Kill For Love (24 page)

Chapter
Forty Three

She sat at her desk and watched a
river taxi making its way downstream towards the Thames Barrier. Seagulls were
flapping in its wake, and she wondered vacantly how many minutes it would take
to get there. It was already after three, and all around her the harvesting of
the day’s news was continuing. Along the desk Chloe Estevez was eating a salad
at her computer, and Ned Swann was booming down his phone to a correspondent in
Jeddah. On her screen the WSN-TV economics correspondent was saying the Bank of
England was warning of bad times to come, while across the floor someone on the
sports desk was very loudly asking a young researcher to get him coverage of a
Manchester United game.

And she was doing nothing.

 
She’d known that her report wasn’t complete and
would require input from others, but she’d been unprepared for the atmosphere
of denial in Fraser’s office. Now little groups of senior staff were standing
around talking quietly to each other, avoiding her eye. It was as if no-one
knew quite what to say to her, that once again her mental health was being questioned.

Only the Elizabeth McDonagh
strand of the report had engaged any urgency, albeit edged with considerable
doubt, and
the section that showed her had
been copied and sent to the West Midlands Police in Birmingham.

It wasn’t that Fraser and his
lieutenants hadn’t wanted to believe her story. Kate could see that. They just
couldn’t
believe it. The version of the
Jesse Gadden narrative she’d described was totally at odds with the manufactured
universal perception of him, and she hadn’t provided enough material to rebut
it. In journalists’ terms, her story just didn’t stand up.

“Kate!”
Hetty, the foreign desk secretary suddenly called. “The West
Midlands police want a word. Do you want to take it?”

She
did.

The
police officer had a gravy brown Birmingham
accent, in which he asked for further details of how she’d come to interview
the woman she maintained was Elizabeth McDonagh.

She
explained.

“Am
I to understand that you’re saying you broke into Jesse Gadden’s house?” There
was astonishment in his tone.

“Yes.
That was where I found her. I left a message with you on Friday."

"An
anonymous call. It was logged."

"But
did you find her there?"
 

"I
understand the Devon and Cornwall
police are still making enquiries."

She
knew what that meant. Elizabeth McDonagh hadn’t been found. She wasn’t
surprised.
 
The Glee Club was nothing if
not efficient. “But you can identify her from the film I shot, can’t you?”

“I’m
not in a position to say at the moment. Relatives will be contacted later
today.”

“She
was being hidden there. You should be interviewing Gadden and his staff and…”

“We’ll
be getting in touch with you again should the lady be positively identified.
Thank you.” The call ended.

She turned back to the river. The
hours to the Jesse Gadden web concert were slipping away.

“Here you go, Kate. Your mail
while you’ve been away.” Hetty, smiling sympathetically, dropped a handful of
letters on to her desk.

Without interest she began to
sift through the brochures and publicity handouts. A small handwritten envelope
with
“Personal”
written in the top
left hand corner, and stamped as having been received at WSN six days earlier,
looked like a viewer’s letter. It wasn’t. It was from Beverly’s flatmate.

“Dear Kate, I’m sorry to bother you, but I got a call from Beverly’s mother this
morning. She says she’d be happy now for us to send all Bev’s Jesse Gadden
records and photos and stuff over to her in Chicago. She thinks that as he meant so much
to Beverly she
ought to try to understand what she saw in him.

“
I’m really glad about this, and I think Beverly would have been pleased, too, don’t
you? She spent so much time thinking about the guy. Anyway, is it okay for me
to leave this with you? I imagine WSN-TV will be able to arrange to send it all
easily enough.

“I hope you’re getting over everything. I read about you in the paper.
It must have been terrible finding your friend like that.

“My news is that I’m giving up publishing and going to do a degree in
textile conservation in Bristol.

With best wishes,

Meg Johnson”

Kate closed the letter, and,
slipping it into her jacket pocket, glanced at the monitor above her desk. A
news report from outside the Pavilion
Picture Palace
was running on Sky. It was the usual pre-show TV coverage, with shots of Jesse
Gadden fans, having turned up without tickets, waiting hoping to get a glimpse
of the star, while technicians hurried to and from their vans.

She changed channel. For the
first time in weeks she didn’t know what to do? She’d failed.

A man in dungarees carrying a
ladder was making his way across the newsroom towards the foreign desk. Chloe
looked up from her screen as he reached the digital clock on the wall behind
her. Its job was to tell the time in Beijing, Kabul, Moscow, London, New York and Los Angeles. Except that
today it wasn’t. All the times were the same.

“Looks like something got into it
and stopped it doing what it’s supposed to do,” Chloe smiled to the man.

“You mean like a gremlin?” he
joked.

“Exactly!”

Kate stared at the digital clock.

Then, getting up from her desk,
she walked quickly to the lift.

Chapter
Forty Four

If Chris Zeff had been speaking
Cantonese she could scarcely have understood less. Standing on a rostrum in a small
lecture theatre in London’s

She’d arrived late at the London
Mathematical Society. Creeping into the back row, she’d spotted Zena, Zeff’s girl
friend, staring at him adoringly as she worked the PowerPoint. In his own
rarefied world Zeff was a coming young star, a notion reinforced when as he
stopped speaking the entire hall burst into applause. Kate clapped hard, too.

He wasn’t exactly mobbed after
his speech, but he was surrounded with much earnest congratulation, and she
waited until there was a gap in the group before approaching.

He giggled, delighted to see her.
“Oh, wow! Kate! I thought you couldn’t make it. That’s so cool. Did you enjoy
the lecture?”

“Fascinating,” she lied. Then
putting a hand on his elbow, she moved him to one side, dropping her voice:
“Look, I know this isn’t the best time, but I need a favour.”

“You got it!”

“Well, maybe not, because, you
see…” She glanced around. “I’m looking for a hacker.”

His eyebrows rose, then he moved
her still further from his admirers. “To do what?”

“To put gremlins in someone’s
website and stop it doing what it’s supposed to do. I don’t even know if that’s
possible, but…it’s urgent.
Is
it
possible?”

“Jesus! ‘Not easy’ would be the
understatement of the year!
 
Can you tell
me why and which website?”

Taking a DVD of her Gadden report
from her pocket she pressed it into his hand. “It’s all on here. If you take a
look, I think you’ll understand. But it’s urgent. It has to be done tonight.”

“Tonight?
 
Kate, that’s impossible. I’m sorry. These
things take time.”

“Just look at the disc, Chris…
Please!”

At that moment a corduroy clad
academic intervened jovially. “Can we all offer felicitations to our supernova or
is this a private audience…?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “Well done,
Chris! That was quite brilliant.” And he led the young maths genius back to his
pregnant girl friend and a waiting aura of admirers.

She was no longer afraid to go
home. The previous day she’d worried that there might be an attempt there to
prevent her finishing her report. It didn’t matter now.

Her home was as she’d left it, and
going upstairs to her study she logged on to her email. There was nothing of
any importance, and no further word from the West Midlands Police on either of
her phones.

Taking off her jacket, she was going through her pockets
before hanging it up, when her fingers found Meg Johnson’s letter. She read it
again.

 
“He’s
just everything,”
Beverly
had told her.

A rage
bubbled. “No, he isn’t, Beverly,”
she heard herself saying. “He’s a mad phoney who murdered you.”

Suddenly
she was barging into her spare bedroom. Pulling out Beverly’s box of posters and programmes that
she’d stuffed under the bed, she began throwing the contents on to the rug. It
was all tat, all fake, everything an artificial creation of a bogus hero. All
the tricks of celebrity creation were here: carefully backlit photographs on
DVDs to make Gadden look romantic; archaic green lettering to give a semblance
of historic Gaelic; flattering articles cut from credulous Sunday magazines in
which he said mundane nothings that sounded meaningful; exorbitantly overpriced
souvenir programmes that were just a collection of photographs and tour dates;
postcards and baseball caps, T-shirts and a key ring, and, the focus of
everything, those eyes bluer than cornflowers. Oh yes, those eyes, they were
everywhere, watching everything. Jeroboam had spotted that. Out from the box it
all came, all Beverly’s
sacred relics of a cheap iconography, shiny and nasty.

She
stopped. At the bottom of the box, lying beneath a copy of
Uncut
magazine, was a thick, much thumbed, hardback, exercise book.
Taking it out, she looked inside.

It was a journal, a history of Beverly’s infatuation full
of little affectionate cartoons of Gadden, lines from his songs and quotes from
his early interviews. And then there were Beverly’s
own comments.

She hesitated. Would reading on
be a betrayal of Beverly’s
private life, getting to know what the girl had thought about, what she’d
enjoyed imagining? It would be akin to looking at someone’s diary or love
letters.

“The thing about Jesse is that he fills the gap,”
the intern had
said.

Sitting on the edge of the bed,
she began to read. Sometimes the notes were wry, often funny, always devoted
and sometimes sexual, as they described a degree of obsession Kate had never
experienced.

To Beverly, Gadden hadn’t been just a singer,
he’d been her muse, her best friend, her companion and her lover through the
last years of high school and on through college. An all consuming love affair
that Beverly
had conducted in the privacy of her own mind and body, his songs were his side
of their conversations. All wisdom was there, all consolations, all answers and
all declarations. Whenever loneliness had stalked, he’d been there for her; and
if sexual frustration had vexed he’d offered himself through her. Some girls
looked for solutions in self-help books or the horoscope and problem pages in
magazines, as others in an earlier age might have looked to religion. Beverly had found her
advice and friendship in the lyrics of Jesse Gadden’s songs with their mixture
of the conversational and the baroquely mysterious.
 

When Kate had read writing like
this in the internet chat rooms, she’d dismissed the fans as deluded, lonely
adolescents. But she’d known Beverly
to be a bright, intelligent, well grounded young woman. How little we know each
other, she thought.

 
“Must go to Tarlton next May,”
Beverly had
noted at one point; while at another she’d written a short, quasi-philosophical
essay on the song
“Squaring The Circle Of
Life”
. But when, in one of the most recent jottings, Kate found her own
name, it came as a shock. Beverly
had spelled out a crush on her, imagining a playfully erotic threesome with
Gadden.

Then the girl had gone to Galway with Seb Browne, leaving her journal behind.

Carefully Kate now went backwards
through the book. Frequently Beverly
had added notes alongside the printed song lyrics that she’d pasted to the
pages. Her annotations to a song about mothers and daughters would inevitably
upset when it reached Chicago, while comments
about a lyric involving troubadours and fair ladies revealed, to a historian, a
Hollywood scale ignorance of courtly love.

A crowded page about the meaning
of
A Sunny Day In Eden
stopped her
browsing. It was the funeral song, the piece in the jigsaw she’d thought might
have linked the McDonaghs and Donna Hallsden. It came at the end of
The Sandman
album, the song she’d
previously interpreted as meaning
“Make
the best of being young and in love”
.

She now re-read the lyrics,
checking on Beverly’s
notes as she went.
“How do you hold back
time? How do you hang on to today? By putting it in a bottle? No, sorry, Jim, I
don’t think that’s the way”.

That had thrown her on first
reading. Not so Beverly:
“Jokey ref. to Time In A Bottle …old hit
by Jim Croce!”
the intern had written, and given herself a little star as
though she’d been rather pleased with herself.

Other lines had been marked in
pink.
“It’s been a perfect day in Eden, but the serpent’s
coming soon, to steal your youth and rip out your truth and prick your pretty
balloon.”

Next to the word
“serpent”
Beverly had written:
“In Jesse-talk ‘Serpent’ always used for ‘Future’”
. And then:
“Eden=Youth”.

Kate read on.
“So deep-freeze the diem, if you really do
love, and extreme sweet unction tonight, And don’t let the serpent suck
innocence dry, with age and betrayal and spite.”

She glanced again at Beverly’s notes. A row of
question marks signified that she hadn’t been able to interpret this part.
 

Could she? Extreme Unction was a
Catholic prayer for the dying. Did the adjective
‘sweet’
imply that death would be welcome?
 
She moved on to “
diem”,
the Latin word for day.

Gadden had written “
Deep-freeze the diem!”
What did a deep
freeze do? It preserved.
So where did
that lead? To: “
Freeze the day, the
perfect day of young happiness, innocence and love”
?
 
In other words, was he saying, at the moment
of perfect bliss, perfect happiness, stop time before betrayal, disappointment,
despair and adult cynicism set in?
 

But how could anyone stop time?

By not growing up, like Peter
Pan. Which was impossible.

Or by dying?

She stared at the page. Was that
it? Could such vague, pretentious banalities have been enough to convince a
clever girl like Donna Hallsden to take a gun on a picnic, or Liz McDonagh to
poison her husband and children? Perhaps, if they were sung by Jesse Gadden,
when the recipients of the message had already been groomed by him.

Beverly hadn’t understood the message, if
such it was, and therefore hadn’t acted on it. A phone call from Gadden had
been the trigger for her. Her devotion had been complete, as had that of Donna
Hallsden, the one or two in a million that Sadie Kupfermann had estimated could
be manipulated into murder and self harm.

She looked at her watch. It was
six fifteen; less than four hours to the concert. There’d been no word from
Chris Zeff. Had he managed to play the DVD, or been whisked off to a
celebratory dinner with his mathematical admirers?

 
Downstairs, the front door bell rang.

“Hello, Kate.” Stefano was
standing on her step, his lieutenant, Kish,
just behind him. “Jesse wants to see you. Bring your camera.”

It wasn’t a request and it wasn’t
an order. It was a statement that came with the assumption that it would be
acted upon.

For just a moment she paused.
There was ample time to slam and bolt the door. She did neither. Unlike the
members of the Glee Club these two were just hired thugs, and, therefore, readable.
Today they were unthreatening messengers. And she was a journalist. Fetching
her camera case, she followed the two men from the house.