The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (11 page)

St Paul’s Cathedral in the rain cut a desolate spectacle. Stark still retained an image of the great baroque dome, bigger than any in what once was Christendom save St Peter’s in Rome, floating ethereally above the smoke and flame of the Blitz, a photograph he had found in his father’s wardrobe, clipped from the front page of some wartime newspaper.

He had meant to ask the old man about it, but had never quite got around to it mainly because he could not think of an easy explanation for poking around in his father’s things in the first place. Now he only wished he had done it more. The photograph had gone by the time he and his mother sorted out the old man’s things after his sudden death.

The photograph, he knew, had to have been taken during the first phase of the war, when the capitalist government played up an imaginary image of such a national
landmark’s
invulnerability. In reality the cathedral had been hit several times, though only by minor incendiary bombs that had been extinguished quickly by fire crews who had been ordered to ignore damage to people’s homes to preserve this great symbol of empire and religion. To prove God was on their side. At least that was how Stark had been taught it in school.

The cathedral had not been so lucky the second time around when the Junkers and Heinkels had been replaced by MiGs and Antonovs. God had thrown in the towel. The apse had suffered a direct hit, the altar itself shattered by falling debris, the interior scorched by a fire that raged for
nearly two days. That the great dome itself had survived was indeed something of a miracle, though due more to Wren’s architecture than the will of God: a glancing blow from a Soviet howitzer shell had left a crack nearly ten metres long in which, thanks to some wind-blown or seagull-dropped seeds, a scrappy pine tree had managed to take root. Its straggly branches dipped disconsolately in the rain, like some frayed feather in a mad monk’s headdress.

Stark looked instinctively up at the clock on the tower. The hands pointed to twenty past four, as they had, he realised with a bitter laugh, for the past forty years. Right twice a day, as they said. His own watch told him the right time was 1.45 p.m. He was late, but only just. After his tellingly futile search in the Reading Room, he had decided he had little choice but to follow the American’s other lead. A quick call from the phone box on the corner of Great Russell Street to the cathedral offices had ascertained there was indeed a deputy churchwarden called Michael McGuire. It was he who answered the phone. The man seemed cagey, but then people often did when rung up out of the blue by a policeman. Stark said only that he wanted to have a face-to-face chat, gave no details. But when he gave his full name the man’s tone changed, the latent hostility suddenly dissolving. He would be available during his lunch hour between one and two, he said, adding cryptically, ‘Upstairs. Ignore the sign.’

Stark hurried the last few metres up Ludgate Hill past the statue of Lenin on the round pedestal before the cathedral steps. Once upon a time there had been a queen there.
Victoria
or Elizabeth, Stark had supposed, until Kate told him it had been Anne. Stark hadn’t remembered an Anne. The great doors at the front, intended by Wren for use on royal occasions, were as ever closed. Stark had never seen them
open. He walked round to the south side and pushed open the wicket gate set in the scarred wooden portal.

It was uncannily quiet. The cathedral nave was used as a practice or performance venue by music groups, playing anything from Shostakovich to Tchaikovsky. The party liked to boast of its sponsorship of culture, always providing, of course, that the culture in question had been previously approved. Although still in theory consecrated and available for religious use, St Paul’s was in reality primarily used as a concert venue. Stark had vague memories of his father bringing him to hear a performance of the
Nutcracker Suite
, by the Woolwich Working Men’s Symphonia. He
remembered
the architecture more than the music.

Even now the building impressed him, not just the scale but the relics it retained of a past otherwise consigned to oblivion. Around the walls, rain-streaked and soot-
blackened
, great sculpted chunks of marble statuary recreated in pseudo-classical heroic mode the last moments or noble poses of an entombed military aristocracy. It could have been Thebes or Karnak transported from the desert shores of the Nile to the soggy banks of the Thames. Even the names of these dead captains of empire interred around him had an eerie resonance as powerful as that of any pharaoh: Gordon of Khartoum, Nelson of the Nile, Wellington, the Iron Duke, his great black catafalque gathering dust and smeared with dirt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Like his father. Like Martin Bloom. Like himself one day. One day all too soon if he was not careful.

Here and there a few tourists, whose accents and designer clothing suggested they came from up North, but also a tour party of French trades unionists, identifiable by the
Compag-nie
Touristique des Syndicats Socialistes
placard held aloft by
their guide, wandered around talking amongst themselves and stopping for the occasional photograph. Unsurprisingly Wellington’s tomb was the greatest draw for the Frenchmen. They wanted to make sure he was dead.

But of church personnel, secular or spiritual, there was little sign. A pool of water on the floor under the dome could have done with some attention, but there was no sign of a caretaker, or churchwarden, just a yellow plastic sign that said ‘Wet Floor’. Stark needed someone to ask what constituted ‘upstairs’. He assumed some sort of
administration
offices, though it seemed unlikely these would be
anywhere
but on the ground floor. The door marked Sacristy was locked. But there was a woman with thick glasses and a worn cardigan sitting reading a knitting magazine behind the desk of a dowdy little souvenir shop by the door. Stark approached her gingerly. She seemed unwilling to be
distracted
from her reading material. It was clearly a long time since anyone had purchased any of her wares, which was hardly surprising seeing as they extended only to a few black-and-white postcards showing the cathedral in the immediate aftermath of the war, with the red flag flying from the damaged dome, and a well-thumbed book on the works of Sir Christopher Wren.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. The woman paid him no
attention
. Stark was tempted to produce his warrant card but thought better of it. Under the circumstances. ‘I’m looking for Michael McGuire.’ No reaction, beyond a slightly
dismissive
glance over the top of her almost opaque spectacles. ‘He said I’d find him “upstairs”. Do you know where that might be.’ The woman looked up, considered Stark as if he were some village idiot and then nodded, upwards towards the great concave expanse of Wren’s dome, and pointed to
a door in the wall opposite. As Stark turned towards it, she added, ‘It’s closed.’ And went back to her reading.

Stark walked across to the door. It was open. But a sign placed centrally in the doorway said in large faded letters, ‘Whispering Gallery. 259 steps. No lift.’ Another sign, newer with more legible lettering, was hung over it, proclaiming: ‘Strictly No Admittance. Loose Masonry.’ Stark turned and looked back at the woman by the kiosk who despite her warning was showing no interest in him whatsoever, then up into the great void of the dome. And sure enough, there was someone up there. A figure just distinguishable beyond the balustrade. For a moment Stark was tempted to call out to him, to tell him to come down. Then he looked around at the milling dozen or so tourists and realised how
ridiculous
that was. The man was clearly mad, or paranoid, or both, but there was no alternative. He pushed past the sign and with a sigh he took in the ‘259 steps. No Lift.’ Started up, instinctively reverting to a habit of his childhood, and counting: ‘One, two, three …’

Harry Stark was panting heavily. He had not realised quite how unfit he was. He had started almost at a run but slowed to a veritable policeman’s plod after the first 150 steps. They were low, to be sure, wooden, but dark and cluttered with bits of rubble and abandoned tools, here a brush, there a chisel. The restoration work on St Paul’s had been going on for the best part of forty years and by the rate of progress it would be at least another forty before it was anywhere near finished.

The spiral had left him quite dizzy by the time he arrived at the corridors immediately beneath the dome. But it was only at the top of the last small flight of stairs that led into the gallery itself that the horror overcame him. In huge, sweeping, biliously nauseous waves. His eyes, which had rapidly become accustomed to the dark of the stairwell, suddenly reeled at the sudden glare of daylight pouring into the void of the dome through Wren’s meticulously placed area of portholes, designed in an age without power. The sun had come out and celestial light was pouring into the house of God.

But it was not just the sudden eruption of light that sent Stark reeling. At the same time the world fell away beneath him like a giant bottomless well, sucking him towards it with a fatal seduction more powerful than gravity. Urging him, goading him, pulling him onwards, to throw himself over the narrow rail, to hurtle headlong to the welcoming embrace of infinity. Go on, it urged, go on, you know you
want to! In a moment of sheer, unbridled, unanticipated terror Stark closed his eyes tight shut and turned to clutch the smooth unwelcoming plaster of the wall.

He had had attacks of vertigo before, but nothing like this, and he had not expected it
inside
a building. But the vast scale of the cathedral, the fact that the height above him was at least as great as that below, and with the all too visible crack that ran like a jagged lightning bolt down one side of it, all magnified the sensation unimaginably. His head was reeling, his heart pounding. Slowly, biting his lip, ashamed of the irrational fear and angrily aware that he was probably cutting a less than impressive spectacle for the man he had come to interview, he opened his eyes to the mouldy yellow stucco in front of them, and then more slowly still forced himself to turn around.

Michael McGuire, at least that is who he assumed it to be, was sitting calmly watching him from the other side of the dome. Stark managed a brief wave, still pressed against the wall. He had not expected this, in fact he had no idea how he was even going to edge his way around the
circumference
of the open maw that yawned in front of him. But the man opposite smiled and gestured with his hands to
indicate
Stark should sit down. He breathed a sigh of relieve. Perhaps he was going to have mercy and come round to this side. But as soon as he sat down he realised that that was not what was going to happen. To his astonishment, stupidly when he thought about it, he immediately heard someone say his name. Quietly. Almost a whisper.

Of course, they were in the Whispering Gallery. His father had told him about it when he was a child, but never brought him here. He supposed it had been closed for safety reasons even then. Wren’s architectural skill was such that
the circumference was an almost perfect circle and words whispered against the wall were audible to anyone who leant their ear against it even on the far side. It was the perfect place, provided there was no one else in the gallery, to conduct a conversation in total secrecy.

‘Sta-k, Harry Stark,’ he heard as if a ghost was speaking from the wall itself. ‘Welc-me’.

‘You are Mi–’ Stark began, then realised he was doing it wrong, speaking aloud as if trying to talk across the void to the man who had to be at least fifty metres away. The man frowned, looked down pointedly towards the floor of the cathedral, something Stark felt nauseous even considering, and then gestured towards the wall behind him.

‘You are Michael McGuire,’ Stark whispered to the wall.

The figure opposite nodded.

I’m here because I want to find out what you know about the murder of an unknown man I believe to have been an American by the name of Bloom. That was what Stark had planned to say to this mysterious churchwarden who might or might not be a link to a group of organised anti-socialist dissidents. What he actually said was: ‘You knew my father.’

The man opposite nodded again, turned to the wall and whispered: ‘Yes, I did. You- father, John, was a g--d man.’ Stark was struggling to make out the words clearly. The gallery wasn’t working as well as it should have done. Clearly the fracture in the great dome itself had had a detrimental effect on the acoustics. The light faded and a couple of drops of water fell in front of his eyes. He looked up. There were dark clouds overhead, rainwater coming through the crack.

‘I need to find out more about him,’ Stark whispered to the wall. ‘I need to meet some people he knew. The same people an American came looking for a few days ago. A man called
Martin Bloom.’ Stark was speaking slowly, quietly, but as clearly as he could. He wondered how much of what he was saying the man on the other side could actually hear and understand. He glanced across and thought for a moment he caught a glimpse of movement in the door that
presumably
led to the ‘down’ stairwell on the other side. McGuire had his ear pressed to the wall attentively and was nodding. He had obviously done this before. Stark wondered how many politically incorrect conversations had taken place in this way, far removed from the listening devices of the men from Social Security.

‘I --ow what you a-- -alking about,’ the wall whispered. ‘But I -elieve Mr -loom is no longer -ith us.’ That was saying the least of it, Stark thought. ‘I can help you. But --is is not the -ight place.’

Stark was getting cross. He needed to ask the man some more direct questions. Sitting whispering against a wall was not the format he was used to for conducting police interviews. He looked across the vast empty space at the man with irritation, wishing he could pluck up the nerve to just march round there and collar him. And then he noticed it again, a flicker of movement in the stairwell entrance behind him. He went to call out, then turned to the wall to whisper but it was speaking to him.

Stark had missed his first words: ‘… -nderground,’ he made out, but it was like weather conditions harming radio reception, perhaps the rain coming through the crack ruining the acoustics. ‘You need -- talk to another man … love … the church … bride … Christ …’ and then suddenly the same word only this time not whispered, but shouted, ‘CHRIST’. Stark spun round from the wall and jumped to his feet.

Opposite him the physical form of Michael McGuire was rising. And not just rising to his feet. He was lifting himself, or being lifted, up, up against the balustrade, almost to the point of no return when his own centre of gravity would take over and the laws of physics, irrespective of human insanity and irrational death wishes, would assume final fatal command.

And then he was gone. A split-second cry, lasting half an eternity, in truncated echo amidst the great marble columns and rising into the imperfect vault above, and then a
horrible
, dull, ineluctably final crunch from below.

Stark reeled as if he had been physically struck, and fell to the floor, his head hitting the wooden boards as he retched, clutching the cold stone of the balustrade with clenched knuckles. Jesus Christ, he told himself. Two murders in two days and each time you throw up. What kind of
policeman
are you? Against instinct he forced himself to look up, across the void that had swallowed McGuire. Disappearing into the stairwell opposite was a short, stocky, heavily built figure. Proof of what Stark already knew: McGuire hadn’t jumped – he had been pushed! Taken by surprise, grabbed suddenly from behind before he knew what was happening and lifted bodily over the balustrade.

Swallowing down his terror with the taste of his vomit, Stark pushed himself to his feet, pulled his service Makarov pistol from his shoulder holster and did his best to run the half-circumference of the gallery, his eyes studiously fixed to the wall next to him, not daring to look up and least of all down, to the horrible sight he knew awaited him. It was easier than he thought. This was work, running for dear life in pursuit of a murderer.

Only when he gratefully dived through the doorway, into
the relative darkness, away from the gallery’s deadly whirlpool of light and space, did he realise his error. The doorway did not lead, as he had expected, to a separate stairwell, but into a corridor that led him back around the dome to the same stairwell he had come up. If he had simply turned around where he was and gone back, he would have been waiting for the killer. Now, instead, he could hear the feet receding rapidly into the distance down the wooden steps beneath him. Stark plunged after them, reckless of the danger of slipping on the worn treads.

He emerged into the nave of the great cathedral to the sound of a penetrating scream. It was the woman from the kiosk, her head darting back and forth between the
crumpled
corpse and Stark standing there with a murderous expression on his face and a gun in his hand.

‘Where did he go?’ Stark shouted, only to be met by expressions of uncomprehending terror on the faces of the woman from the kiosk and the tourists, most of whom were clumped by the marble bases of the great memorials, while a few ducked down behind a pew. The wicket gate opposite flapped open in the rain. Michael McGuire’s killer was gone, melted into the streets of the metropolis, beyond pursuit. Stark had no obvious way of finding him. No clear idea of what he looked like. No murder weapon to be found.

He turned his attention to the ruin of a human being that lay sprawled in an unnatural heap, a sinister pool of red spreading across the cold stone floor. The crowd of cowed onlookers retreated as he walked towards the body,
holstering
his weapon.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m a police officer.’

Not one of them looked reassured.