Kill For Love (13 page)

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 drink. "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 weekend 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.”

“Yes. But go on.”

Greg seemed pleased to have an
audience. "Well, think about it. Why is it that certain singers become
loved all over the world, whether or not the listener can understand a word they're
singing? Bing Crosby did, Elvis did and John Lennon did, and a few others, too.
Right now it’s Jesse Gadden’s turn.”

"With the first two wasn't
it something about happening along at the right moment, when radio and records
were taking off.”

"That led to the sound of
their voices being globally exploited, yes. But other voices were around as
well. It doesn't explain why
they
and no-one else became loved in their
time more than…well, almost anyone on earth.”

"Is that true?”

"I think so. The individual
human voice,
some
human voices, anyway, put to a tune, are among the
most adored things on the planet."

"Perhaps these guys were
just better at it than anybody else."

"That’s also true. But why
should singers be popular anyway? Why do singers get more offers of sex than anybody
else? And they do. In the purely evolutionary sense, successful sportsmen or
generals, rich businessmen or top politicians should get all the women, not
weedy little rock singers."

“Okay! Why? Go on, tell me.”

Greg drew himself up higher on
the bench. "Well, what if the particular sounds some singers make touch
subconscious triggers, making the listener particularly open to suggestion and emotion?"

Kate didn’t answer, but turned
her head back across the park, remembering the sounds of the choristers in
Westminster Abbey.

"It's only a theory, of
course, Greg Passfield's Theory of the Primeval Inner Voice. But I suspect shamans
and primitive holy men may have had a touch of this. That's how they were able
to control people. And perhaps that's what guys like Jesse Gadden are tapping
into when they sing."

"A touch of…?"

"Well…I call it aural
magic."

"Aural magic." She
played with the words. "And that's why some singers are so popular?"

He shrugged. “Maybe. And
powerful, too, because their particular aural magic can now he heard everywhere
in the world, at every second of the day, unlike the village shaman who never
drew much of a crowd outside his wigwam."

“Powerful?”

"Well, yes. Obviously. When
they're really ticking, these guys hold the thru-route to our sub-conscious.
They have us in thrall. That's power, all right."

Kate considered this. Was Jesse Gadden
powerful? She thought about the half-million fans in Hyde
Park and the legions of worshippers on the websites. And then she
thought about the Glee Club and Beverly
and even her sister-in-law, Nell, all unquestioningly loyal.

"John Lennon talked about
the Beatles being more popular than Jesus," Greg was continuing. "But
I don't think he quite realised what he was saying. Think of what could have
been achieved if that energy had been directed to some single cause. Think how
much good the Beatles could have generated in the world!”

"Or how much bad, if they'd
used it wrongly."