Kill For Love (17 page)

Kate leafed through the box's contents. Yes, she
could see that Sister Grace had had ability. Brought up in another family in
another place she might have had a career as a commercial artist or illustrator.
There were drawings, water colours, little cartoons about life as a teacher,
portraits of the nuns and pupils. And there was also a charcoal sketch of a
thin, urchin faced teenage boy, so androgynous looking he might easily have
been a girl, the hair long and matted, the features delicate, the eyes
unmistakeably wide open: Jesse Gadden at the end of childhood.

"You like that one, do you?" Nancy
Cleary asked as Kate held the sketch up to the light.

Kate hesitated. "I wonder, can I ask a great
favour, Mrs Cleary? Would it be all right if I filmed it?”

She parked off the road a couple of miles from
the Clearys’ cottage, pulled out her camera and staring into the viewfinder
checked what she’d shot. The face of the fourteen year old Jesse Gadden filled
the screen. Tom Cleary had been angry, but Kate had got the measure of the
power in that house. Nancy
made the big decisions, and she was feeling guilty.

Switching off the camera, she put the car into
gear and bumped back on to the wet road.

After a few miles she turned on the car radio. A
Twist-O and the Koolboys record was playing and she thought about Jeroboam at
the Wellington Hotel, proud but nervous on his first day in a hotel porter's
uniform.

She hoped it was going well.

Chapter Twenty Nine

To a young boy, standing at
Coneyburrow Point must have been like looking out off the edge of the world,
Kate thought, as, two hundred feet below, the sea tore itself into fragments of
foam on the rocks. Out of the recent past Jesse Gadden's light, slow, soft
voice carried in eddies on the wind.
"I
used to think that when I reached the Atlantic Ocean I'd be able to see America
if I looked hard enough. All it took was willpower
."

"And magic,"
Kate heard herself tease, as she had that
sunny afternoon in Cornwall.

The answer had been flip.
"If you have the willpower, making
magic's easy."

She gazed out across the sea, now
salmon coloured as, with the rain gone, the evening sun came out from behind a
cloud. Then, turning around, she took in the bright green grass on the thin
layer of earth, the stunted trees, crouching away from the winds, the gorse
bushes and granite cliffs. This was where Grace Cleary had jumped. The
newspaper reports had described and photographed this very spot on the
cliff-top path, the shortest route between the convent, where she'd lived, and
the boys' school, where she'd tried to help a special pupil.

But
why
had she died? There'd been no explanation: no last letter. No
message for the parents who'd lived their lives through her.

Peering into her camera Kate
stepped gingerly off the path and focused over the side of the cliff. Her
Eyewitness Travel Guide to Ireland
described the walk as a remote, unspoiled beauty spot. If Michael Lynch had
been telling the truth, somewhere along here on balmy evenings, thinking
themselves hidden by the gorse, Sister Grace and her pupil Jesse Monaghan had
made love.

She kicked at a loose pebble and
watched it sail away, then pulled quickly back. One slip and she could be
another mystery. It was easily done.

She'd raced a hundred miles back along
the coast and down into County Clare to get to this spot before the light went,
and now she searched for angles best lit by the deepening sunset. She'd already
shot exteriors of the boys' orphanage where Gadden had lived, a grey nineteenth
century slab of a place, recently converted into a hospice for the terminally
ill, and she’d visited the Convent of St Mary, where Grace Cleary had been a
nun. She’d been met with politeness there, but her requests to talk to any of
the nuns who might have remembered the events of November 3, l989, had been
rejected. That had come as no surprise. Phil Bailey had told her about the
beautiful new stained glass window behind the altar in the chapel, a gift from
a wealthy donor.

She didn't stay filming on the
cliffs a moment longer than was necessary. She had much to do. Besides, sea
shores troubled her.

She left the car at the Budget
return depot at Shannon
Airport and booked in at
the Park Inn, a modern hotel immediately opposite the main airport building.
Sitting on her bed she booked her flight. Then she went down to the coffee shop
where she checked the voicemail that had accumulated on her landline in London. The postcard to
her mother seemed to have alleviated worries among her family, but there was
concern at WSN. Ignoring all requests from Chloe, Sarojine and even Fraser to
call back she had a light dinner in the restaurant, before, at ten thirty, she
made her way back into the lobby.

"I wonder, could I order
some newspapers for tomorrow morning," she asked, approaching the desk.

 
"Absolutely you can," the young porter
replied, turning away from watching a quiz show on a small television. "If
you'll just wait while I get a pen. Now what room number would that be?"

She told him the number. Then:
“I’d like
The Times
,
Guardian
, and
…”
She stopped, arrested by the television. The quiz show had been
replaced by a commercial.

"Was there one more?"
 
The porter prompted.

She didn't answer. She was
looking at a familiar face. But what she heard was the commentary riding over
the music.

"Don't miss it. A special webcast, Jesse Gadden’s farewell, in
concert. Coming soon to a computer near you at www.jessegadden.com.”

She sat on her bed and stared at
her laptop. A Jesse Gadden concert, in sound and vision, streamed live and free
over the internet. The marketing campaign had begun and the web chatter was
delirious with fans fuelling and feeding each other’s excitement. Everyone
wanted to tell everybody else how wonderful this was going to be, and, to help
them, links to new pages of information, pieces of songs, photographs and cryptic
references had already been set up.

Clicking to a page, she found a
fragment of a song lyric.
“Knights of the
night, looking for the light.”
She recognised it. Gadden had played it to
her that night in the recording studio. It was, she’d decided then, a song
about seduction. She just about remembered some of the lyrics.
“Come go with me, come love with me, come,
come with me…”

A Jesse Gadden retirement concert
had been promised for months, but, she’d assumed it would be in a large arena
and filmed for a later showing on television.

A show streamed live directly
through the internet into the Macs and home computers of fans would make it a
one to one experience.

Chapter
Thirty

October 24:

She travelled economy on the
flight from Shannon to Boston, sitting with a
party of Limerick wives from a computer assembling company who were crossing
the Atlantic to do a week’s early Christmas
shopping. They were pleasant women and it was easy to be amused by the
craic
of their conversation. And
although one of them, flame haired and wearing more make up than she ought,
said a couple of times that she reminded her of someone, Kate went
unrecognised. She told them she did market research. "What for? Hair
restorer?" another jibed.

The popular morning papers all
carried items about the Jesse Gadden internet concert and his impending
retirement, a subject of discussion among some of the women. "It'll break
my heart if he really does retire," said Maureen, a forty year old who was
sitting in the seat next to Kate, as she waited for the Brad Pitt movie to
begin.

"Why?" Kate asked.

"Because he has the voice of
a lost soul crying in the wilderness, and when I hear it there's nothing I want
more than to go and nurse him," Maureen said, and then laughed. "And
here's me with three children to worry about."

"Does he ever frighten
you?"

"Frighten me? Why should I
be frightened of a pop singer?"

"They say he frightens some
people."

"Really? Well, all I can
think is they must be people who’ve got too much time on their hands." And
plugging in her headset, Maureen turned her attention to the movie.

Pulling down her window shade,
Kate closed her eyes and dozed the dreams of an imposter. As a television
correspondent she'd been aware of people looking at her for years. Now, as a
market researcher, she was anonymous.

It was late afternoon when they
touched down at Boston's Logan Airport.
Wishing her travelling companions good shopping, she collected her bags and
made her way to another terminal for the connecting flight to Bangor, Maine.
With time to kill she checked her bags, then, going through into the departure
lounge, bought a cup of coffee and a copy of that morning’s
Boston Sunday Globe
. Like all
journalists she was addicted to news, and she leafed quickly through the pages.
As usual the White House was worrying about relations with Iran, while closer to home there was a Massachusetts row about
state cuts in education funding.

A photograph of a pretty teenager
on the front of the local news section under the headline
"BATTLE OVER NAKED PICNIC COMA GIRL”
caught her eye. The girl had
been unconscious for nine weeks in a hospital in Romsey, New Hampshire,
with a gunshot wound to her head, sustained during a double suicide attempt
with her boy friend while on a picnic. The weapon had belonged to her father, a
police officer, and the fact that the couple had been discovered naked had
apparently intrigued the public almost as much as the lack of any motive. The
boy had died instantly. Now the girl’s parents were fighting the insurance
company to have her life support system left on a little longer.

Kate’s flight was being called.
Interrupted in her reading, she finishing her coffee, shoved the newspaper into
her bag and set off for the gate.

The Oyster Sound Motor Inn at Shakeston, Maine,
was the sort of place where she might once have imagined spending a romantic
weekend, she reflected, as she pulled the car she'd rented at the airport into
the driveway. Forty miles north of Bangor,
with each cottage of the inn a renovated fishermen's clapboard home, it felt
immediately cosy and protective.

It was now almost evening, and,
registering, she carried her bags to her cottage. A smell of warm pine greeted
her. Crossing to the window she drew back the sliding door at the rear of the
room and stepped out on to the deck. It was a pretty view. At one end of the
bay was Shakeston’s small, old fishing harbour, while just around the corner of
the coast was a new parking lot of a marina. More interesting to her, though,
was the long peninsula facing her across the bay, and the couple of grand white
houses peeping through the woods. It was to here that Kevin O'Brien, the rock
manager from Galway, had chosen to retire.

Going back inside, her shoulder
touched a set of stainless steel chimes which some previous guest had hung from
a beam and a delicate shiver of notes broke the silence of the evening. She
touched them again and stood listening. Music: it was everywhere.

Kevin O'Brien was sitting on a
fold-up chair at the end of the jetty when she found him. He looked older than
the man in the photographs Phil Bailey had given her, and was now heavy, white
stubbled and in his late-sixties. Wearing outsize blue jeans, a thick red and
navy checked shirt and a baseball cap, he seemed more like a retired lumberjack
than a multi-millionaire. He must have seen her park in the lane and walk
towards him, but he gave no indication.

"Mr O'Brien?" she asked
as she reached him. The location given for him by the proprietor of the Oyster
Sound Motor Inn had been spot on: he was at the same spot nearly every weekday
morning, she’d been told.

"Yes." O’Brien didn't
even look to see who was speaking, but concentrated on tempting his bait
through the water.

"I'm Kate Merrimac from
WSN-TV in London.
I wondered if I could talk to you for a few minutes."

"No. You may not."

"It won't take very long."

There was no answer.

"I just have a few
questions..."

Silence.

"I'm enquiring about Jesse Gadden,
whom I believe..."

That was enough. "If you'll
excuse me..." Standing up, O'Brien brusquely reeled in his line, folded
his chair, and, picking up his fishing basket, strode away down the jetty to a
grey pick-up truck that was waiting in the lane.

She made no attempt to pursue.
She'd expected something like this. The man had come here looking for anonymity
and seclusion, and now she'd spoiled it.

Returning to her car she tore a
sheet of paper from her notebook and wrote a note.

“
Dear Mr O'Brien,

I don't want to harass you but I have no choice. Phil Bailey tells me
that in the old days at the Crazy Horse in Galway
you liked to pretend you were hard, but that really you were a ‘big man’, who
always helped him out in the end.

I'm not sure I can wait for the end, whatever it may be. But I wouldn't
have come all this way to see you if I didn't really need your help. It is
important, believe me. And not just for me.

So, please, can we talk? You can find me at the Oyster Sound Motor
Inn.”

Adding her new mobile number, she
signed the note and slipped it into an envelope she'd taken from the hotel in Shannon. Then she drove up the lane and out along the
peninsula.

At

Climbing from the hire car she
rang the bell on the gate post. Then, not unexpectedly getting no reply, she
dropped the envelope into a mail box at the gate, and drove back to the inn.

She couldn't hurry him: there was
nothing she could do but wait. It would have been good to have taken a look
along the coast, but, unsure of how far the signal to her mobile would stretch
in this rural area, she sat on her deck and watched the afternoon activity on
the Sound.

He didn't call.

In the evening she went back to
sifting through the Jesse Gadden websites, dinner being brought across from the
dining room. Time passed slowly. At nine thirty she gave up, and went for a
stroll down the road into Shakeston.

 
There wasn't much to see, just a pastel
painted, mainly wooden fishing and sailing community with a couple of
restaurants, which, this being Monday and out of season, were all closed. A bar
was open. It was called the Fishing Hook, from where the sound of karaoke was
escaping.

Wondering if any local people
would like to talk about Kevin O’Brien, she went inside, and, buying a beer,
watched a little wrinkled guy wearing a brown hair-piece sing the Eagles’
One Of These Nights
. He wasn’t bad, but
no-one was paying him much attention. He didn’t look right.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

She swung around.

It was Kevin O’Brien. “Don’t
worry. That’s what a man says in a bar when he wants to get to know a little
bit about a woman.” He paused. “I got your note.”

“I didn’t expect you to be here.”

“But now that I am…” And, picking
up her drink, he led her to a table as far from the karaoke singer as they
could get without being outside. “Didn’t they tell you in Galway,
I don’t do interviews,” he said as they sat down.

“Yes. But Phil Bailey…”

“Jesus! Phil Bailey! What I want
to know is, who the hell gave him my address? I’m retired now. Out of it all.
Living a quiet life out here. Loving it, too.”

She dipped her head, but didn’t
reply.

After a moment he softened. “Phil
Bailey! How is he? Still starving to death writing his little rock reviews?
God, but it’s pathetic. At his age, too. And he was always tone deaf.”

She had to smile.

He smiled, too. “Tell me
something about yourself.”

“Well, I’m following up a story about
Jesse Gadden, and…”

He stopped her. “No. I
know
about Jesse Gadden. I want to know
about you.”
 

She looked at him. What to tell
him?

He waited.

“I had a breakdown,” she found
herself saying. “I saw terrible things. In Africa.
Now everyone thinks I’m having a relapse, another breakdown. But I’m not.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He nodded. “It was brave of you
to tell me.”

The little singer had now been
replaced at the karaoke by a couple of local fortyish women friends who were
charging into an old Whitney Houston hit.

O’Brien considered them with a
wry smile. “Take a look at that? This is what I come to see. For a few minutes
every Monday night those two fulfil their dreams and become famous rock
singers, beautiful, young, sexy, rich and loved, albeit in a back of beyond
place not far from the Canadian border when there’s hardly a soul in the place.
You can’t beat it, though, can you! All it takes is a little pop song and your
view of your life is changed.”

 
Kate didn’t say anything. O’Brien might have
retired but he still couldn’t resist the romance of the live act, no matter how
amateur. Nor, she suspected, could he quite resist a contact with someone who
knew him in the old days in Galway. She’d come
across this before, people who’d retired to get away from their old lives, but
who always remained curious about those they’d left behind.

She watched the singers. One was
shapelessly stout and the other small and thin: both their faces were weather
beaten and lined from too much sea air. In jeans and sweatshirts, they were
hardly dressed for a performance. But, then, they didn’t need to be. Their
performance was for them alone, in their heads.
“Oh, I wanna dance with somebody, I wanna feel the heat with somebody…”
they sang.

 
“So you want to talk about Jesse,” O’Brien
said as their last song finished, and the karaoke was switched off for the
night. “Why?”

“Because I think things are
happening that I don’t understand. Bad things. And no-one will believe me.”

“And you think I will?”

“I don’t know. You might.”

He ruminated a long time after
that. Then, finishing his drink, he stood up. “Come on, I’ll drive you home.
You might have too much imagination to find your way back by yourself.”

At the Oyster Bay Motor Inn, he
pulled his pick-up into the drive. He’d been thoughtful on the short journey.
“Bad things, you said. What kind of bad things!”

“Bad things where people die.”

In the light of the neon oyster
shape which stood on a pole outside the inn she saw his forehead crease.
“People
die?
”

“Suicide. And…”

“Yes?”

She didn’t answer.

“Did you tell Phil Bailey this?”

She nodded.

“And?”

“I suspect he thinks I’m insane.”

“So do I.”

“I’m not.”

Another silence followed. Then: "You
may not know this, but part of my agreement with Jesse, part of everyone's agreement
with Jesse, is that you don't talk or write your memoirs when you stop working
for him or with him.”

"So I’ve been told. Does
that mean he buys everyone's silence?"

"I think he might prefer the
word 'discretion'. Most former managers and employees of rock stars sign
similar deals. It stops them telling lies to the tabloid newspapers.”

"Does Jesse need that
silence?"

"That's just the way he is. So,
I'm sorry, you've had a wasted journey. It’s been nice meeting you." He
was ending the conversation, wanting her to get out of his truck.

She didn’t move. "It seems
to me,” she said quietly, “that if something bad
is
happening, and people stay silent, for reasons of discretion or
loyalty or money or whatever….that makes them accessories."

That was enough. He leant across
her and opened the passenger door. “Good night, Miss Merrimac. I hope you have
a pleasant journey back to London.”

There was no point in going on.
She climbed from the pick-up, then stopped as she was about to close the door. "Mr
O'Brien, I know your career. I've read about the convictions and the drink and
the drugs. I can understand it. That was part of the business you were in. But
I never read anywhere that you were a violent man. And I don’t think you were
ever involved in killing.”