Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  At that moment the Spanish waiter, who a few moments ago had served Huckle, realized that he now had a guest, and began to walk towards the table carrying a menu. The girl saw him first. ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ she said. She was smiling as she said it, but Huckle was in no doubt as to the seriousness of her threat. The waiter reached them, and her hand slipped further under the table. ‘I’m not hungry. But could I have a glass, please?’ she said, smiling up at him, so that Huckle was struck by the whiteness and evenness of her teeth. The waiter, charmed by her smile, hurried away noiselessly on his errand.

  At last Huckle found his voice: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Eyna,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eyna … as in Dinah …’ she repeated.

  Huckle tried to keep calm, and picking up his fork again began to play with his food. ‘I don’t know many killers called Eyna,’ he said.

  The green eyes opened wider and seemed to embrace his soul. ‘Don’t call me that, please. I don’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘Well, what do you want?’

  ‘To talk to you.’

  ‘Go ahead, I’m listening.’

  ‘No. Not here.’

  ‘I’m not leaving here. I’m not a complete fool.’ Huckle looked along the silent diners again. The conversation had been so low that none had overheard or even looked up to see who this remarkably attractive girl might be.

  She smiled again. ‘Just finish your meal, and we’ll go somewhere more private to talk. You can trust me. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Supposing I won’t go.’

  ‘Then you won’t be able to trust me.’ She laughed, her mocking three-descending-note chuckle. Huckle picked up his glass of wine. She poured one for herself and, raising it almost in a movement of toast, drank along with him. He turned and looked into the aquarium again, and noticed that one of the goldfish had died, and was floating bloated and open-mouthed on the surface of the water, constantly shifted in a rhythmical circle by the force of the water spout.

  ‘I seem to have lost my appetite,’ he said, which he thought must have ranked as the biggest understatement of his life.

  ‘There’s no hurry for us to go yet.’ She seemed content to relax there, and allow him to pull himself together again. ‘Have some more wine.’ Although his glass was still half full, she added more to it.

  He looked at her for a long moment before he spoke again. She was, he would have guessed, about twenty-six, and she was wearing a stylish trench coat over what he could see was a sweater and jeans. She looked casually thrown together, but the effect was devastating. The idea of this lovely girl carrying a gun around London seemed nonsensical.

  ‘Where’s it to be then?’ he asked at last. ‘Your place or mine?’ The joke was only half intentional, a way out of the nervousness of the situation, but anyway she thought it was funny. She threw her head back and laughed with a gaiety that Huckle found almost disquieting. Again he looked around the restaurant to see if anybody had noticed. There was nothing; no sign of rescue anywhere. He couldn’t imagine what had happened to the tail Howlett had put on him. Suddenly the street door at the top of the short flight of steps opened and a dark, good-looking young man with a slight beard and wearing pale blue jeans and a dark blue windcheater zipped up to his neck, entered the restaurant. As Huckle caught sight of him Eyna nodded brusquely towards the newcomer. Quickly, walking with a precise athleticism, he moved towards them and slid into the seat alongside her. For a split second they looked at each other. Then she turned back to Huckle.

  ‘I think it’s time we were going,’ she said. ‘Order the bill.’

  Hopelessly Huckle looked into the face of the newcomer. He had a pretty face, but it was marred by crooked teeth and a sallow impassivity which suggested an absence of emotion. He didn’t speak.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’ Huckle knew he had to play for time, but suddenly Eyna and her friend were in a hurry. The young man stood up and beckoned the waiter across to him.

  ‘The bill, please.’ It was Eyna who spoke.

  As if he were in some conspiracy of efficiency the wretched waiter walked quickly away and returned immediately with the bill. Huckle put his hand in his pocket to find his wallet. There must be some message he could leave, but he wasn’t quick enough.

  ‘No,’ said Eyna. Nodding again to her companion, she stood up, sliding her right hand into the pocket of her raincoat. ‘Come on, we have to go now,’ she said to Huckle. Slowly he pulled himself to his feet, while the young man put a leather-gloved hand in his pocket and withdrew a handful of notes to pay the bill, leaving them scattered loosely on the table.

  Together the three of them moved towards the door. For one mad moment Huckle thought of making a dash for it as they reached the swing doors, but catching the expressions on the faces of his two captors he decided against it.

  They moved through the doors and out into the street.

  ‘Round the back,’ snapped the girl once they were clear of the doors, and linking Huckle with her free arm, while her dark ally loped along outside them, she led the way behind the building towards a large black Jaguar. Huckle’s heart was now beating so loudly that it seemed to him it was about to come bursting through his rib cage and all over the pavement. But the stern arm of Eyna forced him onwards towards the unlighted car.

  If Huckle had not been walking so quickly, propelled forward to an unknown destiny with such speed, he might have seen the half-hidden body of Detective-Constable Phillips, lately employed as his shadow, as he lay broken at right angles under the pile of rotting refuse. Had he had the chance to investigate further he might have discovered that the man’s throat had been cut just above the bulge of his Adam’s apple, and that his Burton’s grey suit had been stained red and black for ever by the outflow from a severed artery.

  But he saw none of this. Reaching the Jaguar he turned, and as he wondered for the last time whether he should try to get away, there was a blinding flash across the back of his head, a blow which seemed to crush his head into the rest of his body. And with that his evening came to an abrupt end and he fell forward on to the back seat of the Jaguar.

  Chapter Ten

  Huckle’s disappearance was known shortly before nine-thirty when the once eagerly awaited replacements for Phillips and Binns discovered their bodies. A plain-clothed PC called James Wilford found Binns. Although he’d seen scores of corpses during his five years with the service the sight of his colleague’s head blown open and splashed across the inside of the car in which he was still sitting caused his stomach to bubble in protest.

  Radio contact had been lost between the grey police Austin and Scotland Yard just a few seconds after Sergeant Binns had made the obligatory check call giving his superiors information of the whereabouts of the subject he was tailing. At that moment Phillips had been standing on the corner of the alley watching Huckle enter the steak house. Since then nothing had been heard, and when the relief pair checked in slightly earlier than expected they were ordered across to Kensington immediately to find out what was going on. They spotted the Austin quickly, parked in the place Binns had said, and as was customary in this kind of situation one man stayed in the relief car while the other went to check the Austin. It was then that Wilford had seen what was left of Binns’s head, split apart, a coroner was later to be told, by a shot from a 9-mm Makarov pistol held hardly more than a foot away from the victim.

  Immediately the relief police had radioed for help, but even before that could arrive, in the three minutes it took for a car to race the half mile from Earl’s Court Road, Wilford had made the second of his macabre discoveries, as he found himself tracing another stream of congealing blood until it led under a pile of litter bags to the body and half severed head of Detective-Constable Andrew Phillips.

  Winston heard the news at midnight when he arrived home at the Barbican after an evening with his mother and sister in Kensal Rise. A City of London police constable was waiting
for him outside his apartment door as he got out of the lift. Instantly he feared something terrible, but at the same time he was aware of a nagging annoyance about what his neighbours might think to see a policeman waiting for him at this time of night. The environment of his childhood still lingered in his subconscious.

  ‘Mr Collins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could I have a word with you, sir?’

  The words were the meaningless polite clichés of police and police-drama jargon: but, all the same, they embarrassed Winston. He hurried the constable inside his flat and away from prying eyes. This had to be a private word.

  Inside the flat the policeman took out his notebook, and, without explaining the purpose of his mission, asked Winston his whereabouts that evening. Then he asked him what time he had last seen John Huckleston. That was all. He didn’t offer any information, but simply added that he had been asked to interview a Mr Winston Collins, which he had now done. Suddenly Winston began to feel angry. He was beginning to demand some kind of explanation when his telephone cut into his protest. It was Sam Griffiths, the overnight reporter.

  ‘Winston?’

  ‘Yes.’ Winston was watching the policeman carefully as he saw him taking stock of the apartment and its fittings. For the first time in years he felt as though he were being treated with less respect than he deserved.

  ‘You haven’t seen Huckle have you?’ asked Griffiths.

  ‘No, what is this? The police are here looking for him, too.’

  ‘He’s gone missing. Disappeared. And there have been two more murders. Policemen.’

  ‘Oh Christ …’ Winston dropped his head into his free hand. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We don’t really know. They’re saying Huckle was tailed to a restaurant in Kensington where he met a girl and another bloke. And then they all left together. Apparently the bobby following him was found round the back of the place with his throat cut … and another one had his brains blown out.’

  Winston couldn’t understand what had happened. ‘You say he met a girl and another man?’

  ‘That’s what the police are saying.’

  ‘What was the name of the restaurant?’

  ‘It was a steak house in Kensington … somewhere near the Royal Garden Hotel …’

  Winston suddenly felt tired and sat down on the edge of his settee. It was a small flat, but tidy and fashionable and new, a place of wooden polished block floors, a tweed and wooden three piece suite, and a room divider from which he had hung directional spotlights to make more cosy the sparseness of his furnishings. Winston looked up at the policeman, who had been watching him throughout the conversation. He could feel himself growing hot under the man’s gaze. ‘Tell me, do the mornings have anything yet, Sam?’

  ‘The Express and Mirror have fudged the killings for their first editions. But they’re on to the Huckle angle now. He’ll be all over the front pages by the time they get to the London editions. They’ve been on to me non-stop for the last hour. Two police killings is one hell of a story.’

  ‘Okay. Do me a favour, will you? The minute you get the last editions let me know what they’re saying. I won’t be sleeping. I’ll be here waiting for you. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. Sorry for the bad news.’ Sam Griffiths almost sang his regrets. It had been his life’s job to wake people up in the middle of the night with bad news, and he had become immune to it; apart from which, as he worked from eleven at night until seven in the morning, he had rarely met any of the other staff of the paper. John Huckleston was virtually as foreign a person to him as any reporter on any paper in London.

  ‘That’s okay. I’ll hear from you then?’

  Griffiths agreed again and Winston put down the phone. Angrily he turned to the silent policeman.

  ‘For Christ’s sake you could have told me.’

  ‘I’m afraid that wasn’t my job, sir. I was simply told to interview you. I don’t make the rules.’

  Winston hardly heard him, but began walking round the room, his customary coat of calmness in tatters. ‘Jesus, somebody must know something … this is unbelievable … Jesus Christ!’

  The Sun told Susan at one in the morning. Since she and Huckle had separated she had become unused to getting many telephone calls, and none came during the night any more. Her instincts told her that something was wrong as soon as the bell raised her from her sleep, and she floundered across to the now cold side of the bed which had been Huckle’s to take the call. He had always wanted the phone by his right ear and she, being a creature of habit, had continued to occupy her own little blanketed valley on the window side. The man from the Sun didn’t waste too many words in explaining what had happened, and that her husband had disappeared with a woman.

  ‘Do you know of any women your husband might have been friendly with?’ he asked in a broad Glaswegian accent.

  Susan felt her anger at the callousness of journalism begin to boil. It was her only certain reaction. She daren’t think that anything might have happened to Huckle. She struggled with herself to keep calm as the hoarse interview continued. At last she replied to the Glaswegian’s probings: ‘Look. You know that we’re separated. I have no idea who my husband is friendly with, nor where he might have gone. But I have got an idea that you don’t care either way what may have happened to him. Thank you for calling. Don’t call again. Good night!’

  She put down the phone. Surely no one would want to hurt Huckle. It was unthinkable. Getting out of bed she went downstairs into the kitchen. All sleep had been driven out of her. She wanted to know more, but she couldn’t bear the thought of what she might find out. Just then the phone went again. This time it was Kinney, making formal enquiries and asking her whether her husband was staying there that night since he couldn’t be found at his flat. She explained that he was not, and that he needn’t be coy because the Sun had beaten him to it. ‘Have you any idea at all what might have happened to my husband?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid not, Mrs Huckleston.’ The reply was stiff and unyielding. The police murders had shocked him.

  ‘But he might have met some old friends and gone off with them for the evening?’ She was gabbling in hope more than from any reasonable belief in the assumption.

  There was a slight pause. ‘Well, that is possible. But he left his overcoat behind in the restaurant. And it is a cold night. And his car is where he left it … and then there are the two policemen …’

  Susan was afraid to ask the next question, but she had to. ‘What … what do you think might have happened to my husband …?’

  Again there was a slight pause of embarrassment. ‘I’m afraid at this moment we don’t exactly know, madam.’ The reply was supposed to be comforting. But it had to be accurate. ‘All I can suggest is that you try not to worry. We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything. I’m to tell you that Commander Howlett will be wanting to talk to you in the morning, so we’d be grateful if you could let us know if you intend going away in the next few days …’

  Susan began to sob, a silent heaving process, that shook her body as she leant against the kitchen wall of her home, her hand over the telephone mouthpiece so that she wouldn’t betray herself. It was so unlike her. So weak. She was embarrassed for herself. As a wife she didn’t love Huckle: that had all gone a long time ago. But at that moment she was thinking about the young man she had first met, and about the father of her children.

  Kirsten didn’t hear the news until ten o’clock next morning when she reached the exhibition on which she was working at Grosvenor House. Kinney was waiting for her in the small office which she was using for the week while planning the Chanel show. He was surprised she didn’t know what he wanted, but, after suggesting that they shouldn’t be disturbed for half an hour or so he gave her as brief a summary as was possible. It was, he said, all over the papers, and almost as evidence produced a copy of the Daily Express. It was the banner headline in the London edition: ‘PUMA: 2 POLICE DIE, NEWSMAN MISSING.’ Kirst
en read the story with care and self-control, putting on her glasses, as much to hide her eyes as to help her read. Bad news should come when one is alone, she thought. With a stranger one’s natural reactions are smothered. She didn’t know how to look, or how t feel.

  ‘This was last night … is there any news today?’

  Kinney shook his head: he looked at her legs and admired them. He remembered Huckle had said he liked trim women. ‘I have to ask you some questions which may seem distasteful …’ he said. He felt slightly nervous of her; she was so self-contained. ‘But ask them I must, so if you can just bear with me …’

  Kirsten nodded: ‘Yes.’

  He took out his notebook: ‘We know that you and Mr Huckleston were on very familiar terms …’

  ‘You mean “were we lovers?” Yes we were.’ Kirsten had no time for polite nonsense that day.

  Kinney smiled, a bony little grimace. ‘Mr Huckleston was joined by another woman in the restaurant … do you know if he knew many other women?’

  ‘I’m sure he knew several.’

  ‘Did he talk about any?’

  ‘Not to me. He wouldn’t, would he?’

  ‘Do you think he had … relations with any other women?’

  Kirsten almost lost her composure: ‘No … well, yes … Possibly … I really don’t know, and I don’t see what his sex life has to do with his being kidnapped.’

  ‘Miss Parish.’ Kinney looked at her in what he hoped was as kindly a way as possible. ‘No one can say for sure whether Mr Huckleston was kidnapped. All we do know is that he drove his car to a restaurant, that the police officers trailing him were murdered, that he was joined by a woman and later a man, and that he left with them … without actually attempting to draw attention to himself.’

  Kirsten stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment. ‘Are you suggesting …?’ She stopped in confusion. ‘Are you saying he might have wanted to be kidnapped … to go missing … you’re crazy …’