Kill For Love (27 page)

Chapter
Forty Eight

The bodies were lying, not quite
together, just behind the spot where Gadden had been performing, his guitar
still around his neck, but now crushed under him. None of the musicians or
floor assistants had yet approached; as though this had been the domestic
arrangement of a god and it wasn't their place to interfere.

Kate had seen blood before, but
the volume always surprised. Gadden's cream silk smock was now patterned
brilliant red at the collar and shoulders. Alongside the bodies the white roses
were stained.

This had been his ultimate spectacular.
To go out at the pinnacle of success, to freeze the moment before illness and
madness caught up with him. Except madness already had: perhaps it had always
been there.

Yet there must have been a
terrible anger and bitterness, too. It hadn’t been enough to simply end his own
life. He’d wanted to take others with him, to put others to sleep as well. Like
the Sandman.
 
 

She forced herself to look at
what was left of his face. This was the man she'd wanted to make love to her,
but who had been responsible for the deaths of her friends. One of his eyes was
still there, still open, but, she noticed, it was dark grey in colour. Then she
saw why. A deep blue contact lens was lying on his cheek, stuck there by a spec
of blood. Even his famous eyes had been a lie.

He'd been beautiful in life, but
there was no beauty in his death. One side of his head and the bottom half of
his face, the beautiful mouth that had sung so plaintively, had ceased to
exist.

She turned away. She’d failed to
stop him.

Across the cinema a series of screams
had begun, wails of abandonment. Some young people had just lost their reason
for living.

The cinema’s house lights were
now coming on and chaos was escalating as the rows of seats began to empty in
squalls of growing hysteria. A cameraman was sitting with his head between his
hands, but a dozen or more members of the Glee Club hadn’t moved. It was as if they
were waiting to be told what to do. Elizabeth McDonagh simply looked puzzled.

Slowly Stefano and Kish approached the
bodies, staring in disbelief. With Gadden they’d been strong, even frightening.
Without him they were just two unemployed heavies.

 
From a fire exit, now open to the street, she
could hear approaching police and ambulance sirens. She forced her way out. She
needed fresh air.

The crowds outside were in a
tumult of confusion as the audience joined them in the rain. "Is it true?
Is it true?" asked a middle aged woman.

"It's true," she said.

“But is it true?” the same woman
repeated, unable to believe.

A scrum of bystanders was
surrounding a figure on the ground. A flood of blood was running along the
pavement. She pushed through. A policewoman was on her knees, gripping the bare
arm of a young man and tying a tourniquet around it, the face on his Jesse
Gadden T-shirt almost blotted out by his blood. It was Peter, the friendly
studio assistant. He’d cut his wrist.

“Die for love…”

More police arrived, pushing her
away into the crowd.

At the side of one of the outside
broadcast vans the girl who’d been monitoring the concert was sitting on the
ground, her computer still in her lap.

“It didn’t go out,” she was
murmuring repeatedly to a colleague. “The website changed…just before…before
the end… I don’t know what happened.”

Kate stopped. “What was that?”

“It somehow changed…in the
chanting…the website changed…”

Kate looked at the girl’s laptop
screen. The face on it was her own, as she’d been filmed that morning in Frank
Teischer’s editing suite.

Gadden’s website was streaming
her report.

“It didn’t go out?”

“Not the end…not the…” The girl
put her head in her hands in confusion.

Kate stared again at the screen.
Chris Zeff. It had to have been him. She’d given him the DVD of her report and
asked him to hack into Gadden’s website and disable it. He’d gone a step
further. He’d begun streaming her report instead.
 

"Kate, Kate!" Someone
was calling to her through the crowd, then physically dragging her away. It was
the WSN cameraman Tom Adams who'd covered the Hyde Park
concert. His camera was on his shoulder. He handed her a microphone and an earpiece.
"We've got a live feed.”

“What?”

 
“They're waiting for you."

She stared numbly into the camera
as she attached the earpiece.

A familiar voice came into her
ear. It was Fraser. "All right, Kate. This is your story. Let's have
it."

She swallowed, and hesitated.

"Come on, Kate," Fraser
hurried her. “We’re waiting.”

Chapter
Forty Nine

November 4:

“Guess what, Kate! You’re on
YouTube!” The speaker was Jeroboam. It was six in the evening. She’d only just
turned her phone on again.

 
“What?” she groaned.

“It’s some programme you made
about Jesse Gadden. It’s all over the internet and on YouTube.”

“On
YouTube
! Well, if I’m on YouTube I must be very important now.”

“I think so,” he said and rang
off.

She lay in bed collecting her
thoughts. She’d been up all night, at first reporting live from the Pavilion Picture Palace,
then later on air at WSN, as news of Gadden’s death had wrapped itself around
the world. By the morning, with nearly forty eight hours without sleep, she’d
been close to collapse, and, after being interviewed by a contrite Robin
Broomfield on the Breakfast Show, had been driven home.

Now, as she re-ran the events of
the previous night in her mind, questions she hadn’t had time to consider
before returned. Had Gadden intended to kill her in that moment on stage? She’d
thought he’d been about to. But, if so, why had he changed his mind? Or was it
that, having secured her to witness his final act, he’s simply been playing
with her for one last time?

She was still exhausted, but she
was a journalist, there was work to do. Getting out of bed she called Chris
Zeff’s number. She’d tried to reach him during the night, but his mobile had
been switched off. It still was. She left another message.

She was showered, dressed and in
her study looking through and playing back dozens of emails and voicemails when
he returned her call. He was back in Cambridge,
lying low, and adamant that she had nothing to thank him for.

“I think a lot of parents have
quite a lot to thank you for,” she said, the stricken image of Donna Hallsden’s
father in her mind.

“It was a no-brainer when I saw
the disc you gave me.”

“But you said it was virtually
impossible to take over a website?”

“Impossible for me to do it so
quickly.”

“But you
did
do it
.”

He hesitated. “Ah…not only me.”

“You had help?”

“I have friends…”

“You mean other hackers?”

“Other
ethical
hackers,” he stressed. “We had a wrecking crew on the case
in no time when I put the word out.”

“And still, you only just made
it.
 
Another few seconds and…”

“I think one of our friends was a
bit of a Jesse Gadden fan,” he said easily. “She was enjoying the show and
didn’t want us to take it off too soon.”

 
She didn’t believe him. He was just making
light of everything. He was a strange, modest and brilliant guy. When she’d
first met him she’d thought he was slightly dippy. Now he seemed to be one of
the best adjusted people she knew.

“Anyway,” he was saying, “I can’t
talk now. Zena and I are due at our pub quiz. It’s the finals in our league, so
it’s a big night for us!”

“Good luck,” Kate wished as he
rang off, although she doubted he’d need it. Then she got ready to go to the
studio where the Metropolitan Police wished to interview her.

“Apparently they want to know how
your programme ended up on Jesse Gadden’s website,” an email from Fraser had
already warned her.

She wouldn’t be telling them.

During the following days she was
rarely off camera for more than a few hours as every news report added some
extra twist and WSN-TV wanted a further comment from her. In a single night the
legend had been destroyed. Overnight the man universally adored had become the
bogeyman.
“PIED PIPER OF DEATH,"
screamed
several of the tabloids,
“SANDMAN WHO PUT
HIS FANS TO SLEEP,”
registered
The
Times
less hysterically.

There was, however, no epidemic
of murders or suicides, no one-in-a-million killings in the name of love or preserving
the perfect moment of happiness. Nobody would ever know how effective Jesse
Gadden’s last message might have been because, thanks to Chris Zeff and his
hacker friends, nobody had heard it beyond the Pavilion Picture
Palace.

Peter, the studio technician, had
heard it and acted on it. He’d bled to death in the ambulance on his way to
hospital. And a close watch was being kept on several other vulnerable members
of the Glee Club who’d been present at the concert, after the freckled Swedish
girl, Agnieta, only just survived an overdose. Some of them, it was said, would
require psychiatric counselling for years.

Meanwhile, as the world’s media
pursued every detail of Gadden’s life, all other traces of his existence were
being quickly removed. It was, Kate thought, like witnessing the downfall of a
dictator. The first thing to go was the Jesse Gadden website. Then there was his
music. Though photographs of him dominated the news stands, the aural magic
that Greg had talked about was silenced. As his records were taken off radio
playlists, racks of CDs pulled from stores and his entire canon deleted from
iTunes, Christie’s were hurriedly withdrawing an old Gadden guitar from a rock
memorabilia auction. No-one wanted to be accused of doing anything to contribute
to murder or suicide. And who could say what triggers might still be lurking in
those songs?

The pace of the reverse was startling.
Within hours of the shootings inquiries had begun in London,
New Hampshire, Ireland
and Maine, Elizabeth McDonagh was being held
at a secure hospital, and reporters from all over Europe had joined Natalie
Streub in Tallinn
sifting through the mental health records of Petra Kerinova. While in Japan
police had re-opened enquiries into the deaths of three schoolgirls, murdered
by a classmate as they slept in their dormitory. It had happened just after the
girl had listened to Gadden’s Hyde Park
concert on her computer.

No one doubted that there would
be other enquiries about unexplained deaths as the weeks passed. And as anxious
parents began flying into London
to seek drop-out offspring among the now abandoned members of the Glee Club, Phil
Bailey, called to say that the marble angel over Sister Grace's grave had been
removed on the instructions of Tom and Nancy Cleary. Stefano and Kish had, not
surprisingly, disappeared. They’d probably never understood what they’d been
involved in.

Everywhere fans were now
disowning the man who had so recently mesmerised them, even Kate’s sister in
law, Nell, sending her a short, embarrassed note thanking her for making her
“grow up and see sense”.
 

One afternoon Detective Sergeant
Cotton phoned Kate at WSN to say that the investigations into the deaths of
Greg Passfield and Hans Overmars were being broadened.

"I thought you’d decided it
was a straight forward gay killing," she chivvied.

"It was a sex crime,"
Cotton came back.

"It was an execution made to
look like a sex crime," she replied, though only Greg would have known
what he was doing undressing and getting into a bath in the presence of Hans
Overmars.

Out of curiosity she logged on to
a Jesse Gadden chatroom one night. Most of the conversations were sad, friends
saying goodbye to each other as though the writers were closing a door on
youth. But some were disturbing.

"If that Merrimac bitch
hadn't interfered, Jesse would have still been alive today," one had
written, misunderstanding completely the reasons for his suicide.

"Or we'd have been with him,
too," came another, wistfully.

She didn't respond, nor did she
when, as analysis followed shock, the young psychologist Sadie Kupfermann,
grabbed a chance at early celebrity, wondering publically if the Gadden
phenomenon didn’t also tell us something about the modern desire to stay young.

“All of us, rock stars
particularly, face the problem in that there’s always going to be a new kid in
town,” she said on the BBC’s
Newsnight
.
“In Gadden’s case he was facing a terminal illness which would first have taken
his looks and then his talent. By doing it his way he stays forever young.”

It made for good headlines the
following day, as elsewhere psychiatrists were writing of how Gadden had “shown
every classic sign of narcissistic, neurotic obsession”, something no-one had
thought to mention before his suicide.

Maybe, Kate thought, maybe…and wondered
what her father would have said. She’d watched Jesse Gadden kill himself, but
already she felt as though she was seeing him from a distance. If in life his
contradictions had made him difficult to explain, in death he was impossible.

Back at her desk at WSN,
colleagues were leaning over backwards to be nice to her, with perhaps the
exception of Hilly Weston, who, it was rumoured, was being poached by CNN, and
would soon be leaving.

The thought of leaving WSN
crossed Kate’s mind, too. Right now she was hot. Offers from rival news
stations were getting through to her.

Fraser pre-empted that decision
over lunch one day. “We’ve been thinking, Kate. How would Southern African
Correspondent suit? Based in Johannesburg.
There’s going to be a lot of news down there in the next couple of years.”

“You mean you don’t think I take
unacceptable risks in pursuit of stories any more,” she goaded.

He just smiled.

For the usual week in any major
news story Jesse Gadden filled the newspapers and TV schedules, before,
inevitably, interest moved on. Kate was relieved when it happened. It was, she
felt, as though she was finally being set free from an obsession. She could now
admit that to herself. That is what Gadden had become.

Determined to enjoy a little bit
of normality in London
before she went away again, she invited her family over for dinner. That
necessitated a trip to the supermarket. Jeroboam was waiting for her, chatting
to Lois Mott on the pavement outside her house, when she got back.

 
"I was just saying to Jeroboam that you
never know the power there is in music, do you?" her neighbour gushed as
Kate climbed out of the Citroen.

"Evidently not," Kate
said, glancing at Jeroboam in surprise at this new display of friendliness.

"I mean, it makes you wonder
if it's safe to listen to anything, doesn’t it. They'll be finding a message in
the national anthem soon.” And with a special smile for Jeroboam she hurried
off to her car.

 
"I may have to have a word with you about
the company you've begun keeping," Kate chided as Jeroboam helped her
carry her bags into the house.

"Oh, she's not so bad when
you get to know her," he said, his brown putty face breaking into the
widest grin.

What’s happened to the boy who
was almost too shy to speak, she thought, as she made the tea, and he told her
all about his job at the hotel…who’d been nice to him and what tips he'd been
given. There was even talk of him being sent on a computer course if he did
well.

“Go for it,” she insisted.

He said he would.

She'd bought him a new reading
book,
Bill And Harry: A Big Day Out
,
an account of a trip to Wembley for the FA Cup Final, which, apart from a
couple of less familiar words, he raced through. Suddenly these two fictional
characters were much too young for him. The penny's dropped, she thought.

He guessed what she was thinking,
and he smiled.

She’d been apprehensive about
telling him that she would be soon going to South Africa, but when she did he
surprised her.

“That’ll be great, Kate. I can
email you and tell you how I’m getting on here and you can tell me about what
you’re doing there.”

 
“Right. And try not to use the spell check
until you get to the end of the email. Then see what words you got wrong and
correct them,” she advised, perhaps a little bossily.

“Is that what you do?”

“Yes, that’s what I do,” she
smiled. She was going to miss this breath of innocence in her life.

When he’d gone she spent a
thoughtful afternoon preparing dinner for her family. Something had happened to
her during her Gadden investigation. Her early morning nightmares about Owoso
had ended. The massacre would have happened whether or not she and a camera team
had been present, she’d accepted, if not theatrically, in the full view of
world television, then, probably just as bloodily, around the backs of the
bungalows and in the forest.

There would be times when a
camera acted as a spur to violence, particularly in these days of the internet
when every kid with a mobile phone could see himself as a movie director. But
there would be many occasions, too, when the possibility of being caught on
camera would act as a deterrent for those intent on violence.

She still thought about the
President’s wife, the child bride with the Cartier Tank watch and the expensive
blue-trimmed new trainers who’d been raped and then shot. She always would. But
she wouldn’t go on reproaching herself. It hadn’t been her fault.