Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  The phone rang several times before the bleary voice of the detective mumbled a greeting. This was the third night in a row that he had been woken up. He was sure it must be Howlett again, and although still in a state of semi-sleep he was ready to sound as polite as he could.

  ‘Kinney, it’s Huckle.’

  The intended politeness went out of Kinney’s mind. ‘What the bloody hell do you want now?’

  ‘I have something I think you ought to hear. Can you come over?’

  ‘Now?’ Kinney looked at his watch. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think it’s a lady puma,’ said Huckle.

  Kinney was at the flat in twenty minutes, banging on the door. Huckle had double-locked and bolted it immediately after calling him. When he was sure that it was indeed Kinney, he let the short and skeletal policeman in.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, handing Kinney a brandy specially poured to revive the man. He turned on the tape recorder. Like a gnome Kinney sat on the edge of the settee and listened to the recording, crackly from the phone but totally distinct. Huckle watched him for signs of surprise or anger, indeed just about any recognizable emotion. But he showed none.

  When it was over he stood up, walked stiffly across to the cassette player and ejected the cassette. ‘I think we should take care of this for a few days. We’ll let you have it back, of course.’

  Huckle didn’t argue. He didn’t need to. He’d already made a copy of the tape. He had a good story, and nothing was going to stop him printing it.

  ‘If I were you Huckle I’d keep on my toes now. You’re going to be in the front line. It might even be an idea if you made yourself scarce for a week or two.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Huckle was unconvinced. He wasn’t going to walk away from what looked like being the story of a lifetime.

  ‘Well, think about it anyway,’ said Kinney, swallowing the last of his drink and going back towards the door.

  Huckle shrugged. The excitement of PUMA and the girl’s call were like an irresistible urge which was tempting him nearer and nearer to the fire. He could hardly wait for the next day, to get his conversation into the paper. And just simply to see what happened.

  There’s a wonderful feeling of exhilaration in having a great story all to yourself, and Huckle had that feeling as he walked into the office at eight o’clock the following morning. All week he and Winston had been having the best of the PUMA stories, but the hunt was now on in earnest and every paper in London was digging up facts and suspicions, pictures of squatters being harrassed, theories about links with the IRA, the PLA, the Baader-Meinhof group and even some Croatian separatists. On television the nightly news feature programmes were doing specials on who and what PUMA might be, while the Anti-Terrorist Squad had been pressurized into giving daily Press conferences to keep up with developments. Terrorists at work among the people of a city provide a good story to start off with, but when those terrorists name the media as their target the media react with hysteria at being given the opportunity to put themselves on the front pages. Howlett, for his part, was living through a nightmare as every new lead came to rest quickly at a blank wall: someone, somewhere must know something about PUMA, he had said with an impassioned sincerity before the television cameras. But those who did were not telling.

  It was into this arena of mounting paranoia that Huckle took his taped telephone conversation on the Thursday morning of that winter week. After Kinney had left the night before he had purposely rebolted his door, checked the locks on the windows and then set about playing back his duplicate tape of the conversation and transcribing it into a large notebook. As he had listened again to the curious way the voice changed from a gentle flirtatious mockery to an intoning monotony he had wondered what kind of person could embrace within herself such seeming contradictions of nature. He had puzzled over what her motives for wanting to talk to him might have been. And he had wondered how she had got his phone number, since he wasn’t listed.

  He waited until he reached the office before writing up his story; he wanted first to read all the morning papers to see what angles they had before corning out with his exclusive. Winston was already sitting at his desk, following up a lead in the Daily Telegraph that the terrorists might be a Marxist-backed West Indian group of dissidents. There seemed little evidence to support such a claim, but it was one of several being put forward, and they all had to be checked.

  As Huckle reached his desk, Mitford spotted him. Looking up towards the clock which was suspended just above the chief sub’s desk he reassured himself that he wasn’t dreaming and that Huckle was actually in the office so early in the morning. Something must be on, he was sure of that. He got up and sauntered down the room towards him.

  ‘Well, a rare pleasure for the early birds.’ He was smiling. There was no real injury intended in his sarcasm. Although timekeeping had never been Huckle’s greatest asset he had others with which to compensate. Huckle didn’t answer, but, opening his briefcase, produced a pocket tape recorder containing the copy cassette.

  ‘I’ve got a present for you and the editor,’ he said. ‘Just take a listen to this.’

  Mitford picked it up and looked at it. ‘How do you work this thing?’

  ‘Winston will show you.’ Huckle put an arm around the back of Winston’s chair. Winston’s expression was a mirror of puzzlement. ‘I’d go somewhere quiet to listen to it if I were you … I’ve got a story to write.’ His behaviour was deliberately theatrical, the sort of act you can only get away with when you’re winning.

  Mitford, who had no time for playing at mystery stories, turned to Winston. ‘Do you know what this is?’

  Winston shook his head, then taking the tape recorder from Mitford he pressed the start button. The volume was turned up and the tape set at Huckle’s question: ‘Who are PUMA?’ The electrical sound of his voice cracked the office air, and a couple of sub-editors working directly behind them turned round in annoyance at the new and intrusive sound. ‘We’re the bogeymen,’ came the telephone reply once again. Mitford’s face was a stunned blank.

  ‘Not here,’ said Huckle, taking back the recorder and rewinding it to the beginning of the conversation. ‘Somewhere quiet, please …’

  ‘Come with me,’ said Mitford to Winston. Taking the tape recorder he strode away towards the editor’s office.

  By the time Mitford and Winston returned, trailing behind a beaming editor, Huckle had completed the first three folios of his story. When a story is good it writes itself. Without a word Lloyd picked up the first folio, read it and passed it on to Mitford. Winston waited for his turn, delighting in his friend’s success. All the questions which Mitford or Lloyd might have wanted to ask Huckle were answered in his copy, and so in silence they stood over him as he raced through his piece, working from his foolscap transcript and a series of notes he had made immediately after the phone call. Lloyd, who had just arrived in his office for morning conference, looked at his watch. It was almost nine by the time Huckle had finished. Carefully he tore the carbon copies away from each set of folios, and then quickly arranged the story in separate copies, one for the editor, one for the copy-taster, another for the lawyers, another for the picture desk, one for his own reference and lastly one for the chief sub-editor. At last he looked up at the hierarchy which had assembled around him.

  ‘Okay?’ he asked.

  Lloyd smiled. ‘Not bad,’ he said. And walked away to the morning conference.

  Mitford put an arm on his shoulder. ‘Wonderful, dear boy,’ he said and followed Lloyd towards the editor’s office.

  Huckle turned towards Winston. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  Winston shook his head philosophically. ‘Well, it’s been nice knowing you.’

  At lunchtime Huckle tried to call Kirsten at Grosvenor House where he knew she was working, but he was unable to reach her. He guessed that she was purposely avoiding him. All morning Howlett had been trying to reach him, but he wanted to stay out of sight until his story got on to the stree
ts. The last thing he wanted was a request from Scotland Yard to sit on the piece for a couple of days. Co-operation can only go so far. Besides, he had nothing further to add to what he had told Kinney the night before. In the absence of Kirsten he had lunch with Winston in the Hand and Shears, an ancient pre-Tudor pub behind Smith-field. Together they ate huge platefuls of red under-done beef, and treated themselves to a bottle of claret, and for once in his life Winston had more than his single customary temperate glass. In a sense it was a celebratory lunch: but the sense of danger stalking them made it also a nervous time. While Winston kept an edgy eye upon the street door, expecting almost anything to happen, Huckle day-dreamed himself into long silences. At last Winston put the direct question to him.

  ‘Are you frightened?’

  Huckle shook his head slowly, though without certainty. ‘I don’t think so. But I want to know what’s going to happen. There’s a tension about knowing so little and yet finding oneself so deeply involved. I want to know why she wanted to talk to me. Nothing seems to make any sense about PUMA, and I think that’s worrying, because whoever they are they’re probably crackers.’

  ‘I’m surprised the police haven’t put a tail on you.’

  Huckle laughed at Winston’s use of police slang. ‘You mean like pin the tail on the donkey?’ He cut into his beef thoughtfully; some blood oozed from it on to his plate, and he found himself staring at it. ‘Maybe they have, and I haven’t noticed,’ he said, more in hope than suspicion.

  ‘Why don’t you go away for a few days?’

  ‘And leave all the headlines to you and Carol McGough?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  Huckle smiled. ‘No, I know you didn’t,’ he said. ‘But I did.’

  They spent the rest of the day waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. In the afternoon Kinney called Huckle with a semi-reprimand from Howlett for taking a copy of the telephone recording, but it was clear from his tone that he was more upset at not being told about it than by the actual deed. Howlett, too, he was told, wondered what PUMA might have to say to Huckle and how they knew his telephone number. At the end of the conversation Kinney added, almost casually, that he hoped that he and Mr Collins had enjoyed their lunch at the Hand and Shears. So they are tailing me, Huckle thought. That could be embarrassing at some later date, but he’d worry about that when all this was over. In the meantime he wondered what his tail looked like, and tried to remember some of the faces he’d seen in the pub.

  Somehow the business of PUMA had thrown Huckle’s private life out of gear. Eating alone in the evenings is the desolate threat which all single men dread most, and since he had left Susan he had managed to avoid that desert of isolation by courting this girl or that, or seeing Kirsten, or going to a cocktail party or simply staying behind and getting drunk in the pub with those sub-editors who were in no haste to go home. In the past few days a couple of girls had telephoned the office and left messages for him to call back, but somehow the emotional tentacles of being tied up in the PUMA story so encompassed his interest that he ignored what, in other circumstances, would undoubtedly have been welcome invitations. Tonight he wanted to be by himself again, to think out the somersaulting events of the past few days. He had taken the car to the office, and, as he drove home, down the Mall and up Constitution Hill, he peered continually into his rear view mirror, wondering which of the hundreds of following cars contained the men who were supposed to be guarding him.

  Three cars behind in a grey Austin 1100 Detective-Constable Andrew Phillips watched the darting blue Renault as it made an opportunist’s way up to Hyde Park Corner. This was not a task he would have chosen for himself, yet another chore on the sideways stepping stones of life in the CID. Shadowing John Huckleston was hardly arduous but it was boring, and neither he nor his companion, Detective-Sergeant Graham Binns, had appreciated their lunchtime’s under-done beef one bit. They would both be glad when their replacements took over at ten o’clock. Phillips and Binns didn’t get on particularly well together and conversation between the two men during their shift had been virtually non-existent. If things didn’t improve in the next month or so Phillips would be getting out of the force altogether. He was still young enough to start a career in something which would appreciate his talents more fully, and the more he heard about the oil for tunes to be made up in Aberdeen the less attractive became the menial under-paid tasks of the Metropolitan sleuth.

  At Hyde Park Corner they followed as the Renault turned off towards Kensington where it eventually pulled to the kerb in a side alleyway off Church Street. Carefully Phillips pulled the Austin into the darkness of the alley some thirty yards further back, and the two policemen watched silently as Huckle climbed out of his car and, turning a corner, walked away from them down the pavement towards Kensington High Street. At a nod from Binns Phillips slipped quietly out of the car and along the alley in pursuit, turning the corner just in time to see Huckle entering a steak house at the corner of the alleyway and Kensington High Street. Slowly he moved past the piles of litter scattered along the rear wall of the restaurant, black plastic bags full of rotting food. Another bloody night, he thought, as he took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. He was cold and damp and bored. He would have to wait here to be sure that no harm came to Huckleston when he decided to leave the restaurant. Fifteen minutes went by and two more cigarettes. Life was so bloody dull, he thought.

  And that was the last thing he ever did think. Without his being aware that he was in danger a black shadow had moved out from the wall of the restaurant, and before he could even begin to cough up the blood which was pouring into his windpipe and lungs from the slash across his throat he was, in every physical sense, already dead.

  He had lived just three minutes longer than Detective-Sergeant Graham Binns.

  It was his first time in this particular steak house but Huckle knew well the form of being the lonely and single man. As a student he had frequently eaten alone, although rarely in steak houses, and it was not a state to which he enjoyed returning. Hanging his navy-blue overcoat on a peg in the lobby he moved down the steps of the restaurant, glancing casually around at the assorted collection of middle-aged men, also alone, and also embarrassed for themselves, hiding behind their copies of the evening newspapers, and eating with a mechanicalness which neither complimented the chef nor boded well for their stomach linings.

  He had come to the place by chance having made an inexplicable wrong turning at Hyde Park Corner, and spotting the pink lights of the restaurant as he drove past the Royal Garden Hotel. It looked an anonymous place, he thought, and driving around the block had parked behind the restaurant, wondering if the car which pulled in behind him was his police tail.

  Without bothering to consult the menu Huckle ordered his steak. He’d been in hundreds of these places before; they always served the same thing. For a steak house it was gaudily elegant, and he found himself sitting alongside an aquarium of tropical fish which swam around in the underwater lights, their mouths opening and closing like toothless infants, their tails directing them always away from the current of water that rose continually from the middle of the glass tank. It was mesmerizing to behold at such close quarters, and Huckle wished he’d chosen a table further from this tropical grotto.

  He ordered nothing for a starter and his steak appeared in a very short time accompanied by a bottle of Burgundy. The place was efficient, he thought, hardly lifting his eyes from his meal. If one had to eat alone, or wanted to eat alone, this was perfect. Quiet as a tomb, and peopled only by those so preoccupied that they scarcely noticed where they were. Even the waiters looked abstracted, the result, no doubt, of too many hours locked in with the lonely and the fishes.

  Huckle opened a baked potato further and allowed the butter to run inside, then, cutting a small piece away, he put it to his mouth. He turned once again to look at the aquarium at his shoulder. A striped sliver of a fish, shaped like a vertical sycamore leaf, seemed to be stari
ng at him. Suddenly, disturbed by a movement outside the tank, it darted away.

  ‘Now will you talk to me?’

  The potato caught in Huckle’s throat as a charge he could only describe as electrical shot through him. He swivelled his head round. There, sitting facing him at the table, was the face that in his dreams had become so familiar. The girl who looked lik Susan.

  His first reaction should have been to run, but something rooted him in his place, clutching white-fisted on to his fork and knife, his eyes riveted on the beautiful symmetry of her face. She was like Susan, or at least the way he had imagined Susan to look when he had first been in love with her, but she was taller, and more self-assured. She was looking at him with a calmness which he found incomprehensible. His eyes wandered to the right of her and he looked over her shoulder. The restaurant was still as preoccupied as the moment he had entered. All he had to do was to get up and grab her. He wondered if his table knife would serve as an adequate weapon should she prove difficult to handle. He put down his fork, but even as he did, and as though the girl were thinking exactly the same thoughts, she slowly but very firmly shook her head.

  ‘Don’t do anything silly, or I’ll shoot you,’ she said. And letting his eyes drop he saw that her hand was clenched over something hidden under a scarf just below the level of the table.

  Huckle swallowed his potato. It went down with difficulty. Somehow his larynx seemed to be blocking half his throat. The girl smiled and with her free hand poured him a glass of wine.

  ‘This should help,’ she said. Still he couldn’t take his eyes away from her. She was so beautiful, so tall and assured, with huge broad-set green eyes and a wide and curly mouth. Only her hair was not as he had remembered it. She was darker than Susan, her hair a light sandy colour of auburn that fell in self-ruling waves and curls about her face and shoulders. Again she seemed to guess what he was thinking. ‘it must have been the glow from the street lights that made you think I was blonde,’ she said.