The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (25 page)

Detective Sergeant Dick Lavery looked at his watch and smiled. He would be off duty in ten minutes. The parade had finished an hour ago. For nearly four hours now he’d been standing in front of the National Gallery, mingling with the rent-a-crowd, keeping an eye out. Just for pickpockets and stuff like that, of course. The Department were on hand for any other sort of trouble.

Not that any had been expected. Just as nobody had expected what actually did happen. Lavery thought all hell would break loose when that business with the float happened right in front of the podium. For a moment it looked like it might. He could see the DoSSers in the crowd moving forward like lightning, and felt an instinctive twinge of sympathy for the young girl who had done the business, even if she must have known what was coming to her. Even she looked stunned by what actually happened. Lavery still found it hard to believe.

Although possibly not quite as hard to believe as what was happening in front of his eyes at this very moment. He thought he had heard a noise, a strange grating noise like scraping metal. Coming from the ground not far away from him. And then the manhole cover had begun to move, screeching as if it hadn’t been turned in decades. Gradually, in front of Lavery’s bemused eyes, the thing began to lift. But he couldn’t stop his jaw dropping in sheer amazement at what emerged from it: the ragged-looking but unmistakable head of his boss, Detective Inspector Harry Stark. Who clambered out and dusted himself down, followed by an
equally dishevelled but undoubtedly very attractive
dark-haired
young lady.

‘Sir! Boss! What the f … Pardon my French, miss!’

Stark gave a brief smile as he threw an arm round his shoulders.

‘I was expecting a welcome committee. But this is as good as it gets. You know we’ve been hanging on the top rung of a ladder down there for an hour waiting for the fuss to die down.’

‘Harry, come here. Look at this. Look what your amazing little sister did.’ Lizzie was standing staring up at the one remaining float on the square, parked right in front of the National Gallery.

Stark walked across and joined her, staring up in amazement at the float, at the great double-sided hoarding. Only a few days ago he would have been astonished, rendered speechless. Even now he was shocked, awestruck. At the sheer audacity of it.

On each side of the huge hoarding standing on the lorry bed were stencilled images, similar to the Churchill images on Bankside, and the one he had uncovered on the Wall, but painted in to look like photographs, is shades from grey to sepia. Life size. A montage of images with dates written large across each: Stalin seated alongside Roosevelt and Churchill, and the date Tehran 1943, the next Stalin shaking hands with Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, and the date Moscow 1939. The other side showed Hitler with Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister with the date Berlin 1940, Khruschev with Richard Nixon, the date Moscow 1959, and Churchill with von Stauffenberg, Hitler’s assassin, dated Berlin 1944. And finally the image that had become iconic over the past week, Churchill giving the V-sign with a pistol held to his own head and a question mark over it.

There was a caption underneath.

The Lesson of History:

Glasnost
. At least those years of compulsory Russian had been of use. The idea that his sister, his little sister, was responsible for this filled him with awe. And pride. And sudden fear.

‘What happened to her?’

‘Her?’

‘The girl. Was there a girl on the float?’

‘Oh, yes. A girl and a couple of blokes. From the college. I must admit I thought they were in for it. Doing something like this. In front of the old man. As soon as they tore down the paper that covered all this. You could see the lads from the Department bearing down on them. Baying for blood, they were.’

‘What stopped them?’

Lavery laughed, shrugged his shoulder and gestured up at the gallery, to the now empty rostrum in front of it.

‘He did.’

‘Harkness!?’

‘Hardly! He looked as if he was about to burst a blood vessel. The other bloke, the Russian. The one with the funny birthmark on his head.’

‘You’re telling me the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union intervened to stop the DoSS tackling a political provocation.’

Lavery nodded. ‘Well, not directly. As such. The DoSS lads were just about to go for it, when he started clapping. You should have seen the look on old Harkness’s face.’

‘I can imagine. But what happened to the girl?’

‘She could hardly believe it either. But she wasn’t taking any chances. Done her bit, hadn’t she? She and her mates legged it, heading for the pub to celebrate getting away with it, I shouldn’t be surprised.’

Stark sighed with unexpected relief.

‘But why is this still here?’

‘Apparently he wants it for his art collection. I had a word with one of the diplomatic protection boys afterwards. It seems there really is a wind of change blowing. The word is he’s also asked for an amnesty for all political prisoners. Harkness is furious, but he can hardly refuse. Without the Kremlin behind him he’s nothing. There’s talk of rumblings in the Mansion House, a politburo coup against Harkness. History in the making.’

‘History?’ said Stark, looking up at his sister’s artwork and scratching his head. ‘Whatever that is.’

Lizzie grabbed his arm and said, ‘It’s whatever you want it to be, Harry. People don’t just live history; they make it.’

‘Including my father? I don’t even know which side he was on.’

‘Yours, Harry. Yours and Katy’s. That’s the one thing that was never in doubt. He was on your side.’

‘If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.’ Stark turned to stare at his sergeant. ‘Not me, sir,’ Lavery said. ‘Him. Winston Churchill.’

‘Finding the future,’ Lizzie said, and stood on tiptoes to kiss Harry Stark on the lips. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

‘Me too,’ said Lavery. ‘I could murder a pint.’

The End
(or at least its beginning)

Alternative histories are a fetish. You either love them or hate them. I love them and have read and admired many of the genre, from Len Deighton's
SS-GB
to Kingsley Amis's
Russian Hide-and-Seek
and Robert Harris's
Fatherland
. My version is extrapolated very largely from my own experience.

In the early 1980s I lived and worked for Reuters news agency as the sole non-German correspondent in East Berlin and towards the end of that decade returned for
The Sunday Times
to report on the delirious and life-enhancing spectacle of the Berlin Wall's demise. A few weeks before that happened, on the eve of the major parade, attended by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the East German state, major anti-communist demonstrations broke out on the streets of East Berlin. I was caught up in them and like many others was arrested and transported to police cells on the outskirts of the city. As a foreigner I was singled out for interrogation by the Stasi secret police, held overnight and expelled from the country the next morning.

It was only a matter of weeks before I was back. It turned out that Gorbachev had criticised the East German leader Erich Honecker for failing to appreciate the need for reform. Before long he was gone and the chain of events that led to the Wall's collapse set in place. Anyone who would like to know more about those specific events I refer to my memoir
1989: The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall
, also published by Arcadia Books.

Living in divided Berlin, on the ‘wrong' side of the Wall, was both daunting and fascinating. In attempting to explain it to others, particularly friends and family back home in Britain, I frequently asked them to imagine what it might be like if the same thing had happened to London. To my surprise it was extremely easy to draw a similar line through our own capital, placing monuments and great buildings in positions that corresponded remarkably to their German equivalents. For example in this book, Admiralty Arch corresponds to the Brandenburg Gate, Trafalgar (Stalingrad) Square to Pariser Platz, the Houses of Parliament to the Reichstag. Similarly my Leicester Square ghost Underground station corresponds to Unter den Linden in Berlin, which was in the East but closed and unmarked above ground, while north-south Western trains passed underneath.

Underground London is a complex and fascinating place. All the tunnels and other structures I have referred to in this book are essentially real, although I have taken some liberties with geography.

My deep shelter between Charing Cross and Leicester Square is based on several that were constructed between 1941 and 1942. The most notable survival is that near Goodge Street (a few hundred metres north of my location) which was commandeered as an emergency headquarters by General Eisenhower, the American head of Allied Forces. It last played a military role in 1956 when it was used as a temporary billet for 8,000 troops bound for the disastrous Suez adventure. Today this is sealed off from the Tube network and run by a private company as an important secure underground storage facility. The original exits at ground level can still be seen in Chenies Street, near Tottenham Court Road

The secret system of government tunnels running under
Whitehall is real and was begun in the 1930s, substantially expanded in the early years of the Second World War, and further during the cold war. Although their existence is widely known, details are highly classified, but the tunnels are reliably believed to connect the Houses of Parliament, No. 10 Downing Street, the Ministry of Defence and several underground telephone exchanges near Trafalgar Square, as well as Churchill's ‘bunker', a limited part of which has, since 1983, been open to the public as the Cabinet War Rooms. There is also believed to be a separate spur which runs under the Mall as far as Buckingham Palace so that in a modern crisis the monarch and her prime minister could, if need be, meet without venturing above ground.

During the Kosovo crisis and the war in Iraq, it was discreetly admitted that top-level strategic meetings were held in a modern, reinforced citadel under Whitehall known as COBRA, a glamorous acronym for the more mundane Cabinet Office Briefing Area.

There is indeed a bone-filled crypt underneath St Bride's which dates back to at least the sixth century and probably earlier and was only rediscovered after the bombing raids of 1940. The crypt is open to visitors by appointment and offers a rare glimpse of the city's archaeology. Not all of it has been excavated; however, it does not, as far as has yet been discovered, afford a means of entry to the main sewers.

The Fleet River which features prominently in depictions of London before the end of the eighteenth century (notably Samuel Scott's
Entrance to the Fleet River
painted c.1750 and hanging in London's Guildhall Art gallery) was an important waterway until pollution forced its enclosure and eventual incorporation into the new sewer system.

London's main sewers were substantially laid out by
Joseph Bazalgette between 1859 and 1865 following a cholera outbreak and waste pollution so extreme that members of parliament were in 1858 indeed forced to evacuate their new building because of the stink from the adjacent river. The new sewage system incorporated into the mammoth construction project that saw the Victoria Embankment replace the old river shoreline was considered one of the engineering wonders of the modern world.

Installing the Underground railway at the same time was a stroke of inspiration; unfortunately the District Line to be laid along the Embankment was not far enough advanced, so the whole structure had to be dug up again for its installation some four years later. Some things never change.

PETER MILLAR
is a British journalist, critic and author, named Foreign Correspondent of the Year 1989 for his reporting of the later days of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall for
The Sunday Times
. He is the author of
All Gone to Look for America, 1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall, The Black Madonna
and the translator of several German-language books into English including the best-selling
White Masai
by Corinne Hofmann, and
Deal With the Devil
by Martin Suter.