by Ray Connolly
‘What time is it?’ his voice sounded cracked when he finally spoke again.
‘Ten o’clock.’
‘Morning or night?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘No.’ It was true. It no longer mattered. Time had ceased to be important in this world. Only the puzzle remained. The puzzle of her and his part in her life. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said finally. Only by telling her what she wanted to know could he hope to gain any answers to his questions. She looked at him and smiled in that way she had, and he realized that he was admiring the shape of her lips … not fulsome, overshaped things, but wavy and sensual. She sat down at the end of the bed. Lifting her feet so that her legs ran alongside him she faced him, with her back resting on the iron corner of the bedstead. Without thinking he felt behind himself, and releasing one of the pillows, passed it to her so that she might lean more comfortably.
‘I’m still waiting to hear about you.’ That was all she said. It was the repeated request of the interrogator who has all the time in the world. Huckle had no way of knowing how long they had been together, but it seemed like for ever. He had woken and slept and woken; and still she was there. And he felt he knew her.
‘Well,’ he hardly knew how to begin, ‘you know I’m a reporter. Not a very good one, but that’s what I do … that was what I always wanted to do … to write. And when I was growing up if you wanted to write, then you wrote for a newspaper. So that was always my ambition.’ He paused and looked at her to see if he was telling her the things she wanted to know. She didn’t indicate anything, and he knew that he would have to try harder if he were to win any marks from her. ‘I’ll tell you about the place I grew up in, shall I?’ he suggested, and was relieved when she nodded her head. ‘Well, it was in the Channel Islands … Alderney, d’you know it?’ She didn’t answer, so he carried on. ‘My parents were from Portsmouth originally, but they went to live in Alderney when the island was returned to Britain after the war. My mother was forty-two when she had me, and my father was over fifty and I think they thought that Alderney would be a good place to live in when he retired. He worked for the Customs and Excise, looking over people’s boats when they went into the harbour and all that kind of thing. I was the only child and we lived in a sort of fort thing which had been built at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Napoleonic Wars, and then reoccupied during every war. The Germans lived in it until 1945. It was a weird place: very thick walls but warm and cosy. Alderney was so small that in ten minutes you could meet everyone … but it was also incredibly lonely. I mean you always had the feeling of being cut off when you were there, as though the whole island could sink into the sea, and not only would no one care, no one on the mainland would even notice.
‘Anyway at first I went to the local school, but my parents were worried that the only thing I’d ever be able to do if I stayed there was to sail a fishing boat, so when I was twelve I was sent to school in England … in Surrey actually.’
He stopped talking for a few moments while his brain relived the fear that had gripped him on realizing that there were more boys in his school than there had been people on the island of Alderney itself, and the feeling of claustrophobia which bore in on him during school assemolies. Then he remembered and talked about the day when he was thirteen, when his name had been called out during assembly and he had been asked to pay a visit to the headmaster’s study where he had been told that his father had died of a heart attack. He had gone home for the funeral, and somehow his mother had scraped enough money together to keep him on at school. But before he was seventeen she was dead, too. He never really knew what she died of. She just seemed suddenly to grow old and die. She wasn’t even sixty. Again he went silent. He was forcing himself to talk about things which he had blacked out of his mind for years, because the memories had been too painful.
‘So anyway I left school and wondered what to do with myself. We never had any close relations, although I got letters from uncles and aunts and things who promised aid and support and promptly forgot about me. Bastards. But anyway I got along all right … you know …’
Again a thoughtful silence as he remembered the gradual realization that had hit him at sixteen when he knew that he was going to have to carry on by himself for the rest of his life.
Eyna lay back against the bedpost, still watching him, her legs splayed out in front of her. An unspoken intimacy was upon them; he could sense it but not explain it. He knew she was a killer. She had virtually threatened his children. But that seemed to be some other person whom he had seen outside this room in another existence. The girl he was now with was like a magnet, drawing out of him more of his past than anyone had ever done - more than Susan, much more than Kirsten.
And so it was to her that he described the bleak loneliness which had always surrounded him, even in the midst of family life; the bitterness he harboured over the years against those people who had wronged him; the appalling impotence of his anger. He told her about his first work as a reporter, living in digs in Purley. Of his three years as a student at Southampton. Of the regional papers, and the slow trek towards Fleet Street, where he had once imagined the best brains to lie. And of the sad disappointment when he finally got there and discovered that it was all a myth, and that if you were only half way sharp you could do well.
Although he was telling her all these things he knew that in another way he was telling himself. He told her about Susan, the girl he’d met during his last year at Southampton. How she seemed to offer all the things he was lacking, like security and self-assuredness. How she seemed like a good match for him because she could take care of that streak of self-ruination that had been his constant friend. There had been lots of other girls before Susan, and worrying moments in those days when a man had to take care of everything. And he had been glad to settle down. But the loneliness remained: black mental caves which he entered alone and stayed in for days while babies cried and debtors howled. Now it was better for both of them, he with his head tuned into FM headphones and Susan, he hoped on the lookout for the career man she had always wanted. ‘She’ll find one soon. It’s inevitable,’ he said. ‘She’s too good not to be snapped up. And then he’ll have the kids too, won’t he? And I’ll have a few photographs and some magnetically taped recordings of their voices.’ Again he fell silent.
Shifting against the bedpost, she asked him if he always felt so sorry for himself. He thought about that for a while, then laughed and said Yes, he did; when he felt anything at all, he felt sorry for himself. For some time they didn’t talk much more. But he found himself returning her gaze more and more.
There were all kinds of things he wanted to ask her, things he wanted to tell her, but it was a mellow time, and he didn’t want to break the mood of that moment, so he kept them back. Later on when the fire was going low she got up and fed it some more logs from a pile on the hearth and while he watched her she left the room for a while. Because of the darkness he soon found that he was sinking back into some kind of sleep yet, although he slept, part of his brain stayed awake and anxious for her return. When she did she came and sat by him with her head in her hands, while he in a dream state of half waking watched her, until at last she said: ‘I’m tired. Can I come into your bed?’ Wondering where reality and dreams met he held out an arm of welcome, and then watched while she slipped out of her clothes, and opening the bed, climbed in and slammed it shut like a casket lid over their two bodies. No longer aware of anything other than the moment and its security he realized that he was not aroused and curling towards her he allowed her to take his head in her arms while they both tumbled headlong into sleep, a slow motion movement which he again found he could watch inside his brain. Later on, when the fire had died down to no more than a heap of red ash, they partly woke and joined together for a while, and he examined her body with his own, and admired it and was grateful.
And although it was now too dark to see anything he dreamed he saw her smiling up at him. Fo
r a while as they lay together she was his prisoner, a fine satin-skinned prisoner whom he could not see but whose body stretched like a river beneath his, a river where at once he paddled and sailed and drowned and lost himself. Until again sleep came to them both, she holding him tightly, and he grateful and captive again and asleep across her breasts.
Chapter Fourteen
There were four other pictures of Red Jenny among Joe Chambers’ collection of negatives, and with the aid of a residents’ association in Paddington she was quickly identified as Jennifer Silas, a twenty-nine-year-old former playgroup assistant, ex-secretary, unsuccessful teacher, and failed wife and mother from Wolverhampton. As soon as she was identified Howlett put his entire force into tracing her husband, finding out who her friends were and discovering where she was now living. Her address was discovered through the Social Security. It was a bedsitter in Sussex Gardens. Failing to get an answer from repeated knocks the Paddington police eventually decided to bend the law a little. With the help of a landlady who was somewhat chagrined at not having had any rent for three weeks they let themselves into the room. It was a dank and dingy little place with just a bed, a wash-basin and a gas ring for cooking, on which, to their disgust, had been left a saucepan containing the remains of a tin of baked beans, now covered with a green moss-like substance and smelling like a stagnant pond. They took care not to disturb anything and, after a preliminary check to ascertain that they were indeed in the right place, radioed their superiors for further instructions. ‘Stay where you are, and touch nothing,’ was the reply: ‘If she turns up, hold her for questioning.’
She did not turn up, but within an hour Bomb Squad officers were going over the place, with the added protection of a search warrant. Howlett paid a visit during the search but did not stay long. He had enough faith in the ability of his men to find whatever there was to find, although he didn’t expect them to discover very much. On the way out he bumped into an old-time crime reporter from a freelance agency he had known years earlier when climbing up the path of promotion in the Metropolitan Police Force.
‘Is it true you’ve discovered a PUMA bomb-making factory, then, Bernard?’ The reporter always had a way of addressing Howlett as the police constable he’d been when the two first met thirty years earlier.
Howlett’s first reaction was to deny everything, but after a second’s thought he put an arm on the reporter’s shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t still be at this lark, Alf. Not with your cough. Come and sit in the car for a minute and get warm.’
Alf Pugh, whose lungs had been protesting loudly against the way he had abused them for as long as they both could remember, was grateful for a spot of warmth in the back seat of the police Triumph.
Before speaking Howlett considered for a moment; then, his mind made up, he turned to his old friend. ‘Alf, I want you to do me a favour. I want you to say we’ve found the home of suspected PUMA member Jenny Silas, known in the world of pornography as Red Jenny, and that the information we have found there has given us leads on several other members of the terrorist group. Say that investigations in the case have jumped forward with this discovery, and that further police raids can be expected in the next twenty-four hours. Then say that a senior police officer said that he expected to be making a number of arrests within the next few days. And don’t forget to make it clear that we consider this place to be a mine of information.’
‘You flying a kite, Bernard?’
‘Alf, you’ve known me a long time …! One other thing. Whatever you do don’t attribute anything to me, and don’t put your name on it. I don’t want to find you with your throat slit open in some dark entry.’
‘What did you really find?’
‘I’ve just told you.’ Howlett was smiling at his old friend. ‘You file that piece and you’ll never regret it, Alf. And if I were you I’d do it now so that you catch the nationals’ first editions. D’you want a lift to a phone box?’
Alf Pugh smiled. He knew that Howlett was lying, but he trusted him not to let him down. ‘Good man,’ he said. And began to laugh softly. But then he began to cough and Howlett felt the pain as the worn-out body shook under the wheezing.
‘We’ll take you back to your office, Alf. It’s a bad night to be standing around waiting in phone boxes,’ he said. And the car sped east across the cold London night.
There were few crime agency reporters so respected for their contacts as Alf Pugh and when his story began dropping on news editors’ desks at nine o’clock that night none of them needed much encouragement in running it, although all of them tried to stand it up for themselves. The Daily Express got a man and photographer actually into a room facing Red Jenny’s bed-sitter, and with the use of a 250-mm zoom lens were able to reproduce shots of plain clothes policemen carefully searching the room, while other pictures showed uniformed officers guarding them. The Mirror even managed to get an unnamed police constable to say that several boxes of evidence had already been taken away. But on the pornographic past of Red Jenny the Sun did best, describing the alleged revolutionary as ‘sexy and curvaceous’ and referring to the ‘several unpublishable pictures now in police hands’.
In fact the search of Red Jenny’s lodgings proved, as Howlett had suspected, to be a disappointment. Although clearly she had moved out in some haste she had left nothing to indicate involvement in terrorist activities. There were, however, a couple of names and addresses written on various envelopes, bills and pieces of paper, all of which had to be checked out thoroughly -all routine stuff. In the meantime her husband had been traced by West Midlands police to a council flat in Staffordshire where he was living with his mother, sister, and two children. They had not, the police were told, had anything to do with Jennifer in three years. Angry at being involved in this business at all they suggested that the police would do better by contacting Jenny’s sister, Mary, in the Tufnell Park area of London. She was, it was thought, the only person who was still close to Jenny.
Mary, a successful school teacher, was not hard to find. She strenuously resisted any suggestions that her sister might have been involved in anything illegal. If anything illegal had been done, she told the enquiring CID officers, then it wasn’t Jenny but a friend of Jenny’s called Martin Jenkins.
Slowly the pieces were beginning to fit in the jigsaw. Howlett now had another name and another address, that of Martin Jenkins. Suddenly, from having nothing to work on, the police had two names, two homes and two separate lists of friends for both suspects. Again the word PUMA was dominating the headlines. Howlett was using the media as PUMA had used it. It was now only a matter of time before someone in the gang broke their cover and came out of hiding. Nothing in the homes of either Red Jenny or Martin Jenkins was enough to incriminate them (although Jenkins’s Brixton flat contained a large assortment of what police would, no doubt, describe as ‘radical literature’), and there was no indication of where they might now be hiding. But there was no doubt in Howlett’s mind that at the very least they must be unnerved. Although the two individuals directly involved might feel confident they were in the clear, how could their comrades be so certain? And how safe could they feel in their hide-out, wherever it might be?
There is something remorselessly thorough about a major police investigation. The romantic idea of detection by strokes of genius is okay for Saturday night television shows in which the dashing amateur confounds the blundering police but the reality is the assembling of massive libraries of data, the cross-indexing of information and the general piecing together of material until some kind of comprehensible structure emerges.
For Howlett the identification of Jenny Silas had been the one stroke of luck: from then on the investigation began to run itself. One by one other names began to emerge as his troupe of anti-terrorist experts persisted. A couple of telephone numbers discovered in Martin Jenkins’s flat led to another flat in the Harrow Road which had been rented in the name of Michael Hickmore and his girl friend Kate Springfield. Although their
place contained only clothes, film magazines and popular paperbacks, the owner of the house was certain that Hickmore had once worked at the BBC and that the girl was American. To Howlett this kind of information was like gold. Through the BBC Hickmore’s background was traced and his former colleagues and friends were taken in for questioning; through the American Embassy and the Home Office a substantial dossier was compiled on the personality and political leanings of Kate Springfield, once a UCLA political activist, then a drop-out and radical student journalist. Most important of all were the photographs that came with the information from the BBC and the Home Office. Now Howlett had four pictures and four names - Martin Jenkins once having been careless enough to let Jenny Silas’s sister capture him on a Kodamatic during a family trip into Epping Forest.
Nothing came easy, but it came. During the next two days hundreds of people were interviewed, and dozens of false trails followed: and while Jenny Silas and Martin Jenkins were hogging the front pages, the system scored again.
Although the Hickmore-Springfield flat was bare of any evidence or further leads Howlett decided that it was worth staking out. It had no telephone and had been vacated only a couple of days before the police learned of its existence, so there was always the possibility that one of the couple’s friends might call round looking for them, or that they might return for the rest of their belongings. It was a long shot, but so was the whole operation. Accordingly a plain clothes man was installed in the bare flat to watch and to wait. His name was Brian Sapper, a detective-constable, and it was his lucky day when he was chosen for the first shift of the stake-out.
Hardly had he installed himself in the small bedroom of the flat when, through the lace curtains that shielded the inside of the room from the street life of the Harrow Road, he saw a black Morris Minor pull up outside and a girl of about eighteen make for the front door. Since the landlord had already told the police that he had no other tenants at the moment Sapper waited for the inevitable ringing on the bell. It never came. For a moment Sapper thought that the girl might have changed her mind and gone back to the car, but from the window he could see no sign of her. Then, as he moved from the bedroom into the hall, he saw that the handle on the lock of the flat door was being turned. He pressed himself against the wall behind a wardrobe, took out his Webley automatic from his shoulder holster and took aim. His stealth was unnecessary. Never expecting to meet anyone, the girl opened the door. As she turned and closed it, she suddenly heard Sapper say the line that he was to remember for the rest of his life. ‘Don’t move. This is the police. I have a gun. Put up your hands.’ Even as Sapper said it he felt a sense of cinematic melodrama but it was the first time he had been in such a position, and if he were overacting he could hardly be blamed. Even old coppers hammed a bit when they got frightened and he was actually scared stiff. His words had the required effect, however. Without even looking around the girl froze and shoved her hands high in the air.
