by Ray Connolly
when they got back. Wearing a grey anorak, jeans and old trainers, he was in his mid-fifties, a thin, worn man with thinning, white hair weaved into a tight pigtail. Between his fingers was a self-rolled cigarette. He looked about as unprepossessing as a man could be but his voice was warm and sad. "Seb wanted contacts from the old days when Gadden was around here playing the pubs," he said. "I gave what help I could...a few old phone numbers for Kevin O'Brien...he was Jesse’s first manager. Stuff like that. I thought I'd got myself a nice little job there...researching for WSN."
"I'm afraid the programme has been cancelled," Kate said. "If you send me an invoice for the time you spent I’ll see that you get paid."
Bailey nodded. "It's always the same with Jesse Gadden. Always difficult. They've all been here asking questions, all the tabloids and the big Sunday papers, Americans and Germans, Japanese and South Americans, but no-one ever finds out anything we don't already know, which is next to nothing. They say Bob Dylan tells a different version of his life to every journalist who ever asks him. Jesse Gadden goes one better. He hardly breathes a word. He never did. Not even in the beginning."
Kate was hardly concentrating. She didn't care any more.
"I remember trying to interview him years ago when he was first playing the Crazy Horse here in Galway. God, he was difficult. He never gave me anything. Even the girls he had...even they never got to know him, though there were quite a few. He had his pick, but he always kept them at a distance. And then along comes that Kerinova woman."
Kate changed the subject. "I understood Seb had been talking on the phone to one of Gadden's school friends, someone called Michael Lynch. Perhaps that was who he and Beverly were seeing in Connemara..."
"I'd be surprised. I got the impression Lynch was here in Galway. They must have heard about him through pub talk. I’ve never met the man. He sounded a bit dubious. I warned them to take what he said with a pinch of salt."
She left it at that.
Larry was a solid lawyer and family man. They had a quiet dinner in the hotel, musing bleakly over the events of the day, and then Larry retired to his room to prepare an initial report for the insurers.
Kate was exhausted, but not yet ready for sleep. Switching on the TV in her room for the late night news, she found WSN now very respectfully covering the deaths of Seb and Beverly, giving brief details of their careers. A sports round-up followed and she clicked away through the other channels on offer, a late-night chat show from CNBC, Spanish football, movies everywhere and on into MTV and the rock music channels.
Abruptly a ghostly face caused her to pause in her channel surfing. Jesse Gadden was miming in what looked like a temple, the blue of his eyes rendered even larger by make-up. For a few moments she watched.
“Breaking the fence around a yester Da-Glo love affair,” Squaring the circle, circling the square, Making sense of a yester-night-time nightmare…”
She switched off the television.
Chapter Twenty
October 5:
They took the first flight back to London the following morning. They didn't talk much, busying their minds with the morning papers. There was a photograph of Beverly on page three of the Irish Daily Mail. It must have been taken a couple of years earlier and showed a wide-eyed, laughing college girl goofing around holding her iPod to one ear, headphones draped over the other, a zany picture the intern had posted on Facebook.
At WSN they separated, Larry to report to Fraser, Kate to pick up her car and drive home. All the way back on the plane she’d been mentally composing a letter to Beverly’s parents, wondering just what she could say. In her study, she now propped a coffee on the side of her desk, took out a sheet of stationery and picked up a pen.
Words didn’t come. Beverly had been working on a project for her. She wanted to blame herself. But Beverly’s parents had lost their daughter. That was all they would care about.
Switching on her computer, she went into her WSN mail and pulled out old messages that Beverly had sent her, chatty, over-enthusiastic ones written when the girl had been compiling her Jesse Gadden information. The ghost of her voice was in her ears as she re-read them. “Kate, These are the best articles I could find. By the way, if you get chance, listen to The Sandman. It’s brilliant…” And then another: “Kate…I thought these lyrics might help… They’re totally awesome.”
Kate’s eyes smarted. What was it Beverly had laughed down the phone on the Saturday morning? “One touch and I go,” she said she’d told Seb. Things must have moved on between them, if they’d been planning a romantic extra night in Connemara.
And what was it Seb had written about his chances with her? Going back to her in-box she found his last email. “Bloody rock stars…I hope he gets foot rot…” she read again. “As it happens, Galway might not be a complete disaster.” Then: “Beverly…wants you to know that I’m not as bad as she thought!”
Had she misjudged him? Beverly must have thought so.
She’d ignored the attachment that had come with the email, Seb’s research notes on Gadden. She hadn’t wanted to know anything more about the singer. But for twenty four hours she’d been trying unsuccessfully to visualise Beverly and Seb together on the Sunday before the accident. Seb’s notes might fill in part of the picture. She clicked to download them.
The document opened. At the top was Gadden’s full name, JESSE GADDEN MONAGHAN. Then beneath was a haphazard collection of notes, questions and themes, together with lists of names and phone numbers, everything Seb had considered interesting about the singer from the moment he’d begun researching him. His reputation for committing everything to his laptop hadn’t been idly earned. Why he’d bothered sending her his research when the interview had been cancelled she couldn’t imagine, but for a second the piece of mangled steel that had fallen from the burnt-out car creased a path in her memory. What she was now seeing was probably that laptop’s last task, sent from a hotel room in Galway while she’d been sitting on the train coming back from Cornwall.
Quickly she scrolled down the pages. An entry headed LOUGHREA RECORDS caught her eye. Beneath it was the name of Jesse Gadden’s first manager, KEVIN O’BRIEN. She began to read.
“PHIL BAILEY (freelances for Irish Times) says O’BRIEN was around Galway in the nineties with Gadden, but lives in the US now. Used to run a music pub in Rafferty St called The Crazy Horse. Made original tapes of LIVE IN GALWAY album, then issued them on LOUGHREA RECORDS, and turned them into a fortune. Later on Gadden bought the tapes back from him. The quiet word is O’Brien got 5 per cent of Gadden’s earnings for life, which has made him a multi-millionaire. O’Brien is said to be the old style rock promoter, hard living, drinking, women’s man, etc…. But couldn’t stand Petra Kerinova.”
Kate stopped reading as Kerinova’s blank gaze slipped into her mind. Then she returned to the screen. Another name was underlined: MICHAEL LYNCH.
“Petty villain and a drunk. In and out of jail. Claims he lived in the same boys’ home as Gadden for a while and believed to be somewhere around Galway with something to sell. Probably the drink talking, but Beverley leaving messages in all the bars for him.”
Now an image of Beverly charming barmen across Galway presented itself. They would have liked the willowy, chatty American.
“Limerick, Friday, 6.p.m. Visited four Catholic boys’ homes. Sketchy records. They’ve been asked many times before and aren’t interested in talking about Gadden, other than to say he’s been very generous to them.”
Again she skipped the details. One item had been underlined. It was from a teacher, Brother Amedy, at a Christian Brothers boys’ home, who’d arrived there after Gadden had moved on. “Considering how famous Jesse Gadden is now, as young Jesse Monaghan he seems to have been totally anonymous. He left no trace around here.”
Despite her misgivings about him, Kate had to be impressed by Seb’s efforts. On the Friday night, probably after Beverly had resisted his first attempts at seduction, he’d written a
late note.
“Midnight: Michael Lynch rang. Drunk. Says he wants money and has a story ‘to rot the eyeballs’. Doesn’t sound like the sort of stuff we’re looking for, but there’s no harm in seeing him...if he’ll ever agree to it. Beverly to try and talk to him. She’s good at that.”
He’d then become reflective.
“Beverly says she read that Gadden once claimed to have run away from more homes than he can remember (Rolling Stone, about 2005). Good area for interview, maybe?”
Kate finished her coffee. It had just begun to rain and for a moment she watched the drops running down her study window. She was puzzled. She’d begun reading the attachment in order to feel closer to Beverly not to learn more about Jesse Gadden. Yet now she found herself intrigued by what Seb had been uncovering. She turned back to the computer.
“No bullying reported at any of the schools, though they may be lying or have forgotten. He was small and quiet, but doesn’t seem to have been picked on. Almost the reverse. At St Patrick’s, Lough Dera (aged 10), a secretary said she remembered people saying some of the older boys were frightened of him. She didn’t know why. She only remembered him because he had the ‘biggest eyes of any child she ever saw’. She loves to watch him now on the television, but ‘other than the eyes’ he’s unrecognisable. Apparently he wasn’t so cute as a young boy. More odd looking.”
Recollections by a couple of groupies from the pub performance days came next, telling how mysterious Gadden had been with them. “He’d take his pants off, but he always kept his secrets on”, one had quipped.
It hadn’t been an easy last project for Seb.
“How can anyone be so mysterious? Everyone in Ireland has friends and family apart from him and his mother, Theresa Mary Monaghan. Why????? Who was she?”
Then on the Saturday afternoon there’d been a breakthrough. “MICHAEL LYNCH phoned Beverly, a bit more sober. She said we’re looking for a few schoolboy anecdotes. LYNCH: ‘I’ll give you schoolboy anecdotes all right. Ask him about the nun’.”
“Ask him about the nun....” Something reverberated in Kate’s memory. Gadden had mentioned nuns.
The next entry was Donnelly’s Bar, Saturday, 6.p.m.
“MICHAEL LYNCH. Virtually a derelict. Hard to believe he’s the same age as Jesse Gadden. Prevaricated for an hour while we bought him enough booze to kill most men, then suddenly opened up when he got too drunk to remember he wasn’t going to tell us anything without being paid.
“Said he and Gadden, or Monaghan, as he calls him, were together at the age of 14 in an orphanage in County Clare, and one thing our boy was particularly good at, other than running away, was art. He and Gadden went to an all boys’ school there, but someone got the idea that Gadden should have special lessons in art. Perhaps they thought it might stop him running away. Which, he says, it did…for a while.
“According to Lynch, the art teacher they shipped in was a young nun from the girl’s school called Sister Grace. She was a brilliant teacher, but she seems to have got a bit of a crush on him. A bit like Sting singing Don’t Stand So Close!!! I suppose.”
Kate stopped reading. “Hellbound nun”. That was a line on the River of Ghosts album. “With broken words from some hellbound nun.” She read on.
“Now comes the tricky bit. Lynch says it was more than a crush, more like an obsession. They’d meet secretly in the gorse bushes on the cliff path. There was sex, too. He says he saw them at it more than once. It went on for months. Then suddenly Sister Grace commits suicide, jumping off a cliff while walking home one night.
“After that night Monaghan was never seen around there again. The next time Lynch hears anything about him he’s sitting in jail in Belfast years later watching TV and there’s his old pal, now calling himself Jesse Gadden, singing and making millions. Same big eyes though, he says. ‘That bastard had eyes you never forget.’ He’s right about that.
“I suppose what he’s suggesting is that Sister Grace jumped after a row or something. Who knows? Anyway, no one tried too hard to find our boy. The Catholic Church isn’t big on suicide and it would have been embarrassing for them to admit that one of its nuns had seduced a fourteen year old. They good at covering up stuff like that, as we’ve learned.”
Kate moved to the final page.
“Problem. This is real tabloid stuff, not WSN material. Lynch would sell it to the News Of The World or National Enquirer if he had any brains, which he hasn’t. At the same time, if the man we all thought was a rock and roll version of John The Baptist has a past, it’s at least worth knowing about.”
“Anyway we’re off to CONNEMARA now. Lynch reckons that Sister Grace’s parents live somewhere there. Maybe they’ll talk.”
Finally there was a line of almost comic desperation.
“Beverly’s still listening to those bloody Jesse Gadden records through her headphones. A man can have too much of a good thing!”
Kate finished reading the notes. Now she knew. It hadn’t been a romantic extra night that had taken Seb and Beverly to Connemara. Seb wouldn’t have been able to resist following up a story like this. For some reason they’d stayed late, then on the way back to their hotel, when Browne was probably planning his final attempt at seduction, there’d been the accident.
She sat back in her chair. Had they met the nun’s parents? Did it make any difference to anything, anyway? She didn’t know. But saving the notes, she printed them and then read them again in full.
From outside the heavy rumble of a diesel engine was trying to invade her thoughts. The household rubbish was collected on Tuesday mornings.
In an instant she was downstairs. She was just in time. As she opened her door a refuse collector was reaching into her dustbin.
“I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind,” she shouted above the roar of the truck, now revving hard in crushing mode. And, taking the black plastic bag from his grasp, she stepped back into the house and closed the door.
Putting the bag on the kitchen table, she untied the double wreath knot with which she’d secured it and began searching inside. The Jesse Gadden CDs were at the bottom, damp and stained beneath newspapers, wet, used tea bags and orange peel. Carefully she took them out and wiped them. Then she laid them down next to the CD player.
Chapter Twenty One
October 6:
She hit the water at a run and plunged into the silence. Then she was breaking through the surface, arms and legs already kicking into rhythm, earplugs in and the world blocked out as she reworked the events of the past few days.
She hadn't wept when she'd been told of the accident. Now, two days later, she cried privately into the water, her eyes stinging from the chlorine of Fulham Pools. Beverly had been a Jesse Gadden fan like no other. Had she revised her opinion when she'd heard what Michael Lynch had to say about him? No. She wouldn’t have believed it.
But what of Sister Grace: sex with a fourteen year old boy with mirror eyes. Could that be true? What had happened the night Jesse Monaghan ran away for the last time?
She wanted to stop there, to erase Gadden from her thoughts, but she couldn’t. He haunted her. Her account of the executions on the beach at Owoso had excited him. She couldn’t escape that. She thought about fetishes, the excitement of violent death, the mobs at public hangings at Tyburn, the crowds of men waiting in the sun outside mosques in Saudi Arabia for the regular Friday beheadings? She'd seen film of that, barbaric footage of faces obscene with excitement. For Gadden violent death had been an aphrodisiac, and she remembered the music she’d heard in her Haverhill bedroom.
That had to have been arranged. Had someone else been involved?
It was now almost lunchtime and the pool was becoming congested, serious swimmers racing along the lanes, and boys from the local schools appearing at the edges of the pool and hurling themselves into the water. Reaching the shallow end she watched two boys dash along the side and somersault like dam-busters into the pool, narrowly missing other swimmers.
"They don't care at that age, do they?" A voice sighed alongside her. It was an elderly woman in a green floral suit and red rubber swimming cap. "It's always the same: the more confident they are, the bigger the risks, the worse the accidents." And she wagged her head as another youth dive-bombed into the water.
Kate nodded polite agreement. Then, climbing from the pool, she went to get dressed. She was back in control, the moment of emotion behind her.
The dare-devil boy swimmers were still playing at the corners of her mind when she bought a cup of coffee in a cafe on
North End Road
. "The more confident they are, the bigger the risks, the worse the accidents", the old lady had said. Did the converse to that hold true: the less confident, the more careful, the fewer accidents? Beverly had been unused to driving on the left hand side of the road. So, how confident would she have been? Twenty miles an hour confident, the intern had told her. Leaving the café she made her way back to her car. A parking fine was sticking to the window. She peeled it off and stuck it in her pocket. Normally she would have been cross with herself for so carelessly throwing money away. She wasn’t. She was distracted.
Sitting in the driving seat she pulled out her phone, called WSN, and asked for Larry Abramsky.
"Yes, Kate," the lawyer answered.
“Larry, something’s puzzling me…”
“Yes?”
“Well, Beverly told me she was a timid driver since she’d been in England.”
“Yes, I think you mentioned that.”
“Right. But I don’t understand how a timid driver, someone who says she went along at twenty miles an hour on those little Irish lanes, could drive off the side of the road, across a grass verge and over a cliff on a straight road.”
There was a pause. Then: “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m following.”
