by Ray Connolly
"So I believe."
"I was given to understand that Frances may have taken him for special art lessons."
"We've heard the same."
"So, did she ever mention him to you?"
"Not to my recollection."
In the armchair his wife shook her head. "We never knew that Frances taught any boys. She didn't think to tell us. She was a marvellous artist herself. I sometimes wonder if we'd encouraged her more..." She halted a line of thought that must have bled from her a thousand times. "But she wanted to be a nun. She seemed happy. We thought she was happy."
"I'm not sure I understand. How do you know she taught Jesse Gadden if she didn't tell you?" Kate asked.
There was no answer. The old couple looked uncomfortable. They weren't used to hiding things.
She tried another tack. "The statue of the angel in the cemetery...it's beautiful. It must have been very expensive. Did someone help pay for it?"
"And if someone did?" Tom Cleary snapped.
"Mr Cleary, was it Jesse Gadden who helped?"
"If you know all the answers why do you come here asking questions?" He was shouting now.
"Because I don't know all the answers. Look, I understand that this is painful for you, but it might be more important than you know. Did Jesse Gadden arrange to have Grace reburied over in Castlemount...in sanctified ground?"
There was a silence. Outside the rain tattooed against the windows.
"We've nothing more to say to you," Cleary said, and drank his tea.
Kate turned to his wife. "I think you might have entertained some colleagues of mine a couple of weeks ago, Mrs Cleary. Perhaps until quite late. A young American girl and a television producer."
Beads of tears were glinting in the old woman's eyes.
"You know, don't you, they were killed in a road accident later that night?"
Still a silence.
"What I don't understand is why you didn't tell the police they'd been here."
"It wouldn't have brought them back," Cleary interrupted.
"It would have explained where they'd been all evening. Everyone wondered. Their colleagues, their friends..." She hesitated. "Their parents were devastated. It might have made it easier..."
That was enough. Cleary was on his feet. "Devastated, you say! I'll tell you about devastated. We know all there is to know about devastated."
"Tom..." his wife tried to intervene.
But he'd have none of it. His hand shaking he gestured to the photograph on the mantelpiece. "They said our daughter took her own life, that Frances killed herself. And because of that, they wouldn't give her a requiem mass. They buried her outside the church grounds. Do you know what that means? It means her soul was condemned to burn in hell or be lost in limbo for eternity and there was nothing we could do to help her. Our only child.
"Then suddenly we get a miracle. Someone helps us. She's brought back home, here to Castlemount. Her sins are absolved. And a statue is put up so everyone will know." Tears were now running down the crevices in his cheeks. "Frances was all we ever had. We gave her to God when she became a nun. Now she's back with God and with us. That's all we ever wanted." Struggling to control himself he turned away.
Kate looked at the old couple sadly. It didn't matter that she couldn't believe in the arbitrariness of salvation and damnation, or that any loving God would need to be bribed into reprieving a lost soul. These people, brought up in another age and a different culture, did believe. Ireland might be a modern, computerised state, but, as with any country in the world, indulgences straight from the Middle Ages could still be bought for those devout enough and desperate enough.
The Clearys hadn't told the police where Beverly and Seb Browne had spent their last evening, because someone hadn't wanted them to. Just a word would have bought their silence.
There was nothing more to be said. Kate sipped her tea and watched the wheezing of the fire. Tom Cleary stood at the back of the room staring out of the window into the mist.
At length, as the rain abated, Kate scribbled her phone numbers and home address on a WSN card. "I'm sorry to have taken up so much of your time," she said, putting the card on the table. Then there was a final thought. "You said that Frances was an artist. You wouldn't have any of her work I could see, would you?"
Had it been up to Tom Cleary she would have been out of the house there and then, and he protested loudly. But Nancy Cleary was proud of her daughter’s talent. Getting to her feet she drew open the heavy bottom drawer of an old dresser, and, rummaging down, produced a large, battered cardboard box. "The convent sent us everything after... They were very kind."
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 alread
y 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
1020 Nantucket Road
heavy iron gates barred her way. Beyond was a sweeping drive leading to a white, New England mansion. Stone harps were mounted on each side of the portico which overhung the front door, beside which O’Brien’s pick-up was now parked next to a black Rolls-Royce. 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.