The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (13 page)

The spring storm clouds were rolling over as Stark pushed open the door of the Corner House restaurant on The Strand. He had decided to walk back to the office. He had too much on his mind and walking was something he had done ever since his teens when he needed to clear his head. So far, however, he had not succeeded. And he was hungry. He had swallowed no more than a cup of coffee at breakfast and most of that he had puked over the balustrade.

A Corner House would not normally have been his first choice but it had the advantage of being there, and being open. The chain had altered little since being introduced as a wartime austerity measure to provide cheap, filling
sustenance
and the residual morale-boosting illusion of ‘eating out’. He ordered a sausage roll and washed down the doughy pastry and gristle with a cup of weak milky tea. It was not much better than the office canteen, but not much worse either. They probably had the same bulk suppliers from the same government stockpile as they had had in his father’s day.

His father’s day – all of a sudden the cliché no longer had the same meaning. There was a certain seductive magic in the dream of a truly egalitarian society, but Stark was
beginning
to wonder if his father too had realised the dream had long since been stifled by a drab monotone mundanity and the blatant abuse of privilege. He cleared away his teacup and walked out, around the corner and into Stalingrad Square. Once named for a different battle in a different war, between
old empires, now it bore the name of the great turning point in the Great Peoples’ War. The few buildings around it, scarred and mutilated, still housed the ghosts of their
previous
imperial incarnations, the great chiselled letters that spelt CANADA and SOUTH AFRICA still visible through the pockmarks left by shell and shrapnel.

Stark had seen pictures of the statue of the old one-eyed, one-armed admiral which used to dominate the square but he was so used to Motherland on her plinth that he could no longer imagine it; any more than he could imagine the square crowded with taxis and buses. Today this was nothing more than a turning circle at the end of the Strand,
dominated
by the neoclassical bulk of the Soviet Embassy that ran along the northern side and had allegedly once been the National Gallery. The Wall ran just behind it, as was so often the case. It had a habit of running behind things, as if scurrying away from prying eyes.

Only at the edge of the Square had the Wall itself been incorporated into the landscape, running like a
whitewashed
garden fence across what had once been the busy entry to the gentlemen’s clubland of Pall Mall, now a few ruins on the little visited eastern edge of West London. Around the grandiose isolated monument that was
Admiralty
Arch, the Wall looped out again, though it was only a few feet high here to allow a view of the uniformed sentries of the English People’s Army who proudly guarded the Anti-Capitalist Protection Barrier. Work was almost
completed
on the tribune erected in front of it, the porticoes of the gallery adorned with pictures of the ‘four great thinkers’: Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Attlee.

The American’s depiction of traffic once again
streaming
through the Arch in both directions was beyond Stark’s
powers of imagination. For his entire life the Arch had
represented
not so much a gateway as a closed door. Beyond it, he knew, an old royal road led through parkland to what had once been a royal palace, but that – like the very idea of royalty itself – seemed something out of another, ancient world.

Stark had no Latin, but a defence lawyer had told him the shrapnel-scarred letters, still just about visible, carved above the gateway described its dedication to Victoria, Queen and Empress, by her son Edward VII. There was an irony that a monument to monarchy now provided a reviewing point for the Socialist Labour Party leadership to take their annual salute, their rostrum mounted so that they showed their rear ends to the ideological enemy.

Stark turned left down Whitehall. It was impossible to imagine that the great slabs of government offices on the left had once had alter egos on the right. Now there were just a few nondescript flat blocks, thrown up in the early sixties to house party officials, and of course to hide the Wall that once again ran behind them. The most miraculous survival on Whitehall was the seventeenth-century Banqueting Hall, where King Charles I had been forced to march through the window onto a hastily erected scaffold. A memorial plaque informed visitors that this was where the first, sadly
short-lived
, English Republic had been born. It was a matter of pride to the Central Committee to remind their French and Russian comrades that the English had killed a king more than a century before it became fashionable in Paris or Petersburg.

On the other hand, there was nothing whatsoever to indicate where, beneath the great plot of devastation beyond the Wall across the street, somewhere under the earth, lay the
remnants of the bunker where the last great drama of the old empire had been acted out. They said the old ogre’s body had been burnt after he cheated the hangman; that there was no last resting place for the truly wicked.

Out of curiosity, Stark did something he had never done before. He crossed the street to where the Wall itself ran along the scarred edge of the pavement, where once the walls of government buildings had stood. Signs at
fifty-metre
intervals proclaimed, ‘Warning: State Border’. Yet there was a distinct anonymity to the Wall on this side: a stained concrete structure, little more than two metres high. A tall man might almost stand on tiptoes and look over it, if he was foolish enough to dare. The actual Wall, the one Stark had only seen on Northern television, the one the non-communist world was familiar with, three metres high, graffiti-daubed and topped with concrete curves like giant barrels with a circumference too great to grant human hands a purchase, was at least ten metres away, across a strip of sand laced with barbed wire and constantly patrolled by armed men and dogs. All to stop, so Attlee had said,
innocent
southern Englanders being seduced by empty greed into becoming wage slaves of the capitalist multinationals.

Stark had never once thought about crossing the frontier. But he knew more than a few of his fellow citizens, lured more – as Attlee had warned – by the television
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-driven images of the consumer lifestyle than by any political philosophy, had done so illegally, or more
frequently
died in the attempt. The Wall was a draconian – Northern propaganda said ‘inhuman’ – measure to prevent the haemorrhage of a state and a system. It was not an
argument
Stark had ever been encouraged to have. Not with himself or anyone else. Until now.

Up ahead of him, on the other side, the battered tower of Big Ben, pockmarked with the craters of howitzer shells, poked its head over like some sinister scarred night
watchman
. Just in front of Harry a few hardboard hoarding panels, probably surplus material from the stands and
backdrops
erected for the parade, leaned against the Wall partly obscuring one of the ‘State Border’ signs. Instinctively, the policeman who believed in orderliness over anything else taking command, he pushed them along to reveal it. Only when the sign was completely visible did he notice the red paint next to it, in the unmistakable shape of an elbow.

With the trepidation born of anticipating the
unthinkable
he pushed the hardboard panel to one side. And
immediately
recoiled, stunned by what confronted him. Larger than life in the red paint of the Republic. Winston bloody Churchill himself. Trilby on his head, right hand raised in the trademark V-sign that had become synonymous with savagery. The same image that had been on the note in the murder victim’s pocket. The same image painted on the wall of Bankside power station.

No, not quite the same. The left hand held a pistol pointed at his head. But beneath it was a question mark.

Filled with an overwhelming sense of both shock and awe, Stark, in a reflex action, put out his hand to touch it. The paint was still wet.

For the second time that day DS Lavery jumped to his feet at the sight of his boss entering a room. But instead of the turret office they shared in New Scotland Yard, it was the snug bar of the Red Lion on Whitehall. Lavery was wondering how to tell Stark that whatever it was he had accidentally or
otherwise
walked into this afternoon, the DoSS was determined he should forget it. The Harry Stark he knew was not a man to forget things to order, especially if he thought it was a murder. Especially one he had witnessed himself.

One look at Stark confirmed his fears. The detective had seen more than one corpse in his career; right now he looked as if he had seen a ghost.

‘A beer, now please, and a chaser,’ Stark gabbled out at the barman, who was used to not asking questions of policemen in a hurry. Within seconds there was a pint of Red Barrel and a double vodka on the bar. Stark took a large swallow of the beer and downed the vodka in one. Lavery sensed his job was getting harder by the minute.

‘Sir,’ he said. Stark turned, noticing him for the first time. His expression suggested surprise to find his sergeant here rather than at the office. It was only 5 p.m. He had no way of knowing his sergeant had decided he needed a large dose of Dutch courage. To Lavery’s surprise and intense
gratification
, however, Stark actually seemed glad to see him. But it was the sergeant who found his voice first: ‘I’ve … I’ve got something to tell you.’

There was a noticeable stammer to his voice. Stark picked up on it.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know,’ and put a hand on Lavery’s sleeve. ‘I’ve just seen it. Unbelievable. Right under our very noses.’

‘Sir?’ Lavery wanted to be sure they were talking about the same thing.

‘What the hell is going on, Lavery?’

The sergeant shook his head. The one thing he was sure of was that on that score he had absolutely no idea.

‘For half a century nobody mentions the old bastard. The initials WC reduced to a toilet joke. A bogeyman dead and buried. Then all of a sudden he’s everywhere. The Yanks are making a film about him, asking God knows what sort of awkward questions that don’t want asking. We find a corpse with its head half-off and a stencil drawing of the bogeyman in its pocket. Then a larger than life-size image, almost
identical
, appears on Bankside power station. And now there’s one on the bloody Wall itself!’

‘What wall? Oh …
that
wall? You don’t mean?’

Stark nodded, looking at Lavery as if his sergeant had suddenly lost his wits.

‘Right across the bloody road.’ He nodded backwards towards the saloon bar doors. ‘Half covered up with a couple of plywood hoardings. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?’

‘Yes. I mean, no. It’s …’

‘What? You haven’t seen it? I thought …’

‘No. I mean, no. I mean I got a phone call. From the Department. Him. That colonel. You know the one, with the posh voice. Marchmain. About something that
happened
this afternoon. You told me you were going to the museum. But he said something about St Paul’s Cathedral. What happened?’

Stark narrowed his eyes, looking at Lavery as if he were trying to read the man’s mind. Or remember what was
supposed
to be on his own.

‘What did he say? What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing. I mean, nothing much. There was an incident? A …’ he hesitated over the word, ‘a suicide. Right?’

Stark pulled back and opened his eyes wide.

‘What?’ He held his breath a second. ‘A suicide. That’s what … You’re telling me Marchmain rang you up and told you it was suicide?’

‘Yessir. I didn’t even know what he was talking …’

‘Never mind. Never mind.’

‘He said forget about it, sir. I mean, he said you were to forget about it.’

Stark closed his eyes.

‘I’ll bet he did. I’ll bet he did.’

‘It wasn’t though, was it, sir? Suicide, I mean?’

Stark almost laughed.

‘No, Lavery. It was most certainly not suicide.’

‘Who was he? Why? How? The colonel mentioned a name. Michael Mac something or other. Said he was, you know, a homo. One of them. Said that was why … why he done it.’

Stark shook his head. ‘Is that what he said? Michael McGuire. He was a churchwarden, Lavery, and as for his particular sexual orientation, I neither know nor care. But that is not the reason he met his end. He was killed because he was trying to tell me something.’

Lavery looked more confused than ever.

‘About … about the murder. The other murder, I mean.’

Stark shrugged.

‘Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I never will. It was just then
that …’ His mind flashed back, a sudden queasiness washing over him as he remembered sitting there next to that
precipitous
beckoning void, and then seeing the man opposite him lifted up and plunged into it. He tried to conjure up the man’s last words, what it was he had been saying when … Had something he said been equivalent to pulling a trigger against his own head?

There had been some mention of ‘underground’, ‘
the
Underground’? The Tube? Or the American’s shadowy conspiracy?

‘What was it, sir? Maybe something …’

‘Something about “another man”, and “love”, maybe he was right, the old DoSSer …’

Lavery suppressed a look of shock. The common street nickname was frowned upon in work circles, even though everybody used it at home.

‘Something about “love … the church …”, he mentioned a bride and then said “Christ”, though the second time I think it was more an imprecation than a theological reference.’

‘A bride?’

Stark shrugged. ‘Doesn’t make sense to me either. Though it is something they say, though, isn’t it?’

‘It is?’

‘About the Church, with a capital ‘C’ being the bride of Christ.’

‘Oh, yes. I have heard that. Not much of a churchgoer myself. I thought there for a minute …’

‘What?’

‘No nothing, it’s just …’

‘What? Come on, Lavery, spit it out.’

‘It’s just, just that I thought of something else. I mean, if it was true …’

‘If what was true?’

‘What he said. That colonel. I mean if this bloke, Mac …’

‘McGuire.’

‘If he was, you know, a bit …’

Stark closed his eyes and nodded.

‘It’s just that it’s a bit of a coincidence, that’s all.’

‘What is, man? For God’s sake.’

‘Well he might not have meant the Bride of Christ. He might have meant St Bride’s Church. Just down the road like. I mean, it’s well known the priest there, old Arthur Rye like, I mean he’s as bent as a nine-bob note.’

Stark’s eyes opened wide. He turned and stared his
sergeant
directly in the eyes.

‘Come on, Lavery. What the hell are we doing sitting here?!’