Kill For Love (19 page)

Chapter
Thirty Three

The Hallsdens weren't difficult
to find. They were famous in Romsey since the shooting. Bill Hallsden answered
the door. With his firm features and short, thick, greying hair, he must have
been a handsome small town cop before he got the call telling him his daughter
had murdered her boy friend and blown half her brains out with his gun. Now he
was a ghost of self reproach.

Some fathers might have shunned
attention but Bill Hallsden courted it. He was in a battle with the doctors
who'd given up hope. Every little bit of publicity about Donna’s plight helped,
even in the shape of a reporter from England who worked for a satellite TV news
station he'd never seen. Besides, it gave him something to do, he explained. He
hadn't worked since the day of the picnic. He didn't believe he ever would
again.

Standing on his lawn under the falling
red leaves of a maple tree, his face crumpled into bewilderment as he talked
about the picnic. "It should have been a beautiful day for them: it was a
beautiful day, a perfect August day. And then this happens. Something happened
to our children that day, and I don't know what it was or why it was."

Kate asked where it had happened and
he surprised her. He took her, showing her where the police had found the boy's
mother's abandoned car, before taking her through the wood and climbing across
the wide field, now ploughed and muddy, up to the little copse of trees.

There wasn't much to see, just a
damp hollow in a patch of high ground, around which some of the trees were
beginning to shed their leaves. A young oak sapling, broken in half by some
careless investigating foot, was struggling to survive. A larch looked forlorn
against the sky.

She had no idea whether what had
happened here had any relevance to her investigation, but she filmed Bill
Hallsden and the scene of the shooting anyway.

They went to the hospital next.
Kate had never failed to be surprised at how much pain victims of tragedy were
prepared to share with television audiences, and the Hallsdens were no different.
Perhaps they thought TV might somehow help bring their daughter back to them,
alert a brilliant brain surgeon in some far off part of the world who could
work a miracle, or at least make their own doctors think again. Or was it
simply that they wanted that last morsel of recognition for their child before
the hospital unplugged the tubes and the news spotlight moved on?

She didn't ask for any
explanation. Putting the viewfinder to her eye she focused her camera on the
face and body of Donna Hallsden, the girl’s head bandaged from above the eyes,
the nose and mouth trailing tubes to match those to the heart and lower body.
Then, panning around, she took in the parade of hopeless get-well cards. The
CDs stacked on the bedside table were familiar, but the miracle prayed for when
a favourite song had been played into the coma hadn't happened.

She didn't stay long. After a
couple of shots she switched off the camera, and, nodding her thanks to the
girl's mother, who was sitting silently in vigil by the bed, she left the room.

Bill Hallsden walked her out of
the hospital. "I wish you'd known Donna before," he murmured as they
passed down the green walled corridor. "You'd have liked her. Everybody
did. She was the brightest button you ever met. Straight A's right through school."

Waiting a moment as they passed a
couple of chatting nurses, Kate said: "Mr Hallsden, did Donna spend a lot
of time on the internet?"

Hallsden smiled at the memory of
normality. "Sure. They all do these days. FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube. She'd
send her friends, Jenny and Ali, little messages. And, of course, Rick. That
sort of thing. Heaven knows what they found to say to each other. They saw each
other all day at school."

Kate understood. Methods of communication
might change but teenage girls didn't. "She liked music a lot, I believe."

"Never happy unless it was
playing or she was watching one of those music channels. I don't know how she
did her homework with that noise going on, but it never seemed to bother
her."

"And Donna and Rick took an
iPod along with them on the picnic."

"That's right. I think most
young people would nowadays."

"Right. But, well...I was
just wondering if you had any idea what music they listened to."

"What?" Hallsden's face
was torn with pain. "If you don't mind my saying, that sounds like a pretty
trivial enquiry. You saw Donna! How she is! What does it matter what music they
were playing?"

They'd reached the elevators.
"I don't want to upset you. But it may be relevant."

Hallsden stared at her without
comprehension. "Relevant to what?"
 
He looked tired. "I thought you could help."

She hadn't wanted to lead him,
but she saw no other way. "Mr Hallsden, they were playing Jesse Gadden
records, weren't they?"

His emotions snapped. "Of
course they were. Wasn't that all they ever played?"

She thought about her own father
as she waited outside the school. They'd been close, but he'd never known as
much about her, nor understood her as well, as he thought he had. It hadn't
been possible. It never was: not with Bill and Donna Hallsden either.

Across the road the yellow school
bus rattled as the children boarded. She held the camera steady and pressed to
record. It was a television cliche, but a useful short cut. Nothing set a scene
as efficiently as an American school bus.

Panning around, she reached the
school gates where the sight of the camera was attracting the usual attention.
Everyone knew why she was there. They'd become used to seeing cameras outside
Romsey High.

"Hi! You looking for
us?" A voice caused Kate to turn. It belonged to a tall, black girl
wearing a grey track suit and carrying a bag over her shoulder. She was, she
said, Ali. At her side was a wide girl with dyed blonde hair and a brace. She
was Jenny. Two seventeen year olds, they were Donna Hallsden's best friends.

There was a small park with a
bench and a war memorial opposite the school. The girls waited politely as Kate
set up the camera. She’d decided to let the girls talk and see what emerged.

It took a little time for them to
settle, but when they did it was to tell the story of a normal girl growing up
in a small New England town, maybe cleverer
and prettier than the rest, but apparently perfectly balanced until the day she
took a gun on a picnic.

"You don't think jealousy
could have been a motive, do you?" Kate asked.

"No way," Ali
protested. "Donna and Rick couldn't take their eyes off one another."

"They totally lived for each
other." This was Jenny.

"Which is why none of this
stuff about the doctors keeping her alive makes any kind of sense," Ali
came in forcefully.

"I'm sorry?" Kate was
surprised.

"Well, don't you see? Donna
loved Rick more than anything. All this trying to bring her out of the coma is
crazy. She wouldn't want to live now that he's dead. I just hope she dies soon.
She was my best friend, our best friend, but I hope the doctors turn her off. I
really do."

Jenny nodded her agreement.
"We've already planned the funeral."

"Won't that be for Donna's
parents to do?" Kate asked. There was something morbidly practical about
these girls.

"Oh, yes, sure. But we'll
help with the music. Play the right record, the one she liked best, so that she
enjoys it, too."

"Can you tell me which one
it will be?"

"Oh well, you know,
A Sunny Day In Eden,
obviously."

Kate tried to remember the tune.
She couldn't.
 

“It’s the one with the
‘live for love’
chorus at the end,”
Jenny said helpfully.

“Oh, right, thank you.” She
remembered now. "Donna’s father says she was very bright,” she said.

"The cleverest," Ali
replied.

"Clever in what way?"

"Every way. Clever at
working out problems in math," said Jenny. "Clever at playing chess,
at doing jigsaw puzzles, at physics, at biology…”

"So she was more on the
science side?"

Now it was Ali: "No. She was
good at literature, too. At interpretations."

"Interpretations?"

"You know. Like Shakespeare
or Ezra Pound or Robert Browning. She loved interpreting things. Working out
what stuff really meant."

The last flight back to London was with Virgin Atlantic
at 8.20. After racing all the way to Boston,
she just made the check-in time. She was exhausted and it was a welcome
surprise when the English girl on the ticket desk recognised her, albeit only
when she saw her passport, and gave her an upgrade.

Kate smiled her thanks, bashful at
the outrageous privilege of celebrity, but not about to refuse it. She’d only slept
for a couple of hours, and that had been in her car at a filling station the
previous night.

Perhaps the free champagne helped
to relax her, because stretched out in the darkened dormitory of the top deck,
swaddled in Virgin blankets, eye mask and airline socks, she soon found herself
in a state of free reflection, sifting thoughts and memories in the night.

There was Beverly, owning up over lunch:
"The thing about Jesse is that he sort
of fills the gap...when my parents divorced, it was as though he was talking to
me...he still talks to me."
And then there was Greg in St James’s
Park, embarrassed as he told her about rock stars and his concept of aural
magic.
"I think the shamans and holy
men in primitive societies may have had a touch of this...that's what some rock
stars may be tapping into."

“Shamans and holy men…”
The words repeated in her half-sleeping
mind. Shamans and holy men were spiritual leaders, men who knitted groups of
people together.
 

Her mind wandered on. She’d been
a modern historian, but her father had been a medievalist. He’d studied holy
men, messianic religious movements and sects in the Middle Ages more than
shamans, but he would have had a view. He always did.
“Always remember, Kate,”
he’d said so often when she’d been growing
up,
“where human behaviour is concerned
there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s only the circumstances that change.”

She slept for a while, but, when
disturbed by another passenger’s reading light being switched on, she sat up,
and, drawing up the blind, peered down into the blackness. Somewhere below was
the north Atlantic, and momentarily she
thought about Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet in the movie
Titanic
. And, then, by association, she remembered
the old black and white film,
A Night To
Remember
, showing the orchestra of the Titanic playing
Abide With Me
on the sinking ship.

Abide With Me
. It was a good tune, a Cup Final hymn, a prayer for
solace. But was it something else?

A picture of Donna Hallsden
watching YouTube while doing her homework came to mind next. One of her friends
had said that Donna had been good at jigsaws.

Jigsaws!

She was doing a jigsaw, too, it
seemed. But so far she’d just been turning over the pieces, trying to see if
any of the colours matched. The next step would be to try to fit some of the
pieces together.

For a while she dozed again, her
canvas bag with the filmed interviews at her feet, the heavy drone of the 747's
engines anaesthetizing her senses.

Next time she woke with a start.
The tune to
Abide With Me
was still
running through her mind, but now she was remembering hearing it mentioned
recently. Ned Swann, on the foreign desk, had said that he would prefer it at
his funeral.

Prefer it to what?

It came in a rush.
“Live for love,”
she found herself
saying
.
They were the words of the song
that Ali and Jenny had chosen for Donna Hallsden's funeral, the song that had
been played during the funeral of a father and his children in England.
She’d watched it one morning at WSN when Ned had become irritated, grumbling
that lapping music over news stories turned them into entertainment.

“
Live for love…
” the phrase was now running circuits in her mind.

From opposite sides of the Atlantic, had one piece of the jigsaw just matched
another?

Chapter
Thirty Four

October 28:

The image greeted her as she
passed through the arrivals hall at Heathrow. It was on a screen, thirty feet
high, a slightly out-of-focus black and white photograph with two sharply-in-focus
blue eyes peering out.

Coming to a computer near you

Wednesday, November 3,10pm

www.jessegadden.com

She almost stopped walking in
surprise. Gadden’s farewell concert was less than a week away. It hadn’t
occurred to her that it might be so soon.

 
She hurried on through Customs, taking the
Heathrow Express to Paddington and then a taxi back to Fulham. It was nearly a
quarter to nine when she got home with children running to the school in the
next street: a perfectly ordinary London
day. But she found herself peering around to see if anyone was watching before
opening her front door.

There was a fresh fall of mail on
the mat, but, ignoring it, she played back the latest messages on her landline
voicemail, new ones from colleagues at WSN, one from Chris Zeff, the Cambridge
hacker, and yet another from the Kentish Town police asking her to get in
touch.

Deciding to deal with them later,
she took a shower, dressed, then, sitting at her computer with a cup of coffee,
logged on to the
Times Online.
Her
mind was a tangle of threads. But, first, she needed names.

 
“UK. Murder
of father and daughters,”
she typed into the search engine.

The information came in the form
of several news stories. The father who had died in the Birmingham family killings had been Jim
McDonagh: his daughters were Melanie, Alice and Lucy. Their mother was still
missing, sought by the police.

She made a note of the date:
September 13
.

Next she went to the online
facility provided by the ITN Archive and called up the coverage they had on the
McDonaghs’ joint funeral.
“Live for love…”
sang that high, reedy voice as she again watched the coffins being carried past
rows of schoolchildren. Several seconds of a McDonagh home movie shot on a
summer holiday in Italy
had also been filed, the sequence ending on a close-up of the missing mother
Elizabeth McDonagh.

She froze the frame. Did this
woman look familiar?

Going to the index, like the historical
researcher she'd once been, she then did a crosscheck by date, running her eye
down the menu of other subjects logged on the day the bodies had been
discovered.

ROYAL: Prince Harry opens hospice for homeless

CITY:
 
Bank rate fears as
inflation rises

PAKISTAN
: Seven die in mosque suicide bombing

DROUGHT: Ends with storms in West Country

JESSE GADDEN: Clean up after Hyde Park
concert.

 
She stopped there. The Hyde
Park concert had been the evening before, and she caught a mental
picture of herself driving along the

Making a note of the footage she
required, she turned to newsreel shots of Jesse Gadden at various moments of
his career. When he’d become famous she’d been mainly abroad building her
career and had been hardly aware of him. Now, looking at pieces of film shot
over nearly a decade, she was surprised to see how much weight he’d lost. Did
fans prefer their rock stars thinner?

 
Finishing her film research, she filled in an
order for broadcast quality copies of the material chosen and emailed it to ITN
Archive.

There was just one more thing to
do. Slipping
The Sandman
album into
her computer she selected the last track,
A
Sunny Day In Eden,
and re-read the lyrics. What was it about this song that
made people choose it for funerals as though it was a Jesse Gadden equivalent
of
My Way?

 
Five minutes later she was no further on. With
an opening reference to the serpent and the Garden of Eden, and the long
fade-out line,
“Love the one you love for
love
”, it sounded to her little more than a paean to the innocence of young
love.

Perhaps she hadn’t quite fitted
two parts of the jigsaw together after all.

Her mother's face fell as she
opened the front door. "Your hair, Kate!"

"Oh yes!" She'd
virtually forgotten that she'd had it cut so short. "Don't you like it? I
thought I'd have a change." And, smiling, she entered the house, hiding
the instant hurt she felt at her mother's expression. She couldn't help it. She
was thirty five and she still wanted to make her mother happy. Obviously she hadn't.

Her mother hurried after her.
"Are you all right? We’ve all been so worried. Why didn’t you phone us?
The young man…he was your friend? And you found him! The papers said he’d
been…” She hesitated. “…mutilated. And you’ve been away again.”

They'd progressed down the hall.
There was a mirror at the foot of the stairs. Kate glanced into it. She was
shocked. The nights without sleep had taken their toll. Dark bags bruised the
skin under her eyes. She turned quickly away, cross with herself for caring.
"I’m okay. Honestly. But very busy. Dad’s books. I need to look at some of
them.”

"I don't think you're well,
Kate."

"I’m tired, that’s all. It’s
just that…I can’t explain. I'll just go and get the books.” And she hurried up
the stairs.

Her father's study had been a
little room on the first landing. In a house bulging with books he'd had the
largest collection, stuffed in rough order into the shelves which lined all
four walls. The shelves were still there, the desk and the typing chair, and,
yes, there were a few books neatly displayed. But there were also silver
trophies and framed photographs of people she didn't know holding golf clubs.
 

Her mother had followed her up.
"I told you. Don't you remember? We put most of Dad's books in the attic.
Jim thought it was a waste of such a nice light room to fill it with books."

Kate did remember.
"Yes," she said, trying in vain to recognise anything of the lure this
room had once held for her, and wondering how her mother could have allowed her
personality to be hijacked by that of her new husband.

"Kate, I think you should
see a doctor."

"I'm fine," she said, and
climbed sadly on up the stairs to the attic. Did her mother think she was
having a breakdown, too?

She found the books she wanted.
She could have got the same ones from several libraries in London, but it was her father’s she wanted
today, and, with them, the reassurance he’d always given her. She sat down to
read.

Her mother was sitting worrying,
when, clutching an armful of books, she went down to the kitchen an hour later.
 

Kate tried to smile. “All right
then, let's have that cup of tea before Jim gets back and he starts telling me
how terrible I look, too. It's not much fun, you know, being told I look a
mess. No wonder I can't get a man."

She didn’t explain what she was
working on. It was difficult enough to explain to herself. And she avoided all
questions about finding Greg’s body. Her mother didn’t question her about that
too rigorously; perhaps she didn’t want to know the details.

Luckily Jim was away playing
golf, and, after having something to eat, she finally gave in to exhaustion,
and, going up to her old bedroom, slept away her jetlag through the rest of the
day.

It was early evening when she
woke and almost nine by the time she got home to Fulham. Waiting on her
voicemail was a message from Natalie Streub in Moscow. She called back immediately, although
she knew it would be almost midnight there.

Getting no response at first she
was about to hang up when Natalie answered, sounding muffled, interrupted, and not
best amused. "Jesus, Kate! You sure choose your moments."

In the background Kate could hear
the grumble of a man's voice speaking in Russian. Natalie had always been a popular
girl.

"I'm sorry. I got your
message and..."

"It's okay. Don't worry
about it. He's a mistake anyway," came back Natalie.

Obviously her companion wasn’t an
English speaking mistake.

"Now, what have I got for
you? Petra
Kerinova. I think I've traced her. It took a while. Things move slowly over
there in Estonia."

"She was a circus performer
or something. That was what I heard."

"Well…maybe.” Natalie
sounded uncertain. “If it's the same Kerinova. But
only
sort of… According to my sources, she worked as a hypnotist."

“A
hypnotist
!"

“Yes. Part of an act. You know,
those shows where the hypnotist gets people out of the audience to take their
trousers down? Well, that was her. Petra Kerinova, a music hall hypnotist."

"Are you sure about
this?"

"As sure as anybody can be working
out of Moscow.
Does it make any sense to you?"

"I'm not sure. What happened
to her? I mean, why did she give up?”

"From what I hear she tried
to commit suicide a couple of times and then spent some time in a mental hospital.
After which, according to an unreconstructed old Commie Russian lady who used
to live in the next apartment, she ‘became a whore in the West like all the
others’." Natalie laughed huskily.

"Some whore," Kate
mused. Then: “Thanks, Natalie, you’re a saint.”

"Actually, saintly was one
thing I wasn't being tonight. But never mind. Are you ever going to tell me
what this is about?"

"As soon as I know myself.
Now, go back to bed and enjoy yourself. We'll speak again soon." And,
bidding her goodbye, she put the phone down.

A hypnotist? The sorcerer's
apprentice with the bleached-out face and hair was a hypnotist?

Switching on her computer she
went into YouTube. Greg had talked about Gadden's voice being like aural magic,
but was there something else? She scrolled down the menu for the song she
wanted, then turned up the volume on her speaker.

           
"Going down to Tarlton the last week in
May, Tasting the sea, cheating with me, On a wasted working Wednesday..."
sang
Gadden, his eyes never leaving the camera lens, never leaving hers.

Kevin O’Brien had said Gadden
only really took off as a world star when the fans could see him in close-up.
Had Kerinova’s music hall hypnosis tricks helped him perfect a talent he’d
already been discovering in himself?

But, if he could turn any small
town called Tarlton into a tourist attraction for a day, what else could he do?

Having slept all afternoon she
wasn’t tired. There were several calls she could have returned, but she chose
only that of Chris Zeff. The guy could become a nuisance, but at least he
wouldn’t immediately enquire about her health and state of mind.

He was breezy when he picked up
the phone. “Oh, hi Kate, thanks for getting back. I just wanted to tell you I’m
giving a paper at the London Mathematical Society next Wednesday afternoon.
It’s kind of a big deal in my world, and Zena and I thought, if you’ve nothing
better to do, maybe you’d like to come along.”

 
She wouldn’t understand a word of a lecture on
maths, but she was touched that he’d thought to invite her. She’d done
something for him. Now he wanted to include her on his big day.

At any other time she might have
accepted the invitation, but time was something she doubted she’d have on
November 3. It was the night of the Jesse Gadden concert. So, thanking him, and
wishing him well with his lecture, she made an excuse.

Then, opening a bottle of red
wine, she sat down at her kitchen table with her father’s books. Greg had
linked rock stars with shamans and charismatic leaders: her father had for a
time studied hysterical, medieval messianic sects. Was there a link that he
would have spotted?

“Where human behaviour is concerned, there’s nothing new under the sun…”
she repeated as she worked her way through a dancing-until-death mania in Germany
in the early sixteenth century. “Mania,” she read the word out loud. At least
the kids high on drugs in night clubs these days didn’t go that far. Then she
moved on to the sects of the Assassins and the Anabaptists and the Cult of
Relics.

“Only the circumstances change…”

Was it any less superstitious to
walk hundreds of miles to venerate the shrivelled hand of a dead saint, than to
fly to London
in order to walk across the pedestrian crossing at

An account of a religious
movement in 1251 known as the Children’s Crusade came next. It was led by a
renegade monk known as the Master of Hungary, but was told today as the story
of the Pied Piper, the man whose music had led the children of Hamelin away, never
to return.

Music.

In the end, sleepy again and a
little drunk, she nearly missed what she looking for. It came in the form of
some faded notes scribbled in the margin of a section on religious
superstition.
“Heavens Gate, Branch
Davidians
and
Jonestown cults,”
her
father had written. Then further down the page:
“Leaders facing personal crises.”

She recognised the names:
Heaven’s Gate were the group of people in California
who believed that an alien spaceship was following the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997;
while the Branch Davidians were the followers of David Koresh who had died at
the siege in Waco, Texas. All were modern sects, or cults, with
charismatic leaders.