by Ray Connolly
"You don't think jealousy could have been a motive, do you?" Kate asked.
"No way," Ali protested. "Donna and Rick couldn't take their eyes off one another."
"They totally lived for each other." This was Jenny.
"Which is why none of this stuff about the doctors keeping her alive makes any kind of sense," Ali came in forcefully.
"I'm sorry?" Kate was surprised.
"Well, don't you see? Donna loved Rick more than anything. All this trying to bring her out of the coma is crazy. She wouldn't want to live now that he's dead. I just hope she dies soon. She was my best friend, our best friend, but I hope the doctors turn her off. I really do."
Jenny nodded her agreement. "We've already planned the funeral."
"Won't that be for Donna's parents to do?" Kate asked. There was something morbidly practical about these girls.
"Oh, yes, sure. But we'll help with the music. Play the right record, the one she liked best, so that she enjoys it, too."
"Can you tell me which one it will be?"
"Oh well, you know, A Sunny Day In Eden, obviously."
Kate tried to remember the tune. She couldn't.
“It’s the one with the ‘live for love’ chorus at the end,” Jenny said helpfully.
“Oh, right, thank you.” She remembered now. "Donna’s father says she was very bright,” she said.
"The cleverest," Ali replied.
"Clever in what way?"
"Every way. Clever at working out problems in math," said Jenny. "Clever at playing chess, at doing jigsaw puzzles, at physics, at biology…”
"So she was more on the science side?"
Now it was Ali: "No. She was good at literature, too. At interpretations."
"Interpretations?"
"You know. Like Shakespeare or Ezra Pound or Robert Browning. She loved interpreting things. Working out what stuff really meant."
The last flight back to London was with Virgin Atlantic at 8.20. After racing all the way to Boston, she just made the check-in time. She was exhausted and it was a welcome surprise when the English girl on the ticket desk recognised her, albeit only when she saw her passport, and gave her an upgrade.
Kate smiled her thanks, bashful at the outrageous privilege of celebrity, but not about to refuse it. She’d only slept for a couple of hours, and that had been in her car at a filling station the previous night.
Perhaps the free champagne helped to relax her, because stretched out in the darkened dormitory of the top deck, swaddled in Virgin blankets, eye mask and airline socks, she soon found herself in a state of free reflection, sifting thoughts and memories in the night.
There was Beverly, owning up over lunch: "The thing about Jesse is that he sort of fills the gap...when my parents divorced, it was as though he was talking to me...he still talks to me." And then there was Greg in St James’s Park, embarrassed as he told her about rock stars and his concept of aural magic. "I think the shamans and holy men in primitive societies may have had a touch of this...that's what some rock stars may be tapping into."
“Shamans and holy men…” The words repeated in her half-sleeping mind. Shamans and holy men were spiritual leaders, men who knitted groups of people together.
Her mind wandered on. She’d been a modern historian, but her father had been a medievalist. He’d studied holy men, messianic religious movements and sects in the Middle Ages more than shamans, but he would have had a view. He always did. “Always remember, Kate,” he’d said so often when she’d been growing up, “where human behaviour is concerned there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s only the circumstances that change.”
She slept for a while, but, when disturbed by another passenger’s reading light being switched on, she sat up, and, drawing up the blind, peered down into the blackness. Somewhere below was the north Atlantic, and momentarily she thought about Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet in the movie Titanic. And, then, by association, she remembered the old black and white film, A Night To Remember, showing the orchestra of the Titanic playing Abide With Me on the sinking ship.
Abide With Me. It was a good tune, a Cup Final hymn, a prayer for solace. But was it something else?
A picture of Donna Hallsden watching YouTube while doing her homework came to mind next. One of her friends had said that Donna had been good at jigsaws.
Jigsaws!
She was doing a jigsaw, too, it seemed. But so far she’d just been turning over the pieces, trying to see if any of the colours matched. The next step would be to try to fit some of the pieces together.
For a while she dozed again, her canvas bag with the filmed interviews at her feet, the heavy drone of the 747's engines anaesthetizing her senses.
Next time she woke with a start. The tune to Abide With Me was still running through her mind, but now she was remembering hearing it mentioned recently. Ned Swann, on the foreign desk, had said that he would prefer it at his funeral.
Prefer it to what?
It came in a rush. “Live for love,” she found herself saying. They were the words of the song that Ali and Jenny had chosen for Donna Hallsden's funeral, the song that had been played during the funeral of a father and his children in England. She’d watched it one morning at WSN when Ned had become irritated, grumbling that lapping music over news stories turned them into entertainment.
“Live for love…” the phrase was now running circuits in her mind.
From opposite sides of the Atlantic, had one piece of the jigsaw just matched another?
Chapter Thirty Four
October 28:
The image greeted her as she passed through the arrivals hall at Heathrow. It was on a screen, thirty feet high, a slightly out-of-focus black and white photograph with two sharply-in-focus blue eyes peering out.
Coming to a computer near you
Wednesday, November 3,10pm
www.jessegadden.com
She almost stopped walking in surprise. Gadden’s farewell concert was less than a week away. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might be so soon.
She hurried on through Customs, taking the Heathrow Express to Paddington and then a taxi back to Fulham. It was nearly a quarter to nine when she got home with children running to the school in the next street: a perfectly ordinary London day. But she found herself peering around to see if anyone was watching before opening her front door.
There was a fresh fall of mail on the mat, but, ignoring it, she played back the latest messages on her landline voicemail, new ones from colleagues at WSN, one from Chris Zeff, the Cambridge hacker, and yet another from the Kentish Town police asking her to get in touch.
Deciding to deal with them later, she took a shower, dressed, then, sitting at her computer with a cup of coffee, logged on to the Times Online. Her mind was a tangle of threads. But, first, she needed names.
“UK. Murder of father and daughters,” she typed into the search engine.
The information came in the form of several news stories. The father who had died in the Birmingham family killings had been Jim McDonagh: his daughters were Melanie, Alice and Lucy. Their mother was still missing, sought by the police.
She made a note of the date: September 13.
Next she went to the online facility provided by the ITN Archive and called up the coverage they had on the McDonaghs’ joint funeral. “Live for love…” sang that high, reedy voice as she again watched the coffins being carried past rows of schoolchildren. Several seconds of a McDonagh home movie shot on a summer holiday in Italy had also been filed, the sequence ending on a close-up of the missing mother Elizabeth McDonagh.
She froze the frame. Did this woman look familiar?
Going to the index, like the historical researcher she'd once been, she then did a crosscheck by date, running her eye down the menu of other subjects logged on the day the bodies had been discovered.
ROYAL: Prince Harry opens hospice for homeless
CITY: Bank rate fears as inflation rises
PAKISTA
N: Seven die in mosque suicide bombing
DROUGHT: Ends with storms in West Country
JESSE GADDEN: Clean up after Hyde Park concert.
She stopped there. The Hyde Park concert had been the evening before, and she caught a mental picture of herself driving along the
Bayswater Road
after taking Jeroboam to school, and seeing the huge stage being dismantled. At some time during the previous night had a pharmacist called Elizabeth McDonagh been poisoning her entire family? Making a note of the footage she required, she turned to newsreel shots of Jesse Gadden at various moments of his career. When he’d become famous she’d been mainly abroad building her career and had been hardly aware of him. Now, looking at pieces of film shot over nearly a decade, she was surprised to see how much weight he’d lost. Did fans prefer their rock stars thinner?
Finishing her film research, she filled in an order for broadcast quality copies of the material chosen and emailed it to ITN Archive.
There was just one more thing to do. Slipping The Sandman album into her computer she selected the last track, A Sunny Day In Eden, and re-read the lyrics. What was it about this song that made people choose it for funerals as though it was a Jesse Gadden equivalent of My Way?
Five minutes later she was no further on. With an opening reference to the serpent and the Garden of Eden, and the long fade-out line, “Love the one you love for love”, it sounded to her little more than a paean to the innocence of young love.
Perhaps she hadn’t quite fitted two parts of the jigsaw together after all.
Her mother's face fell as she opened the front door. "Your hair, Kate!"
"Oh yes!" She'd virtually forgotten that she'd had it cut so short. "Don't you like it? I thought I'd have a change." And, smiling, she entered the house, hiding the instant hurt she felt at her mother's expression. She couldn't help it. She was thirty five and she still wanted to make her mother happy. Obviously she hadn't.
Her mother hurried after her. "Are you all right? We’ve all been so worried. Why didn’t you phone us? The young man…he was your friend? And you found him! The papers said he’d been…” She hesitated. “…mutilated. And you’ve been away again.”
They'd progressed down the hall. There was a mirror at the foot of the stairs. Kate glanced into it. She was shocked. The nights without sleep had taken their toll. Dark bags bruised the skin under her eyes. She turned quickly away, cross with herself for caring. "I’m okay. Honestly. But very busy. Dad’s books. I need to look at some of them.”
"I don't think you're well, Kate."
"I’m tired, that’s all. It’s just that…I can’t explain. I'll just go and get the books.” And she hurried up the stairs.
Her father's study had been a little room on the first landing. In a house bulging with books he'd had the largest collection, stuffed in rough order into the shelves which lined all four walls. The shelves were still there, the desk and the typing chair, and, yes, there were a few books neatly displayed. But there were also silver trophies and framed photographs of people she didn't know holding golf clubs.
Her mother had followed her up. "I told you. Don't you remember? We put most of Dad's books in the attic. Jim thought it was a waste of such a nice light room to fill it with books."
Kate did remember. "Yes," she said, trying in vain to recognise anything of the lure this room had once held for her, and wondering how her mother could have allowed her personality to be hijacked by that of her new husband.
"Kate, I think you should see a doctor."
"I'm fine," she said, and climbed sadly on up the stairs to the attic. Did her mother think she was having a breakdown, too?
She found the books she wanted. She could have got the same ones from several libraries in London, but it was her father’s she wanted today, and, with them, the reassurance he’d always given her. She sat down to read.
Her mother was sitting worrying, when, clutching an armful of books, she went down to the kitchen an hour later.
Kate tried to smile. “All right then, let's have that cup of tea before Jim gets back and he starts telling me how terrible I look, too. It's not much fun, you know, being told I look a mess. No wonder I can't get a man."
She didn’t explain what she was working on. It was difficult enough to explain to herself. And she avoided all questions about finding Greg’s body. Her mother didn’t question her about that too rigorously; perhaps she didn’t want to know the details.
Luckily Jim was away playing golf, and, after having something to eat, she finally gave in to exhaustion, and, going up to her old bedroom, slept away her jetlag through the rest of the day.
It was early evening when she woke and almost nine by the time she got home to Fulham. Waiting on her voicemail was a message from Natalie Streub in Moscow. She called back immediately, although she knew it would be almost midnight there.
Getting no response at first she was about to hang up when Natalie answered, sounding muffled, interrupted, and not best amused. "Jesus, Kate! You sure choose your moments."
In the background Kate could hear the grumble of a man's voice speaking in Russian. Natalie had always been a popular girl.
"I'm sorry. I got your message and..."
"It's okay. Don't worry about it. He's a mistake anyway," came back Natalie.
Obviously her companion wasn’t an English speaking mistake.
"Now, what have I got for you? Petra Kerinova. I think I've traced her. It took a while. Things move slowly over there in Estonia."
"She was a circus performer or something. That was what I heard."
"Well…maybe.” Natalie sounded uncertain. “If it's the same Kerinova. But only sort of… According to my sources, she worked as a hypnotist."
“A hypnotist!"
“Yes. Part of an act. You know, those shows where the hypnotist gets people out of the audience to take their trousers down? Well, that was her. Petra Kerinova, a music hall hypnotist."
"Are you sure about this?"
"As sure as anybody can be working out of Moscow. Does it make any sense to you?"
"I'm not sure. What happened to her? I mean, why did she give up?”
"From what I hear she tried to commit suicide a couple of times and then spent some time in a mental hospital. After which, according to an unreconstructed old Commie Russian lady who used to live in the next apartment, she ‘became a whore in the West like all the others’." Natalie laughed huskily.
"Some whore," Kate mused. Then: “Thanks, Natalie, you’re a saint.”
"Actually, saintly was one thing I wasn't being tonight. But never mind. Are you ever going to tell me what this is about?"
"As soon as I know myself. Now, go back to bed and enjoy yourself. We'll speak again soon." And, bidding her goodbye, she put the phone down.
A hypnotist? The sorcerer's apprentice with the bleached-out face and hair was a hypnotist?
Switching on her computer she went into YouTube. Greg had talked about Gadden's voice being like aural magic, but was there something else? She scrolled down the menu for the song she wanted, then turned up the volume on her speaker.
"Going down to Tarlton the last week in May, Tasting the sea, cheating with me, On a wasted working Wednesday..." sang Gadden, his eyes never leaving the camera lens, never leaving hers.
Kevin O’Brien had said Gadden only really took off as a world star when the fans could see him in close-up. Had Kerinova’s music hall hypnosis tricks helped him perfect a talent he’d already been discovering in himself?
But, if he could turn any small town called Tarlton into a tourist attraction for a day, what else could he do?
Having slept all afternoon she wasn’t tired. There were several calls she could have returned, but she chose only that of Chris Zeff. The guy could become a nuisance, but at least he wouldn’t immediately enquire about her health and state of mind.
He was breezy when he picked up the phone. “Oh, hi Kate, thanks for getting back. I just wanted
to tell you I’m giving a paper at the London Mathematical Society next Wednesday afternoon. It’s kind of a big deal in my world, and Zena and I thought, if you’ve nothing better to do, maybe you’d like to come along.”
She wouldn’t understand a word of a lecture on maths, but she was touched that he’d thought to invite her. She’d done something for him. Now he wanted to include her on his big day.
At any other time she might have accepted the invitation, but time was something she doubted she’d have on November 3. It was the night of the Jesse Gadden concert. So, thanking him, and wishing him well with his lecture, she made an excuse.
Then, opening a bottle of red wine, she sat down at her kitchen table with her father’s books. Greg had linked rock stars with shamans and charismatic leaders: her father had for a time studied hysterical, medieval messianic sects. Was there a link that he would have spotted?
“Where human behaviour is concerned, there’s nothing new under the sun…” she repeated as she worked her way through a dancing-until-death mania in Germany in the early sixteenth century. “Mania,” she read the word out loud. At least the kids high on drugs in night clubs these days didn’t go that far. Then she moved on to the sects of the Assassins and the Anabaptists and the Cult of Relics.
“Only the circumstances change…”
Was it any less superstitious to walk hundreds of miles to venerate the shrivelled hand of a dead saint, than to fly to London in order to walk across the pedestrian crossing at
Abbey Road
? They were both pilgrimages. An account of a religious movement in 1251 known as the Children’s Crusade came next. It was led by a renegade monk known as the Master of Hungary, but was told today as the story of the Pied Piper, the man whose music had led the children of Hamelin away, never to return.