The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill Read online

  ‘Ssshh!’ said the voice in the darkness, strangely, terrifyingly familiar. ‘Ssshh!’

  Chapter 2

  The most sinister thing about portraits of the dead, Detective Inspector Harry Stark had always been told, was the way their eyes followed you. He had heard how in old castles there used to be peepholes concealed behind the eyes of ancestral images on the walls, and that those who were spied upon could not tell the difference. It was not a rule that applied to the two dead men whose photographs hung on the wall behind his desk in New Scotland Yard: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Clement Richard Attlee.

  Every time Stark turned to glance up at the two photographs looking over his shoulder what struck him first of all was indeed their eyes. Far from following you, the eyes of both men stared straight ahead, full of certainty, seeing nothing. There could be no peepholes hidden behind those dead eyes. But then who needed peepholes when the walls had ears?

  Stark had not been born when Attlee had ‘seen the light’, as the history books had it, and trampled on the old ogre’s fresh grave. But he did not question the presence of the two portraits on his wall, any more than he questioned that of their latter-day incarnation, the portly, grey-haired Arthur Harkness, in the trades union and city council offices, national railway stations or in the shabby surgeries of the National Health Service.

  Stark looked around at the walls of his own office and let out a soft sigh. There were times when he wished the Metropolitan People’s Police would splash out on a bit more colour. Nothing gaudy or extravagant, just an alternative to the ubiquitous government magnolia emulsion. Even just a fresh lick. It must have been a fine room once, back in the 1890s when the great Gothic palace of New Scotland Yard with its high gables, mansard windows, tall Tudoresque chimneys and fairytale turrets in red-and-white-striped brick had soared above the recently laid out Embankment, then named for Queen Victoria rather than the ‘Victory of Socialism’. He would have looked down on the river across a sea of pale green leaves on the young lime trees that lined the pavement as the horse-drawn carriages of the gentry trotted by.

  Hard to imagine now. The trees were chopped down in the winter of 1949–50 to provide fuel for the freezing population in the bombed and blasted ruins. The building itself bore the usual pockmark shrapnel scars from the last-ditch defence put up by those who had failed to recognise their impending liberation. Not to mention the great hole carved in the Portland stone of the main entrance, prima facie evidence of a direct hit from a T-34 tank shell.

  It was widely believed that the shell had been fired by the selfsame T-34 that now stood a hundred metres or so away on a plinth by the river, where once an ancient Egyptian obelisk had stood, as a permanent memorial to the Liberation. On any ordinary day, when the long hours of the afternoon ticked away with nothing more challenging on his desk than another mound of perennial paperwork, Stark would look down on the old tank, before involuntarily letting his eyes drift along the Embankment to that other memorial of the dark days of 1949, the blackened stump of the great Victorian tower that had once housed a bell called Big Ben. And in front of it, closer, more familiar, the long, barrel-topped, three-metre-high concrete symbol of the post-war order: the Anti-Capitalist Protection Barrier. Or as most people called it, on either side, the Wall.

  Was it really that different, he wondered sometimes, late at night, on the other side of the Wall, in the other London, ‘Westminster’, the anomalous enclave left behind by the sweeping red tide of the Liberation? An occupied colonial outpost under American imperialist control, the official press called it; a consumer paradise of free speech according to the radio and television broadcasts that found their way into the ether. But then they were paid for and run by the Americans. And the Yanks would say anything. Wouldn’t they? ‘The American dream is the workers’ nightmare’ the slogans said. ‘Not so much free men as wage slaves!’ Stark knew them as well as everyone else. But ‘wage slave’ was only a label, Stark mused to himself as he fed another triple carbon-flimsied form for recording the grievous crime of ‘Misappropriation of the People’s Property’ – party jargon for someone nicking a jar of pickled eggs from the People’s Own Pickled Eggs production line – into his ancient Hermes typewriter.

  The paperwork was nothing new. His father had told him that. His father was why he had joined the police in the first place. Following in the old man’s footsteps. There were those, both in the force and outside it, who respected him simply because he was ‘Comrade Stark’s Boy’. Not that he had been ‘comrade’ Stark when he first entered the ‘old Met’ back in the mid-1930s. The old man had been a staunch trades unionist but also a believer in the rule of law. He had joined the army on the outbreak of war in 1939, believing strongly in the need to fight the Hitler-fascists, but had not taken long to express his doubts after the 1945 ‘continuation’ when Churchill and the Yanks had enlisted the remnants of the post-Hitler Wehrmacht in their crusade to stop the spread of communism into the heart of Europe. They were ‘fighting history’, old man Stark had muttered privately to trusted friends. And so it had turned out. He had been one of the first to sign up enthusiastically for his old job in the rechristened Metropolitan People’s Police.

  Adding a single word to the force’s title hadn’t changed the essence of what they did, he had told his son, and that was catching crooks, street-robbers, wife-beaters, rapists and conmen, making the world a decent place for decent folk. Solid working-class values. English values. Those were the words still ringing in young Harry’s ears when he signed up on his eighteenth birthday in 1975, barely eleven months after the old man’s all-too-early death. He had either never heard or forgotten the stuff about endless forms detailing snaffled jars of pickled eggs.

  The late afternoon sky was rapidly darkening over the Thames, rain spattering on the windows. Stark was sitting over a fifth mug of barely drinkable tea, literally twiddling his thumbs, when the telephone rang. The co-occupant of his office, a rotund, middle-aged, rosy-cheeked man with flat estuary vowels picked it up, listened for a few minutes, then turned to Stark with a mixture of astonishment and anxious excitement showing on his owlish face:

  ‘We’ve got a murder, sir,’ he said. ‘Border police have found a body. Hanging underneath Blackfriars Bridge.’

  Chapter 3

  Stark felt sick. Sick to his stomach. Sick in his soul. It was partly a hangover from too many after-work pints with Lavery in the Red Lion the night before, but mostly the foul stench from the sludge of effluence called the River Thames, its repetitive heaving motion beneath him and the reek of diesel from the smoke-belching engine of the chugging little cutter belonging to the border patrol. But there was also something deeper, underlying, an intangible lingering melancholy of depression and disillusion.

  Black smoke belched out of the rear end of the little grey-painted boat as it puttered through the murky river water. Up ahead the great black sooty dome of St Paul’s loomed against a morbid yellow sky, still fractured after all these years like the cracked open shell of a bad boiled egg. It was as if the war had ended yesterday rather than forty years ago. The struggle for socialism, it seemed, was never ending.

  The lumpen object hanging from the underside of Blackfriars Bridge, seeping already congealing blood. The cutter heaved to almost immediately beneath it and a crewman dropped anchor. Stark looked up reluctantly. Blood oozed through rough sacking like the pectin his mother squeezed through muslin at jam-making time, and dripped in slow, heavy globules to form a viscous puddle on the rusty deck: reddish brown and slimy, adding its own rich copper and iron aroma to the fetid cocktail of the ambient atmosphere. There was also the unmistakable smell of human faeces. Stark took two swift paces to the port rail and threw up over the side.

  ‘You all right, sir?’ called an insufferably cheery voice behind him. ‘Yes,’ Stark lied. ‘Fine. Just fine. Carry on, sergeant. You’ve got enough on your hands,’ and he waved Lavery forward towards the abomination dripping onto the deck.

  The bul
ky, thickset Kentishman grinned and called forward two uniformed constables to take the weight of the obscene object, while the border patrol crewman used a hooked blade on a long pole, used for God only knew what obscure riverine purpose, to saw through the thick rope that held the thing dangling there like some rotted Christmas decoration.

  Stark let a few dangling threads of bitter bile fall into the stinking murk of the river, wiped his mouth and turned to watch them, a grim rictus on his normally placid face. He tried and failed to derive a note of optimism from the first signs of spring greenery on the vegetation growing from within the cracked eggshell of St Paul’s. Opposite, the great monolithic chimney of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside power station kicked out its own contribution to the spring smog as it struggled to provide the power for a city plagued by brownouts. Somewhere downriver, from one of the hulking Comecon freighters drifting out on the ebb tide from the Russia or East India docks, a ship’s horn sounded, like the cry of some plaintive primeval dinosaur.

  ‘Easy does it, lads,’ called Lavery as the last remaining strands of rope parted and the two constables on the slippery deck took the full strain of the dead weight fallen into their hands. For a second one of them, caught out by the sudden change in equilibrium, lost his footing and slipped to one side. Stark thought that the whole caboodle was going to come crashing down on deck transforming tragedy into farce. But the man righted himself at the last minute, losing only his helmet, which Stark grabbed even as it rolled towards the edge of the deck.

  He picked it up and held it in both hands. It occurred to him that if he had had it earlier, its bulbous shape might have been a tempting receptacle for the meagre contents of his bilious stomach.

  Lavery awkwardly helped the two uniformed men lay the body horizontal on the deck. Stark turned the helmet around in his hands, instinctively giving a quick polish to the familiar enamel badge – the red-on-white cross of St George with the party’s superimposed red rose that marked its owner as an officer of the Metropolitan People’s Police. Once upon a time, when he started out in the force as a lowly beat bobby, he had worn one himself. He handed it back to the constable, who thanked him with just the ghost of embarrassment and put it back on, adjusting the strap around his chin. Propriety restored. We’re still English after all, thought Stark.

  ‘All right, all right,’ called Lavery. ‘Let’s have a look then, shall we?’

  Stark nodded, though the question had been rhetorical and directed to the two constables. Lavery was already grappling with the rope, trying to loosen its grip around what they assumed to be a human neck. The blood oozed on either side of it, in crimson bubbles. Stark looked away.

  ‘No good, sir. I shall have to cut through the sacking.’

  ‘Whatever you have to, sergeant. Whatever.’

  They both knew there was no point. Whatever – whoever, Stark corrected himself – this gruesome parcel contained was already dead. The real work would be for the pathologist. But they had to be sure. If there was any chance …

  ‘There we go. Oh, bloody hell …’

  Lavery had used one of the constables’ standard police-issue Red Army knives to slice through the sacking and reveal a human face. Or something that had once resembled one. Of the facial features themselves there was almost nothing left: just a mass of seared and torn tissue where eyes and nose should have been, as if it had exploded from within.

  Even from where he stood, Harry Stark knew he had never seen anything like it in his life. But only because he had been lucky. This was the face of a man who had been executed, and not by hanging. That had been as gratuitous as it was grotesque. This was the unmistakable remains of someone shot in the back of the head. At close quarters. With the muzzle placed at the soft spot behind the base of the skull.

  The two constables stood back, as did Lavery, waiting for the detective inspector to approach. But Stark was in no hurry. There was something deeply wrong about this.

  When Lavery had first mentioned the scene in his telephone call, before the circumstances had been described, Stark had assumed it was a suicide; that was what a ‘body at Blackfriars’ usually meant. Over the years the bridge had become a favourite spot for suicides, most of them old men, sad derelicts who had once been bankers and stockbrokers, regarded in the bad old days of pre-war capitalism as masters of the universe but since the Liberation scorned by the party as usurers and leeches. Eventually more than a few of them decided they could take no more and had come to end it all in sight of ‘the City’, the little square mile of ancient London from where their finance houses had once dominated the planet.

  There was, of course, always the other alternative. Blackfriars Bridge was the frequent scene of another kind of foolishness: failed attempts to commit what the state considered treason. Every now and then some deluded soul – fewer over the years – would throw him- or herself onto a passing upriver barge, usually under cover of night, in the futile hope that they would go unspotted by the vigilance of the river border control, the frontier guards at Westminster Pier, or their canine companions. None succeeded. At least none that Harry Stark had ever heard of.

  This was something at the same time simpler and much more complicated. Murder was not exactly unknown in the English Democratic Republic, although it was rarely publicised. Humanity, even under developed socialism, was not yet wholly free of its baser side. The party admitted that. Ordinary people killed for many reasons: out of blind, irrational fury, out of drunkenness, out of passion, for love, for sex. Even for money.

  But most murders were committed out of sight, down dark alleyways, in crumbling tenement blocks, the bodies disposed of in shallow woodland graves, on bombsites or abandoned wasteland, at worst dismembered and hidden amongst the household trash. Murder was a crime the criminal tried to hide. This was different. That was what worried Harry most: this open flaunting of an atrocity, this obscene two fingers in the face of authority was something unheard of. It was a gesture.

  More than that, it was a challenge, and not only to the police. This had all the trappings of a crime much more dangerous than mere murder: subversion. Subversion was a crime that could be dangerous not only to the victim, but also to the perpetrator and – what worried Harry Stark most right at this moment – even the investigator.

  He told the helmsman to turn the wheel and steer the grimy little boat with its unwholesome burden towards the north bank of the Thames.

  On the Victory Embankment the ambulance stood waiting, dirty white, spattered with rainwater from the gutters, defacing the red cross and red rose that on the battered vehicle looked less impressive than they did on the policeman’s helmet. The emergency equipment inside, Harry knew, would be of a similar standard: old, worn-out, over-used. Amongst all the drains on the state’s resources, the National Health Service, much trumpeted as the pride and joy of the English Democratic Republic, always seemed to trail near the bottom of the list. Just above repairing St Paul’s.

  Not that it mattered in this case. The ambulance was merely a mode of transport. To the morgue, via the forensic pathology department at St Bartholemew’s hospital and the tender loving scalpel of Dr Ruth Kemp. Stark wondered if the good doctor would be with the ambulance, already waiting for her charge. He knew Kemp well, liked her, but found her enthusiasm for fresh corpses disconcerting at the least. He wondered what she would make of this one. He wondered how many she had seen before in this condition. But that was the sort of question Harry Stark knew better than to ask.

  The cutter pulled up at the rusting iron pier where two burly medical orderlies in soiled green hospital fatigues were already waiting with a trolley. Stark nodded to them and with the constables’ help they manhandled their unwieldy burden onto the trolley, and rattled it up and down the gangplanks onto the pavement. Kemp was indeed there. Stark made a brief gesture of acknowledgement to the small, stout figure in a thick coat stamping her feet and pulling on a cigarette next to the open rear doors of the ambulance. She nodded back. But her
attention was elsewhere.

  Stark followed the line of her gaze and spotted it almost immediately; the long low black Bevan saloon that could have been a hearse but wasn’t, although some of his fellow citizens considered the sight of one as ominous an omen. The black tinted windows were supposed to add to its aura of anonymity but in fact only shouted all the louder the identity of its occupants, the sober-suited, quiet spoken men who prided themselves on being the ‘sword and shield of the party’: the Department of Social Security. Stark swore under his breath.

  Chapter 4

  ‘Trouble?’ said Stark to the small dumpy figure of Ruth Kemp who continued to stare at the stationary black Bevan as he sidled over to her.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. But I’d go with maybe,’ she replied, turning to look up at the policeman who towered over her. ‘Depends what they make of that,’ and she nodded in the opposite direction to where a line of uniformed People’s Police had blocked the road to both vehicles and pedestrians.

  Most of their fellow citizens gave a wide berth to any incident that attracted police presence, but in this case a small group was arguing with the uniformed officers. One of them, a woman, loudly.

  Stark sighed and wandered over towards them, his heart sinking rapidly as he did so. He recognised the voice, or not so much the voice as the accent: Mancunian. Even though they weren’t officially supposed to, policemen listened to news ‘from the other side’ as much as anyone. And there was no mistaking the strident Northern tones of Sian Morris, roving reporter for that delusional relic of a vanished world order, the so-called British Broadcasting Corporation. And self-styled ‘scourge of the Stalinists’.