The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill Page 4

  ‘As ever.’

  ‘It’s particularly difficult because of the peculiar circumstances. Because he was hanging, the post-mortem lividity, caused by the red blood cells settling, in this case towards the feet, is less of a guide than usual while the fact that he was left over the river in the middle of the night means that the core body temperature would have dropped faster than usual …’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ There were always circumstances.

  ‘But judging primarily from the onset of rigor mortis, and more specifically the level of potassium in the vitreous fluid of the eye …’ Stark squirmed; why was it that people like Kemp took such delight in the detail? ‘… it would appear that death occurred sometime between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., some two and a half hours before the body was discovered.’

  It had been a river border patrol boat, doing a routine sweep that had come across the body, much later than they should have done. The corporal in charge had blamed the fog, which had rendered their searchlight almost useless. And the fact, of course, that they normally scanned the water, not the air. Stark suspected he would probably face an inquiry nonetheless.

  ‘The cause of death …’

  ‘… was pretty obvious’ Harry interjected.

  Kemp ignored him: ‘… was probably a bullet fired at point blank range from the nape of the neck, upwards and forwards, the trajectory effectively destroying all facial features. The subsequent hanging was incidental.’

  Stark snorted. ‘Incidental?’

  ‘Under the circumstances,’ Kemp continued, ‘only the survival intact of the bulk of the occipital and parietal skull bones and the lower jaw ensured that there was enough structure to support the rest of the body.’

  He hadn’t thought of that. Had the killer deliberately not blown his victim’s brains out because he needed the skull bone to hang him by? Had the obliteration of the facial features therefore been incidental or quite deliberately no accident. No papers, no name, no face …?

  ‘Nothing that might give any clue as to identity?’ he asked, more in hope than anticipation. ‘What about fingerprints?’

  ‘Intact, as far as I can tell. But I’m no expert. Think there’s a chance you’ve got him on file?’

  It was a possibility. If it was a gangland killing – a few old East End mobs still operated – then there was a chance he’d have form and his prints would be on a database somewhere. The problem would be finding them. Scotland Yard’s antiquated records system was nowhere near as comprehensive or as efficient as those who alleged they lived in a ‘police state’ believed. And anyway, the gangs did their killing in their own ‘manors’, like dogs marking their territory with urine. They did not advertise in public.

  ‘I’ll send someone round,’ he said. It was still worth trying. ‘In the meantime, I guess it’s still Joe Bloggs. I don’t suppose there’d even be any point looking for dental records.’

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. Longer than he was used to in dealings with Kemp.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was just thinking things through. I mean there can’t be anything left of the guy’s mouth. Can there?’

  A second’s hestiation again. ‘Actually, as I said, although the upper jawbone is fragmented and the palate totally missing, the lower half is relatively intact. In fact …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The thing is, Harry …’ It wasn’t often she called him that. ‘I don’t often admit it but I’m not as well versed as I should be on dental aspects, but there’s bridgework there, on the rear molars, and it looks to me to be of particularly good quality …’

  Stark lifted his eyes and found himself staring at the big white mirror-image on the map. He knew what she was going to say.

  ‘There’s something else. A couple of things actually. Not necessarily anything on their own …’

  ‘Come on, Ruth, if you’re onto something, spit it out.’

  He thought he heard the ghost of a chuckle, quickly suppressed. ‘An unfortunate choice of words, it’s the contents of his stomach.’

  Stark made a face. He had too much imagination for details like this.

  ‘… and his skin …’ Kemp continued.

  ‘His skin?’

  ‘Yes. Whoever he was, he had an interesting lifestyle. Within the last twenty-four hours he had consumed not just a small portion of standard street-corner fish and chips, but sometime before that a substantial good quality steak, blue cheese and a not insignificant amount of red wine. Also on the upper back were a number of small lesions, almost certainly early-stage BCCs …’

  ‘B … what?’

  ‘Basal Cell Carcinomas.’

  ‘Cancer?’

  Was that what she was trying to tell him, that the man was dying anyway? But somehow he knew it wasn’t.

  ‘Yes, a form of skin cancer, but not the most serious. They’re often harmless unless the disease spreads. More disfiguring than anything else. But they are consistent with having spent long periods in the sun, in hot climates …’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me here, Ruth?’

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you anything. You’re the detective. It’s just that, if you add it all together …’

  Stark let the silence hang, let her lead him down the path he didn’t want to tread.

  ‘… if you asked me to hazard a guess …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Then I’d say that, whoever Joe Bloggs is …’

  The silence resumed briefly. Then Ruth Kemp seemed to decide the game was no longer worth the candle: ‘He isn’t one of us.’

  Chapter 7

  The overhead lights flickered, the yellow glow dimming until the filaments themselves could be seen burning red through the worn patches of the frosted-glass housings. They flashed unusually bright an instant, then oscillated in intensity between red and yellow before restoring the familiar low-level light that cast the carriages and their passengers in an oil-lamp ochre.

  At Lambeth North the doors scraped open and the shuffling masses rearranged themselves, those within the train compacting tighter together as more pushed in than pushed out. A woman with a pallid face and a hairy upper lip sneezed loudly into Stark’s face, then sniffed the residue back, turning away rapidly to avoid the embarrassment of an apology. For at least the fifth time that day, Stark felt physically sick.

  He pulled the hand that was not hanging on to the overhead strap free of the throng and wiped his face. Those packed around him turned their faces down or away, watching only out of the corner of an eye to make sure he did not wipe it on them. He plunged the spittle-damp hand into his pocket and closed his eyes. So much for the National Health Service exhortation on the panel above the window: ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases: Catch your germs in a handkerchief.’ It might have been funny; but nobody was laughing.

  The train lurched forward in alternating spasms as if in coordination with the flickering lighting, a distinct possibility given that electricity for both lights and motion came from the ageing Bankside power station. Finally, carriages jolting and shuddering on century-old rails, the train turned a subterranean corner and with a screech of brakes rattled into Elephant and Castle station. Normally it made more sense for Stark to change here onto the Bank section of the Northern Line to get out at Borough, but in the circumstances he felt he needed fresh air. It was only one stop.

  He resisted the temptation to elbow the woman with the moustache in the ribs as he joined the communal push towards the opening doors. The platform was as crowded as the train, rendering the carriage’s attempt to void itself as hopeless as a drowning man trying to vomit under water. There was a certain, almost military, order to it, like a mock battle performed in deadly earnest on a daily basis by cohorts of some conscript mediaeval army. Only occasionally did an individual unused to the drill risk being trampled by failing to follow the flow. Stark noticed one such now: a tall, sturdy man, with a tanned weathered face, a hop grower maybe from the collecti
ve farms of Kent, battling against the flow towards the ‘Way Out’ signs at the far end of the platform. Stark as usual let himself be swept along in the opposite direction. The sign saying ‘No Exit’ was blatantly ignored because it clearly was an exit and was closer. As he turned the corner he noticed the big man, looking lost and confused, squeezed up against a peeling poster for the Transport and General Workers’ Union holiday homes at Whitstable. Meanwhile the flow carried Stark to the foot of the wooden-treaded escalators that clankingly brought him up into the only relatively fresh air of the part of London that still bore the seemingly incongruous name of Elephant and Castle.

  The fact that it did, his mother had told him proudly, in the days when they still talked much, was down to his father. Extreme elements in the local party back in the fifties had been keen to change the name of the busy roundabout that was the hub of South London to Clement-Attlee-Circus, an attempt to reinforce their politically correct anti-royalist credentials. When young Stark had looked puzzled she had explained it was widely believed the name was derived from ‘Infanta de Castilla’, for one of the Spanish princesses who had married English kings.

  In fact, Harry’s father had pointed out at a local party meeting, it was simply the name of a long-vanished pub whose sign had portrayed an elephant with a howdah on its back, symbol of the Worshipful Guild of Cutlers, in reference to the ivory used in their knife handles. As impeccably working class as the junction a mile down the road known as the Bricklayers’ Arms.

  It was one thing to play down people’s religion, re-evaluate their history, redefine their nationality, but take away all atavistic identification with their home neighbourhood and you ran the risk of having nothing left. That’s what his father had argued with the party bosses, his mother told him. And there was truth in that, Stark had realised. He had been impressed.

  The streets around the ‘Elephant’ bore no resemblance to the busy hub Harry Stark’s father had known in his pre-war youth, yet they had changed little in all the years his son had known them. The Elephant of today was a mixture of ugly concrete tower blocks thrown up on the wasteland left by the Luftwaffe Blitz in 1941, followed by the ‘historic misunderstanding’ of the working class who had been fooled into siding with the armies of capitalism at the Liberation of 1949.

  The Stark family was lucky. It was almost certainly down to his father’s influence among the housing cadres of the local party that they still had a house to themselves. A real house, in one of the little streets of Victorian terraces that had somehow survived both bombs and bulldozers. It was only a small house, two-up and two-down, but it allowed them the luxury, at the expense of what would once have been called the downstairs sitting room, of a bedroom each for himself, his mother and his sister.

  Would Kate be in, Stark wondered, by the time he got home. He was worried about her. Though not as worried as their mother was. She’d got ‘in with the wrong crowd, always out late, drinking and I don’t know what, not dressing properly, not keeping herself tidy like a decent young girl should’. Stark had tried to reassure her, tell her it was just natural, the way young people were these days. Kate would grow out of it. After all she was still in her teens, just about. Just about, his mother had echoed. The girl would be twenty years old in a few weeks’ time. By that age she was already married, to a respectable man, and pregnant too, carrying you, Harry Stark, much good did it do me. At times like that, Stark just smiled and kissed the old lady on the forehead which brought a tear to her eye. Too much discussion of the family history was never an easy topic.

  Kate had been a late birth. His father had been fifty-six years old, his mother just over forty. A bit of an accident, people said. The same ones in general who had tittle-tattled back when they first got married. His mother was just turned twenty and Lieutenant Stark, as he already was, nearly fifteen years older. Back then the gossip hadn’t been about cradle-snatching, more the opposite: that young Violet Easton was ‘on the make’, picking a party member on purpose, and a policeman to boot. There was also the fact that she was six months’ pregnant with Harry at the time.

  Stark only found out the ‘word on the street’ about his parents when Katy was born shortly after his tenth birthday, and the same tongues started wagging again, saying this time that accidents only happened to them what didn’t take precautions. The inference was clear – that Harry’s father wasn’t Katy’s – but no one said it in so many words, not in Harry’s hearing. And they would never have dared to the old man’s face. One way or another, he had never said a word, had given every appearance of rejoicing in the new arrival, despite the extra strain on the family’s resources. But when he died a year later, from a heart attack, there were more than a few who said it was the shock that had killed him.

  Stark didn’t believe a word of it. He could see more than a fair reflection of the old man in the dogged, single-minded way his ‘kid’ sister took up causes and clung stubbornly to ideas, even if they weren’t ideas the father she had never known would have approved of. Harry didn’t really care what the backstreet gossips said. Any more than he really cared, in the depth of his soul, who had killed the poor bastard whose mutilated remains were lying on Ruth Kemp’s dissecting table. The difference was that finding out the answer to that question was his duty. At least until someone told him otherwise and took it off his hands. That was a development he was half expecting, and more than half hoping for. If the DoSS wanted to do the dirty work, Harry Stark was not going to stop them. And he didn’t care either if they knew it. Maybe that was why he felt as if there were eyes boring into the back of his head.

  An unseasonably cold wind was blowing scraps of newspaper along the gutters. The crowds that had poured out of the Tube melted away into the backstreets, bus queues and the few remaining pubs. There had been more once, many more. In his childhood, pubs had still been the hub of the community. Everyone had a local and everyone in it knew everyone else. There had been more shops too. But when rationing had continued far longer than anyone expected, and the new regulations made it harder to remain as owner of a small business rather than an employee of the state, the corner shops disappeared and the pubs began to dry up.

  Before the war, old people said, the Elephant had been awash with small shops, ironmongers, greengrocers, butchers and tobacconists, with a cinema and a variety theatre. Today there was a giant shopping centre built in to the ground floor of the concrete tower blocks, except that half the shops had never been opened and the others were so short on goods they may as well have been empty. One week there would be an excess of plastic Polish potties, the next maybe garden products or unseasonal wooden Christmas decorations that were about all the decimated German economy was allowed to produce.

  There were butchers still but it was pot luck what you found in them. Sausages were a staple, as long as you didn’t analyse the meat content. Harry’s walk home from the Tube took him past one. The crude stencilled signboard out front which would once have proudly declared the owner’s name read simply ‘Meat and Sausages’, as if somehow accepting that there was at best a slight correlation between the two, although the sign above the shop next door read ‘Flowers’ but was empty. It opened only occasionally, usually in late spring when a grey lorry would pull up and unload a riot of incongruous colours from the Dutch tulip growers’ collectives. Its neighbour boasted ‘Fruit and Vegetables’, which was an exaggeration, certainly in the winter months, when there would be little on sale but cabbages, onions and knobbly grey potatoes.

  Stark hurried past and slowed only briefly when he passed the one real attraction the Elephant still retained. At least the generic sign hung outside here had tradition behind it, even if ‘Fish and Chips’ was also something of a euphemism. The chips could be relied on, and weren’t that bad usually, but fish was rare and fresh fish all but unheard of. He had heard a rumour that the cod and haddock trawled in industrial quantities from the waters of the North Sea were in sharp decline. Perhaps one bleak day in the near future
the sign-writers would come along with their brushes and paint over the word ‘Fish’ and another staple would be gone forever. But not just yet. The smell of frying oil and vinegar drifted into the street. An old man in a flat cap and thick glasses was staring hungrily into the window; Stark pressed a sixpence into his hand. The old man flinched. Begging was banned. But Stark gave him a reassuring smile.

  He was tempted himself. Lunch had been a curling sandwich of dried-up ham from Mavis the tea-lady’s trolley, snatched at his desk and washed down with yet another mug of the vile brew that flowed, ready sugared and milk-powdered from her mobile urn. But what he needed right now was refreshment of a different sort: alcohol. Preferably lots of it.

  A pint after office hours was something of a Yard ritual. He and Lavery, like most of the rest of CID, would nip around the corner to a run-down pub on the corner of the wasteland that was Whitehall. The Red Lion had once been a favourite with members from the Houses of Parliament, in the days when there had still been a parliament housed in the ruin that now lay on the other side of the Wall. Today it was a tawdry little inn on the edge of nowhere maintained only as a watering hole for flatfooted policemen. Stark believed it had been kept deliberately tacky to discourage any foreign visitors who ventured down in the hope of snapping a rare photo of Big Ben’s blackened stump from ‘the other side’. It was strictly forbidden to take photographs of the ‘state frontier’, and there was a guard on regular duty to make sure the rules were obeyed. The brave few who still came were rarely tempted to linger over a refreshing pint in such a ‘historic’ setting once they had seen the dour-faced men who sat over their warm beers in the ‘Lion’.

  There was a more salubrious establishment not far away, just off Northumberland Avenue, a relatively well-preserved old Victorian pub with leaded windows and plush, if slightly faded, velour upholstery, that rejoiced in the name The Sherlock Holmes. Stark suspected the name pre-dated the war and was an attempt by some long-dead publican to cash in on his famous near-neighbours at Scotland Yard. It was maintained as a sort of showpiece by Inside England, the state tourism authority, to impress on Northerners or ‘other foreigners’ who wandered down from Stalingrad Square, that they were now in ‘real London’, not the glitzy phoney Yankee showcase of ‘Westminster’.