by Ray Connolly
Kate watched the transformation in silence through the mirror. It seemed as though her eyes were growing in size, as if, with the drone of the clippers, a new, tougher, angrier Kate Merrimac was emerging from under a camouflage of prettiness. If Neil Fraser wanted to think she was heading for another breakdown, well, she looked the part now. Besides, if she wasn’t going to be reading the news, she didn’t need to look cute.
She was home by ten thirty. Discarding the small mountain of cardboard and polystyrene packaging, she quickly assembled her new equipment, and, attaching the battery pack, tried out the camera on the flowers in her patio. It was as light to carry as a bottle of wine. Satisfied with the results, she collected her laptop from the study and called a cab. Her bag was already packed. As a foreign correspondent it always was.
She left her old mobile phone on her desk switched off. By now her voicemail had collected a clamour of worried voices demanding she call back, including that of her mother, her brother Richard, and her sister-in-law, Helen. She ignored them all.
In the cab she programmed her new mobile, copied Seb Browne's email on to her laptop and scribbled a postcard to Jeroboam. It showed an aerial view of a school of whales off Norway's Lofoten Islands. She wrote: "Had to go away. I’ll explain when I get back. Enjoy your first day at work. Much love, Kate."
She posted it, along with a card to her mother, and a short, sad letter to Harry, sent via his Kentish Town address, when she reached Heathrow.
Phil Bailey peered at her over his glasses. "'Dangerous'?"
“It's possible."
They were wedged in the dark brown corner booth of a pub in the old port area of Galway, watching a fire of wet logs hiss dismally in a grate as Bailey huddled inside his anorak and Simon and Garfunkel sang Cecilia on the radio. The landlord, a lean man with a thin cigarette stuck to his top lip, was studying the horses in the Irish Independent.
"You seriously think snooping around after Jesse Gadden can be dangerous?" The freelance rock journalist looked sceptical, his eyes going repeatedly to Kate’s new haircut, although he politely hadn’t commented on it.
She told him what had happened when Greg had interviewed Overmars.
Bailey gripped his white pigtail between his thumb and first finger as he listened. "Jesus, Kate, that’s terrible. Just terrible. My God! I’m sorry. The poor man! But, you know, there must be some other explanation. I’m sorry for your friends and all, but we're talking rock and roll here, not Al Qaeda or the IRA. It’s just a few catchy tunes with silly words, stuff to sing to yourself in the car. There's nothing dangerous about it."
Kate sucked some of the head off her Guinness. It made a ring around her lips and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. "Well, whether I’m right or wrong, I thought you ought to know if you’re going to help me.”
“Right. Thank you.” He sipped his beer, watching her, as though unsure of what to make of her.
“So, do you have anything yet? What about Gadden’s mother?”
"Not the mother, no. I'm sorry. She’s hard to trace. But I did have some success." Unfastening an old briefcase, he took out a buff coloured folder and laid its contents on the round pub table.
A black and white photograph of a pleasantly smiling teenage girl, a copy of a detail from a school photograph, lay on top of a collection of photostats of newspaper cuttings.
Kate turned the photograph over. "Frances Cleary," a caption read. "St Anne’s High School for Girls, 1974." She looked at Bailey for explanation.
"Sister Grace. You change your name when you’re ordained.”
“Yes.”
“This was her two years before she joined the order. She's buried in a place called Castlemount in Connemara. Her parents live near there."
He stopped talking as Kate read the cuttings. "TRAGIC DEATH OF YOUNG NUN," ran one headline from 1989; "MYSTERY SUICIDE OF DEVOTED TEACHER," said another above a photograph of the same smiling girl, now in a nun’s habit with a crucifix hanging around her neck.
Kate stared at the smooth, freckled complexion. Was it really possible that this had been Jesse Gadden's first lover?
Bailey began to talk again. "The sad thing was that the Church traditionally doesn't allow suicide victims to be buried in consecrated ground in the belief that a mortal sin has been committed..."
"...because only God can give and take life," Kate continued. As a little girl she'd attended a Catholic school for a time. "I didn't know that still happened."
"Well, it doesn't normally. Priests turn a blind eye these days and accept that suicide victims may be of unsound mind, and therefore not capable of committing mortal sin. But the death occurred in County Clare and Frances Cleary came up against one of the old school. He was unbending. So at first she was buried over in Roscommon with no requiem mass. It was tough on the parents. They’re very devout.” He paused. “I suppose you’d almost describe them as, well… fundamentalist if you were talking about another religion in another country, if you know what I mean. And she was an only child."
Kate did know what he meant. "'A hellbound nun...'" she mused.
"What's that?"
"Just something I heard in a song."
"Ah right! Well, anyway, about five years ago there must have been a change of heart, because suddenly her body was exhumed and brought up to Castlemount to be reburied…with a requiem mass and in consecrated ground this time. You'll find her right alongside the church door if you go. You can't miss her."
"And the parents?"
"I left them for you to talk to, if they will, which I very much doubt. You'll find their address and all the details in the file."
Kate nodded her gratitude. Slipping the photograph and photostats back into the folder, she turned to a large envelope. "And this?”
“Kevin O'Brien! Jesse’s first manager.” Bailey smiled fondly as Kate took out a second collection of photographs and newspaper cuttings. They all showed a big, dark haired man. “He’s a legend in the pubs and clubs around here for his drinking and drugs and girls. God, the girls he had! He’d be running three or four all at the same time. But he’s all right. His heart was always in the right place…even if the rest of him wasn’t. He’s living in America now. Become a bit of a recluse. He's got a place in Maine...just sits there and counts his money, I suppose. He has a lot of it. They say he likes to go fishing.”
"Couldn't he go fishing in Ireland?"
Bailey smiled. "He could do anything he wanted in Ireland, apart from go ski-ing, I suppose. But…" He shrugged and pointed to an address he’d written on a scrap of paper.
“
1020 Nantucket Road, Shakeston, Maine
,” she read. "It took some getting. Cost a bit, if that’s all right. I'm sorry, but I didn’t get a phone number..."
“Would he talk to me?”
“Well, he was always a sucker for a pretty face, but…”
“Not pretty enough?”
He laughed. Oh yes, pretty enough, all right, I’m sure of that. It’s just that, well, they say the past is a closed book for Big Kevin.”
"And Michael Lynch? Did you have any luck there?"
Bailey sighed. "Ah, no. It seems that since talking to Seb and Beverly, he's disappeared off the face of the earth."
She'd chosen a hotel out along the coast west of Galway, where there was a view of the Atlantic Ocean. Her room was neat and anonymous. She liked that, and she appreciated the feeling of security as she turned the solid key in her door, locking out the world. Phil Bailey had wanted to take her to dinner to a fish restaurant he swore was the best in the west of Ireland, but, although she was now ferociously hungry, and he was an agreeable enough companion, she'd resisted. Needing a good night's sleep, she'd sent him off with an eight hundred pound cheque for his work and expenses as a researcher. He still had to find out what had happened to Gadden's mother.
Sitting on her hotel bed she phoned down for a room service steak and salad and a half bottle of Cotes du Rhone. It arrived with in
decent, microwave haste, but that didn't matter. It tasted good and was filling.
She ate at a small, fold-out table attached to the side of the dressing table. She'd had hundreds of such meals when she'd been travelling for WSN, but usually there was a camera crew next door or Ned Swann on the end of the phone. Tonight no-one knew where she was. She hadn’t even told Phil Bailey. That was the way she wanted it, responsible only to herself and for herself. Emotionally, it was easier to travel light.
While she ate she re-read the newspaper cuttings about the death of Sister Grace. Then, reaching for a road map she’d picked up at the airport, she circled the spot where the nun had fallen to her death. It was called Coneyburrow Point.
She went to bed early. Putting the tray outside the door, she undressed and slipped into the protective envelope of the covers. Her body was heavy with exhaustion. She closed her eyes and waited for sleep, listening to the rain on the window, and the sounds of plumbing as her fellow guests made their way to their beds. Somewhere a bath was being run...
The blood of Greg's bathroom splashed across her thoughts once again. She tried to put it from her mind, but her brain refused to allow it. One by one the pictures came up like a slide show; the photograph of Frances Cleary, the schoolgirl who had become Sister Grace: Beverly's mother at the crematorium: the wound between Greg's legs.
After an hour she gave up. Reaching out in the dark she found the TV remote control on the bedside table.
The sound came first, a thin electronic music synthesizer filling the space between exaggerated gasps. Then the picture appeared. A young blonde girl was lying naked on a bed with a dark haired, smooth bodied man. It was soft, bedtime porn for the lonely, barely titillating stuff she'd come across in hotels all around the world.
Usually, after a moment’s curiosity, she'd moved on, looking for a news station or a movie to watch, but not tonight. Sex, the balm to heal all wounds. She was a TV star. She could, she knew, have all the sex she wanted and she thought about the last time she'd made love. It had been in Morocco seven or eight months earlier with a Czech cameraman who was an old friend and occasional lover.
Then her night at Haverhill came back, and she switched off the television.
Chapter Twenty Eight
October 23:
Propping the photograph on the bedroom dressing table, she positioned the camera on the tripod, switched on the top light, focused and then pressed to record. "Frances Cleary, aged sixteen,” she noted into a microphone as the tape ran.
The newspaper cuttings were next, their headlines almost overlapping, the key words "TRAGEDY", "NUN" and "DEATH" central, before she panned down from "MYSTERY SUICIDE OF DEVOTED TEACHER" to the photograph of Frances Cleary as the nun, Sister Grace. Lastly she shot a close-up of Grace's crucifix. Whether she would ever use any of these images she didn’t know, but she’d have them. She’d begun.
She'd been up at seven thirty having breakfast of crispy bacon and scrambled eggs in the dining room. Two other tables had been occupied by bleary-eyed men sitting alone in their Stay-prest suits. Wearing her glasses, with her hair still wet from the shower, no-one had paid her any attention as she'd examined a road map of County Galway. She didn’t look like a TV star any more.
She left the hotel at just after nine. Wearing jeans, a thick sweater and a raincoat, she headed west along the coast road under charging white clouds on a blue, windy sky, before turning north to join the route along which she and Larry Abramsky had been driven just a few weeks earlier. It must have been just as beautiful then, she thought, as she began to climb the twisting roads from the bog into the Connemara mountains, but somehow she'd missed it. Grief blinds, she thought, as she gazed across the wilderness, sparkling after a night's rain.
She found the site of the accident without difficulty. It was about nine miles east of Castlemount. When she'd been here before there'd been so many police cars the road had looked narrower. Now as she pulled on to the grass verge her doubts about the Garda’s assumption of an accident were reinforced. It would have been extraordinary for an over-cautious driver to have carelessly left the road at this spot.
Getting out of the car she set to work with the camera. First she took general views of the road, then the place where the car had plunged over the side of the precipice. She could still see the marks where the vehicle had ripped through the undergrowth, before it had turned over and gone into free fall into the gully. Trying not to slip on the wet grass, she traced long slaloms along the hill as she made her way down the mountain. There was no mistaking where the car had come to rest. A large patch of earth was blackened where the petrol tank had exploded.
The little town of Castlemount had a permanent look of early closing, although it was a Saturday and not yet noon when she drove along the main street before pulling on to a cinder patch beside a bingo hall. A place of grey stone cottages and occasional shop windows, it seemed almost squeezed between the hills.
With her tripod under her arm and her camera case in her free hand, she made her way towards the church. A couple of elderly women stopped chatting to watch her.
In the stark, nettled cemetery she walked up the gravel path. "You can't miss the grave," Phil Bailey had told her, yet she almost did. Looking for a modest gravestone she'd passed right by the giant, white marble angel stationed by the church door before she noticed it.
She retraced her steps. The statue was so disproportionate to everything else, she hadn't realised it marked a grave. She looked more closely. An inscription had been etched into the folds of the marble robes.
“In memory of
Sister Grace Frances Cleary
Departed this world November 3, l989
Aged 31
With God now”
She set up her camera.
She saw the house as she rounded a corner. It was a low, once white, windswept cottage with farm outhouses, standing alone on the side of a hill. Desolate was the first word to come to mind. Driving on, she followed the road along the side of the valley. The bright morning had now degenerated into heavy clouds, and it began to rain as, splashing off the tarmac through a large puddle, she drove along a mud track to the rear of the buildings.
Close to, the place looked even more dismal, with a rust of general neglect spreading across the equipment in the yard. Pigs could be heard snuffling in the sties; the axle of an ancient, one-wheeled tractor rested on bales of rotting straw.
It was now raining heavily and she was just deciding to stay in the car until the shower passed when the cottage door opened. An old man stood watching her. Reaching for her equipment bag, she climbed from the car and made her way through the rain towards him. "Mr Cleary?"
The man made no response. He was tall, thin, slightly stooped, and what was left of his white hair was clumsily cut. His cheeks were sunken into the clefts of a lifetime's disappointment.
"Mr Cleary, my name's Kate Merrimac from WSN-Television. I wondered if I might talk to you for a few minutes."
As she'd been speaking a woman had moved alongside the old man. Possibly a couple of years younger, she was more solid. Phil Bailey's notes had named them as Tom and Nancy Cleary.
"To talk about what?" Tom Cleary asked.
"About Frances. I've been looking at the statue in the cemetery."
"We've nothing to say about Frances. Goodbye.” The man turned to go inside.
“But Mr Cleary…” She stepped forward.
He span around. “I said good-bye. It was all a long time ago. I don't know what you people can possibly want after all this time."
She turned to the woman. "I've come a long way to see you, Mrs Cleary, and I'm getting very wet standing here. If I could just have a few minutes..." The rain was pouring on to her head.
Nancy Cleary shifted with embarrassment. "Perhaps just a couple of minutes, Tom," she murmured. "The poor girl's getting soaked."
"She'll have a heater in her car. Be as dry as a bone by the time she's back on the road."
"Tom!" the old woman chided.
Kate waited. She would, she knew, be looking more pathetic by the second.
"I just don't see what good can come of it." Cleary was now avoiding everyone's eyes, looking over Kate's shoulder at the rain and the mud. Then suddenly he sighed a defeat and went back inside leaving Kate standing at the door.
Nancy Cleary backed away. "I'll just make us some tea," she said.
She'd noticed it as soon as she entered the house: a sense of time having been frozen, as tangible as a broken clock. She'd come across it before in parts of the world ravaged by war, and where the survivors existed on memories of happier years. For the Clearys the happy part of their lives had long since passed. In a gloomy living room of faded, autumn patterned wallpaper and a threadbare carpet, all that remained of those times were the icons and comforts of Catholicism; the framed print of the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus; the small, blue, souvenir plaster statue of Our Lady of Lourdes; the photograph of Pope John Paul II; the crucifix over the door and the coiled rosary beads on the sideboard. And there in the centre of the mantelpiece the photograph of their only daughter, Frances Cleary, smiling in her habit with her parents on the day of her ordination as a nun as Sister Grace.
"The reason I'm here," Kate began, sitting low into a velour covered, broken-springed sofa, her hair spiky now, rubbed dry with an old towel, "is because I'm making a television programme about one of your daughter's pupils, and I wondered if she'd ever mentioned him to you…perhaps in a letter or conversation."
Nancy Cleary looked towards her husband as she finished pouring the tea.
He cleared his throat. "You're talking about Jesse Gadden."
"He was Jesse Monaghan when Grace…Frances knew him. A young boy of about fourteen," Kate said.
