Hack

by Graham Johnson

  Then I drove over to Falmouth to lord it over my former colleagues at the Falmouth Packet. I was more bolshy here. My previous Editor John Marquis was genuinely pleased that I’d ‘made it’ in some fashion. The suave, sun-tanned former boxing correspondent, who was also too big for small-town papers, had tasted success himself in his own day. Flying all over the world to glamorous venues in Vegas and the like, to cover the big fights for Thompson Publishing. So he was on it and all smiles. The Sports Editor Leon Prynn took the piss, in a good-natured Cornish fashion, about being a big shot and a hard-hitter. Again, I should have decoded the secret message: pride comes before a fall. But by now I was desensitised to such an extent that I could only tune in to basic bodily functions.

  That afternoon, both Steve and I travelled up to see the crypto-zoologist in person. To show him the pics of the claw marks. A bizarre, bespectacled nerd with stains on his shirt. Cramped-up inside an overheated, pebble-dashed council house. In one of those isolated urbanisations that you only ever see in the poverty-scorched Scottish hinterlands. Both floors filled with wall-to-wall glass cases containing reptiles, snakes and dinosaur-looking fish. Spooky posters on the walls of dragon sightings, werewolves in Hungary, and a black and white print of a dead sea monster in Canada. Back in the world of Wayne Phelps but nice and X-Filesy, if it came down to it. With a bit of bamboozling, he soon put his name to the claw pics saying they were a straight-up puma.

  Later that day, Ray called back with the verdict on the list line. ‘No to claw marks. Rebekah wants you to stay down,’ he said. ‘She wants a picture of the Beast. Are you sure there aren’t any new pictures floating about down there of fresh sightings?’

  ‘We’ve spoken to everyone,’ I said, ‘and there’s deffo no new collects.’

  ‘Well, somehow we’ve got to get a picture,’ Ray emphasised. ‘Rebekah’s still keen on the story and coming home is not an option.’ My recollection is that he said: ‘Somehow, we will have to engineer it in some way.’

  I didn’t know exactly what Ray meant by the word ‘engineer’. But, instinctively, I took it to mean he was asking me to fabricate a picture. Ray had a different interpretation – he later denied he was suggesting Steve and I stunt-up a picture. he said that he meant for us to work harder and find a way of getting a good story. But I was so keen to impress, and on the back foot, that I didn’t care to ask him to elaborate at the time. It was as though Ray was a superior being and I couldn’t bear for him to be tainted with such problems.

  When the call came in, I was sitting next to Steve in the car. Night-time was closing in. Steve kept badgering me to tape Ray to cover our arses. But taping superiors, though prevalent at the Screws, was never my style. I still looked up to my bosses. I still trusted them.

  Whatever he meant, we took it that Ray was saying that a picture could be stunted and he was OK with that. Engineered = set-up = fabricated, to our minds. Ray wasn’t exactly being explicit, but he was nodding us in a certain direction. That’s what I concluded, anyway.

  Either way, it didn’t really matter to me, to be honest. By that time, I’d already made up my mind that a picture of the Beast would have to be stunted. Even before the conversation with Ray. It was inevitable. Surely, that’s what everyone wants, I concluded. If you send Sherlock Holmes to Cornwall, you want a stupid picture of the Beast. It’s that simple, isn’t it?

  The more I thought about it, the more I rationalised that Ray wanted me to stunt it. Maybe he and Rebekah knew that I was a demon stunt-up merchant all along. Maybe they had seen through the Nazi E-peddler, the fake-gun dealer and Princess Di’s unofficial cannabis farm, from the outset. Realised that they were great pieces of fiction from the off, and come up with idea of Sherlock as a harmless outlet for my talents. That’s what good managers do, isn’t it? Bring out the best in their staff.

  Afterwards, both Steve and I had a long discussion. Steve was under the impression that both Ray and Rebekah were in on it together. My position was slightly different. I thought that Ray was trying to inspire us to stunt, push us in that direction without actually saying it direct. Re Rebekah – I didn’t believe that she had ordered Ray to ask us to stunt it. She did, however, create the right conditions for it to happen. By applying pressure. Forcing us into a corner. Where we’d feel we’d have no option. We both concluded that we’d sleep on it over the weekend. Then, if nothing changed, if the pressure kept up, we’d have no option but to stunt a picture the following week. We didn’t know exactly how, yet. But again, we both agreed to plot and scheme on some options over the weekend. We both agreed to go back to London for a couple of days. Covering each other’s backs if the desk called to check that we were still down in Cornwall. That night Steve headed off back to his plush property in Pinner. He was greatly relieved. He’d been extremely pissed off– the monstrous weather, the stress, the constant phone calls from the NoTW.

  Triggered by my own stress, the virus crept back. Pressure on the back of the skull. Dark veil spreading over my frontal lobes. A raging heat infesting the front of my brain. I retreated into my mental cave to fight it. I couldn’t face going back to Watford to see Angela. One time I’d gone back and found a young millionaire Apprentice-type getting dressed in the living room. I didn’t go mad – I just went over to the fridge, popped open a couple of Pils and sat down with him.‘ How’s business?’ I asked. Turned out he owned a merchandising franchise for a Formula One team.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll bring you a baseball cap, next time I come round.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  Another time, I found her and Pulp’s coke dealer, snorting off the five-grand glass table in the kitchen. The drug dealer started lecturing me for treating Angela badly. I just kept looking at my reflection in the smoked sheen of the table top, thinking: ‘What the fuck is going on here?’

  I stayed down in Cornwall. Lost and alone. The disease making me reactionary and angry – and for some mad reason sexually heightened as well. Like a predator roaming the moors, I tapped up a couple of girls I knew down there. One was the girlfriend of an old mate, a photographer called Shadow. Buxom blonde-type and an outrageous flirt. Played heavily on the devilish country girl thing. That was her hustle. She’d first come on to me in the Good Mixer pub in Camden one night. Blowing me kisses – and her digits – behind Shadow’s back. Asking me to call her in sign language whilst flustering up her skirts. I’d always resisted because Shadow was such a nice feller. Now in my deranged werewolfian trance, it was a case of lock up your daughters. But when the time came, when the Beast came on to the phone breathing heavily, Little Bo Peep was too scared to come out to play. All talk. Another girl, who I knew from my agency days in Bristol, said she had settled down now and couldn’t even slip out for a drink these days. The whole world seemed to be growing up and playing house. For me, anything outside my hotel room was too much reality. I like to stay inside, concocting fairy stories for a living. Like a lost soul, I headed to Newquay to get pissed. To cop for a slag, on my Todd.

  Like a rabbit, I couldn’t stay still. Darting from one impulse to another. Got to stay on the move. That was my medicine. On Sunday morning, I headed back to Watford. The transitory hope of the train giving me consolation. Being Oscar Mike stopped me from having to think about anything.

  I spent the rest of Sunday and Monday crashed on the couch. Landline chinned up against my ear. Ringing round to find a stuffed puma which I could take back down to Cornwall on Tuesday. By this time, I’d deffo lost it. In the field without any reasonable command or control.

  I phoned my old stunt-up compadre Gav.

  ‘I want you to get your hands on a prop for me,’ I asked. ‘No expense spared, and I’ll pay you well. D’you get me?’

  ‘OK, mate,’ said Gav. ‘No probs.’

  ‘It’s got to be a stuffed puma, OK? Failing that, a tiger or a panther or something in that mould, d’youknoworramean?’

  ‘What about a lion?’ Gav asked.

/>   ‘Yes, if it’s a girl one. But it can’t be a King-of the-Jungle one. As that’ll be too mad.’

  ‘More low-key, like a leopard, I get you?’

  ‘Yes, keep it a bit real, d’you know what I’m saying? It can’t have a big main or hair around it, like in the cartoons. That’ll look too on top.’ I pictured myself getting back on the train to Bodmin. A big cat under my arm with its legs sticking out of the brown paper.

  ‘OK I’ve got it now. Who d’you think will have one, mate?’

  Pangs of impatience welled up. Spikier than usual, sharpened hot by the virus. Dealing with Untermenschen, who weren’t as resourceful as my good self, was a burden. Asking loads of questions. Holding their hands like on their first day of nursery. Get a job with the council, if you can’t figure these things out for yourself.

  ‘Firstly, try some prop-finders,’ I sighed wearily. ‘They are specialist set designers, companies that supply objects to film sets and the telly and that. From hats, to cars to blow-up dolls – whatever is needed to make something look right. Like an Aladdin’s cave – they’ve got everything. If they haven’t, for some reason, then try the museums – they’ll rent out some of their dead animals, if you ask them nicely.’ I remember paying Bristol City Museum a few quid. For lending me a stuffed bat in a glass case and a little robin nailed to a perch. At the agency, we set up a picture of them, together in a cage. Lied to the papers that they were alive and said they were mates. It was at the time of all those Batman and Robin films. So it tied in with all the hype around that.

  ‘Then obviously try the taxidermists and the county homes and things.’

  ‘OK, mate. I’ll give it a whirl.’

  ‘I’d do it myself, but this one is double-secret. You’ve got to put in the calls and front it, so there’s no connection to me, because I’ll be using it in a story next week.’

  Then I rang Steve and told him what I was doing. But Gav’s search proved fruitless. No one in Britain had a stuffed big cat for hire that week. Gav called me on Monday night with the bad news.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, mate. You’re getting lazy,’ I told him. Gav had recently moved to West Hampstead. It was all bottles of wine and spag bol. Hippy teachers and so on.

  ‘I was relying on you.’ Phone down. I rang Steve immediately.

  ‘Sorry, mate, I can’t get one,’ I told him, deflated with failure. I bet he was used to Mazher, getting him anything he wanted.

  ‘It’s OK, mate,’ Steve consoled. ‘It was a long shot anyway.’

  ‘What about using a cardboard cutout?’ I suggested.

  ‘What do you mean, mate?’

  ‘Like a life-sized outline of a cat, kind-of-thing, cut out in plywood or something. We could paint it black, like a silhouette and put it far away behind a hedge. Snatch it from a distance. That’ll do, won’t it?’

  ‘No, it’s not going to work, mate – it will stand out a mile. Too suss.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to have come up with something. And fast, because we’ve got to be back in Cornwall tomorrow. And you-know-who will be on the phone early doors, wanting a big piece of meat to throw at Rebekah.’ The spectre of Ray was hanging over us, hollowing our stomachs like Physics homework on a Sunday night.

  ‘Well, it’s going to have to be Plan B, isn’t?’ Steve said.

  ‘Do you mean the other Plan B we spoke about last week?’

  ‘Yes, mate.’

  ‘Well that’s that, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘No option, have we?’

  ‘’Fraid so, mate,’ Steve said. ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning and we’ll have a chat about it on the way back down.’

  24

  Dartmoor

  Plan B was simple. Locate a puma in a safari park. Take a picture. Pretend it was the Beast of Bodmin.

  The difficulty lay in maintaining the hoax. Believability depended 50 per cent on technical details. Twenty-five per cent on blagging skills (convincing the Desk that we’d actually seen a wild animal on the moors and snapped it). Then, most crucially, 25 per cent on Steve’s authority. As Senior Investigative Photographer at the News of the World, if Steve Grayson put his name to the picture, then the grown-ups back in Wapping were more likely to swallow it. After all, Steve’s cop-show-style partner back in the world was none other than the legendary Mazher Mahmood. The Investigations Editor no less. The Fake Sheik, for fuck’s sake. Together, they had broken some of the biggest stories in the history of the paper. Steve’s Big Top Operator status sucked up privileges like a life peer. Reporting less to the minions on the Picture Desk. Often going over their heads. Direct to the Editor. Even the Cunt was an open door to him – I’d seen Steve wander in. Slide contemptuously into one of his chairs. Tap him up for a fireside chat. Steve’s professional pull was the keystone. The wedge of trust holding the whole caper up. For the common good, he had to remain strong.

  For the five-hour journey back to Cornwall, we tilled over all the angles like Farmer Giles.

  ‘Obviously, the most important thing,’ I said, ‘is that the safari park isn’t recognised in the background.’ Bombing down the M4, Steve turned to me wide-eyed and nodded madly, as though I was stating the obvious.

  ‘That it’s bland enough,’ I continued, ‘so that we can match it up with a similar landscape in Cornwall.’

  ‘Yeah, course,’ agreed Steve. ‘It’s got to be just grass or trees or something.’ Under no circumstances could there be identifiable topography, such as fences, cages, buildings, telephone poles and pylons clueing-up the scenery for nay-sayers to latch on to later. Easily recognisable hills and roads and stand-out foliage, such as lone trees and rare plants, would also have to be avoided at all costs.

  ‘And it goes without saying,’ I carried on, ‘that we don’t want to ID the puma as one that belongs to a particular zoo. That’d be fucking suicide, wouldn’t it? So it can’t have any distinguishing marks on it. We can’t have some ball-bag zookeeper seeing his puma in the paper and saying, “That’s my Elsa” or something. Then we’d be fucked, d’you know where I’m going?’

  ‘Like I’ve said,’ Steve added, ‘we’re best snatching it at a distance.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So that it just looks like a generic pic of a puma, roaming around.’

  An amorphous image of a Big Cat. Could be anywhere or anything. But because the News of the World are saying it’s the Beast, it’s the Beast. And that’s that. Who’s gonna say it’s not? We’re the News of the World. If you say otherwise, we’ll destroy your life.

  By the time we got to Exeter, our spirits were high. Excessively inflated by the warm glow of conspiracy. At the service station, I jumped out of the car readily. To get Steve a cup of tea. Eager to please. Feeling important that I was part of the plan. Comfortable that I was in safe hands. Of a VIP. The old biddies, in the queue for the till, made me impatient. The salesmen, with their tedious lives, shuffling about. Mugs who didn’t know the score. As we got off, Steve seriously hoped that, in the end, it wouldn’t have to come to down to Plan B.

  ‘Maybe,’ he mused, ‘Ray has calmed down over the weekend . . . and it’s all been forgotten about now, d’youknowwhatImean? Hopefully, when you speak to him, we’ll get pulled off.’ But checking in with Ray was a brisk formality. During the call, he still sounded pissed off. Rebekah was still keen on the Beast, he said. Obvious that she still wanted a picture of a mystery cat. Plan B hadn’t been a forgone conclusion up until that point. But in a way, now it was a relief. To know for sure that, finally, we’d have to put it into action. At least we had a firm objective. It seemed that Steve and I had talked about Plan B for so long that morning, on top of the several days of exploring the stuffed animal option, that in truth it felt as though we were already committed. That’s the way you think when you’re a young reporter. Once you’ve spent time on an angle, it’s hard to give it up. Even though the results might be bad. A kind of self-destructive tendency.

  Arriving back at the hotel in Bodmin, I did a ring-round of all the zoos
I knew. Dartmoor Wildlife Park, on Exmoor, was the nearest facility containing pumas. Over the phone, the woman told me that the big cats were in pens, like giant cages. I preferred to go to a proper safari park, I told Steve. Where the big cats roamed more or less free over acres of territory. But they were miles away up north and no one could be arsed. That’s the problem with Cornwall – it’s fucking miles away from everywhere.

  During the day I checked in with Ray. He was still pushing but was also telling us to rejig last week’s piece to make it better. I had a solution but I couldn’t tell him just yet.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told Ray, bursting to tell him that everything was going to work out just great.

  ‘I think we’ll get some good stuff. It’s all in hand, we’re following some fresh leads. We’ve got some info on new sightings.’ I remember Ray being slightly sceptical.

  The next day we drove up to the zoo, around five miles away from Plymouth. On the way, Steve made an unusual decision.

  ‘I’m going to shoot it on digital,’ he announced.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, slightly alarmed at this last-minute aberration. Digital cameras were in their infancy. Very few Fleet Street snappers used them routinely. The picture quality was low and the cost high. Steve had been given one free by the News of the World only because he was so important.