The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (23 page)

The operation had gone like clockwork. Unfortunately these days clockwork wasn’t quite enough.

Colonel Charles Marchmain was studying a map of the London Underground, a map with which even he was unfamiliar. A map that showed a network that extended into what was now another city, another country. And this map from the distant past, from another world had been written on. Recently. By someone in a hurry, someone who had disappeared into a tunnel underneath St Bride’s. Marchmain had every reason to believe that person was Harry Stark. What he didn’t know was the significance of the two square boxes drawn in pencil on a spur of the old Northern Line, a spur nowadays used only by trains from the other side.

Instances of closed stations and through tunnels being used by deserters had fallen to zero since the above-ground entrances had been demolished and their location, or very existence, faded from popular memory. Marchmain showed the map to his oldest officer, a man on the brink of retirement who had been in the Military Police during the war. Did it mean anything to him. The old man had looked at the colonel with some surprise, then delight in being able to provide his superior with important intelligence so late in his professional life: ‘I can’t be certain, sir. And I don’t really understand the significance of the little squares, but I do know what is down there: the old Deep Shelters. Including the one used by General Eisenhower.’

Marchmain’s eyes lit up. Was it possible the people Stark
had got involved with, the dissident scum who had escaped his men in the raid on the church, had a hideout he knew nothing about, improbably close to Stalingrad Square. Today of all days he was extremely uncomfortable about that. He had deliberately allowed Stark a slack rein, knowing the risks of the policeman becoming a loose cannon, in the hope that his past would work in Marchmain’s favour, giving him an ‘in’ to the so-called ‘underground’ that his own men had failed to achieve.

But the possibility could not be ruled out that he had somehow been deluded – or deluded himself – into playing his father’s game, or whatever he might have been led to believe that was. Within minutes – a call to the Ministry of Works records office from Social Security was an event seldom enough to warrant immediate attention – Marchmain was perusing ancient plans, drawn up in 1942, for a shelter he had no idea existed. He all but snarled. Whatever was going on down there required attention, and now.

Within less than forty minutes a dozen armed DoSS operatives were assembled on the platform of Covent Garden Underground station. The veteran military policeman aided by a rapidly co-opted member of the London
Transport
Cooperative led Marchmain and his men down to a passageway behind the main lift shaft to a locked door that had not been opened in decades. The Tube man said he was certain he would be able to find a key somewhere. Marchmain blew the lock away. The door swung back to reveal an antechamber to a lift, descending beneath the main shaft. On the wall was an ancient red trip switch of the sort used for emergency power cut-offs. The colonel nodded to one of his men who flipped it. Against expectations there was a low hum and a light came on in the lift.

Nonetheless, Marchmain led his men, and their muzzled dogs, in single file down the stairs.

St James’s Park, 1949

The old man stood, in his mind’s eye, like the last warrior on the field of Armageddon, amidst the smouldering ruins of the empire he had loved and cherished.

The hour had come. He stared out at the wasteland of St James’s Park, briefly remembering distant sunny afternoons when he had walked beneath the shade of the trees and fed the ducks. There were no ducks now. No trees either.

The desolation of the parkland was an advantage; the trees would have been obstacles. To the south ran Birdcage Walk. King James I had had an aviary nearby. Now it would help this caged bird fly free. It had been broadened into a makeshift runway, as usable as The Mall leading down to Buckingham Palace had once been but less obvious and as a result less pitted by enemy shelling.

Already the aircraft was waiting, barely fifty yards away. He recognised it at once, a Boeing L-15 Scout two-seater, straight off the production lines, an experimental model specially designed for short take-off and landing.

A fresh peal of artillery thunder shook the ground. Only a core of American forces remained in the metropolis, in the western half of the city, defending all approaches to their own embassy. The rest had pulled north, ‘the better to regroup’ he had been assured. He could not really complain. It was little more than he was doing himself; but it still somehow left the sour taste of abandonment. Would his ‘flight’ leave the same taste in the mouths of those he left behind?

If he had seen the small, slight figure who had emerged
 
timorously, in awe of the destruction around her, from the blackened blast doors he had used just a few moments before, he might even have stopped for a few minutes and tried to explain to her, in the hope that she, in turn, might explain to others.

But he did not. His eyes were on the plane and the man who came to meet him as he stomped towards it. For a moment he flinched. The uniform was unfamiliar. Then he remembered: the new president had renamed the Army Air Corps as the US Air Force. A new name for a new age. Now they had new tailoring to suit. It was typical of the uneven relationship all along: the British forces had barely enough ammunition; the Americans were buying new uniforms.

The empire still had style, though. He put his hand into his greatcoat and found what he was looking for. At times like these a little theatre was called for. As the air force officer came up to him, he pulled out his last Havana cigar, and asked for a light. Something the man would remember. Something to tell his grandchildren.

It was to his immense surprise, therefore, when the pilot produced not a Ronson cigarette lighter but a Colt automatic.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said with that slow accent that marked him clearly as coming from south of the Mason-Dixon line. ‘I
regret to tell you there’s been a change of plan.’

‘What happened?’

‘What do you think? He shot him. Between the eyes. Then put another into the skull to be sure. Went back to his little plane and came back with a jerrycan of petrol. Poured it all over the body and set fire to it. I can still see it today.’

‘But how …?’

‘I was there, Detective Inspector Stark. I was his secretary. One of them anyway. I followed him out when he left the War Room. I shouldn’t have but I wanted to give him that,’ the old lady pointed to the diary in Stark’s hand. ‘He’d left it on his desk. Probably deliberately I now realise. But I didn’t know. I’ll have it back, please.’

Stark handed it over, his mouth still gaping in astonishment, turned to Lizzie and said, ‘The Americans killed him? Why?’

‘Wrong question, Harry,’ she replied as if it was the easiest thing in the world. ‘Why not? They’d changed the plans. Roosevelt was dead. The new people in Washington didn’t feel under the same obligation. How much love do you think America has ever really felt towards England. The relationship might have turned upside down at one stage but in the eyes of most of them we were still the empire they’d rebelled against. Look at their movies even today – the bad guys always have English accents.

‘This was their big chance and they weren’t going to share it. And certainly not their nuclear weapons. It would be so much easier if there were just two superpowers, not three.
Especially if one of them was governed by an old man
hell-bent
on revenge. With no Churchill – and no British empire – it would be a hell of a lot easier to divide the world into two new empires.’

‘But it was all over. We … they’d lost.’

‘No, you were right first time. We’d lost. They won. Both the Russians and the Yanks. Think about it. Think how inconvenient it would have been if the old man had survived. He had no intention of surrendering, of giving up the empire, just because the capital had fallen, no more than the Russians had with Napoleon or the Nazis at the gates of Moscow. He would have had the young princess, Elizabeth,’ she blushed slightly at the name, ‘crowned in Canada, as Queen and Empress, and used North America as a base to carry on the struggle on a global scale. It could have meant another ten, twenty, thirty even forty years of conflict.’

‘But that’s what we’ve had. The cold war.’

‘Not cold, Harry, cool. A comfortable temperature. Small wars by proxy in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa nobody cares much about. Afghanistan, Angola, but not Coca-Cola. Weapons testing with human guinea pigs. It’s all been light entertainment. The real business was done back then. Think about it. For forty years the world has been neatly divided in two: Europe, mainland Asia and North Africa under Soviet influence. They already had Europe. With Britain out of the picture, the Chinese took Hong Kong back while the rest: India, Singapore, Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Egypt, all fell under the sway of Moscow, given ‘independence’ with communist governments: dictatorship by delegation.

‘The western hemisphere, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, all the way up to the Sudan all became dependent on American money and muscle, not to mention the whole of
the West Indies including Bermuda, the Bahamas, Barbados and Jamaica all joined Cuba and Puerto Rico in the United States’ Caribbean co-prosperity zone: a protection racket by proxy.

‘It was a carve-up, right from the beginning, a deal done between Washington and Moscow the minute they realised they both had nuclear weapons, and nobody else did. And it’s served them very well, until now.’

Stark’s mind was reeling. He wondered how much if any of this Fairweather was hearing, wherever he was, or what he would make of it.

‘And that’s why the Department, the DoSSers killed the American journalist, because they didn’t want him reporting it? But he was American. Why would he?’

Lizzie looked at him almost pityingly as if he were a small child with learning difficulties. In a small, quiet but firm voice, she said: ‘The DoSSers didn’t kill him. We did.’

‘I did,’ said a deep voice forcefully. Malcolm, the Museum Man, the one with the floppy hair and the flabby hands.

‘You. You did
that
to him. Blew half his head off and hung him under a bridge like a bit of meat on a butcher’s hook. And you have the nerve to talk about inhumanity.’

‘You watch your mouth …’ the Museum Man growled.

‘Quiet,’ barked Lizzie. ‘Okay, Harry, your point is valid. Malcolm does get carried away sometimes. There are reasons for it. But it was self-defence. Sort of. He tried to kill my gran. To shut her up and take the diary. To destroy the evidence of what they did. And he would have done it too. The bullet would have gone straight through her heart if Malcolm here hadn’t had a premonition and jumped him just as he fired. As it is at her age, she may never have the use of one arm again.’

Stark looked and saw the dark brown stains around the shoulder of the old lady’s sling.

‘In any case, we wanted to send a message. To the CIA or whoever he was working for. Don’t try it again. We thought that if it looked like it was the DoSSers had done it, it would scare off the ordinary plod, that the PP would leave it alone. But oh no, we hadn’t counted on Harry bloody “hero” Stark.’

‘The young lady’s right, Harry. There’s no more room for heroics.’ The sudden interjection, out of nowhere, startled them all, as much as the old lady’s scream that accompanied it.

‘Okay guys, don’t move, not anybody, not a muscle, and the old lady here’s gonna be a-okay.’

To his horror Stark recognised the American accent at the same time as he saw – but barely acknowledged – Benjamin T. Fairweather, his angel Gabriel, the bearer of great tidings, metamorphosed into Lucifer with a drawn handgun held hard against a frightened, wounded, old lady’s head.

‘Just move back, all of you, back towards Harry over there. Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you. He packs a mean rabbit punch, but I don’t think he’s carrying anything but my penlight torch and he’s as surprised as you are. Just look at him.’

Stark’s face was ashen. The immensity of the global strategy Lizzie had unveiled slowly sinking in, along the with the realisation that if even half of it was true, he had betrayed his calling not to side with the angels, but with a representative of the devil. In the world she had described, there were no angels. No saints. Only different shades of sinners.

As he stared, stupefied at the American he had trustingly put his faith in, he realised that even the man’s voice was different. Before it had struck Stark as conveying an uneasy mixture of braggadocio and self-doubt, now it was cold, calm, self-confident and wholly unfazed by the fact that he was heavily outnumbered. This was not a man who was used to facing hard questions from editors; this was a man who was used to asking hard questions, and using hard means to get whatever answers he required.

It was Malcolm, the Museum Man, who replied, his heavily accented voice now a slow drawl almost languid with venom: ‘You fucking scum. Why the hell shouldn’t we just blow your brains away now, Yankee.’

‘Stop it!’ Fairweather snapped. ‘Come one step further, and I’ll do something we’ll all regret.’

‘You’re going to kill her anyway. Just like your mate tried to. And when you do, you’ll meet the same fate he did.’

Calmly, Malcolm produced an ancient-looking pistol and pointed it straight at the American.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Fairweather. ‘And nor do you, you know. Does he, Lizzie. Or aren’t you running the show any more?’

Lizzie had moved back, not before giving Stark a baleful glare, and was now on the very edge of the platform. Her look was thunder, but she didn’t deign to reply.

‘You’ve got it wrong, you see,’ continued Fairweather. ‘I don’t know what happened with my colleague – he always was a bit of a hothead – but I have no intention of doing any harm to this sweet little old lady here. All we – that is me and my compatriots – want to do is to help her regain her memory, make her understand what really happened all those years ago, and not the crazy, mixed-up version that’s worked its way into her old grey head in the meantime.

‘Winston was half-American. He was our pal. Our big hero. Presidents have had busts of him in the Oval Office since 1949. Now that Russia’s teetering, communism’s collapsing, we’re going to reel you guys back in. Rehabilitate ol’ Winnie-the-pooh, give you something to believe in again. So you can live the American dream. Rejoice in the free world. Drink Coca-Cola, eat Big Macs. You know it makes sense. That’s the future. Not just for you, for everybody. Get used to it.

‘The version of history you guys were getting all so worked up about is just pure pie in the sky. You know that, Miss Lizzie, or should I say Elizabeth – that’s who you’re named for, isn’t it, the princess who should be queen? Hell, even your ol’ gran here knows America would never betray Britain. Everyone knows that. And if they don’t they soon will. There’s a movie about it. The camera never lies. With 
the right management, this ol’ gal here could even be a star. So just back off, Malc, or whatever your name is.’

The Museum Man glanced at Lizzie. She shook her head and he lowered his weapon.

‘Now that’s what I like to see,’ said Fairweather. ‘English and Americans all allies again, just like in the good old days. Now just do what you’re told and we’ll all be fine.

‘First thing is – me and Mrs Goldsmith here are leaving, quietly and peaceably, but not by that godforsaken route we had to follow to get here. This is an old Deep Shelter, hell, if I’m not mistaken it might even be the one Eisenhower himself used. You sitting where old Ike used to sit?’ Lizzie ignored him. ‘Well, I reckon there’s another way out of here, a whole lot easier. At the very least the way our friend Harry there got out of your little prison, though I don’t fancy
train-dodging
and I’m not so sure the old lady here’s quite up to it.’

The old lady gave a timid whimper. Fairweather was obviously controlling the pressure on her wounded arm. Even so, she piped up in that thin, ethereal voice from another era: ‘I know what I saw, sir, and these people know too, and none of your bully boys will make any of us believe differently.’

‘Sure thing, ma’am, sure thing. And nobody’s going to force you, but I am going to ask you, very firmly, to come with me right now. You’ll have every chance to tell the world what you know once we’re out of this communist colony.’

‘And just how do you plan to achieve that, even if we do show you how to get back above ground?’ Lizzie had found her voice at last, and it was cold, chastened and angry.

‘Don’t you worry about that. We have our ways and means. For very special guests of the United States government, that is. You put in a request one day, and I just might see what I can do for you.’

Lizzie spat on the platform. The American tutted.

‘Manners, manners. “Manners maketh the man”. Isn’t that one of your old English sayings. But then maybe it doesn’t apply to women. Leastwise not women like you. But maybe you’d still be so kind as to indicate the exit from this little warren. We’ll go quietly …’

Then all hell broke loose.

It was the dogs they heard first, a sudden outburst of barking and yelping as if a pack of foxhounds had been simultaneously let off the leash, a howling and bellowing that was amplified by the echoing tunnels from which it emerged.

Then the arc lights hit them, a blinding wash of
white-blue
intensity that instantaneously swamped the subterranean world’s glow-worm gloom. And the crackling growl of the megaphones.

‘Department of Social Security. Stay right where you are. Do not move. I repeat: this is the Department of Social Security. Do not move.’

Everyone moved: ducked or dived. Throwing himself to the ground Stark caught a fleeting image of Fairweather and the old lady pressed back against the wall, the gun still held to her temple, and what appeared to be the Museum Man in stark silhouette brandishing his pistol.

Then there was an explosion and the light intensity halved, creating a ghastly cartoon world of darting figures and extenuated shadows. Stark scrabbled for the cover of darkness.