Newsdeath

By Ray Connolly

The campaign of terror in London begins with a televised death-threat and climaxes in a spectacular, on-the-air takeover of Capital Radio.

One man has been following the terrorists from the beginning. John Huckleston, one of their first victims, is also a top reporter after a hot story - and a lonely man, more than half in love with their seductive, ruthless woman leader.

He will be with them at the death...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448204915

Ray Connolly

Born in 1940, Ray Connolly was brought up in Lancashire and attended the London School of Economics, where he read social anthropology. As a journalist, he has written for the London Evening Standard, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and The Observer. Much of his journalism about the Beatles over 40 years has been compiled into his book The Ray Connolly Beatles Archive. His non-fiction includes Being Elvis: A Lonely Life and Being John Lennon: A Restless Life. His novels include Sunday Morning, Shadows on a Wall and Love out of Season, while for cinema he wrote the original screenplays That'll Be The Day and Stardust, and for television the series Lytton's Diary and Perfect Scoundrels. He wrote and directed the TV documentary James Dean: The First American Teenager, and has written plays for radio, short stories and the novella Sorry Boys, You Failed the Audition. He is married and lives in London.

Book preview

Chapter One

It was the silence that he noticed first, a sudden and strange absence of sound, as though someone had abruptly cut the tape that provided the city with its recorded background noises. He wasn’t afraid. He knew what had happened, and he knew that he was all right. Below his face he could feel sharp crystals of frost, and he wondered whether his cheekbone had been hurt when he hit the ground. He lifted his head and turned to look down the road. He found that he could move easily, and as he pulled his feet together he heard his shoes scraping along the ground. So he hadn’t been deafened, he thought. He wondered if anyone had been killed: or if he had been injured without yet knowing it; and then, in the first moment of shock, he wondered where he was.

Over his shoulder and down the road a figure moved by the edge of the pavement, something sliding on its stomach across the glacial field of shattered glass. It was a girl of about seventeen. She moved slowly, with great difficulty and without sound. The street that a moment ago had seemingly been alive with noise and traffic and people hurrying home out of the cold was now a wasteland. The long moment that followed the blast petrified everything it touched. Huckle leaned on to his elbows and tested the strength of his legs. Every movement he made seemed to unfold as though in slow motion. He felt dizzy, and held his body still for a moment, crouching on all fours while he forced his eyes to focus on the new arrangement of the street, where the smoke was now lifting from the jagged stump of the wrecked car. The pungent smell of saltpetre burned into his nostrils.

Then suddenly, as if a signal for the rescue workers to assemble and begin their work, someone began screaming hysterically and deafeningly; a young girl on the other side of the road from where the blast had been, a dark girl in a mac and wearing only one ridiculously heeled platform shoe, screaming and crying for her sister, begging to be allowed to see her, and pulling and pushing at the confused and restraining arms of someone less shocked than herself. Meanwhile her sister crawled in bewilderment a little further along the pavement, unaware still of what was happening.

And so the street was quickly filled with people, local people mainly who had come timidly out of their elegant homes to offer help to the injured, to stare in amazement and embarrassment that it should have happened in their neighbourhood and to watch while the more thoughtful pulled blankets and coats over the injured, or ran signalling to the oncoming traffic.

Unsteadily Huckle stood up and began to walk towards the two girls. Once again the street was alive, but it wasn’t like a street any more. People scurried across the open expanse of road and huddled in confused groups making a concourse area of the normally busy thoroughfare. And as more and more people converged on the scene it seemed to Huckle that the place was becoming something of a macabre carnival, the players lying and sitting, bloodied along the pavement, faces razored by flying glass, limbs turned at angles which now confused their bodies, heads down in attitudes of submission; while the audience were thrilled, excited and glad to be the audience. As Huckle moved among them he counted three minor casualties other than the hysterical girl and her badly wounded sister. Nobody dead, he thought, and wondered whether he ought to have some sensation of relief. A hand moved out to steady him: it belonged to a middle-aged man in a dressing-gown and pyjamas. Was he all right, he was asked. Yes, he murmured, he was all right.

And then there were police everywhere, charging to the blast area, their sirens accompanying them with that droning two-tone trumpet blare: a sudden invading army of navy blue and chrome, cream cars with orange bands, flashing red lights on black motorcycles; white road blocks; and quickly followed the urgent megaphone instructions to the still-growing crowd of sightseers: ‘Will you all please leave the area as quickly as possible … there is nothing to see … please get right away from the area … there may be another explosion. You may be in danger.’ Huckle listened to the ebb and flow of the sirens, and watched the racing ambulances and running policemen.

‘Come on. On your way." The policeman’s tone was impatient. Huckle, leaning against the wall of an undamaged shop for support, looked up and was surprised to discover the face of a boy: a youth really, but with the authority and world-weariness of a man of middle-age.

‘I’m sorry … I’m still a bit shaken.’ Realizing his mistake the policeman’s attitude changed. He turned and looking over his shoulder, shouted down the street to where a group of variedly uniformed people were helping strap the injured girl on to a stretcher: ‘Another one here. Just shock, I think.’ Huckle felt his stomach muscles begin to clench, and the sweat soaking his palms and forehead.

‘I’m all right. Honestly,’ he said.

An arm went around his shoulders and he found himself being guided into the yellow pool of lights thrown from the belly of an ambulance. The girl on the stretcher was lifted inside: her sister, now sobbing silently, climbed up the steps and sat on the facing bunk. Huckle joined her, and the doors were closed. Two ambulancemen leaned over the unconscious girl, simultaneously holding on to the hand rails as suddenly the vehicle jerked forward, its siren coming on automatically.

Through the smoked-glass windows Huckle could see other figures getting into other ambulances, and as the traffic jam which had developed momentarily halted their progress he found himself staring through the window, as though he were watching the scene on a television screen, somehow feeling no longer part of what had happened. Then as the ambulance paused at the corner traffic lights, making sure the road was clear before darting through on the red, he thought he saw someone he knew: a pretty girl, with long blonde hair, hair that had caught the wind and was blowing in streams across her face as she looked down the street away from the activity. He only saw her for a moment, but he remembered her from somewhere. And he didn’t know where. And then as the ambulance lurched forward again, half-throwing him off his bunk seat, a firm hand went out to secure him.

They sent him home from the hospital by taxi at just after two in the morning. Huckle had wanted to go earlier, but the casualty doctors insisted upon an elaborate check before giving him permission to leave. They looked at the cut on his head, where his face had caught the pavement when he fell, and for cosmetic sake inserted a couple of stitches; and they X-rayed his skull and his elbow, which was now swelling from the fall. But at the end of the night they were pleased to admit that his injuries were no more than a cut forehead and slight shock. A bed was ready for him if he wanted it, but he was insistent that he did not.

‘Is there somebody at home to look after you?’ a nurse had asked, her voice louder and more resonant than he would have preferred it.

‘I live alone,’ he said, almost feeling embarrassed at such an admission.

‘You’re not married?’ The nurse, West Indian and all wig and teeth, was silently tapping her pen on his accident report card.

‘Separated,’ he said. He didn’t know why he said that. There was no reason, but somewhere inside himself he wanted her to know about Susan. He regretted it the minute he’d said it.

‘Would you like us to get in touch with your wife?’

‘No, please … it’s all right.’

‘Is there anyone who can look in on you?’

‘I’m all right. Honestly.’ He smiled at her. He knew that she was only going through the formality. It didn’t look good for hospitals to discharge into an empty world people suffering from minor shock: but, at the same time, no one was going to break his arm to persuade him to stay the night if he didn’t wish to. Teeth and Wig smiled, and, writing something quickly on his card, suggested that he call back for a further check in a couple of days. He nodded, pleased to be released, and began walking towards the door.

Just as he reached it his path was intercepted by two men. Their inexpensive smartness would have identified them, even if he hadn’t seen them earlier talking quietly and earnestly to the other uniformed members of their profession. They had tried to approach him an hour ago while he was being examined, but the young casualty doctor would have none of it.

‘Detective-Superintendent Kinney …’ The younger of the policemen moved between Huckle and the door, flipping open an identity wallet, the way he had probably seen it done on TV.

Huckle nodded.

Kinney looked him squarely in the eye from a distance of about two feet. His gaze embarrassed Huckle. ‘I know you’re shaken up, sir, but if it’s possible we’d like you to tell us in as much detail as you can exactly what you saw just before and just after the explosion.’

‘Certainly, I’ll try,’ said Huckle, suddenly fascinated by the protruding cheekbone formation which gave Kinney the appearance of the living dead. ‘I’ll do all I can.’

And then he tried to picture in his mind the exact state of the street before the blast, to recapture his own feelings, and his thoughts as he’d walked along, on his way home from seeing Susan and the children. They asked him where he’d been that evening, and he explained as briefly as possible. He gave them Susan’s telephone number, should they wish to corroborate his story, and he wondered whether they would use it. His name was probably known to them, if not his face, and his reputation would have allayed any fragments of suspicion that might have lodged in their minds. They were polite to him, and kindly, and would have taken him home by police car, but he refused their offer. Even before the blast he had wanted time to be alone, to think about what Susan had told him, to try to work out what had gone wrong. The bomb had been a diversion, lifting his brain momentarily away from his self-doubts and sudden numbing loneliness. But now he craved that very aloneness; he wanted time to remember, to allow his mind to work its way through his life and maybe discover the path that had led him to this point. Most of all he wanted time to mourn: his marriage and his family had been something that he had helped create. Now that it was over and they were gone he needed to mourn that loss.

Was there anything at all he might have seen, Kinney persisted: someone walking away from the parked car which had been the target of the attack; anyone running; driving quickly; could he remember any of the faces of the people on the street before or immediately after the blast? How many yards had he got past the car before it blew up? How busy was the street; what colours came into his mind … colours of coats, skins, hair, cars? But there was nothing. He said he was sorry, and leaned against the wall, and searched his mind. He actually felt embarrassed that his mind should be so empty. He ought to be able to remember something of value; his memory was supposed to be trained to recall. But all he saw was Susan standing at the door, her expression emotionless, her chin jutting out in that attitude of weathered defiance. ‘We’ll see you again then,’ she had said. ‘Don’t come too often. It will only confuse the children. Make sure you get enough to eat.’ That was the worst of it: she was almost patronizing towards him. She saw him now as a wayward youth: not a husband. They both knew that their’s had been a failure of a marriage. She had married a young man with a bright future; and then she had watched while that future and that energy had withered while her husband spent his evenings in other women’s beds, before scurrying home to tell unconvincing lies about the unexpected jobs which had been pushed on to him at the last minute.

And now at thirty-five he was alone, his memory of this night a jigsaw of pieces which wouldn’t fit. At last the police, always polite and prodding, more by habit than from hope, realized that whatever this man might have had on his mind it was not likely to have left space for the casual observation of urban bombers.

‘Well if anything does occur to you … anything at all, you know the ropes anyway, don’t you … if you do think of something give us a call, will you.’ Kinney finalized the brief discussion, gave Huckle his card, and standing aside allowed him to climb into the waiting taxi.

With unusual courtesy the cab driver opened the door. ‘IRA starting up again then?’ he asked, as Huckle settled back into the leather seat.

‘I imagine so.’

‘Heard it on the news. Girl killed, they said.’ Huckle winced. They hadn’t told him that. The injured girl had been rushed into an operating theatre as soon as they’d arrived at the hospital. He thought about the girl’s sister sitting over her in the ambulance, and he wondered about their parents. And then he thought about his own children. ‘You were lucky.’

‘Yes. I wasn’t really close to it. It was …’ Huckle didn’t know what he had intended to say, because he suddenly found himself staring sightlessly out of the window of the cab, staring at nothing as they drove down the Fulham Road, but suddenly seeing again in his mind’s eye the face of that pretty blonde girl who had been on the corner by the traffic lights when the ambulance had stopped. He closed his eyes, and the face stayed with him. Somewhere he had seen her before. And suddenly he began to wonder if he had in fact told the police everything he remembered. Because there she was now, as clear as day in his mind, the fair-haired girl climbing out of a car just before the explosion. But which car? And then he remembered what it was about her. She looked like Susan, the same long fair hair, eyes he was sure would be grey, a tall and thin girl. And he knew which car, too. In a flood it came back: she had driven up in the Ford, parked it just in front of him, and then climbing out had walked down the street, not hurried, not frightened. And as they’d passed he’d caught just a glimpse of her face, and thought he was looking at Susan. And then she was gone. And then came the blast.

He didn’t sleep that night: the darkness intensified the humming whistle that had coursed through his ears and brain since the explosion and a headache formed into a knot where the stitches had been inserted into his forehead. He’d lived alone for ten months now, leaving Susan and the children at the house in Fulham. At first honest bachelorhood had been greeted with the enthusiasm of a boy reaching the end of school term. His flat, though tiny, was handy for the careless capering which had always seemed so attractive as a full-time husband. Tonight, however, the smallness of the flat seemed claustrophobic. When he had arrived home the doorman had made polite noises about the Elastoplast on his head, but he had not asked the cause of the accident. And Huckle realized that he missed that glow of sympathy that the sight of blood evokes in wives and mothers.

At first he tried to tell himself that there could be no possible connection between the girl he had seen on the street and the explosion. He went over in his mind the vital moments when he had seen her, and doubts crept into his head: he was, after all, suffering from shock, he told himself, wanting to believe that might be an explanation. He recalled the questions the police had asked. Was his brain just reacting to their suggestions? Was he certain? If he wasn’t, how could he report it to them? Then again into his mind came that screaming, that animal cry from the girl whose sister had been blown open; and he heard once more the shattering and sprinkling of glass as it had fallen over them all.

At around five he got up, and took another tranquillizer. Suddenly he felt sick. Forcing his stomach to grip its contents for a moment longer he stumbled into the bathroom and knelt penitently over the lavatory bowl while his body convulsed and the partly digested remains of the tea he had had with the children hurled itself free from him. As the sweat on his forehead turned into an icy coldness, his brain began to clear, and the events of the day became more vivid in his mind: his telephone call to Susan, the hesitant request that he might take the kids to the pictures; her grudging agreement. And then he remembered watching his children during the film, and wondering about all the moments in their lives that he had missed, and the many more moments that he would miss in the future. Taking them to tea at the Dorchester had been an extravagant gesture of paternal non-comprehension, he thought. They hadn’t appreciated whatever there was that ought to have been appreciated; and he had been embarrassed that his own children were such strangers to him that he should have harboured desires to impress them. And yes, they were strangers. He had no idea how many lengths Jane could swim; he didn’t even know the name of Charles’s teacher, or what reading book he was on. Their mother had dressed them up to go out to the pictures with him; and he had washed his hair for the occasion. And he felt saddened and ashamed that seeing his own children had become such an occasion.

He didn’t know whether he had expected any greater show of affection from Susan than he had received: he knew he didn’t deserve more. All the same her aloofness and cold practicality when he got the children home had increased the barrier between them. In the months since their separation they had seen little of each other, and it was harder to talk than it had been. Whatever either of them said seemed to be a blind alley, from which no conversation could emerge. The children had gone up to the bathroom to get ready for bed, and suddenly realizing that Susan didn’t want him in their home any longer, he had told a lie and said that he had to be somewhere else.

At first he had gone into a pub in Fulham and sat in the saloon at a quiet table, reading the arts section of somebody else’s neglected Sunday paper. But he couldn’t concentrate and didn’t want to drink. Failing to find a taxi, he had resolved to take the bus home. At the bus stop there had been a few snow flurries in the wind which had ripped across his face, stinging his skin still glowing from the warmth of the pub fire. It was a quiet, secret night, and the pace of the bus suggested a meandering uncertainty as it made its way back towards the city, picking up and dropping silent citizens, all numbed to muteness by the frost. It was only the beginning of December, but already the temperature had dropped below freezing for nine consecutive nights. He had got off the bus where Old Brompton Road meets Harrington Gardens and Pelham Street, just opposite South Kensington Underground station, and had begun his walk across the street and towards Sloane Avenue …

Huckle raised himself from his kneeling position, and, flushing the lavatory, made his way to the washbasin, where he poured himself a glass of cold water that washed away the acrid bile that burned his throat and mouth. Filling the basin with cold water he shoved his face and head under to cleanse the sweat which had soaked the roots of his hair and the tops of his lips. He pulled his head back and with eyes closed reached for a towel, dripping water all over the bathroom. Only when his head was swathed in white towelling did he open his eyes again, staring into the mirror, into his tired blotchy face, watery blue eyes and short dark hair, combed forward these days so that it disguised its own erosion, and which partly hid the Elastoplast that the hospital had provided to cover his stitches. Cautiously he lifted the edge of the plaster, tentatively eager to discover what size of wound lay beneath it. He was disappointed. The two tiny stitches were hardly worthy of comment. Footballers got worse every other Saturday afternoon. He doubted whether there would even be a mark in a few days time.

He wandered out of the bathroom and into the living-room, and searching in a cabinet drawer found a cigarette he had saved for such a moment. Giving up smoking had been no problem for him, but he needed the assurance of the ever-ready packet for rainy days. Three puffs and he put it out. He always did. The sound in his head was now abating: and his mind was clearer than it had been all night.

He looked around his little flat without affection. There was a bareness to it which reminded him of his days in bedsitters when he was a student. In those days to live in a two-roomed apartment in Chelsea Cloisters would have meant that he was a millionaire, but now the poverty of his life was reflected from the surface of every piece of furniture. When he had left Susan twelve years emotional and material accumulation had been left behind. He had taken the minimum of his own possessions, taking care not to deprive her of anything she might need. At first, probably because he had been busily occupied outside the flat, he had hardly noticed the bare walls and the cheap teak furniture. He sat and considered his surroundings, his eyes passing over the empty coffee mugs, bills stacked behind books on the mantelpiece, and, everywhere he looked, pieces of Sunday newspapers scattered like a paper chase from the bathroom, through into the small square living-room and on into the bedroom.

Leaning across from his chair he pressed a button and the room was filled with the melancholy of Delius, pre-recorded sadness to accompany such moods as the one into which he had now fallen. All in all, he thought, there wasn’t much to show for thirty-five years on earth: a couple of cameras; a typewriter, electric and rented from a place in the Strand; a second-hand Renault which had broken down; a coffee perculator which plugged into the same socket as the typewriter; and then, shoved haphazardly on to a bureau behind the settee, a dozen or so files of his own newspaper clippings, an encyclopaedia of his life’s work, a coded map in volumes of words which had led him out of one life and into another.

He pressed the ‘stop’ button on the elaborate tape-deck system and put an end to Delius, and, getting up, crossed to the shelves which he had erected in one corner of the room. If his Press clippings contained his life’s work, then here on these half dozen shelves was the greater part of his life’s pleasures and playtimes. Susan could keep the house and the family car but he would keep his tapes and his tape recorders, his hundreds of stereophonic hours of music, and thousands more hours of what, in lofty, drunken moments, he would describe as ‘the sounds of history’.

While some men collected stamps Huckle collected sounds, speeches, discussions by the famous, arguments by the illiterate, radio jingles from now defunct radio stations, living words by dead heroes. It was a library in which a radio station might have taken pride, and to Huckle it was a passion. When wiser men had questioned Richard Nixon’s decision to tape-record every White House burp, Huckle had understood and stayed silent, suctioning his recording device on to the side of the telephone and collating with a glee disguised by his methodicalness the useful and the useless audio-ephemera of his daily life. When he had lived in Fulham the tapes had become an escape from the bitter silences. Now that he was alone with his headphones and recorders, hi-filters, Dolby buttons, microphones and earplugs, twin sockets and zipped pockets and a small mountain of C-120 cassettes for economy and convenience, his sounds of history had become a path out of the solitude of the perpetual insomniac, and a study of his past that would be for ever with him. He was, he realized, sorry that fortune had not allowed him to record tonight’s explosion.

But supposing he had been killed? It was a zany notion, he knew, but he was sure his true fate should be in recording his own death. Only that would make sense of the time wasted over the years in compiling the great and mundane moments which had occurred in his lifetime.

Carefully he ejected the Delius cassette and turning on his radio searched along the tuning dial for LBC, the twenty-four-hour all-news programme. Perhaps there was something there he might save. The crackly voice of a phone-in listener came over the airways ‘… all I want to say, Michael, is that with all this bombing and violence and sex and all that going on, we should seriously think about making all the coloureds have licences …’ Huckle moaned to himself. Why was it that late-night phone-in programmes attracted the most bigoted segment of society? Weary immediately at the Cockney howl of the protesting person’s larynx, he turned the radio off again and allowed his mind to wander into a state of semi-trance. Not much to show … he thought again, and his night wandered wide-eyed and unblinkingly towards his day.

At six o’clock he heard the first intimations of morning when a milk cart, shaking with bottles, hurried past in the street outside: it was a daylight sound, he thought, and climbed into bed to try to sleep away