by Ray Connolly
KILL FOR LOVE
by
Ray Connolly
Kill For Love
Copyright © 2011 Ray Connolly
Originally published as The Sandman as an eBook in 2010 in the United Kingdom.
The moral right of Ray Connolly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the permission in writing of the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-9565915-4-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
www.rayconnolly.co.uk
email: [email protected]
Plumray Books
Dedication
For Louise, Jack and Olivia
Prologue
August 16:
They pulled the car off the road, bouncing down a track and into the pine woods, before reversing behind a thicket of brambles and turning off the engine. Neither spoke. After a few moments a vague, sparkling cloud caught the boy’s attention as it rose and fell in a shard of sunlight between the trees. It was, he knew, only a swarm of flying ants celebrating the beginning of life, but, as he watched, it occurred to him that it was like seeing a wraith.
The girl saw it, too. But then, stretching her brown legs, she smiled. She had a pretty smile, at sixteen all promise, and, taking it as a signal, the boy leant across and kissed her cheek. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, amused. Then, very practically, she began to check the Walmart payslip against the items in the bag which lay wedged between her ankles. There was half a roast chicken, some ready-mixed avocado salad, a large bag of popcorn, a basket of strawberries and then, a treat, vanilla slices from the bakery counter.
Getting out of the car, the boy opened the trunk and withdrew a blanket. A basket containing glasses and a bottle of Californian Merlot followed, together with some cans of beer. Joining him, the girl picked up a red and white checked tablecloth and matching napkins, then pulled out a blue canvas backpack. Her shoulder sagged slightly under its weight, but when the boy offered to carry it she laughed and pushed him away. Then, threading her arms through the straps, she set off through the woods, leading the way up a sharp incline and out on to the cream shoulder of an open field.
It was, they agreed, a perfect day, the barley stubble springy underfoot, the sun warm on their faces, and, as they strolled side by side, they made bets on how high the thermometer might climb. From another hill came the faint sound of metallic threshing from the harvester that must have passed that way a day earlier.
Quickly they half circled the brow of the hill. The boy was tall and serious, his hair dark and wavy, while his glasses were round and bookish; the girl, less conservative, was neat and athletic in her long, beige shorts and collarless white shirt, her hair the colour of pale copper. At one point they stopped and looked down through a gap in the wooded slopes to the pleasant white houses of their neat New Hampshire town, and the girl pointed out the maple tree which stood outside her home. Then they walked on. It was, the boy thought, like a moment from a television commercial in which they were featuring.
At the uppermost edge of the field, behind a fence, was a copse of trees that capped the summit of the hill. There, twenty or so paces into the wood, a shallow cleft in the rocks had made a natural basin a few yards across. It was their place. Reaching it, the boy looked around carefully. He’d been half afraid another couple might have discovered it, too, and defiled it. But the dry grass was upright and undisturbed.
Letting the backpack slip from her shoulders, the girl began laying out the blanket and then the tablecloth on the ridge of land at the centre of the basin. The boy uncorked and poured the wine.
They were thoughtful as they ate. At one point a blue jay flapped noisily from a tree just above them, and they glanced up, startled, before laughing at themselves. Otherwise there was nothing to distract from the enjoyment of each other, and when they spoke it was of routine matters, classes they shared and the idiosyncrasies of friends and teachers.
It was deep into the afternoon before they made love. That had been the plan; that the wait would increase the anticipation. They’d finished the wine and were a little drunk, and the boy was eating from the bag of popcorn when the girl began to unbutton his shirt. His skin was smooth and quite white. He didn’t believe in sunbathing, he said, and she teased him about it. No, seriously, he insisted, he didn’t want to get skin cancer. She giggled.
Playfully they undressed one another. Usually sex was uncomfortable or rushed, in the dark in the car, in friends’ bedrooms at parties, or in their own rooms when their parents were out. But on this day they had all the time in the world. They wanted it to be perfect.
It wasn’t. The anticipation was too much. The girl understood, and, as the boy melted inside her, she took his head in her hands and stroked his hair. Sometimes perfection had to be practised, she reassured. The first time was only ever a rehearsal, anyway.
The boy wanted to sleep now, to extend this moment of happiness, and pressing his face into her skin he was aware of the different scents, traces of Johnson’s Baby Powder and fresh ironing.
Around them the tall grass stood like a barrier to the world, and turning on his back on the blanket he stared at the branch of a pine, noticing for the first time the length of the needles. Then, with a slight sideways movement of his head, he found a young oak, pushing upwards through the trees towards the light. There was so much to see. He closed his eyes. It was just after four. The sun was at its warmest, and he wondered what his parents and brother were doing over in Wellfleet, and then pictured them sunbathing and playing on the beach. This summer, for the first time, he’d stayed at home.
Perhaps he did sleep. When he opened his eyes the girl’s iPod was playing familiar music through the speakers she’d brought, and she was sitting up, adjusting the levels, murmuring the lyrics to a song he’d heard so many times before. He smiled, admiring the gymnastic straightness of her body and the fake ruby that was studded into her earlobe. Appearances were deceptive: she didn’t look like the brightest girl in class.
Becoming aware of his gaze, she picked up a speaker, and, placing it in the grass behind their heads, brought the volume higher. Then she turned back to him. And when they made love again, this time it was perfect.
He was still lying inside her dozing, when he felt the touch at the back of his neck. A moment earlier he’d been aware of a movement as the girl had reached for something in her backpack, but, sleepy from the wine and sex, he’d been too contented to move.
At first he didn’t recognise the feel of metal on his skin, but when he tried to turn his head, the muzzle found the soft spot at the junction between the base of his skull and his neck. Then he realised. She hadn’t been kidding.
Below him her eyes, the pupils wide as though sucking in every last atom of light, never left his. Smiling, she pushed herself upwards, closer to him and he felt her breasts flattening against his skin. Her stomach was trembling beneath him, her thighs and arms clamped around him. He was trapped.
The music was now loud, as loud as it would go, and he imagined it carrying across the fields and woods and on down to the town. And he thought of his father and mother and wondered what they would think.
Both her hands were around his neck, gripping him, holding the gun. “No,” he pleaded, and tried to struggle free.
“I love you so much,” she smiled. Then, reaching up, she kissed him.
No-one heard the gunshot. In the fields b
elow the rattle of the harvester drowned everything. Later a wind got up and blew remnants from the unfinished bag of popcorn around the sheltered basin of grass, into the trees and out on to the shaved surface of the hill.
Chapter One
September 12:
Kate Merrimac had never seen so many people in one place. "It’s amazing," she murmured down the line to the studio. "Almost Biblical.”
Below her the multitude waited patiently. All day they'd been arriving, rolling along the motorways, overwhelming the airports and ferries and flooding on to special trains and buses. They were an invading army, but they were well behaved and undemanding, and when they'd bottlenecked into slow moving rivers and flowed westwards through Central London, students, adolescents, dutiful children and earnest young parents together, their evident delight in the moment had been disarming.
From the island of a television news gantry fifty feet above the swell, she watched latecomers as they sought unoccupied territories on the far extremities of the park. Too distant to see the stage or even the giant screens standing in the midst of the crowds, they were grateful just to be present.
"The night Jesse Gadden took London..." she said, testing her voice level above the noise of the television news and police helicopters floating above the crowd. Then, glancing towards the camera pointed at her, she grimaced at Tom Adams, her cameraman. “Maybe your dad should have bought you a guitar instead of a camera for your twelfth birthday.”
Adams grinned from behind his viewfinder. “It could have been worse. What I really wanted was a Ninja kung fu outfit.”
Kate smiled as a voice cut through the studio talkback into her earpiece.
"Coming to you just as soon as Hilly finishes with the casualty bay." It was Sarojine Chandra, the technical co-ordinator, who was sitting across London in the WSN-TV gallery in Blackfriars.
Nodding, Kate pulled her shirt collar up at the neck, adjusted her linen jacket, and, cupping her thumbs under her dark hair, lifted it back over her ears, as she routinely did before doing a piece to camera.
"Kate!" There was a new voice in her earpiece. "The BBC are talking about half a million now. Does that seem possible? Can we say that?" It was Seb Browne, the rather too bouncy young producer who was tonight's acting editor.
She looked across the gantry where a television news monitor was showing the sea of faces in the park below. The concert was soon to be streamed live in sound from Jesse Gadden’s website, but radio and TV broadcasters were allowed to cover it only as a news story. There would be no pictures of the man performing. "Half a million! Could be. From up here anything seems possible,” she said, then added: “This guy had better be good.”
"He will be!" Browne came back.
Having hoped to be producing the link from the concert himself, he was, Kate knew, disappointed that he hadn't been able to find anyone prepared to swop shifts. “If you say,” she shrugged, and went back to collecting her thoughts for her report.
In truth the audience was bigger than anyone had anticipated. A hundred thousand had turned out in Berlin for the start of the Gadden tour, while New York’s Central Park had estimated nearly quarter of a million. Here in London for the last night, the rippling sea of bare arms and exultant faces stretched from Marble Arch across the dry, dusty grass to the Serpentine.
Twenty yards away, alongside the satellite vans, a young man with black hair falling out of a blue baseball cap, one of dozens of Jesse Gadden lookalikes present, had recognised her and was waving, excited to see someone famous. She pretended not to notice him. She had a job to do.
She hadn't wanted this story. She didn’t normally complain about assignments, but knowing virtually nothing about current styles in music she was, she’d pointed out, the wrong person for the job. "I don't know whether Jesse Gadden is hip-hop, techno, rave, the new Black Eyed Peas, retro-rock, rap, neo-folk, rock romantic or whatever else they have these days. Hilly Weston should do it all," she’d told Neil Fraser, her boss, the editor-in-chief at WSN-TV.
But having demonstrated in that one sentence that she knew quite enough for WSN viewers, her protests had been brushed aside. Hilly Weston was froth from the entertainment desk, Fraser had let it be known. The sheer numbers turning out to see Jesse Gadden made this a news event. Kate Merrimac was a name reporter and it would do her good to broaden her range by doing lighter subjects.
She hadn't liked the sound of that. She didn't do lighter subjects.
"Five seconds, Kate." The steady voice of Sarojine Chandra brought her to attention.
She cleared her throat. Then, as the red signal light lit up on the camera facing her, she smiled. "Well, it’s almost time and here we are, high above London’s Hyde Park on this warm, late summer evening, as an estimated half a million fans await the arrival on stage of the enigmatic Jesse Gadden.”
She paused and looked bemused: “And, like everything Gadden does, it’s all cloaked in mystery! Two years ago, after a career spectacular even by rock music's standards, the star went into retreat. No one saw him and no one heard from him. For months there were rumours…that he was ill or that he’d been paralysed or disfigured in an accident.
"Then in July, just as suddenly as he'd disappeared, Gadden came out of hiding with The Sandman…an album of new songs, followed by a summer tour of the world’s capitals. But there was a shock for the fans. This, he announced, would be his last album and last tour. After a special final concert some time this autumn, he would be retiring.
“And there was more. Always generous to charities around the world, suddenly he was the rock star turned philanthropist… promising to donate two hundred million pounds to the building of a new children’s hospital in Ireland.
“That’s a lot of money! Even for a rock star! But then he’s a very popular rock star!” Half turning, she looked towards the stage, a baroque, polystyrene cathedral that rose from the sea of fans like a pop-up outline in a book of fairy tales. “So…what is it about Jesse Gadden that’s drawn so many fans here tonight? Is it his voice…high pitched and warbling, you might say? Or his songs? Impenetrable to some, mesmerising to others. Or maybe it’s his looks…those unblinking blue eyes, at this moment unblinking from the covers of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different magazines around the world." She smiled playfully into the camera.
That Jesse Gadden was charismatic and mysterious there was no denying. All the girls in the WSN-TV newsroom were agreed on that. "The word is magnetic," Chloe Estevez, the agencies monitor on the foreign desk, had offered as they'd watched his arrival into London by helicopter on their screens that morning.
"You mean magnetic as in a device for picking up pins and needles?" Kate had teased.
Chloe had been undeterred: "I know it's a tabloid cliché, Kate, but in this case it’s sort of true.”
"Chloe's right!" Beverly Dennis, a very tall, fair, smiling young intern, recently over from college in Chicago, had joined the discussion. "When Jesse's on TV you daren't take your eyes away for a second in case you miss something."
Kate had been sceptical. "He’s that wonderful? More wonderful than the last big sensation, or Lady Gaga, or next year’s crop? "
"Wonderful isn't the word," Beverly had countered, ignoring the tease.
"So, what is the word? Tell me. I'll use it."
The intern had shaken her head. "I can’t describe it. But, at that moment, when you see him and hear him, he’s…everything.”
"I told them I was too old for this," Kate had sighed. She was thirty six and hadn't been to a rock concert in fifteen years.
"No-one's too old for Jesse Gadden," Beverly had come back slightly defiantly, and then gone to buy Kate a selection of Gadden albums: the reporter covering the concert ought at least to know something about the man’s music.
But now, high above Hyde Park, as a swell of anticipation began to roll around her, Kate was making it clear to World Satellite News viewers that she remained unconvinced. "And so, as the sun goes down over Central Lond
on, whatever the Jesse Gadden magic is… we’ll soon find out. This is Kate Merrimac for WSN-TV…” And as Tom Adams panned his camera around the audience, she looked back at the stage.
"Er, yes, thanks, Kate!" The voice of Seb Browne came doubtfully into her earpiece. "We’ll come back to you at the end of the show. You never know, if you try, you might even enjoy it. And let's keep trying for that interview. Okay!"
"Interview! Come on, Seb, I told you…” she began, but the studio feed had gone dead. Irritated, she unplugged her ear-piece. There wasn't going to be an interview. Jesse Gadden didn't do interviews. Her request for one had been practically ridiculed by his publicist. Even he couldn't get to talk to him, the guy had laughed.
She understood that. This was rock and roll. Mystery was mystique. Mystique was money: money that Jesse Gadden was giving away in prodigious quantities, thus making himself the darling of the world’s media. Everyone, it seemed, loved the idea of Jesse Gadden.
It was almost dark. Softly at first, but with increasing volume, a deep, rumbling electronic note began to burrow through the September evening. Then electric guitars started to moan and howl, before a volley of drums detonated from tower blocks of speakers. Above the audience laser beams were duelling in the darkening sky. Kate put on her glasses. The pantomime was about to begin.
Later she would be tempted to mock the electronic firestorm that preceded the performance by saying that it reminded her of a barrage of mortar launched to soften up the enemy before an infantry attack. But she didn't, because when, in the midst of the cyclone, Jesse Gadden finally appeared, a slight, young man, with long black hair, dressed in black and walking through the clouds of frozen nitrogen along a pier that cut into the audience, even she found herself leaning forward with the tumultuous welcome.