Kill For Love (25 page)

Chapter
Forty Five

The gates opened automatically as
the Lexus edged through the mob of cameras and fans in the road outside Gadden's
Chelsea home. Alone
in the back, Kate’s eyes met the astonished expression on the face of the
policewoman who’d reprimanded her on this spot almost two weeks earlier. Then,
as the car pulled inside the grounds, the gates and normality, closed behind
her.

Climbing from the car she
followed Stefano into the house.
e
smiled when he saw her.

It was gloomy inside the building, with patches of light
illuminating the casual garnish of rock star wealth, a coat-of-many-colours
painting that was probably a Klimt on one wall, an old drum kit beneath it. As
she moved through the main hall, young faces appeared around doorways, watching
her, intrigued, as ever silent, but smiling again. Recognising several of the Haverhill entourage, it
seemed the entire Glee Club family was here for the big night.

Having delivered her, Stefano stood
back as Petra Kerinova, her cream hair elaborately beaded and wearing what was
probably a traditional Baltic dress and pinafore, approached. "He's
upstairs, waiting for you. Just follow the music.”

Tentatively Kate made her way up
a wooden staircase. On a landing she paused, as she heard the whine of guitars.
The last time she’d been alone with Gadden he’d tried to rape her. Then, opening
a door, she stepped into semi-darkness.

The music stopped. There was a
long silence. Then: "Dear God! If you don't mind me saying, Kate, you've
had a terrible haircut.” His voice crept teasingly from out of the gloom. “It
doesn't suit you at all. If I weren't a Kate Merrimac fan already it would have
put me right off you."

Jesse Gadden was sitting
cross-legged and barefoot in a patch of light on a black divan at the far end
of a large, otherwise empty room: black blinds covered the windows. The singer’s
hair had grown in the month since she'd seen him. He was unshaven, and, because
his face was thinner, his eyes seemed more magnetic than ever. A Fender bass
leant against sandwiched layers of electronic equipment at his side. Facing him
was a large screen on which an open air Jesse Gadden concert in New York’s Central Park
had been frozen as she entered.

"They said you wanted to see
me,” she said. “Why?”

He smiled. "You know why.
Because I like you." And he looked away pretend shyly, his long eyelashes
sweeping across his eyes.

"What else?"

"'What else?'" he
mimicked her English accent. "Well, do you remember, when we first met you
said you wanted to know everything about me, and sent your spies out looking
for information? You’ve been on a tour of Ireland
and America
digging up dirt, they tell me. That’s the truth now, so don’t try to deny it.”

She didn’t.

 
“But, anyway, it seemed to me, there’s an
easier way than that. I’ve got an hour or so before I’m needed, so, if you want
an interview, why don’t we do it now?”

She hadn’t seen this coming.
"You want to be interviewed?”

He giggled. "Well, I thought
perhaps more like that programme on the radio where you play your favourite
records and reminisce.
Desert
Islands
Discs
. I’ve been waiting for years for
the BBC to ask me, but they never have, or, if they have, no-one’s told me.
That happens. Anyway, I had a brainwave. Kate Merrimac, famous foreign
correspondent. She can do it. This could be a new career opportunity for you,
don’t you think, Kate? A sort of up-market disc jockey. And don’t worry about
not having the records to hand because they’re all set up on my system, ready
and waiting.”

He was giddy, scornful, silly,
and speaking very quickly. Completely different from the man he’d become in her
bed at Haverhill,
he was different again from the charmer who’d invited himself to dinner at her
house. He was also playing a game in which he made the rules. She wouldn’t, she
knew, discover what the game was unless she played along.

Taking out her camera she fitted
it to the tripod. “Very well,” she said. Then setting the exposure for the pool
of light in which he was sitting, she looked into the viewfinder and focused.

She was shocked. In close-up
Gadden looked older than when she’d last seen him. His summer tan had faded:
his cheeks were sunken.

"You'll need a
microphone," she said, approaching him. Their fingers touched as she
clipped the microphone to his shirt and she pulled back in revulsion.

He noticed. "You don't like
to get too close any more, right? Pity about that. We nearly had a good thing
going that time.”

Putting a headphone to one ear to
check the sound level, she ignored the comment. Then kneeling by the camera,
she focused and pressed the button to record.

Immediately professional, Gadden
pulled himself further upright on the divan and

straightened the creases in his black silk shirt. “So, go on
then, Kate Merrimac.
a
sk away.”

She felt awkward. Was this going
to be a pantomime of an interview? He was in a strange mood. “All right! As you
know, you’re allowed eight favourite records,” she began, following the format
of the programme. “Perhaps you can tell us about your first choice.”

Immediately Gadden’s attitude
changed. The self-mockery and exaggerated blarney disappeared. “Well, it would have
to be one my mother used to play. My very earliest memory. She was unwell and
we lived in a broken down caravan. She had a stack of old forty-fives, not
records she’d bought herself, I wouldn’t imagine…she never had money enough for
that…but records from an older generation that someone must have given her.
She’d play them all the time. So my first choice would be Ella Fitzgerald
singing
Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye
.
Whenever I hear it I think of her.” And, as he pressed a remote, the record
began to play.

Kate watched him. The charade
he’d begun had become eerily real. Quickly his eyes became wet as he listened
to the song, forgetting, it appeared, both her and the camera.

At the end of the song he nodded
for her to continue.

“And after the death of your
mother…?”

Immediately Gadden interrupted,
his voice now raging into bitterness. “Orphanages! Orphanages! That’s what my
childhood became. God and church, church and God, morning, noon and night.
Always in the wrong, always guilty and always expected to be grateful. Grateful
for what? That they didn’t leave me to starve to death? Maybe they should have
done. Maybe it’s all their fault.”

“Their fault for what?”

He shook his head defiantly. He
wasn’t going to answer that.

“And the record?”

“Kurt Cobain and Nirvana and
Smells Like Teen Spirit
,” he snapped as
an electric guitar led into an explosion of drums. “God, the priests must have
hated this one!”

It wasn’t a record for her and
she was relieved when he faded it out after a couple of minutes. Gadden’s behaviour
was changing with every record.

“The orphanages weren’t all bad,
though, were they! You had someone who taught you art for a while… Sister
Grace.”

A hesitation, then a smile. “Yes,
Grace. Lovely Grace. Appropriately named. I like to think she died in a state
of grace.”
 

“I saw the statue you had erected
over her grave.”

"So I heard."

"You were very fond of
her."

"I was a boy. She was a
girl, even though she was a nun. You could say I was fond of her."
 
For a second vulnerability lanced his
features.

Sensing her advantage, she
pressed further. "She wanted to go into an enclosed order. Isn’t that
right? She wanted to leave you.”

He frowned. "She wouldn't
have been happy like that, locked away."

"She must have thought she
would."

"No, she didn't think that.
She was..." He didn't finish his thought.

"Yes? What was she? Guilty?
Ashamed?” She waited, but again there was no answer.

About to change the subject,
something came to her, an idea that had been forming for days, but only now put
into words. "Was that why she fell? Why she died? Because she wanted to
leave you?"

He stared silently into the
blackness of the room, the single light catching one side of his face so that
she could see only his profile.

"You don't like people
leaving you, do you? Betraying you…?"

Still no reply. No denial.

She had her answer, although he
hadn't said a word. Grace Cleary hadn't jumped or fallen. He'd pushed her. At
fourteen Jesse Gadden Monaghan had murdered his lover. She left it at that.
“And your record for Grace would be?”

   
“Gregorio
Allegri’s
Miserere
by the choir of
King’s College Cambridge,
”
he
murmured just audibly. “Did you ever hear anything as beautiful as this in your
life.”

The record began to play. She
watched him. His gaze was distant as he stared into the darkness around him. In
a couple of hours he would be entertaining millions, but at this moment he was
fourteen years old thinking about a night on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic
as the unearthly voice of a boy soprano soared and soared and asked God to be
merciful.

 
“After the death of Grace you became a folk
singer…” she continued when the music finished.

Unexpectedly, he giggled. “I did.
But not exactly immediately...” The cheeky leprechaun was back. “The singing
took a little while. I was all kinds of things all over the place before that,
helping with the harvest in one place, robbing the poor box in another. You’d
be surprised how inexpensively you can live if you’re anonymous, show a little
enterprise and don’t give a toss what you do or who you do it to. You name it,
I did it.”

“But finally you began singing…”

“A busker got careless in Temple
Bar in Dublin,
so I stole his guitar and taught myself to play. I knew I could sing. It beat
working for a living. It still does.”

“And one day you met the man who
would become your manager and change your life, Kevin O’Brien.”

He smiled. “I did. God rest his
soul.”

She stopped. What had he said?

He noticed and raised a quizzical
eyebrow. “Haven’t your heard? The coastguards found poor Kevin near his
upturned boat off the coast of Maine
an hour or so ago,” he said casually. “He’d been fishing. Something must have
gone wrong.”

She couldn’t speak.

“And?” he prompted, his eyes
unblinking.
 

Words finally came. “Was he
alone?”

“I believe there was the body of
a young lady companion with him. He was always a great ladies man, was Kevin.”

“You bastard!”

He laughed, carelessly. “That I
was, but you can’t blame me for that, can you? Anyway, you’re forgetting your
job, Kate. You didn’t ask me, but I’ll tell you, my next record would be
Galway Bay
as sung by the late, great
Sam Cooke. That’s in memory of Kevin, by the way. He always said Sam had the
best voice ever, and since he was always certain he was right about everything,
even when he was stabbing me in the back, I’ll take it he was right about Sam.”
He pressed his remote.

“If you ever go across the sea to Ireland…”

She felt sick.
“This is a friend of mine, Julie,”
O’Brien had introduced. He’d become besotted with a much younger woman. But
she’d been doing a job, in love with someone else, keeping an eye on the man
who knew Gadden best.

It had been Julie from the yellow
Toyota,
disturbing the wind chimes on the motel deck in Shakeston, spying on her.
“On days like this he scares the living
daylights out of me,”
O’Brien had said of his protégé. Was that the real
reason why he’d become a recluse, why he’d helped her?
 

Sam Cooke had reached the end of
his song. Across the dimness of the room Gadden was becoming querulous. “Come
on, Kate, you’re not paying attention.” We haven’t got a lot of time left. Next
question, please.” He checked his watch as he spoke.

She tried to concentrate. “Then
you became famous,” she said. “A world star. Very powerful. Very rich.”

“I’ve given away as much as I’ve
kept. More.”

“Yes. You’ve given a lot of money
to charity. Why?”

“What?” He looked nonplussed.

“Why have you given away so much
money? Is it because you want to do good works? Or is it to get good,
unchallenging publicity? Or perhaps it’s to…”

“…buy my way into heaven?” he
snapped. “Like a mountain of indulgences? What do
you
think?”

Inwardly she nodded at a little
victory. She’d got to him. “And it’s made you dangerous, too, hasn’t it?”

“So you seem to think. Next
record, please.”

“Are you denying that you’re a
dangerous, manipulative man?”

“Next record, I said.”

She’d reached the parameters of
what would be allowed. “So, your fifth song?”

“
Gimme Shelter
, the Rolling Stones,” he replied quickly. “And the
sixth,
Talking Heads’
Take Me To The River.
I used to sing
that, not very well, when I was starting out, before I discovered which way I
was going. We’ve no time to play them all now. Everybody knows how they go,
anyway…” Impatient and increasingly nervy, he was moving about on his divan,
incapable of remaining still, probably, she worried, going in and out of frame
as the camera continued to record him.

“Do we have time for the
seventh?”

He sighed, the pressure seeming
to ease again. “It’s another ancient one of my mother’s.” The very Irish Jesse
Gadden was back. “
Mr Sandman
by the Chordettes
.
I always thought it was about me when
I was little, because she used to call me the Sandman, in that if I cuddled up
to her I could send her to sleep and everything would be all right. I cuddled
her a lot. But it wasn’t all right.”