daddy talking about, Mummy?” asked Adelaide.
    â€œJust a joke, dear.”
    â€œThis 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.”
    â€œI won’t tell her because there’s nothing going on,” said his daughter, standing up. “And I don’t know why you’re pretending to get so hot under the collar about it. You wouldn’t care if I was fucking Mick Jagger—except you’d like that because you’d get a good story out of it.”
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    Father Pardoe finished the letter to his bishop after five attempts, all of which he read to Mrs. Knowsley. Madge, he called her now, though she was unable to call him anything but Father Pardoe, or just Father. She was not much use when he read her the first attempt, confining herself to assent and enthusiasm and then agreeing to his self-criticisms. But she gained in confidence, and when she heard the later attempts she would, eventually, when she had thought about it, tell him about the passages that she’d had doubts about. Often her criticisms were shrewd.
    Eventually they had reached a point where a draft satisfied them both, convinced them that all the necessary points had been covered, and that they had been presented in the most honest and convincing words. Above all the tone had been right. Pardoe had always been careful to get the tone right when addressing different congregations and groups. He thought heshould be equally sensitive when addressing his superiors in the Church.
    He tapped out the letter on the decrepit manual typewriter he had brought with him. When Madge looked it over she said it was fine, except that it looked rather dirty, with the holes in the d ’s, g ’s, e ’s, and a ’s all clogged up with dirt. A trip to the stationers in Leeds in search of a cleaner convinced Pardoe that they regarded electric typewriters as ridiculously passé and manual ones as prehistoric. Mrs. Knowsley took the letter for her daughter, sworn to total silence on the subject, to put on her grandson’s word processor. So there was someone else who knew. Pardoe took the letter out with him on his walk the next day and popped it into the nearest mailbox.
    â€œSo that’s off at last, Madge,” he said to Mrs. Knowsley. He saw her hesitate.
    â€œWould you mind very much if I asked you to call me Margaret?” she said out of the blue.
    â€œNot at all. Why should I?”
    She smiled, oddly nervous.
    â€œMadge started at school, but I’ve always hated the name. My parents were Scottish, and they named me after Saint Margaret.”
    â€œWife of Shakespeare’s Malcolm. A good choice of name. So—I’ll always call you Margaret, Margaret.”
    They both laughed. It was a bond between them, making relations not more formal but less. He knew all her friends, such as Mrs. Cordell, called her Madge, and now he knew she didn’t like it but wouldn’t tell them so. It meant that just by naming her, he was doing something special, and something private for them.
    On the third day after he had mailed his appeal, he collected the post and said, “Nothing from the Bishop, Margaret. He’s obviously not going to be rushed.”
    â€œDo you think,” she began hesitantly, “that you should—not go and see him—”
    â€œNo, I couldn’t do that. Not straight after writing.”
    â€œâ€”but put yourself