Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  ‘We’d like you to just cast your eyes around some of the people who may have had access to last night’s film,’ Kinney told Huckle again as they rode up in the lift. The security man shook his head soundlessly in an expression which might have signified any one of a number of emotions. He clearly didn’t like the duties he was being asked to perform that morning, an aversion which Huckle could well appreciate upon meeting the telecine room staff. It wasn’t that they were hostile: on the contrary they were very co-operative. But there was something of the spirit of technological elitism about them. Kinney, the security man and Huckle were outsiders who were trespassing. All morning the staff had been questioned and cross-questioned by different detectives, and now here they were again being spied upon. No one had any idea who might have tampered with the film, but because the guilt for what had happened fell collectively upon all of them they had quickly developed a jaunty we’ll-all-hang-together attitude. Kinney didn’t expect Huckle to be able to help (as he couldn’t, since none of the twelve members of the staff on duty bore any resemblance whatsoever to the mystery blonde) but it was a task which had to be covered.

  One hundred and fifty feet below Green Park Carol McGough sat watchfully in her Piccadilly Line carriage, her knees crossed rigidly, her frown behind her glasses hiding the misgivings she was feeling about her situation. It was ten-thirty, and her first story about commuter reaction had already been filed. Now she was doing a round up on the vigilance of the London Transport Underground staff.

  This was the one job she would not have chosen. Habitually a bus and taxi traveller she only ventured into the gloom under London when duty insisted on it. Today of all days she had particular reason to wish herself up on the surface. If she managed to concentrate on the job she would be all right, she told herself. If she didn’t, her imagination would chase her towards claustrophobic hysteria.

  As the train pulled out of Green Park and headed towards Piccadilly Circus she made a mental inventory of her fellow travellers. There were five women, aged between about twenty-five and sixty, who looked like clerical workers, an Indian girl in a sari, two Asian teenage girls, four African students, three young men who might have been trainee account executives, a school girl in a grey uniform and an elderly gentleman in a neat dark suit.

  Thinking how grateful she was that it had turned out to be an uneventful morning, she did not at first see the girl in the sari get out of her seat, and walk past her to the end door of the carriage, two empty seats away from where Carol was sitting. By now the train was drawing into Piccadilly Circus. Carol decided to get off when it reached Holborn in three stops and walk through the back streets of Lincoln’s Inn down to Fleet Street. The exercise would calm her down.

  The train was slowing down now. ‘Excuse me, is this your bag?’ The Indian girl was leaning over Carol, holding a blue airline bag by the strap so that it swung backwards and forwards in the movement of the train.

  ‘I’m sorry …?’ Carol was momentarily confused.

  ‘This bag … it was by the door. It isn’t yours …?’

  Carol felt an uncontrollable tremor pass under her heart, and the muscles of her stomach crushed tightly together. ‘Put it down,’ she half-whispered, not knowing why quietness should be of any virtue. The blue bag swung backwards and forwards carelessly in the girl’s grasp, as she hung on to a hand strap that looped from the ceiling. ‘Please! Put it down,’ she repeated. The girl looked mystified. ‘It may be a bomb,’ hissed Carol finally.

  The girl’s expression was one of surprise and amusement, and suddenly fear. Then as the train lurched when the driver applied the brakes she lost her hold on the leather hoop and went stumbling and falling down the carriage, the blue bag along with her.

  Further down the carriage one of the middle-aged women looked up, saw the tumbling girl and bag and screamed. Someone else leapt for the communication handle and pulling it down was immediately thrown away from it as the automatic safety brakes came into operation with a tearing, screaming sound as the wheels shuddered to a halt. The train was already far into the station, only the last carriage remaining partly in the tunnel, and almost immediately the doors slid open to let the terrified passengers escape.

  Carol got to her feet and bent over the Indian girl, whose sari was twisted around her where she had fallen, and who now looked almost too frightened to stand. Hardly daring to look at the blue bag, Carol helped the girl to her feet. Together they followed the rest of the passengers out of the carriage.

  On the platform they were met by the guard: ‘Who pulled the handle? Was it you?’ He was a handsome West Indian, whose face was now alert with danger.

  ‘No,’ said Carol. ‘Somebody panicked. We found a bag. It’s in there.’ She pointed over her shoulder.

  ‘Let’s get right away then, please. Okay?’ The guard was taking control of the situation.

  At that moment two policemen began running down the platform towards them, while from the loudspeakers came directions to give some order to the evacuation: ‘Don’t panic. Walk quickly towards the stairs. But don’t panic. Make room for the police.’

  Carol and the Indian girl began to walk in the direction of the escalator.

  ‘You married?’ Huckle asked, thinking it was about time that he began to learn something about a man who clearly knew a great deal about him.

  ‘No.’ Kinney shook his head, his eyes passing round the BBC Club like a radar scanner.

  As an added insurance against the possibility of missing something at Television Centre, Kinney had suggested to Huckle that they spend twenty minutes or so in the bar before returning to their duties. The odds against it being of any value were long, but as they were both there it was a chance worth taking. Huckle rarely needed much encouragement to enter a bar. The BBC security man, embarrassed by what he clearly saw as an invasion of his territory, had tried to suggest that as neither men were members of the Club that might be difficult, but a long searching look from Kinney had quickly changed his mind, and he had obligingly signed them in before saying that perhaps he ought to check back with his seniors. Neither man had attempted to stop him, and once alone Huckle had ordered them both lagers. Then with backs to the bar, almost like a couple of youths at a Saturday night dance, they took a long look around the lunchtime revellers: Huckle marvelling, as always, at how much like a university bar or middle-age youth club it was, while Kinney’s eyes missed the girls’ legs and studied only their faces.

  ‘Good pulling place this,’ said Huckle after a moment. It was. There always seemed to be a healthy number of pretty secretaries and programme assistants. One certain way to advancement if you happened to be pretty and bright and secretarial and ambitious was by way of employment at Television Centre. If you can’t do it yourself, at least you can marry it, had always seemed an appropriate motto for the girls from Lucy Clayton’s who made their way west for employment. ‘There is one snag though …’

  ‘What’s that?’ Kinney wasn’t really interested in talking about women. PUMA was his job, but at the moment Huckle was part of his job.

  ‘Well, you saw how this building is circular … built like a ring. The story goes that that’s because most relationships that develop here tend to be between ladies and gentlemen who work on the same floor. Should any one of them introduce some antisocial disease into the circle then eventually it will work its way round the building until it ends up infecting the original guilty party again. And that’s true. You can ask anyone here. It’s been known to happen.’

  Kinney smiled, although he wasn’t amused at Huckle’s vulgarity. ‘You’ve got a very pretty wife,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve met her?’

  ‘We had to check your story …’

  Huckle nodded: ‘Of course. Yes, she’s pretty, all right. Perfect actually. Too good for me.’

  ‘She kicked you out?’

  Huckle ignored the slight trace of scorn in Kinney’s voice: ‘No. If you want to know I’ll tell you. I kicked myself o
ut. If you’re not married you probably won’t understand this, but I got to the stage where I admired her too much, maybe in a way I loved her too much, to allow myself to go on humiliating her. And the children. The whole family was being humiliated by my behaviour.’ He paused for a moment and wondered why he was telling this policeman these things. He had never even put it in such self-abusing terms to Winston. Maybe he was still under some kind of shock. But he continued all the same. ‘Before you get married you mess around a bit, and you think you’ve got it worked out of your system. You know? Then along comes a girl you think you want to marry, and she thinks so, too. So there you are. And for a while it’s okay, there are a couple of kids, and you’re doing well. Then for some reason you start again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t answer that. I mean, I suppose you start again because you want to. You miss the chase, the excitement. You get bored with the same old thighs … and then she gets bored with the same old lies. There’s no answer.’

  ‘Is it worth it?’

  ‘If you mean is what I’ve got now better than what I had before, the answer has to be no. Of course not. But what I had before wasn’t right either. Not for me. It is for some people. You got a girl friend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you gay?’

  Huckle enjoyed Kinney’s surprise, and the haste with which he denied the suggestion. ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘D’you want another drink?’

  ‘I’ll buy it.’

  ‘Okay, same again.’

  Kinney ordered the drinks while Huckle watched him. He was a strange, inscrutable little man, and Huckle couldn’t readily figure him out.

  ‘This hasn’t got much to do with PUMA,’ said Kinney, as he slid another pint of lager along the bar towards Huckle.

  ‘Well, she’s not in here, if that’s what you’re meaning,’ replied Huckle, taking another long glance over jolly Corporation staff. ‘We’d better get back when we’ve had this.’

  Kinney nodded soberly, his head moving as though it might be worked by strings that ran down his hair and under his collar at the back. ‘So you don’t recommend marriage?’

  Not for you, you cold-hearted bastard, Huckle thought to himself; but he said: ‘I recommend it completely, so long as you know when it’s not working and can get out before you start driving everyone insane. The only person I’ll drive crazy now is myself. Susan and the kids - they’ll be okay. As a principle monogamy is perfect. But in fact it doesn’t work for everyone. And it doesn’t work for me. For Susan it does work. She was lucky that way.’

  ‘Would you get married again?’ Kinney was asking no more than polite questions, but Huckle quite liked talking to him. He got the feeling that Kinney was only half-listening as his gaze continued to sweep around the bar, but that was all Huckle wanted. To have admitted so many things to a friend would have been almost embarrassing.

  ‘No. I’m no good at it. We’re not even divorced. When Susan asks for it, I’ll be ready though.’

  ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ asked Kinney.

  Huckle looked at him. ‘Because you’re there,’ he said.

  Piccadilly Circus Underground station was in chaos. By the time the passengers from the train on which Carol McGough had been riding reached the top of the escalators the ticket area was filling with police, as the entrances and exits were blocked and the station closed. For the next half hour, while bomb disposal officers examined and then opened the blue bag, hundreds of names and addresses of travellers were taken before they were allowed out on to the street to continue their journeys by bus. At one point Carol telephoned Mitford and explained what had happened and had filed a story about panic in the Underground (omitting to mention that she had played not a little part in causing it), and had then been told to stay at the station until it was clear what was inside the bag.

  At eleven-fifteen she got her answer: a descant recorder, a geometry set, a box of water colour paints, a plastic sandwich box containing corned beef sandwiches, three exercise books belonging to someone called Jenny Baker, a pencil box and an apple.

  There was no bomb. But there had been a lot of panic.

  Carol went back to the telephone to call the office.

  ‘It wasn’t a bomb,’ she told Mitford.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Someone’s lunch … a schoolgirl’s lunch.’

  Down the phone she thought she heard Mitford laughing to one of his colleagues. She knew they would be laughing. ‘Okay. Never mind that. Have you seen any signs of any manifestoes?’

  ‘What manifestoes?’ Carol was puzzled.

  Mitford suddenly sounded annoyed. ‘PUMA manifestoes! While you’ve been causing chaos at Piccadilly Circus people have been finding PUMA manifestoes on half the trains in London.’

  Chapter Six

  It wasn’t often that editor John Lloyd held a conference so late in the afternoon, and the invitation to heads of departments to attend a meeting in his office immediately after the last edition had raised some bleary eyebrows among the senior sub-editors and news-staff on duty that day.

  It had been a good day for London news. The circulation department had added a further 40,000 to the run of the last edition, and as the chief sub-editor and deputy editor compared their day’s work with that of their rivals they both felt a slight buzz of exhilaration.

  Once again PUMA had taken all the headlines: but this time without damage to anyone or anything. Several other bomb scares throughout the day had been reported, all of which had had to be investigated, and all of which proved negative. By the weapon of threat PUMA had managed to disrupt a large part of the Underground system, thus tying-up considerable numbers of police, and unnerving several thousand travellers. Had they indeed planted a bomb they could scarcely have had greater success. The widespread dissemination of the closely typed sheets of paper, which bore the title PUMA Manifesto and had as its emblem the same leaping black cat bearing the machine-gun as had been seen on television the night before, demonstrated that, whoever or whatever PUMA was, it certainly consisted of a number of well-organized people, rather than one or two dissatisfied outlaws. What’s more, they seemed to be an invisible enemy. No one had seen anyone distributing manifestoes, but they had been found on thirteen different trains and at five different stations. To Tube travellers the anonymity of PUMA made their threats additionally disturbing.

  But it was the content of the manifesto which had prompted the editor to call his conference. When he had first seen it, brought into the office by a secretary in a law firm who was promptly paid £25 for her help, his first thought had been that it was another hoax. Ever since the name PUMA had been first linked to the terrorist activities, the switchboards of all the newspapers in London had been lighting up repeatedly with calls from hoaxers. Generally they were easy to spot - the callers betraying themselves by the menace which they tried to inject into their voices - but no one could ever be sure and all the warnings were duly passed on to Scotland Yard. Now this written manifesto might be no more than a similar hoax. But even as he was studying it and balancing in his mind the value of putting a photocopy on the front page, a flash was being tapped out over the teletype machine from the Press Association asking all editors to refrain from running the manifesto while enquiries were being made. Clearly the Bomb Squad were taking it seriously.

  Lloyd swore to himself about what looked almost like obstructive behaviour on the part of the police. There was, however, no indication that reference should not be made to the finding of the manifesto, nor to the broad nature of its contents, so sitting down with Mitford they concocted the bones of a story, which would give the public some indication that something was going on, without actually ignoring the police directive. At the same time other editors up and down Fleet Street were performing similar feats of literary sleight of hand in their attempt to inform the public (and sell their wares) without interfering with the police investigations.

  It was not di
fficult since the manifesto consisted of little more than a series of cliched threats and promises of support for other world terrorists. Yet, anxious not to miss any possible leads, the two men had read very carefully through the text several times before writing their story:

  The PUMA Manifesto

  We are the voice of the oppressed peoples of the world, the truly silent majority who go unheard because it is in the interests of the oppressors to remain deaf to their cries.

  We are the voice of truth. Throughout civilization the rich and the powerful have been able to maintain their positions only by lies and deceit. The true and good people are the victims of centuries of verbal camouflage. They have never known the truth about their situation because they have never been allowed to see it.

  PUMA is the truth: the people’s truth.

  Our war is against the media, the chief instrument of the capitalist pig classes for maintaining the status quo.

  We will fight false prophets and they shall receive the ultimate punishment according to their crimes against the people.

  We are in a state of war with those newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television stations whose purpose is to dupe the people. They are the enemies of the people, because it is through them that the ramparts of capitalism, elitism, sexism, racism and fascism are reinforced. Instead of the truth the people are presented every day with a diverting spectacle, an entertainment in deception, compiled and disseminated with the sole purpose of keeping the people in ignorance.

  We salute our allies in the fight against oppression: we salute the heroes of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; we salute Bill and Emily Harris and the Symbionese Liberation Army; we support the Baader-Meinhof heroes, the Basque separatists, the Turkish People’s Liberation Army; the Black Liberation Army; the Red Army of Japan; and we send salutations to the gallant Irishmen of the Provisionals in their struggle against the occupying army of the British ruling class.

  There is no other way but the path of revolution. We abhor violence, but there can be no victory without violence, and we are prepared to lay down our lives in the name of freedom from tyranny. A valiant few must die in any struggle, but their deaths will only make stronger the living.