by Ray Connolly
She stopped. She was no more than four feet away.
Then Jesse Gadden smiled at her, a winning, dazzling, victorious smile, and put the gun to the side of his head.
Blood exploded across the stage.
It was too quick and too sudden for most of the audience. Some were still chanting among the screams of others as Kerinova calmly bent over the singer’s body, picked up the gun, put the blood coated muzzle into her mouth and pulled the trigger.
Chapter Forty Eight
The bodies were lying, not quite together, just behind the spot where Gadden had been performing, his guitar still around his neck, but now crushed under him. None of the musicians or floor assistants had yet approached; as though this had been the domestic arrangement of a god and it wasn't their place to interfere.
Kate had seen blood before, but the volume always surprised. Gadden's cream silk smock was now patterned brilliant red at the collar and shoulders. Alongside the bodies the white roses were stained.
This had been his ultimate spectacular. To go out at the pinnacle of success, to freeze the moment before illness and madness caught up with him. Except madness already had: perhaps it had always been there.
Yet there must have been a terrible anger and bitterness, too. It hadn’t been enough to simply end his own life. He’d wanted to take others with him, to put others to sleep as well. Like the Sandman.
She forced herself to look at what was left of his face. This was the man she'd wanted to make love to her, but who had been responsible for the deaths of her friends. One of his eyes was still there, still open, but, she noticed, it was dark grey in colour. Then she saw why. A deep blue contact lens was lying on his cheek, stuck there by a spec of blood. Even his famous eyes had been a lie.
He'd been beautiful in life, but there was no beauty in his death. One side of his head and the bottom half of his face, the beautiful mouth that had sung so plaintively, had ceased to exist.
She turned away. She’d failed to stop him.
Across the cinema a series of screams had begun, wails of abandonment. Some young people had just lost their reason for living.
The cinema’s house lights were now coming on and chaos was escalating as the rows of seats began to empty in squalls of growing hysteria. A cameraman was sitting with his head between his hands, but a dozen or more members of the Glee Club hadn’t moved. It was as if they were waiting to be told what to do. Elizabeth McDonagh simply looked puzzled.
Slowly Stefano and Kish approached the bodies, staring in disbelief. With Gadden they’d been strong, even frightening. Without him they were just two unemployed heavies.
From a fire exit, now open to the street, she could hear approaching police and ambulance sirens. She forced her way out. She needed fresh air.
The crowds outside were in a tumult of confusion as the audience joined them in the rain. "Is it true? Is it true?" asked a middle aged woman.
"It's true," she said.
“But is it true?” the same woman repeated, unable to believe.
A scrum of bystanders was surrounding a figure on the ground. A flood of blood was running along the pavement. She pushed through. A policewoman was on her knees, gripping the bare arm of a young man and tying a tourniquet around it, the face on his Jesse Gadden T-shirt almost blotted out by his blood. It was Peter, the friendly studio assistant. He’d cut his wrist.
“Die for love…”
More police arrived, pushing her away into the crowd.
At the side of one of the outside broadcast vans the girl who’d been monitoring the concert was sitting on the ground, her computer still in her lap.
“It didn’t go out,” she was murmuring repeatedly to a colleague. “The website changed…just before…before the end… I don’t know what happened.”
Kate stopped. “What was that?”
“It somehow changed…in the chanting…the website changed…”
Kate looked at the girl’s laptop screen. The face on it was her own, as she’d been filmed that morning in Frank Teischer’s editing suite.
Gadden’s website was streaming her report.
“It didn’t go out?”
“Not the end…not the…” The girl put her head in her hands in confusion.
Kate stared again at the screen. Chris Zeff. It had to have been him. She’d given him the DVD of her report and asked him to hack into Gadden’s website and disable it. He’d gone a step further. He’d begun streaming her report instead.
"Kate, Kate!" Someone was calling to her through the crowd, then physically dragging her away. It was the WSN cameraman Tom Adams who'd covered the Hyde Park concert. His camera was on his shoulder. He handed her a microphone and an earpiece. "We've got a live feed.”
“What?”
“They're waiting for you."
She stared numbly into the camera as she attached the earpiece.
A familiar voice came into her ear. It was Fraser. "All right, Kate. This is your story. Let's have it."
She swallowed, and hesitated.
"Come on, Kate," Fraser hurried her. “We’re waiting.”
Chapter Forty Nine
November 4:
“Guess what, Kate! You’re on YouTube!” The speaker was Jeroboam. It was six in the evening. She’d only just turned her phone on again.
“What?” she groaned.
“It’s some programme you made about Jesse Gadden. It’s all over the internet and on YouTube.”
“On YouTube! Well, if I’m on YouTube I must be very important now.”
“I think so,” he said and rang off.
She lay in bed collecting her thoughts. She’d been up all night, at first reporting live from the Pavilion Picture Palace, then later on air at WSN, as news of Gadden’s death had wrapped itself around the world. By the morning, with nearly forty eight hours without sleep, she’d been close to collapse, and, after being interviewed by a contrite Robin Broomfield on the Breakfast Show, had been driven home.
Now, as she re-ran the events of the previous night in her mind, questions she hadn’t had time to consider before returned. Had Gadden intended to kill her in that moment on stage? She’d thought he’d been about to. But, if so, why had he changed his mind? Or was it that, having secured her to witness his final act, he’s simply been playing with her for one last time?
She was still exhausted, but she was a journalist, there was work to do. Getting out of bed she called Chris Zeff’s number. She’d tried to reach him during the night, but his mobile had been switched off. It still was. She left another message.
She was showered, dressed and in her study looking through and playing back dozens of emails and voicemails when he returned her call. He was back in Cambridge, lying low, and adamant that she had nothing to thank him for.
“I think a lot of parents have quite a lot to thank you for,” she said, the stricken image of Donna Hallsden’s father in her mind.
“It was a no-brainer when I saw the disc you gave me.”
“But you said it was virtually impossible to take over a website?”
“Impossible for me to do it so quickly.”
“But you did do it.”
He hesitated. “Ah…not only me.”
“You had help?”
“I have friends…”
“You mean other hackers?”
“Other ethical hackers,” he stressed. “We had a wrecking crew on the case in no time when I put the word out.”
“And still, you only just made it. Another few seconds and…”
“I think one of our friends was a bit of a Jesse Gadden fan,” he said easily. “She was enjoying the show and didn’t want us to take it off too soon.”
She didn’t believe him. He was just making light of everything. He was a strange, modest and brilliant guy. When she’d first met him she’d thought he was slightly dippy. Now he seemed to be one of the best adjusted people she knew.
“Anyway,” he was saying, “I can’t talk now. Zena and I a
re due at our pub quiz. It’s the finals in our league, so it’s a big night for us!”
“Good luck,” Kate wished as he rang off, although she doubted he’d need it. Then she got ready to go to the studio where the Metropolitan Police wished to interview her.
“Apparently they want to know how your programme ended up on Jesse Gadden’s website,” an email from Fraser had already warned her.
She wouldn’t be telling them.
During the following days she was rarely off camera for more than a few hours as every news report added some extra twist and WSN-TV wanted a further comment from her. In a single night the legend had been destroyed. Overnight the man universally adored had become the bogeyman. “PIED PIPER OF DEATH," screamed several of the tabloids, “SANDMAN WHO PUT HIS FANS TO SLEEP,” registered The Times less hysterically.
There was, however, no epidemic of murders or suicides, no one-in-a-million killings in the name of love or preserving the perfect moment of happiness. Nobody would ever know how effective Jesse Gadden’s last message might have been because, thanks to Chris Zeff and his hacker friends, nobody had heard it beyond the Pavilion Picture Palace.
Peter, the studio technician, had heard it and acted on it. He’d bled to death in the ambulance on his way to hospital. And a close watch was being kept on several other vulnerable members of the Glee Club who’d been present at the concert, after the freckled Swedish girl, Agnieta, only just survived an overdose. Some of them, it was said, would require psychiatric counselling for years.
Meanwhile, as the world’s media pursued every detail of Gadden’s life, all other traces of his existence were being quickly removed. It was, Kate thought, like witnessing the downfall of a dictator. The first thing to go was the Jesse Gadden website. Then there was his music. Though photographs of him dominated the news stands, the aural magic that Greg had talked about was silenced. As his records were taken off radio playlists, racks of CDs pulled from stores and his entire canon deleted from iTunes, Christie’s were hurriedly withdrawing an old Gadden guitar from a rock memorabilia auction. No-one wanted to be accused of doing anything to contribute to murder or suicide. And who could say what triggers might still be lurking in those songs?
The pace of the reverse was startling. Within hours of the shootings inquiries had begun in London, New Hampshire, Ireland and Maine, Elizabeth McDonagh was being held at a secure hospital, and reporters from all over Europe had joined Natalie Streub in Tallinn sifting through the mental health records of Petra Kerinova. While in Japan police had re-opened enquiries into the deaths of three schoolgirls, murdered by a classmate as they slept in their dormitory. It had happened just after the girl had listened to Gadden’s Hyde Park concert on her computer.
No one doubted that there would be other enquiries about unexplained deaths as the weeks passed. And as anxious parents began flying into London to seek drop-out offspring among the now abandoned members of the Glee Club, Phil Bailey, called to say that the marble angel over Sister Grace's grave had been removed on the instructions of Tom and Nancy Cleary. Stefano and Kish had, not surprisingly, disappeared. They’d probably never understood what they’d been involved in.
Everywhere fans were now disowning the man who had so recently mesmerised them, even Kate’s sister in law, Nell, sending her a short, embarrassed note thanking her for making her “grow up and see sense”.
One afternoon Detective Sergeant Cotton phoned Kate at WSN to say that the investigations into the deaths of Greg Passfield and Hans Overmars were being broadened.
"I thought you’d decided it was a straight forward gay killing," she chivvied.
"It was a sex crime," Cotton came back.
"It was an execution made to look like a sex crime," she replied, though only Greg would have known what he was doing undressing and getting into a bath in the presence of Hans Overmars.
Out of curiosity she logged on to a Jesse Gadden chatroom one night. Most of the conversations were sad, friends saying goodbye to each other as though the writers were closing a door on youth. But some were disturbing.
"If that Merrimac bitch hadn't interfered, Jesse would have still been alive today," one had written, misunderstanding completely the reasons for his suicide.
"Or we'd have been with him, too," came another, wistfully.
She didn't respond, nor did she when, as analysis followed shock, the young psychologist Sadie Kupfermann, grabbed a chance at early celebrity, wondering publically if the Gadden phenomenon didn’t also tell us something about the modern desire to stay young.
“All of us, rock stars particularly, face the problem in that there’s always going to be a new kid in town,” she said on the BBC’s Newsnight. “In Gadden’s case he was facing a terminal illness which would first have taken his looks and then his talent. By doing it his way he stays forever young.”
It made for good headlines the following day, as elsewhere psychiatrists were writing of how Gadden had “shown every classic sign of narcissistic, neurotic obsession”, something no-one had thought to mention before his suicide.
Maybe, Kate thought, maybe…and wondered what her father would have said. She’d watched Jesse Gadden kill himself, but already she felt as though she was seeing him from a distance. If in life his contradictions had made him difficult to explain, in death he was impossible.
Back at her desk at WSN, colleagues were leaning over backwards to be nice to her, with perhaps the exception of Hilly Weston, who, it was rumoured, was being poached by CNN, and would soon be leaving.
The thought of leaving WSN crossed Kate’s mind, too. Right now she was hot. Offers from rival news stations were getting through to her.
Fraser pre-empted that decision over lunch one day. “We’ve been thinking, Kate. How would Southern African Correspondent suit? Based in Johannesburg. There’s going to be a lot of news down there in the next couple of years.”
“You mean you don’t think I take unacceptable risks in pursuit of stories any more,” she goaded.
He just smiled.
For the usual week in any major news story Jesse Gadden filled the newspapers and TV schedules, before, inevitably, interest moved on. Kate was relieved when it happened. It was, she felt, as though she was finally being set free from an obsession. She could now admit that to herself. That is what Gadden had become.
Determined to enjoy a little bit of normality in London before she went away again, she invited her family over for dinner. That necessitated a trip to the supermarket. Jeroboam was waiting for her, chatting to Lois Mott on the pavement outside her house, when she got back.
"I was just saying to Jeroboam that you never know the power there is in music, do you?" her neighbour gushed as Kate climbed out of the Citroen.
"Evidently not," Kate said, glancing at Jeroboam in surprise at this new display of friendliness.
"I mean, it makes you wonder if it's safe to listen to anything, doesn’t it. They'll be finding a message in the national anthem soon.” And with a special smile for Jeroboam she hurried off to her car.
"I may have to have a word with you about the company you've begun keeping," Kate chided as Jeroboam helped her carry her bags into the house.
"Oh, she's not so bad when you get to know her," he said, his brown putty face breaking into the widest grin.
What’s happened to the boy who was almost too shy to speak, she thought, as she made the tea, and he told her all about his job at the hotel…who’d been nice to him and what tips he'd been given. There was even talk of him being sent on a computer course if he did well.
“Go for it,” she insisted.
He said he would.
She'd bought him a new reading book, Bill And Harry: A Big Day Out, an account of a trip to Wembley for the FA Cup Final, which, apart from a couple of less familiar words, he raced through. Suddenly these two fictional characters were much too young for him. The penny's dropped, she thought.
He guessed what she was thinking, and he smiled.
She
’d been apprehensive about telling him that she would be soon going to South Africa, but when she did he surprised her.
“That’ll be great, Kate. I can email you and tell you how I’m getting on here and you can tell me about what you’re doing there.”
“Right. And try not to use the spell check until you get to the end of the email. Then see what words you got wrong and correct them,” she advised, perhaps a little bossily.
“Is that what you do?”
“Yes, that’s what I do,” she smiled. She was going to miss this breath of innocence in her life.
When he’d gone she spent a thoughtful afternoon preparing dinner for her family. Something had happened to her during her Gadden investigation. Her early morning nightmares about Owoso had ended. The massacre would have happened whether or not she and a camera team had been present, she’d accepted, if not theatrically, in the full view of world television, then, probably just as bloodily, around the backs of the bungalows and in the forest.
There would be times when a camera acted as a spur to violence, particularly in these days of the internet when every kid with a mobile phone could see himself as a movie director. But there would be many occasions, too, when the possibility of being caught on camera would act as a deterrent for those intent on violence.
She still thought about the President’s wife, the child bride with the Cartier Tank watch and the expensive blue-trimmed new trainers who’d been raped and then shot. She always would. But she wouldn’t go on reproaching herself. It hadn’t been her fault.
Epilogue
November 16:
The funeral for Donna Hallsden took place in the white painted Church of Jesus in Romsey, New Hampshire, at eleven o’clock on a cold morning, three months to the day after the picnic shooting. There was early snow in the air. In the end the argument about whether the girl’s life support system should be closed down had become irrelevant. Her body had just given up.
