Cry of the Needle

by Radford, Roger

  ‘Look, Kieran,’ said the older man, ‘the only way you’re going to get me to leave you is to shoot me, and I don’t think that’s an option.’

  Kelly, normally cool and calculating, was almost overcome by emotion. ‘I don’t know what to say, Sean,’ he said almost in a whisper.

  Callaghan looked at his leader squarely, ‘I loved Teresa, too, you know, Kieran. She treated me better than a favourite uncle. That girl was a saint. When you moved to London I was devastated. I felt I’d lost the only two people in the world who cared about me. I was a lonely middle-aged bachelor who’s never known the sort of love you two shared. She had this gift, you know, the gift of listening. Here was a woman twenty years younger than me who let me pour out my heart to her. I was so uneducated. You know how much I found filling in forms a nightmare. I used to turn to her for help. She was never judgmental, never condescending. She had the sort of wisdom that all the money in the world can’t buy. She never deserved what happened to her and she deserves justice.’

  Visibly moved by his friend’s words, Kelly’s mind flooded with images and memories of his dead wife. Like most men, he had often been selfish, especially through his involvement with the Republican cause. Teresa had never criticised him for the days he went missing. She never questioned his actions or his motives. She, too, had been a committed Republican, but she also knew that the best way she could serve her husband and the cause was to be a dutiful wife and mother. She had accepted that the real battle for a united Ireland was man’s work. ‘I don’t know what to say, Sean,’ he said again.

  ‘Say nothing and let’s get some sleep,’ said Callaghan. ‘I’ll look after our guests in the morning, and you can concentrate on letting the world know what a bunch of arseholes they are.’

  Jonathan Tring had not been altogether sure whether he’d been dreaming, but he could have sworn he had heard a commotion in the night, as if a further guest or guests had arrived. He thought he had heard the sound of shackles, although they might have been his own as he moved in his sleep. He had also been vaguely aware of a gentle sobbing followed by a shout and a slap. Now the morning sunlight was once again streaming through his window, and for a few moments there was an unearthly silence. He guessed it was somewhere around eight a.m., but there really was no way of knowing. He heard the sound of shackles again, and this time they were definitely not his own. The strange thing was that there were two sets of sounds coming from either side of his room. The whole affair was becoming increasingly bizarre. Suddenly his door swung open and a small wiry man stood before him carrying a breakfast tray. By the nature of his stature and clothing it was balaclava-man sans the hood.

  ‘Room service,’ said the man with bonhomie. ‘Bacon, eggs and two slices, wholemeal of course.’ With this, he stooped to place the tray at the foot of the mattress.

  The voice confirmed that it was indeed the man who had worn the balaclava, though his decision to remove it seemed to defeat the object of having worn it in the first place. Tring’s immediate thought was that if his captors no longer cared about revealing their identities, then things did not augur well. He reckoned the man was probably in his early fifties. He had small pointed features and eyes that were grey studs but not unkind. A receding hairline and widow’s peak gave him somewhat of an elfin appearance.

  ‘Thank you,’ the scientist responded automatically, forgetting momentarily that he was meant to be seen and not heard.

  His visitor laughed. ‘And the condemned man ate a hearty breakfast.’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Now you know better than that, Professor,’ the Irishman said, putting his finger to his lips. ‘You’ll have a chance to have your say.’ He then added cryptically, ‘after all, a man cannot be expected to atone for his sins if he is not allowed to confess, now can he? My name’s Callaghan, by the way, but my friends call me Sean.’ He giggled, then, ‘so you can call me Callaghan. I drew the short straw, so it’s been me who’s been seein’ to your every need and even removing your slops bucket for you. Now isn’t that nice of me? Of course, that’s why we Irish are famous for our hospitality. Now enjoy the food. It may be the last hot meal you get.’

  With an enigmatic smile, Sean Callaghan left his guest and made his way down the stairs. There were two other breakfasts to serve, although the cut lip on one of his guests might make eating for him somewhat difficult. He descended the stairs and entered the kitchen. It was more of a galley really, and not altogether conducive to preparing meals for five people. He reckoned it was going to have to be sandwiches all round for his guests from now on.

  ‘How is he?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Sweet as a bird,’ the older man replied. ‘I think we’ll have more trouble from the other two. The good doctor’s already having the DTs and the minister’s got a big mouth on him, but I soon put him straight. Anything on the news yet?’

  ‘No, I reckon it’ll be another few hours before any announcement is made. They’ll try to sit on it for as long as possible, just in case our politician is found in some bordello somewhere with his trousers round his ankles.’

  ‘So you’re going to let them stew?’

  ‘Yup. As soon as the news breaks, I’ll post a video of their confessions to the BBC. That’ll set the cat amongst the pigeons. I want to make them sweat before I reveal our whereabouts; prime the world so that international pressure is brought to bear on the wonderful Prime Minister. There’s nothing better than having world opinion on your side.’

  ‘Who are you seeing first?’

  ‘The professor. Each one of them will be able to present his defence, but there’s only one judge and one jury – me.’

  ‘Do you want me with you, Kieran?’

  ‘No. You keep a watching brief on the news.’

  ‘Besides the cooking.’

  ‘That, too.’ Kelly smiled and glanced at his watch, then, ‘I reckon he’s finished his breakfast, don’t you? He must be going crazy trying to figure out why he’s here.’ With this, Kelly pushed aside his breakfast plate and rose to his feet.

  ‘Well, he’s about to find out,’ he said venomously.

  Tring had had to admit that the man who called himself Sean could make a mean English breakfast. It was the first decent meal he’d had since his incarceration, and he’d wolfed it down with gusto. Although he desperately wanted someone to tell him why he was being held, he was more preoccupied with trying to guess the identities of his fellow prisoners. His greatest fear was that one of them might be Fiona. This was the only logical conclusion he could draw from the rattling chains. He imagined killing them if they harmed a hair on her head, a desire thwarted by the irons around his wrists and ankles. His imagination worked overtime as he thought of fanciful ways of escape. A file would mysteriously appear by his side; the stays holding the chains to the walls would fortuitously come loose; even a heavily bearded Count of Monte Cristo character appeared in front of him, pledging to help him escape. The scientist was so wrapped up by visions of the impossible that he failed to notice the door being opened.

  ‘Sean makes a great breakfast, don’t you think?’

  Startled from his daydream, Tring looked round to see camera-man standing in front of him. The man then took the chair that was in the corner of the room, swivelled its back towards him, and sat astride it.

  ‘I think it’s about time I introduced myself formally,’ said the man. ‘My name is Kieran Kelly and I don’t expect you ever to forget it.’

  ‘Why am I here, Mr Kelly, and who are the others?’

  ‘I will reveal everything to you, Professor Tring, but I ask you not to interrupt until I tell you about my wife and what happened to her.’

  Tring, a captive audience in the fullest sense, listened intently to the Irishman’s story of the medical negligence that had caused his wife’s suffering and her ultimate suicide. He could see the hurt in his captor’s piercing blue eyes, and the man’s sense of loss was tangible.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Tring genu
inely when his captor had finished. ‘It’s an awful tragedy.’

  ‘But you don’t see how you come into the equation?’

  ‘Frankly, no, I’ve never had anything to do with any drug used in spinal anaesthesia.’

  ‘Do you have any opinions at all on the use of spinal injections?’

  The chains rattled as Tring scratched his head, unsure of where all this was leading. ‘I can’t say that I’ve given it much thought.’

  ‘What about Triamerol?’

  Tring had an immediate vision of the syringe and phial his inquisitor had shown him earlier. ‘It’s not an anaesthetic and, anyway, we inform doctors that it should not be used intrathecally,’ he said.

  ‘It took you twenty-five years to issue that warning, and doctors are still using it epidurally.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with that. The new warning came in two years before I joined the company.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s all right then,’ said Kelly sarcastically.

  ‘It’s not my field of expertise. I’m researching male contraceptives. I really haven’t had time to concern myself with Triamerol.’

  ‘There’s a lot you haven’t concerned yourself with, Professor,’ said the Irishman, his eyes narrowing in contempt. ‘Medicine is just a dog wagged by your industry’s tail. That Triamerol stuff is crap, just like those diagnostic dyes that corrode ceramic tiles. They put it in people’s spines for years because it gave pretty x-ray pictures. The drug companies knew they were super toxic, but they disregarded the results of tests on animals. They fucked up monkeys and then claimed that as monkeys weren’t humans…get my drift? Hundreds of thousands have been maimed for life because companies like yours put profit before people.’

  Tring’s mind began to race. This angry Irishman was not working for Jack Proctor. He was railing against him. ‘Look, Kelly, I don’t know who the hell you are, but if you are against Parados and what it stands for, then so am I.’

  Kelly, his eyes like blue lasers, glared at his prisoner. ‘You’ve got a fucking nerve trying to ingratiate yourself with me, you bastard.’

  Tring didn’t know where he got the courage from, but he decided to call the Irishman’s bluff. ‘Maybe you’re trying to ingratiate yourself with me. Maybe you’re working for my boss. Maybe you’re Jack Proctor’s protector.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about, man?’ Kelly said, taken aback.

  ‘You know who Jack Proctor is, don’t you?’

  ‘I know he’s your boss.’

  ‘So why didn’t you take him hostage.’

  ‘We thought about that, but he always seemed to surround himself with heavies. Frankly, you were an easier target.’

  The Irishman’s reaction appeared to Tring to be genuine. If it wasn’t, and all of this had been an elaborate bluff, then what he was about to do could be the biggest mistake of his life. The scientist took a deep breath and for the next few minutes told his captor about the machinations of Jack Proctor, how he had thought his boss was out to get him, and how he had believed that the Yorkshireman had been behind his current incarceration.

  Kelly listened intently to the story with increasing scepticism. After all, he was used to captives concocting cock and bull tales in order to save their own skins. His victims had always begged him for mercy during The Troubles. They all had had an excuse and it was always someone else’s fault. The person who would admit to his own culpability was a rare bird indeed, unless it was at the point of a gun, of course. ‘Why should I believe a word you’re saying?’ the Irishman sneered.

  ‘Because I have proof.’

  ‘I don’t need any more proof that your company is owned by a greedy bastard, or that the health secretary is probably the most corrupt man in the British Government.’

  Tring noted the slight inflection of his captor’s head towards the right. My God, he realised suddenly, one of the other captives was none other than Stephen Sellars. The professor’s chains rattled as he reached inside his sock and pulled out the cassette. ‘I mean I have proof on me,’ he said bluntly.

  There was not much in life that surprised Kieran Kelly, but the sight of the tiny cassette being proffered by his captive took him aback. Here before him was a man he was prepared to maim or kill if necessary, and yet this same man appeared to be on his side in fighting the forces of evil. Unless, of course, it was all an elaborate ploy. Maybe Tring was exploiting the Stockholm Syndrome. The Irishman was a master of hostage taking and was fully aware of the phenomenon. Back in the early seventies, four hostages had been taken in a botched bank robbery in Sweden. At the end of their captivity, six days later, the hostages had actively resisted rescue. They had refused to testify against their captors and, indeed, raised money for their legal defence. Psychologists had given the phenomenon its name and defined it as a hostage’s strategy of trying to please the captor in order to stay alive. It had never worked for the Irishman’s victims in the past. Although this time the circumstances might be different, the principles were the same.

  Kelly took the cassette. ‘I’ll pay you the courtesy of listening to this, but don’t expect too many brownie points. You’ve seen too much.’

  ‘I’ve only seen the inside of this room.’

  ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘He’s here, isn’t he?’ said Tring, hoping he wasn’t taking his inquisitiveness too far.

  ‘If you mean the Right Honourable Secretary of State for Health, yes. Soon the whole world is going to know everything, so there’s no reason to keep any of you in the dark. The lush who injected my wife is also here. I want you all to know why and what will happen to you if the Government, the pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession don’t meet my demands.’

  Tring didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure that one out. The man had already made it clear that he meant to take his revenge with a syringe. ‘They’ll trace you to this place and they’ll use every means to defeat you, if not for me, then for Sellars,’ he said.

  ‘They won’t have to trace me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I intend to let them know the exact location. I want the maximum exposure I can get over this. You can only defeat a government by embarrassing it.’

  ‘So what are your demands?’

  ‘Enough questions for now, my friend,’ Kelly replied, ‘you’ll find out soon enough. We’re not unreasonable. Each one of you will be given a television and radio so you can keep in touch with the news. You’ll have a ball-by-ball commentary on how much your government and your employers care about your lives. My guess is, very little.’

  With this, Kelly rose from the chair and silently left the room. There were further fish to fry, and he doubted whether his other two guests would provide the sort of surprise Tring had sprung. He couldn’t wait to play the professor’s tape to Stephen Sellars.

  And then to the world.

  Less than twenty miles away, and in a more or less northerly direction, lay the hub of the British Government’s answer to one of its own coming under threat. The Diplomatic Protection Group was based at Charing Cross, the true centre of London, and, indeed, the fulcrum for measurement of distances to all points north, south, east and west. Its remit, among other things, was to guard the liberty of ministers of the Crown. Needless to say, secretaries of state for health did not come high up in the pecking order for guarding. The Prime Minister, of course, received twenty-four hour protection, but lesser lights were mostly left to fend for themselves if any threat against them was deemed unlikely.

  The DPG, set up in 1974, essentially protected London’s diplomatic community under the Vienna Convention. It also provided for an armed contingency reserve for the Metropolitan Police Service. But the DPG was just one facet of five interactive groupings under the banner of Specialist Operations. Directly responsible to the Assistant Commissioner, these included the anti-terrorist squad and the Serious Crime Group (SO7). Within the ranks of SO7 was the Hostage and Extortion Unit. These included highly tra
ined negotiators whose main purpose was to extricate hostages with minimal collateral damage. On most occasions this would revolve around family disputes involving desperate and vulnerable people whose very vulnerability gave the negotiator more than an even chance of coming out on top. The biggest challenge always came from the politically motivated terrorist, the man who thought of his own death as secondary to the cause that he represented.

  The Unit was about to face its greatest challenge.

  ‘I need a drink.’

  Kelly looked with disdain at the speaker, a pathetically thin figure with rheumy, tortured eyes. The good doctor was still reeking from the alcohol he had imbibed before they had picked him up. This was the man directly responsible for Teresa’s suffering, the man who was a disgrace to himself and to his profession. ‘Whisky and water’s your favourite tipple isn’t it, Townsend?’ the Irishman said with a sneer. ‘Well, the good news is we’ve got the water.’

  The Gobi desert that was Martin Townsend’s mouth emitted little more than a croak.

  ‘You know,’ Kelly went on, ‘I don’t know whether I blame you as much as the governing body that allows people like you anywhere near a scalpel or a needle. The General Medical Council gives a little rap on the knuckles and in no time the drunks, the butchers and the molesters are back in their surgeries creating more mayhem for the sick and vulnerable.’

  Townsend remained silent. The mention of the word whisky had created an overwhelming craving that subsumed any inclination he might have had to argue the toss with his captor. He had recognised the Irishman as soon as the man had taken off his balaclava. There hadn’t been a night when the obstetrician had not thought of Teresa Kelly and her husband. The drink that had guided the epidural syringe into the wrong location had also tried to obliterate memory of the deed. Guilt, however, had proven a thirsty demon.

  ‘What should always be your first concern as a doctor, Townsend?’ his inquisitor sneered. ‘I’ll tell you. Never to do harm. We come to you at our most vulnerable and we put you on a pedestal. We put our trust in you. If you abuse that trust, then you’re not fit to touch another person with a feather duster, let alone a syringe.’