Kill For Love (6 page)

“Petra. Right. Excellent!”

“I think so.”
 
He held her gaze.

This man is a brilliant flirt,
she thought. Then getting up she moved towards the limo’s door.

He got there first, jumping out
and holding it open for her. On the pavement he looked up at her house. “You
live here?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“Cosy.” He grinned slyly.

She didn’t answer because just
then she became aware of a movement behind him. Her neighbours’ front door had
opened and Lois and Paul Mott were coming out to go to work. Their faces froze
as they took in first the limousine, then Jesse Gadden. For a moment Lois’s
features seemed to go into a little giggle of panic as she nudged her husband.
He gawped.

“So, we’ll talk later…” And,
unaware of, or at least uninterested in, the excitement behind him, Gadden
suddenly leant forward and kissed her on the cheek.

He was back in the car before she
could react. Quickly the limo pulled away.

At their front door, her
neighbours were still watching.

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”
Kate smiled. And, as they groped for answers, she slipped her key into the lock
and entered her house.

It was only as she looked out to
gloat at the Motts as they finally scurried off towards the Underground, that
she saw another car pass. It was a cream 4 x 4 Lexus. Kerinova was in the back.

Chapter
Eight

September 22:

She told Beverly about her night out as the intern was
delivering the mail and she was taking a paracetamol to dull an exhaustion
headache. “I’m too old for this rock chick life,” she groaned.

"I can’t believe it! You
watched Jesse in the recording studio! Oh my
God!
” Beverly
trilled.

Amused by the girl’s response she
took the promise of a Jesse Gadden interview to the mid-day planning conference
in Neil Fraser’s office.

"Great! Didn't I say you'd
be more use to us here in London
than gallivanting around the world?" the editor-in-chief chortled.

Kate wanted to say that she’d
never gallivanted anywhere in her life, but she let it pass. He’d probably
meant the expression as a peace offering. "Well, let's wait and see what
he has to say when we put a camera on him,” she replied.

"You'll get something good. I’m
sure you will.”

She hoped so, then she sat in
silent frustration as the conference moved to Afghanistan
and developments in Washington.

"Aren't you glad I insisted
on you for the concert now?" Seb Browne congratulated himself as they left
Fraser’s office. "I'm going to enjoy this one."

She didn't answer. Browne had lobbied
for, and been given, the job of producing the Gadden interview, and, much as he
irritated her, it made sense. He had a reputation for being a more than
thorough researcher, and with so little to go on in the Gadden files, she’d
need one.

Across the newsroom Hilly Weston
was less thrilled. Jesse Gadden was her turf, her expression said.

"Hilly's hoping you'll fall
on your face," foreign editor Ned Swann noticed, stirring his coffee with
a ball point pen. "You can't blame her!"

Kate, who'd kept her place on the
foreign desk despite being restricted to home grown stories, glanced sharply at
him. “I don’t blame her.”

Noticing the momentary tension, Chloe
looked up mischievously. “If you’re going to start doing show-biz stories,
Kate, you'll need a make-over … fluffy hair…lips stuffed with collagen…a cement
mixer of foundation."

"In which case we might have
to ask you to sit elsewhere," Ned guffawed.

"Bastards!" Kate
laughed.

She worked all afternoon
assembling the bones of a Gadden biography to help structure the interview. All
around her reports of world events were being gathered, packaged and
transmitted, but, for almost the first time since she'd returned to work, she
wasn't distracted, to the extent that she was somehow unsurprised when she
heard Gadden's voice somewhere close by.

Looking around to locate the
source of the music, she noticed that Ned was watching a funeral on his TV
monitor. Pulling on her headset she looked at her own. A report was running on
a service held that morning in a Birmingham
parish church for a father and his three daughters.

"Jesse Gadden was a favourite of all the family,"
Robin Bloomfield,
WSN's main anchor, was intoning above a recording of Gadden's voice which was
echoing mournfully around the packed modern chapel:
"Life is just a start, a getting ready,
 
Stumbling down the path, the way unsteady, Love for love, give for
love, live for love..."

With professional detachment Kate
watched the four coffins being borne down the aisle past rows of
schoolchildren. For over a week a countrywide search had been in progress for
Elizabeth McDonagh, the wife and mother of the murdered family, now strongly
suspected of their poisoning.

Across the office Beverly mouthed the song's
lyrics.

"Personally I think I'd
rather have
Abide With Me
when it's
my turn," grumped Ned, staring in distaste at his screen
 
as a cortège of four hearses made its way
along suburban dual carriageways. “This is like a rock video! It makes us look
like MTV.”

He was right. To heighten the
occasion the producer in charge of the piece had lapped the record over the
soundtrack of the entire footage. It was a bad error of taste, the awkward
junction where news becomes entertainment.

Taking off her headset Kate
returned to her research.

She gave Beverly a truncated version of the previous
night's events over lunch in the WSN canteen.

“And what was he singing?” The
intern asked, too excited to eat.

“Well, nothing really. He had an
orchestra there.”

 
“Really! An
orchestra!”
Beverly
digested this. “And the lyrics?”

“Well, yes, there are lyrics. He
showed me some. He writes them out longhand in capital letters…with spelling
mistakes.”

“And?”

Kate shrugged. “Well, you know.
Fine.” She hesitated. “We’re not talking John Donne here, you know. At least I
don’t think so. They’re only pop songs.”

Beverly pushed away her salad. “No, they
aren’t. I understand that you can’t see it, Kate, even though you’ve met him.
But the thing about Jesse is that he fills the gap."

"What gap?"

Beverly screwed up her hands in front of her
face. "That's the trouble. I can’t really explain. It's something like
this: after my parents split I'd sit in my room and play his records for days,
and, you know, before long I didn't really care. It sounds terrible, but it was
as though he was talking to me and they weren't. And that was all right, I
didn't mind at all. He was enough."

"You were just upset and
lonely. But you're not lonely now. So you don't need him."

"Maybe not. But I want him.
And he still talks to me."

“He
talks
to you?”

“Through his songs.”

Kate looked sceptical. “And what
does he say?"

Beverly giggled and looked slightly embarrassed.
"All kinds of stuff. Whatever I want him to say, I suppose."

"What you mean is, you make
up your interpretations of the songs to fit your mood?"

"Okay, yes. Sometimes, I
suppose I do. But not always. Jesse can be very direct when he wants to be."

"I'm not sure what you mean
by 'direct'?"

"You'd have to listen to the
albums to know that."

"I have, and I still don't
know."

Beverly laughed. "Ah, well, there you
go, Kate. Some of us get it, some of us don't. What do they say?
'Many are called but few are chosen'
…
The King James Bible
."

Kate finished her lunch: "
'It's only rock and roll’...
The Rolling
Stones."

“What we really want is to get
him on to sex. That’ll get the ratings going.” Seb Browne, a stout thirty year
old with goodish chestnut hair of which he was very proud, was pouring them
both second glasses of wine.

“We’ll get the ratings whatever
he says,” Kate said, putting up a hand to stop the flow. “And there’s a bit
more to him than sex.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But at the end
of the day, that’s what rock music comes down to, isn’t it? I’m amazed you hadn’t
realised that.” He gave her a sly smirk.

She wished she hadn’t come. She’d
been on her way out of the office when he’d caught up with her and suggested a
quick drink to go over a few ideas.

“Come on, Kate,” he’d urged while
she’d been trying to think of an excuse. “We’re going to have to work together,
so let’s see if we can’t get along. I know you don’t reckon me, but that’s
because you don’t know me.”

That had been half an hour ago.
Now she knew him as well as she ever wanted to and reckoned him even less. They
were sitting in Pearl’s, a noisy bar at Gabriel’s
Wharf on the South Bank of the Thames where
producers courted their prettiest research assistants before taking them on
location. And she wondered how many girls Browne had brought here and what his
hit rate had been. She didn’t like the way his knee was occasionally touching
hers around the side of the table. She moved it away.

Noticing, he smiled. “Anyway,
Jesse Gadden…any thoughts?”
 

“Well, it’s been tricky getting
him this far,” she said, “so we’ll have to be careful not to frighten him off
before we’ve even started.”

“I can’t imagine you frightening off
anyone?” He was getting leery.
 

Kate sighed and looked away.

Browne grinned and took a large
gulp of wine. “Sorry, back to the interview. Plan of campaign?”

“At the moment, I’m not certain.
But we could make a start by trying to get him to talk about his childhood and
its relevance, if any, to his songs. That might lead him into other areas.”

“You mean you want to ask him to
explain the lyrics, like people used to do with Dylan, or
 
A Whiter
Shade of Pale
or the Beatles…trying to read all kinds of significances and
subliminal messages in them, when really they were just...what did John Lennon
call it...goggledebook?”

“Gobbledegook,” she corrected,
bored and waved good night to Chloe, who was leaving the bar with a group of
colleagues.
 

Spotting her, one of the group broke
away and approached. “Are you coming with us, Kate? We’re going on to dinner.
It’s on me.” The speaker was a bald, fifty-five year old online editor called
Frank Teischer who was celebrating his leaving party. The rumour was he’d been
forced to take early retirement following a complaint of sexual harassment from
Hilly Weston, and had invested his redundancy pay-off in a little editing suite.

“I’m sorry, Frank. I can’t
tonight.” She
was
sorry, but she’d
promised a book review to
The Observer
and she was already late with it. She was fond of Teischer. Seb Browne’s
behaviour was just as crass but he got away with it because he was younger and
more upmarket.

“Ah, pity! Anyway, if ever you’re
around Smithfield
and fancy a cup of tea...” And, pulling out a card bearing his new address, he
pressed it into her hand, and went off to rejoin his party.

“Mount Venus
Cutting Room,” she read to herself, and, amused, slipped the card into her
pocket.

“Okay gobbledegook!” Browne began
again. “But is any of it really relevant for our purposes?”

“Who knows? The lyrics might be
nonsense to you and me, but millions of people spend half their waking hours on
the internet trying to work out what they mean.”

“Millions of Jesse Gadden freaks.”

“I thought you liked him.”

“I like his voice. But I never
listen to what he’s singing about.”

“So what’s going on?”

“For me, catchy tunes and lots of
guitars. The rest is bollocks.”

That made her smile. At least he
was honest.

Noticing her change of mood
Browne grinned. “All right! What do we have on his childhood?” he said, opening
a laptop on his knee.

She relented. “Hardly anything!
He’s managed to keep most of it a secret.”

“Yes. And why?”

“That’s for us to find out.”

“Perhaps it’s just incredibly
boring.”

“Most people’s are. On the other
hand most rock stars buy their mothers nice detached bungalows at the seaside.
He has no mother, we know that. But what happened to her? Why is he so alone?
No-one gets through childhood without being influenced, so, is there someone in
his past who helped shape him, or who can shed light on him? If there is, let’s
find him or her. And then there are all the millions he gives to charities and
the hospital he’s planning to fund in Ireland. It’s for children. Maybe
there’s something there, too.”

Browne, famous at WSN for committing
everything to computer, typed rapidly into his laptop.

For ten further minutes they
talked about the kind of programme they had in mind. Then, just as suddenly as
he’d begun, Browne snapped the laptop closed. “Okay. Leave it to me. I’ll come
up with something, don’t worry.”

Kate finished her drink. “Good. I’ll
see you tomorrow then.” She got up.

He pulled a silly face. “Pity you
don’t fancy me. We’d make a great team.”

He was so brazen she almost
laughed. “I’m sure I’d be a disappointment.”

Already though, he’d had another
thought. “That American girl…Beverly. She’s a Jesse Gadden fan, isn’t she?
Maybe I should talk to her. She’s pretty.”

“Maybe you should,” she said, and
left him to his alternative plans.
 
Surely Beverly
would never be so stupid.

Chapter Nine

September 24:

Her phone began ringing as she was closing her
front door. She hurried to get to it before her voicemail cut in. “Hello?”

“Hi.” The voice was breathy. “It’s
Jesse.”

“Oh! Yes! Hello!” She was, she
knew, trying to sound as casual as possible. She’d met and interviewed kings,
killers and presidents without qualm, but with Gadden every word seemed to come
out sounding gauche.

“’
Hello
’,” Gadden mimicked,
putting on an English accent. “Look, er, I was wondering...”

“Yes?”
 

“Can you cook?”

“Cook?” She felt the slightest
breath of panic. “Well, I know how to use a microwave.”

“I’ve known women in Cork work miracles with a
microwave. If I were to come over tonight could you perhaps work a small
miracle for me, d’you think?”

“You want me to cook something for
you?” Jesse Gadden had just invited himself to dinner.

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“Er...no. No, of course not.” It
wouldn’t have occurred to him that she might have other plans for the evening.
She had, but she’d just changed them.

“I mean, if you’d rather we went
to Pizza Express…that would be all right, too. I just thought it would be
easier to talk about the interview at your place.”

“Here will be fine.” Already she
was visualising a practically empty fridge, wondering if she had time to run to
the supermarket.

“Right! See you in a minute.”

“A
minute
?”
 

But he’d already hung up.

She dashed up the stairs to
change. As she was pulling on fresh jeans and one of the sweaters she’d bought
at the weekend, she spotted the black Mercedes through her bedroom window. It
was parked about fifty yards away down the road. Had Jesse Gadden been waiting
for her to arrive home from work?

She was cleaning her teeth when
the bell rang. Spitting out the toothpaste, she hurried to the door.

He was standing holding a ragged
bunch of sunflowers that looked as though they’d been too long without water. “I
saw you watching me,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I was just...” She’d
almost apologised for having spotted him before she stopped herself. It wasn’t
she who’d been spying. “It’s a distinctive car. I mean, being so long and black.
It looks as though it should belong to a South American dictator or someone
sinister…” Then, thanking him for the flowers, she led him inside.

She’d been hoping he would wait in
the living room with a glass of wine while she recced the fridge, but, after
being complimentary about her home and paintings and the various photographs
she’d taken around the world and had framed, he followed her downstairs to the
kitchen. Suddenly it felt very small as she manoeuvred around him trying not to
bump.

Taking off his jacket, he offered
to help. She didn’t let him. Instead he opened the wine while she got the
glasses out. All the time his eyes followed her, bright blue magnets, which, no
matter how she tried, she couldn’t ignore.

If he realised she was nervous, he
didn’t betray it as he went through her fridge, pulling out ready-to-serve lasagne
and tortellini, and helping himself to a bunch of shrivelling grapes.
Hopefully, she thought, he’d be so used to people losing their sense of direction
in his presence he’d take her stumbling conversation for normal behaviour. But,
God, why was she behaving like this?

In the absence of anything else
they decided upon a mixed selection of pasta, with salad and some left-over
cheese, and whatever remained of the grapes after he’d finished with them. But
by now he was studying her CD collection. She frowned. She wasn’t sure she
wanted to be judged on her taste in music. Then:

“Oh yes!” A yelp of approval.

“What’s that?”

“Neil Young.
After The Gold
Rush
.”

“Ah...” A short-term boy friend
who made documentaries on eco-systems had left that just before they’d drifted
apart. She hadn’t played it since. “You like Neil Young?”

“Oh yes. I wasn’t aware of him
until Kurt Cobain alerted me. He was a big Neil Young fan.
 
He loved that line of his
‘Better to burn out than fade-away’
.
That’s pure rock and roll!” He grinned. “Then I began playing his early stuff.”
And, as he selected the track, a piano gave way to Young’s high, reedy voice.
“Well,
I dreamed I saw the knights in armour coming, saying…”

Dutifully she listened with him.

“When did
you
start to sing?” she asked as a French horn began a forlorn
break in the song.

“What’s that?”
 

Boys and their records, she
thought, just like Jeroboam. And she rephrased her question. “I know you’re
supposed to have played every folk pub in Ireland before anyone noticed you,
but before that, did you sing at school and parties, that sort of thing?”

Almost wearily the eager fan
disappeared and the wary star returned. “And here was me thinking we’d be
leaving the business until the coffee and After Eights.”

“We haven’t got any After Eights,”
she returned.

But they did have candles, tall
red ones, and the special offer supermarket claret wasn’t bad. And dinner was
cosy, if, at first, careful, as Kate explained how she wanted to know about his
childhood for background information, and he nodded and turned the question by
asking about her family.

“You probably know all your uncles
and aunts and stuff, do you?” he said, and almost before she realised she was
telling him about her brothers.

He did that all evening, not
rudely, just making it seem that her story was at least as interesting as his.
It was exasperating, but flattering, and not something she was used to among
the very famous who generally asked very few questions themselves. She knew
what he was doing, yet somehow she felt compelled to answer. He was such a good
listener, his eyes, as always, locked on hers when she was talking.
Occasionally he would offer snippets of information about himself as
encouragement, but generally of the negative kind. No, he had never been an
altar boy nor a chorister, he told her. In truth, though the nuns, and, later,
priests, had chastised him, he’d hardly ever gone to mass.

“Nuns?” she interrupted.

He grinned. “Nuns. You know,
Brides of Christ. Engaged, at least. Well, going steady.”

“You were brought up by nuns after
your mother died...?”

“And brought down by them, too,
from time to time. I must have been a terrible disappointment to everybody who
taught me. All I ever wanted was to play the guitar, write songs and make
records. They didn’t see that as a fitting career for one of their little
Christian soldiers.”

“Would you think I was a bit thick
if I admitted I don’t always understand what your songs are about?” she asked, half
wondering if this was being indelicate.

The blue gaze met her
unblinkingly. “I wouldn’t think you were thick at all.”

“Yet lots of people obviously do
understand them. At least they like to analyze and interpret them.”

“So I believe.”

“It would be fascinating in the
interview if you could perhaps take us through a couple of them, give us
your
interpretation.”

He laughed. “What? And spoil
everybody’s fun? No artist should be asked to interpret his own work. That’s
for everybody else to do.”

It was a door closing in her face,
but he did it with such charm. Then pouring more wine he swivelled the
conversation back to her. Had she ever been tempted to write fiction, he wanted
to know. A lot of reporters tried. “Or what about a memoir on being a foreign
correspondent?”

She understood now why the
cuttings were so flimsy. She was the interviewer hoping to do research, but he
was asking the questions.

Did she get nervous on camera? he
pursued. Had she made mistakes? What about regrets? And then there was Owoso?
What exactly happened there that day?

“No,” she said. That was one thing
she didn’t want to talk about.

He accepted that and the
conversation moved to other things, but he’d opened a file of sadness in her
mind, and later, long after the bottle of wine was finished and he’d forbidden
her to open another, she mentioned the death of her father. He was immediately
interested, asking to know what he did and how close she’d been to him.

“Close.”

“And did you see him when he was dead?”

She was surprised at the question. “Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“Why?”

“Just tell me.”

“It was a Sunday evening. I’d been to Devon for the weekend. My brothers had been trying to
contact me but my phone had been out of range. My father…he’d suffered a
cerebral aneurysm and his brain had flooded with blood. He was in intensive
care. He died while I was on my way to the hospital.

“My mother and brothers were waiting when I got
there. They looked blank, puzzled. I didn’t understand then, but I’ve seen that
look many times since. It’s as though the bereaved are just realising that a
part of their world has died, too, and that nothing can ever be the same again.”
She stopped.

He waited.

After a moment she continued: “I wanted to see
him. They left me alone. I just sat there.”

“And he looked peaceful?”

Kate shook her head. “He looked dead.”

It was after midnight when he
left. He was, he said, going back to the studio to work. Time was pressing. He
had a timetable to keep to.

“What timetable?”

“My timetable.”

She let it go. The matter of the
interview had already been resolved. “I’ll discuss it tomorrow with Petra,” he said as he
moved towards the door. “We’ll sort something out, dates and times, that sort
of thing.”

“And the questions?”

“You decide. I’ll answer anything
you want.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Can it be soon?”

“Pretty soon.”

“Why are you giving it all up?”
she asked.

“What?”

“Getting off the merry-go-round.”

He hesitated, but didn’t reply.

“I mean, you’ll miss it, won’t you.
Singing, playing, recording, the adulation. Why?”

His head rocked slowly from side
to side. “It’s time.” Turning away his eyes fell on Jeroboam’s
Bill and
Harry
book lying on the dresser. “Now what have we got here?”
 

“It belongs to a boy...a friend,” she
explained.

He looked at the book, puzzled. “A
boy friend?”

Kate thought about Jeroboam. “More
than that,” she smiled, and then added: “He doesn’t like you.”

Gadden put the book down. “But you
do, don’t you.”

She didn’t answer. She’d expected
him to telephone for his car, but instead he simply opened the front door, and,
stepping out on to the steps, raised his hands, palms outwards. Down the street
there was the muffled ripple of a powerful engine being started. Then the
Mercedes slipped out from under the trees. Stefano was at the wheel.

Gadden turned back to her: “I’ll
call you.”

“Right.” She was smiling, her hand
out to be shaken, when suddenly there was the soft imprint of a kiss on her
lips. And he was gone.

Even before the car had reached
the corner of the street she was chastising herself. That’s quite far enough,
she told herself, as she went back inside the house. What did
she
think she was doing, for heavens
sake!

Going down to the kitchen she set
about clearing the table and filling the dishwasher. But his presence in her
home lingered and she found herself putting
a Jesse Gadden album
into the CD player. Seb Browne had said
that it was the man’s voice he liked. She could understand that. It had an
abandoned quality. As she scoured the pans she listened to the lyrics,
“Waiting
in the waiting room of life, making a plan, meeting the man, waiting in the
waiting room of life…”,
and wondered what the words really meant. If
anything.