Hack

by Graham Johnson

  ‘It’ll be easier to Photoshop the image afterwards,’ Steve explained. ‘If the puma is in a cage, there’s going to be metal bars all over the place. So I’ll have to clean it up on the computer later.’

  This worried me.

  ‘Won’t the Picture Desk be suss? If you suddenly change your usual camera, from film to digi?’

  ‘No, it’ll be OK. Trust me. If they ask, I’ll just tell them the battery went on my film camera, after we were walking around all night, looking for the Beast.’

  We’d already cooked up a basic back story to explain, when the time came, how we’d managed to get a picture of the Beast. For over a week now, we’d been telling the desk that we had been tracking the Beast at night. We’d even told them we’d bought a tent for £50, to make it more on the up-and-up. The bonus was that we were going to claim £25 quid each on expenses for the phantom nylon shelter. Going out on to the moors in the early hours. Looking for trails and listening for howls. Of course, it was all bollocks. After chicken and chips and a pint in the hotel bar, straight to bed. We’d had to lie to get Ray off our back. Anyway, the plan was simple – we were going to say that we’d snapped the Beast at dawn. On the way home to the hotel, from one of these bogus late-night missions.

  ‘The battery went?’ Sounded iffy to me. But I had to defer to superior knowledge. ‘OK, if you’re safe with that, then that’s fine.’ But it got me niggling. Maybe Steve wasn’t as streetwise as I thought he was. Me, I was a stunt-up imperator – I never went off-plan, no matter what. That’s how you got caught. That’s how easy it was for a guy to get whacked. Maybe Steve’s standards weren’t as high as mine. Maybe he’d never done a stunt-up. Maybe, God forbid, he was naive.

  Sensing my uncertainty, Steve bolstered his position: ‘The other thing is that I’ve got to think about the roll of film and the sequence of the negs. If I use a film camera, then the Desk are going to want to see all the negs. They are going to look at the order of pictures on the contact sheet, before, during and after the useable ones. And it’s fucking hard to make that look kosher.’

  He had a point.

  ‘You’ve got to understand that when we get to the zoo, I’m going to have to get loads of frames of the puma to find the one that is usable. But with film, you can’t delete the unusable ones. So it’d be obvious to anyone who saw the negs that they’d been stunted in captivity. Whereas with my digital camera, I can just delete the ones I don’t use. So it just looks like I managed to get off two or three shots of the Beast, as it’s come into view, all of a sudden.’

  ‘OK, I understand.’ You had to trust him. After all, he’d once worked as a freelance spy for the security services. Keeping an eye on foreign revolutionaries as they partied on in Soho nightclubs. In the ’70s, Steve had been a top disco DJ. Perfect cover for being on the payroll of those fat grammar schoolkids they call military intelligence.

  In the zoo’s car park, Steve rotated a shortish lens on to the digital camera body. Stashed covertly into a green plastic bag. Waltzing in with his classic canvas Billingham would have attracted too much attention.

  Drizzly Wednesday morning. A sprinkling of visitors shielded from the wind behind bare concrete walls. An old man, shod in a throw-away plastic mac that looked like a giant condom, was stooped at the entrance. A coach-load of kids crowded around the low fences of the deer sanctuary. All potential meddlers who would have to be neutralised during the business stages of the coup. Steve and I stood out like undercover coppers at a riot. Unshaven, dead-eyed city-types. Looking from side-to-side, whilst feeding the monkeys.

  Snaked up a gravelly mud path, that led to a large enclosure. Boxed in with strengthened steel mesh. A dark-coloured puma loping around inside. Geronimo! Like the SEALs, who came to smoke Osama in front of his missus, we went in for the kill. Slow is smooth. Smooth is good. The good news – there was just enough free space around the puma. If Steve got in close, with a tight shot, he could get one off without revealing too much of the background. The bad news – the resulting photo might be too much of a close-up.

  Bonus – each square of mesh, that formed the lid of the cage, measured around 10 cm by 10 cm. Just enough to partially slot the lens through. Saving Steve from having to shoot right on to it. Around the back, the access was even better. No mesh, just a dirty concrete wall. Topped off with a row of thicker steel bars. Widely spaced so that Steve could get the lens right inside. A bit further inside the bars. Not completely, so there’d still be some metal in the frame. But it was the best of a bad situation.

  We waited until the other visitors had moved on. I kept watch at the entrance to the puma enclosure, blocking the path. While Steve papped away at the rear. Darting around the outside of the cage. Scoping it from different angles.

  ‘OK, keep a close eye,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get a bit of a leg-up.’ Steve hoisted himself up the concrete wall, so he could shoot through the wide-spaced metal bars. Dangerous game – if the puma pounced, Steve’s hand was breakfast. More worryingly, he was putting himself on offer by exposing himself from the rear. As the park was on a slope he could be seen from the base at the bottom and from those higher up.

  ‘Is it going to work?’ I whispered, my adrenalin pumping.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I heard. ‘It’s hard, but if I can get a bit higher, I can get a shot that will.’

  ‘Go on then. Get up there,’ I said.

  Sure enough, Steve edged himself higher. Balancing with one foot on the concrete wall. Another precariously on the wire mesh. Cool as a cucumber. You had to admire him. Game he was. Streetwise enough not to show out. Under any circumstances.

  In the old days, they called them Luftmenschen, or ‘men of air’. The scallywags of Eastern Europe, who floated in and out of the shtetls, the poor Jewish villages. The underground fixers who lived by their wits and could get their hands on anything. Steve was a Fleet Street version of the man of air. No wonder the Screws had got their hands on him. He made things work.

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ I said. Steve jumped down. Brushed himself off. Camera stowed in the bag seamlessly. Casually we walked on as though nothing had happened.

  ‘Any good?’ I asked.

  ‘Think so, mate,’ he replied. ‘I think there’s one or two frames which might work.’

  Back to the car. Raced to the nearest pub, a large neo-Victorian Wetherspoon-style place with a yellow painted restaurant that sold cheap food. While I got the teas and scran in, Steve uploaded the images on to his Mac. The waiting was torture. I had to sit at a separate table. This could be the story that finally makes me. Or breaks me.

  ‘Here you are,’ Steve said, after about a quarter of an hour. ‘Have a look at that.’ I peeked over his shoulder.

  My heart sank. A close-up shot of the puma’s face stared back. Stretching its mouth, baring its teeth. Not quite yawning but not quite roaring either. Its pupils, like yellow jewels, beamed out from the dead centre of its eyes. A pair of perfectly erect ears stood up like pyramids on top of its head. Too close. Too ferocious. Too perfect.

  But it was the background that really fucked things up. The fluorescent quality of the digi pixels tinged the colours with an unreal, jump-out feel. A fire of streaky reds, yellows and oranges, that matched the walls of the restaurant, striped the rear. As though the puma was pouncing out of an inferno. All in all, the picture looked like a car advert or something.

  But I had to be careful not to offend Steve. After all, he’d done his level best. Under unusual and difficult circumstances.

  ‘What do you think?’ I said diplomatically. ‘Is it too close up? Too dramatic, maybe?’

  ‘See what you mean,’ mmmed Steve. ‘I’ll try ’n’ tone it down a bit, on the Photoshop.’

  ‘OK, mate.’ I said flatly. But I was still not convinced. If we sent this picture in, then we’d get wholly buzzed off. No back answers. Laughed out of court. Even air-brushed, the portrait nature of the shot was evidence of a close encounter with a puma. No other way of expla
ining it. That meant the story would no longer be just about the picture. But a whole new ballgame altogether. No longer just a third-person report. An ambiguous feature that tied in with the playful Sherlock Holmesy feel of the piece. Is this the Beast of Bodmin or not? Is this bullshit or not? A close-up spun the story into a different kind of journalistic animal altogether. Now it became a first-person account. A piece of reportage. An ‘I-came-face to-face-with-a-ferocious-mystery-beast’ kind of tale. That meant we’d have to invent not only a back-story but a first-hand account of the whole shebang.

  All the time, I’d been thinking of more of a long shot. Of a puma sneaking through some grass or in between the bushes or trees. Like the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. Where you didn’t really know what the fuck you were looking at. It was just a load of shite that you glanced at for a second. Bollocks for kids and bottom-shelf penny dreadfuls. A bit of crappy footage for Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, before Coronation Street came on. Steve’s picture, on the other hand, showed every detail. Right down to the spots on the puma’s face and the perfectly formed triangle of its nose. David Attenborough would have given it an award.

  Steve ate his burger and chips as he got busy with the Photoshop. I forked over my scampi, thinking about whether this was going to work.

  ‘Do you think we should try somewhere else?’ I suggested.

  ‘Where like?’

  ‘Well, there’s the big cats at Longleat in Wiltshire. I don’t even mind driving up to Knowsley Safari Park, just outside of Liverpool. I know it well. Went there loads of times as a kid. You can drive through these massive fields and the cats are hundreds of yards away. It’s ideal for us. Do you get me? That’s the kind of thing I had in mind.’

  ‘OK, fair enough,’ said Steve. ‘I’ll have a play around with it tonight on the computer. See if I can tone it down a bit. Make it a bit more real. We’ll see how it looks tomorrow morning. If it looks too moody, then fair enough, we’ll have another go somewhere else.’

  On the way back, we drove past Dartmoor Prison. We both laughed.

  ‘I wonder where all this is going,’ I said.

  25

  Black Thursday

  Sun up. Woke up. Sexed up. Steve’s Photoshopped puma looked a bit better in the dark dawn of a new day. But it seemed like an old decision by then, anyway. Steamrollering on regardless now. Eight hundred miles an hour. Like those marines up the Baghdad highway. The momentum of the job was in charge by this stage. Carrying us along like a pair of pricks.

  The next mission was to recce up a location. For the Close Encounter of the Furred Kind. Without too much hassle we discovered a perfect place – a dirt track, buffeted by hedges on either side. A conveniently short distance from the hotel. Credibly close to the lion’s den in the spooky copse, where we’d chiselled out the claw marks exactly one week earlier. Like the government, it was all joined-up thinking.

  We cooked up the deets. Choreographing around the scene, like a couple of homicide cops off The Wire.

  ‘Keep It Simple.’ Yawn. ‘Stupid,’ I lectured. Blowing Steve an early morning bad-breath kiss.

  ‘OK,’ he nodded, crouching down next to some tall weeds. ‘We’ll say it all kicked off at around 6.15 am – that’s about first light – when the puma loped out of the bush around here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, picking up the baton and a handful of soil on one knee. ‘Then suddenly the thing turns to us there, face-on, in the middle of the open track, because it sees us coming. Bosh! Bosh! Bosh! You get off three shots from, around 15 foot away, back there. Bingo! Job done. File by three. Home for tea.’

  ‘Then the Beast leaps back into the undergrowth here,’ finished off Steve, pointing to a hole in the bushes on the other side of the track. Whoosh! Gone! Splash! The rest is natural history.

  We rushed to fabricate the evidence. Eager to get back to the hotel before breakfast finished. Our bellies hollow with worry. If this was going to work, we’d have to ring it in soon – before conference Wapping-time in fact. Otherwise, we might miss the boat and it might get held over till next week, which was out of the question.

  I squashed down the brambles at the pretend entry and exit points on both sides of the track. Then I sculpted out a few paw prints in the mud, around the pools of rainwater on the ground.

  ‘Maybe it had stopped for a drink?’ I said.

  ‘Who the fuck knows?’ said Steve. I carried on, carefully mimicking the exact indentations that we had seen a day earlier inside the puma’s pen at the zoo. Accurate spacing was important, too, Steve reminded me, as I did so. A kind of cabin fever had set in by now – we’d been in-country too long. Operating out there, without any decent restraint. Totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.

  By half-eightish, I’d been up for nearly four hours. Mid-morning listlessness dragged under my eyes. A dry, tinny taste clagged up my mouth. My mind was saggy with sleep fog. Dozed off in the car on the way back to the hotel. But no sooner was I asleep than I was jolted awake, by Steve pulling into a sloping road, that led into a sleepy tree-lined hamlet.

  ‘OK. If we’re going to do this, we better check in now,’ he said. ‘Liz usually gets into the office around this time.’ Steve looked at me ominously. ‘OK, are you sure you want to go ahead with this?’

  My head was heavy with fatigue. But three reassuring thoughts clouded my vision. One – I’d always got away with spoofing before. Two, at the end of the day, it was only a bit of laugh, wasn’t it? And three, there were no safer hands to be in than Steve’s. While I was trying to focus, a sign appeared from God. In front of the News Int. company car that we’d brought back down from London. A jet-black cat crept out into the road. From under a tree-tangled street sign, and walked right across the lane into a yellow cottage. Of course – it was the omen for me to say ‘No’ to Steve and fuck all this madness off right now. Were we insane? What the fuck did we think we were up to? I turned to Steve.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not wanting to let anybody down. Weighed down by all the energy already spent on it so far. ‘OK, let’s do it,’ I said. But this time, I didn’t follow it with a gung-ho catchphrase like usual. There was no, ‘Let’s do it to them, before they do it to us,’ now. For some reason, my heart wasn’t in it.

  I sat in the car pathetically. While Steve wandered up and down the lane, on the moby. Gesticulating in gross motor movements, whilst telling the story to the desk. As though animation proved it was true. Journalists never like to talk to their bosses in front of anyone else. I overheard him recounting the story, first to Pictures Assistant Claire Wood, then to Act Pic Ed Liz Cocks. The gist of it was how we’d seen the Beast of Bodmin an hour or so earlier. I wound the window down to earwig.

  ‘I don’t know whether I got the picture yet,’ I heard him say. Lacing it up with false real-event uncertainty. ‘Because we’ve only just pulled off. It was fucking mad. Fucking scared shitless, d’youknowhatImean?

  ‘But anyway, fuck’s sake, we’re on the way back to the hotel now. We’re not hanging around here any longer. The fucking thing might come back and bite us on the arse. No, I’m fucking serious – it was dangerous. So I’ll see what I’ve got when I get back to the room and whack ’em over in a bit.’

  Hero or what? He came back to the car buzzing.

  ‘She was fucking ecstatic,’ he said. ‘Nearly wet her-fucking-self. They love it. Not a fucking word. If it was anyone else, she would have been, “Fuck off, you’re taking the piss. Either that, or you’ve dropped a fucking trip. It’s a fucking spoof But because it’s me, she knows it’s all on the up ’n’ up.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said.

  But already I was getting jealous. That he’d got in there first. To steal the glory of the Beast for himself. Cheeky twat. Making me look like a tool. Just down here to carry his cameras and a fresh pair of undies for him. Sleep-deprived furies were raging me up. These four-by-twos – they’re always taking your graft off you. ‘Who put this thing together, me th
at’s who?’ Tony Montana’s indignant mantra, madly looping around my head.

  Frustrated, I kept speed-dialling Ray to check in. But he kept going straight to answer machine. Impatience and fatigue were shredding my nerves. Worried, in case I got a bollocking off him. For not getting him the big news first. I didn’t want to make him look like a cunt. Walking into the office and getting ambushed unawares by Beast-mania

  Joyrided back to the hotel at car-chase speed. Steve pinged his pics in to wild applause. Then fuck. Rebekah came straight back on to him. That’s when I thought, for the first time, ‘What the fuck have we done here?’

  From then on, the conversations got very messy. Mainly because everyone had different opinions about who knew what. Steve was convinced that both Ray and Rebekah knew the pictures were stunted. I disagreed. My position was slightly more convoluted – I believed Ray was a kind of catalyst. Who’d lit the fuse. But was not responsible for the resulting explosion. That side of the Chinese Wall was down to me and Steve. I assumed Ray would twig for himself and let us crack on. However, the crucial point was this. To maintain protocol, I could only communicate with him as though he had no idea whatsoever.

  As far as Rebekah was concerned, deep down, I didn’t really think she was in on it. But I assumed she would suspect foul play because it was all so expedient and just too damned good to be true. However, I also thought that she’d wave it through with a nod and a wink. As it was a calculated risk in her own interests to do so – to get a good story. Of course, again, I would have to speak to her as though she was totally innocent as well. The script would have to play out like I was conning her. Her position was too important, too pristine to be contaminated. Like a private military contractor who was killing babies on the side, I’d have to remain reliable and deniable at all times. On her side, she’d have to reciprocate with a straight bat. Pretending to check out the story. To protect herself. But not pushing it too hard. One of the great skills of being a tabloid editor. Both Steve and I agreed that no one on the Picture Desk knew or would ever know. As was the case with Kuttner.