Kill For Love (22 page)

Chapter Thirty Nine

The door clicked shut behind her
as she stepped back into the corridor. She waited, listening. There was
nothing. Her bag was heavier now. It contained half a dozen DVDs taken from
Jesse Gadden’s personal library.

Silently she headed back to the
staircase. At the fourth step she stopped. There were voices from the hall
below. She pushed herself against the wall. The words "loose feed"
and "too much reverb" reached her. A couple of studio technicians
were discussing a technical problem. She recognised the voice of one: it was
Peter, the young assistant recording engineer she’d met on her night at the
studio.

 
"Hang on a minute, I'll take a look."
Footsteps began to climb the staircase.

 
She fled, not back the way she'd come, but at
right angles, across to the opposite end of the wing, running, virtually silently
in her trainers, choosing corridors and flights of stairs at random, wandering
ever deeper into the back of the main house.

Reaching a narrow corridor, she
came to some double doors. Carefully she inched them open, then stopped in
surprise. She was in a large storeroom, a vast grotto, stuffed with everything
Jesse Gadden. There were silk stage costumes hanging in rows on hangers, shoes,
scarves, posters, guitars, and boxes of CDs and DVDs. From every wall
photographs of Gadden seemed to watch her. Delicately she moved through the
room, stepping around the embroidery of rock fame.

A slight cough from behind a life-sized,
stand-alone photograph of Gadden made her start. She edged forward.

A woman, wearing a pale blue
dressing gown, was sitting on the side of an upturned packing case, rocking backwards
and forwards, arms clasped around her body, listening to something on
earphones. In front of her, placed neatly on a large cardboard box, were five
empty paper cups, an old tea pot and an empty milk bottle. Seeing Kate, she
smiled.

It was the woman Kate had seen
cutting sunflowers on her first visit. But this time she knew who she was.

"I'd ask you to stay for a
cup of tea, if you don't mind waiting for the children. They'll be home from
school soon," the woman said matter-of-factly, removing the earphones.

Kate moved closer. It was a
dolls' tea party without the dolls.

The woman turned her head to one
side, listening hard. "Is that them coming? Can you hear them? No? I keep
thinking I can hear the bus outside in the road."

"Elizabeth? Elizabeth McDonagh?"

"Oh, I think you can call me
Liz. Everybody else does. Apart from Jim. He calls me Lizzy sometimes. Skinny
Lizzy when I go on a diet and get too thin." She chuckled to herself.
"He doesn't like it."

"Liz!”

Elizabeth McDonagh nodded
agreeably. "Like I said, they'll be here soon. They'll be wanting their
tea, I expect. Hungry after a hard day at school."

"What are you doing here,
Liz?"

A cloud of uncertainty crossed
the woman's face. "They'll be home soon," she repeated.

"Do you know where you are?
Who's house this is?"

"It's our house, of course!
Jim's and mine. And the Abbey National’s, of course. We needed the four
bedrooms when the youngest came along. We thought it was best if they could
each have their own bedroom. Somewhere for them to do their homework."

Quietly Kate was taking the
camera out of her bag as Liz McDonagh talked.

She noticed. "Ah, Jim bought
a camcorder last summer. We went to Italy and made our own video diary.
It'll be nice to look back on when the children are grown up."

The camera began to turn.

"They should be here soon.
We'd better wait for them..." She was becoming agitated.

"Why did you do it,
Liz?" Kate asked, the camera held just below her face, still focused.

Liz McDonagh looked puzzled, as
though the answer was self-evident. "He told me, too."

"Who told you to?"

"Jesse, of course." A
little smile of pleasure lit up at the excuse to say the name.

"Jesse told you to?"

Another smile, a finger to her
lips. "It's a secret."

"How did Jesse tell you,
Liz?"

"How?"

"How did he tell you to do
it?"

Liz McDonagh giggled slightly and
indicated her iPod.

Taking the player, Kate put a
headphone to her ear.

“Come go with me,”
Gadden was singing.

 
"I don't understand," Kate said.
"How did Jesse tell you to do those things? I can't hear him saying that."

Elizabeth McDonagh smiled
secretively. “He doesn't want everyone to hear it. Not yet. He will soon. But
it's just for the special ones now."

"And everyone else...when
will they hear it?”

“Soon. He says soon…very soon…”
Her voice faded as she became distracted.

Outside it was getting lighter.
Kate couldn’t risk staying any longer. "I've got to go now, Liz," she
said.

Disappointment crossed the other
woman's face. "They'll be home any minute. Can't you wait? No, well,
another day. They'll be sorry they missed you. There must be something on.
Games, I expect, or perhaps music or play practice…"

"I expect so," Kate
said sadly.

But Liz McDonagh was no longer
listening. Picking up the earphones, she immersed herself back into the music.

Kate backed away from her and
moved on through the room. At the door she looked back. Liz McDonagh was still
sitting there, checking the empty tea pot again, and waiting into eternity for
the children she'd murdered to come home from school.

Kate switched off the camera.

There were two staircases beyond
the store room: a wide sweeping one, and a modest spiral down the back of the
house. She chose the latter. It took her to a ground floor passageway alongside
the kitchen, from where she could hear a murmur of conversation. A rear door
there opened on to the garden. It was bolted at the top and bottom. The lower
bolt slid back easily. The top one was stiff. She needed more leverage. A three
legged stool stood by a wall. Placing it in front of the door she climbed on to
it and put all her weight against the bolt.

This time it did move: too
quickly. As she lost her balance the stool shot from beneath her and clattered across
the stone flags of the floor.

She wasn't hurt. But had someone
heard? She didn’t wait to find out. Opening the door she stepped out into the
garden, quickly heading back behind the stables to the path which had brought
her. It was light now and she could see a security camera by the weather cock
on the roof of the stable block sweeping the back of the house. She hesitated
at the end of a wall, waited for it to pass, and then she ran.

It was over half a mile back to
the gate, but, her camera bag over one shoulder, she began covering the
distance quickly. She'd always been a good runner. She'd approached the house
slowly and carefully, now she just wanted to get away. Her luck had held for
too long. It had to end soon.
 

She was right. With a hundred
yards to go, the howl of a siren cut across the length of the estate, a World
War Two alarm, which made her heart leap with shock and sent the ponies
galloping around the pasture.

She ran faster, glancing back as
she went. She could see people hurrying from the house, pointing towards her.
Dogs were barking excitedly, being let off their leashes. One was already
racing after her.

She reached the gate. Her fingers
were clumsy as they keyed in the figures. “
1967
.”
Nothing happened. Had an automatic lock been activated? She looked back. The
first dog, a large Alsatian, was now bulleting down the path.

"
1967
," she repeated. “Come on.” And keyed again.
One-nine-six-seven.

The dog, its slack lips drawn
back behind its teeth, was almost on her.

“Please...!” she heard herself
gasp.

With a buzz the gate opened, and,
pushing through, she immediately slammed it hard closed behind her, smashing it
into the jaws of the Alsatian. The dog leapt back with a howl.

But she was already running, back
along the side of the estate wall, up on to the road, across it and down
through the fir plantation to her car.

Racing back through the woods, the
Citroën slithered on the thick carpet of old pine needles as it went. At the
road she hit the brakes.

The Haverhill Jeep was speeding
towards her down the lane. To try to outrun it in twisting lanes that she
didn't know would be risking disaster. She made a decision. Driving on to the
road she turned towards the oncoming vehicle and accelerated. She recognised
the driver coming at her: it was Brendan, the guy who ran the estate. The
Chinese American girl from the kitchens was at his side.

She steered straight at them.

The Jeep gave way first, braking
at the last moment, a reflex action. Pulling around it, Kate ripped on to the
grass verge. Mud flew from the Citroën’s wheels. But then she was through and on
to the open road beyond. Behind her the Jeep was stranded, facing in the wrong
direction.

Accelerating hard, she raced away
past the main Haverhill
gates. If there were any other pursuers, she didn't see them.

Chapter
Forty

She put sixty miles between
herself and Haverhill
before she dared stop, and then it was to refill with petrol at a service
station. On the forecourt she went to a payphone and asked to be put through to
the West Midlands Police.

"I thought you should know
that Elizabeth McDonagh, who you've been looking for in connection with the
deaths of her family, is living at a house owned by the singer Jesse Gadden at Haverhill in Cornwall,"
she told them. "She's very confused and needs care."

"Who is that
calling...?" The police operator began.

She didn't answer. Hanging up,
she returned to her car.

Frank Teischer was waiting for
her at his Mount Venus editing suite. “You’re not going
to like what’s on them,” Kate warned as she handed him the DVDs she’d taken
from Haverhill.

“That’s okay. How’s your story
coming?”

“I’m getting closer.”

He raised a slightly questioning
eyebrow.

She knew that expression. How
many times had reporters said that to him when they were struggling to make
sense of a piece?

“Okay. Let me log all this into
the system. The recording of your friend Greg interviewing Overmars is in a
sound lab at Pinewood. A pal of mine is seeing if he can clean it up. It’s safe
with him. Now, if I were you, I’d go and get some sleep. We’ve got a busy day
tomorrow.”

She agreed, and left him to his
work. She needed sleep, but more than that she needed time to think.

The image of Elizabeth McDonagh
sitting in the Haverhill storeroom at her dolls’
tea-party had tormented her all day as she’d driven back from Cornwall. Jesse Gadden had given her the
message to kill in a song, the woman had told her. Was that even remotely
possible?

She was almost back at her car
when she got a call on her mobile.

It was her sister-in-law, Helen.
“Hi, Kate. The social psychologist who specialises in music you asked for…I’ve
got her. They say she does her best research at rock festivals and raves, so
don’t you dare tell my daughter I put you on to her or she’ll want to be her
assistant. Give her a call now. She’s waiting to hear from you.”

Looking much like the earnest student
she must recently have been, Dr Sadie Kupfermann, small with bobbed black hair,
and wearing glasses with a blue tint, jeans and a faded Arctic Monkeys
sweatshirt, peered at Kate. "The thing about music,” she began, “is that
it’s so much a part of being human, that we take it for granted and very rarely
ask the why and the how of it.”

“You mean, we don’t question what
it’s for?” Kate said. Told that she could be squeezed in between tutorials for
a quick background briefing, she’d driven immediately to the young academic’s
cramped office in one of the Georgian cross streets near London’s
University College. She hadn’t told her the exact
nature of the programme she was working on.

“That’s right! As in why we have
music, what it’s for, and how it does what it does to us.” On a wall behind her
was a large poster of Beyonce: on another, one of Mozart. “Most people think of
music simply as entertainment, but many of us now believe it may have started
out as another form of communication, a parallel language, if you like. In
fact, there are some who think it may even have pre-dated speech or perhaps
have been a primitive kind of speech in that different notes had, and still
have, different values and therefore meanings.”

“A parallel language?” Kate
questioned.

 
"Well, yes. A scream is basically the
high note we make when we are afraid, but we also find that an upward key
change in a popular song or a high D sung by a soprano in an opera can make the
hairs on the backs of our necks stand on end. So some messages are being
physically passed on simply by the notes we use or hear.

“At its most obvious, of course,
music communicates to us through our emotions, in that it can, for instance,
encourage us to feel patriotic during the
Last
Night of the Proms
, send regiments to war with a marching band, or unite us
behind our favourite football team, as we see when we watch football supporters
singing
You’ll Never Walk Alone.
It
can also relax us when we’re nervous at the dentist, lull the baby to sleep,
help teach small children to talk through nursery rhymes, and provide a rhythm
for us to dance to, therefore helping us find a sexual partner. Some music
helps us feel romantic, while minor chords can make us feel sad. On top of that
it's also a short cut to our memories. As everyone knows, a few notes played in
a certain sequence can instantly reduce us to tears. All that suggests to me a
parallel language.”

Kate nodded, aware that she was
hearing an edited lecture, and came quickly to the point. “So, if music can
change the way we feel, does it also mean it could be used to manipulate
us?"

Dr Kupfermann smiled. "As a
back-up technique it obviously
does
help
manipulate us to some extent, which is why music is played in TV commercials
and in supermarkets and in movies when the makers want to reinforce the mood of
a scene. One of my colleagues says that when he was a little boy the theme from
Jaws
used to frighten him, although
he hadn’t seen the film. And the music played over the shower scene in
Psycho
can be terrifying if you know the
context in which it’s being used. And yet it’s really only a few notes…”

“But what about something more
than that? Can music dictate to us…tell us what to do?”

The psychologist sipped water
from a bottle before answering. "Well, anthropologists have found
countless examples of tribes where music is used to create a trance like state,
brainwashing, you might say…where people lose control of their minds and bodies
and become suggestible. Warriors would sing songs and do war dances before
taking on impossible odds, so obviously music was being used there to create an
unnatural mental state.

“We see it in some churches, too,
where fundamentalist preachers arouse their congregations to such a pitch of
excitement that some people go into fits. There’s even said to be music on
videos used as recruiting tools by some jihadist suicide groups. And I remember
Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits saying that rock stars purposely bring down the
excitement level of audiences before they finish a set, because some fans might
be dangerous if sent out without being calmed down."

Kate was glad it was the
psychologist who had mentioned rock stars. “So are you saying that music can be
powerful enough to provoke violence?”

Sadie Kupfermann wouldn’t be led.
“I’m saying it’s possible. We know there are certain chords than can provoke
nausea. And music has certainly been used as a torture. The repeated loud
playing of the same song can drive people literally to distraction. In Panama
they managed to get President Noriega to surrender by playing him hard rock
records all day and night. And wasn’t Metallica used as one of the tortures at Guantanamo Bay? There’s even said to be a really
deep chord that can kill when played.” Suddenly she grinned.
 
“And, of course, Joshua played his ram horn
at Jericho ‘
and the walls came tumblin’ down’
.”
 

It was all so cosy and friendly, sitting
here in this little room with this pleasant young woman and her posters, CDs,
books and roller skates behind the door. But then Kate thought about Elizabeth
McDonagh and her dead family and remembered Donna Hallsden with her brains
blown across a New Hampshire
hillside and the fathers who just couldn’t understand why. "What about
using hypnosis with music?” she asked.

This drew a frown. "Well, hypnosis
isn't really my area, but I suppose I can envisage a situation where certain
kinds of music might play a role in helping generate trance-like suggestibility
in some people. We know it can lead to hallucinations in certain situations.”

"Aural magic," said
Kate suddenly. The words had come out without thinking.

"I'm sorry?"

"A friend of mine had a
theory. He thought it possible that some singers might make sounds which
trigger primeval responses, that primitive holy men may have had a touch of
this and that was what made them powerful. And that some rock singers have it,
too."

Dr Kupfermann beamed: “I like the
sound of this. I'm sure it's impossible to prove, but it's an interesting idea.
Perhaps your friend should give me a call."

Kate's voice dropped. "I'm
sorry, I should have said. Greg was... He's dead.”

"Oh. I'm so sorry."

The interview had stopped. Kate
felt the hollow of bereavement. Greg would have been thrilled to think that an
academic was intrigued by his idea.

From outside in the street she
could hear students milling about changing classes. She had one last question.
"Suppose continuous listening to one singer could, in the right
circumstances, lead to a kind of trance-like state, would it be possible for
some people in such a trance to be persuaded to act against their better
judgement…to kill, for instance?”

This was too far. "I’m
sorry. You're piling hypothesis upon hypothesis.”

 
"I know. But is it conceivable?”

"Well, I suppose
theoretically it might be, if we accept the idea of hypnosis through music in
the first place. But the numbers of people who would be subject to that kind of
manipulation would, I’m sure, be very, very small.

"What do you mean by
small?"

Dr Kupfermann shrugged. "It's
impossible to say, but tiny… unmeasurable from a social psychologist's point of
view. Probably no more than one, maybe two, in a million."

"One or two in a million."

"Something like that, I
would imagine."

Outside in the street Kate
hurried through a melee of students. Turning a corner, she stopped under a
horsechestnut tree.
“Probably no more
than one or two in a million,"
she repeated to herself. The news
reports were saying that Jesse Gadden was expecting a worldwide internet
audience of over fifty million.
 

A sudden sharp gust of wind blew
a sweep of dead leaves around her ankles.

She didn’t go home. After the
events at Haverhill
who knew what might be waiting for her there? Instead she booked into a tourist
hotel in South Kensington. Her room was an
anonymous space that looked out over the backs of other tourist hotels.

She lay down on the bed for a
while, but still she couldn't rest. In the end, ordering a pot of coffee and
salad from room service, she showered, and set about turning the dressing table
into a work surface.

The message had been in the song,
Elizabeth McDonagh had said. Music could, in certain circumstances, manipulate
certain people, Sadie Kupfermann had agreed.

 
"He told me to do it…”

But how? Arranging her Jesse
Gadden albums in chronological order of release, she played them through her
laptop. The killings in New Hampshire and Birmingham had occurred
after concerts had been streamed live for sound over the internet. That was
also when the songs from Gadden’s album,
The
Sandman,
had been first played.

So?

She'd never been good at solving
puzzles. She’d never done crosswords on trains, or played Scrabble on wet
holidays. Her mind didn't work that way. All she could hear in Gadden’s songs
was a labyrinth of imagery, all tied together with a muddle of banal lyrics
that could be interpreted to mean just about anything the listener wanted them
to mean. Thousands of rock songs had harmlessly ploughed similar furrows over
the decades. What made Gadden’s songs special?