Free Kill For Love by RAY CONNOLLY

more than
thorough researcher, and with so little to go on in the Gadden files, she’d
need one.
    Across the newsroom Hilly Weston
was less thrilled. Jesse Gadden was her turf, her expression said.
    "Hilly's hoping you'll fall
on your face," foreign editor Ned Swann noticed, stirring his coffee with
a ball point pen. "You can't blame her!"
    Kate, who'd kept her place on the
foreign desk despite being restricted to home grown stories, glanced sharply at
him. “I don’t blame her.”
    Noticing the momentary tension, Chloe
looked up mischievously. “If you’re going to start doing show-biz stories,
Kate, you'll need a make-over … fluffy hair…lips stuffed with collagen…a cement
mixer of foundation."
    "In which case we might have
to ask you to sit elsewhere," Ned guffawed.
    "Bastards!" Kate
laughed.
    She worked all afternoon
assembling the bones of a Gadden biography to help structure the interview. All
around her reports of world events were being gathered, packaged and
transmitted, but, for almost the first time since she'd returned to work, she
wasn't distracted, to the extent that she was somehow unsurprised when she
heard Gadden's voice somewhere close by.
    Looking around to locate the
source of the music, she noticed that Ned was watching a funeral on his TV
monitor. Pulling on her headset she looked at her own. A report was running on
a service held that morning in a Birmingham
parish church for a father and his three daughters.
    "Jesse Gadden was a favourite of all the family," Robin Bloomfield,
WSN's main anchor, was intoning above a recording of Gadden's voice which was
echoing mournfully around the packed modern chapel: "Life is just a start, a getting ready,   Stumbling down the path, the way unsteady, Love for love, give for
love, live for love..."
    With professional detachment Kate
watched the four coffins being borne down the aisle past rows of
schoolchildren. For over a week a countrywide search had been in progress for
Elizabeth McDonagh, the wife and mother of the murdered family, now strongly
suspected of their poisoning.
    Across the office Beverly mouthed the song's
lyrics.
    "Personally I think I'd
rather have Abide With Me when it's
my turn," grumped Ned, staring in distaste at his screen   as a cortège of four hearses made its way
along suburban dual carriageways. “This is like a rock video! It makes us look
like MTV.”
    He was right. To heighten the
occasion the producer in charge of the piece had lapped the record over the
soundtrack of the entire footage. It was a bad error of taste, the awkward
junction where news becomes entertainment.
    Taking off her headset Kate
returned to her research.

    She gave Beverly a truncated version of the previous
night's events over lunch in the WSN canteen.
    “And what was he singing?” The
intern asked, too excited to eat.
    “Well, nothing really. He had an
orchestra there.”
      “Really! An orchestra!” Beverly
digested this. “And the lyrics?”
    “Well, yes, there are lyrics. He
showed me some. He writes them out longhand in capital letters…with spelling
mistakes.”
    “And?”
    Kate shrugged. “Well, you know.
Fine.” She hesitated. “We’re not talking John Donne here, you know. At least I
don’t think so. They’re only pop songs.”
    Beverly pushed away her salad. “No, they
aren’t. I understand that you can’t see it, Kate, even though you’ve met him.
But the thing about Jesse is that he fills the gap."
    "What gap?"
    Beverly screwed up her hands in front of her
face. "That's the trouble. I can’t really explain. It's something like
this: after my parents split I'd sit in my room and play his records for days,
and, you know, before long I didn't really care. It sounds terrible, but it was
as though he was talking to me and they weren't. And that was all right, I
didn't mind at all. He was enough."
    "You were just upset and
lonely. But you're not lonely now. So you don't need him."
    "Maybe not. But I want him.
And he still