The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (18 page)

Fleet Street, even in the hour before dawn, could be a busy place. Not as busy as it had once been when it had been home to both editorial offices and printing works for a dozen newspapers feeding the appetite of the world’s most voracious consumers of news, analysis and tittle-tattle. Back in the 1930s the rags had rolled off giant presses
throughout
the night before being transported by fleets of lorries to the railway stations where consecutive editions were loaded onto the relevant night trains departing for Aberdeen,
Edinburgh
or Liverpool and Hull, the packet boats for the
continent
and eventually the far-flung reaches of empire.

Fleet Street remained the centre of newspaper production for the English Democratic Republic. But its fiefdom was greatly diminished. As was the size and quantity of news sheets it produced. Two great buildings, patched up from their wartime wounds, still dominated the street, though their owners had changed. The great stone edifice that had once housed the
Daily Telegraph
was now home to
New Times
, the official organ of the ruling party.

Since partition the
Telegraph
, the archetypal paper of the old Right, had been produced in distant Manchester, as was its former neighbour the
Daily Express
with its deliberately provocative ‘chained crusader’ masthead. The old
Express
building, in its day an ultra-modern art deco temple of
glinting
black glass and steel with great glistening silver warrior statues in the atrium, had been refurbished as the new home for the
Guardian
, an old left-wing newspaper that itself
ironically had relocated south from Manchester and was now the house journal of the DoSS. It also produced
The Watchtower
, a monthly magazine for frontier guards.

As befitting the serious duties performed by its audience, the
Guardian
rarely descended to the trivial. But it did pay homage to the human side of its readership with occasional articles on everyday fashion, with the unstated
understanding
that ‘everyday’ included ‘operational’. It would have been interesting to know to what extent the authors of such
articles
would have approved, had they been present in their office at such an hour and looked out of their window, of the taste on display. There appeared to be a marked preference for short leather jackets amongst the men gathering in ones and twos outside the closed pub, or the municipal tea kiosk that served print workers and lorry drivers a stewed milky version of the national beverage in reusable plastic cups.

Later there would also be a display of navy blue
trench-coats
although these were mostly not yet on parade, their owners still being seated in the number of parked cars, unusual for that time of the morning, or indeed any time of the day on the southern side of the street near the
junction
with Ludgate Circus, almost directly opposite the
New Times
building and along New Bridge Street.

There were four men in each. All of them were wearing watches, so they did not need to look up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s to see the clock on the front of Sir
Christoper
Wren’s battered masterpiece which in any case had long since relinquished its time-keeping functions. The minute hands on the men’s identical service-issue Sekondas ticked relentlessly towards 5.30 a.m.

At 5.28 a long black Bevan had swung into the street and slid to a halt precisely next to Bride Lane in the lee of the
wedding cake pinnacle that was all that remained above ground of St Bride’s. But it was not what remained above ground that interested its occupants, or their gathering army.

At precisely 5.30 the rear door of the Bevan was opened from within and a tall figure in the trademark navy
trench-coat
got out, looked up at the imperceptibly lightening
dishwater
sky, adjusted a wide-brimmed black hat on his head and gave an abrupt decisive nod of his head.

The charred wooden door was reduced to splinters in seconds. The crunch of heavy shoulders assisted by the leverage of iron bars saw to that. The noise of its breaking merged into the thunder of boots on stone steps and the scuffing of leather sleeves on stone walls. Powerful torch beams cast hard white light on sepulchral walls scraped out centuries before by monks with iron spoons. Neat piles of ancient bones, cranium and clavicule alike, were shattered with iron bars by men for whom such mortal remains held neither terror nor awe. This jetsam of departed souls was smashed not deliberately but out of the habit of
destruction
and long familiarity with the powerful intimidation inspired by a display of wanton violence. The blows were not systematic but randomly struck by those who followed as the vanguard ploughed bellowing into the labyrinth.

If there was any apprehension in the minds of those who led the charge there was nothing to demonstrate it. These were men used to following orders not questioning them, men who delighted in force because it was something they dispensed, who were blind to the concept of danger because it was something others encountered in their presence. Except that in this instance the others were missing.

The camp beds against the wall were tipped up and turned
over. Bottles of precious ink were wantonly smashed, and two ancient Roneo copying machines hurled to the ground and set upon with lead-lined wooden truncheons, reduced in seconds to battered scrap. At the end of a long corridor of skulls a small room laid out like a Sunday school
classroom
, though none present could remember such things, was reduced to a repository for broken furniture.

And then, all fury spent, they looked at one another. A few, in response to barked commands, investigated side passages that led to dead ends or fallen rubble or broken bones. The hubbub diminished, the adrenalin eked away to be replaced by the frustration of unexhausted anger,
contained
only by the strictures of discipline and training as heels clicked together and left hands snapped to foreheads with the automatic stiff-lipped ‘Sir’.

Striding amongst the debris the man in the trenchcoat and the hat, which he had deliberately disdained to remove on entering so-called hallowed ground, pursed his own lips pensively and ran his eyes over the scene like a pirate captain who has seized control of a prize ship only to discover her an abandoned rotting hulk. The men who had carried out his will stood to attention in his presence, fearing that somehow they might be held to account for having attacked a mirage.

‘So,’ he said, as if he were consciously choosing the words of the English monarch who attempted to stop the march of fate and in so doing met his death at the executioner’s axe – and given Marchmain’s enthusiasm for the history of the first republic he might well have been, ‘I see the birds have flown.’

‘All except one,’ said the leather jacket behind him.

Marchmain turned and saw the creature held by the scruff of the neck by his lieutenant. But the thing he held did not
so much resemble a bird with the means to fly as a
fledgling
sparrow, thrown out of the nest by an invading cuckoo: featherless, crippled and blind. Except that this creature was nearer the end of its life than the beginning. Much nearer, in fact.

‘Take him away,’ snapped Marchmain.

Long after you are dead and the worms have eaten your brains, boys will play football with your skull, Harry Stark had been told by a particularly cruel history teacher at school. Now it had already happened and his soul was
condemned
to live through the experience.

The space between his ears vibrated like timpani in a Wagner opera, his cranium ached as if the bone had been surgically removed; nerve endings burned where his eyes should be. If they were still there, there was little to prove it. The world was a featureless void. Except, he realised with a curse, banging his shin on something hard and angular, that it wasn’t empty. It also stank, of damp and something sickly sweet, almost chemical, vaguely familiar. There was a
metallic
tang in his mouth.

He tried to sit up but his feet were trussed, his hands tied behind his back. He rolled on to his side and realised he was lying on rough, cold ground – probably stone or concrete. There was something metallic, like a box or a bench, on the floor next to him, a little out from the wall. That was what he had banged his shin on.

The darkness was real. Either that or something really had happened to his eyesight. He choked on bile at the thought of Ransom with his eyelids sewn together. He could hear water, running water. Not close, and not like a tap or a pipe. Maybe he was close to the river. There was something else too: a faint hum and every so often a louder, but still distant
rumbling, and then near at hand, barely distinguishable but unmistakable: voices.

With difficulty, in a motion like a crippled crab, using his elbows and knees, with his toes for leverage, he inched himself painfully along the hard surface of the floor towards the sound. It was coming from his left, a few metres away, the other side of a door maybe, though if it was it let no chink of light escape. He could make out two voices. Then it stopped.

He froze. Had they heard him? Did he want them to? Whoever it was had to know he was there. Had to have brought him there. Wherever there was. He tried to
reconstruct
what had happened and failed. There had been
shouting
, footsteps, A raid? A DoSS raid? Had to be. And that explained where he was too. In a DoSS cell, some tomb deep under the Barbican he shouldn’t wonder.

And then the voices started up again and he realised he was wrong.

‘I still say we shouldn’t have left Ransom.’ It was the broad West Country accent of the man who had spoken in the room below the crypt. The second voice was also male, but sounded older, more educated, yet still strangely familiar although the context seemed wrong.

‘He refused to come. What were we going to do? Knock him unconscious too and carry him? It would have killed him.’

‘He’ll talk.’

‘He won’t. He’ll tell them whatever he wants to and nothing more, but they’ve done all they ever could to him and he’s too frail to take any more. He’ll die.’

‘Almost certainly. I’m quite sure he intends to.’

‘I still don’t like it. And in that case, why’d we bring
him
?’

Stark caught his breath. There was no doubt who they were talking about.

‘Because like you said – today’s the day of the parade, there’s only hours to go and all of a sudden we get a visit from a copper, whatever his supposed pedigree. And then
this
happens. We need to know what he knows. And who he’s told. Before the others get here.’

‘
If
he knows anything …’

There was a grunt that sounded like acknowledgement.

‘If he’s a spook, we have to know, if only to know how much they know. We were damn near caught like rats in a trap this morning.’

‘It is still possible he might be on the level.’

‘But how likely? We’ve been caught before by being too trusting. We can’t afford to take risks. Not now. We’ll find out when he wakes up.’

‘What do you want me to do.’

‘Give him a bit of a slap. Nothing too hard, for the moment at least. See what he says.’

‘And if he says nothing?’

There was a perceptible pause. Then, the same voice
continued
:

‘I know what I’d do.’

‘What?’

Another pause. Whatever he would do was obviously being demonstrated rather than enunciated. Then: ‘Don’t be stupid. Apart from anything else, it’s far too risky.’

Another pause. Then the other voice again: ‘There’s always a risk involved in this sort of business. The question is, whose risk? Look what happened with the American.’

‘That was different.’

Stark’s mind whirled. They’d had to leave the old man somewhere but taken Stark with them, unconscious and
trussed. And now they were going to beat him, interrogate him … or worse. What did they know about Fairweather? Or were they referring to the other American? The dead one?

He had to get out of there. If he was going to talk to these people again it would be on his own terms. Or not at all. He wondered how much time he had and decided it was not long enough. The only advantage was that they thought he was still unconscious. That meant they had drugged him – chloroform, that was what the smell was. And it explained the taste in his mouth.

‘Should I go and look at him?’

His heart stopped.

‘Leave it a while yet. That stuff should have him out for another half an hour at least. Let him sweat a bit, then go in and kick him gently in the balls. I’ll see you later.’

Stark breathed again. Silence. Where the hell was he? No longer in the crypt, that at least was certain. It reassured him slightly to know that he was not surrounded by human bones. Although he might have found something to help him escape. He had a vision of himself working on his ropes with an ancient human jawbone.

His bindings were not so tight as to be painful; they had relied on the chloroform to keep him quiet. And the lump on his head. He wondered if he had sustained brain damage. A cerebral haemorrhage could kill him two days or two weeks from now. But he had to live that long first.

He had to get his hands free, and then untie his feet. His feet! He was wearing the size 10 black leather brogues that had belonged to his father. He had waited years to grow into them and never quite managed it. In so many ways. They were still one size too big for him. Which just might be his salvation.

Painfully rubbing his ankles together, slowly he pulled
his heel out of the left shoe, then, more slowly because he had done the laces more tightly, the other. Perspiration was dripping off him. His gamble was that without his shoes he would be able to pull at least one foot through the rope that bound his legs.

Arching his back he tried and failed, failed again and then finally succeeded in getting his hands, tied behind his back, to the ropes at his feet. There was no way he could untie them in this position but at least it gave him more leverage. With a wrench that felt as if he had dislocated his spine, to add to his other injuries, he eventually managed to get his right heel inside the loop, and then slowly, minus his sock, through it. The relief was a minor transport of ecstasy. With one foot free, he could pull the other through, although not quite as easily as he had imagined. The rope remained caught around his ankle until he managed to use the other foot to keep it taut. At last, he could stand.

That meant he could walk, even if he did still have his hands tied behind his back. Crushing down the leather at the heel, he crammed his feet minus one sock back into his shoes. He held his breath. How much noise had he made? There was no sound from behind the door. Was it the only way out? Were his captors still there? If they were not – and it had been silent for several minutes at least – then maybe he could get out that way.

Walking sideways, he edged along the wall feeling his way with his fingers behind him: cold, stone, no, not stone, too smooth, not brick either, there was no pointing, concrete probably. The darkness was complete. Did that mean he was still underground. Buried somewhere in the bowels of the earth beneath St Bride’s. But then wouldn’t the wall be rough stone not smooth concrete?

Then, almost beside him, came an unexpectedly loud, squeaking, scraping noise. He froze. Immediately to his left he could feel cold metal. He was next to the door, yet not a chink of light emanated. The sound again. Not so extreme. Someone pushing back a metal chair from a table, scraping on a stone floor. Then a cough. And again silence. Just one of them, waiting for the other to come back, before they would make their decision. Then from the other direction,
somewhere
in the distance, came the same noise he had heard before: a long, low rumbling that rose and then fell again.

Still feeling his way along the wall, he edged past the door. There was a round metal handle in the middle. Maybe there was another door. Barely two metres further the wall turned at right angles. Stark felt his way along it. Five, maybe, six metres long, then another right-angled turn. Then he bumped into something, hard, round, metal. Stark found what he had been praying for: a second door. With an
identical
, round handle.

Here too no light leaked through. But was it locked? And if not, what or who would he find on the other side. He leaned his ear against the cold metal, but could hear nothing beyond the faint hum that he had almost come to ignore as part of the background. At the same time he heard the scraping of chair on floor again from beyond the door on the other side. Any minute now, Stark realised, they could come to get him.

He had no alternative. With his back to the door – just about the worst position possible for opening one – he turned the handle and edged it open, expecting at any moment a shout of discovery, a flood of light. Instead a rumble from the distant throat of a snoring giant turned into an ear-splitting rattling roar and a whistle of wind behind his back throwing
him forward onto the concrete floor. He got up and in the low lighting beyond realised immediately why the background noise had seemed so familiar. He was underground alright. In
The Underground
, a service facility for the Tube.

For a second his dilated pupils were confused by even the glimmer of light from the vestigial illumination in the train tunnel. The door opened on to a ledge recessed into the tunnel wall for about three metres before descending at either end some sixty centimetres to the tunnel floor. He had found an escape route. Of a sort. Which direction hardly mattered; either way had to lead to a station. What worried him was whether a train could pass him. He doubted it. And then there was the high voltage power rails. To touch them accidentally meant certain death. He listened for the sound of an approaching train. Nothing. How frequently did they run? He had no idea which line he was on. Some ran more frequently than others.

He was not even sure what time of day it was. With his hands tied behind his back, his watch was useless. In rush hour there could be trains hurtling through the tunnels every three minutes on average. But fewer later in the day. How long had he been out? If he was lucky there could be more than ten minutes between trains. Not enough to make the distance between stations. But in one direction he could see another recessed ledge in the wall. Another service
facility
. That decided it.

Making his way as quickly as he could – he dared not run in case he stumbled or fell without the use of his hands to steady him. He doubted if there was more than ten
centimetres
clearance between a passing train and the wall. Anyone who tried to flatten themselves against the wall would find the experience a mite too literal for comfort.

He had heard that if caught in the path of an approaching train, it was best to lie down flat in between the tracks but he doubted that was a safe prospect in the tunnel where both inner rails carried the voltage. Even if the clearance was
sufficient
to allow a man to lie beneath it, he would have to remain perfectly still to avoid touching either.

He tried counting off the seconds but realised there was no point. If a train came, it came. And then he saw it, dimly, ahead of him, a faint glimmer of expanded light as the tunnel straightened out. He breathed a sigh of relief. A station. It had to be. He could make out now where the tunnel opened out to the platform, and in the distance the dark hole where it narrowed down and once again became a tight circular tube. The platform was barely fifty metres away, closer than he had dared hope at first, but not quite close enough for total comfort. It was not as well lit as normal, even
considering
the recent brownouts, and seemed empty. Odd. It had been barely daybreak when he had arrived at St Bride’s. How long had he been out? It couldn’t be longer than a few hours at most. But he would worry about that later. He was almost safe. Relief flooded through him. A moment too soon.

Even as he relaxed, the rumbling began again,
unmistakably
behind him and rapidly rising in volume, a harsh, metallic sound accompanied by a high-pitched zinging from the rails. Stark cursed, picked up his feet and ran, his tied hands flapping behind him as uselessly as the rope that dangled from them as he rocked dangerously from side to side. Any second he could topple over and fall onto the tracks to be either electrocuted instantaneously or seconds later sliced in two by the speeding train. Why wasn’t the damn thing slowing down? They were approaching a station, after all. Why had they turned the goddamn station lights down?
The only illumination he could see was a baleful little green light near the end of the tunnel, which he realised with an extra frisson of horror was a ‘go’ signal. He wanted to look behind but didn’t dare. The platform was still metres away. To make matters worse there were no steps; he would have to climb up on to it.

The noise was deafening now. Stark felt a blind panicky urge to leap out into the middle of the tracks waving his arms. He knew it was the sort of urge that inspired men to suicide. And then he saw it, just this side of the platform, four metres in from the end of the tunnel, right underneath the glowing signal that illuminated it in ghostly green like a sarcophagus cut into the Victorian brickwork: a niche barely big enough to hold a man. A refuge, they called them. Now he knew why.