The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (12 page)

They gathered together in the dark, faces lit only by
candlelight
, for they were, in the very real sense of the word, underground. About six metres underground by the
roughest
of reckonings.

There were eight of them in all. The tall man standing at the little square metal-legged table was speaking, addressing his comments primarily to a slight figure slouched against a wall in the corner with a hood pulled up, as if hugging the dark and shunning even the flickering candlelight.

‘You’ve done well,’ he said, his normally quiet voice resounding unfamiliarly in the echoing darkness. ‘Put the cat among the pigeons and no mistake. Gave the buggers the shock of their lives, I shouldn’t wonder, seeing old Winnie staring out at all and sundry across the Thames, large as life and twice as scary.’

There was a rumble of muted laughter at that. Although notably not from the figure in the corner.

‘A true mark of brilliance, I reckon, using stencils and spray paint. Makes putting up a picture as easy as daubing a slogan. And they say a picture is as good as a thousand words. I bet there’s been a damn sight more than a thousand words expended down the Mansion House and up the
Barbican
since this morning. Most of them not repeatable in polite company.’

He looked around at his audience as if anticipating another laugh, louder this time. He was disappointed. There was an
edginess in the air, a sense that they’d somehow stepped off a cliff and there was no going back.

‘I’m not kidding. I reckon we have a tool here that’s not just a powerful weapon of protest, but a new art form. You watch – there’ll be people talking about “the phantom of Bankside” before long.’

That did get a subdued rumble of amusement, including this time from the figure in the hood.

‘That’s if anyone ever sees them,’ said the man seated at the table, his hands folded in front of them. He peeked briefly over the top of half-moon glasses at the elderly woman next to him and the tall man whose self-confidence he clearly didn’t share.

‘They had the area closed off and the paint erased within an hour or so. If it hadn’t been for the BBC photographer passing by, with a camera and long lens, nobody would have noticed it.’

The big man shrugged. ‘Maybe, but that was just a trial run, wasn’t it. And it’s hardly as if the photographer was there by chance now, was he?’

The bespectacled man looked up at him sceptically.

‘Oh, come on, Malcolm, there are ways of doing things, you know. It’s not that hard to tip off a foreign news
organisation
, you know. Especially in the current climate. An anonymous call from a phone box, saying nothing but a location and a time. Nothing incriminating in that. Yes, the DoSSers were probably listening in, but that doesn’t do any harm either. Every time they interfere with the
Northern
press only increases the perception of this place as the police state it is.’

The man called Malcolm was shaking his head.

‘It also increases the danger. To everyone involved.’

‘We were never going to get anything done without
exposing
ourselves to danger. We all knew that. Have known it all along. But this is the best chance we’ll get in a lifetime. You know it. There’s a new mood in the air. Maybe not here, yet, but we’ll never have a better chance. And time is against us.’ The last phrase was said with a pointed if deliberately oblique sideways glance at the old lady who seemed almost to have dozed off.

‘Bankside’s one thing. This next step is a lot more risky.’

‘We’ve got cover. You know that. Two lads on the detail. They’re going to supply cover for the few minutes the job itself will take, then cover it up. Until we’re ready.’

‘There’s a chance it’ll be found beforehand. It’s very risky. You know that. A site like that.’ He looked over at the slight figure in the hood, but wasn’t rewarded with so much as a glance in acknowledgement.

‘Come on, that’s what it’s about in the end, isn’t it.
Publicity
. Free speech. The truth?’

‘Like the pictures they got of the body?’

There was a minute’s silence, a tangible tension in the air.

‘Yes,’ the big man said at length, quietly as if by his very understatement he was emphasising his point. ‘Like the
pictures
of the body.’

‘It’s just a bit unfortunate that the man they put on the case happens to be one Harry Stark.’ He could not help but let his eyes fall on the figure in the corner, as if waiting for a reaction from that direction. A few seconds of silence passed first, and when there wasn’t one, he added: ‘Then again, maybe not. Maybe it was fated. For better or worse, eh?’

The figure in the corner shrugged, then as if on a whim, produced a coin, flipped it in the air, caught it and turned it
over on the back of one hand. The others watched, craned their necks to see which side up it had landed: the cross of St George or the Kentish plough. And wondered, in this case, which was heads and which was tails.

But the hand did not lift enough for anyone else to see. Seven pairs of eyes, including those of the old lady who had raised her nodding head, watched silently as the coin was replaced in a pocket and its owner stood up, pushing a stray lock of hair back inside the hood and lifting a holdall from the floor.

‘Best be getting on with it then,’ were the only words spoken, in a small but determined voice, as the slight figure made its way to the door.

If Ruth Kemp was overawed by either the architecture or the religious significance of St Paul’s cathedral, let alone the
desecration
of a murder committed in its heart, she gave little sign of either. She continued chain smoking as she examined the bloody mess that had been Michael McGuire sprawled on the marble floor. Behind her, technicians wearing rubber gloves were unrolling a tarpaulin. St Bart’s morgue would be receiving another customer. Kemp took a long pull on her cigarette and ground out the stub beneath her heel next to the corpse.

‘What is it with you, DI Stark? Got the idea I have too much free time on my hands or something?’

Stark gave her a look that said this time he was not in the mood for laconic world-weariness.

‘At least there’s not much doubt about cause of death with this one,’ Kemp said, taking the hint. ‘Skull smashed on impact. Brains splattered all over the floor. Looks to me like a fall from a great height.’ She stared up into the cracked dome. ‘A fall from grace?’ she added, in a deadpan voice that suggested she wasn’t so much wisecracking as
following
Stark’s dangerous train of thought. Stark gave her a look, and Kemp raised her hands in a defensive gesture that said, I don’t need to know.

‘At least there’s no doubt about this one’s identity,’ Kemp added, handing over the grubby laminated ID card she had extracted from the dead man’s thin wallet.

‘Michael McGuire, St Paul’s churchwarden. Been in the
job for more than fifteen years, according to his colleague.’ She nodded at the woman in thick glasses who now sat on a seat next to her desk, sobbing into a grubby handkerchief.

Kemp had got more out of the woman in two minutes than Stark had in the more than half an hour that had passed between his call to the pathologist and her arrival. Stark had questioned the dozen tourists and other visitors, all of whom insisted they had noticed nothing other than the scream and the horrible impact of the body on the floor. Nobody even admitted noticing a man emerge from the stairwell door and rush out of the cathedral. They had been too shocked, they insisted. Each and every one.

Neither EDR citizens nor foreign tourists were keen to be involved in an investigation by the Metropolitan People’s Police. Only some had more choice than others. Stark took their details, including visa numbers in the case of the
tourists
, most of whom would be out of the country by midnight. They breathed an audible sigh of relief as Stark let them go, vanishing through the wicket gate without so much as a glimpse back at the bloody mess on the cathedral floor.

From the phone in the cathedral office, he called
Forensics
, told them to search for traces of fibres or anything else up in the Whispering Gallery. Not that he had much hope they would find anything. Or even look very hard. The only witness was Stark himself. Two men were dead, both
murdered
, both linked to an American reporter who had thrust his way into Stark’s life and done his best to turn it upside down. Harry Stark had been presented with an agenda. A personal agenda. Only he had no idea what the next item might be.

Stark had never had time for the grey-faced men of the Department of Social Security. There were questions better
not asked about some of the interrogation methods in the cellars of the Barbican. But ‘persuasion’ was one thing. Murder was something else. And if the Department did something, usually they did it in secret. They didn’t hang their wares out for everyone to see. A gesture intended to intimidate? Most people were intimidated enough just by the sight of a black Bevan. But the missing newspapers
suggested
not everything the American said had been a lie. And the McGuire man had been trying to tell him something. Something important enough to get him killed?

At his desk in New Scotland Yard, Detective Sergeant Dick Lavery scratched his head and let his eyes wander out across the river to the great chimney of Bankside power station belching out black smoke in the distance.

He was not a man who involved himself much in politics. He believed, even more than his boss, that being a policeman was about the simple business of keeping the peace, nicking thieves and solving crimes. Ordinary, everyday crimes, not ‘political crimes’ whatever those might be. He knew, just as everyone his age knew, there were things you didn’t say, not because they were right or wrong, but because that wasn’t the way the world worked.

There were tramlines. And as long as you ran along them, life ran smoothly enough. Try to deviate, to follow a route the tramlines didn’t run along and you crashed. Simple as that. Your career got derailed. Fast. He had heard people say it was different up North, or in America. But Dick Lavery had never been up North, and nor had anyone in his family. And as for America, well that was another continent, an ocean away. About as accessible as Mars.

And in any case he was by no means sure things were as different as all that. He knew all about the McCarthy
business
in America back in the 1950s. He had learned about that in school. America had its ‘dissidents’ too: people who believed in the socialist system. What had happened to them? They had been hounded. People who admitted to being communists could end up in jail, and if not, then
certainly out of work. In fact, anyone could be suspected of ‘left-wing’ leanings, even the rich and famous, the big stars of Hollywood. People famous all over the world could be hauled up in front of a committee, little better than a
kangaroo
court, accused of ‘un-American activities’.

Those who were found ‘guilty’ could expect never to work again. Was it that different really? Even those who talked – and Lavery did not know many – about them having a ‘freer’ system up North admitted that the McCarthy period – named for the American senator who had spearheaded the witch-hunt – had been a ‘mistake’. But there were people on this side who admitted ‘Uncle Joe had made a few
mistakes
’ too. No, Lavery knew only one thing about that sort of stuff: it was a kettle of worms and one he was not going to lift the lid on, if he could possibly avoid it.

Which was why he was in such a despondent mood as he gazed at the chimney of the power station. As far as he was concerned, Winston Churchill was a bogeyman from another generation. Definitely not someone you expected to be involved in a present-day investigation. It was like
interviewing
a witness in a murder inquiry only to find out it was the ghost in
Hamlet
. Lavery was quite proud of himself for that little Shakespearean analogy. He hadn’t read much of the great man, but
Hamlet
had been a set text at school. A great play about the sort of corruption and evil doing that went on in monarchies, if he remembered right. Also a lesson that putting your head above the parapet only made it more likely to get shot off. There were certain things it just didn’t pay to find out. That was what he felt about the current case. It was one for the Department of Social
Security
and the sooner they took it off the hands of ordinary decent policemen the better.

Why his boss had all of a sudden taken it into his head to go tearing off to a museum when he had a murder to deal with, even one that really shouldn’t be on their plate at all, was beyond him. Museums were about history. Winston Churchill belonged to history. And as far as Dick Lavery was concerned, history was the past. And the longer it stayed there the better.

It was precisely at that moment he was rudely dragged into the present. By the shrill ring of the telephone on his boss’s desk. Lavery hauled his increasingly corpulent frame out of his chair and answered it: ‘DI Stark’s phone.’

The voice on the other end was instantly recognisable. ‘Is the DI there?’

‘Due back any moment, sir. Detective Sergeant Lavery here.’ Lavery had only rarely had occasion to converse with Colonel Marchmain of the Department of Social Security, but that had been enough to convince him the best answers to give the man were always those closest to what you guessed he might want to hear.

For a microsecond Marchmain sounded nonplussed.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, Lavery, can you give him a message. An important one. I think he’ll find it good news.’

‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

‘It’s about the incident. At the cathedral.’

‘Incident, sir?’

‘Yes. I see you aren’t aware yet. There’s been a death. Most unfortunate business. DI Stark was there, by coincidence I believe. Dare say that’s what’s detained him. Though, as you say, I would expect him back by now.’

Lavery kept quiet. Another death? Another murder? The more he heard about the events of the last forty-eight hours, the less he wanted to hear.

‘Anyway, as I say good news. Although I suppose that’s a rather cynical way of putting it. But I’m sure you appreciate, Detective Sergeant, and I’m sure your boss will appreciate even more that, with your hands full with a murder case, the last thing you need is an extra complication.’

‘Indeed, sir,’ said Lavery who had not the faintest idea what the colonel was talking about.

‘Anyway just tell Stark, DI Stark, I mean, that the case was brought to my attention very quickly. Given the man’s
position
in the church, de facto curator of a national monument and all.’

‘Yes sir,’ said Lavery, his confusion growing.

‘Name of McGuire. Michael McGuire. I had my people do some quick background research on the man.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Lavery hoped to God he would never be in a position to discover the DoSS had done ‘quick background research’ on him. It almost certainly meant they had a file going back years.

‘Turns out he was a homosexual, you can tell Stark. A right bugger in fact.’ Lavery could hear a snigger in his voice, the sort of conspiratorial innuendo that was intended to make clear this was ‘lads’ talk’. ‘Seems he was rogering another of the clergy and was about to be outed, have his pants pulled down in public by some foreign press busybody. You know how the party looks at that sort of thing. It was going to mean immediate loss of his job and public disgrace. More than the bugger could cope with. His death, therefore, is clearly a case of suicide. Tell Stark he can forget all about it. Got that?’

‘Yes sir. A suicide. Forget all about it.’

‘Good man.’

Lavery put down the black plastic receiver, wishing to hell he could forget he had ever picked it up.