Kill For Love (16 page)

Greg would have recognised these words. He might
even have smiled. They’d heard them together at the journalism course at which
they’d met, when an old-time, Scottish sub-editor, sceptical of the academic
qualifications of some of his class, had written them on a blackboard on their
first day. “Never mind your fancy degrees, this is what reporting is all about,”
he’d rasped as Greg had caught her eye. “The five questions you have to know
the answers to before you file your story. So make sure you do.”

Finally she wrote one additional word:
“HOW?”

She knew what she had to do. It was the only
thing she could do.

Chapter Twenty Seven

October 22:

She was the first customer of the
day, waiting at the door when Mr Badawi arrived with his two sons to open up.
She'd been peering in the other camera and computer shop windows in Tottenham
Court Road since eight thirty. A few years ago she would have had to find a
professional stockist for the equipment she needed. Now anyone with a digital
camera could make a TV programme.

She ran though her requirements.
A Sony Z1 camera, together with battery and spare and charger; a folding,
lightweight tripod; and two Micron Explorer microphones together with a
Sennheiser hand-held. Then there was a production bag for carrying the equipment,
a set of headphones, a top light for the camera, and eighty 60 minute Panasonic
DV tapes. Lastly, as an afterthought, she bought a new BlackBerry. She paid on
her American Express card.

She called in at an Economy Cutz
hairdresser on the

"A number three," she
shouted, above the banter of a radio disc jockey.

The hairdresser, all of
seventeen, looked uncertain. Women with educated accents and expensive clothes
didn't go into Economy Cutz, and didn't ask to have their heads virtually
shaved. "You mean with the clippers?" the girl checked cautiously.

"Yes, very short all over. That's
four centimetres. Right?"

"Well, yes, but..." The
hairdresser was about to protest further, but must have thought better of it. Fetching
the electric clippers she obediently ran them around the nape of Kate's neck, up
the sides and over the crown of her skull. In curls and whirls the admired
expensive elfin cut dropped to the floor.

Kate watched the transformation
in silence through the mirror. It seemed as though her eyes were growing in
size, as if, with the drone of the clippers, a new, tougher, angrier Kate
Merrimac was emerging from under a camouflage of prettiness. If Neil Fraser
wanted to think she was heading for another breakdown, well, she looked the
part now. Besides, if she wasn’t going to be reading the news, she didn’t need
to look cute.

 
She was home by ten thirty. Discarding the
small mountain of cardboard and polystyrene packaging, she quickly assembled
her new equipment, and, attaching the battery pack, tried out the camera on the
flowers in her patio. It was as light to carry as a bottle of wine. Satisfied
with the results, she collected her laptop from the study and called a cab. Her
bag was already packed. As a foreign correspondent it always was.

She left her old mobile phone on
her desk switched off. By now her voicemail had collected a clamour of worried
voices demanding she call back, including that of her mother, her brother
Richard, and her sister-in-law, Helen. She ignored them all.

In the cab she programmed her new
mobile, copied Seb Browne's email on to her laptop and scribbled a postcard to
Jeroboam. It showed an aerial view of a school of whales off Norway's Lofoten Islands.
She wrote: "Had to go away. I’ll explain when I get back. Enjoy your first
day at work. Much love, Kate."

She posted it, along with a card
to her mother, and a short, sad letter to Harry, sent via his Kentish Town
address, when she reached Heathrow.

Phil Bailey peered at her over
his glasses.
"'Dangerous'?"

“It's possible."

They were wedged in the dark
brown corner booth of a pub in the old port area of Galway,
watching a fire of wet logs hiss dismally in a grate as Bailey huddled inside
his anorak and Simon and Garfunkel sang
Cecilia
on the radio. The landlord, a lean man with a thin cigarette stuck to his top
lip, was studying the horses in the
Irish
Independent.

"You seriously think
snooping around after Jesse Gadden can be dangerous?" The freelance rock
journalist looked sceptical, his eyes going repeatedly to Kate’s new haircut,
although he politely hadn’t commented on it.

She told him what had happened
when Greg had interviewed Overmars.

Bailey gripped his white pigtail between
his thumb and first finger as he listened. "Jesus, Kate, that’s terrible.
Just terrible. My God! I’m sorry. The poor man! But, you know, there must be
some other explanation. I’m sorry for your friends and all, but we're talking
rock and roll here, not Al Qaeda or the IRA. It’s just a few catchy tunes with
silly words, stuff to sing to yourself in the car. There's nothing
dangerous
about it."

Kate sucked some of the head off
her Guinness. It made a ring around her lips and she wiped it away with the
back of her hand. "Well, whether I’m right or wrong, I thought you ought to
know if you’re going to help me.”

“Right. Thank you.” He sipped his
beer, watching her, as though unsure of what to make of her.

 
“So, do you have anything yet? What about
Gadden’s mother?”

"Not the mother, no. I'm
sorry. She’s hard to trace. But I did have some success." Unfastening an
old briefcase, he took out a buff coloured folder and laid its contents on the round
pub table.

A black and white photograph of a
pleasantly smiling teenage girl, a copy of a detail from a school photograph,
lay on top of a collection of photostats of newspaper cuttings.

Kate turned the photograph over.
"Frances Cleary," a caption read. "St Anne’s High School for
Girls, 1974." She looked at Bailey for explanation.

"Sister Grace. You change
your name when you’re ordained.”

“Yes.”

“This was her two years before
she joined the order. She's buried in a place called Castlemount in Connemara. Her parents live near there."

He stopped talking as Kate read
the cuttings.
"TRAGIC DEATH OF YOUNG
NUN,"
ran one headline from 1989;
"MYSTERY
SUICIDE OF DEVOTED TEACHER,"
said another above a photograph of the
same smiling girl, now in a nun’s habit with a crucifix hanging around her
neck.

Kate stared at the smooth,
freckled complexion. Was it really possible that this had been Jesse Gadden's
first lover?

Bailey began to talk again.
"The sad thing was that the Church traditionally doesn't allow suicide
victims to be buried in consecrated ground in the belief that a mortal sin has
been committed..."

"...because only God can
give and take life," Kate continued. As a little girl she'd attended a
Catholic school for a time. "I didn't know that still happened."

"Well, it doesn't normally.
Priests turn a blind eye these days and accept that suicide victims may be of
unsound mind, and therefore not capable of committing mortal sin. But the death
occurred in County
Clare and Frances Cleary
came up against one of the old school. He was unbending. So at first she was
buried over in Roscommon with no requiem mass. It was tough on the parents. They’re
very devout.” He paused. “I suppose you’d almost describe them as, well…
fundamentalist if you were talking about another religion in another country,
if you know what I mean. And she was an only child."

Kate did know what he meant.
"'A hellbound nun...'" she mused.

"What's that?"

"Just something I heard in a
song."

"Ah right! Well, anyway,
about five years ago there must have been a change of heart, because suddenly
her body was exhumed and brought up to Castlemount to be reburied…with a
requiem mass and in consecrated ground this time. You'll find her right alongside
the church door if you go. You can't miss her."

"And the parents?"

"I left them for you to talk
to, if they will, which I very much doubt. You'll find their address and all
the details in the file."

Kate nodded her gratitude.
Slipping the photograph and photostats back into the folder, she turned to a
large envelope. "And this?”

 
“Kevin O'Brien! Jesse’s first manager.” Bailey
smiled fondly as Kate took out a second collection of photographs and newspaper
cuttings. They all showed a big, dark haired man. “He’s a legend in the pubs
and clubs around here for his drinking and drugs and girls. God, the girls he
had! He’d be running three or four all at the same time. But he’s all right.
His heart was always in the right place…even if the rest of him wasn’t.
is heartHis
He’s living in America
now. Become a bit of a recluse. He's got a place in Maine...just sits there and counts his
money, I suppose. He has a lot of it. They say he likes to go fishing.”

"Couldn't he go fishing in Ireland?"

Bailey smiled. "He could do
anything he wanted in Ireland,
apart from go ski-ing, I suppose. But…" He shrugged and pointed to an
address he’d written on a scrap of paper.

 
“

"It took some getting. Cost
a bit, if that’s all right. I'm sorry, but I didn’t get a phone number..."

“Would he talk to me?”

“Well, he was always a sucker for
a pretty face, but…”

“Not pretty enough?”

He laughed.
He doesn’t talk to anyone now. “
Oh yes,
pretty enough, all right, I’m sure of that. It’s just that, well, they say the
past is a closed book for Big Kevin.”

"And Michael Lynch? Did you
have any luck there?"

Bailey sighed. "Ah, no. It
seems that since talking to Seb and Beverly, he's disappeared off the face of
the earth."

She'd chosen a hotel out along
the coast west of Galway, where there was a view of the Atlantic
Ocean. Her room was neat and anonymous. She liked that, and she
appreciated the feeling of security as she turned the solid key in her door,
locking out the world. Phil Bailey had wanted to take her to dinner to a fish
restaurant he swore was the best in the west of Ireland, but, although she was now
ferociously hungry, and he was an agreeable enough companion, she'd resisted. Needing
a good night's sleep, she'd sent him off with an eight hundred pound cheque for
his work and expenses as a researcher. He still had to find out what had
happened to Gadden's mother.

Sitting on her hotel bed she
phoned down for a room service steak and salad and a half bottle of Cotes du
Rhone. It arrived with indecent, microwave haste, but that didn't matter. It
tasted good and was filling.

She ate at a small, fold-out
table attached to the side of the dressing table. She'd had hundreds of such
meals when she'd been travelling for WSN, but usually there was a camera crew
next door or Ned Swann on the end of the phone. Tonight no-one knew where she
was. She hadn’t even told Phil Bailey. That was the way she wanted it,
responsible only to herself and for herself. Emotionally, it was easier to
travel light.

While she ate she re-read the
newspaper cuttings about the death of Sister Grace. Then, reaching for a road
map she’d picked up at the airport, she circled the spot where the nun had
fallen to her death. It was called Coneyburrow Point.

She went to bed early. Putting
the tray outside the door, she undressed and slipped into the protective
envelope of the covers. Her body was heavy with exhaustion. She closed her eyes
and waited for sleep, listening to the rain on the window, and the sounds of
plumbing as her fellow guests made their way to their beds. Somewhere a bath
was being run...

The blood of Greg's bathroom
splashed across her thoughts once again. She tried to put it from her mind, but
her brain refused to allow it. One by one the pictures came up like a slide
show; the photograph of Frances Cleary, the schoolgirl who had become Sister
Grace: Beverly's mother at the crematorium: the wound between Greg's legs.

After an hour she gave up.
Reaching out in the dark she found the TV remote control on the bedside table.

The sound came first, a thin
electronic music synthesizer filling the space between exaggerated gasps. Then
the picture appeared. A young blonde girl was lying naked on a bed with a dark haired,
smooth bodied man. It was soft, bedtime porn for the lonely, barely titillating
stuff she'd come across in hotels all around the world.

Usually, after a moment’s
curiosity, she'd moved on, looking for a news station or a movie to watch, but
not tonight. Sex, the balm to heal all wounds. She was a TV star. She could,
she knew, have all the sex she wanted and she thought about the last time she'd
made love. It had been in Morocco
seven or eight months earlier with a Czech cameraman who was an old friend and
occasional lover.

Then her night at Haverhill came back, and
she switched off the television.

Chapter Twenty Eight

October
23:

Propping the photograph on the bedroom dressing
table, she positioned the camera on the tripod, switched on the top light, focused
and then pressed to record. "
Frances
Cleary, aged sixteen,
” she noted into a microphone as the tape ran.

The
newspaper cuttings were next, their headlines almost overlapping, the key words
"TRAGEDY"
, "
NUN"
and "
DEATH"
central, before she panned down from
"MYSTERY SUICIDE OF DEVOTED
TEACHER"
to the photograph of Frances Cleary as the nun, Sister Grace.
Lastly she shot a close-up of Grace's crucifix.
Whether she would ever use any of these images she didn’t know, but
she’d have them. She’d begun.

She'd been up at seven thirty having breakfast of
crispy bacon and scrambled eggs in the dining room. Two other tables had been
occupied by bleary-eyed men sitting alone in their Stay-prest suits. Wearing
her glasses, with her hair still wet from the shower, no-one had paid her any
attention as she'd examined a road map of County Galway.
She didn’t look like a TV star any more.

She left the hotel at just after nine. Wearing
jeans, a thick sweater and a raincoat, she headed west along the coast road under
charging white clouds on a blue, windy sky, before turning north to join the
route along which she and Larry Abramsky had been driven just a few weeks earlier.
It must have been just as beautiful then, she thought, as she began to climb
the twisting roads from the bog into the Connemara
mountains, but somehow she'd missed it. Grief blinds, she thought, as she gazed
across the wilderness, sparkling after a night's rain.

She found the site of the accident without
difficulty. It was about nine miles east of Castlemount. When she'd been here before
there'd been so many police cars the road had looked narrower. Now as she
pulled on to the grass verge her doubts about the Garda’s assumption of an
accident were reinforced. It would have been extraordinary for an over-cautious
driver to have carelessly left the road at this spot.

Getting out of the car she set to work with the
camera. First she took general views of the road, then the place where the car
had plunged over the side of the precipice. She could still see the marks where
the vehicle had ripped through the undergrowth, before it had turned over and
gone into free fall into the gully. Trying not to slip on the wet grass, she
traced long slaloms along the hill as she made her way down the mountain. There
was no mistaking where the car had come to rest. A large patch of earth was blackened
where the petrol tank had exploded.

The little town of Castlemount had a permanent look of early
closing, although it was a Saturday and not yet noon when she drove along the
main street before pulling on to a cinder patch beside a bingo hall. A place of
grey stone cottages and occasional shop windows, it seemed almost squeezed
between the hills.

With her tripod under her arm and her camera case
in her free hand, she made her way towards the church. A couple of elderly
women stopped chatting to watch her.

In the stark, nettled cemetery she walked up the
gravel path. "You can't miss the grave," Phil Bailey had told her,
yet she almost did. Looking for a modest gravestone she'd passed right by the
giant, white marble angel stationed by the church door before she noticed it.

She retraced her steps. The statue was so
disproportionate to everything else, she hadn't realised it marked a grave. She
looked more closely. An inscription had been etched into the folds of the
marble robes.

“
In memory of

Sister Grace Frances Cleary

Departed this world November 3, l989

Aged 31

With God now”

She set up her camera.

She saw the house as she rounded a corner. It was
a low, once white, windswept cottage with farm outhouses, standing alone on the
side of a hill. Desolate was the first word to come to mind. Driving on, she
followed the road along the side of the valley. The bright morning had now
degenerated into heavy clouds, and it began to rain as, splashing off the
tarmac through a large puddle, she drove along a mud track to the rear of the buildings.

Close to, the place looked even more dismal, with
a rust of general neglect spreading across the equipment in the yard. Pigs
could be heard snuffling in the sties; the axle of an ancient, one-wheeled tractor
rested on bales of rotting straw.

It was now raining heavily and she was just
deciding to stay in the car until the shower passed when the cottage door
opened. An old man stood watching her. Reaching for her equipment bag, she
climbed from the car and made her way through the rain towards him. "Mr
Cleary?"

The man made no response. He was tall, thin,
slightly stooped, and what was left of his white hair was clumsily cut. His
cheeks were sunken into the clefts of a lifetime's disappointment.

"Mr Cleary, my name's Kate Merrimac from
WSN-Television. I wondered if I might talk to you for a few minutes."

As she'd been speaking a woman had moved
alongside the old man. Possibly a couple of years younger, she was more solid.
Phil Bailey's notes had named them as Tom and Nancy Cleary.

"To talk about what?" Tom Cleary asked.

"About Frances. I've been looking at the
statue in the cemetery."

"We've nothing to say about Frances.
Goodbye.” The man turned to go inside.

“But Mr Cleary…” She stepped forward.

He span around. “I said good-bye. It was all a
long time ago. I don't know what you people can possibly want after all this
time."

She turned to the woman. "I've come a long
way to see you, Mrs Cleary, and I'm getting very wet standing here. If I could
just have a few minutes..." The rain was pouring on to her head.

Nancy Cleary shifted with embarrassment.
"Perhaps just a couple of minutes, Tom," she murmured. "The poor
girl's getting soaked."

"She'll have a heater in her car. Be as dry
as a bone by the time she's back on the road."

"Tom!" the old woman chided.

Kate waited. She would, she knew, be looking more
pathetic by the second.

"I just don't see what good can come of
it." Cleary was now avoiding everyone's eyes, looking over Kate's shoulder
at the rain and the mud. Then suddenly he sighed a defeat and went back inside
leaving Kate standing at the door.

Nancy Cleary backed away. "I'll just make us
some tea," she said.

She'd noticed it as soon as she entered the house:
a sense of time having been frozen, as tangible as a broken clock. She'd come
across it before in parts of the world ravaged by war, and where the survivors existed
on memories of happier years. For the Clearys the happy part of their lives had
long since passed. In a gloomy living room of faded, autumn patterned wallpaper
and a threadbare carpet, all that remained of those times were the icons and
comforts of Catholicism; the framed print of the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus;
the small, blue, souvenir plaster statue of Our Lady of Lourdes; the photograph
of Pope John Paul II; the crucifix over the door and the coiled rosary beads on
the sideboard. And there in the centre of the mantelpiece the photograph of
their only daughter, Frances Cleary, smiling in her habit with her parents on
the day of her ordination as a nun as Sister Grace.

"The reason I'm here," Kate began,
sitting low into a velour covered, broken-springed sofa, her hair spiky now, rubbed
dry with an old towel, "is because I'm making a television programme about
one of your daughter's pupils, and I wondered if she'd ever mentioned him to
you…perhaps in a letter or conversation."

Nancy Cleary looked towards her husband as she
finished pouring the tea.

He cleared his throat. "You're talking about
Jesse Gadden."

"He was Jesse Monaghan when Grace…Frances
knew him. A young boy of about fourteen," Kate said.

"So I believe."

"I was given to understand that Frances
may have taken him for special art lessons."

"We've heard the same."

"So,
did
she ever mention him to
you?"

"Not to my recollection."

In the armchair his wife shook her head. "We
never knew that Frances
taught any boys. She didn't think to tell us. She was a marvellous artist
herself. I sometimes wonder if we'd encouraged her more..." She halted a line
of thought that must have bled from her a thousand times. "But she wanted
to be a nun. She seemed happy. We thought she was happy."

"I'm not sure I understand. How do you know
she taught Jesse Gadden if she didn't tell you?" Kate asked.

There was no answer. The old couple looked
uncomfortable. They weren't used to hiding things.

She tried another tack. "The statue of the
angel in the cemetery...it's beautiful. It must have been very expensive. Did
someone help pay for it?"

"And if someone did?" Tom Cleary
snapped.

"Mr Cleary, was it Jesse Gadden who
helped?"

"If you know all the answers why do you come
here asking questions?" He was shouting now.

"Because I
don't
know all the
answers. Look, I understand that this is painful for you, but it might be more
important than you know. Did Jesse Gadden arrange to have Grace reburied over
in Castlemount...in sanctified ground?"

There was a silence. Outside the rain tattooed
against the windows.

"We've nothing more to say to you,"
Cleary said, and drank his tea.

 
Kate
turned to his wife. "I think you might have entertained some colleagues of
mine a couple of weeks ago, Mrs Cleary. Perhaps until quite late. A young American
girl and a television producer."

Beads of tears were glinting in the old woman's
eyes.

"You know, don't you, they were killed in a
road accident later that night?"

Still a silence.

"What I don't understand is why you didn't
tell the police they'd been here."

"It wouldn't have brought them back,"
Cleary interrupted.

"It would have explained where they'd been
all evening. Everyone wondered. Their colleagues, their friends..." She
hesitated. "Their parents were devastated. It might have made it
easier..."

That was enough. Cleary was on his feet. "Devastated,
you say! I'll tell you about devastated. We know all there is to know about
devastated."

"Tom..." his wife tried to intervene.

But he'd have none of it. His hand shaking he
gestured to the photograph on the mantelpiece. "They said our daughter
took her own life, that Frances
killed herself. And because of that, they wouldn't give her a requiem mass.
They buried her outside the church grounds. Do you know what that means? It
means her soul was condemned to burn in hell or be lost in limbo for eternity
and there was nothing we could do to help her. Our only child.

"Then suddenly we get a miracle. Someone
helps us. She's brought back home, here to Castlemount. Her sins are absolved.
And a statue is put up so everyone will know." Tears were now running down
the crevices in his cheeks. "Frances was all we ever had. We
gave her to God when she became a nun. Now she's back with God and with us.
That's all we ever wanted." Struggling to control himself he turned away.

Kate looked at the old couple sadly. It didn't
matter that she couldn't believe in the arbitrariness of salvation and
damnation, or that any loving God would need to be bribed into reprieving a
lost soul. These people, brought up in another age and a different culture, did
believe. Ireland
might be a modern, computerised state, but, as with any country in the world, indulgences
straight from the Middle Ages could still be bought for those devout enough and
desperate enough.
 

The Clearys hadn't told the police where Beverly
and Seb Browne had spent their last evening, because someone hadn't wanted them
to. Just a word would have bought their silence.

There was nothing more to be said. Kate sipped
her tea and watched the wheezing of the fire. Tom Cleary stood at the back of
the room staring out of the window into the mist.

At length, as the rain abated, Kate scribbled her
phone numbers and home address on a WSN card. "I'm sorry to have taken up
so much of your time," she said, putting the card on the table.
 
Then there was a final thought. "You
said that Frances
was an artist. You wouldn't have any of her work I could see, would you?"

Had it been up to Tom Cleary she would have been
out of the house there and then, and he protested loudly. But Nancy Cleary was
proud of her daughter’s talent. Getting to her feet she drew open the heavy bottom
drawer of an old dresser, and, rummaging down, produced a large, battered
cardboard box. "The convent sent us everything after... They were very
kind."