Newsdeath

by Ray Connolly

  ‘It seems to me a hell of a jump from sitting around talking about the revolution you all might want … to actually going out and blowing people up,’ said Huckle.

  Kate didn’t answer his assertion directly. ‘You know,’ she said, as though she were confiding in him, ‘we needed Eyna. Even before she found us, we needed her. We’d just sit and talk and smoke and get high and we didn’t have any sense of direction. We knew we wanted to do something, but we didn’t know how. We knew what the target was … we knew that it was the media that had to be controlled, but we didn’t know what to do, or maybe we were too frightened to try. Without her we would probably still be talking. When I was in the States I saw it happening all the time to people who were trying to get into things. You always need someone to say “Look you guys this is what we’re gonna do, okay!” And we didn’t have anyone. We just procrastinated. We didn’t even have a name. Eyna put our thoughts and frustrations into a workable shape. She’s such a beautiful person. I think she’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever known, don’t you?’

  The question came like a knife into the under-belly of Huckle. One moment ago he had been wondering whether Kate Springfield was certifiable, and now, without knowing it, she had turned the tables on him, and was already regarding him as some kind of accomplice, correctly identifying the source of his fascination with PUMA.

  He looked at her, but he didn’t answer. ‘How did you meet Eyna?’

  ‘Nancy brought her to us.’

  Here was a new name to Huckle: ‘Who’s Nancy?’

  ‘She was Neil’s girl.’

  ‘Where is she now, this Nancy?’

  ‘She’s dead. The pigs murdered her.’

  ‘I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Why not? You don’t have any difficulty in believing that we kill people. The pigs killed Nancy and Johnny. This is a war.’

  Huckle stared at her and realized that she meant what she was saying. Now she was no longer a plump, gossipy girl; her face was stern and intense. He knew that she meant it, insane though it was. Ever since his kidnapping, Huckle had felt as though he were cut off from the reality of the world as he knew it, a world where rationality reigned and where acts against social morality were always weighed against the likely consequences for the perpetrators. Now he was in an alien world where the end, no matter how absurd, justified the most savage and indiscriminate of means.

  Everything he had seen or heard convinced him that the PUMA members were misfits in their own society. They were a group of people who in themselves were harmless, probably almost pathetic, but who once exposed to an alternative way of life that suggested adventure, self-importance and, in their minds, a kind of crusading righteousness, had become blind to rationality. All it had taken was one spark to shift all pent-up frustration along a lunatic road; and that spark had been Eyna.

  Yet Eyna seemed as much an enigma to the other members of the group as she was to the police. On to the basic rump of misfits which was the PUMA organization, Eyna had grafted her own particular brand of revolutionary activity and had brought violence to a group of people who would never have reached that state by themselves.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ asked Kate. She was smiling. He felt that she wanted him to like her, and to love Eyna as she did. If he were to tell her that he despised everything they stood for, he doubted whether she would understand. She was like a missionary; so certain of her mission, no matter how mad it might seem to everyone else. Nothing he could say would ever make her see things rationally.

  ‘I was just wondering what you need me for,’ he said.

  Her expression told him that she already knew, but she revealed nothing further. ‘You’ll find out when Eyna gets back,’ she said.

  He didn’t learn anything until the next day as it turned out. After a while Kate left him and locked the door behind her. He wondered whether in sitting talking to him for so long she had not been aping the behaviour of Eyna. Eyna would have known that Kate had no way of converting him; but Kate, in her naïveté, might have been less certain. She returned once towards midnight with some food, but this time she didn’t talk much, although she was friendly. There was, he thought, a glow of excitement about her, but she gave no indication of the reason for it.

  In the late afternoon of the following day he heard the trample of running feet on the stairs. He could tell from the weight of the tread that it was neither Eyna nor Kate. His face collapsed in fear when the door opened and barrel-chested Dave entered. He was carrying an automatic rifle, across the barrel of which were spread a set of clothes, denims, shirt and nylon windjammer. He tossed them on the bed, and then stood back against the door while the girl Huckle knew to be Jenny came in, carrying a pair of shoes and socks.

  ‘Get dressed,’ said Dave. Huckle knew better than to argue with him, and slipped into the clothes, not even bothering to complain about the absence of underclothes.

  ‘All right, downstairs.’ Dave indicated the door with the rifle and Huckle walked down in front of him into the large kitchen.

  Eyna was already there, talking quietly and urgently to Danny, who, Huckle noticed, was also carrying an automatic rifle. Across the large kitchen table were stacked an assortment of hand guns, rifles and ammunition clips. Both Martin and Neil were sitting holding machine-guns. The friendly farm kitchen had suddenly been turned into an armoury. At the window Shelley stood, apparently keeping watch on the approach to the farm.

  ‘Keep well away from the table, stay quiet, and you’ll be all right,’ said Dave into Huckle’s ear.

  Huckle leaned against the wall and looked around the room. Lying on a chair was a copy of that day’s Sunday Mirror. Four pictures covered the front page: one was of Jenny, another of Martin and the other two were Shelley and Dave. The headline ran ‘Faces of Death’. Then underneath the pictures ran a second line: ‘Police seek ex-paras in terrorist group’.

  Huckle wondered who had given Howlett the lead.

  Seeing that Huckle and Dave had rejoined them Eyna called the meeting together. Gone completely was any semblance of the femininity Huckle had appreciated just a few days earlier. She looked frighteningly practical.

  ‘I still think we should lose this geyser now,’ said Dave, looking at Eyna but indicating Huckle with a jerk of his head. To Huckle it sounded not unlike a death sentence, and he could sense Eyna’s interest in watching his obvious fear as he waited for her decision.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘He can be useful to us. He’ll do what he has to, take my word for it.’

  Dave shrugged, then Eyna turned to address the entire room: Huckle noticed how, whenever she spoke, her words were carefully listened to. ‘We all know our objectives, and we all have our tasks to do. Whatever you don’t need for the job, or for later, leave behind. The pigs are on to you anyway now, so it hardly matters what they find. Tonight’s job is an all-or-nothing situation. Either we succeed one hundred per cent, in which case we will have brought our cause forward by years, or we achieve nothing, and spend a very long time in prison wondering why.’

  What madness they might be discussing Huckle couldn’t begin to imagine, but clearly Eyna’s words had the right effect upon the little army.

  ‘We’ve been through the plans enough times already. The only thing that has been changed is that the date has been brought forward. Nothing has altered.

  ‘We’ll travel in both cars. Don’t leave anything inside either vehicle that you might want, because you won’t ever see it again. Danny, Martin, him …’ she pointed towards Huckle … ‘and I, will go in the Jaguar. The rest follow closely behind in the Ford.

  ‘We attack at ten past three exactly … Okay?’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘Capital in tune with London, yeah, yeah, yeah …’ The jingle faded away, and the deep American impersonation of late night disc jockey Charlie Brown breathed into the microphone: ‘And now, at just two after three on this wet and windy London night how about some Ketty Lester …’ h
e murmured, and bringing the volume of his voice down slightly he released his right hand from the turntable. The sound of ‘Love letters straight from your heart’ filled his headphones and the studio. He listened to the gospel piano chords of the song for a moment, then turning back to his programme running order he studied his playlist.

  As always when Shirley was producing there was a larger number of records in it by women artists; he wondered whether she would notice if he were to drop a couple by Dinah Washington and Helen Reddy and replace them with some Pink Floyd. There was really no point in doing it unless she did notice, because virtually the only entertainment during the entire dead watch, which was his name for his midnight until six a.m. marathon, was to see Shirley getting irate when her authority was being undermined. She was young and new to the job, a renegade from the BBC, Manchester, and she took it very seriously. He knew that secretly she wished that she were introducing as well as producing the programme, but he had no intention of letting her have the opportunity.

  He looked through into main control, and saw his reflection in the glass which separated the two jobs. The studio was dark, the way he liked it at this time, with just a low lamp on over his turntables and consul, and he could clearly make out his image on the glass wall. He looked, he thought to himself, younger than thirty-four and he thanked God that his hair had not yet begun to recede. Baldness would condemn him to the dead watch for life, he was certain. As it was, there was still an outside chance that he might be given one of the day-time spots if he played his hand right and kept in with the hierarchy.

  He certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of his life being the most anonymous disc jockey in London. Nobody, he was sure, listened to him other than a few shift workers and some perpetual insomniacs, who, he was equally sure, were mostly deranged. Night after night the girls on the switchboard would get the same calls from the same rambling idiots, people complaining about the cost of spanners or Spangles, barleywater and Concorde, postage stamps and mistletoe. It was a wonder none of them ever claimed about the cost of their telephone bills, the way they abused the instrument. Most nights he hardly felt like talking to them, but that was what he was paid to do, and he knew that if he didn’t do it most certainly somebody else would quickly be found to fill his shoes.

  He withdrew another album from his stack. It was Brook Benton. ‘It’s Just A Matter Of Time’ was the track he was to play. He could remember that being a minor hit nearly twenty years ago when he’d been at school. If he’d known then that one day he’d have a six-hour spread on a London radio station he would never have believed it. But now that he had it he wasn’t sure that he really wanted it. Sometimes he wondered about the listeners, and about what they must be doing at this Godforsaken hour of the morning. No doubt they were as lonely as he was and they would imagine that Charlie Brown was where it was all happening, that Capital Radio in the middle of the night was the one place in all London which lived. Charlie looked around him: if this was life, how would he know when death came and rigor mortis set in?

  In main control he could see Shirley and the engineer Bill Adams drinking coffee and talking. Poor Bill, she was probably trying to convert him, he thought. Shirley saw him watching and smiled. She wasn’t a bad sort, nice tits, too, but she was so bloody intense. The song was drawing to a close now, and he cued up the Brook Benton on the other turntable. He wouldn’t bother with any chat between songs. That could come afterwards. He’d go straight from one record to the next, and then it would be time for a commercial break. Well it was one way to kill the night. It was five minutes past three. Fifty-five minutes until the next news-break.

  ‘Charlie,’ Shirley spoke to him from the control room as the Brook Benton song took the air. ‘Charlie, we have a caller who wants to talk about the commercialization of Christmas … are you interested? It’s up to you. I don’t want to lumber you …’

  Charlie groaned to himself and looked around the studio. The whole place was filled with symptoms of the commercialization of Christmas, a Christmas tree, the lights of which he had turned off as soon as he’d entered the studio, paper decorations, cards, holly everywhere. It looked like a bloody grotto, he thought to himself.

  ‘I don’t think we need any more of that, do we, Shirley …?’ He screwed up his face, shaking his head. Shirley, earnest in her horn rims and Capital T-shirt, smiled at him. She wanted him to take the call, he knew. He picked up the telephone which connected him with the telecommunications room. ‘Patti … what d’you think you’ve got there?’

  Patti Horrocks had worked the switchboard overnight for three months since the break-up of her marriage. It was the only job which enabled her to be at home to get her eight-year-old son off to school in the morning, be there to meet him at four o’clock in the afternoon, and then spend a few hours with him before she had to go to work. She lived with her mother now, and was virtually cheerful at the idea of working nights. At twenty-eight and with one emotional disappointment not very far behind her only interest was the welfare of her child. Her companion on the dead watch was less contented but then she was single, and suffered from the terrible feeling that while she was locked in here every night her youth was being stolen away from her. Her name was Frances, a dopey and miserable northern girl who had come south looking for adventure and freedom, and discovered that neither came easily to the dopey and miserable.

  ‘Quite frankly, Charlie,’ Patti replied down the phone, ‘I think he’s another nut. He’s already bored Frances into a stupor …’ Frances shifted lazily in her chair, a layer of fat spreading sideways under her like a burst tyre.

  Charlie laughed and, thanking Patti, put down the phone. They would do without being told of the commercialization of Christmas this night at least. He knew that if he didn’t take the call tonight, the lunatic would be back there tomorrow night trying again. He knew also that eventually he would give in just to get rid of him. He cued up another record, the Carpenters’ ‘There’s A Kind Of Hush’, and then, as the Brook Benton track finished, leant back as the engineer took over. Loud and clear through his headphones came an insanely gibbering commercial for a liquor mart, asking all listeners to stock up now for Christmas. He checked the studio clock as another commercial for Pan American came on. It was eight minutes past three. Two hours and fifty-two minutes to go. In the control room he could see Shirley, looking efficient and alert. She was again studying her programme running order. What she could be doing God only knew since the show virtually ran itself. Then suddenly his red light was on again.

  ‘This is Charlie Brown on Night Train …’ he faded up a snatch of the instrumental Night Train which he had first heard on AFN, Munich, many years earlier … ‘and I’m here through with you until six o’clock in the morning. So if you have nothing better to do, or you can’t sleep, or you’re working, or whatever the reason may be, might I suggest that you stay tuned to 194 medium wave, that’s 95.8 if you’re listening in FM and stereo, and we’ll do our very best to entertain you. Before the break you heard an oldie from Brook Benton. “It’s Just A Matter Of Time”, and now for everyone who is alone and feeling lonely here’s the winsome Karen Carpenter …’ and letting his pressure on the turntable go, the song began: ‘There’s a kind of hush, all over the world tonight …’

  Wearily he took off his headphones and, slouching back in his chair, closed his eyes for a moment. It was just nine minutes past three.

  Outside the Capital Radio studios in Euston Road it was damp and windy, and a driving rain whipped across the wide area of paving stones in front of the Euston Tower building that housed the station. It was no night to be out, and the streets were deserted. Slowly a black Jaguar followed by a blue Ford Consul cruised past the front of the radio station and turned left into Hampstead Road. No one noticed them. A little way down Hampstead Road both cars made a second left and came to a halt at the kerbside in Drummond Street. At that moment the traffic lights at the top of Tottenham Court Road changed to green and a single c
ar crossed the intersection at Euston Road and drove on up Hampstead Road in the direction of north London.

  Inside the Jaguar Eyna watched it go. She was sitting in the passenger seat alongside Martin. Danny and Huckle were in the back. ‘Now,’ she said, and throwing open the door she waved to the people in the car parked behind her. Immediately all the doors of the two cars opened and the eight other PUMA members, plus Huckle, followed her. Had anybody been watching they would have seen nine people carrying guns and sports bags, and one unarmed man, climb from the cars, run across the open concourse area to the shelter of the Euston Tower building and then begin a stealthy and speedy advance along the eastern wall of the tower block. Within a few seconds they were all at the back exit of the building.

  ‘Martin and Jenny stay here. Cut off anyone who tries to get out this way.’ Eyna’s tone was brusque. The two dropped behind and took up positions on either side of the door, their bodies pressed flat against the walls. The rest of the group moved forward. Until this moment there had been no indication of what action PUMA were going to take. Now that he could see the target Huckle could scarcely believe the audacity of the group. Whatever they intended could hardly end in anything but disaster. And yet sliding along the wall with them he felt a tremor of the excitement they must all be feeling. He was not a part of them, he was a captive, and yet when Kate stumbled in front of him he found himself putting an arm out to stop her from falling over her own gun. Behind him Dave, possibly misunderstanding his motives, cursed a command to behave himself.

  Reaching the end of the block Eyna put an arm up to stop the group, and peered around the corner to look up Marylebone Road and past the front entrance of Capital Radio. The road and surrounding area was still clear. Together the group rounded the edge of the building. Then, leaving her machine-gun propped against the wall in the care of Michael Hickmore, Eyna stepped confidently and carelessly forward right in front of the glass doorways of the Capital Radio foyer and tried to push open the door.