Kill For Love (14 page)

“Ah, well! You know what they
say: the devil has all the best tunes."

"Will you help me?" Kate
asked. “I’ll pay you.”

"Help you do what?"

"Find out what’s going on. Puncture
the myth of Jesse Gadden as the giveaway saint of rock music."

"Why?"

"Because that’s what
reporters are supposed to do, tell the truth about liars. If we don't, what are
we but a bunch of fans with laptops and soft focus cameras."

Greg liked that. "Okay! Why
not? Let's see what we can find. Do we have a starting point?"

"Several, but the kids
around him interest me most. They're like a commune. Both loving and then
menacing to order. Who are they? Where do they come from? Do any of them ever
leave and get normal jobs? They've certainly never talked if they have done?”

"And what about you?"
Greg asked as, dropping their empty coffee cups into a litter bin, they began
to make their way through the park towards

"I'm going to be looking for
stuff on Sister Grace. I want to know what happened on that cliff top."

There was a shoal of emails waiting
for her when she got home. Most were fan replies to her questions about Jesse Gadden's
childhood, offering no new information. Nearly a dozen, however, were responses
to her request for information about
JESSE'S WEDNESDAY CLUB
. Ruth from
Havelock North in New
Zealand had written: “
Welcome to Jesse's
Wednesday Club. Surprised it took a real fan so long to cotton on. Don't you
ever listen to the lyrics? Try Wasted Working Wednesday on Chance Meadows Morn and
we'll see you next May if you can make it this far. Otherwise I suppose the
original will have to do.”

See her
where
next year?
The fans' answers were as cryptic as the lyrics. Another message was from South Wales. “
Some of us go by coach, the last
Wednesday in May, if you're interested. Let me know if you want to join in.”

Reaching across to the stack of Jesse
Gadden CDs she slipped
Chance Meadows Morn
into her computer and scanned
the lyrics in the booklet as she listened. As the record came on, she found the
lines:
"Going down to Tarlton
the last week in May, Tasting the
sea, cheating with me, on a wasted working Wednesday."

It was just Jesse Gadden singing about
the simple pleasures of taking time off from work to go to somewhere called
Tarlton and sit by the sea.

She looked at other
Wednesday
Club
messages: the vast majority were from American fans, writing of days
in Tarlton, North Carolina
and Tarlton in Washington
State. Then there were
some from Australia,
inviting her to Tarlton, New South Wales, a
few from the south of England,
one from Cheshire and three from Canada.

Was it possible that simply by
mentioning the name of a town in a song, Jesse Gadden could make anywhere
called Tarlton a centre for day excursions?

It was too late to call anywhere
in England, but getting the
number from Google, she called the tourist office in Tarlton, Washington
State. A gossipy, middle aged assistant called Estelle was amused by the
question. “Yes. You’re right. The police department noticed it first. For some
reason there’s a small increase in the number of day trippers visiting us the
last Wednesday in May.”

"And what do the trippers do
when they come to your town?” Kate enquired.

"Not much, so far as we can
see. They just seem to sit around all day."

"And on bad weather
days?"

Estelle chuckled. "The same.
This year was awful. It rained all day. But they didn't mind. They just sat in
their cars and listened to their MP3s. Nice people, young, but not raucous. I
mean, they didn't cause any trouble. No arrests for drugs or drunkenness or anything
like that. Seems a kind of strange thing to do though, doesn’t it?”

Chapter
Twenty Three

October 18:

The two mothers stood and prayed,
their shoulders almost touching in the cramped pew, like pillars supporting one
another. From the other side of the small, modern, brick chapel Kate watched.
Mourning makes the most unlikely companions, she thought, then, bowing her
head, she listened to the prayer.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord
taketh away,” an elderly man in a loose brown suit intoned. “Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust...”

At the back of the chapel someone
pressed a button on a CD player and the thin, quavering keyboard sound of
Jerusalem
began. The ranks of mourners
stared ahead without expression. Then, at a nod from the man in the brown suit,
the lacquered, shining coffin bearing the remains of Sebastian Peter Browne
slid forward on the conveyor belt towards the curtain.

In the front row the stouter,
elder of the two women, Mary Browne, exhaled a deep, broken breath of emotion
and dropped her head forward. At her side the other woman, tall and leaner,
and, in her late forties, perhaps fifteen years younger, put a hand out in
support. She was Carol Dennis, Beverly’s
mother.

They were worlds apart, Mary
Browne, a forceful widow, her iron grey hair clipped back behind her ears, and
Carol Dennis, a fey, pretty, blonde divorcee, but the grief they shared bound
them together. There’d been a delay with formalities in Galway
before the bodies had been released to the parents. Now, while Beverly’s
father had returned to Chicago with the remains
of his daughter, Carol Dennis had stopped off in London to attend Seb’s funeral.

The hymn finished and there were
an uncertain few moments. One of Seb’s relatives blew his nose. Then, as Mary
Browne led the way out of the chapel, the small congregation followed. Kate watched
as they passed: a couple of aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbours, an old school
friend and a small contingent from WSN led by Neil Fraser.

Outside on the forecourt the
mourners waited in the October rain, unsure of what to do next. A small down of
flowers had been piled by the undertakers on the paved drive and Mary Browne
began going through the tributes, carefully making a note of the names of the
senders. Kate could see where her son had learned his thoroughness.

Before the service she’d
introduced herself and given her condolences to both mothers, Carol Dennis
replying with the frozen smile of someone determined not to break down. Now, as
the mourners began to drift away before they were overtaken by the following
funeral, some of the tension had eased.

“Beverly told us about you,” Carol Dennis said,
approaching Kate. “She enjoyed working with you. She said she wanted to be like
you one day.”

“She could have been anything she
wanted.”
 

Carol Dennis forced a watery
smile. She had a thin, stretched face, with pale eyes. Beverly, an only child,
had been like her, though bigger boned. “It all seems so poignant now,” she
said, “but I can’t help thanking God that He chose to grant her greatest wish
before He took her from us.”

“Yes,” Kate said flatly. She’d
never felt comfortable in the presence of those who knew God’s mind.

“I mean her speaking to Jesse Gadden.”

For a moment she thought she
hadn’t heard properly.

“It may not seem much of an
ambition in His universal scheme of things, and Beverly would have grown out of it, I’m sure,
but you know how girls are at that age. She was such a fan. I only wish I’d not
been so...” Carol Dennis stopped as regret overcame her.

Kate frowned. This was difficult.
“I think there’s been a misunderstanding...” she began, then hesitated. Did it
matter if this poor woman had got the story back to front?

“Yes?”

She was sorry she’d started now. “Well,
what I was going to say was, Beverly
was involved in planning a programme about Jesse Gadden, which she loved doing.
But I don’t think they ever actually spoke.”

Mrs Dennis smiled. “Oh, but they
did.” The voice was certain, the eyes shining. “Didn’t you know?”

Kate felt the muscles of her face
tighten.

“But, of course. How could you
know?”

“What don’t I know?”

“Well, her father and I didn’t
really want to mention it before. We felt it would have…well, devalued our loss
and Beverly’s
memory if we’d made it public. It would have become a part of show business,
and it isn’t show business to us...”

“No. But you say Beverly spoke to Jesse Gadden?”

“Only by phone, but...” Suddenly
tears were welling. “I like to think Beverly
died thinking about that call.”

“He called her?”

“She was on the voice mail when I
got home from playing golf. She just said, ‘Guess what, Mom! Guess who called
me a minute ago. Jesse! Jesse Gadden. Can you believe it?
Jesse Gadden
called
me!
’
I could hear the excitement in her voice. She was giggling all the time, you
know that little laugh she had when she was excited.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“No, not really. She just
repeated it. She said he called her on her cellphone! Out of nowhere. That she
just picked it up and said ‘hello’ and there he was, talking to her and playing
her something off his new album. ‘Like in a dream,’ she said. ‘Right here in
the middle of Ireland.’
And then, there was a little family thing we had...”

Kate waited.

The emotion had burst, tears were
flowing, but Carol Dennis wanted to say it. “She said,
‘What a day for a daydream!’
Like the song, you know. Mark and I
always used to say that around the house when she was a little girl. Then she
suddenly said she had to go, that she had something to do for Jesse, and she’d
just called to say hello and goodbye and that she loved us...”

Kate felt in the pocket of her
jacket and passed Carol Dennis a handkerchief.

“I’m sorry,” Beverly’s mother wiped her eyes. “I thought I
was being so brave. Maybe I should have gone straight back to Chicago. It’s just that…there’s nothing to
look forward to there, anymore.”

Kate allowed herself just one
question. “You don’t know what time Beverly
called you, do you, Mrs Dennis?”

She’d gone to the crematorium by
taxi but Fraser insisted she travel with him in his car on the journey back to
the studio.
 
“Sorry you had to be dragged
through all this,” he broke into her thoughts.

She didn’t reply. She was
wondering whether she should tell him of her conversation with Carol Dennis.
She didn’t.

“Anyway, Robin wants a couple of
weeks off from anchor duty. How do you feel about manning the morning show
alone from Wednesday?”

“I’d like that,” she said
immediately.

“Terrific!” And, that settled, he
began to talk about the complaints they’d been getting about poor reception in India.

Kate only half listened. The
efficacy of space satellites wasn’t her subject. Her mind was re-running what
Carol Dennis had told her. Beverly had left her
voicemail message sometime between two and five Chicago time, she’d said. That was between
eight and eleven in Ireland.
The Galway police had said the accident had
occurred at just after eleven o’clock.

But, was it really possible that
Gadden had called Beverly?
She and Seb had gone around Galway for days
asking about Jesse Gadden Monaghan. They would have left their mobile numbers
with anyone they thought might help, so Gadden could have got it from any
number of people, and Kate herself had told him her name.

But why would he want to talk to
her? And what was it he asked her to do for him?

Chapter
Twenty Four

October 19:

They had breakfast at a pavement
cafe in Covent Garden. Kate arrived early and
watched as a solitary street performer, a raven-haired girl wearing a red
velvet dress and an old top hat, played a clarinet on the cobbles in front of
the Inigo Jones church. Because it was too early in the day for most tourists,
and perhaps equally because a solo of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto probably
wasn't to everyone's taste, the girl was mainly playing for free. But there was
a dignity with which she practised her music, an air of her having been
transported to a private world. And Kate found herself wondering where the
girl’s thoughts went as she played.

When Greg arrived, carrying his
bag and striding across the street like a loping exclamation mark, he greeted
her over-loudly. He'd been covering a Muse concert for a BBC rock programme the
previous night, he explained, and thought he might have gone slightly deaf.

She told him about the day
trippers congregating at anywhere called Tarlton as he waited for his
croissant.

He shook his head, balefully.
"I should have warned you. You don't want to hang around on chat rooms for
rock fans. Some of those people are serious anoraks, trainspotters a-go-go,
howling-at-the-moon crazy. You log into a Jesse Gadden interpretation forum and
you really are dancing with the dandelions."

 
Then she told him what Carol Dennis had said
about Gadden telephoning Beverly.

He listened, looking
expressionlessly at her through his round tortoiseshell glasses. “And?”

"Well, I don’t know. I mean,
I thought you ought to know," she said lamely.

"Why?"

"Well, Seb Browne and
Beverly were investigating Gadden, too? Like you."

Across the square a flock of
pigeons rose in noisy, flapping unison. "You know what you just implied,
don't you?"

She felt awkward. She hadn't
wanted to suggest anything. Putting thoughts into words made them more real.
"Well, think about it! Two people are killed in an accident on a straight,
empty road shortly after they discover something potentially damaging about
someone very, to use your own word, 'powerful'."

"Coincidence."

"As a journalist I don't
think I believe in coincidence."

"Why? Because it kills too
many good stories?” he teased.

"Bear with me. Supposing that
very powerful somebody, or someone working for him, wanted to shut Beverly and
Seb up before they could repeat a damaging allegation."

"Ah! Conspiracy now."

She couldn't win. "And as a
former historian I should beware of conspiracy theories too, right?"

Greg looked at her. "Think
about it, Kate. Do you really believe that a man who’s given millions to
charity, who is universally loved, could really be involved? I mean, the guy
might be a monster in his personal life and a fetishist in bed. But even if he
had some motive we don't know about, how do you stage-manage a murder to look
like an accident in the middle of Ireland
when you're in Cornwall?
Didn't the Irish police say they found nothing mechanically wrong with the
car?"

She nodded.

He summed up. "I know a lot
of people think he's God, although personally I still prefer Eric Clapton…but
not even Jesse Gadden could have masterminded this.”

She stared out across the piazza
for a long moment. “You’re right. I’m going mad. They'll lock me up again.
Throw away the key next time."

"Probably," Greg
smiled.

 
Out on the cobbles a young harlequin had now replaced
the clarinet player, and was juggling yellow and blue skittles high into the
sky.

"Not that Gadden doesn’t run
a weird organisation,” Greg suddenly added.

Kate looked up.
”

 
"I’ve been digging around. All his lawyers,
accountants, marketing and publicity people are the best professionals money
can buy. And they’re all very straight. But in many ways they're outsiders
themselves."

"To the Glee Club...?"

He nodded. “Those kids are like a
praetorian guard, involved in everything.”

"I thought they just fetched
and carried."

"They do. But they're also Gadden's
eyes and ears, keeping watch on what the professionals are up to. They're like
courtiers to the king and the Stasi all rolled into one. They even spy on each
other.”

Courtiers to the king, Kate
thought, and pictured the eager, young faces at Haverhill, who had switched off their charm
so abruptly. "Have you found anyone who’ll talk?”

"None of the professionals.
They've got absurdly lucrative contracts with Gadden and they don't want to
lose them. And those who've split with him have hefty loyalty pensions which
stop if they say anything.”

She’d anticipated that.

“But…if you put up enough signals
you always get something back. And a guy I know had a night or two with a boy
from the Glee Club a few months ago, which, by the way, isn't allowed."

"Being gay?"

"Fraternising with anyone
outside the organisation. Apparently it's seen as a sign of disloyalty. They even
have to room together in apartments Gadden owns."

Kate grimaced. "Christ! Can
you imagine, everyone smiling all the time and playing those bloody records!"

"Unfortunately, yes,"
said Greg. Then fishing in his bag, he produced an envelope and shook it. A small
square photograph dropped out, one of the sort taken in an automatic passport
photo kiosk. It showed a good looking young man with shoulder length fair hair,
staring confidently into the camera. "This is the guy, Hans Overmars, and he's
a mad Jesse Gadden fan but currently a reluctant semi-member of the Glee Club.
Apparently he's disillusioned with the whole scene and wants to leave, but
they're making it very difficult."

"In what way?"

"Psychological pressures,
putting up endless barriers, telling him how Jesse relies on him, how much he's
an essential part of the team, and how bad he must feel letting everyone down. He's
moved out, but even now they want him back, phone calls, visits… And because he
still worships Gadden he's being torn apart."

“They sound like the Moonies.”

“Worse from what I hear.”

"Why does he want to leave
if he's such a big fan?"

"Something to do with
discipline, and maybe some unfulfilled expectations. He thought he'd be getting
into a wild scene, mountains of drugs, wall-to-wall sex, all that rock and roll
legend stuff. But apparently Gadden runs a pretty tight ship. It seems the only
one there to get any kind of action is Jesse himself. Of course Overmars is
said to blame all the others for keeping him and Jesse apart."

Kate's brows knitted.
“Any kind of action!”
 
Was that what she was supposed to have been? Some
kind of action. "Can I talk to Hans Overmars?"

"I'm trying to arrange
it." Greg took the photograph back. "He's difficult to pin down. Does
the clubs a lot. Takes all that walk on the wild side stuff to heart. I'll give
you a call when he surfaces."

"Great!" She checked
her watch. She was already late. "I have to go."

"Me, too." He finished
his coffee. "And in the meantime, a word of warning..."

"Yes?"

"Keep away from the loonies
on the internet. They can damage your health."

“I’ll do that.”

They looked back across the
street as they waited for the bill. Having failed to draw an audience with the
skittles, the harlequin was now entertaining a group of Japanese tourists with
the three card trick. He was a bright button of a boy, laughing winningly as he
moved the cards around.

"Can you believe that,"
Greg said, as the tourists tried and failed to spot the queen. "They know
they're being manipulated..."

"...they just can't see how
he's doing it."
 

She got her hair cut at lunch
time. Greg had made her feel better, so on a whim she went to a new place in Butler’s Wharf and came
back with an urchin cut. Della, from make-up, said she wished she'd warn her
when she was going to do these things, but she was complimented by everybody
else. Even Ned grinned and said, "Well, well", which was his way of
expressing approval.

The rest of the day was spent
with the researchers planning the following morning's scheduled live
interviews. Around her it was the usual steady newsroom tide as information ebbed
and flowed over the hours. There was even another mad letter from the tyre
salesman in Damascus
in the afternoon post. It went straight into the bin this time. She'd had
enough of fans who fancied her.

She was home by six. Jeroboam was
waiting on her doorstep, holding a letter inviting him to attend for interview
at the Wellington Hotel the following day. He'd shaved off his burgeoning
moustache and was looking altogether more grown up. He giggled when he saw her
hair. She took that as approval.

Because he was always hungry she
grilled him some chicken (with chips, of course: he always wanted chips) and then,
sitting together at her kitchen table, they discussed the interview.

"Best not to fake it if you
don't know the answer to something they ask you," she advised. "They
nearly always guess."

He nodded gravely. She didn't
tell him that she'd spent the best part of her television career faking
knowledge she didn't have and getting away with it. Jeroboam's best bet was his
guilelessness.

"Just be yourself," she
insisted. "And don't forget to clean your teeth before you leave
home."

He promised he wouldn’t forget.

I'm just like a mother, she
thought, nag, nag, nag. But she was always pleased to see him. For years she’d
run around the world chasing events, seeing less and less of old friends, and
then not wanting them to visit when she was in hospital. Then, there was
Jeroboam, someone who needed helping. As she sat watching him eat, his boyish
excitement visible, she smiled to herself. Who was helping whom?

She was out in the street wishing
him luck when she heard the phone ringing. When she got back into the house Greg
was leaving a message.

"It's tonight," he told
her. “Hans Overmars will be in a bar called Danton's in Kentish Town
at midnight. He wants to talk.”

"Tonight! So soon!" She
winced with frustration. She had to be up at dawn for the morning show and
would need to be in bed by ten or she'd look terrible on screen. "I'm
sorry, Greg. It's too late. Can't it be earlier or some time tomorrow?"

"I don't think so. He's been
hard to get hold of."

"Blast!"

"Sorry,” Greg said. “Never
mind, I’ll use this meeting to get to know him, soften him up. Is there
anything specific you want to know?”

Kate thought quickly: “A list of
Glee Club members and their backgrounds would be interesting? Can he get us
that?"

"I don’t know. From what he
was saying on the phone I got the impression he reckons most of them are
drop-outs, ex-junkies and hopeless cases who gravitate towards Gadden because
he seems so strong and they like being told what to do.”

So much for Petra Kerinova's
careful recruitment policy, Kate thought.

"Anyway, let's see what he
has to say. If he's as good as he sounds maybe we can all meet later in the
week when you can be there, too. Okay?”

"Okay!"

They were about to hang up when
Greg’s voice suddenly lightened. "And, hey, guess what! Harry's coming
home from Stockholm
tomorrow. He's given up his job. Says he misses me. He called this
morning."

"That'll be nice. Keep you
out of trouble, too."

Greg laughed. "That's for
sure. Anyway, speak to you tomorrow with more news."

And they rang off.

She
was
in bed by ten. It was frustrating that she couldn’t be in
Danton’s to meet Overmars, but Greg was a good reporter, he’d know what to ask.
Besides it might be better if she gave them some time together. If the guy was
nervous he might take some persuading.

She purposely hadn’t checked for
new messages on the internet. Greg was right. Those freaks could mess up her
mind.