Kill For Love

KILL FOR LOVE

by

Ray Connolly

Kill For Love

Copyright © 2011 Ray
Connolly

Originally published
as The Sandman as an eBook in 2010 in the United Kingdom.

The moral right of
Ray Connolly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced without the permission in writing
of the publisher.

ISBN
978-0-9565915-4-8

This book is a work
of fiction. Names characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely
coincidental.

www.rayconnolly.co.uk

email:
[email protected]

Plumray Books

Dedication

For Louise, Jack and
Olivia

Prologue

August 16:

They pulled the car off the road,
bouncing down a track and into the pine woods, before reversing behind a
thicket of brambles and turning off the engine. Neither spoke. After a few
moments a vague, sparkling cloud caught the boy’s attention as it rose and fell
in a shard of sunlight between the trees. It was, he knew, only a swarm of
flying ants celebrating the beginning of life, but, as he watched, it occurred
to him that it was like seeing a wraith.

The girl saw it, too. But then, stretching her
brown legs, she smiled. She had a pretty smile, at sixteen all promise, and,
taking it as a signal, the boy leant across and kissed her cheek. She watched
him out of the corner of her eye, amused. Then, very practically, she began to
check the Walmart payslip against the items in the bag which lay wedged between
her ankles. There was half a roast chicken, some ready-mixed avocado salad, a
large bag of popcorn, a basket of strawberries and then, a treat, vanilla
slices from the bakery counter.

Getting out of the car, the boy opened the trunk
and withdrew a blanket. A basket containing glasses and a bottle of Californian
Merlot followed, together with some cans of beer. Joining him, the girl picked
up a red and white checked tablecloth and matching napkins, then pulled out a
blue canvas backpack. Her shoulder sagged slightly under its weight, but when
the boy offered to carry it she laughed and pushed him away. Then, threading
her arms through the straps, she set off through the woods, leading the way up
a sharp incline and out on to the cream shoulder of an open field.

It was, they agreed, a perfect day, the barley
stubble springy underfoot, the sun warm on their faces, and, as they strolled
side by side, they made bets on how high the thermometer might climb. From
another hill came the faint sound of metallic threshing from the harvester that
must have passed that way a day earlier.

Quickly they half circled the brow of the hill.
The boy was tall and serious, his hair dark and wavy, while his glasses were
round and bookish; the girl, less conservative, was neat and athletic in her
long, beige shorts and collarless white shirt, her hair the colour of pale
copper. At one point they stopped and looked down through a gap in the wooded
slopes to the pleasant white houses of their neat New Hampshire town, and the girl pointed out
the maple tree which stood outside her home. Then they walked on. It was, the
boy thought, like a moment from a television commercial in which they were
featuring.

At the uppermost edge of the field, behind a
fence, was a copse of trees that capped the summit of the hill. There, twenty
or so paces into the wood, a shallow cleft in the rocks had made a natural
basin a few yards across. It was
their
place. Reaching it, the boy looked around carefully. He’d been half afraid
another couple might have discovered it, too, and defiled it. But the dry grass
was upright and undisturbed.

Letting the backpack slip from her shoulders, the
girl began laying out the blanket and then the tablecloth on the ridge of land
at the centre of the basin. The boy uncorked and poured the wine.

They were thoughtful as they ate. At one point a blue
jay flapped noisily from a tree just above them, and they glanced up, startled,
before laughing at themselves. Otherwise there was nothing to distract from the
enjoyment of each other, and when they spoke it was of routine matters, classes
they shared and the idiosyncrasies of friends and teachers.

It was deep into the afternoon before they made
love. That had been the plan; that the wait would increase the anticipation. They’d
finished the wine and were a little drunk, and the boy was eating from the bag
of popcorn when the girl began to unbutton his shirt. His skin was smooth and
quite white. He didn’t believe in sunbathing, he said, and she teased him about
it. No, seriously, he insisted, he didn’t want to get skin cancer. She giggled.

Playfully they undressed one another. Usually sex
was uncomfortable or rushed, in the dark in the car, in friends’ bedrooms at
parties, or in their own rooms when their parents were out. But on this day
they had all the time in the world. They wanted it to be perfect.

It wasn’t. The anticipation was too much. The
girl understood, and, as the boy melted inside her, she took his head in her
hands and stroked his hair. Sometimes perfection had to be practised, she
reassured. The first time was only ever a rehearsal, anyway.

The boy wanted to sleep now, to
extend this moment of happiness, and pressing his face into her skin he was
aware of the different scents, traces of Johnson’s Baby Powder and fresh
ironing.

Around them the tall grass stood like a barrier
to the world, and turning on his back on the blanket he stared at the branch of
a pine, noticing for the first time the length of the needles. Then, with a
slight sideways movement of his head, he found a young oak, pushing upwards
through the trees towards the light. There was so much to see. He closed his
eyes. It was just after four. The sun was at its warmest, and he wondered what
his parents and brother were doing over in Wellfleet, and then pictured them
sunbathing and playing on the beach. This summer, for the first time, he’d
stayed at home.

Perhaps he did sleep. When he opened his eyes the
girl’s iPod was playing familiar music through the speakers she’d brought, and
she was sitting up, adjusting the levels, murmuring the lyrics to a song he’d
heard so many times before. He smiled, admiring the gymnastic straightness of
her body and the fake ruby that was studded into her earlobe. Appearances were
deceptive: she didn’t look like the brightest girl in class.

Becoming aware of his gaze, she picked up a
speaker, and, placing it in the grass behind their heads, brought the volume
higher. Then she turned back to him. And when they made love again, this time
it was perfect.

He was
still lying inside her dozing, when he felt the touch at the back of his neck.
A moment earlier he’d been aware of a movement as the girl had reached for
something in her backpack, but, sleepy from the wine and sex, he’d been too
contented to move.

At first he didn’t recognise the feel of metal on
his skin, but when he tried to turn his head, the muzzle found the soft spot at
the junction between the base of his skull and his neck. Then he realised. She
hadn’t been kidding.

Below him her eyes, the pupils wide as though
sucking in every last atom of light, never left his. Smiling, she pushed
herself upwards, closer to him and he felt her breasts flattening against his
skin. Her stomach was trembling beneath him, her thighs and arms clamped around
him. He was trapped.

The music was now loud, as loud as it would go,
and he imagined it carrying across the fields and woods and on down to the
town. And he thought of his father and mother and wondered what they would
think.

Both her hands were around his neck, gripping
him, holding the gun. “No,” he pleaded, and tried to struggle free.

“I love you so much,” she smiled. Then, reaching
up, she kissed him.

No-one heard the gunshot. In the fields below the
rattle of the harvester drowned everything. Later a wind got up and blew
remnants from the unfinished bag of popcorn around the sheltered basin of
grass, into the trees and out on to the shaved surface of the hill.
 

Chapter One

September
12:

Kate Merrimac had never seen so many people in
one place. "It’s amazing," she murmured down the line to the studio.
"Almost Biblical.”

Below her the multitude waited patiently. All day
they'd been arriving, rolling along the motorways, overwhelming the airports
and ferries and flooding on to special trains and buses. They were an invading
army, but they were well behaved and undemanding, and when they'd bottlenecked
into slow moving rivers and flowed westwards through Central
London, students, adolescents, dutiful children and earnest young
parents together, their evident delight in the moment had been disarming.

From the island of a television news gantry fifty
feet above the swell, she watched latecomers as they sought unoccupied
territories on the far extremities of the park. Too distant to see the stage or
even the giant screens standing in the midst of the crowds, they were grateful
just to be present.

"
The night Jesse Gadden took London...
" she
said, testing her voice level above the noise of the television news and police
helicopters floating above the crowd. Then, glancing towards the camera pointed
at her, she grimaced at Tom Adams, her cameraman. “Maybe your dad should have
bought you a guitar instead of a camera for your twelfth birthday.”

Adams
grinned from behind his viewfinder. “It could
have been worse. What I really wanted was a Ninja kung fu outfit.”

Kate smiled as a voice cut through the studio
talkback into her earpiece.

"
Coming to you just as soon as Hilly
finishes with the casualty bay
." It was Sarojine Chandra, the
technical co-ordinator, who was sitting across London in the WSN-TV gallery in Blackfriars.

Nodding, Kate pulled her shirt collar up at the
neck, adjusted her linen jacket, and, cupping her thumbs under her dark hair,
lifted it back over her ears, as she routinely did before doing a piece to
camera.

"
Kate!
" There was a new voice in
her earpiece. "
The BBC are talking about half a million now. Does that
seem possible? Can we say that?
" It was Seb Browne, the rather too
bouncy young producer who was tonight's acting editor.

 
She looked
across the gantry where a television news monitor was showing the sea of faces
in the park below. The concert was soon to be streamed live in sound from Jesse
Gadden’s website, but radio and TV broadcasters were allowed to cover it only
as a news story. There would be no pictures of the man performing. "Half a
million! Could be.
From up here
anything seems possible,” she said
, then added: “
This guy had better be good.”

"
He will be
!"
Browne came back.

Having hoped to be producing the link from the
concert himself, he was, Kate knew, disappointed that he hadn't been able to
find anyone prepared to swop shifts. “If you say,” she shrugged, and went back
to collecting her thoughts for her report.

In truth the audience was bigger than anyone had
anticipated. A hundred thousand had turned out in Berlin
for the start of the Gadden tour, while New York’s
Central Park had estimated nearly quarter of a
million. Here in London
for the last night, the rippling sea of bare arms and exultant faces stretched
from Marble Arch across the dry, dusty grass to the Serpentine.

Twenty yards away, alongside the satellite vans,
a young man with black hair falling out of a blue baseball cap, one of dozens
of Jesse Gadden lookalikes present, had recognised her and was waving, excited
to see someone famous. She pretended not to notice him. She had a job to do.

She hadn't wanted this story. She didn’t normally
complain about assignments, but knowing virtually nothing about current styles
in music she was, she’d pointed out, the wrong person for the job. "I
don't know whether Jesse Gadden is hip-hop, techno, rave, the new Black Eyed
Peas, retro-rock, rap, neo-folk, rock romantic or whatever else they have these
days. Hilly Weston should do it all," she’d told Neil Fraser, her boss,
the editor-in-chief at WSN-TV.

But having demonstrated in that one sentence that
she knew quite enough for WSN viewers, her protests had been brushed aside.
Hilly Weston was froth from the entertainment desk, Fraser had let it be known.
The sheer numbers turning out to see Jesse Gadden made this a news event. Kate
Merrimac was a name reporter and it would do her good to broaden her range by
doing lighter subjects.

She hadn't liked the sound of that. She didn't do
lighter subjects.

"
Five seconds, Kate.
" The steady
voice of Sarojine Chandra brought her to attention.

She cleared her throat. Then, as the red signal
light lit up on the camera facing her, she smiled.
"Well, it’s almost
time and here we are, high above London’s Hyde Park on this warm, late summer
evening, as an estimated half a million fans await the arrival on stage of the
enigmatic Jesse Gadden.”

She paused and looked bemused:
“And, like everything Gadden does, it’s all cloaked in mystery! Two years
ago, after a career spectacular even by rock music's standards, the star went
into retreat. No one saw him and no one heard from him. For months there were
rumours…that he was ill or that he’d been paralysed or disfigured in an
accident.

"Then in July, just as suddenly as he'd
disappeared, Gadden came out of hiding with The Sandman…an album of new songs, followed
by a summer tour of the world’s capitals. But there was a shock for the fans.
This, he announced, would be his last album and last tour. After a special
final concert some time this autumn, he would be retiring.

“And there was more. Always generous to charities
around the world, suddenly he was the rock star turned philanthropist…
promising to donate two hundred million pounds to the building of a new
children’s hospital in Ireland.

“That’s
a lot of money! Even for a rock star! But then he’s a very popular rock star!”
Half turning, she looked towards the stage, a
baroque, polystyrene cathedral that rose from the sea of fans like a pop-up
outline in a book of fairy tales.
“So
…what is it about Jesse Gadden that’s drawn
so many fans here tonight? Is it his voice…high pitched and warbling, you might
say? Or his songs? Impenetrable to some, mesmerising to others. Or maybe it’s
his looks…those unblinking blue eyes, at this moment unblinking from the covers
of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different magazines around the
world."
 
She smiled
playfully into the camera.

That Jesse Gadden was charismatic and mysterious
there was no denying. All the girls in the WSN-TV newsroom were agreed on that.
"The word is magnetic," Chloe Estevez, the agencies monitor on the
foreign desk, had offered as they'd watched his arrival into London by helicopter on their screens that
morning.

"You mean
magnetic
as in a device for
picking up pins and needles?" Kate had teased.

Chloe had been undeterred: "I know it's a
tabloid cliché, Kate, but in this case it’s sort of true.”

"Chloe's right!" Beverly Dennis, a very
tall, fair, smiling young intern, recently over from college in Chicago, had joined the
discussion. "When Jesse's on TV you daren't take your eyes away for a
second in case you miss something."

Kate had been sceptical. "He’s
that
wonderful? More wonderful than the
last big sensation, or Lady Gaga, or next year’s crop? "

"Wonderful isn't the word," Beverly had countered,
ignoring the tease.

"So, what is the word? Tell me. I'll use
it."

The intern had shaken her head. "I can’t
describe it. But, at that moment, when you see him and hear him, he’s…
everything.
”

"I told them I was too old for this,"
Kate had sighed. She was thirty six and hadn't been to a rock concert in
fifteen years.

"No-one's too old for Jesse Gadden," Beverly had come back slightly
defiantly, and then gone to buy Kate a selection of Gadden albums: the reporter
covering the concert ought at least to know something about the man’s music.

But now, high above Hyde
Park,
as
a swell
of anticipation began to roll around her, Kate was making it clear to World
Satellite News viewers that she remained unconvinced.
"And so, as the
sun goes down over Central London, whatever
the Jesse Gadden magic is… we’ll soon find out. This is Kate Merrimac for
WSN-TV…”
And as Tom Adams panned his camera around the audience, she looked
back at the stage.

"
Er, yes, thanks, Kate!
" The
voice of Seb Browne came doubtfully into her earpiece.
"We’ll come back to you at the end of the show. You never know, if
you try, you might even enjoy it.
And let's keep trying for that
interview. Okay!
"

"Interview! Come on, Seb, I told you…” she
began, but the studio feed had gone dead. Irritated, she unplugged her
ear-piece. There wasn't going to be an interview. Jesse Gadden didn't do
interviews. Her request for one had been practically ridiculed by his
publicist. Even he couldn't get to talk to him, the guy had laughed.

She
understood that. This was rock and roll. Mystery was
mystique. Mystique was money: money that Jesse Gadden was giving away in
prodigious quantities, thus making himself the darling of the world’s media.
Everyone, it seemed, loved the idea of Jesse Gadden.

It was almost dark. Softly at first, but with increasing
volume, a deep, rumbling electronic note began to burrow through the September
evening. Then electric guitars started to moan and howl, before a volley of
drums detonated from tower blocks of speakers. Above the audience laser beams were
duelling in the darkening sky. Kate put on her glasses. The pantomime was about
to begin.

Later she would be tempted to mock the electronic
firestorm that preceded the performance by saying that it reminded her of a
barrage of mortar launched to soften up the enemy before an infantry attack.
But she didn't, because when, in the midst of the cyclone, Jesse Gadden finally
appeared, a slight, young man, with long black hair, dressed in black and
walking through the clouds of frozen nitrogen along a pier that cut into the
audience, even she found herself leaning forward with the tumultuous welcome.

For his part Gadden made absolutely no response,
not even as hundreds of thousands of glowing mobile phones, held high above the
heads of the crowd, recorded and transmitted the moment. Even his small group
of anonymous musicians, playing in the shadows, were ignored.

How could anyone be so self-consumed, she
thought. But then the minstrel’s hand started to stroke the strings of his
guitar, and the high lilt of the voice she’d so recently mocked began to quell
the ovation, and she realised she was smiling. It was corny and manipulative,
yes; but it was beguiling, too.

What was he thinking, she wanted to know, as she
gazed at his boy’s face, sixty feet high in close-up on the giant screen behind
him? What was going on behind the unblinking blue of those eyes?

"
Hey,
what is this! A convert
!" producer Seb Browne was burbling down the
line the moment Kate finished her post-concert report. "
Suddenly, you're a fan. He seduced you,
right!
"

"Not even close," Kate came back.
"I was just trying to make you happy. You said you wanted upbeat!"

"
You
always make me happy. Upbeat we wanted! A convert we got! Very nice! See you
tomorrow
." And, still chortling, Browne cut her off again.

Kate sighed with exasperation. She hadn’t sounded
that
enthusiastic, though the concert
had been more engrossing than she’d anticipated. Actually two hours of
plaintive guitars and wordy songs, followed by a carnival of encores, chants,
communal singing and finally tears as the spotlight had gone out and Gadden had
disappeared, had left her more puzzled than entertained.

Unfastening her microphone and battery pack, Kate
passed them to Tom, the cameraman, thanking him and wishing him good-night.
Then, as he, and the other news crews began packing their equipment, she made
her way carefully down the steps of the gantry.

Somewhere below in the Press enclosure a car with
a driver was waiting to take her through the crowds, but even before she
reached the ground she realised there would be no hope of finding it. The front
row celebrities and keen-to-be-thought-groovy politicians, no doubt with Hilly
Weston among them, had already made their getaways. She’d waited too long,
savouring the atmosphere. Now the police lanes were completely blocked by the
crowds.

It didn’t matter, she thought, as she set off on
foot. She would aim towards Kensington High Street. Maybe she would pick up a
taxi there.

She hadn't got far, however, before she realised
the impossibility of this plan. The particular river of fans into which she’d
waded was heading remorselessly in the opposite direction. She had no
alternative but to go with the flow.