The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (7 page)

In the rain the watcher waited, uncomplainingly. That was, after all, a substantial part of his job. And he was dry, if not warm, inside the anonymous little Sputnik car. That was the trade-off, the deal. If sometimes the job was dirty, you could wash your hands afterwards. In a flat of your own, with hot water, and a fridge full of food.

Coincidentally exactly the same thought was running through the head of his boss at that precise minute. Col Charles Marchmain gazed out from the high windows of the Department of Social Security’s offices at the cosy curtained windows of the staff apartments in the surrounding tower blocks of the Barbican Estate and thought how fitting it was that he and his co-workers lived where they did.

The Barbican had been the name of a long-vanished gate to the ancient City of London, a tower from which the city watch ensured the security of its inhabitants, a job for which they were well rewarded. Less had changed, he mused, than some people thought. Today’s inhabitants of the 1960s
high-rise
Barbican development were the moral descendants of the men who manned the Barbican gate all those centuries ago, and they too were well rewarded, not least with a self-contained housing complex with shops, concert hall, cinema and underground parking, A city within a city.

You did your bit for the state, and the state saw you right. It was not a moral choice; it was an economic one. Marx had been right; economics was the basis of all human activity. It was, of course, just a fancy modern way of describing a
law that had been known since before the dawn of human history; the law of survival. And often, in the cause of survival, compromises had to be made. Even in a socialist society everything had its price. And a job well done brought its own rewards.

Marchmain’s reward, for example, was that it had been a long time since he had been required to spend an evening sitting in a Sputnik in the rain. The Soviet-made Sputnik was an unpleasant, uncomfortable little car, particularly in comparison with the big plush Bevans, but the incalculable advantage in the watcher’s line of work was that they were the most common cars on the streets of the capital. They also came in very few colours. Although he had lately observed an irritating trend for ‘sky blue’ and ‘apple green’, undoubtedly the brainchild of ministries with more time on their hands than was good for them, most remained solidly beige. Beige was the colour the colonel preferred. The one he would have chosen if he had been designing camouflage for the streets of his city.

Marchmain’s relatively lowly employee, parked only twenty metres from Detective Inspector Harry Stark’s house was doing a job that was essential to maintaining the established order. Those who did not like the established order despised those who maintained it. But that was the way of things. The alternative was revolution. And the party was vehemently opposed to revolution.

If there was an irony in that, the colonel was oblivious to it. He understood the Marxist principle of dialectics: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. He understood it to mean you looked at both sides of the argument and adopted the solution that suited you best. That was what he liked about the philosophy: it seemed only common sense. He had heard
there were other, more doctrinaire interpretations, but as that did not seem to make sense to him, he declined to explore them.

He was often impressed by how many ordinary citizens seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Like the boy in the fish shop, for example, who had spotted the clumsy tail, possibly even before Harry Stark. He had done well, calling in on spec to leave a message on the ‘anonymous’ citizen’s advisory line, the tape recorders which were in reality monitored live twenty-four hours a day, just because he noticed something unusual about a Significant Person. Marchmain had been pleased.

Sometimes he wondered what they would do without their ready army of Fellow Travellers, that invisible army who chose, for small reward, to be of service to the Department. Just as he wondered how many of them knew that the phrase used to describe them was English for the Russian name of the first Earth satellite and the mundane little car to which most ordinary citizens aspired: Sputnik. Precious few, he imagined. The English had never been good at foreign languages and, despite compulsory lessons at school, Russian had proved no exception to that rule.

The human Fellow Travellers were as integral a part of the Department of Social Security as the four-wheeled variety was part of the socialist dream. It was yet another volunteer who had noted the suspicious stranger in the pub. The man who both arrived and left just after Stark, and within minutes one of the colonel’s little friends had gone to the public phone to do the proper thing. Marchmain was impressed, in a curious sort of way.

But then he was a connoisseur of the common people. Watching them was what he did for a living, taking in the
minutiae of their existence, collectively and individually, noting subtle changes, behaviour shifts, taking stock of new acquaintances and adding as required to the list of those observed. From a professional point of view, it was compelling, even obsessive work. But there again, it was just what he did for a living. For some, it seemed, it was a way of life.

There were times, only times, Marchmain told himself as he sank back into his swivel chair, when he almost envied the man on the spot, the man who followed orders without thinking. Not that he didn’t follow orders himself, it was just that he was also obliged to do at least a minimal amount of thinking. And he was not a man who liked to define his life by the minimum.

The radio on his desk buzzed. Marchmain glanced at the flashing red light and flicked the switch next to it. The voice was the one he had been expecting, that of the man in the little nondescript car sitting in the rain in Bermondsey.

‘Strongbow and Fisherman have entered property,’ it said.

Marchmain nodded thoughtfully to himself. It seemed Detective Inspector Stark was bringing a visitor home to meet the family.

The American perched on the edge of Harry Stark’s single bedroom chair nursing a mug of scalding tea. Stark sat opposite him, on the bed, doing the same, like a pair of old-fashioned adulterers embarrassed by their first hotel room tryst.

The American took off his battered spectacles, rubbed the lenses on his tie, fiddled with the twisted frames and put them on again. They still looked ridiculous.

‘I’m sorry about your glasses,’ Stark said.

The American shrugged. ‘It’s okay. I have another pair.’

Stark nodded. Of course, he would have. It was the sort of thing Americans had. And here he was, a man who had a spare pair of glasses, sitting in the meagre surroundings of a southern English home. A policeman’s home to boot. Some American reporters, he imagined, could make a story out of that alone. He envisaged the ticking off he would get from the Chief Constable if the Stark domestic household ended up the subject of a
New York Times
Sunday supplement feature.

Luckily Katy was out. She usually was these days. Out more often and later with the friends her mother didn’t approve of. Kids who wore their Young Pioneer uniforms sloppily if at all, preferred jeans and sneakers, imports from ‘up North’, the sort of stuff you could only get if you had relatives in Leeds or Manchester who sent presents at Christmas. Or sent money so you could buy them in the hard currency shop in Cheapside where they only took ‘British’
pounds, not the everyday English ones ordinary folk had in their pockets. Mrs Stark didn’t approve of any of that, just as she knew her late husband hadn’t. Just another thing she held against her daughter’s current lifestyle.

The minute Stark had put his key in the lock, she had stuck her head round the corner of the sitting room door, a hatchet look on her face to disguise the anxiety he knew it concealed: expecting it to be Katy, ready to tell her off, venting her concern as anger. Harry had told her a hundred times not to worry, that it was only a phase, that kids were like that these days. But he would have preferred her not to have been standing like an inquisitor in the hallway when he led Benjamin Fairweather into the house.

‘Just someone from work, Mum,’ he had said as nonchalantly as possible. ‘Be a love and fetch us a couple of mugs of tea, would you,’ he added, turning her around and shepherding her back through the hall door before she had a chance to ask questions, or Fairweather had a chance to open his mouth. The last thing Harry Stark wanted was for his unusual visitor to become a focus of conversation for neighbourhood tittle-tattle.

Mrs Stark knew more than to gossip as she queued at Smithfield for the meat stores to open. Careless talk costs lives, she had been taught as a girl and she had seen nothing in her adult life to believe things had changed. But that did nothing to stem her curiosity, honed already to razor’s edge when she knocked on Harry’s door to deliver the tea and the idiotically grinning Benjamin Fairweather had taken it from her hands with a ‘Gee, thanks, Mrs Stark, sure is good of you.’ He couldn’t have shocked her more if he’d sung ‘God Save the Queen’.

Stark had warded off her machete glances as he
manoeuvred her towards the door, closed it firmly, then opened and banged it shut again to be sure the old lady did not have her ear pressed to the other side. He glared at the American.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Fairweather, ‘just being polite. I’m from Boston. New England. Most people in the US think we talk like the British – the English I mean … as well – but I guess it still sounds kind of different over here. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.’

Stark nodded. ‘As a rule of thumb. However, right now I’d prefer it if you did some talking. But keep it concise.’

‘Sure thing. That’s why I’m here. Oh, and call me Ben.’

There was less of the lost-dog look to him now, Harry thought, as if he had shrugged off the awkwardness and embarrassment with the rainwater. He stood up and took off his wet overcoat – ‘If I may,’ Harry nodded – sat back down and took a sip of tea like a junior Harvard professor about to deliver a tutorial. He put his hand inside his jacket pocket and asked, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

Stark shook his head. The American produced a flip-top box, the sort you saw on BBC commercials. Marlboro. Stark knew the jingle as well as the national anthem. They played the latter at television closedown every night: ‘There’ll always be an England, while there’s a country lane, Wherever there’s a cottage small beside a field of grain’ – the bucolic image the party peddled to its collective farmers and factory-worker high-rise dwellers. Most people preferred the illicit BBC diet of
LA Vice
laced with ads for ‘the big taste from the big country.’ The American flicked open the packet.

‘Want one?’

Stark had been trying to give up. But it was a lot easier to abandon Bulgarian factory-floor sweepings than it was
to turn down finest Virginia. He hesitated, but only for a moment. The American leaned towards him and with a silver Ronson that produced a clean clear flame at the first click lit up both of them.

‘Thanks.’ It was a word Stark had not anticipated using this evening. The American took a quick puff. Stark inhaled deeply, hunched forward and listened. It was the first lesson he had learned in detective training: don’t always be in a rush to ask the questions.

‘Go ahead,’ he said.

‘First of all, I had better show you this.’

The American opened a bulging wallet and from a zipped compartment produced a two-by-three centimetre passport-style photograph. Harry leaned forward to take it. The man in the photograph was middle-aged, early forties at a guess, thickset with dark, beetling eyebrows beneath a head of swept-back hair just beginning to turn to pepper and salt. He had wide, smiling, self-confident eyes and the sort of smooth suntanned complexion that suggested frequent exposure to a stronger sun than that of southern England. Or Northern England, come to that.

‘Who is he?’

‘That picture is at least five years old, probably more. His name is Martin Bloom. And I am almost totally certain that it was his body that your men found this morning hanging under Blackfriars Bridge.’

‘Almost?’

‘Detective Stark … Harry, if I may …’

Stark said nothing. Why Americans tried to force a phoney familiarity on complete strangers was beyond him.

Stark looked at the photograph. It was possible. But given the state of the bloody corpse he had dispatched to St Bart’s
morgue earlier that day, almost any photograph of a thickset middle-aged man would have been a candidate. Apart from this improbable American’s assertion that they were one and the same, Stark had no reason to believe it. On the other hand he was signally lacking in alternatives.

‘Who is this man, and what makes you think someone would want to murder him?’

Fairweather smiled, a smug little self-confident smile.

‘So you have ruled out suicide? It was a bit unlikely, wasn’t it?’

Stark winced at his error. Yet somehow he didn’t think he had given anything away. If this man really knew who the victim was, then he already knew far more than Harry Stark did.

‘Like I said, his name is Martin Bloom. Born and brought up in San Antonio, Texas, but also a British citizen, courtesy of the fact that his mother was a Londoner. From your part of the city, I might add, although back in the day when there was no division. She was what they called back then a GI bride.’

Stark showed no expression. He still had no idea where this story was going any more than he had the faintest idea where Mr Benjamin Fairweather was coming from, in any sense other than the geographical.

‘You still haven’t told me what this Mr Bloom was doing in the capital of the English Democratic Republic.’

The American leaned back in Stark’s little wickerwork bedroom chair causing it to creak.

‘He was working for me.’

‘What?’

‘It’s simple enough. Martin Bloom was a journalist, like myself. But a freelance, not a staffer. Because of his British passport it was easier for him to come over here. I’m sure
you know there are fewer visa restrictions for visits from your former compatriots.’

Stark instinctively looked up in supposed offence.

‘I’m sorry, citizens of the Federal Republic of Britain if that’s what you prefer. We’re both men of the world, detective. Whatever.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘The other thing was his accent. Unlike me, he could speak the English language as you guys speak it in England. He didn’t walk around with a big sign above his head that said “Yank” in flashing neon every time he opened his mouth. He could pass as a native. People talked to him. Told him things.’

Stark gave him a quizzical look.

‘That sounds suspiciously like deliberate deception to me, Mr Fairweather. Foreign journalists are supposed to go through the official channels.’

As far as Stark was concerned, the American had just confirmed that this was a case for the Department. Whatever Mr Bloom, if that really was his name, had been up to, it sounded no good. No good at all.

The American leaned back again, and sighed, and bent forward giving Stark the distinctly patronising impression he thought he was talking to a child.

‘I know it’s different over here. But you have to understand, at least try to understand. I’m not talking about some sort of espionage here, even if maybe that’s how some people in your system might see it. Journalism in …’ – he struggled for the phrase – ‘… our world, it’s, it’s just different. It’s not about reporting what the authorities want reported.’

Stark raised an eyebrow.

‘I don’t mean your authorities, I mean ours too. No matter what they tell you in the official press here, our press really is free. We ask questions. Uncomfortable ones. And there are
some people over here who wish things worked the same here too.’

And there were some, thought Stark, who were determined to make damn sure they never did.

‘You must have noticed the world is changing. I know it doesn’t feel like that in London, but there are people thinking the unthinkable. Even in Moscow.’

Stark blinked. Twice. The trouble with what Fairweather was saying was that it was true. Sort of. Things were happening. Elsewhere. There was talk of a free trade union in Poland, not tied to the party. There had been economic reforms in Hungary, a move towards letting more people be self-employed. There had been student marches in Paris, although there again, there always had been. But most significantly of all there was a new man in the Kremlin. Talking a new language. Words like
perestroika
and
glasnost,
rebuilding, openness, unfamiliar words that had people across Europe dusting off their Russian dictionaries. Even Lavery had said the other day he’d heard
Pravda
was more interesting than
New Times
or the
Guardian
these days.

But that was elsewhere. London was London, and London didn’t change. The old guard in the Mansion House had been there forever and showed no sign of moving out in the foreseeable future. Even old Harkness’s heir apparent was older than the new man in Moscow, handpicked for a seamless handover, and not any time soon either.
Glasnost,
they joked in the Red Lion, was a foreign concept, and an abstract one at that. The English didn’t deal in abstract concepts; they dealt in concrete ones. Summed up by a three-metre high concrete wall.

‘What if I told you,’ the American leaned forward conspiratorially, ‘that there are people here, in this society, who
feel it is time for a change. People who have a story to tell. A great story, one that could change your world and maybe mine too?’

Stark sat back. He felt like saying he sincerely hoped he was not going to be told anything of the sort.

‘That’s what Martin Bloom was doing, Harry. Trying to talk to people, trying to give people over here something they desperately lack – a voice.’

Stark could have replied that his father had always taught him it was all right having a voice as long as you knew the consequences of what you said. But deep down there was a part of him that understood what the American was saying, even if he could not quite believe it.

‘It’s not a crime, Harry. At least it shouldn’t be. It’s not subversion or starting a revolution. It’s just letting people have a discussion. Is that really such a bad thing?’

‘And for this, you’re saying, this Mr Bloom was …’

‘For this, Mr Bloom was killed.’ For the first time, there was anger in the American’s voice. ‘For this he was hung like some piece of carrion underneath a bridge over the Thames. I’m not saying journalists are one hundred per cent on the side of the angels, here. Maybe he had no right to expect kid-glove treatment but he sure as hell didn’t deserve to be murdered in cold blood and strung up like some piece of butcher’s meat.’

‘And who are you suggesting is responsible?’

The American drew on his Marlboro and exhaled a long grey plume of smoke towards the solitary low-wattage light bulb that dangled in its drab shade from the ceiling: ‘Jesus Christ, Harry, don’t give me that. You know who killed him as well as I do: your so-called Department of Social Security.

‘The same people who killed your father.’