Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  The rest of the story dealt with the casualties, the fact that police forensic experts were still working on the car, and that they believed a two-pound bomb had been responsible for the explosion. Throughout the article the word PUMA cropped up with a regular persistence. Whoever PUMA were, Huckle considered, they had certainly chosen the right name to promote their cause. They could hardly have had more success if they’d launched an advertising campaign.

  If he was surprised by the space that PUMA had garnered for itself with this single bomb, he was still more amazed at the vehemence of much of the reaction. Several Tory MP’s were already pressing the Home Secretary for the inevitable statement about ‘this new threat to our democracy’, which, thought Huckle, was rather over-emphasizing the effects that a two-pound bomb might have upon the great British public institutions; there was more talk about the reintroduction of the death penalty; someone had absurdly mentioned the introduction of penal camps for such offenders; and renegade Labour MP and working-man’s darling, Cyril Bolt, had been denouncing the attackers as cold-blooded killers, who, by their very action, had in the eyes of all ‘plain-thinking people’ forfeited the right to their own lives. Hardly Transport House policy, thought Huckle, but then Bolt was not renowned for his liberal standpoints. His success as an MP was based upon his astonishing rapport with the working class, and no ill-informed prejudice had ever seemed too extreme for him. Huckle shook his head as he considered the growing popularity of people like Bolt and the things for which they stood. They must love those PUMA people, he thought vaguely. Doom merchants need a bit of the real thing every now and again if they aren’t to lose credibility.

  His car was ready for him at the garage in Sloane Avenue: and, after wincing at the size of the bill, he drove the few yards to his home, parked in the basement garage, and took the lift up to his rooms on the fifth floor.

  A girl he had once brought back had asked him if he minded living in a rabbit hutch. Seeing it that way for the first time he had been cut to the quick, although not too cut to make some flip backbite about it being good enough for a bit of a buck like himself.

  Once home, he was at last warm again, but to chase away the last of the chill he poured himself a couple of mouthfuls of brandy, blinking away the tears that bled into his eyes as he gasped them down. The flat was tidy again: and he was glad of that. The cleaning woman, whom he rarely saw but who was provided by the landlords, must have been in.

  Revitalized, he picked up the telephone and dialled the answering service. Someone to answer the telephone for him, he had discovered upon becoming a bachelor again, was one way to a fuller, if not necessarily more enriching, life. There were three messages for him: Winston wanted him to call him at home; Susan had called; and a Miss Parish had said she would call again. Huckle smiled when he heard the last message. Funny how spinster ladies in their early thirties involved in an adulterous relationship referred to themselves as Miss. He was sure the ladies who worked on answering services must be able to spot them a mile away.

  He phoned Winston first: there was no answer. Next he called Susan. He knew that she was only ringing in response to his piece in the paper, the queries of neighbours and because the police had asked her to corroborate his story. He was right on all three counts. The children had been worried that he might have been hurt, Susan told him, although he knew that she was probably more worried than they were. They might not love each other any more but when love goes it doesn’t necessarily mean that caring follows.

  Miss Parish called again at quarter to nine, just as Huckle was deciding that the easiest way to eat that night was by making himself some scrambled eggs. He didn’t like cooking for himself: but it had begun to snow quite heavily. He was breaking an egg into the pan when the phone went.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Huckle, it’s Kirsten.’

  ‘Hello, Miss Parish.’

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘Not much.’

  Huckle could hear Kirsten Parish pause for a moment on the other end of the phone. He knew she was plucking up the courage to ask herself over. When you’re thirty-two, female, alone and feeling a bit lonely, you need guts if you’re going to do anything about it. It’s bad enough for a man.

  ‘Would you like me to come over?’

  ‘D’you want to come?’

  ‘That’s not very encouraging.’

  ‘Okay, come over.’

  ‘Well.’ Kirsten now was playing her game of pretending she had a million other things to do. He knew she didn’t, or she wouldn’t have telephoned him in the first place. ‘Well … I’ll see how I feel.’

  Huckle sighed to himself: ‘Yes … you do that … and when you get here park your car in the underground car park or it’ll get lost in a snowdrift and you’ll make me ask you to stay the night.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Huckle.

  Kirsten was in his apartment by five past nine, which wasn’t bad going considering she’d had to see how she felt, get out, drive across from Battersea, park her car and get up to the fifth floor. Huckle could almost have timed her arrival to the second from the moment she put down the telephone. She was that predictable.

  She came in shivering with cold, a trim bundle of fur, streaked short fair hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and calf-high boots. She looked, he thought, like a cartoon version of a chipmunk, all furred up like that, but her face was open and slightly owlish behind her glasses. When he opened the door he was almost surprised to see how pretty she was looking, not glamorous or over-dressed or even particularly sexy - just pretty; and clean. He helped her off with her fur, and noticed, and was glad, that she was wearing a skirt. He wondered whether she’d put one on especially for him because she knew that he would appreciate it. Better not to ask, he thought: she might not feel like any goading tonight.

  Standing by the radiator and rubbing her bottom and the backs of her thighs against it to get warm, she looked at him. ‘Well, from the way you described your great adventure in the serious little organizer. At first she hadn’t encouraged him, but she hadn’t discouraged him enough to shut him up, and one afternoon, after he and Susan had parted, they had become lovers. Sometimes he had enquired what she was doing still single at thirty-two, but she became irritable when the subject was broached. He had not known what to expect the first time they had gone to bed, but whatever he had expected certainly didn’t measure up to the reality. And yet, he thought, as he stared fondly down at the sleeping woman, his affection for her knew no future nor fidelity. He didn’t deserve her any more than he had deserved Susan. He wished he did.

  Now that she was asleep he knew that she was here for the night; probably that was why she had come anyway. About twice a week she would telephone and come over. Maybe she just doesn’t like to sleep alone, he thought. And he was glad. She never asked him too many questions about himself: and he didn’t feel that he had the right to enquire too deeply into her personal life. Yet instinctively he knew that at the moment he was the only man in her life, although they rarely did anything together except eat, make love and sleep. She had once suggested that she might tidy out the apartment for him, but when he had replied curtly that he liked it the way it was she had never offered to do anything for him again. He realized later that she had probably been hurt by the brusqueness of his rejection, but she had taken care not to show it. He had never seen the apartment in Battersea that she lived in, although he knew she shared it with two other ladies of similar age. Shortly after the break-up of his marriage he had wondered aloud, idly and mischievously, whether Kirsten’s two flat-mates might like to join them sometime for a ménage à quatre, and had met with a swift rebuke. That was one function she wasn’t going to organize for him, which he thought was just as well, since he didn’t really believe that he could cope with more than one Kirsten at a time. But it was nice to think about, all the same.

  He would have liked to have joined Kirsten in her sleep but exhaustion is no help to the
committed insomniac, and so at around eleven o’clock he climbed out of bed, and turned on the television. The volume had been left high and suddenly incidental zither music was filling the room. Kirsten woke up, her face a blue-white texture in the light of the television. Huckle turned the volume down and climbed back into bed.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  Kirsten didn’t complain. She put an arm out to his chest affectionately and stroked him: ‘What is it?’

  He was surprised that she didn’t know: ‘The Third Man.’

  She pulled herself up in the bed, pulling the sheet discreetly around her front, arranging a pillow behind her back, and then leaning across him again to take her glasses from the bedside table. ‘I’ve never seen it.’

  He looked at her and was glad that she had woken up. She looked very serious sitting there against the pale blue and white sheets of the bed: and he noticed how smooth her shoulders were, still a touch of a golden shade from last summer.

  He turned his attention back towards the film: he knew virtually every frame of it, but it still fascinated him. It had now reached the point where Harry Lime and Holly Martin were up on the carousel. Orson Welles’s pudgy pallid face was smiling at Joseph Cotten, and pointing down at the people moving about at the bottom of the Big Wheel. Huckle almost knew the lines by heart: ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever?’ asked Lime. Cotton stared down at them. ‘If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops …’ Huckle was virtually on to the rest of the line when suddenly the image of the screen changed. They should have been looking at Joseph Cotten’s expression of disgust and Orson Welles’s sly evilness: but they weren’t. At first Huckle thought it was an old-fashioned ‘Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible’ notice, but as soon as he could read it he realized his shock. Staring out at them from the television was the unmistakable outline of a large black pouncing cat, bearing across its forepaws a machine-gun, and with the words in white written across its body: ‘Tomorrow’s target: The London Underground,’ and the signature ‘PUMA’ written underneath. Huckle gaped in disbelief, Kirsten half-turned to him, and then almost before either of them could say anything they found themselves staring back into the face of Harry Lime … ‘would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money …’ Suddenly the film was broken into again. But this time the screen went blank.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Huckle swore, his eyes glued to the empty screen.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Kirsten was sitting bolt upright in bed, the sheets fallen away from her. ‘What did it mean … how could they do it?’

  ‘God knows.’ said Huckle. And began to climb out of bed.

  Chapter Four

  The inquest on the PUMA’s four second commercial warning in the middle of The Third Man had started almost before Michael Levy, the unfortunate producer in presentation, had had time to kill the transmission. He was a split second faster than the telecine operator who, in the telecine operations room on the fourth floor of the BBC’s Television Centre, had been in the middle of lacing up the next reel on the complementary machine being used for the showing of the film, and who, against all normal procedure, had taken it upon himself to stop the machine and its ominous warning. But the efforts of both men were to no avail. Before either of them was able to cut the transmission the message had been seen by at least a million London Transport Underground users.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ screamed Levy into the loudspeakers which connected him with the telecine operator. Then without even waiting for an answer he screamed again, this time even louder: ‘Don’t touch that film. Leave it exactly as it is.’ Even as he had been talking, the late night duty editor in his office along the corridor had shouted instructions down his phone to a network duty announcer and she was now hurrying into the small sound-only studio, glancing nervously up at the still shining blue-white empty monitor screen. Suddenly it went to black as the duty engineers took a grip on the situation.

  ‘What shall I say?’ she jabbered into her microphone, looking anxiously at the faces staring at her behind the sound-proof glass.

  By now the duty editor had raced down the stairs from his office to join the staff in presentation. ‘Apologize for a technical breakdown … and tell them that we’ll play them some music. No more. For Christ’s sake don’t sound so bloody scared. We’ll go to the ident. as soon as you’ve finished. Okay?’

  By now every telephone in presentation was ringing and the late night staff who, less than a minute ago, had been lounging about waiting to go home, were cueing in prerecorded tapes of all-purpose classical music.

  A minute and ten seconds after the screens had gone blank the familiar ‘Monday Night Movie’ card lit up on the country’s televisions which had lately been showing The Third Man.

  ‘We apologize for this technical breakdown,’ the duty announcer intoned in a voice which she hoped found a reasonable balance between seriousness and reassurance. ‘We are trying to put it right as quickly as possible and in the meantime we’ll play you some music.’

  BBC1’s network identification of spinning globes appeared, and a soothing piece of Elgar began to run across the tape head.

  At his home in Wimbledon Commander Howlett had been helping his wife load the dishwasher after a dinner party when the telephone had rung bringing the news of PUMA’s television message. With a speed developed by a lifetime of shocks and surprises his mind turned from what had already been done to how it might have been done, and what the consequences might be. Thanking the inspector who had called him he requested that all available men should be alerted for duty the next day. Then, hanging up, he dialled Kinney’s home number. Kinney was the best informed man on the case.

  The younger man was already asleep. ‘Hello,’ his voice was drowsy, the call dragging him out of the deep sleep of the early-to-bed man.

  ‘This is Howlett. Did you see television?’

  ‘See what, sir?’

  ‘Never mind. Meet me at the BBC in forty-five minutes. I’ll see you in reception at Television Centre.’

  Kinney wondered if he’d been asleep for forty years and missed a world war or something. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s that bloody PUMA again,’ shouted Howlett. ‘Hurry up!’ And, as though he were finishing a scene, he slammed down the phone.

  When it comes to handling news which actually takes place on the air the BBC and Independent Television News have a clear lead on Fleet Street. They can give it an action-replay virtually the moment after it’s happened, and because most writing newsmen don’t watch television and have to be told about it by their wives, it is not uncommon for the readers to be better informed than the writers. This occasion was no exception. Three of the BBC newsroom staff had actually seen the PUMA broadcast and within two minutes of its transmission the assistant late night news editor was leaping upstairs to the telecine operations room, where he found half a dozen assorted colleagues manually rewinding the film in its spools and looking for the PUMA message. Waves of excitement were spreading outwards from the room, attracting ever more onlookers into the ‘authorized personnel only’ department of the television complex. Around the corner from the chaos, in another telecine bay, a further operator was quickly lacing up an alternative reel of video.

  ‘There it is,’ said a voice at last.

  The assistant late night news editor leant forward to examine the film as the unhappy telecine operator continued to unwind the spools. ‘I don’t believe it,’ someone said, as the strip of film appeared. There, neatly Sellotaped into the middle of the fourth reel of The Third Man was the four second message, eighteen feet of pirate film, just under a hundred frames, each one bearing that same black puma emblem and its warning message: ‘Tomorrow’s Target: The London Underground’.

  ‘The police are on the way,’ someone shouted from the back of the crowd. ‘Nobody touch the film. They’ll want to fingerprint it.’ The message c
ame a little late: half of those present had already touched it and pulled it out of the sprockets for closer examination.

  ‘What’s the chance of getting a quick video of it?’ asked the man from the news department with more cheek than hope.

  The telecine supervisor looked at him blankly. If they’d only put every film they showed on to video in the first place this could never have happened. He knew the police would want to take the film away with them for examination. He wished he’d never won promotion; his nerves were in tatters. ‘What the bloody hell are you talking about?’ he bellowed. ‘And what the hell are you doing in here anyway? Can’t you read? “Authorized personnel only”. Now get out!’

  Huckle, standing naked by his bed, didn’t know what to do. After a couple of minutes of Elgar the television announcer had suddenly apologized again for the breakdown and added that, as it wasn’t possible to go on with The Third Man, a repeat of an episode of Dad’s Army was to be shown until the late news in half an hour’s time.

  Technically Huckle had no idea how a group of anarchists might have been able to transmit a message during the showing of an old film on television, but they’d done it. Now he was wondering how many people had seen it, and what the effect would be upon tomorrow’s Underground users. Kirsten lay in bed and looked at him. She didn’t say anything. He was glad that she knew when not to bother him with silly questions which neither of them could answer.

  ‘Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler, if you think old England’s done …’ sang Bud Flanagan, as the titles to Dad’s Army brought relief to the television screen. Huckle flicked over to ITV, saw that as usual they were showing wrestling, and leaving some hooded moron stuck in a half-nelson tried BBC2. The screen there was blank. They’d already closed down for the night. Just then the phone rang. It was Winston.