Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  ‘Believe me, I know this is painful for you, but we have to have completely open minds if we are ever to find out what has happened to him. I’m suggesting nothing at all. I actually like him very much. But we must know about him. We must find out everything we can. We need your help. We need all the help we can get.’

  The possibility that PUMA might have claimed their first media victim in Huckle was the official line taken by the evening papers, set out quite clearly for everyone on that Friday at another special evening conference held by editor John Lloyd. All day he had been aware that the rumour already circulating Scotland Yard, that Huckle might not be altogether innocent of his own kidnapping, had been gaining strength in Fleet Street, but he was obstinate in his refusal to listen to it. The police killings had spread the panic to Scotland Yard.

  ‘John Huckleston is no domestic, small-time Carlos or Kim Philby,’ he intoned to his assembled heads of departments that evening. ‘He has not been playing a double game, as you may no doubt be led to believe, possibly even by other newspapermen. He is a reporter on this newspaper. He is one of us. And he is missing. We must all do everything in our power to get him back safely, if that is still humanly possible.’

  The conference had broken up shortly after Lloyd’s little speech and Winston had been asked into the office. He was tired from lack of sleep and worry, and the top of his throat felt dry and unpleasant. Lloyd invited him to sit down.

  ‘You know him best. What do you think, Winston?’

  Winston shook his head. ‘I think he’s still alive. He has to be or we’d know. Everything PUMA has done has been guaranteed to grab headlines. Now they’re trying a new tactic. They’ve used the Press one way, now they’re using us in another. And I think Huckle’s probably played right into their hands by complete accident. All night long I sat up thinking about everything that had happened. When you think about it it makes a kind of sense. These guys are waging war on the mass media. So what have they done? They’ve used us against ourselves. They’ve whipped us up into some kind of frenzy, and in their way they’ve controlled us. A week ago no one had heard of PUMA. Today they grab the headlines all the time. I think probably they got mad when we didn’t publish their manifesto. They probably thought we’d be terrorized into running it, and now they think Huckle may be one way of making us do it. I don’t know who PUMA are, but I think I know their type. I think I can understand their strategy a little bit. They see revolution as inevitable; but they don’t see it as some far off thing to fight for, like the Communist Party do. To them it’s coming tomorrow. And by tomorrow I don’t mean on Sunday. I mean tomorrow - Saturday.’

  John Lloyd leaned back in his chair and studied Winston. ‘What you’re saying is you think they lack a rational view of history.’

  Jesus Christ, thought Winston. He thinks it’s a seminar. ‘Yes,’ he said weakly. ‘You could say I’m saying something like that.’

  On that Friday evening Howlett received the phone call he had been expecting all day. It was from the Home Office. The Home Secretary, he was told, was becoming increasingly worried about the apparent lack of police success in providing hard information about these terrorists who were calling themselves PUMA. It was a patronizing call, a call intended to galvanize Howlett into action. Howlett knew in his heart that it was a political move as much as anything. But it was irritating. He tried to explain: how for every step forward his men made they seemed to be taking one to the left, two back and three to the right. Nothing was making sense and the sparseness of information about PUMA was a sheer enigma. There was no way that he could make any optimistic announcement about early arrests because, saving a miracle, that just wasn’t on the cards. There were no leads that meant anything to him or his group of experts who had been covering terrorist activities in London since the early seventies.

  That was more than unusual: it was bewildering, because there ought to have been. Urban guerillas don’t just sprout up overnight: they have to mature from being political protestors, to becoming activists, to becoming terrorists. Yet none of the likely areas of protest had ever heard of a group calling themselves PUMA. A few years ago it would have been possible for these people to have existed without the police knowing about them, but since the Angry Brigade activities in London in 1971 and the Carlos affair in 1975 the political underground had been infiltrated by police informers. The information he was getting back was that while PUMA appeared to be attracting a certain amount of sympathy for its goals in attacking the media, there was scant respect for the wave of killing which had accompanied the campaign. He didn’t doubt that there were people who applauded the killing of policemen and pornographers and even innocent passers-by, but the ignorance of the underground about the identity of PUMA was just as complete as at Scotland Yard.

  At this point the gentleman from the Home Office decided that he had heard enough. He ended his conversation with an exhortation for Howlett not to waste a second longer than was necessary in apprehending these people. To which Howlett replied that he hoped the minister could have every confidence in him to do his job efficiently without outside interference. The last thing he wanted was for someone to suggest that the police were unable to carry out the operation without the help of the military. He already had thirty-five officers working on the case, from explosives experts who were taking apart every inch of the car bombed on the Sunday evening, to simple foot-in-the-door men. Eventually something must give him a lead. Someone would let something slip: the detonators, which were Czech-made would be traced; the Xerox machine, which had reproduced so many copies of the manifesto, would be discovered; the person who had tampered with The Third Man would be identified; the couple in the restaurant would be named; and what about Huckle - his disappearance must lead to something. There just had to be a lead somewhere. The whole affair was too secret. It almost made him suspicious of himself.

  To Winston it seemed that a sudden blanket had fallen over the PUMA story with the disappearance of Huckle. Friday brought no new developments, only the proliferation of rumour. At the start of the week he had been charged with excitement at the chance to be covering the story which was currently on the lips of every Londoner. It had been fun. He didn’t know Sheila Fairclough and he was sorry for her, but her death and the birth of PUMA had been an exhilaration. Now, after the disappearance of Huckle and the three murders in twenty-four hours, it had become a nightmare. Yet suddenly nothing was happening, at a time when things ought to be.

  He sat at home alone on the Friday evening. There was nothing he wanted to do. Twice during the day he had taken a cab down to the restaurant in Kensington to try to talk with the waiter, or indeed anyone who might have been around the night before, but the police had hidden the man away ‘for his own safety’, they said, and no one else in the area had seen anything or been near the steak house at the appropriate time. Now the steak house was closed on orders from the central office in Mayfair. Kidnappings and murder were bad for business, and it only seemed decent to close the premises while the public had time to forget.

  He wondered whether he should telephone Susan, but she would only be waiting for good news and he didn’t have any to offer. He had met Kirsten only once, but since Huckle had never spoken about her it would never have occurred to him to telephone her.

  It would have been nice if he had done. In her room, in the flat she shared in Battersea, she waited a lonely weekend with the radio, the television and the newspapers and hoped for something.

  For Susan the weekend was the worst part of it. On Friday the house was virtually put under a state of siege by photographers and television news camera teams wanting to get pictures of her and the children as they waited for news. But by Saturday evening, when all the papers had had their bite of that particular apple and the television channels had shown film of the children peering through the windows of their home, they were left alone, and the long wait for news set in. For a day and a half the phone had rung constantly from friends, telling her
not to worry; sympathizers who had never been friends but who felt that they ought to express something; police, and reporters. Then as the weekend came fully upon them the calls stopped.

  By Sunday, with no new developments the PUMA headlines were a little smaller. Saturday was unusually busy for news, with the crash landing of a British Airways Trident in Normandy, a flare-up reported to be imminent in the Middle East, a new strike at Fords of Dagenham, questions over the future yield of North Sea oil following the leaking of a secret Government document to the Observer, and fourteen sendings-off and eighty-four arrests in one of the most violent days of the football season. Several politicians, spurred on by the excesses of their more outspoken colleagues, made some unhealthy political capital out of the PUMA affair in their Saturday constituency speeches, but by and large it was left to the feature writers and investigation teams to fill countless columns of inside pages with details of how the police were doing their work, and chronological accounts of the story so far.

  Susan, Winston and Kirsten read all the papers almost simultaneously. There was nothing much else they could do. To Susan and Winston the lack of news was the most worrying factor. They knew that Scotland Yard was doing as much to find the killers as was possible, but the silence meant that the possibilities of their finding Huckle were getting fewer, and the odds against his surviving growing longer. On Sunday evening Susan phoned Winston. It was the first contact between the two. At first she was embarrassed to have called, but sensing his own awkwardness, she quickly recovered. ‘I simply wanted to talk to someone,’ she told him. ‘Someone who knows Huckle.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Winston. ‘I know how you feel. I thought of calling you, but I knew you’d only be disappointed when I had nothing to tell you.’

  ‘What do you think is really happening?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean?’

  ‘I mean, do you think he’s still alive … I know I shouldn’t ask. We’re not even married any more … not really. I’m sure he’s got someone far closer to him than I am now, but the worry is driving me out of my mind.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s alive,’ said Winston.

  ‘But how can you be so sure?’ He could hear that Susan was on the point of breaking down.

  ‘Because if he wasn’t his body would have been found by now,’ he said as calmly as he could. And he prayed that he was right.

  The Monday morning editorial conference was a sober affair. Somehow everyone present had to drag their minds away from PUMA and Huckle and back to their main job of running a newspaper. Although other news had not been neglected during the past week it had more or less run itself, while everyone’s minds had been turned towards PUMA. Now John Lloyd had to bring his staff back to earth.

  ‘Life has to go on,’ said Lloyd, ‘but whatever happens we must keep Huckle on the front page for as long as there is any hope for him.’

  The chief sub nodded gravely, wondering secretly just how long that would be in the event of another big news story breaking in the next couple of days.

  ‘I suggest we keep Winston Collins working on the PUMA story full time,’ said Mitford. He felt he owed it to Winston not to clutter up his brain with some petty GLC meeting about Covent Garden or an Inner London Education row when his thoughts were obviously so singly channelled.

  Lloyd nodded and stood up, signalling that the meeting was over. The assembled staff began to climb to their feet. Suddenly the door flew open and Lucy, the editor’s secretary, dashed in, followed closely by one of the girls from the post-room.

  ‘Mr Lloyd …’ the secretary pushed through the staff to the editor’s desk. ‘Jean has something you have to see.’

  Jean, a rather fat, south London, unfashionably mini-skirted girl from upstairs, was out of breath. Overcome by the very idea of breaking into morning conference she simply pushed an open envelope into Lloyd’s hands. ‘This just arrived, sir,’ she said, in hardly more than a whisper. The whole staff had stopped and were staring at the envelope. Lloyd took it from the girl, studied the type-written addressing on the front and then held it open. Inside were two objects: an NUJ Press card and a strip of Dymotape. Suddenly he sat down heavily in his chair.

  ‘Good God!’ He dropped the Press card and the tape on to his desk for Mitford to see. There smiling up at them from the front of the card was a picture of John Huckleston.

  Mitford picked up the strip of Dymotape. Punched on to it was the message: ‘PUBLISH OUR MANIFESTO OR ELSE, PUMA.’

  Mitford looked confused. He looked again at the envelope; and then he saw the postmark. It had been posted on the previous Thursday night from Trafalgar Square.

  ‘Jesus Christ … this thing has been stuck in the post for three days.’

  The room was in complete silence. Lloyd turned to his secretary. ‘Get me the police, will you! Immediately.’

  By ten o’clock Howlett, one of his chief superintendents, and Kinney, were in Lloyd’s office, while eight less senior detectives began a thorough search of the building. Had Howlett wanted to put any pressure upon Lloyd not to publish the PUMA manifesto it would have been in vain: because by the time he arrived the document had already been set in type, and a full page fashion spread taken out of the middle of the paper so that the manifesto could be run as prominently as possible. As Lloyd said when he had telephoned the newspaper’s proprietor with his decision to publish: ‘What price freedom of the Press when we’re dealing with a man’s life … and when that man is one of our own?’ It was an argument with which it was difficult to argue. Everyone knew that they were giving in to blackmail, but the alternative was unacceptable. There was, of course, the possibility that the publication might already be too late, and that PUMA had tired of waiting and had executed Huckle. Everyone was aware of it; but no one said it.

  The second edition was due on the streets by eleven-thirty in the morning, but because of the sudden change of pages there was a delay of half an hour. As it turned out that delay was fortuitous. But not for everyone.

  At ten-thirty one of the vans making its way back towards Fleet Street from north London pulled into a Kings Cross side-street to pick up a bundle of unsold back issues at a newsagent’s shop. The call was a regular feature of evening newspaper van delivery, and since edition times are governed strictly to a timetable the call at King’s Cross was a daily incident by which one could virtually set one’s watch. The two occupants of the van neither saw nor heard anything unusual as they pulled up. The driver’s mate slid back his door, dropped down to pick up the carefully tied bundle of papers on the kerbside, and as usual tossed them into the back of the van, before they moved on to the next call in Grays’ Inn Road. They saw nothing at all: but they were watched all the way to and from the pick-up point, although the person who usually saw them, Mrs Annie Mather who ran the shop, was in no position to see anything that day. She was unconscious in a back room, with blood trickling from an open wound on her head.

  At eleven-thirty, when the van should have been entering the ramp which would have taken it right into the cavernous loading bay under the heart of the newspaper’s complex of buildings, it was still held back in the jam of other vans waiting for the next edition, queuing back up the street towards High Holborn. Picking up his racing edition off the passenger seat where his mate, who had gone ahead on foot to discover the cause of the delay, had been sitting a moment before, Bill Kennedy studied the form for the runners at Haydock Park. That was just about all there was to do with the first edition of the day, and although he didn’t bet, he liked to spend odd moments picking horses and later calculating how much he might have won or lost if he had done.

  He got as far as selecting his choice for the three-thirty, before his body was torn apart and its odds and ends hurled against the vans in front and behind by the force of the explosion.

  Howlett and Kinney were waiting to get their copies of the edition bearing the manifesto when they heard the blast. They tore out of Lloyd’s office into the main newsr
oom where reporters were running to shattered windows and photographers dashing for their cameras.

  Outside in the street the remains of the van were a raging furnace. Five minutes later, and the whole of the loading bay would have been blown apart.

  PUMA had not waited for the post to be delivered.

  Chapter Eleven

  Consciousness was something which returned to Huckle in a series of waves, as though he were tethered under water and trying repeatedly, with growing success, to break through to the surface. Afterwards he could not recall any specific moment when he realized that he was alive, conscious and in pain; rather, it came in confused and disjointed instalments, as he rose and fell again, in and out of his faint. Interwoven into this half-conscious state was the burden of a dream sequence in which he watched himself mopping the blood away from Kirsten’s spliced neck, while the razor in his hand became a glinting open-mouthed goldfish. And looking into the eyes of Kirsten he found that they were hanging out of her face, like those of a grilled plaice. In terror he tried to scream out, only to find that his tongue was jammed into the bottom of his mouth by something tight strapped inside his open jaw and around the back of his head. Gradually the dream receded as consciousness swam forward again, taking him finally to that state of awareness when eyes are opened.

  Huckle tried, but his lids remained closed, strapped together. And he felt the numbing pressure of something building them tightly closed. Automatically he attempted to move, to bring his hands up to his eyes so as to tear away whatever it was which was blinding him. He was unable to, and he realized that his arms and feet were strapped down, his hands tied behind his back in such a way that all feeling had been squeezed from them.

  As his mind became more fully aware of his situation, terror raced him forward to the brink of panic; the disorientation was total, and in quick succession he felt the symptoms of choking, nausea and heavy sweating breaking out throughout his body. In fear, he realized suddenly that he was wetting his trousers. Then, as the panic became unbearable, a panic in which he felt his arm being torn open while he looked on, trussed up and helpless to save himself, he passed again into unconsciousness.