Number Two camera came up and life went on. ‘The strike of dental surgeons in Gwent has, according to a statement issued by their association, already begun to bite . . .’
Up in South Shields the middle-aged housewife spoke for us all. ‘Well,’ she chuckled as she nudged her husband into semi-wakefulness, ‘fancy that!’
Two
THE THREE CLARET TAPPERS SAT STARING AT THE talking heads, too stunned to move.
At last the first kidnapper bestirred himself. ‘Switch that bloody thing oft’!’
The third kidnapper, the one at the bottom of the pecking order, hurried to obey. The screen went dead.
The second kidnapper was chicken. ‘They’re having us on, aren’t they?’
‘Bloody hell!’ The first kidnapper’s mind was roaring away like a Formula One car. If he didn’t watch it, he’d have the whole bloody business coming apart in his hands.
The second kidnapper was desperate for reassurance. ‘It’s a bluff’, isn’t it? They’re trying to con us.’
‘Oh, belt up, for Christ’s sake! I’m trying to bloody think.’
The third kidnapper was as white as a sheet. ‘How are we going to do it? I mean, he’s a big man. He isn’t just going to sit there and . . .’
‘Shut up, the bloody pair of you!’ The first kidnapper sucked in a great mouthful of air and tried to calm down. ‘Look,’ he said, speaking more quietly, ‘we’ve got to check this.’
‘Check?’
‘That’ – the first kidnapper jerked a would-be contemptuous thumb at the television set – ‘could be for the birds. Keeping up the public’s morale or something. The pigs just don’t want to lose face, that’s all. Don’t you sweat – they’ll negotiate behind the scenes.’
His companions continued to look like a pair of cream-faced loons.
‘You never said what we was to do if they didn’t cough the cash up,’ Number Three accused his leader miserably. ‘You said they’d pay for sure. Oh, God, I don’t think I can kill anybody!’
‘You won’t have to!’ The chief Claret Tapper swung round angrily on his second-in-command, a broken reed if ever there was one but all he’d got. He pulled a handful of small change out of his pocket. ‘Here, go and phone your sister!’
‘Eh?’ The second kidnapper backed away from the proffered money as though it carried the plague. ‘Ring Jean? What for?’
‘To find out what’s going on, of course. She’ll know if the pigs are trying to pull a fast one, won’t she? Oh, go on! Get moving!’
The second kidnapper fought a craven rear-guard action. ‘I don’t fancy ringing the Yard right now,’ he whined. ‘Suppose they get suspicious?’
‘Why the bloody hell should they? They’ll have enough to worry about without getting their knickers in a twist over some bloody girl getting a private telephone call when she’s on duty. If anybody asks you – which they bloody won’t – tell ’em your old grannie’s just up and kicked it.’
The second kidnapper was still hovering by the door. ‘What are you going to do?’
The first kidnapper scowled. Sometimes he couldn’t help longing for a bit of this blind, unthinking obedience you were always reading about. ‘I’m going to sit here, mate,’ he said grimly, ‘and think until the bloody ten o’clock news comes on the telly.’
The second kidnapper came back into the centre of the room. ‘You think they’ll change their minds?’ he asked eagerly. ‘You think there’ll be another announcement and . . .’
‘For Christ’s sake,’ screamed the first kidnapper who merely hid his worries better than his companions, ‘sod off!’
* * *
The producer of commercial television’s ten o’clock news programme had worked himself up into a fair old paddy. He had, as a matter of routine, watched the rival newscast on the BBC at nine o’clock and the sheer, lousy unfairness of it all had got him down and chewing the carpet. Why had old Auntie BBC been handed this wonderful kidnapped copper story on an effing plate while the poor bleeding Independents were expected to scratch around on their own and make do with the left-overs.
‘O.K.,’ he bellowed eventually at the crowd of technicians, news-readers, secretaries and sycophants who had gathered round him in an orgy of commiseration, ‘if that’s the way they want to play it, we’ll show ’em!’ He reached for his telephone before pausing to toss a sop to his megalomania. ‘I’ll show ’em!’
And, to his credit, he did.
There was a bigger than usual audience for commercial television that evening owing to the fact that the alternative viewing was something less than compulsive, BBC I had a forty-five minute profile of one of the more boring and most dogmatic of trade union leaders while BBC 2 was showing its award winning film, A Day in the Life of the Narrow-Bordered Bee Hawk Moth, for the third time – and almost anything was better than that.
L he producer of News at Ten hadn’t been able to achieve the completely impossible, of course. Both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary had declined invitations to appear at thirty minutes’ notice to explain their policy in respect of the outrageous kidnapping of a valued public servant, but Commander Brockhurst, head of the Murder Squad and Dover’s immediate superior, was only too happy to oblige. As he told his wife later, for that sort of money he would have appeared in A Day in the Life of the Narrow-Bordered Bee Hawk Moth.
After a short resume of the story so far, Commander Brockhurst came up on the screen, looking the very epitome of your pink and cuddly neighbourhood policeman. The interviewer had been instructed to go hard for the human angle.
‘How, Commander Brockhurst, do you think Chief Inspector Dover is feeling at this moment?’
The commander squirmed uneasily. ‘Well, I don’t suppose he’s feeling too chirpy,’ he admitted with evident reluctance, ‘but. . .’
‘Chief Inspector Dover has been snatched from the very heart of London by a gang of ruthless terrorists and held to ransom. Even where there is a readiness to
