Kill For Love (12 page)

Chapter
Twenty

October 5:

They took the first flight back
to London the
following morning. They didn't talk much, busying their minds with the morning
papers. There was a photograph of Beverly
on page three of the
Irish Daily Mail
.
It must have been taken a couple of years earlier and showed a wide-eyed,
laughing college girl goofing around holding her iPod to one ear, headphones
draped over the other, a zany picture the intern had posted on
Facebook
.

At WSN they separated, Larry to
report to Fraser, Kate to pick up her car and drive home. All the way back on
the plane she’d been mentally composing a letter to Beverly’s parents, wondering just what she
could say. In her study, she now propped a coffee on the side of her desk, took
out a sheet of stationery and picked up a pen.

Words didn’t come. Beverly had been working
on a project for her. She wanted to blame herself. But Beverly’s parents had lost their daughter.
That was all they would care about.

Switching on her computer, she
went into her WSN mail and pulled out old messages that Beverly had sent her, chatty,
over-enthusiastic ones written when the girl had been compiling her Jesse
Gadden information. The ghost of her voice was in her ears as she re-read them.
“Kate, These are the best articles I
could find. By the way, if you get chance, listen to The Sandman. It’s
brilliant…”
And then another:
 
“Kate…I thought these lyrics might help… They’re
totally awesome.”

Kate’s eyes smarted
.
What was it Beverly had laughed down the phone on the
Saturday morning? “One touch and I go,” she said she’d told Seb.
Things must have moved on between them,
if they’d been planning a romantic extra night in Connemara.

And what was it Seb had written about
his chances with her? Going back to her in-box she found his last email.
“Bloody rock stars…I hope he gets foot rot…”
she read again
. “As it happens, Galway might not be a complete disaster.”
Then:
“Beverly…wants
you to know that I’m not as bad as she thought!”
 

Had she misjudged him? Beverly must have thought
so.

She’d ignored the attachment that
had come with the email, Seb’s research notes on Gadden. She hadn’t wanted to
know anything more about the singer. But for twenty four hours she’d been
trying unsuccessfully to visualise Beverly and Seb together on the Sunday
before the accident. Seb’s notes might fill in part of the picture. She clicked
to download them.

The document opened. At the top
was Gadden’s full name,
JESSE GADDEN
MONAGHAN
. Then beneath was a haphazard collection of notes, questions and
themes, together with lists of names and phone numbers, everything Seb had
considered interesting about the singer from the moment he’d begun researching
him. His reputation for committing everything to his laptop hadn’t been idly
earned. Why he’d bothered sending her his research when the interview had been
cancelled she couldn’t imagine, but for a second the piece of mangled steel
that had fallen from the burnt-out car creased a path in her memory. What she
was now seeing was probably that laptop’s last task, sent from a hotel room in
Galway while she’d been sitting on the train coming back from Cornwall.

Quickly she scrolled down the
pages. An entry headed
LOUGHREA RECORDS
caught
her eye. Beneath it was the name of Jesse Gadden’s first manager, KEVIN O’BRIEN.
She began to read.

“
PHIL BAILEY (freelances for Irish Times) says O’BRIEN was around Galway
in the nineties with Gadden, but lives in the US now. Used to run a music pub in
Rafferty St called The Crazy Horse. Made original tapes of LIVE IN GALWAY album, then issued them on LOUGHREA RECORDS, and
turned them into a fortune. Later on Gadden bought the tapes back from him. The
quiet word is O’Brien got 5 per cent of Gadden’s earnings for life, which has
made him a multi-millionaire. O’Brien is said to be the old style rock promoter,
hard living, drinking, women’s man, etc…. But couldn’t stand Petra Kerinova.”

Kate stopped reading as Kerinova’s
blank gaze slipped into her mind. Then she returned to the screen. Another name
was underlined:
MICHAEL LYNCH.

“
Petty villain and a drunk. In and out of jail. Claims he lived in the
same boys’ home as Gadden for a while and believed to be somewhere around Galway with something to sell. Probably the drink talking,
but Beverley leaving messages in all the bars for him.”

Now an image of Beverly
charming barmen across Galway presented itself.
They would have liked the willowy, chatty American.

“Limerick, Friday, 6.p.m. Visited four Catholic boys’ homes. Sketchy records.
They’ve been asked many times before and aren’t interested in talking about Gadden,
other than to say he’s been very generous to them.”

Again she skipped the details.
One item had been underlined. It was from a teacher, Brother Amedy, at a
Christian Brothers boys’ home, who’d arrived there after Gadden had moved on.
“Considering how famous Jesse Gadden is now,
as young Jesse Monaghan he seems to have been totally anonymous. He left no
trace around here.”

Despite her misgivings about him,
Kate had to be impressed by Seb’s efforts. On the Friday night, probably after Beverly had resisted his
first attempts at seduction, he’d written a late note.

“Midnight: Michael Lynch rang. Drunk. Says he wants money and has a
story ‘to rot the eyeballs’. Doesn’t sound like the sort of stuff we’re looking
for, but there’s no harm in seeing him...if he’ll ever agree to it. Beverly to try and talk to
him. She’s good at that.”

He’d then become reflective.

“Beverly
says she read that Gadden once claimed to have run away from more homes than he
can remember (Rolling Stone, about 2005). Good area for interview, maybe?”

Kate finished her coffee. It had
just begun to rain and for a moment she watched the drops running down her
study window. She was puzzled. She’d begun reading the attachment in order to
feel closer to Beverly
not to learn more about Jesse Gadden. Yet now she found herself intrigued by
what Seb had been uncovering. She turned back to the computer.

“No bullying reported at any of the schools, though they may be lying
or have forgotten. He was small and quiet, but doesn’t seem to have been picked
on. Almost the reverse. At St Patrick’s, Lough Dera (aged 10), a secretary said
she remembered people saying some of the older boys were frightened of him. She
didn’t know why. She only remembered him because he had the ‘biggest eyes of
any child she ever saw’. She loves to watch him now on the television, but
‘other than the eyes’ he’s unrecognisable. Apparently he wasn’t so cute as a
young boy. More odd looking.”

Recollections by a couple of
groupies from the pub performance days came next, telling how mysterious Gadden
had been with them.
“He’d take his pants
off, but he always kept his secrets on”,
one had quipped.

It hadn’t been an easy last
project for Seb.

“How can anyone be so mysterious? Everyone in Ireland has friends and family apart
from him and his mother, Theresa Mary Monaghan. Why????? Who was she?”

 
Then on the Saturday
afternoon there’d been a breakthrough.
“
MICHAEL LYNCH phoned Beverly, a bit more sober. She said we’re
looking for a few schoolboy anecdotes. LYNCH: ‘I’ll give you schoolboy anecdotes
all right. Ask him about the nun’.”

 
“Ask him about the nun....”
 
Something reverberated in Kate’s memory.
Gadden had mentioned nuns.

The next entry was Donnelly’s
Bar, Saturday, 6.p.m.

“MICHAEL LYNCH. Virtually a derelict. Hard to believe he’s the same age
as Jesse Gadden. Prevaricated for an hour while we bought him enough booze to
kill most men, then suddenly opened up when he got too drunk to remember he wasn’t
going to tell us anything without being paid.

“Said he and Gadden, or Monaghan, as he calls him, were together at the
age of 14 in an orphanage in County Clare, and one thing our boy was
particularly good at, other than running away, was art. He and Gadden went to
an all boys’ school there, but someone got the idea that Gadden should have
special lessons in art. Perhaps they thought it might stop him running away.
Which, he says, it did…for a while.

“According to Lynch, the art teacher they shipped in was a young nun
from the girl’s school called Sister Grace. She was a brilliant teacher, but
she seems to have got a bit of a crush on him. A bit like Sting singing Don’t
Stand So Close!!! I suppose.”

Kate stopped reading.
“Hellbound nun”
. That was a line on the
River
of Ghosts
album.
“With broken words from some
hellbound nun.”
She read on.

“Now comes the tricky bit. Lynch says it was more than a crush, more
like an obsession. They’d meet secretly in the gorse bushes on the cliff path.
There was sex, too. He says he saw them at it more than once. It went on for
months. Then suddenly Sister Grace commits suicide, jumping off a cliff while
walking home one night.

“After that night Monaghan was never seen around there again. The next
time Lynch hears anything about him he’s sitting in jail in Belfast years later watching TV and there’s
his old pal, now calling himself Jesse Gadden, singing and making millions.
Same big eyes though, he says. ‘That bastard had eyes you never forget.’ He’s
right about that.

“I suppose what he’s suggesting is that Sister Grace jumped after a row
or something. Who knows? Anyway, no one tried too hard to find our boy. The
Catholic Church isn’t big on suicide and it would have been embarrassing for
them to admit that one of its nuns had seduced a fourteen year old. They good
at covering up stuff like that, as we’ve learned.”

Kate moved to the final page.

“Problem. This is real tabloid stuff, not WSN material. Lynch would
sell it to the News Of The World or National Enquirer if he had any brains,
which he hasn’t. At the same time, if the man we all thought was a rock and
roll version of John The Baptist has a past, it’s at least worth knowing about.”

“
Anyway we’re off to CONNEMARA now.
Lynch reckons that Sister Grace’s parents live somewhere there. Maybe they’ll
talk.”

Finally there was a line of
almost comic desperation.

“Beverly’s
still listening to those bloody Jesse Gadden records through her headphones. A
man can have too much of a good thing!”

Kate finished reading the notes.
Now she knew. It hadn’t been a romantic extra night that had taken Seb and
Beverly to Connemara. Seb wouldn’t have been
able to resist following up a story like this. For some reason they’d stayed
late, then on the way back to their hotel, when Browne was probably planning
his final attempt at seduction, there’d been the accident.

She sat back in her chair. Had
they met the nun’s parents? Did it make any difference to anything, anyway? She
didn’t know. But saving the notes, she printed them and then read them again in
full.

From outside the heavy rumble of
a diesel engine was trying to invade her thoughts. The household rubbish was
collected on Tuesday mornings.

In an instant she was downstairs.
She was just in time. As she opened her
door a refuse collector was reaching into her dustbin.

“I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind,”
she shouted above the roar of the truck, now revving hard in crushing mode.
And, taking the black plastic bag from his grasp, she stepped back into the
house and closed the door.

Putting the bag on the kitchen
table, she untied the double wreath knot with which she’d secured it and began
searching inside. The Jesse Gadden CDs were at the bottom, damp and stained
beneath newspapers, wet, used tea bags and orange peel. Carefully she took them
out and wiped them. Then she laid them down next to the CD player.

Chapter
Twenty One

October 6:

She hit the water at a run and
plunged into the silence. Then she was breaking through the surface, arms and
legs already kicking into rhythm, earplugs in and the world blocked out as she
reworked the events of the past few days.

She hadn't wept when she'd been
told of the accident. Now, two days later, she cried privately into the water,
her eyes stinging from the chlorine of Fulham Pools. Beverly had been a Jesse Gadden fan like no other.
Had she revised her opinion when she'd heard what Michael Lynch had to say
about him? No. She wouldn’t have believed it.

But what of Sister Grace: sex
with a fourteen year old boy with mirror eyes. Could that be true? What
had
happened the night Jesse Monaghan
ran away for the last time?

She wanted to stop there, to
erase Gadden from her thoughts, but she couldn’t. He haunted her. Her account
of the executions on the beach at Owoso had excited him. She couldn’t escape
that. She thought about fetishes, the excitement of violent death, the mobs at
public hangings at Tyburn, the crowds of men waiting in the sun outside mosques
in Saudi Arabia
for the regular Friday beheadings? She'd seen film of that, barbaric footage of
faces obscene with excitement. For Gadden violent death had been an
aphrodisiac, and she remembered the music she’d heard in her Haverhill bedroom.

That had to have been arranged.
Had someone else been involved?

It was now almost lunchtime and
the pool was becoming congested, serious swimmers racing along the lanes, and boys
from the local schools appearing at the edges of the pool and hurling
themselves into the water. Reaching the shallow end she watched two boys dash along
the side and somersault like dam-busters into the pool, narrowly missing other
swimmers.

"They don't care at that
age, do they?" A voice sighed alongside her. It was an elderly woman in a
green floral suit and red rubber swimming cap. "It's always the same: the
more confident they are, the bigger the risks, the worse the accidents."
And she wagged her head as another youth dive-bombed into the water.

Kate nodded polite agreement.
Then, climbing from the pool, she went to get dressed. She was back in control,
the moment of emotion behind her.

The dare-devil boy swimmers were
still playing at the corners of her mind when she bought a cup of coffee in a
cafe on

Leaving the café she made her way
back to her car. A parking fine was sticking to the window. She peeled it off
and stuck it in her pocket. Normally she would have been cross with herself for
so carelessly throwing money away. She wasn’t. She was distracted.

Sitting in the driving seat she
pulled out her phone, called WSN, and asked for Larry Abramsky.

"Yes, Kate," the lawyer
answered.

“Larry, something’s puzzling me…”

“Yes?”

“Well, Beverly
told me she was a timid driver since she’d been in England.”

“Yes, I think you mentioned
that.”

“Right. But I don’t understand
how a timid driver, someone who says she went along at twenty miles an hour on
those little Irish lanes, could drive off the side of the road, across a grass
verge and over a cliff on a straight road.”

There was a pause. Then: “I’m
sorry. I don’t think I’m following.”

“Well, what I’m saying is,
accidents like the one Beverly and Seb were in don’t usually happen to cautious
drivers. They happen to people who are drunk or high or most often going too
fast, kids who think nothing can ever happen to them, who take risks.”

“Er, yes…probably. So?”

“So something must have caused
her to do that.”

"Yes, maybe. A rabbit in the
road, you mean. Or a sheep. Possibly. Or perhaps another car. Maybe Seb tried,
you know…” He left the suggestion unsaid. “It could have been any number of
things."

"Yes," she said.
"Any number of things." And, thanking him, she rang off.

Her mother had left a voicemail
message while she’d been out. She'd read about the accident in the
Daily Telegraph
and wanted to know if
Kate had been friendly with either of "those poor young people".

Kate called her back. "I
hardly knew them," she lied. It was easier that way.

"She was a very pretty
girl," her mother replied, and Kate could hear the crackle of a newspaper
down the line as her mother examined a photograph.

"Almost beautiful,"
Kate said, which was an exaggeration, made because Beverly was dead. She then added, "She
was a very jolly girl," which was true.

It really wasn't the moment for a
chat, so promising to call at another time, she put down the phone and went
downstairs into the kitchen to find something to eat.

That was when she saw it, just
for a moment, out of the corner of her eye, as she was about to put some pitta
bread into the oven: the cream Lexus cruising slowly past her house, Stefano
driving, Kish
alongside, Kerinova in the back.
 

The pitta bread fell from her
hands.

Almost immediately the phone
rang. On the sixth ring she picked it up. "Hello?"

His voice was never sweeter.
"Kate, it's Jesse. How are you?"

She didn't reply.

"The other night," he
breathed. "I think there might have been a misunderstanding." One of
his records was playing in the background.

"There was no
misunderstanding."

"Well, I think there might
have been. I wanted to talk to you, but when I woke up, you’d gone. I was a bit
upset, to be honest.”

"Why are your people spying
on me?"

"That isn't a word I'd
use."

She didn't answer, forcing him to
follow on.

"They were just checking to
see that you got home from Ireland
safely."

He must have seen her being
interviewed on TV at the site of the accident. Now she spoke very quietly.
"Okay, now listen. If I see any of your zombies in this street again I'll
complain to the police that they're stalking me."

“Oh, come on. Maybe if I came to
see you, talked things over, we could, you know, be friends again, sort things
out,” he coaxed.

"There's nothing to talk
about."

There was a sad, slight sigh.
Then: "It was tragic what happened in Connemara...to
your friends, I mean. I was very sorry to see that." The music was now
quite loud.

"So was I." She slammed
down the receiver.

The phone rang again almost
immediately.

She threw herself at it. "Listen,
if you don't leave me alone..."

"I'm sorry?" A timid
voice came back. It was David Harris, assistant news editor at WSN-TV. It was
his job to organise the roster for the correspondents. "What is it, Kate,
should I have been somebody else?"

"Oh God, I'm sorry. I
thought you were...my niece. She's taken to calling me all the time." She
didn't know why she didn't tell him the truth, when it was obvious she was
lying.

But Harris had his own worries.
He'd made a mistake on his timetable and just realised that no one was
available to cover the Chinese Ambassador at a tree planting ceremony. With
some trepidation, he asked if she could do him an enormous favour and help out.

She could easily have declined.
What he was suggesting was another diary job, not one for a well-known
correspondent. But when she immediately agreed she could hear the gratitude in
his voice as he thanked her.

“That’s okay,” Kate soothed. What
she needed more than anything at this moment was an ordinary, routine reporting
job.

It was as humdrum as she'd
anticipated, a twenty minute ceremony in College
Garden, just behind Westminster Abbey,
commemorating some long-forgotten Englishman who’d been at school there a
hundred and eighty years ago, gone to China, opposed British imperial
policy and been accidentally shot by his own side in a skirmish during the
First Opium War. Now he was a hero. Such was history.

She made what she could of it.
And, after shaking hands with the Chinese ambassador and telling her cameraman
she’d see him back at the studio, she picked her way out of the garden. She
might have carried straight on through the cloisters to the outside world, had
it not been for a tourist mob surrounding a team of brass rubbers. To avoid
them she stepped into the Abbey.

Evensong practice was taking
place, young choristers in crumpled surplices lined in rows along the wooden
choir stalls at right angles to the high altar, casually confident in their
voices, taking for granted their gift. And sitting in a pew, she gazed at the
folds of stained glass light falling across the nave as tourist day turned into
spiritual evening.
“The day Thou gavest,
Lord, is ended,”
sang the choristers.

She wasn't religious, she didn't believe
in God, but somehow she was moved. But why, when, judging by the cheeky
expressions on the faces of the boys who were singing, this music meant nothing
to them. Perhaps it reminded her of her father, or was it memories of school,
or even some long forgotten concert or radio programme heard at an
impressionable age? She couldn't say. She knew only that her emotions were
being touched by the music in a way she couldn't define. And it seemed that Beverly sat and listened
with her.

The taxi stopped on the corner.
The street lamp, having been repaired, had been vandalised and deep shadows lay
across the street. As Kate fumbled in her wallet for the fare, she could sense
the driver watching her in recognition through his rear view mirror.

Tipping him generously, no
well-known TV face ever wanting to be considered mean, she climbed from the
cab, and waited under the plane trees as it drove away. She then looked across
at her house. It was in darkness. For the first time in her life she was afraid
to go home. She didn’t know why.

There was a light shining in the
window of the Motts’ bedroom next door. They went to bed early, and for a
moment she envied them their companionship. Then, telling herself not to be foolish,
she crossed the road.

At the door she stopped. Was
someone watching her? She looked back, hoping to see Jeroboam appear from
behind a tree. Nothing moved. Then with a rush she unlocked the door and
entered the house. Everything was as she’d left it, but it hadn’t been the
thought of an intruder that had frightened her. It was something less tangible.

Although she’d hardly eaten all
day, she wasn’t hungry. So, making some cocoa she took it upstairs. She’d
intended watching some television and going to bed and reading. Instead she
went into her study and switched on her computer.

There was no new interesting
email waiting. She was disappointed. She’d wanted something to divert her
thoughts. Instead, and despite herself, she found herself looking again at Seb’s
attachment. If Michael Lynch’s information had been kept hidden from the fans,
what else didn’t they know? And, then again, what did they know?

She knew she was beginning to
torment herself. Every rational thought demanded that she put Jesse Gadden
behind her, but she couldn’t help herself. There were questions that had to be
answered.

And once again she found herself
searching the Jesse Gadden internet sites, added more and more words, “
Monaghan
,
Lynch
and “
NUN
”, as she
went.