by Ray Connolly
For his part Gadden made absolutely no response, not even as hundreds of thousands of glowing mobile phones, held high above the heads of the crowd, recorded and transmitted the moment. Even his small group of anonymous musicians, playing in the shadows, were ignored.
How could anyone be so self-consumed, she thought. But then the minstrel’s hand started to stroke the strings of his guitar, and the high lilt of the voice she’d so recently mocked began to quell the ovation, and she realised she was smiling. It was corny and manipulative, yes; but it was beguiling, too.
What was he thinking, she wanted to know, as she gazed at his boy’s face, sixty feet high in close-up on the giant screen behind him? What was going on behind the unblinking blue of those eyes?
"Hey, what is this! A convert!" producer Seb Browne was burbling down the line the moment Kate finished her post-concert report. "Suddenly, you're a fan. He seduced you, right!"
"Not even close," Kate came back. "I was just trying to make you happy. You said you wanted upbeat!"
"You always make me happy. Upbeat we wanted! A convert we got! Very nice! See you tomorrow." And, still chortling, Browne cut her off again.
Kate sighed with exasperation. She hadn’t sounded that enthusiastic, though the concert had been more engrossing than she’d anticipated. Actually two hours of plaintive guitars and wordy songs, followed by a carnival of encores, chants, communal singing and finally tears as the spotlight had gone out and Gadden had disappeared, had left her more puzzled than entertained.
Unfastening her microphone and battery pack, Kate passed them to Tom, the cameraman, thanking him and wishing him good-night. Then, as he, and the other news crews began packing their equipment, she made her way carefully down the steps of the gantry.
Somewhere below in the Press enclosure a car with a driver was waiting to take her through the crowds, but even before she reached the ground she realised there would be no hope of finding it. The front row celebrities and keen-to-be-thought-groovy politicians, no doubt with Hilly Weston among them, had already made their getaways. She’d waited too long, savouring the atmosphere. Now the police lanes were completely blocked by the crowds.
It didn’t matter, she thought, as she set off on foot. She would aim towards Kensington High Street. Maybe she would pick up a taxi there.
She hadn't got far, however, before she realised the impossibility of this plan. The particular river of fans into which she’d waded was heading remorselessly in the opposite direction. She had no alternative but to go with the flow.
It was a virtually silent journey, a candle-lit procession as everyone around her seemed to be mentally rewinding and replaying the concert, the only sounds being the shuffling of feet as for thirty minutes she was carried along by the flood.
And when eventually she was washed up close to the new Buckingham Hotel in Mayfair, where Jesse Gadden was holding his goodbye party, she wasn't entirely surprised.
Chapter Two
"So, what do you think, laughing lady? Did that look like a farewell concert to you?"
Kate looked around. Beaming down at her in the lobby of the hotel was a tall, shaven headed young man in old jeans and a Kasabian T-shirt. A large leather bag was slung over his shoulder. “Greg!” she smiled. “I should have known you’d be here.”
Greg Passfield kissed her. They’d been friends since they’d met on a training course early in their careers, since when she'd done brilliantly, and he, now a freelance radio broadcaster who specialised in rock music, hadn't. “You know me,” he laughed. “Never one to miss what might be an iconic moment.”
“That was an iconic moment!” she said, showing the Press invitation she’d never intended to use to the requisite pretty girl on the guest desk.
“What else? The last big free concert of the last tour…if he means what he says about retiring.”
“You don’t believe him?”
Greg pulled a face, waiting as his bag was searched by a security guard. "Why would anyone retire when he has the world in his hands?"
"An early sign of Sinatra syndrome?"
"You mean he's going to pull a stunt like this every year until he's eighty? Jesus!” And together they joined a wedge of glossy, noisy party-goers entering a lift, to be immediately expressed thirty two floors to the hotel's roof gardens.
"All right then, what about the ultimate adolescent sulk?" she resumed as, picking up glasses of champagne, they made their way through a glass domed Arcadia. "Perhaps he’s just saying, 'You don't love me enough. I'll leave you. You'll be sorry then'."
"They could hardly love him more! You must have noticed.”
"Yes…” Kate hesitated for a moment. “But they were very quiet. I’ve only just realised. Subdued. After the concert, too. Half a million people moving through London and hardly anyone saying anything."
"Isn't that how it is with kids today! Deaf, dumb and blind! It's always like that at Jesse Gadden concerts. Didn't you know?"
"No, I didn’t know." She'd told them she was out of touch.
Greg dropped his voice. "Anyway, enough of Jesse Gadden, what about you? Fully recovered? I must say you’re looking terrific." Greg had been among the first to visit her in hospital.
"Never better." And her eyes went to a CCTV camera that was panning the party.
"Really?"
“More or less. But…I want to get back to work. Proper work. And..."
"Yes?"
"Well...my sort of stories don't happen in Hyde Park. You know that. Every other day I put in a request to go to Afghanistan or Somalia or... But they always send someone else."
"They're probably just looking after you. You should be grateful. Have you told them how you feel?"
"I've tried. But you know how it is with bosses…only ever hearing things they want to hear, then interfering when you don't want them to." She fell silent. She was looking down at the lights of late night traffic moving across London, but other pictures were leaking into her mind: a Cartier tank watch on a chubby black wrist; a new, white trainer with blue trim encrusted with blood.
"Are you all right?" Greg was watching her.
"Yes. Yes, of course." She pulled herself together, embarrassed. "Sorry." She changed the subject. “How’s Harry, anyway?”
Greg winced. “Off to Stockholm next week. To work.”
“Ah…”
“Right! It’s a terrific opportunity for him. Great new job. But…God knows what I’ll do stuck here without him.”
She sympathised. Greg was in love. “Sweden isn’t so far. Only a weekend flight away.”
“I know. I’ll probably book a season ticket.” He looked around. The party was now becoming increasingly noisy. "No sign of the man himself, I notice. Look, I'm supposed to be working, picking up some post-concert reaction for tomorrow morning’s Radio Five. What about a drink some time?"
"Yes! Please. Any time."
"Great! I'll call you. And if you see anything that looks like my kind of work, give me a shout!"
"Promise."
Then with an affectionate squeeze of her arm, he moved away into the expensive murk of the crowd, pulling a digital recorder from his bag as he went.
Alone again, Kate was aware of eyes upon her, as guests recognised her, those with famous faces bestowing the friendly glances the well known reserve for each other. She didn't encourage. Having a familiar face might be like belonging to an exclusive caste, but it had never made her feel she had to be friendly to perfect strangers. Besides, she knew why her face was so memorable at this particular moment, and she wished it could have been otherwise.
She would have left then, but the prospect of another battle with the mob outside deterred her. So, collecting a late dinner, she allowed her colleague from the WSN entertainments desk, the effervescent Hilly Weston, to attach her to some television people, and settled into a garden seat to half-listen to their gossip.
It was after midnight when she saw Petra Kerinova. Loud music was now playing, a recordi
ng from an earlier Jesse Gadden tour, someone said, when a tall woman in her mid-thirties, with cream, almost ivory hair pulled back off a white face, dressed in black silk trousers and shirt, and accompanied by an escort of agreeable looking young men and women, made her way across the roof garden.
For a distinct moment, Kate realised, the woman's eyes fell fully on her before she strode purposefully past.
"The daunting Petra Kerinova?" A greying, rather glamorous middle-aged reporter from CNN said, looking up from his drink. “The gatekeeper.”
Kate nodded. She'd seen photographs of Kerinova on a Jesse Gadden website that morning. She was a startling looking woman, with a triangular, feline face.
"She’s Estonian,” a BBC research assistant mused. “Her master's voice in all things. She keeps everyone away from him. Including me!”
"What about the others?" A woman producer from Sky-News was surveying Kerinova's retinue of young people.
"They're the Glee Club." This was celebrity expert Hilly Weston. She was, Kate noticed, sitting very close to the man from CNN.
"The Glee Club?"
"The tabloids call them that because they never stop smiling," Hilly continued. "They work for Gadden, running the office and his homes. They're all very helpful, so long as you don’t actually want to talk to him. But they drive you mad because they're so nice."
"You'd smile if you were paid a fortune to spend someone else’s money," CNN joked, seeking and being rewarded with some very special Hilly Weston eye contact.
"She already is," someone else threw in to general amusement.
Kate glanced at her watch, bored with the banter. It was time to go home. Leaving Hilly to more drinks and the apparently welcome pursuits of the man from CNN, she bade goodnight and began to make her way from the party. By the bar a couple of disc jockeys, accompanied by their black clad, leggy blonde girls, were in earnest conversation.
"River of Ghosts was my favourite," one was saying.
"Seminal! Especially Snakepit," came in the other.
"Crusader Of Sadness. That was when I realised. But The Sandman…Fundamental!"
“Yeah!”
Kate skirted the nonsense. The cloying superlatives which anointed rock stars and their works were too foolish for words. She had to get back to some real work before she went mad. She pressed the lift button to go down.
His blue eyes met hers as the doors slid open.
She stopped in surprise.
"Well, are you getting in or aren't you?" Jesse Gadden asked quietly.
"Oh, yes. Yes, of course," she said, feeling foolish, and stepped quickly into the otherwise empty lift. He waited. She waited. She was admired at WSN for her ability to extemporise in almost any situation, but for once words had dried up.
"Second floor, ladies underwear; mezzanine would be gents outfitting. And haberdashery, garden furniture and electrical appliances in the basement.” Gadden paused. “It's the lobby you want, I take it."
"Oh yes, I'm sorry." She stepped forward to press the button for the ground floor but he got there first. Their hands bumped. She pulled back embarrassed, and was then mortified by her own confusion. She was behaving like a demented fan.
The doors closed. The lift began its descent.
"You're leaving early. You don't like parties?" His soft Irish accent was more pronounced when he spoke than when he sang. He looked younger than thirty five. Dressed now in black slacks and jacket and a black silk shirt, his long, wavy hair was falling about his shoulders.
"I have to go to work tomorrow," she said. He didn't answer and she felt compelled to fill the silence. "It was a..." She hesitated. "I enjoyed the concert," she finished feebly.
"More than you thought you would, I hope."
She looked at him.
"I saw you on television. I heard what you said before I went on stage. You didn’t seem to be looking forward to it very much. A bit dismissive, I thought. I knew I'd have to be good tonight to change your mind."
"Well, I was just..." She stopped again, unsure of what to say. Surely he didn't want a justification. “I was just doing my job as an impartial observer. And there weren’t many out there tonight.”
He grinned. “’Course you were.”
At that moment the lift came to a halt and the doors opened on to the hotel lobby.
There was a moment's silence. “Well, it’s been nice meeting...” she began.
He’d been playing with her, but now, looking over her shoulder, his expression changed as in the lobby a herd of fans who had somehow sneaked past security, had spotted their object of devotion. "Er, look…”
"Oh, sorry." Quickly Kate stepped out of the lift, feeling awkward. Looking back to say goodbye, she was just in time to see the lift doors close behind her. And he was gone.
A curtain of disappointment fell across the faces of the onrushing fans. Pushing through them she made her way towards the street.
Outside the crowds were still waiting, but at least she could now choose which way she went. Setting off, it was only when she'd covered some distance from the hotel that the oddness of the encounter struck her. Had Jesse Gadden been going to the party when she'd got into the elevator, and then, for some reason, changed his mind? And could it really matter to him what she thought about his concert.
"Just wait till I tell Beverly," she told herself. "Will she be jealous!" Then she smiled. For a man famous for his enigmatic introspection, Gadden was actually a bit of a flirt when you got to meet him. But, then, wasn’t that the way with stars: nothing like their image.
Chapter Three
September 13:
She didn't dream. She didn't have to. Her nightmares came with the dawn when she was awake and could get a better reception, she heard herself thinking, as she did on so many mornings.
It was just after seven. She didn't need to look at the clock to know. That was when it had started. She lay and waited for the images and sounds, the blood on the sand, and her own uncontrollable shaking. The running order never changed. First came the hut, a concrete prefabricated building at the edge of the forest by the shore; then the single electric bulb with its squadron of fat, slowly circling moths; and finally the boy guards in their voodoo masks, wigs and tattered dresses, torn from the women they'd raped and murdered, worn now as trophies.
Jumpy on ecstasy and crack, they were unpredictable in their emotions, one moment asking politely, "Do you know the Queen of England. She is everybody’s boss, yes?", the next polishing their stolen bayonets on the trembling skin of their captives, then giggling hideously as an old Abba record played incongruously in one of the other huts. "You are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen.” All through the night the music never stopped, old songs, which she knew, and newer ones, most of which she didn't, someone's compilation from better times.
From outside the hut came the tumbling roar of the ocean as the tide receded, leaving the open beach firm and clean and ready; then the sound of feet padding past in the darkness as the local people were assembled to witness and be complicit in the guilt of the occasion.
Inside the hut the stillness was broken only by the terrified, quiet sobbing of a young girl, a wife though hardly a woman. She was wearing a Cartier Tank watch and a brand new pair of expensive trainers with special blue trim. Beside her lay her husband, until a few hours earlier a handsome man in his late thirties prime, his face now broken by boots and rifle butts, his white shirt ripped by machetes. Soon they would take him and castrate him. He knew that. Everyone did. And that would be just the beginning.
And Kate, now in her bed in London, bathed in sweat, wondered, as she never ceased to wonder, if there was anything she could have done that would have stopped it; if it had happened because of her: because she and a television camera had been there.
It was nearly ten when she got up, disturbed by a call from the travel desk at WSN-TV reminding her that she hadn't put in any expenses for three months, and that this was the last day to claim. Promi
sing to do something about it, she hung up and switched over to voicemail. Then, showering, she pulled on a track suit, checked her email in her study, and, finding nothing of interest, went downstairs.
The morning newspapers lay with the post on the mat of the Fulham cottage in which she lived, and she leafed through the foreign news pages as she drank her coffee at her large kitchen table. In the background the television, tuned to WSN, provided a murmur of rolling incident.
She'd lived alone all her adult life and had been in this house for three years. With a large living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, study and a white walled patio, it was functional and convenient. There had been men along the way, some of whom had wanted to move in with her or have her move in with them, but sharing a life was not how she saw herself. Love, cosiness and responsibility to another would have imposed limits. She was a foreign correspondent, frequently a war correspondent. It was a transient kind of life: sometimes dangerous. But it was the career she wanted, even if the price she had to pay brought the occasional ache of loneliness.
After the late night at the Jesse Gadden concert she wasn't due at the studio until the afternoon, so she took her time over breakfast, before making a token attempt at tidying her kitchen. Personally clean to the point of obsession, the result, she was sure, of never being certain that there would be a plug or even water to put in the wash basin whenever she got off a plane, at home she was untidy. And, quickly losing interest in her housework, she stepped out on to her patio to take a look at her potted plants. The WSN weather girl was forecasting rain, so there was no need to water them, and after idly tugging out some random chickweed that was growing around the miniature tea roses, she went back inside to dress.