by Ray Connolly
“Well, what I’m saying is, accidents like the one Beverly and Seb were in don’t usually happen to cautious drivers. They happen to people who are drunk or high or most often going too fast, kids who think nothing can ever happen to them, who take risks.”
“Er, yes…probably. So?”
“So something must have caused her to do that.”
"Yes, maybe. A rabbit in the road, you mean. Or a sheep. Possibly. Or perhaps another car. Maybe Seb tried, you know…” He left the suggestion unsaid. “It could have been any number of things."
"Yes," she said. "Any number of things." And, thanking him, she rang off.
Her mother had left a voicemail message while she’d been out. She'd read about the accident in the Daily Telegraph and wanted to know if Kate had been friendly with either of "those poor young people".
Kate called her back. "I hardly knew them," she lied. It was easier that way.
"She was a very pretty girl," her mother replied, and Kate could hear the crackle of a newspaper down the line as her mother examined a photograph.
"Almost beautiful," Kate said, which was an exaggeration, made because Beverly was dead. She then added, "She was a very jolly girl," which was true.
It really wasn't the moment for a chat, so promising to call at another time, she put down the phone and went downstairs into the kitchen to find something to eat.
That was when she saw it, just for a moment, out of the corner of her eye, as she was about to put some pitta bread into the oven: the cream Lexus cruising slowly past her house, Stefano driving, Kish alongside, Kerinova in the back.
The pitta bread fell from her hands.
Almost immediately the phone rang. On the sixth ring she picked it up. "Hello?"
His voice was never sweeter. "Kate, it's Jesse. How are you?"
She didn't reply.
"The other night," he breathed. "I think there might have been a misunderstanding." One of his records was playing in the background.
"There was no misunderstanding."
"Well, I think there might have been. I wanted to talk to you, but when I woke up, you’d gone. I was a bit upset, to be honest.”
"Why are your people spying on me?"
"That isn't a word I'd use."
She didn't answer, forcing him to follow on.
"They were just checking to see that you got home from Ireland safely."
He must have seen her being interviewed on TV at the site of the accident. Now she spoke very quietly. "Okay, now listen. If I see any of your zombies in this street again I'll complain to the police that they're stalking me."
“Oh, come on. Maybe if I came to see you, talked things over, we could, you know, be friends again, sort things out,” he coaxed.
"There's nothing to talk about."
There was a sad, slight sigh. Then: "It was tragic what happened in Connemara...to your friends, I mean. I was very sorry to see that." The music was now quite loud.
"So was I." She slammed down the receiver.
The phone rang again almost immediately.
She threw herself at it. "Listen, if you don't leave me alone..."
"I'm sorry?" A timid voice came back. It was David Harris, assistant news editor at WSN-TV. It was his job to organise the roster for the correspondents. "What is it, Kate, should I have been somebody else?"
"Oh God, I'm sorry. I thought you were...my niece. She's taken to calling me all the time." She didn't know why she didn't tell him the truth, when it was obvious she was lying.
But Harris had his own worries. He'd made a mistake on his timetable and just realised that no one was available to cover the Chinese Ambassador at a tree planting ceremony. With some trepidation, he asked if she could do him an enormous favour and help out.
She could easily have declined. What he was suggesting was another diary job, not one for a well-known correspondent. But when she immediately agreed she could hear the gratitude in his voice as he thanked her.
“That’s okay,” Kate soothed. What she needed more than anything at this moment was an ordinary, routine reporting job.
It was as humdrum as she'd anticipated, a twenty minute ceremony in College Garden, just behind Westminster Abbey, commemorating some long-forgotten Englishman who’d been at school there a hundred and eighty years ago, gone to China, opposed British imperial policy and been accidentally shot by his own side in a skirmish during the First Opium War. Now he was a hero. Such was history.
She made what she could of it. And, after shaking hands with the Chinese ambassador and telling her cameraman she’d see him back at the studio, she picked her way out of the garden. She might have carried straight on through the cloisters to the outside world, had it not been for a tourist mob surrounding a team of brass rubbers. To avoid them she stepped into the Abbey.
Evensong practice was taking place, young choristers in crumpled surplices lined in rows along the wooden choir stalls at right angles to the high altar, casually confident in their voices, taking for granted their gift. And sitting in a pew, she gazed at the folds of stained glass light falling across the nave as tourist day turned into spiritual evening. “The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,” sang the choristers.
She wasn't religious, she didn't believe in God, but somehow she was moved. But why, when, judging by the cheeky expressions on the faces of the boys who were singing, this music meant nothing to them. Perhaps it reminded her of her father, or was it memories of school, or even some long forgotten concert or radio programme heard at an impressionable age? She couldn't say. She knew only that her emotions were being touched by the music in a way she couldn't define. And it seemed that Beverly sat and listened with her.
The taxi stopped on the corner. The street lamp, having been repaired, had been vandalised and deep shadows lay across the street. As Kate fumbled in her wallet for the fare, she could sense the driver watching her in recognition through his rear view mirror.
Tipping him generously, no well-known TV face ever wanting to be considered mean, she climbed from the cab, and waited under the plane trees as it drove away. She then looked across at her house. It was in darkness. For the first time in her life she was afraid to go home. She didn’t know why.
There was a light shining in the window of the Motts’ bedroom next door. They went to bed early, and for a moment she envied them their companionship. Then, telling herself not to be foolish, she crossed the road.
At the door she stopped. Was someone watching her? She looked back, hoping to see Jeroboam appear from behind a tree. Nothing moved. Then with a rush she unlocked the door and entered the house. Everything was as she’d left it, but it hadn’t been the thought of an intruder that had frightened her. It was something less tangible.
Although she’d hardly eaten all day, she wasn’t hungry. So, making some cocoa she took it upstairs. She’d intended watching some television and going to bed and reading. Instead she went into her study and switched on her computer.
There was no new interesting email waiting. She was disappointed. She’d wanted something to divert her thoughts. Instead, and despite herself, she found herself looking again at Seb’s attachment. If Michael Lynch’s information had been kept hidden from the fans, what else didn’t they know? And, then again, what did they know?
She knew she was beginning to torment herself. Every rational thought demanded that she put Jesse Gadden behind her, but she couldn’t help herself. There were questions that had to be answered.
And once again she found herself searching the Jesse Gadden internet sites, added more and more words, “Monaghan, Lynch and “NUN”, as she went.
Chapter Twenty Two
October 8:
Routine pacifies and for the next few days life took on a muted pattern as Kate returned to co-presenting the morning show with Robin Broomfield, while spending most of her free afternoons at her computer.
On the Friday evening Natalie Streub, an American friend on leave from WSN's Moscow bureau took her for a d
rink. "Is it true that Frank Teischer's gone into the porn business?" Natalie enquired of the online editor who had been forced out following a complaint about sexual harassment.
“Apparently so.”
"I always said he was too good for WSN," Natalie laughed her smoker's cackle.
Jeroboam came over on the Saturday afternoon for a reading lesson, and, while heating pizzas for them both, Kate helped him fill in an application for a job at the Wellington Hotel. Privately she didn't hold out much hope.
“What would you say your hobbies were?” she asked, as she studied the form, wondering why a hotel would want to know anyway.
Jeroboam’s brow creased. “Map reading,” he said at last.
“Map reading! I didn’t know that.”
“I like looking at the London Underground map and seeing which trains go where, and where you have to change.”
“Right,” she said, surprised, and rather pleased. “You’ll be very useful in a hotel then. I mean, telling the tourists how to get about.”
“I think so,” he said, and watched as she wrote him an enthusiastic character reference.
That night she had a call from Chris Zeff, the Cambridge research student who'd lost his grant after he’d been exposed as a computer hacker. “I thought you’d like to know that the university isn’t going to press charges,” he told her.
“Oh, good news!”
“Yes. They settled for a grovelling apology, and a promise that I wouldn’t do it again.”
“Will you?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“Well, not at Cambridge. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you. Your report helped, it being so sympathetic. I showed it to them at my inquisition.”
“Glad to have been able to play a part. Did you get your computer back?”
“Not yet. But that’s okay. I’d copied everything on to an external hard drive, and I still have that and my tools and software and stuff.”
I bet you do, she thought. Just as she was about to ring off a thought occurred. “By the way, how did you get my landline number. I don’t think I gave it to you. And I’m ex-directory.”
“Oh, I hacked into British Telecom from a cyber-café. It didn’t take a minute.” Then, came a slightly worried afterthought: “You don’t mind, do you?”
Because it was him she actually didn’t mind.
It proved to be the brightest moment of the week. A visit to Beverly’s flat in Pimlico the following day was upsetting. All the intern’s clothes and books had already been put into two large suitcases for shipping back to Chicago. A large cardboard box, however, was in the hall, still open.
"I wasn't sure what to do with all the Jesse Gadden stuff," Meg, the girl with whom Beverly had lived, explained, indicating the box. She was a scrubbed West Country girl who worked in children’s publishing, and had called Kate because Beverly had spoken so well of her. “Beverly used to say her mother hated Jesse Gadden, and I don't want to upset her any more than she’s already upset, but Bev loved all these things…they were her. So, surely her parents…” She stopped. In her mid-twenties this was the first death the girl had known. She’d already decided to move out of the flat.
Kate stared at the stack of Jesse Gadden CDs, photographs and programmes in the box.
"She used to talk a lot about this one," Meg said, picking up The Sandman CD. “But then she used to talk a lot about all of them."
Kate nodded. Her instincts were to suggest they take everything over to the local dump. But, as Meg had realised, that would have felt like a betrayal of Beverly’s memory. "To be honest, I don’t know what to say,” she sighed. “But, if you’re leaving here, maybe we can store it at my place until we decide what to do.”
Meg was grateful, and helped Kate carry the box down to the Citroën.
Back home, with the collection pushed under the unused bed in her spare room, Kate returned to Seb Browne's email. At the back of her mind something was itching.
“I keep wondering about some of the material Seb sent me about Jesse Gadden,” she mentioned at conference a couple of mornings later.
“Really!” Fraser didn’t sound interested.
“He reckoned that he isn’t everything he seems.”
“Who is?” Hilly Weston, who was standing in for the entertainments editor, smiled prettily.
“I mean, he thought maybe there’s a dark side to the public image of a benevolent philanthropist.”
“Mmm.” That was Fraser.
Kate looked around the room. Nobody was interested. Gadden had messed them around by promising then failing to be interviewed. Despite his good works, he’d become, for now, a no-go subject. The mood said she should drop the subject.
But she couldn’t let it drop. Nor could she be in Ireland, so she emailed Seb Browne’s contact in Galway, the journalist, Phil Bailey. Was he available to look for Michael Lynch again, she wanted to know, and maybe trace Kevin O’Brien or provide some information on Sister Grace?
He phoned her back. “This would be a commission from WSN, would it?”
“Er… not quite. At this stage I’d rather we kept it private. It’s probably nothing, but Seb died with a few questions unanswered that I’d like clearing up for my own peace of mind. So, if you’re interested, I’ll pay you myself.”
“Sure, that’s fine.”
For her part Kate continued sifting through the internet chatter, fan forums, blogs and files, anything and everything on Jesse Gadden. And there was so much: conventions, dates of old tours, matrix numbers of recording sessions, listings of bootleg albums and instruments used, favourite songs and comparisons with John Lennon, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison. Then there was fan news from half the countries in the world, and, from everywhere, interpretations of Gadden’s song lyrics.
Sometimes getting further information involved joining chat rooms. “Can anybody help? 'Hellbound nun’. Who is she? Does she, or did she ever exist? Any ideas?” she asked from a new email address that she’d specially set up for the task.
But when the inevitable flood of responses came back she was disappointed. The fans, who were supposed to know everything, didn't.
She tried again: “Anyone know where to find any info on Jesse's childhood?”
Once again the answers provided nothing beyond the meagre details she already knew. Other websites were perused. One with an eccentric name caught her attention---JESSE'S WEDNESDAY CLUB.
“Am I missing something? What is Jesse's Wednesday Club?” she asked. Then she waited.
The problem was, she didn't know what she was looking for, nor did she know very much about rock music.
Greg Passfield was waiting in a sandwich bar in Victoria Station, eating a donut and killing time by texting Harry, his boy friend, who was now in Sweden. "I'm just sending Harry your love," he said as she joined him.
"Will he want it?"
"Oh yeah! In Harry's eyes you're up there with the all time greats…Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler, Judy Garland.”
“Being with them is up?” she came back, acknowledging the joke.
Greg smiled, then immediately became serious. They’d discussed the deaths of Beverly and Seb on the phone, but as her latte was served he immediately returned to them. “Media Guardian said Seb Browne was a high flyer.”
She nodded. "He was very good in his way. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I think he might have been on to something about Jesse Gadden. But I'm going to need some help in finding it...”
Greg hesitated. "This isn't a ‘hell hath no fury’ scenario, is it, Kate? Because, you know, rock and roll and true love never did mix, no matter what the songs might tell you.”
“No. I don’t know what it is, but…” She stopped. “Look…” She glanced around at the lunchtime office workers buying their sandwiches. A couple of young women had recognised her. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Putting caps on their coffees, they chose St James's Park where they found an empty bench by the lake and she told him about the week
end she’d spent with Gadden. Greg didn't comment, not even when she got to the incident in her bedroom. Lastly she pulled out a copy of Seb Browne's notes and watched as he read them.
After a few minutes silence, he refolded them and passed them back. "Well, now..! If any of this is even halfway true…”
Kate bit her lip. "It might not be. But there's something wrong with that whole Jesse Gadden organisation. It isn’t what it seems. Everything's fine, smiles all the time from everyone, when it’s going well, but…”
"Fans are always like that, Kate. It's like some kind of crazy tunnel vision they have."
"The Glee Club aren't just fans. It's as though their minds are locked into his, playing his records night and day..."
"Again, that's what fans do."
"...completely cut off from the outside world."
"You make it sound like a cult.”
She paused. "I don't understand what it is, but it’s unnatural. Sinister. And Jesse Gadden is a lot darker than the misty-eyed Irish romancer who gives goody-goody millions to charity. He's never criticised because he's so generous, never investigated because everyone loves him or thinks he’s just eccentric. But he's a complete fake."
Greg became thoughtful. "Perhaps not a complete fake. Love him or hate him, and he's not for me, you can’t deny that something happens when he steps in front of a microphone. People respond to him in a way they do to very few other singers."
“Which is why he’s such a big star.”
"Right. But why do people make guys like him into stars, anyway?”
She shrugged. “Tell me.”
“Well, this is all conjecture, but I think it may be to with some kind of primeval sound they make…”
“What?”
“…that triggers mass subconscious responses.”
She smiled.
"There you go. Ask a rock journalist anything, and what do you get? A pretentious nerd with an unpublished Ph.D. thesis in his back pocket.”
