by Ray Connolly
“But he’s generous, you must admit that.”
O’Brien laughed bitterly. "He's always believed in paying well, I’ll give him that. But sometimes I used to think every gift, every dollar, every pound, was worked out to the last penny to make people do what he wants them to, almost like those politicians who are always thinking about their legacy. I think he has a fear of being left alone, so he collects people to be around him. But there are no friends. Just Petra. She's always there, whispering with him about something…the total, perfect, unquestioning fan.”
"What about the donations to charities, in millions, they say, and the hospital he’s planning. He’s a public benefactor. That’s generous.”
He shrugged. "To most people it would be. But we're talking rock and roll money here, worldwide wealth which is multiplying faster than it can ever be spent. Jesse already has everything he's ever going to need in this life. Giving away what you won't ever want isn't that difficult, although some of the other guys seem to think it is.” He chuckled wickedly.
"Thank you!" Kate said, and switched off the camera.
For a few moments O'Brien was silent as he reflected upon what he'd told her.
She understood. He'd betrayed an old friend. "Can I ask you something off the record?" she asked,
He looked at her.
"If you’re not sure whether or not you like Jesse, how do you feel about him?"
He spoke very slowly. "To be absolutely honest, on days like this, he scares the living daylights out of me.”
Chapter Thirty Two
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Kate said as she put the tripod into the back seat of her car. “If Jesse is so hooked on enjoying the world's adoration, why is he retiring?"
O'Brien smiled. "With Jesse there's always some new agenda.”
“Like streaming his last goodbye concert over the internet?”
He nodded. “I read about that. That was a surprise. This last tour was streamed on sound from his website. I listened to the New York one myself. But this will be the first time he’s put the pictures out, too. The TV networks would have paid millions for it and here he is giving it away for free to anyone with a computer.”
“So why?”
“God knows! He'll have a plan. Something he wants more than what he already has. He’s always liked being mysterious.” Then another thought occurred. “And, of course, if it’s only on his website, not on a TV channel, he’ll have complete control over it. Control is important to Jesse.”
She could understand that.
She and O’Brien had got on better than she’d expected, to the point that he’d even given her his phone number, and, with a cheeky grin, suggested she come back in the summer when he could take her sailing. But, as the afternoon had worn on, he’d become distracted, and she was now anxious to leave before he changed his mind about co-operating and demanded she wipe the interview. That happened occasionally when second thoughts tapped in.
But then the estate gates opened and a yellow Toyota raced up the drive towards them, and she understood the reason for his distraction.
O'Brien was smiling broadly. "Dead on time!" he breathed as the Toyota slid in between the pick-up and the Rolls Royce, and a girl, quite pretty, with olive skin and long, plaited, black hair climbed out. She didn't look more than eighteen, and, in her jeans and moccasins and wrapped in a red anorak, Kate wondered for a second if she was O'Brien's daughter.
Then he kissed her. She wasn’t his daughter.
"Kate, this is a friend of mine...Julie," O'Brien said as he came out of the kiss.
Kate smiled politely. O’Brien liked younger women, she’d been told. Wasn’t that always the way with these guys in rock music!
O'Brien kept an arm around the girl's waist. "I've just been doing an interview, Julie. Talking about the old times in Ireland. Boring to you, I'm afraid."
The teenager glanced at the camera case in Kate's hand.
O'Brien was glowing now. "Look, why don't you go inside. I'll be right in." And he gave the girl a slight pat on her bottom.
She smiled prettily, and with a nod to Kate tripped into the house.
Kate turned back to her hire car. "Well, anyway, I'll be off…"
O'Brien wasn't listening. "Sweet girl! She comes all the way down from Saint John every Sunday. That's up in Canada, you know."
"Yes!" Kate did know. She was amused by the big man's affection. "Look, I really am grateful. I don't know what's going to happen to any of this, whether there's even anything here, but..." She shook his hand.
"I’m sure there isn’t. Coincidence happens, you know, inexplicable and sad though these things sometimes are.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “I suppose I’ll have Jesse’s lawyers on to me if he ever finds out that I’ve been talking to you. But…hey, what the hell! I can give as good as I get. I’ve got lawyers, too. Anyway, give Phil Bailey my best when you see the old bastard…and don't forget to tell him about the fun I'm having here."
"I'll do that."
There was a movement in an upstairs window. The girl was watching. She’d already taken off her red anorak. Bailey grinned sheepishly.
"Well, I don't want to keep you," Kate said. And, climbing into her car, she drove quickly down the drive. Even before she reached the gates a glance in her rear view mirror made her smile, as she saw O'Brien hurry eagerly into the house.
"Well, well, you old rock and roll devil!" she chuckled aloud, and drove out on to the road.
She checked the DV tapes as soon as she got back to the inn. There were no problems. The framing had been acceptable and the sound quality was excellent. She was pleased with her day. O'Brien had been as candid as she could have expected, and she found herself repeating his phrase "Maybe it's time I helped put the genie back into the bottle."
It was too late to get back to Boston in time to catch an overnight plane to London, so she booked her flights for the following morning. Then she checked her home voicemail. A stumbling message from Jeroboam made her smile. Normally he hated speaking into an answering machine, but here he was determinedly making an attempt to play the part of a confident young man, as he told her about the first days at his job. And, for the first time, she was relieved that he neither read the papers nor watched the television news. In his own, narrow little world, he seemed not to have noticed that she’d made headlines when she’d found Greg’s body.
Two other messages were from the C.I.D. at Kentish Town, asking her to get in touch. Then there were others from Chloe and Ned at WSN, and one each from her mother and her brother, Richard, asking her to call back. She didn’t. First she emailed Phil Bailey in Galway to pass on O’Brien’s best wishes, and then she called Natalie Streub at the WSN bureau in Moscow.
“Jesus, Kate! Where are you? I heard you were all over the papers and had gone on leave…”
She cut her short. “I’ll explain later about that. In the meantime, can you do me a favour?”
“Go on.”
“A woman called Petra Kerinova. She works for Jesse Gadden now, but she was some kind of circus act or night club performer in Estonia about five or six years ago. Do you have any contacts there who might be able to find out exactly what kind of act she did?”
“Estonia? Well, probably. It may take a couple of days.”
“Thanks, Natalie. I’ll owe you one.” And asking her not to tell anyone at WSN about the inquiry she rang off.
At seven thirty she went across to the restaurant for an early dinner. Most of the few other guests were retired couples, so, sitting alone in a corner under a nineteenth century photograph of a whale kill, she hurried through her fish soup and scampi, anxious to get back to her work.
Her chunky young waiter, his name-tag read “Joel”, had other hopes. Intent upon making at first prolonged eye contact, and then semi-flirty conversation with the only single woman in the place, he deliberately dawdled as he served her.
Perhaps it worked with some women, she reflected, as she
tried to ignore his comments about her hair, her English accent and her "leaf-peeping" reasons for visiting Maine in the fall. Perhaps he thought she looked desperate: perhaps she did look desperate. She wanted to tell him that whatever reason she might have had for coming to Maine it most certainly wasn't to get laid by an overweight flounder, but she didn't. Instead she smiled patiently, and, resisting his offer of a drink when he got off, she hurried back to her cottage, where, taking her laptop to bed instead, she pulled a fleece around her shoulders and returned to the Jesse Gadden websites.
The forest of fan trivia had already thickened with the announcement of the forthcoming internet concert, and a couple of hours passed as she trudged ever deeper into it.
She was just deciding to give it ten more minutes and then call it a night when the chimes outside on her deck distracted her. She looked up, listening. A slight night breeze must be getting up. She returned to the laptop. Then stopped. Another sound.
Was that a footstep? A board creaking?
She listened hard.
Getting out of bed, she crossed to the screen door and switched on the outside light. Then cautiously she opened the door a couple of inches. Then further.
The deck was empty, but the chimes were moving. Had a wind got up? It was difficult to tell. The sound of a car engine drew her attention to the inn’s parking lot. A yellow car was just leaving.
O’Brien’s teen girl friend, Julie, had been driving a yellow Toyota.
But so did lots of people.
Putting the thought from her mind she went back inside and locked the door. Returning to her laptop, she couldn’t quite remember what the last website had been. A vague sense that she'd been getting tired and had overlooked something prompted her to go back a site, then another.
It took a few moments to appear, but then the screen began to bloom as illustrations of flowers weaved themselves into a wreath, in the centre of which came photographs of a young girl alongside a good looking boy. “Jesse still sings for Donna and Rick”, read a caption.
Donna and Rick? Donna? She’d seen this girl's picture before, she was sure. But where? She went to the waste paper basket. The copy of the previous day’s Boston Sunday Globe was still in it. There she was: the girl in the coma in New Hampshire who hadn't quite died with her boy friend in the picnic suicide pact.
The website was a shrine to her and a boy called Rick Niemen. All the details of their last day were listed, what they’d eaten that afternoon, their nicknames for each other, the type of wine they'd drunk, the supermarket where they'd shopped, and the popcorn they'd only half finished, but which had blown across the fields like a paper chase bringing the search party to find them the following day.
She hesitated. So what? Why shouldn’t there be a Donna and Rick website linked to Jesse Gadden? Millions of kids were Jesse Gadden fans.
And yet...
She read on through the website, discovering the bright and beautiful young couple, who'd inexplicably thrown their lives away. Then she turned back to the newspaper and read words of incomprehension from the boy's father. “Until my dying day I’ll never understand why my son had to die. I don’t believe he committed suicide. He just wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t have hurt his family like that. He had everything to live for. I just don’t understand what could have happened to them that day.”
She looked at her watch. It was just after midnight. She reached for the telephone and called Logan Airport. She would no longer be taking the early morning flight back to London. Then she got out her road map. It was a two hundred mile drive to Romsey, New Hampshire, and, as there was now no sleep in her, she'd make better use of her time if she drove through the night. Calling the inn's reception, she asked for her bill to be prepared: she was checking out.
Joel took the call. He sounded as though he'd already been in bed. "At this time of night?" he asked.
"Yes."
"I hope it wasn't something I said," he fretted. "I was only being friendly."
Chapter Thirty Three
The Hallsdens weren't difficult to find. They were famous in Romsey since the shooting. Bill Hallsden answered the door. With his firm features and short, thick, greying hair, he must have been a handsome small town cop before he got the call telling him his daughter had murdered her boy friend and blown half her brains out with his gun. Now he was a ghost of self reproach.
Some fathers might have shunned attention but Bill Hallsden courted it. He was in a battle with the doctors who'd given up hope. Every little bit of publicity about Donna’s plight helped, even in the shape of a reporter from England who worked for a satellite TV news station he'd never seen. Besides, it gave him something to do, he explained. He hadn't worked since the day of the picnic. He didn't believe he ever would again.
Standing on his lawn under the falling red leaves of a maple tree, his face crumpled into bewilderment as he talked about the picnic. "It should have been a beautiful day for them: it was a beautiful day, a perfect August day. And then this happens. Something happened to our children that day, and I don't know what it was or why it was."
Kate asked where it had happened and he surprised her. He took her, showing her where the police had found the boy's mother's abandoned car, before taking her through the wood and climbing across the wide field, now ploughed and muddy, up to the little copse of trees.
There wasn't much to see, just a damp hollow in a patch of high ground, around which some of the trees were beginning to shed their leaves. A young oak sapling, broken in half by some careless investigating foot, was struggling to survive. A larch looked forlorn against the sky.
She had no idea whether what had happened here had any relevance to her investigation, but she filmed Bill Hallsden and the scene of the shooting anyway.
They went to the hospital next. Kate had never failed to be surprised at how much pain victims of tragedy were prepared to share with television audiences, and the Hallsdens were no different. Perhaps they thought TV might somehow help bring their daughter back to them, alert a brilliant brain surgeon in some far off part of the world who could work a miracle, or at least make their own doctors think again. Or was it simply that they wanted that last morsel of recognition for their child before the hospital unplugged the tubes and the news spotlight moved on?
She didn't ask for any explanation. Putting the viewfinder to her eye she focused her camera on the face and body of Donna Hallsden, the girl’s head bandaged from above the eyes, the nose and mouth trailing tubes to match those to the heart and lower body. Then, panning around, she took in the parade of hopeless get-well cards. The CDs stacked on the bedside table were familiar, but the miracle prayed for when a favourite song had been played into the coma hadn't happened.
She didn't stay long. After a couple of shots she switched off the camera, and, nodding her thanks to the girl's mother, who was sitting silently in vigil by the bed, she left the room.
Bill Hallsden walked her out of the hospital. "I wish you'd known Donna before," he murmured as they passed down the green walled corridor. "You'd have liked her. Everybody did. She was the brightest button you ever met. Straight A's right through school."
Waiting a moment as they passed a couple of chatting nurses, Kate said: "Mr Hallsden, did Donna spend a lot of time on the internet?"
Hallsden smiled at the memory of normality. "Sure. They all do these days. FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube. She'd send her friends, Jenny and Ali, little messages. And, of course, Rick. That sort of thing. Heaven knows what they found to say to each other. They saw each other all day at school."
Kate understood. Methods of communication might change but teenage girls didn't. "She liked music a lot, I believe."
"Never happy unless it was playing or she was watching one of those music channels. I don't know how she did her homework with that noise going on, but it never seemed to bother her."
"And Donna and Rick took an iPod along with them on the picnic."
"That's right. I think most young pe
ople would nowadays."
"Right. But, well...I was just wondering if you had any idea what music they listened to."
"What?" Hallsden's face was torn with pain. "If you don't mind my saying, that sounds like a pretty trivial enquiry. You saw Donna! How she is! What does it matter what music they were playing?"
They'd reached the elevators. "I don't want to upset you. But it may be relevant."
Hallsden stared at her without comprehension. "Relevant to what?" He looked tired. "I thought you could help."
She hadn't wanted to lead him, but she saw no other way. "Mr Hallsden, they were playing Jesse Gadden records, weren't they?"
His emotions snapped. "Of course they were. Wasn't that all they ever played?"
She thought about her own father as she waited outside the school. They'd been close, but he'd never known as much about her, nor understood her as well, as he thought he had. It hadn't been possible. It never was: not with Bill and Donna Hallsden either.
Across the road the yellow school bus rattled as the children boarded. She held the camera steady and pressed to record. It was a television cliche, but a useful short cut. Nothing set a scene as efficiently as an American school bus.
Panning around, she reached the school gates where the sight of the camera was attracting the usual attention. Everyone knew why she was there. They'd become used to seeing cameras outside Romsey High.
"Hi! You looking for us?" A voice caused Kate to turn. It belonged to a tall, black girl wearing a grey track suit and carrying a bag over her shoulder. She was, she said, Ali. At her side was a wide girl with dyed blonde hair and a brace. She was Jenny. Two seventeen year olds, they were Donna Hallsden's best friends.
There was a small park with a bench and a war memorial opposite the school. The girls waited politely as Kate set up the camera. She’d decided to let the girls talk and see what emerged.
It took a little time for them to settle, but when they did it was to tell the story of a normal girl growing up in a small New England town, maybe cleverer and prettier than the rest, but apparently perfectly balanced until the day she took a gun on a picnic.
