by Ray Connolly
A draught of total disbelief cut through the conference. Hilly Weston caught Robin Broomfield’s eye. Kate dug her nails into her hands.
Donna Hallsden was now on the screen, lying unconscious in her New Hampshire hospital bed, the Jesse Gadden CDs at the bedside.
"So, on the day his ‘goodbye’ concert is to be streamed online to an estimated fifty million fans, we ask, what is the truth about Jesse Gadden? Is he a very generous, enigmatic rock star, or is he a mentally unbalanced cult leader who kills with his songs?"
Fifty minutes later there was complete silence as the programme finished. Kate looked around the room.
Finally Neil Fraser cleared his throat. "Jesus, Kate!”
"It's true." Kate could hear a shake in her voice. Seeing the programme cold, alongside people who knew little about Gadden, had unnerved her.
"It's unbelievable!" said Robin Broomfield.
Everywhere in the room there was a clamour of confusion and disbelief.
"And the woman who killed her children...?" Sarah Shulman interrupted. The interview with Elizabeth McDonagh had caused the greatest impact. "Are you sure that's her?"
"Positive. I expect the police have picked her up by now, but..."
"You're saying she got a message to kill her husband and children from a song?" Fraser interrupted.
"She’s saying that. I think the girl in New Hampshire, Donna Hallsden, got the same message, though not at the same time. There are probably other fans around the world we don't know about yet who may also have got it.”
Broomfield shook his head disdainfully. "I’m sorry, Kate, but…"
Fraser's foot was tapping nervously. "Tell me again how you think this thing works… this manipulation."
"It's something to do with the power of the music, the repetitive riffs, the timbre of the voice and a very charismatic performer. One or two other very big stars have it…”
"Other singers don't get people to do anything apart from buy their records," Bloomfield interrupted.
Kate frowned. “I know it's a big leap, Robin, but other big stars aren't psychopaths who also use hypnotic tricks and the power of the internet to influence their fans. I don't suppose Gadden realised what he could do when he started. Then he met Petra Kerinova and added a little hypnosis to the magic.”
Broomfield was now wearing the incredulous expression he used for interviewing evasive politicians. "’Magic!’ This fellow has millions upon millions of fans. Are you suggesting they're all brainwashed?"
"No, of course I’m not.” She could feel herself over-responding to him as interviewees did when he started to harry them. “To most fans he's a wonderful, good looking guy with a sympathetic voice, who looks at them dreamily out of the screen. But to a few others, a very few, people like poor Beverly Dennis, moments of life become a semi-trance which is reinforced by every Jesse Gadden video they watch on the internet and every Jesse Gadden record they listen to…”
“For God’s sake, Kate…”
She wouldn’t let him in. “And these people watch and listen a lot, believe me. They want to get close to him and become members of his entourage. And it's these people, like Beverly, who, given the right trigger at the right moment, the right message, if you like, will do whatever he tells them to do."
"But why," Harris, the acting news editor, asked. “I mean, if that’s true, what’s in it for him?”
“You’d need a psychiatrist to tell you that. But a crisis has happened in his life. He’s ill.”
“And insane?” said Harris.
“I believe so.”
Again the room was in silence. Everyone was staring at her. She felt uncomfortable. She knew what they were thinking: that it was she who was mad.
Fraser was making notes on a pad. "This woman from Birmingham who you believe to be Elizabeth McDonagh…she says she got a message?”
"Yes."
"What exactly did the message say?"
Kate bit her lip nervously. "She didn’t say.”
Fraser looked at her. "So we don't know for sure that there was a message. Even if it was her, she may just have been saying that she got a message from a song."
"It was her, Neil, and I believe her."
"I'm sure you do, Kate," Fraser said calmly. "But can we prove it? Can we prove that Beverly was responding to him, or that the young man your friend met in the gay bar was given a message on the phone by Gadden? Or even that the girl in America was triggered in some way by a song? Can we prove anything at all?”
She felt shredded. She couldn’t answer. Even the filtered recording from Danton’s Bar hadn’t been enough. They weren’t convinced.
"This Reich’s Syndrome thing," Broomfield came in. "This illness. I've never heard of it."
"Because it’s very uncommon, Robin. But Gadden's mother died of it, insane and helpless at the end. It's inherited and progressive, like Huntington's Chorea. It marks people out from childhood. They seem to lack something...kindness or human sympathy for anyone else's predicament. They're completely self obsessed, often clever, frequently criminal. Later on there are breakdowns, headaches. Dementia always occurs. If he has it, Gadden knows what he's facing. There's no cure."
“If he has the disease! You’ve seen a doctor’s diagnosis?” Broomfield continued.
She didn’t bother to shake her head.
Fraser was kinder. "You said you think he’s suffering from a mental illness?”
"Yes. Mental illness is common in cult leaders.”
"'Cult-leaders'!" snorted Broomfield. "He's a bloody rock star. Like Bono or Mick Jagger. That’s all.”
At this Hilly Weston had to disguise a snigger.
Kate’s temper snapped. "No it isn't all, Robin. The guy has a death obsession. I’ve experienced it. He grooms suggestible fans to kill. He did it to Beverly because Seb was threatening to discover too much about him and get in his way. The same with Greg. Beverly and Overmars had already been programmed to do what he wanted. All it took was a couple of phone calls with music playing in the background. There are veiled messages in his songs when his concerts are streamed over the internet. And, if no-one does anything, there might be another message tonight during his farewell concert, which means there could be more deaths…” She looked around the room.
Faces were blank.
Her voice rose. “Why does nobody believe me?”
“Because it’s all “might” and “could”. It’s preposterous!” Broomfield’s bullying had now lowered into a murmur of derision as he turned away.
She heard him. “‘Preposterous’? That’s what you think? And I suppose the mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana in 1982 was preposterous, too, when over nine hundred people drank cyanide because a charismatic, insane leader told them to. Or what about Charles Manson who told his followers to go out and kill and they did. Or the Heaven’s Gate cult in California who committed suicide because they’d been told a UFO was hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet and they wanted to join it. You’re a newsman, Robin. You must remember that story? You probably even read it on the damn news, for Christ’s sake! Thirty nine grown up people killed themselves because some mad man told them to.” She was shouting.
Broomfield looked away. There was an embarrassed, worried silence.
Finally Fraser looked towards Abramsky, the lawyer. "What do you think, Larry?"
Abramsky, who hadn’t spoken since he entered the room, delicately cleared a couple of spare hairs from his forehead. "It seems to me that whether or not any of this is true, whether or not this woman Elizabeth McDonagh is who Kate thinks she is, whether or not we are convinced that it’s possible to manipulate people to suicide and murder through music, and I’m sorry to say, Kate, I’m not, if we were to run any of it now, Jesse Gadden, a massive benefactor whatever else he may be, could sue us to the moon and back, and we wouldn't have a leg to stand on.”
Chapter Forty Three
She sat at her desk and watched a river taxi making its way downstream towards the Tham
es Barrier. Seagulls were flapping in its wake, and she wondered vacantly how many minutes it would take to get there. It was already after three, and all around her the harvesting of the day’s news was continuing. Along the desk Chloe Estevez was eating a salad at her computer, and Ned Swann was booming down his phone to a correspondent in Jeddah. On her screen the WSN-TV economics correspondent was saying the Bank of England was warning of bad times to come, while across the floor someone on the sports desk was very loudly asking a young researcher to get him coverage of a Manchester United game.
And she was doing nothing.
She’d known that her report wasn’t complete and would require input from others, but she’d been unprepared for the atmosphere of denial in Fraser’s office. Now little groups of senior staff were standing around talking quietly to each other, avoiding her eye. It was as if no-one knew quite what to say to her, that once again her mental health was being questioned.
Only the Elizabeth McDonagh strand of the report had engaged any urgency, albeit edged with considerable doubt, and the section that showed her had been copied and sent to the West Midlands Police in Birmingham.
It wasn’t that Fraser and his lieutenants hadn’t wanted to believe her story. Kate could see that. They just couldn’t believe it. The version of the Jesse Gadden narrative she’d described was totally at odds with the manufactured universal perception of him, and she hadn’t provided enough material to rebut it. In journalists’ terms, her story just didn’t stand up.
“Kate!” Hetty, the foreign desk secretary suddenly called. “The West Midlands police want a word. Do you want to take it?”
She did.
The police officer had a gravy brown Birmingham accent, in which he asked for further details of how she’d come to interview the woman she maintained was Elizabeth McDonagh.
She explained.
“Am I to understand that you’re saying you broke into Jesse Gadden’s house?” There was astonishment in his tone.
“Yes. That was where I found her. I left a message with you on Friday."
"An anonymous call. It was logged."
"But did you find her there?"
"I understand the Devon and Cornwall police are still making enquiries."
She knew what that meant. Elizabeth McDonagh hadn’t been found. She wasn’t surprised. The Glee Club was nothing if not efficient. “But you can identify her from the film I shot, can’t you?”
“I’m not in a position to say at the moment. Relatives will be contacted later today.”
“She was being hidden there. You should be interviewing Gadden and his staff and…”
“We’ll be getting in touch with you again should the lady be positively identified. Thank you.” The call ended.
She turned back to the river. The hours to the Jesse Gadden web concert were slipping away.
“Here you go, Kate. Your mail while you’ve been away.” Hetty, smiling sympathetically, dropped a handful of letters on to her desk.
Without interest she began to sift through the brochures and publicity handouts. A small handwritten envelope with “Personal” written in the top left hand corner, and stamped as having been received at WSN six days earlier, looked like a viewer’s letter. It wasn’t. It was from Beverly’s flatmate.
“Dear Kate, I’m sorry to bother you, but I got a call from Beverly’s mother this morning. She says she’d be happy now for us to send all Bev’s Jesse Gadden records and photos and stuff over to her in Chicago. She thinks that as he meant so much to Beverly she ought to try to understand what she saw in him.
“I’m really glad about this, and I think Beverly would have been pleased, too, don’t you? She spent so much time thinking about the guy. Anyway, is it okay for me to leave this with you? I imagine WSN-TV will be able to arrange to send it all easily enough.
“I hope you’re getting over everything. I read about you in the paper. It must have been terrible finding your friend like that.
“My news is that I’m giving up publishing and going to do a degree in textile conservation in Bristol.
With best wishes,
Meg Johnson”
Kate closed the letter, and, slipping it into her jacket pocket, glanced at the monitor above her desk. A news report from outside the Pavilion Picture Palace was running on Sky. It was the usual pre-show TV coverage, with shots of Jesse Gadden fans, having turned up without tickets, waiting hoping to get a glimpse of the star, while technicians hurried to and from their vans.
She changed channel. For the first time in weeks she didn’t know what to do? She’d failed.
A man in dungarees carrying a ladder was making his way across the newsroom towards the foreign desk. Chloe looked up from her screen as he reached the digital clock on the wall behind her. Its job was to tell the time in Beijing, Kabul, Moscow, London, New York and Los Angeles. Except that today it wasn’t. All the times were the same.
“Looks like something got into it and stopped it doing what it’s supposed to do,” Chloe smiled to the man.
“You mean like a gremlin?” he joked.
“Exactly!”
Kate stared at the digital clock.
Then, getting up from her desk, she walked quickly to the lift.
Chapter Forty Four
If Chris Zeff had been speaking Cantonese she could scarcely have understood less. Standing on a rostrum in a small lecture theatre in London’s
Russell Square
, his fair hair gelled conservatively flat for the occasion, the maths research student was demonstrating a series of equations with the aid of a screen behind him. Sometimes his audience would chuckle and Kate would realise she’d missed the punch line for an algorithmic joke. It didn’t matter: his audience could follow him. She’d arrived late at the London Mathematical Society. Creeping into the back row, she’d spotted Zena, Zeff’s girl friend, staring at him adoringly as she worked the PowerPoint. In his own rarefied world Zeff was a coming young star, a notion reinforced when as he stopped speaking the entire hall burst into applause. Kate clapped hard, too.
He wasn’t exactly mobbed after his speech, but he was surrounded with much earnest congratulation, and she waited until there was a gap in the group before approaching.
He giggled, delighted to see her. “Oh, wow! Kate! I thought you couldn’t make it. That’s so cool. Did you enjoy the lecture?”
“Fascinating,” she lied. Then putting a hand on his elbow, she moved him to one side, dropping her voice: “Look, I know this isn’t the best time, but I need a favour.”
“You got it!”
“Well, maybe not, because, you see…” She glanced around. “I’m looking for a hacker.”
His eyebrows rose, then he moved her still further from his admirers. “To do what?”
“To put gremlins in someone’s website and stop it doing what it’s supposed to do. I don’t even know if that’s possible, but…it’s urgent. Is it possible?”
“Jesus! ‘Not easy’ would be the understatement of the year! Can you tell me why and which website?”
Taking a DVD of her Gadden report from her pocket she pressed it into his hand. “It’s all on here. If you take a look, I think you’ll understand. But it’s urgent. It has to be done tonight.”
“Tonight? Kate, that’s impossible. I’m sorry. These things take time.”
“Just look at the disc, Chris… Please!”
At that moment a corduroy clad academic intervened jovially. “Can we all offer felicitations to our supernova or is this a private audience…?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “Well done, Chris! That was quite brilliant.” And he led the young maths genius back to his pregnant girl friend and a waiting aura of admirers.
She was no longer afraid to go home. The previous day she’d worried that there might be an attempt there to prevent her finishing her report. It didn’t matter now.
Her home was as she’d left it, and going upstairs to her study she logged on to her email. There was nothing of an
y importance, and no further word from the West Midlands Police on either of her phones.
Taking off her jacket, she was going through her pockets before hanging it up, when her fingers found Meg Johnson’s letter. She read it again.
“He’s just everything,” Beverly had told her.
A rage bubbled. “No, he isn’t, Beverly,” she heard herself saying. “He’s a mad phoney who murdered you.”
Suddenly she was barging into her spare bedroom. Pulling out Beverly’s box of posters and programmes that she’d stuffed under the bed, she began throwing the contents on to the rug. It was all tat, all fake, everything an artificial creation of a bogus hero. All the tricks of celebrity creation were here: carefully backlit photographs on DVDs to make Gadden look romantic; archaic green lettering to give a semblance of historic Gaelic; flattering articles cut from credulous Sunday magazines in which he said mundane nothings that sounded meaningful; exorbitantly overpriced souvenir programmes that were just a collection of photographs and tour dates; postcards and baseball caps, T-shirts and a key ring, and, the focus of everything, those eyes bluer than cornflowers. Oh yes, those eyes, they were everywhere, watching everything. Jeroboam had spotted that. Out from the box it all came, all Beverly’s sacred relics of a cheap iconography, shiny and nasty.
She stopped. At the bottom of the box, lying beneath a copy of Uncut magazine, was a thick, much thumbed, hardback, exercise book. Taking it out, she looked inside.
It was a journal, a history of Beverly’s infatuation full of little affectionate cartoons of Gadden, lines from his songs and quotes from his early interviews. And then there were Beverly’s own comments.