Kill For Love by RAY CONNOLLY Read Free Book Online Page B

about Gadden's sex life was paltry.
There were none of the usual groupie tabloid tell-tales, no paternity claims,
and no paparazzi photographs catching him backstage with cocaine stretched
models. Given the sparseness of facts, it wasn't surprising there'd been no proper
biography on him, the couple of Jesse Gadden paperbacks Beverly had come up
with being scarcely more than details of recordings, tour dates, song lyrics,
photographs, publicity hand-outs, a few quotes and names of charities
supported.
    One thing about him, she thought
as she read through the list of charities, and noted the photographs of him
shaking hands with the good, the great and the powerful, he was certainly
generous.
    But what of the missing eighteen
months before the farewell tour? What had he been doing then? Where had he
been? There were no clues. In a world groaning with information technology it was
amazing that Gadden had managed to keep so much of his life secret.
    At around ten she gave up on the
brochure, and, going up to her study, typed “Jesse
Gadden” into Google. Almost immediately a figure came up. “Approximately 19,500,000 entries match your
details.” Approximately!
    As Beverly had already sieved what journalists
had written, Kate turned to the fans' sites. “Crazy,” she murmured, as she saw
the devotion spelled out, from trite declarations of worship to lengthy interpretations
of song lyrics. To her the songs sounded like a succession of sumptuous images
piled one on top of the other, wordy metaphors laced together by a conceit of
significance. And she wondered at the ability of so many people to see in them what
she couldn't.
    Quickly bored by the logjam of
whimsy, she returned to her living room, pushed a Jesse Gadden In Concert DVD
into the player and watched as the singer’s pale face glowed luminously on the
screen.
    What was it about this man that
caused such devotion? What was she missing?

Chapter
Six

    September 18:

    She drove up to Hampstead for a
family lunch the following day, feeling guilty because she didn’t really want
to go. If her father had still been alive there would have been stronger binds.
He’d been a history professor and she’d been half way through a thesis on “unAmericanism
in American cultural imperialism” when he’d died twelve years earlier. She’d
also been having an affair with a married lecturer in international relations
at London’s
King’s College. Her father hadn’t approved of either.
    “You should get out and see the
world as it really is,” he’d always urged.
    And in the weeks following his
funeral she’d abandoned both thesis and lover. Already an occasional broadcaster
on foreign affairs, she’d seen an opportunity for another kind of life when an
opening had presented itself as a radio correspondent with the BBC World
Service. Then there’d been Chechnya
and 9/11, and by the time of Shock and Awe she’d moved into television, making
her face famous with pieces from Afghanistan,
Somalia and West Africa. She was steely, personable, pretty and well
read, and she could improvise intelligently before the camera. The job consumed
her life.
      When her mother had re-married she’d been
pleased for her, although puzzled, disappointed, actually, in her choice of new
husband, David, a widower and retired broker. Now Kate understood how parents
felt when a child married: no-one could ever be good enough. Her mother, who’d
been a teacher, saw things differently; her every gesture towards her new
husband being touched with intimacy. And while Kate’s twin brothers, now forty,
were embarrassed to see their mother making foolish double entendres , Kate was both fascinated and appalled. It was as
if their mother had reinvented herself in her new husband’s image, that she
would do anything to please.
    But, where once there’d been a
centre to the family with shared memories, there was now an elderly couple who
took cruises on their pensions and played golf, and were, it