The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (17 page)

The good sentinel never sleeps. Nor does an old one worried about his job and his pension, thought Colonel Charles Marchmain as he put down the telephone.

It was a long time since he had taken a call from an IA, an ‘Informal Agent’, in person. These days he had a whole battery of staff to funnel and filter the vast array of
information
that such a continuously surprising number of upstanding citizens thought the authorities ought to know about their friends and neighbours.

But this was different. He had placed the surveillance of Detective Inspector Harry Stark and the American
Benjamin
T. Fairweather in a special category, a category all of its own. All operational intelligence was to be directed to him personally and immediately, all verbal contacts relevant to the case rerouted directly to him when possible.

If there were questions to be asked he wanted it done straight away rather than rerouted through the Informal’s usual handler. There was a risk involved, of making the Informal feel too important, of attaching a level of interest to the party under observation that could lead the IA to give himself away and thereby negate any future use. But in this case it was a risk Marchmain had unilaterally decided was worth taking.

They said there was a new mood in Moscow, a new broom in the Kremlin. Marchmain was not sure if it was true – he was old enough to have heard rumours like that before and seen the consequences, or lack of them, right back as far
as Khrushchev’s day – but he knew one thing: if there was any ‘sweeping out’ to be done, it was not going to include him. He was a survivor, and survival meant staying ahead of the game, rewriting the rules when necessary and cheating if you had to. It was a rough game; Marchmain had seen enough blood to know. And spilled enough himself.

So when the call had come through from the Rose public house in Bermondsey around 11.20 p.m., just after closing time, the young man’s usual handler had noted as he asked his contact if he would mind holding a second while he was put through to a ‘senior officer’, and pressed the buttons that patched the call directly through to Marchmain’s tenth-floor Barbican flat.

The colonel, as always, had been briefed. Kevin Atkinson was an ambitious young actor, just a bit-part player in a
television
soap at the moment but grateful that the unchallenging role was slowly winning him street recognition and hoping that he would sooner rather than later gain promotion into the heady ranks of the National Shakespeare Company. That meant membership of the Arts Academy, a job for life, access to the same exclusive shops as Department staff themselves, and, most important, opportunities for foreign travel.

To get there, however, he would have to attain party perfection on topics such as ‘Popular Wisdom: the role of the proletariat in the history plays’, ‘The Malvolio model: Shakespeare’s debunking of the dynastic class system’ and ‘Shrew Syndrome: gender politics in Elizabethan England’. But most importantly he would need a clean bill of political health from the Department, and that implied voluntarily assisting its work. He had been taught to be controversially outspoken in public: there was no better way to get someone else to incriminate themselves.

Nonetheless, he needed to learn a thing or two about respect, Marchmain thought, when the young man’s nasal tones inquired: ‘Who am I speaking to, please?’

‘The right person. Please go ahead.’

‘Ah, yes, well, it was just about DI Stark. I know he’s just someone whose welfare is important to …’ he could almost feel the man searching for the word ‘… security … the state.’

‘Yes indeed,’ Marchmain sighed inwardly, tired already of the weary clichés used by Informals to justify themselves to themselves.

‘Well, it’s probably nothing …’ Marchmain sighed to himself again – everything was nothing and nothing was everything, that was up to him, not some Informal whose insight into human psychology came from soap opera scripts. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘It’s just that he got a bit squiffy tonight, a bit tight, if you know what I mean.’

‘Yes. And?’

‘Well, he seemed to be getting on well with the barmaid, Lizzie Goldsmith, very well, if you know what I mean.’

Marchmain was silent. He wondered what the man was trying to say. It was true that the sex life of anyone the Department was interested in was, by definition, a matter of interest, but usually those who reported relatively routine liaisons had an interest of their own. He wondered if the aspiring great actor saw himself in a Casanova role and felt jilted.

‘It’s just that, her father, I mean you probably know, he used to have connections with the fraternal forces, out at Woolwich barracks. I thought, I don’t know what I thought really.’ There was, entertainingly, just a note of
embarrassment
now creeping into his voice.

That
Goldsmith, thought Marchmain, the old pimp. Of course. He had quite forgotten. Amazing really, some of these Informals were wasted in civilian life. That said, he couldn’t really see any significance in the fact, but it was another little item for the dossier.

‘You did the right thing,’ he said quickly. ‘Was there any suggestion of sexual congress?’ The formal language was calculated to make it easier to talk about, as if they were talking to a doctor instead of gossiping about saucy details from their friends’ and neighbours’ sex lives.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean, not in the pub obviously, but they left together. I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a barmaid, and you know, good-looking, dark eyes, alluring but in the end she’s still … well, let’s just say she’s not quite the sort of girl I’d expect a Detective Inspector to be interested in.’

Marchmain shook his head. Would Britain ever shake itself free of the class system. He thanked Atkinson politely and told him to be in touch as usual if there was anything else that struck him. Like Harry Stark’s fist, if the detective ever found out, he thought as he put the phone down.

So Stark was doing a line with the little barmaid, eh? Well, why not? Sooner or later sex always raised its ugly head. Or maybe not that ugly: from what Atkinson had implied she was quite a looker, and that from a man who earned his living alongside actresses. Oh well, maybe she too could play a role in this little drama. If Stark was forming an attachment to her, it could prove useful. The Department had a healthy respect for personal relationships: there was nothing like having a few extra hostages to fortune.

Sometimes, Harry Stark thought ruefully, the blind leading the blind makes sense. He could see hardly anything and despite the sleep dust in them at such an ungodly hour of the morning he at least had eyes, unlike the wizened old man who held his hand, helped him find his way down the uneven steps without the need of the priest’s torch. They negotiated a second set of stairs that led from the crypt beneath St Bride’s down to a lower level. The only light came from somewhere beneath them, a dull glimmer.

‘We’re below the level of the eighth-century Saxon church now,’ Ransom said. ‘Can’t be certain, but this probably dates from Roman times.’

The space they had entered was wider and had lighting, of a sort: dangling forty-watt bulbs. At one end there was a small table draped with an altar cloth. A makeshift place of prayer. Against the side wall a wooden trestle table held two antiquated Roneo copying machines. Stark could not help staring at items that seemed so out of place in the cellar of a catacomb.

‘Actually, we have a licence for these,’ Rye explained. ‘This is where we produce the leaflets about the church’s history I sell for the restoration fund upstairs.’

Stark picked up a leaflet from a small pile next to one of the machines. It was entitled ‘St Bride’s, the Cathedral of Fleet Street’. The quality and grain of the paper were identical to that of the note found in the dead man’s pocket. He had come across printed material like this before: copies
of texts the authorities didn’t want given a wider
distribution
. Chunks of poetry, short stories, even whole novels by dissidents or Northern propagandists. They existed even in Moscow where they were known as
samizdat
, Russian for self-published. He had found something similar
underneath
Katy’s bed: a satirical anti-socialist novel called
1984
by a satirical product of the old empire who went by the pseudonym George Orwell.

In the EDR, for reasons Stark had never been certain of, they were known as ‘winkies’.

‘You’ve come across the product of our presses before,’ said Ransom. ‘Pity they can’t do ’em in Braille,’

‘A nod’s as good as a winkie to a blind horse,’ said Stark.

‘What?’ said Rye.

‘That’s what people say when they come across this sort of thing. That’s what they’re called, isn’t it, “winkies”?’ For the first time since Stark had met him something remotely akin to mirth came through in the canon’s voice. ‘I’d never thought of that. How very apt. I always thought it was homage to our spiritual mentor.’

‘Come again?’

‘Winkyn de Worde. The first real English printer.
Assistant
to William Caxton who brought the first proper
printing
press to England. He was the man who really sparked the print revolution. From a cellar somewhere around here. You could say he was the man who founded Fleet Street. In the old sense, I mean, before it became just the
Guardian
and
New Times
.’

‘Are you telling me this is where this thing,’ he produced the folded leaflet with the Churchill image, ‘was turned out. An image of an arch-imperialist aristocrat masquerading as some icon of free speech?’

There was a sudden frostiness in the canon’s reply: ‘I’m not telling you anything, Mr Stark. That is something for others to decide. One way or the other. Come.’

Stark followed him further along a half-lit passage, until they came into a low room, barely two metres high but some six metres square that had been cleared of bones or whatever else it had originally been carved out of the London clay for. Another half a dozen passageways led off it in various
directions
, dark spaces of various dimensions, like wormholes leading down into the London clay.

‘Storage, some of them,’ the canon explained. ‘Others, tunnels of various sorts. Some filled with bones, unsorted bones, maybe from as far back as Roman times. This would have been a good site for a graveyard, just outside the city walls. Others may have been used by smugglers, leading down to boats on the Thames, long before the embankment was built. But this space serves our purpose.’

The ‘room’ itself was lit by a single bulb which was fixed to the ceiling near the door and cast long shadows. There were three rows of seating: a number of chairs and several benches, some with backs, sections of pews rescued from the church. It reminded Stark of old carvings of ‘hides’ where religious dissidents in the sixteenth century
gathered
together in secret to profess a faith different from that prescribed by their ruler. Maybe the situation wasn’t that different.

‘Please sit down for a moment,’ the canon said, gesturing towards a seat in the front row.

Stark did as he was told. The old man Ransom sat beside him, still touching Stark’s arm with his hand, not so much to compensate for his blindness, Stark thought, but to
reassure
himself of his presence. He felt a sense of unwanted
obligation weighing heavily on him: like a promise to repay a debt he had never incurred.

One by one a few others began to drift in. Stark couldn’t tell how many. He understood it would be
inappropriate
to turn round and look. He had been invited in, as a guest. But he was also at their mercy. He had considered informing Lavery where he was going and then at the last minute decided against. If something went wrong, the
sergeant
would guess soon enough where to start looking. And he did not expect anything to go wrong. He had not come unarmed.

‘You’ve all heard what Mr Ransom has told us about this young man’s father, who he was and what he did for the movement.’ Canon Rye was standing at the front of the little room as if he was preparing to say mass.

There was a rumbled murmur of assent. Stark understood that the old blind man had some sort of venerable status in the group but, for obvious reasons perhaps, his approval was not considered sufficient in itself. These were men of an altogether different complexion. And a very different generation,

A man seated just behind Stark said: ‘I’m not sure about this. It’s a funny moment for somebody just to turn up on your doorstep, Canon, immediately after what happened to Michael’. The canon looked away and dropped his head. Stark saw him wipe away a tear. ‘And anyway, I’ve heard stuff. About his father. There’s stories and then there’s stories.’

‘That’ll do,’ said a big man in the corner, speaking with a broad Dorset accent. ‘But you’ll just cause more problems than you might solve.’

The man reddened. He was not to give up.

‘Has anyone even searched him this morning. He might
be carrying a wire for the DoSSers.’ A couple of men from the sides moved towards Stark as if preparing to pat him down. Which would not reveal a hidden microphone but would certainly uncover a police issue revolver.

‘Wait a minute,’ said Stark. ‘I’ve come here on my own. You know who I am. Maybe more than I know myself.’ He wasn’t sure how sincere he sounded. He wasn’t sure how sincere he was. But he wanted to avoid being frisked if at all possible. The two lads stopped in their tracks, partly
distracted
by someone else entering the room at the far end.

The man seated behind Stark hadn’t noticed and wasn’t going to be put off his stride.

‘We might – and I say “might” know
who
you are – but we don’t know
what
you are. I say we wait until Malcolm gets here.’

‘I’m here,’ the new arrival said. Loudly. ‘And I know what he is.’

Stark recognised the voice, but only vaguely. He turned round to see a large, middle-aged man in a leather bomber jacket. The face too seemed oddly familiar: thick spectacles, floppy greasy hair, and flabby age-spotted hands. He was staring at Stark as if he were the incarnation of Satan. One of the tough kids moved towards him.

A scream sounded above them. A clatter of boots on the stone stairs and then Harry Stark’s head exploded and his world was engulfed in darkness.