Kill For Love (11 page)

Chapter
Eighteen

She didn’t sleep well. She didn’t
expect to or think she deserved to, as the events of the previous night reran
in her mind. So it was a relief when the morning came and she could get up
early and hurry to the studio.

She wasn't anchorwoman this week,
but deliberately she made herself busy, complimenting Robin Broomfield on the
morning's programme, noticing Chloe's new hair colouring, and asking Hetty, the
returning foreign desk secretary, about her honeymoon in Goa.
She knew what she was doing. She was trying to block-out the weekend. Pulling
on her headphones she listened to the news headlines, and, checking her diary, she
filled in her overdue expenses forms. She even helped Ned Swann man the foreign
desk phones. She was glad of that. It gave her the chance to speak to colleagues
around the world, to feel that she was back in touch with a reality she
understood. But, all the time, stealing up on her, the events at Haverhill pursued.

“What d’you say then, Kate? Are
you coming?” Sally Richards, one of the home news reporters, was looking down
at her.

It was lunchtime and she’d
distantly heard a casual invitation to join a group lunch in Pearl’s wine bar. “I’m sorry, I was
daydreaming,” she apologised.

“One or two of the others should
be down there.”

“Er...better not. I’m waiting for
a call,” she lied.

“Okay. See you later.”

As Sally left, Ned caught Kate’s
eye. He hadn’t mentioned her weekend. “You haven’t heard from Beverly today, have you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Seb Browne
will know where she is. What time is he due in?” She was surprised he hadn’t already
contacted her.

“There’s no sign of him, either. Both
their phones are turned off. If he calls, you might get him to return her. I
need her. It’s busy back here in the real world.” And he picked up a ringing
phone.

At one thirty she went out for
some fresh air. At a fruit stall she bought an apple, and stood and ate it on Blackfriars Bridge as she watched a chain of barges
being towed down the river. She wanted to cry.

By the time she returned to the
office, discussions about Seb Browne’s absence had spread. It had been
established that he and Beverly had left their Galway hotel the previous day,
but neither had yet turned up at their London
homes. Beverly’s
flatmate was said to be cross. She’d spoken to Beverly on Sunday morning and they’d planned
to buy a Thai take-away for supper that night. Since then there’d been no contact.
 

“Any money you want says Seb’s got
the poor girl holed up in some cosy little Irish hotel and is filling his
boots,” laughed one of the older producers. Kate didn’t answer. Galway “might not be a complete disaster!”, Seb had
written. She put the thought from her mind.
 
Beverly
was old enough to make her own decisions about with whom she did or didn’t have
sex.

Neil Fraser had been out all
morning. As he entered the newsroom, Kate crossed the floor to his door.
 
“There’s something you ought to know,” she
said.

With the smile the
editor-in-chief reserved for his star reporters, Fraser showed her into his
office. “There’s a lot I ought to know...” He gestured towards a chair.

She remained standing. “The Jesse
Gadden interview...it’s off.”

“What?” The smile was
extinguished.

“It didn’t work out.”

“But I thought he’d agreed!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Christ! Why?”

It was reasonable that he would
want an explanation, but there was none she was prepared to give. She half
raised her shoulders, shaking her head.

Fraser didn’t give up easily.
Quickly he talked about space having been booked by advertising agencies, and
the syndication value of such a coup. “I mean, are you certain about this, Kate?
Are you sure there’s no way...?”

“I’m sure.”

“Maybe somebody else could do it.
I know Robin would love to. To be honest, I think he’s been feeling touchy
about all the attention you’ve been getting since...”

“Gadden won’t do it,” she
interrupted. “I don’t think he ever intended to.” Only now that she’d said the
words could she see the truth in it. He’d used the bait of an interview as a
way of getting to know her. Like the pathetic men who wrote her fan letters, he
was attracted to her because she was on TV. Even rock stars had their
fantasies. She’d fitted one of his.

“What d’you mean?”

“I was taken in.”

“Jesus!” The silver in Fraser’s
hair looked more defined now. Anger aged him. His expression said he knew there
was much he wasn’t being told.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and
left the office.

Back at her desk a small group of
executives were circling Ned as he tried to keep the foreign news flow going
while others were obstructing him with suppositions about Seb Browne and
Beverly. Kate felt removed from it all. She decided to go home.
 

She’d got only as far as a squeeze
of traffic congestion at Lambeth
Bridge when her mobile rang.
For just a moment she considered ignoring it. She couldn’t.

It was Ned. His voice was
strained. “Kate, if you’re driving can you pull over for a second...”

She told him she was stationary.

“I’ve got some bad news,” he came
back. “We’ve just heard…Seb Browne and Beverly have been killed in a road
accident in Ireland.”

Chapter
Nineteen

It was a hastily convened meeting
for heads of departments. Kate arrived late, having turned back on the
Embankment. Neil Fraser was standing behind his desk, holding the details of the
accident. They'd been emailed by the Galway police.
He looked gaunt, having already had to call Seb Browne's mother, getting to her
before she heard about the accident on the television news. She was a widow,
and it was known around the office that, bumptious as he was, Seb had been the
centre of her life.

"We need someone to go to Ireland
to...to put in an appearance...make arrangements, although...well, in the
circumstances, I don't think formal identification will be possible. No doubt,
dental records will eventually..." He stopped, as though he'd shocked
himself at the significance of what he'd just said. Then he tried again.
"Would anyone...?"

“I’ll go, of course.” The speaker
was Larry Abramsky, the WSN-TV lawyer.

“Thank you, Larry.”

"And I'll go," said
Kate.

Fraser looked at her and
hesitated. He was thinking about Owoso, she knew, questioning her emotional
state.

"Seb and Beverly were there
doing research for my interview with Jesse Gadden," she pursued.
 

He waited. It was obvious he didn't
want to send her, but nobody else offered to go. "Right! Thank you,
Kate," he said at last.

Silently the executives filed out
of the office. Kate closed her eyes. Beverly had
only joined WSN a few weeks earlier, after her father, a TV producer with NBC’s
Channel 5 in Chicago,
had pulled strings.

A studio car took them to
Heathrow, Larry Abramsky quietly relaying what little information the Irish
police had offered on the way. The accident had occurred in the Connemara Mountains
the previous night when Seb and Beverly’s
hire car had gone out of control, careered off a hillside into a gulley and
overturned. There'd been an explosion. Even if the occupants had survived the
fall, which was very unlikely, they’d have been burned alive.

“My God,” Kate heard herself say.

"They’re saying that Beverly would have been
driving," Larry said. "That Seb was disqualified.”

Kate had forgotten. “Oh…yes.”

“Maybe there’s something there…a
young American driving an unfamiliar hire car on the opposite side of the
road.”

Kate didn’t answer.

They had little meaningful
conversation on the short flight to Ireland. She needed quiet, and Larry,
a meticulous, reserved man in his late forties, wasn’t the companion to waste
words saying all the things they were both thinking.

A young man was waiting for them
at Shannon Airport. He was Desmond Kenny, a
sensible boy with pale eyes and heavy shoes. He worked for Molloys, a Galway news
agency that performed a stringer service for WSN in the west of the Irish Republic.

At his side was a girl trainee
called Siobahn. She stared reverently at Kate as Larry made the introductions. "I'll
never forget that time you were on that beach in Africa,"
she said, almost as soon as Larry had finished speaking. "They got us to
study the tape last term on our media studies course. You were brilliant during
the executions. So controlled under pressure. It was fantastic."

Kate shook her head. Was that
what Owoso had become? A training video? How to report on a massacre? Quietly
she turned attentions back to her dead colleagues.

"I still can't believe
it," Desmond Kenny said, showing the way to his car. "I was only having
a drink with them in the hotel on Saturday afternoon, me and Phil Bailey. Phil
was devastated when he heard."

"Phil Bailey?" Kate
asked.

"He does freelance work for a
lot of the papers over here. He knows all the music people in Ireland. Your man had him looking
in every music pub in Galway for
contacts."

They’d reached the car. Kate sat
in the front with Kenny.

"There'll have to be a post
mortem, of course, and they won't be releasing the bodies to the families until
after it," Kenny tolled dourly as he drove them north towards Galway. "But you’ll be able to make arrangements for
the transportation of the…the remains, pending that." He spoke in official
jargon: death demanded that.

"What about their personal
belongings?" Larry asked.

"It was a vicious fire. Everything
in the car was burned to a cinder. That was why it took so long to find out who
they were. The guards wanted their identities checking and re-checking before
they'd release the names."

"Was there any indication of
why the car went out of control?" Kate enquired.

Kenny frowned. "I don't know
that particular road. I went there for the first time this morning. It's a hell
of a drop. They couldn't have chosen a worse spot to go off the road if they'd
tried. The police couldn't even start work until it got light. Avis are sending
their own engineers to look at what's left of the vehicle and see if there was
any mechanical malfunction, but it's considered unlikely."

"Where exactly did you say
it happened?" Kate asked. She'd found a road map of Ireland in the glove compartment
and was looking through it.

"Near Loughmaine. That's a
little place in the hills.”

"We heard it happened at
around eleven."

"Maybe a little later."

"So where had they been
until then?"

Desmond Kenny shook his head. He
didn't know.

They drove on, passing the green
fields and new pastel bungalows of modern day Ireland.

Browne and Beverly had spent the
weekend at the Sandymount Court Hotel
in Galway, a smart new place with a view
across the river to the cathedral. Reservations had been made there for Kate
and Larry Abramsky, too. Checking in, they went to their separate rooms.
Sitting on the Irish tartan counterpane considering the matching carpet and
practical, hotel furniture, Kate pictured Beverly
in a similar room, as she would have been when they'd last spoken on the
Saturday morning. She'd been just 21, shining with health and laughter. It was
easy to see why Seb Browne had fancied her.

Switching on the television, she went
into the bathroom to clean her teeth with a toothbrush bought at the airport;
the whisky she’d drunk on the plane had left a sour aftertaste. Behind her in
the bedroom she could hear the news headlines running on RTE. Then came the
local Galway news. The crash was the lead item.
With the toothbrush still in her mouth, she returned to the television. It was showing
the hire car, lying upside down at the bottom of a steep, rocky incline, a
blackened broken shell of metal.

A retired teacher who'd seen the
fire from his holiday cottage two miles away was talking, enjoying his moment
of television celebrity. "You never saw such flames. Like a funeral pyre. I
said to my wife, ‘if anyone is in there they’ll have been melted alive in that
heat’." And, on cue, photographs of Beverly and Browne appeared on the
screen.

An inspector from the Garda was
waiting when she returned to the hotel lobby. "They must have been going
too fast, is all we can imagine,” he proffered.

"I believe Connemara's
a lovely part of the world,” Kate said.

"It is indeed. Very
romantic."

There was a silence. Had Browne
reckoned he needed one more night to get Beverly
into bed and taken her off to some little out of the way beauty spot?

Leaving the hotel they were driven
across the river and then west out of Galway.
To the north Kate could see the glint of a lake between the trees, but soon
they were into the silent, empty wilderness of moor, bog and mountain that was Connemara. It was already evening, and as the sun fell the
brown and green mountains were soon lit by a pink, rain-soaked filter.

They came across the flashing
lights and police cones before they reached the scene of the accident. High on
a mountain road the little convoy slowed and Kate spotted the hire car two
hundred feet below, a blackened wreck, still lying on its roof. She was surprised.
After twenty miles of twists and turns the lane here, though narrow, was almost
dead straight.

Carefully the police car drew to
a halt in front of a rescue truck. Waiting alongside was a large crane.

Climbing from the car, Kate and Larry
made their way past a small audience of local people. A clutch of reporters and
television cameramen moved as one to greet her. Below, down the mountain, a
group of men were working on the wrecked vehicle.

Suddenly the figures around it stood
back. Clamps had already been attached to the car’s chassis, and, with a wave
and a shout, the crane operator pulled a lever. The steel cables took the
strain. Then, slowly, the burnt-out car was hoisted away from the side of the
cliff and edged upwards, until, reaching the road, the arm of the crane swung
it towards the rescue trailer.

It had just passed above Kate when
one of the clamps slipped on the burnt metal. And, as the car shifted its angle
in mid-air, something fell from it into the grass verge a few yards from where
she stood. Then, gently, the wreck was lowered on to the trailer.

Stepping forward, Kate looked at
the fallen object. For a moment she didn't recognise it. Then she realised: it
was a charred and melted laptop. And she remembered: Seb Browne had rarely gone
anywhere without his computer.

"Miss Merrimac!" A
voice caused her to turn around. An attractive, heavily made-up young woman had
pushed herself past the police cordon. "RTE News. Would you mind if I
asked you a few questions?"

Kate looked over the girl's
shoulder. A television camera was already focused on her. She wanted to say,
yes, she did mind, that she'd just lost two colleagues and was very upset. But
she didn't. The reporter had a job to do.

Phil Bailey, Browne's journalist contact
in Galway, was waiting for her in the bar of
the

"Seb wanted contacts from
the old days when Gadden was around here playing the pubs," he said. "I
gave what help I could...a few old phone numbers for Kevin O'Brien...he was
Jesse’s first manager. Stuff like that. I thought I'd got myself a nice little job
there...researching for WSN."

"I'm afraid the programme
has been cancelled," Kate said. "If you send me an invoice for the
time you spent I’ll see that you get paid."

Bailey nodded. "It's always
the same with Jesse Gadden. Always difficult. They've all been here asking
questions, all the tabloids and the big Sunday papers, Americans and Germans,
Japanese and South Americans, but no-one ever finds out anything we don't
already know, which is next to nothing. They say Bob Dylan tells a different
version of his life to every journalist who ever asks him. Jesse Gadden goes
one better. He hardly breathes a word. He never did. Not even in the
beginning."

Kate was hardly concentrating.
She didn't care any more.

"I remember trying to
interview him years ago when he was first playing the Crazy Horse here in Galway. God, he was difficult. He never gave me anything.
Even the girls he had...even they never got to know him, though there were
quite a few. He had his pick, but he always kept them at a distance. And then
along comes that Kerinova woman."

Kate changed the subject. "I
understood Seb had been talking on the phone to one of Gadden's school friends,
someone called Michael Lynch. Perhaps that was who he and Beverly were seeing
in Connemara..."

"I'd be surprised. I got the
impression Lynch was here in Galway. They must
have heard about him through pub talk. I’ve never met the man. He sounded a bit
dubious. I warned them to take what he said with a pinch of salt."

She left it at that.

Larry was a solid lawyer and
family man. They had a quiet dinner in the hotel, musing bleakly over the
events of the day, and then Larry retired to his room to prepare an initial report
for the insurers.

Kate was exhausted, but not yet
ready for sleep. Switching on the TV in her room for the late night news, she
found WSN now very respectfully covering the deaths of Seb and Beverly, giving
brief details of their careers. A sports round-up followed and she clicked away
through the other channels on offer, a late-night chat show from CNBC, Spanish
football, movies everywhere and on into MTV and the rock music channels.

Abruptly a ghostly face caused
her to pause in her channel surfing. Jesse Gadden was miming in what looked
like a temple, the blue of his eyes rendered even larger by make-up. For a few
moments she watched.
 

“
Breaking the fence around a yester Da-Glo love affair,” Squaring the
circle, circling the square
,
Making
sense of a yester-night-time nightmare…”

She switched off the television.