Kill For Love

by Ray Connolly

  “But what about something more than that? Can music dictate to us…tell us what to do?”

  The psychologist sipped water from a bottle before answering. "Well, anthropologists have found countless examples of tribes where music is used to create a trance like state, brainwashing, you might say…where people lose control of their minds and bodies and become suggestible. Warriors would sing songs and do war dances before taking on impossible odds, so obviously music was being used there to create an unnatural mental state.

  “We see it in some churches, too, where fundamentalist preachers arouse their congregations to such a pitch of excitement that some people go into fits. There’s even said to be music on videos used as recruiting tools by some jihadist suicide groups. And I remember Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits saying that rock stars purposely bring down the excitement level of audiences before they finish a set, because some fans might be dangerous if sent out without being calmed down."

  Kate was glad it was the psychologist who had mentioned rock stars. “So are you saying that music can be powerful enough to provoke violence?”

  Sadie Kupfermann wouldn’t be led. “I’m saying it’s possible. We know there are certain chords than can provoke nausea. And music has certainly been used as a torture. The repeated loud playing of the same song can drive people literally to distraction. In Panama they managed to get President Noriega to surrender by playing him hard rock records all day and night. And wasn’t Metallica used as one of the tortures at Guantanamo Bay? There’s even said to be a really deep chord that can kill when played.” Suddenly she grinned. “And, of course, Joshua played his ram horn at Jericho ‘and the walls came tumblin’ down’.”

  It was all so cosy and friendly, sitting here in this little room with this pleasant young woman and her posters, CDs, books and roller skates behind the door. But then Kate thought about Elizabeth McDonagh and her dead family and remembered Donna Hallsden with her brains blown across a New Hampshire hillside and the fathers who just couldn’t understand why. "What about using hypnosis with music?” she asked.

  This drew a frown. "Well, hypnosis isn't really my area, but I suppose I can envisage a situation where certain kinds of music might play a role in helping generate trance-like suggestibility in some people. We know it can lead to hallucinations in certain situations.”

  "Aural magic," said Kate suddenly. The words had come out without thinking.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "A friend of mine had a theory. He thought it possible that some singers might make sounds which trigger primeval responses, that primitive holy men may have had a touch of this and that was what made them powerful. And that some rock singers have it, too."

  Dr Kupfermann beamed: “I like the sound of this. I'm sure it's impossible to prove, but it's an interesting idea. Perhaps your friend should give me a call."

  Kate's voice dropped. "I'm sorry, I should have said. Greg was... He's dead.”

  "Oh. I'm so sorry."

  The interview had stopped. Kate felt the hollow of bereavement. Greg would have been thrilled to think that an academic was intrigued by his idea.

  From outside in the street she could hear students milling about changing classes. She had one last question. "Suppose continuous listening to one singer could, in the right circumstances, lead to a kind of trance-like state, would it be possible for some people in such a trance to be persuaded to act against their better judgement…to kill, for instance?”

  This was too far. "I’m sorry. You're piling hypothesis upon hypothesis.”

  "I know. But is it conceivable?”

  "Well, I suppose theoretically it might be, if we accept the idea of hypnosis through music in the first place. But the numbers of people who would be subject to that kind of manipulation would, I’m sure, be very, very small.

  "What do you mean by small?"

  Dr Kupfermann shrugged. "It's impossible to say, but tiny… unmeasurable from a social psychologist's point of view. Probably no more than one, maybe two, in a million."

  "One or two in a million."

  "Something like that, I would imagine."

  Outside in the street Kate hurried through a melee of students. Turning a corner, she stopped under a horsechestnut tree. “Probably no more than one or two in a million," she repeated to herself. The news reports were saying that Jesse Gadden was expecting a worldwide internet audience of over fifty million.

  A sudden sharp gust of wind blew a sweep of dead leaves around her ankles.

  She didn’t go home. After the events at Haverhill who knew what might be waiting for her there? Instead she booked into a tourist hotel in South Kensington. Her room was an anonymous space that looked out over the backs of other tourist hotels.

  She lay down on the bed for a while, but still she couldn't rest. In the end, ordering a pot of coffee and salad from room service, she showered, and set about turning the dressing table into a work surface.

  The message had been in the song, Elizabeth McDonagh had said. Music could, in certain circumstances, manipulate certain people, Sadie Kupfermann had agreed.

  "He told me to do it…”

  But how? Arranging her Jesse Gadden albums in chronological order of release, she played them through her laptop. The killings in New Hampshire and Birmingham had occurred after concerts had been streamed live for sound over the internet. That was also when the songs from Gadden’s album, The Sandman, had been first played.

  So?

  She'd never been good at solving puzzles. She’d never done crosswords on trains, or played Scrabble on wet holidays. Her mind didn't work that way. All she could hear in Gadden’s songs was a labyrinth of imagery, all tied together with a muddle of banal lyrics that could be interpreted to mean just about anything the listener wanted them to mean. Thousands of rock songs had harmlessly ploughed similar furrows over the decades. What made Gadden’s songs special?

  Chapter Forty One

  November 2:

  She woke with a shout. Someone was trying to get into the room. "No!" she called, her arm going up to protect herself.

  "I'm sorry. Maid service.” A Spanish voice answered as the hotel room door, hindered by its security chain, closed again and the maid went about her rounds.

  Kate gasped into her pillow, her heart pummelling. Slowly she took in the room and her situation, before reaching for the remote, and, switching on the television. On WSN Hilly Weston was now sitting alongside Robin Broomfield. Robin would like that. Hilly was very pretty.

  Through floods in Bangladesh, a coach crash in Scotland, a minor political sex scandal at Westminster and unemployment in China she moved on through Sky News and then the BBC. She was looking for the arrest of Liz McDonagh but there was no mention of her. Getting out of bed, she checked with the news sites on her laptop. There was nothing there either. She was puzzled. Were the West Midlands Police keeping it quiet while they interviewed Gadden and his staff? Or had the woman been spirited away from Haverhill by the time they got there?

  “What do you think?” Frank Teischer asked as they paused for a break.

  Kate, sitting on a high chair behind him and staring at his editing screen, didn’t answer. It was mid-afternoon and they were drinking some take-away coffee. They’d spent six hours working on the material she’d either filmed herself or had sent over from the ITN Archive, and she was worried. It wasn’t strong enough.

  Like a trainee journalist she went once again through the questions she’d set out to answer at the beginning of her investigation.

  “What was happening?”

  “Suicide and murder,” came her answer.

  “Who was it happening to?”

  “Obsessive fans.”

  “Where was it happening?”

  “Mainly by grooming through the internet.”

  “How was it happening?”

  “By some kind of brainwashing using music.”

  “When was it happening?” She thought about the clusters of deaths, Beverly and Seb Browne
, Liz McDonagh’s family, and Greg Passfield and Overmars. Then there was Donna Hallsden and her boy friend. Had there been others? Reason suggested there must have been.

  An ancillary question was now posed? “When will it happen again?”

  And her answer: “If I’m right, probably tomorrow night when Jesse Gadden’s farewell concert is streamed into millions of computers.”

  But could she prove it? That was what Teischer had really been asking.

  Climbing down from her chair she went to the window and stared out at the street below. Teischer waited. Finally she shook her head. “It’s all supposition, Frank. There are too few hard facts. It doesn’t work yet.”

  She could tell by Teischer’s tone that he agreed with her. "What you have to remember, Kate, is that they don’t all work out."

  "You mean, you think I may be wrong, that I’ve got him wrong…Jesse Gadden?”

  "No. I mean we both know it's a tricky one, and you can only do your best.”

  She looked at him. "But if I am right, and can’t convince anyone..? If they think I’ve become unbalanced and no-one stops him, and tomorrow night…somewhere in the world… something terrible happens…?”

  Teischer didn’t answer. They finished their coffees in ruminative silence, then went back to work. She'd let all the interviews run, knowing that, intercut with the archive material, she'd need only a minute on Donna Hallsden, more on Kevin O'Brien, and perhaps a section on Mary Murray. Then there were moments from Haverhill, shots of Coneyburrow Point and library material of Gadden on and off stage. All the time Teischer was making suggestions, pursing his lips when he thought she was stretching a point, clicking his fingers when he could see sections coming together. They'd done it many times before after she’d returned from foreign assignments, but there’d been more material to work with then.

  At seven o’clock, eyes raw from staring at the screen all day, they went out for something to eat at a cab drivers' cafe on

  Clerkenwell Road

  . Teischer, with a craftsman's cool, was able to put his work aside for twenty minutes and read the football pages in the Evening Standard. She was too worried to read. After dinner they walked back down the alley to the edit suite in silence. A motor cycle courier was riding away from the building as they got there. As Teischer opened the door, he routinely checked the post bin which hung behind the letter box.

  "Well, now..." he said pulling out a jiffy bag and withdrawing two CDs. “What have we here?”

  They listened in silence. Teischer’s friend in the sound lab at Pinewood had been busy. With most of the background noises in Danton’s Bar filtered down to a hum, Overmars' voice was now clearer, touched with excitement when, breaking off from his interview with Greg, he’d answered his mobile phone.

  "I'm sitting here with a friend…talking," he was saying, before pausing to listen to the reply. "Oh, just someone who works in television. That's all right, isn't it?"

  Kate felt tears in her eyes as she pictured Greg listening, trying to work out who had been calling Overmars.

  An embarrassed hesitation from Overmars followed, before. "Yes, I think he might have mentioned her... Merrimac? Yes, that sounds like her."

  She flinched at the sound of her name. Teischer looked at her.

  For a few moments the recording ran on less distinctly, before a plaintive Overmars began protesting: "Who's trying to hurt you? Why would they want to do that? You know I'd never do anything to hurt you."

  Just as quickly there was an easing of tension, followed by: "Yes, I can hear it. I like that one, too." He was listening to something down the phone. It had to be music. He began talking again. "No, I didn't know that... Yes...yes...I understand..."

  Again Overmars fell silent as he listened, but now the sound of the bar, reduced though it was, drowned out his replies. Finally, quite clearly, he said: "I'll do anything you say. You know that. Just tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it. Just say it..." before a sentence was lost beneath someone shouting an order for a drink. Then: “Yes, I understand. I understand. Yes, I…” At that point the recorder had been switched off.

  Listening hard, Teischer replayed the last moments.

  "I'll do anything you say… Just tell me what do you want me to do and I'll do it. Just say it..."

  It had to have been Gadden on the phone. "Music," she said quietly. "He's playing him music, I'm certain."

  Teischer was screwing up his eyes as he listened. "I can hear it."

  “All the time, music and suggestion." And she thought about the music in her Haverhill bedroom, and again during Gadden's phone call to her when she got back, the soft voice and the gradually increasing volume of the record. She'd slammed the phone down. It didn't work on everyone.

  Teischer was already copying the filtered version of the interview into his computer. "So, what do you say we have another go at knocking this report into shape," he smiled. “Mind you, it’s going to cost you. The sound lab won’t be cheap and this is turning into a hell of a long shift.”

  “Charge me anything you want. Let’s just get it done.”

  Re-energised they went back to work, adding the new thread of material, muscling up the programme, putting shots in and taking others out, Teischer as keen as she was.

  They worked through the night and into the morning, before, at shortly after eight, Teischer turned himself into a cinematographer and set about filming the links, Kate speaking to camera while standing in front of a computer image of Gadden. After that came her narration that tied the whole programme together. She’d been writing it on and off all night.

  By noon they had their documentary. It still had major weaknesses, they both knew that, but it was as good as they were going to get it. And, with Gadden’s concert only hours away, time was running out. Quickly Teischer ran off a master and a couple of copies on DVD, sticking the name of the Mount Venus Cutting Room on them with the title of the programme: “Jesse Gadden: The Truth”.

  "I might as well let those bastards at WSN know where they can still get a decent service," he laughed as Kate put the discs into her bag. "You never know, they might decide to use me again some time."

  "I can't thank you enough, Frank," she said as she prepared to leave.

  "You don't have to. It's been good working with you again. Just like old times." He then paused, playfully. “Besides…”

  “Yes?”

  “The job had its perks, you know.”

  “It did?”

  “Oh, yes. Those discs you stole from Haverhill. I took a look at some of the closed circuit stuff when you weren’t here. Didn’t you realise there was a camera in your bathroom? You look very good in the shower, Kate, you really do?”

  Despite everything, she had to smile.

  Chapter Forty Two

  November 3:

  Neil Fraser was taking an early lunch in the WSN executive dining room when she called. He said all the right things, and stressed how worried he’d been about her, but there was a guarded quality about his tone when she requested an immediate meeting. “This afternoon is difficult, Kate. Busy day today! What about tomorrow some time?”

  "It has to be today. I need to show you something. It's urgent."

  "What have you got, Kate?"

  She told him.

  There was a long silence, but she got her meeting.

  He was waiting for her near the lifts when she arrived at WSN at two o’clock. His eyes went uneasily to her shorn head. "Kate, welcome back! You're looking... terrific! Come through! Let's take a look at what you've got. We're all ready for you."

  Aware of eyes on her as she passed through the newsroom, she followed the editor-in-chief into his office. Robin Broomfield winked a hello as he joined her, along with acting news editor, David Harris, Hilly Weston on behalf of the entertainment department and senior producer Sarah Shulman. Everyone was welcoming her back as though she was a recovering invalid. But, then, that was probably how most of them saw her. The last one into the off
ice was lawyer Larry Abramsky.

  Kate took the programme disc from her bag. "I know you thought I might be having another breakdown a couple of weeks ago,” she began, looking at Fraser.

  “Well, no, that’s not……” Fraser began uncomfortably, but she continued over him.

  “And that I’d become obsessed with Jesse Gadden. Well, in a way, I had. But for the right reasons. So I decided to do my own investigation. I think if you look at this you might begin to see him differently."

  Politely no-one exchanged glances, although she knew they wanted to.

  With a clock countdown, the programme began with library footage of Jesse Gadden in performance, his voice and guitar, high and loud.

  Resting against his desk, Fraser shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He didn’t like any kind of rock music.

  A few seconds into the report the music level dropped and the picture cut to reveal Kate standing in Frank Teischer’s editing suite. "Jesse Gadden..." her narration began, her voice low key, "is at this moment one of the most loved men in the world...an eccentric rock star and a generous philanthropist who gives away millions to good causes…to helping the poor and the sick.”

  The archive film now showed Gadden first being mobbed and then signing a cheque in an African hospital surrounded by smiling children and nurses. Then it cut back to Kate.

  "But is he also something else? In the course of a special investigation WSN has learned that there's another side to Jesse Gadden. Always secretive, we have evidence to suggest that as well as being a great benefactor he is also the focus of a sinister, cult-like organisation, and that his voice and music, while loved around the world, are capable of manipulating adoring fans through the internet triggering some into acts of suicide and murder."