by Ray Connolly
It was silent in the flag-stoned hallway, and she took a moment to catch her breath as she looked around. There was, she remembered, a recording studio to the left, while the Jesse Gadden websites were run from a suite further back.
Quickly, walking on the sharp edge of the steps, as she’d been told burglars did, she climbed the staircase, until, reaching a landing, she looked through a window towards the main building. Apart from the estate Jeep there were only two other cars parked in the courtyard.
Continuing to the next floor she turned right. This time there was no band of sunlight to attract her, but she knew which room she wanted. She tried the door. It was locked. There were five smaller keys on the ring. The last one worked.
The video library was dark, with blinds over the windows, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the conditions. Feeling into her bag she withdrew her torch and shone it around the room.
It was bigger than she'd remembered and the collection of DVDs more extensive. Directing the torch’s beam along the shelves she saw that one entire wall was given over to Jesse Gadden, his concerts, promos, tours, Glastonbury performances and TV shows. Another wall had commercial performances by other artists: the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, Neil Young Unplugged.
Behind the door was a large cupboard. It was locked. She looked again at the keys and chose one.
The cupboard door swung open. Once again there were rows of DVDs, but none bore the insignia or titles of distributing companies. The names on them had been handwritten as with home movies, though they were neatly, alphabetically ordered, G for GADDEN, H for HAVERHILL and so on.
At K she stopped. KERINOVa. Pulling out a case she slipped the DVD into the player, and, switching off the sound, pressed PLAY.
The picture was of poor quality, but it was clear enough. Natalie's research had been good. A younger Kerinova, wearing a dark cape, was on a low stage in a small hall standing next to a plastic Christmas tree with fairy lights, giving a demonstration of hypnotism. In front of her a stout man in shirt sleeves was kneeling and flapping his arms like a penguin. Occasionally the amateur cameraman had panned to shots of a laughing audience. Kerinova wasn't smiling.
Ejecting the disc she moved along the shelves. She found M for MERRIMAC next. She was surprised. The first shots had been taken by a CCTV camera at the reception after the Hyde Park concert, and she soon found herself in a corner of the frame talking to Greg in the roof garden. Then there she was sitting with Hilly Weston and those TV colleagues.
At this point something had happened. Until then the camera had been regularly sweeping the room, but suddenly it had become focused on her. And she saw herself in close up as she'd grown bored with the party and said goodnight to her television colleagues.
Her meeting with Gadden in the lift hadn't been an accident.
She skipped forward through the disc. There she was in the dark in the back of the Mercedes on the way to the studio when Stefano had avoided her questions, then at the recording session, and, further on, arriving by helicopter at Haverhill and playing the juke box in the music room. Everything had been recorded: the lunch on the terrace the following day, the swim in the pool, the bedroom...
Gadden had even saved the evidence against himself.
There was another DVD with her name on it. She guessed what it would show. How often had Jesse Gadden watched this, she thought, as she found herself talking to camera in Owoso, her shirt thick with blood, her voice croaking with fear.
This was what had attracted him to her.
She looked around the cupboard at the rest of the collection. There were names of countries, USA, Germany, China and the Middle East. Reaching up, she chose one and slipped it into the player. It was uncut footage of an Al Qaeda beheading in Iraq.
She tried the USA next. This time it was black and white coverage of convicted murderers dying in the electric chair, their heads smoking, bodies jerking. Then there were snuff movies, an IRA lynching of two soldiers before a baying mob…
She wanted to leave. She felt buried alive by Gadden's obsession. But she had a job to do. Opening her bag she took out the tripod and unfolded it. Then attaching the camera and light, she plugged in the hand microphone, and, turning back to the camera, pressed Record.
Finally she took up her own position in front of the camera. She was a reporter again.
Chapter Thirty Nine
The door clicked shut behind her as she stepped back into the corridor. She waited, listening. There was nothing. Her bag was heavier now. It contained half a dozen DVDs taken from Jesse Gadden’s personal library.
Silently she headed back to the staircase. At the fourth step she stopped. There were voices from the hall below. She pushed herself against the wall. The words "loose feed" and "too much reverb" reached her. A couple of studio technicians were discussing a technical problem. She recognised the voice of one: it was Peter, the young assistant recording engineer she’d met on her night at the studio.
"Hang on a minute, I'll take a look." Footsteps began to climb the staircase.
She fled, not back the way she'd come, but at right angles, across to the opposite end of the wing, running, virtually silently in her trainers, choosing corridors and flights of stairs at random, wandering ever deeper into the back of the main house.
Reaching a narrow corridor, she came to some double doors. Carefully she inched them open, then stopped in surprise. She was in a large storeroom, a vast grotto, stuffed with everything Jesse Gadden. There were silk stage costumes hanging in rows on hangers, shoes, scarves, posters, guitars, and boxes of CDs and DVDs. From every wall photographs of Gadden seemed to watch her. Delicately she moved through the room, stepping around the embroidery of rock fame.
A slight cough from behind a life-sized, stand-alone photograph of Gadden made her start. She edged forward.
A woman, wearing a pale blue dressing gown, was sitting on the side of an upturned packing case, rocking backwards and forwards, arms clasped around her body, listening to something on earphones. In front of her, placed neatly on a large cardboard box, were five empty paper cups, an old tea pot and an empty milk bottle. Seeing Kate, she smiled.
It was the woman Kate had seen cutting sunflowers on her first visit. But this time she knew who she was.
"I'd ask you to stay for a cup of tea, if you don't mind waiting for the children. They'll be home from school soon," the woman said matter-of-factly, removing the earphones.
Kate moved closer. It was a dolls' tea party without the dolls.
The woman turned her head to one side, listening hard. "Is that them coming? Can you hear them? No? I keep thinking I can hear the bus outside in the road."
"Elizabeth? Elizabeth McDonagh?"
"Oh, I think you can call me Liz. Everybody else does. Apart from Jim. He calls me Lizzy sometimes. Skinny Lizzy when I go on a diet and get too thin." She chuckled to herself. "He doesn't like it."
"Liz!”
Elizabeth McDonagh nodded agreeably. "Like I said, they'll be here soon. They'll be wanting their tea, I expect. Hungry after a hard day at school."
"What are you doing here, Liz?"
A cloud of uncertainty crossed the woman's face. "They'll be home soon," she repeated.
"Do you know where you are? Who's house this is?"
"It's our house, of course! Jim's and mine. And the Abbey National’s, of course. We needed the four bedrooms when the youngest came along. We thought it was best if they could each have their own bedroom. Somewhere for them to do their homework."
Quietly Kate was taking the camera out of her bag as Liz McDonagh talked.
She noticed. "Ah, Jim bought a camcorder last summer. We went to Italy and made our own video diary. It'll be nice to look back on when the children are grown up."
The camera began to turn.
"They should be here soon. We'd better wait for them..." She was becoming agitated.
"Why did you do it, Liz?" Kate asked, the camera held just below her face, still foc
used.
Liz McDonagh looked puzzled, as though the answer was self-evident. "He told me, too."
"Who told you to?"
"Jesse, of course." A little smile of pleasure lit up at the excuse to say the name.
"Jesse told you to?"
Another smile, a finger to her lips. "It's a secret."
"How did Jesse tell you, Liz?"
"How?"
"How did he tell you to do it?"
Liz McDonagh giggled slightly and indicated her iPod.
Taking the player, Kate put a headphone to her ear.
“Come go with me,” Gadden was singing.
"I don't understand," Kate said. "How did Jesse tell you to do those things? I can't hear him saying that."
Elizabeth McDonagh smiled secretively. “He doesn't want everyone to hear it. Not yet. He will soon. But it's just for the special ones now."
"And everyone else...when will they hear it?”
“Soon. He says soon…very soon…” Her voice faded as she became distracted.
Outside it was getting lighter. Kate couldn’t risk staying any longer. "I've got to go now, Liz," she said.
Disappointment crossed the other woman's face. "They'll be home any minute. Can't you wait? No, well, another day. They'll be sorry they missed you. There must be something on. Games, I expect, or perhaps music or play practice…"
"I expect so," Kate said sadly.
But Liz McDonagh was no longer listening. Picking up the earphones, she immersed herself back into the music.
Kate backed away from her and moved on through the room. At the door she looked back. Liz McDonagh was still sitting there, checking the empty tea pot again, and waiting into eternity for the children she'd murdered to come home from school.
Kate switched off the camera.
There were two staircases beyond the store room: a wide sweeping one, and a modest spiral down the back of the house. She chose the latter. It took her to a ground floor passageway alongside the kitchen, from where she could hear a murmur of conversation. A rear door there opened on to the garden. It was bolted at the top and bottom. The lower bolt slid back easily. The top one was stiff. She needed more leverage. A three legged stool stood by a wall. Placing it in front of the door she climbed on to it and put all her weight against the bolt.
This time it did move: too quickly. As she lost her balance the stool shot from beneath her and clattered across the stone flags of the floor.
She wasn't hurt. But had someone heard? She didn’t wait to find out. Opening the door she stepped out into the garden, quickly heading back behind the stables to the path which had brought her. It was light now and she could see a security camera by the weather cock on the roof of the stable block sweeping the back of the house. She hesitated at the end of a wall, waited for it to pass, and then she ran.
It was over half a mile back to the gate, but, her camera bag over one shoulder, she began covering the distance quickly. She'd always been a good runner. She'd approached the house slowly and carefully, now she just wanted to get away. Her luck had held for too long. It had to end soon.
She was right. With a hundred yards to go, the howl of a siren cut across the length of the estate, a World War Two alarm, which made her heart leap with shock and sent the ponies galloping around the pasture.
She ran faster, glancing back as she went. She could see people hurrying from the house, pointing towards her. Dogs were barking excitedly, being let off their leashes. One was already racing after her.
She reached the gate. Her fingers were clumsy as they keyed in the figures. “1967.” Nothing happened. Had an automatic lock been activated? She looked back. The first dog, a large Alsatian, was now bulleting down the path.
"1967," she repeated. “Come on.” And keyed again. One-nine-six-seven.
The dog, its slack lips drawn back behind its teeth, was almost on her.
“Please...!” she heard herself gasp.
With a buzz the gate opened, and, pushing through, she immediately slammed it hard closed behind her, smashing it into the jaws of the Alsatian. The dog leapt back with a howl.
But she was already running, back along the side of the estate wall, up on to the road, across it and down through the fir plantation to her car.
Racing back through the woods, the Citroën slithered on the thick carpet of old pine needles as it went. At the road she hit the brakes.
The Haverhill Jeep was speeding towards her down the lane. To try to outrun it in twisting lanes that she didn't know would be risking disaster. She made a decision. Driving on to the road she turned towards the oncoming vehicle and accelerated. She recognised the driver coming at her: it was Brendan, the guy who ran the estate. The Chinese American girl from the kitchens was at his side.
She steered straight at them.
The Jeep gave way first, braking at the last moment, a reflex action. Pulling around it, Kate ripped on to the grass verge. Mud flew from the Citroën’s wheels. But then she was through and on to the open road beyond. Behind her the Jeep was stranded, facing in the wrong direction.
Accelerating hard, she raced away past the main Haverhill gates. If there were any other pursuers, she didn't see them.
Chapter Forty
She put sixty miles between herself and Haverhill before she dared stop, and then it was to refill with petrol at a service station. On the forecourt she went to a payphone and asked to be put through to the West Midlands Police.
"I thought you should know that Elizabeth McDonagh, who you've been looking for in connection with the deaths of her family, is living at a house owned by the singer Jesse Gadden at Haverhill in Cornwall," she told them. "She's very confused and needs care."
"Who is that calling...?" The police operator began.
She didn't answer. Hanging up, she returned to her car.
Frank Teischer was waiting for her at his Mount Venus editing suite. “You’re not going to like what’s on them,” Kate warned as she handed him the DVDs she’d taken from Haverhill.
“That’s okay. How’s your story coming?”
“I’m getting closer.”
He raised a slightly questioning eyebrow.
She knew that expression. How many times had reporters said that to him when they were struggling to make sense of a piece?
“Okay. Let me log all this into the system. The recording of your friend Greg interviewing Overmars is in a sound lab at Pinewood. A pal of mine is seeing if he can clean it up. It’s safe with him. Now, if I were you, I’d go and get some sleep. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
She agreed, and left him to his work. She needed sleep, but more than that she needed time to think.
The image of Elizabeth McDonagh sitting in the Haverhill storeroom at her dolls’ tea-party had tormented her all day as she’d driven back from Cornwall. Jesse Gadden had given her the message to kill in a song, the woman had told her. Was that even remotely possible?
She was almost back at her car when she got a call on her mobile.
It was her sister-in-law, Helen. “Hi, Kate. The social psychologist who specialises in music you asked for…I’ve got her. They say she does her best research at rock festivals and raves, so don’t you dare tell my daughter I put you on to her or she’ll want to be her assistant. Give her a call now. She’s waiting to hear from you.”
Looking much like the earnest student she must recently have been, Dr Sadie Kupfermann, small with bobbed black hair, and wearing glasses with a blue tint, jeans and a faded Arctic Monkeys sweatshirt, peered at Kate. "The thing about music,” she began, “is that it’s so much a part of being human, that we take it for granted and very rarely ask the why and the how of it.”
“You mean, we don’t question what it’s for?” Kate said. Told that she could be squeezed in between tutorials for a quick background briefing, she’d driven immediately to the young academic’s cramped office in one of the Georgian cross streets near London’s University College. She hadn’t told her the exact n
ature of the programme she was working on.
“That’s right! As in why we have music, what it’s for, and how it does what it does to us.” On a wall behind her was a large poster of Beyonce: on another, one of Mozart. “Most people think of music simply as entertainment, but many of us now believe it may have started out as another form of communication, a parallel language, if you like. In fact, there are some who think it may even have pre-dated speech or perhaps have been a primitive kind of speech in that different notes had, and still have, different values and therefore meanings.”
“A parallel language?” Kate questioned.
"Well, yes. A scream is basically the high note we make when we are afraid, but we also find that an upward key change in a popular song or a high D sung by a soprano in an opera can make the hairs on the backs of our necks stand on end. So some messages are being physically passed on simply by the notes we use or hear.
“At its most obvious, of course, music communicates to us through our emotions, in that it can, for instance, encourage us to feel patriotic during the Last Night of the Proms, send regiments to war with a marching band, or unite us behind our favourite football team, as we see when we watch football supporters singing You’ll Never Walk Alone. It can also relax us when we’re nervous at the dentist, lull the baby to sleep, help teach small children to talk through nursery rhymes, and provide a rhythm for us to dance to, therefore helping us find a sexual partner. Some music helps us feel romantic, while minor chords can make us feel sad. On top of that it's also a short cut to our memories. As everyone knows, a few notes played in a certain sequence can instantly reduce us to tears. All that suggests to me a parallel language.”
Kate nodded, aware that she was hearing an edited lecture, and came quickly to the point. “So, if music can change the way we feel, does it also mean it could be used to manipulate us?"
Dr Kupfermann smiled. "As a back-up technique it obviously does help manipulate us to some extent, which is why music is played in TV commercials and in supermarkets and in movies when the makers want to reinforce the mood of a scene. One of my colleagues says that when he was a little boy the theme from Jaws used to frighten him, although he hadn’t seen the film. And the music played over the shower scene in Psycho can be terrifying if you know the context in which it’s being used. And yet it’s really only a few notes…”