Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  Although the power link between the Capital studios and the two IBA masts from which the station transmitted had been reopened at four o’clock that afternoon, it was almost twenty past four before engineer Bill Adams announced that they were once again ready to go back on the air. The delay was caused by Huckle’s insistence to the Post Office engineers manning the transmitters that they should not try any tricks since PUMA had brought their own transistor radios into the building to monitor the broadcasts. It was always a possibility that the police and engineers might have managed to rig up some device which put the broadcasts on to a closed circuit which only PUMA would hear; but with their independent, battery-run radios, they could be certain that their every word was being broadcast to the rest of London. The delay in broadcasting was also due to Huckle’s insistence to Bill Adams that there should be no possiblity of a breakdown in the transmission due to confusion, lack of communication with the outside engineers or simply damage done to the Capital Radio equipment during the earlier part of the siege. Huckle now felt responsible for keeping the other hostages alive. He could not afford the risk of some cretin like Shelley suddenly attacking someone if a technical hitch occurred and unnerved him into thinking that they were being double-crossed.

  The preparation for broadcasting sent a flurry of excitement through the terrorists, and Huckle noticed how the strain which had been beginning to show during the early part of the afternoon had now evaporated. Even Jenny Silas appeared to be reaching a point of some exhilaration, aided, he noticed by a couple of amphetamines dropped just before four o’clock. No wonder they were all so bright and talkative again, he realized, as he listened to their loud and crisply consonanted voices. While the hostages had been growing weary under despair and tiredness, their captors were making sure that their bodies were chemically prepared to go on for as long as was necessary.

  Huckle had assumed that Eyna would be the first person to broadcast from the newly named radio station: it seemed logical, since she was leader of the group. But abruptly, with the realization that they had won this round of the battle, she appeared to be dropping back from the activity, purposely standing aside from her colleagues as though her task was completed.

  To Huckle it was more than puzzling. While several of the terrorists prepared to go on the air, pulling copies of their manifesto from their pockets and long, handwritten sheets of notes from out of the rucksacks and sports bags which they had used for carrying slabs of plastic explosives, fuses and coils of wire into the building, he noticed a visible relaxation begin to pass across the recently taut and alert face of his chief captor. Apart from Bill Adams, who sat up in his usual chair in main control setting the sound levels, he and Eyna were once again alone.

  Suddenly the loudspeakers in the room crackled for a moment and popped. Bill Adams gave some last advice to Michael Hickmore, who was now sitting in Charlie Brown’s usual spot in main continuity, and then the red light was on, indicating that they were on the air.

  ‘This is Radio PUMA,’ began Hickmore, reading from the sheaf of notes in front of him, and trying to steady the speed and pitch of his voice. ‘We are the voice of the oppressed people of the world, we are those crying in the wilderness for social justice. We are the voice of truth. This is the radio station of the people. Stay listening and you will understand. Stay tuned and your minds will be changed.’

  Huckle, sitting now with his legs crossed on the floor of main control, looked up and caught Bill Adams’s eye. No one was going to be convinced by anything they could now say. But Bill Adams’s face had a dead, mechanical look about it. It occurred to Huckle that to Adams it didn’t really matter what he was transmitting so long as the voice level was right and there weren’t any technical cock-ups. He doubted if he was even listening.

  Hickmore was carrying on. ‘During the past few days you may have come to believe that PUMA is everything that is bad. Well, I’m here to tell you that so far the only thing you have heard about us has been a bunch of lies, lies fed to you by the capitalist media - in their newspapers, on their radio stations and on their television.

  ‘PUMA is not bad; it means no harm to anyone who believes in peace and social justice. But PUMA is waging a war against all those who wish to silence the free expression of the people. Violence is the one language that the western capitalist pigs can understand. Only through armed struggle will we change the capitalist system for a truly socialist system; only by fighting for our freedom will we achieve it. No one is going to come along and cut the chains from the arms of the working people who provide the wealth of the world. We must cut those chains ourselves. And PUMA, together with all revolutionary groups around the world, is now sawing at those chains. Today we have control of the media. Tomorrow we shall control our own destinies.’

  From his vantage point in main control Huckle could see that Michael Hickmore was no longer referring to his notes, but had begun a long improvised diatribe upon the glories of the coming revolution. Sitting next to him in the small room were Jenny Silas and Neil Maxwell. Presumably each other member of the group was eventually going to have his say. The way Hickmore was rabbiting on that could take them all night and half tomorrow.

  Suddenly it occurred to Huckle that it was some time since he had seen Danny, the silent, pretty boy. He looked across main control towards Eyna, who suddenly seemed smaller and less powerful than he had known her before. As he caught her eye she got up from the floor and, walking to the opposite side of the control room opened one of the other doors and went into a studio that was not being used. It was Studio B. This was the first time that anybody had bothered to go in there. Now that the broadcasting had begun and the main objective of the siege had been achieved a tension had gone out of the day and Huckle saw that Eyna was lying down across two chairs. It was one of the few signs of weakness that he had seen in her. Or was it weakness? Could it be that her job had now been done and she was only waiting for the conclusion of the episode, whatever it might be? But what could the conclusion be? Surely she was no martyr for the cause? There was something too detached about her for that. She was of a different metal from the others, he was certain. The rest were merely her followers.

  Then there was Danny, always with his detonators and wires and guns. What kind of person was he? Where was he from? And why did he never speak? Nothing that Danny had done during the whole time that Huckle had been observing him showed interest in anything other than the means for causing death. He was no politician, he was sure of that. He was no revolutionary. He was, he thought, most probably a mercenary, imported for the tasks of wiping out people and training the other PUMA in the use of arms. But how could he escape? How could any of them hope to escape? The Government might have been willing to let them broadcast, but there was no way that they would ever have the opportunity to fly off to see their fellow revolutionaries in South Yemen or Libya.

  The confusion in Huckle’s mind was not settled when suddenly Danny reappeared, unravelling a length of wire behind him and cradling in his arms all kinds of timing mechanisms and pieces of explosive. Clearly, before the matter was closed, Danny intended blowing Capital Radio and the sixteen storey block on top of it to Kingdom Come. The effect of the PUMA broadcasts was of no concern to him. In bewildered silence Huckle watched him; then, looking through the studio window he studied Eyna, lying with her eyes closed across the chairs. Lastly he turned back and watched the broadcasters in the main continuity studio. Slowly some kind of shape was beginning to emerge from the PUMA jigsaw.

  Nothing that had happened that day had brought any comfort to Howlett. He had been assured, and heard reassurances broadcast over the air, that he had the complete backing of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and he had no reason to doubt the man’s word, but he wondered how long even the Commissioner could hold out against the pressure for the army to be brought in. Since three-thirty that morning Howlett, along with his highest ranking colleagues and in collaboration with a very large section of Scotland Ya
rd, had been sitting outside Euston Tower trying to fathom a way into the building, or at least a way of getting the hostages out, but it seemed impossible.

  The only way would be if someone inside the building were to begin some kind of resistance, and if the terrorists’ minds could be momentarily taken away from the task of guarding the doors. But that was unlikely. The dirty tricks department had installed infra-red cameras which could look right through the drawn blinds of the first floor rooms, but they were of no help, other than to convince him that, apart from the men guarding the doors, everyone was working in the middle section of the radio station, well away from any windows.

  By seven o’clock, with London still in the middle of its worst traffic jam in years, PUMA had been broadcasting for nearly three hours. At first Michael Hickmore had harangued the airwaves with his demagoguery, then he’d been followed by a further hour of Neil Maxwell. Now Jenny Silas was speaking. Howlett had set up his headquarters in an office facing Euston Tower. Throughout the day he had stared through binoculars at the building. Now he still stared, while at the same time listening to the radio for any sign that conditions might be changing inside the building. All day long he had tried to get through to speak to Huckle on the open line which connected directly with main control, but he had found that it was left off the receiver except when Eyna wished them to converse.

  Occasionally, when free for one moment from the almost constant demands of the hundreds of men at his command, his mind would revert to the case of Patsy Peters, now being held under the Anti-Terrorist laws in Holloway Prison. She had said that Eyna had first approached them through the girl called Nancy, and that she knew a great deal about the PUMA members before they had met. It had been Eyna who had brought the South American Danny into the group. Yet no one else knew anything about anyone called Eyna or Danny. They seemed to have no existence outside PUMA. The possibility that they were foreign spies had occurred to him, but discreet enquiries with Military Intelligence in Whitehall had come to nothing. They claimed to be as perplexed by the existence of Eyna as he was. Interpol had been asked to help, but so far that had been equally fruitless.

  By now he had interviewed dozens of acquaintances or friends of Hickmore, Martin, Springfield and company, but no one, he was convinced, had any idea where they might have been hiding during the days prior to the siege. Everyone had professed amazement at discovering that they were involved in a terrorist organization. Some had admitted that they knew that the people now called PUMA were, for one reason or another, bitter, and that Hickmore and Martin had strong political motivations. But no one could understand what could have tipped them over the boundary line from those all-night talking sessions. Some time in the past three months something had happened to push PUMA over the top, to get them to a stage from which there was no going back.

  It was Kate Springfield who accidentally provided the answer. Jenny Silas had not turned out to be a particularly good broadcaster, particularly since she seemed to be going to great extremes to hide the sing-song tone of her Wolverhampton accent, and after a few half-hearted exhortations to her brothers around the world to fight for peace, Kate Springfield had taken the microphone, her voice calm and confident in that Californian way of melifluous assininity. She, too, had begun with the usual plea for everyone to wash out their ears and to stop listening to the lies of the oppressors, but suddenly caught up in the emotion of the moment she had begun to explain away the violence of the past few days: ‘No one can claim to be innocent in this class war,’ she had shouted. ‘Anyone who stands aside and does nothing to change the inequalities which bind us is a cowardly collaborator with the oppressors. Some people have called us “police killers”. Well yes, that’s true, and we’re proud of it. For every pig that we murder we score some retribution for our dead brother and sister, Johnny and Nancy. The pigs didn’t think about morality when they zapped our dear friends and left them dying. We saw what they did to people who wanted to fight for their own freedom, and it taught us one thing, that the winner is the one who is prepared to sacrifice everything. Eyna taught us that.’

  Johnny and Nancy. Howlett’s mind jolted. They were the people Patsy Peters had mentioned, and then clammed up about. Here was this girl now repeating the lie that the police had murdered them. It was certainly untrue, but from the way she was speaking, now suddenly breaking down at their memory, it was also certain that she believed what she was saying. Kate Springfield was saying that she had seen them dead. So if the police hadn’t killed them, who had?

  Huckle knew instantly from the expression on Danny’s face when Kate Springfield mentioned their names who had killed Johnny and Nancy. Danny was sitting cross-legged, a clock mechanism in his hand, when Kate had begun to talk about PUMA’s ‘fallen companions’, and by chance Huckle, who by now was only half way listening to the broadcast, was looking right into his eyes. For a moment Danny stopped turning his screwdriver, and gave a quick little glance up into the main continuity suite from where Kate was broadcasting. Then, as she carried on, he swivelled his eyes again, this time in the direction of Eyna. Huckle had thought she was sleeping, but as he looked that way too he saw that she was now sitting up. She caught Danny’s eyes for a moment, before he looked away again, back down to his screwdriver and wires. Then Huckle saw that his expression was breaking very slowly into a secret smile. The smile of a crazy man. Huckle stared at him, watching, and puzzling. Then he became aware that he too was the object of someone’s attention. Glancing up from the smirking killer, he saw that Eyna was carefully watching him. And then he realized that he already knew too much to be allowed out of that building alive.

  After the lunchtime murder of George Delaware Kirsten for once in her lifetime deserted her post. Leaving the problems of an Arabic children’s Christmas party to the rest of her staff she drove home to Battersea. And while her flat-mates were at work, she sat and cried and listened to LBC as they kept up their all-day commentary on the siege, breaking into it every few minutes to broadcast the increasingly angry opinions of those people who seemingly make a considerable living by being able to offer solutions to the most manifestly insoluble of problems.

  At four-thirty, when it had been established that Radio PUMA had taken to the air, Kirsten had deserted LBC in favour of the revolutionary rantings of Michael Hickmore. It wasn’t that she had any interest in what PUMA might want to say, but by listening to their talk she felt a closeness to Huckle, a closeness which was all the more hopeless as she knew that he had never felt that way about her.

  By six-thirty her two flat-mates were home, delicately aware of Kirsten’s presence in her bedroom and yet excited by the story of the siege. It was a difficult predicament for them. How should they approach her? Should they approach her at all, indeed? At last one of them tapped quietly on Kirsten’s bedroom door and, putting a head around, asked her if she was all right. Kirsten nodded. Would she then like a cup of tea? Kirsten shook her head. She didn’t want contact with anyone. She didn’t want any kind of sympathy. She wanted to be alone, and to be able to concentrate upon Huckle. The flat-mate closed the door again and shrugged in the way that says ‘what can we do?’ to her companion. There was nothing they could do. Realizing this, and the inevitable embarrassment that her presence must be causing, Kirsten suddenly remembered something that Huckle had once said when she had been talking about his fascination with tapes and cassettes. It would seem a pity, he had said, that when he died he would be unable to record his own ending. It was a strange thing to say, and he probably hadn’t meant it. But to Kirsten on this day those words held a strangely morbid fascination.

  At seven-thirty her mind was made up. Slipping quietly from the flat she got back into her car and drove across the river to Chelsea.

  The doorman at Chelsea Cloisters recognized her instantly. Everything and everyone to do with John Huckleston had been imprinted upon his brain during the past week, following days of police and Press questions. Normally he ought to have refused the lady a
key to Huckle’s flat, but she had taken one before and there had been no complaints. And how could he refuse her anything on a day like this?

  He dared not ask her if she had any further news, although he instinctively felt that she must know something that he didn’t. Instead he smiled at her gravely and he hoped comfortingly, and gave her the key.

  Huckle’s door closed behind her and Kirsten turned on the light. The apartment was tidy, too tidy. She knew this could not have been the way Huckle would have left it, and she knew also that the woman who cleaned the place had instructions never to touch his papers and tapes. But now everything was neatly stacked, envelopes on the mantelpiece, copy paper on the desk, newspapers in a pile alongside them, the past week’s unopened and unread. She moved across the living-room towards the tape recorder. There was a pile of unused cassettes on the table alongside it, but that was all. The wall of shelves which had held Huckle’s hundreds of hours of recordings, personal and public, secret and silly, were missing. Huckle’s whole life on tape, his only real hobby and probably the only things he really cared anything about in the world, had been taken away. Had they been burnt or vandalized Kirsten might not have felt the anger which burst inside her. But she knew they hadn’t. They had merely been borrowed by the police in furtherance of their investigations, and no doubt every hiccup was being listened to right now somewhere at Scotland Yard. To Huckle the tapes had always been his diary. She had never been allowed to listen to them: and she knew that no one else had heard them either. Now they had become the objects of interest, scorn, boredom and lewdness to a collection of people Huckle didn’t even know. His private life, his private thoughts and fears were no longer his own. He had no secrets left. The police, with the best and most honourable of intentions, knew him inside out.