The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (9 page)

Pankhurst Street was busy for the time of night. Two cars. One after the other pulled out and passed Kate Stark as she turned the corner, the hood of her parka pulled up against the slanting rain. She hadn’t intended to be out this late and was thoroughly soaked, quite apart from the mouthful she was about to cop from the old woman and no doubt Sherlock Holmes too.

She was at least partly right. Old Mrs Stark’s head was once again poking out of her sitting room as soon as she heard the key in the lock.

‘What sort of time do you call this, young lady? Nearly midnight and you turn up looking like something the cat’s dragged in. You’re soaked to the skin, child. Where on earth have you been to this time of night?’

‘Just out, Mum. You know, with my friends. And don’t call me a child. I’m an adult now. Remember.’

‘You may be an adult by law but you’re not one in my eyes until you start acting like one.’

‘Jesus, Mum, give me a break. I’m nearly twenty years of age. I can smoke, go in a pub, have sex,’ her mother recoiled visibly at that one, much to Kate’s amusement. She had thrown it in deliberately, prepared to come all coy virgin afterwards if needed. If only the old lady knew! ‘If you really have to know, I was just round a friend’s house with a couple of other people, just drinking coffee and talking about stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘Yeah, stuff.’

‘What sort of an answer is that?’ Mrs Stark shook her head wearily, but her anger was abating. Most of all when Kate was out late she was just worried about her. For all her sassy demeanour, she was a slight little thing for her age.

At least there weren’t drugs out there. Or she didn’t think there were. Not like in Westminster, where if you believed everything you saw on Wicked Auntie, kids Kate’s age were out of their heads on marijuana half the time, the ones that weren’t already in the gutter with needles sticking out of their arms from shooting heroin. She knew they exaggerated sometimes, but those photographs, the video clips they showed, they were real enough. Anyhow you could tell just looking at the young ones who came over, flashing their ‘British pounds’. And them with tattoos and pierced noses like tinker muck, lording it all high and mighty. It was a bad influence.

‘Anyway, come in here and sit down and have a cup of tea. There’s a pot made, for your brother and his friend.’

Kate gave her mother an inquisitive look and craned her neck to look round the door into the sitting room. The last thing she wanted was for Sherlock to perform a repeat of the Spanish Inquisition, especially in front of company. Another Plod no doubt.

Her mother shook her head. ‘He’s not here. You just missed him. Him and his friend. Sat up in his room they did anyway, weren’t going to have their little chat in front of his old mum.’

Kate shrugged. Why on earth anyone would want to listen in on her dull as ditchwater brother (PC in every sense of the word, some of her friends joked) talking shop with one of his rozzer mates, she could not imagine.

‘He’ll be back soon enough, though, I imagine. What with the time it is.’

Kate gave her mother a sidelong look. She was the one who got stick if she wasn’t home when expected, not super Sherlock, her big grown-up brother.

‘He’ll be taking his friend to the frontier, I expect. Probably missed the witching hour and all too,’ the old lady said in response, which only earned her another look. More directly querying this time.

‘That’s got you now, hasn’t it? Wish you’d got back a bit earlier after all, eh? Not often your brother brings visitors home. Visitors of any kind. Let alone an American.’

Mrs Stark could not disguise her small satisfaction at even a minor victory in their continuing war of attrition as she watched her obstreperous, usually unflappable daughter’s jaw drop in a gape of astonishment.

The great grey steel and Portland stone shell of what had once been the Dominion Theatre lurked like an abandoned cave on the corner of New Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, a hollow relic from the days when there had been an empire and dominions.

Stark glanced at his watch, all the while keeping one eye on the American as he theatrically weaved towards the floodlit concrete sheds of the border checkpoint. It was twenty minutes past midnight. Officially that meant he had overstayed his day-visa welcome in the English Democratic Republic.

Stark had insisted on driving him there. Dealing with Benjamin Fairweather’s visa issues was one headache he did not need or want. But preparations for the upcoming parade had forced a detour.

‘What will you tell them?’ he had asked the American as they pulled up by the kerbside at the end of the semi-derelict strip of boarded-up buildings that was New Oxford Street, the old eastern continuation of what was once the world’s premier shopping street.

‘Who? Oh, the border guards? That I had one too many in one of your excellent traditional English hostelries and lost track of time. It’s not 1 a.m. yet. They don’t want me any more than you do. Worst they’ll do is make me change another forty bucks at the official rate for being here an extra day, and then take it off me because we can’t take your money out.’

You’re probably right, Stark thought to himself as he watched the barrier lift and the American produce his passport to a stern-looking BoPo, as he would no doubt call the Republic’s border police. The American was more familiar with the procedures involved in entering and leaving Harry Stark’s country than he himself would ever be.

He found it hard to imagine what it must have been like. When you could drive straight through Admiralty Arch, from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace, one huge city and the heart of an empire. Somewhere over there, only a few hundred metres had been Leicester Square, with rich folk from all around the world flooding in to its theatres and cinemas, and the notorious clubs of Soho, a hedonistic world they thought would never end.

A relic of it still existed, so they said, over there, on the other side, migrated west to King’s Road, Chelsea, and Ham-mersmith, names that were at the same time both familiar and little more than legends to him. He supposed he could have asked the American what they were like. But it somehow didn’t seem right. Harry Stark had not been born when the anti-capitalist protection barrier had been built, had never known anything but a city of dead-end streets and roads to nowhere.

He looked down at the pack of Marlboro sitting on the passenger seat. It had fallen out of the American’s pocket as he was getting out of the car. Stark had called to him, but the American had merely glanced back for an instant and said, ‘Keep the pack. It’s as good a way to kill yourself as any other.’

That hadn’t quite been his final word though, had it? He had given Stark one ironic last smile and added: ‘Think about it Harry. I’ll be in touch.’

Stark turned the key in the engine and shook his head. How could he not think about it? Just what he was supposed to think was another matter. Another matter altogether. Especially sitting here, behind the wheel of his father’s ageing Oxford, the little saloon car that had defined the last, brief, best days of his childhood. To Stark it still had a bit of faded magic. The car was an antique but functional. His father had saved and waited years for it, only to have it arrive about the same time as Katy when he really could have the used the money in other ways. But he had hung onto it, because it would be nice, wouldn’t it, with Harry growing up and a young baby in the family to be able to get out of town now and then. The seaside, Margate maybe.

And Margate it had been, for that strange, improbably blissful summer, and afterwards even at weekends, whenever the demands of the Yard allowed, for the remaining months of his father’s life. They were some of Harry’s happiest memories: kicking football with the old man on the long, wide, windswept beach while his mother dotingly fed Katy behind a windbreak or in the back seat of the car. He had considered them perfect, carefree days. Now he wondered.

His father had taken him to the amusement arcade, with its peeling paint and sour smell of grease, sweat and seawater, buying old pre-war pennies at the kiosk to insert in gruesome fairground entertainment machines that must even then have been nearly half a century old: the Olde English Execution with its doll dropped to dangle through a trapdoor, the American Execution (perhaps not such a surprising survival after all) with its doll that jerked dynamically side to side before flopping over in its ‘electric’ chair, and young Harry’s favourite, the French Execution, with the dramatic drum roll before the blade crashed down and the
doll’s head dropped off to reveal a flaking smear of red paint. There wasn’t a Russian Execution: no figure kneeling down in a courtyard to receive an economical single bullet in the back of the neck.

But it wasn’t the model executions that had made Harry squirm. The only one of those strange, antique mechanical toys that Harry had found grotesque, almost frightening, to the painful scorn of his father, was the one aimed at the youngest children of all: Jolly Jack Tar, a rubicund sailor with pink cheeks and rolling eyes beneath bushy black brows who rocked backward and forward to a raucous belly laugh that issued from the bowels of the machine. Come on, lad, his father had said, it’s just a bit of a giggle, that one. But for Harry there was something enduringly, inescapably sinister in the painted smile and the disembodied laughter. After his father died, he never went back.

Now, all of a sudden, that laughter came back to haunt him, as if all along he had known all his life that it one day would. Hollow laughter for a hollow life. Had it all, the legend he had swallowed every day of his life, been a cruel joke he hadn’t understood? Had the real man seen through the hypocrisies of the system he pretended to support, the same hypocrisies that with every passing day Stark found more suffocating? For nearly two decades he had been trying to live up to what his father would have wanted, at the risk sometimes of alienating his little sister. Had he all along been worshiping a phantom? Had the father he thought he knew been someone else entirely?

He turned the radio on, partly instinctively, partly to hear if there was still traffic problems caused by the parade preparations. Stark’s heart skipped a beat as he heard a voice no one of his generation had ever heard live but none could
forget: ‘Even if the British empire, and its Commonwealth, last for a thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour.’ The radio was tuned to a Westminster station. It was an actor, an advert for the film he had heard them discussing in the Rose. A film that no one would have believed would ever be made nor should ever be made.

But then the world was turning on his head. He put the clutch into first gear, his mind whirling, the thought the American had planted there growing like a cancer: ‘Find them Harry, find the people who can tell you the truth about your father, about the world you live in. There’s a man who can help you, a church warden at St Paul’s Cathedral. His name is Michael McGuire. He trusted Bloom and talked to him. He won’t talk to me but he might talk to you. You are your father’s son, after all.’

Am I, thought Stark, as he pulled away from the kerb. Am I?

In the little Sputnik parked among half a dozen others in the shadow of the Dominion, the driver pressed a button on his car radio that was not normally found on production models, gave his report and asked for instructions.

‘Do nothing,’ the calm voice at the other end replied. ‘He can find his own way home.’ One way or another, he mused silently. One way or another.

Detective Sergeant Dick Lavery leapt to his feet and all but sprang to attention when Harry Stark entered his corner turret office at New Scotland Yard.

Lavery had expected his boss to be early, possibly sitting at his desk since the crack of dawn, given that they had just been landed with one of the most sensational murders since he had graduated out of uniform and made detective. Stark could be a stickler for punctuality and Lavery had fretted when he found his normal walk along the South Bank from London Bridge station blocked by DoSS men who weren’t prepared to make exception for his police pass. The riverside path was temporarily closed, they said and declined to give a reason. Even so, he was at the office before Stark.

In the event it was nearly nine thirty when the DI stumbled through the door, looking like he hadn’t slept a wink all night, threw his coat over a filing cabinet and slumped at his desk without even greeting Lavery with his usual cheery, ‘How’s it going, Dick.’ Which was a shame, because for once Lavery had an answer.

‘Things are … going pretty well, boss,’ he said hesitantly, in answer to the question that hadn’t been asked. ‘Under the circumstances.’

Stark gave him a wan smile that may have been meant to be encouraging but was anything but.

‘I’ve done the usual trawl. No missing persons. At least none who’re putting their hands up.’ The attempt at a joke fell flat.

Stark simply nodded. It had been agreed the day before that Lavery and a couple of the DCs would spend the rest of the afternoon and following morning checking up on the ‘regular villains’ of Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets where gangs ran smuggling rackets in American cigarettes and Scotch whiskies. Open warfare between them was rare but not unheard of. The brutality of the death was certainly not a problem. But Lavery’s lads had sources among the minor cogs in the Whitechapel ‘machine’ who took it in turns to ‘grass’ up members of any rival outfit that looked like muscling in on their ‘manor’. If there was any sort of turf war brewing, it would not take long to get wind of it. Particularly if it involved a ritual execution.

‘Which makes the other option the favourite,’ said Lavery.

‘It does?’

Stark had not yet decided how much of the previous night’s events to share with his normally trusted deputy. How did he know the American was not spinning him a line? A line with bait on the hook intended for one particular fish.

Lavery looked at him sideways: ‘You don’t think it’s “river traffic” then, sir? It’s just there was DoSSers … colleagues from the Department, I mean …’

Stark gave him a mock frown of rebuke.

‘… blocking part of the riverbank on the south side, east of Blackfriars on my way to work this morning. Said it was temporarily closed and wouldn’t explain.’

‘Really?’ Stark did not want to dismiss his sergeant’s efforts but could not repress the note of scepticism in his voice. Even without the events of the previous evening, he had discounted the obvious possibility of the murder being a would-be escaper, a political dissident trying to commit
the crime of ‘fleeing the Republic’, who had turned to one of the people-smuggling gangs and then failed to come up with the fare. Kemp had been fairly certain the man was ‘not one of us’.

Yet the more he thought about it, the more possible it seemed. A ‘fare’ who defaulted on one of the ‘cabbie’ gangs that specialised in getting their fellow citizens across the border would be likely to be made an example of. Safer than simply handing him over to the DoSS who might extract inconvenient answers to awkward questions in exchange for supposed leniency. Kemp’s opinion was, after all, circumstantial. There were at least a few EDR citizens who had lived in hot climes, specialists working in the People’s Republics in Africa for example. It was not inconceivable that one of them had become disillusioned. But then why not just defect while abroad, walk into a ‘British’ embassy and claim asylum. No, it didn’t make sense

On the other hand Stark could see no reason why he shouldn’t let Lavery pursue the ‘cabbie connection’. If he took what the American had said at anything like face value, Stark would be sailing perilously close to the wind. Right at this moment he could see no advantage in having anyone else on board. There was also the small possibility that if Fairweather’s so-called ‘Underground’ actually existed, Lavery might end up coming at it from a different direction. By accident.

Lavery turned on the little black-and-white Logie Baird television that sat in the corner of the office for the ten o’clock news, almost immediately – on hearing the headline about Comrade Harkness’s speech in preparation for the national holiday – switching to BBC Westminster. The news from the other half of London might be politically incorrect but
it had the advantage that it wasn’t written two days earlier. The lead item was a visit by the US Secretary of State to the Federal Republic Prime Minister’s residence in Durham. That was followed by a story about protests against a new nuclear power plant in Cumberland. It was only when they got to the very last item that the sergeant sat bolt upright in his seat and tugged Stark’s sleeve to attract his attention.

‘And finally, more mysterious goings-on across the London Wall today as secret police blocked off the area around Bankside power station to remove what appears to have been an unprecedented example of dissident graffiti. What can you tell us, Sian?’

The screen switched from the newscaster to the familiar face and grating tone of Sian Morris standing on the Victory Embankment with the great chimney of the power station in the background.

‘It’s all over now, but earlier this morning dozens of plain-clothes Social Security men cordoned off the area around Bankside power station, which you can see behind me, to remove a remarkable piece of graffiti. As luck would have it, one of our cameramen was passing on this side of the river at the time, and managed to capture this astonishing footage.’

The image that appeared on screen was blurred, clearly shot at long distance through a telephoto lens, but what it showed was remarkable enough: a group of men with brushes on poles actively scrubbing at a larger than lifesize image in red paint. An image of which two details were plainly visible: a trilby hat and two fingers held up in a V-sign.

And then the camera jolted wildly up into the air before levelling out to reveal a pair of hands struggling to cover the
lens and the sounds of a scuffle. Clearly somebody objected to his filming. No prizes for guessing who.

‘Nobody over here is saying anything officially, of course,’ Morris went on. ‘In fact nobody will even admit there was anything there at all, but I think most people would agree that that looks remarkably like it was a picture of the one man people over here absolutely
never
mention: Winston Churchill. This is Sian Morris, reporting live from East London.’

The male anchor in the Westminster studio turned to his female colleague and said, ‘Quite remarkable, that.’

‘Absolutely,’ she agreed with a winning smile. ‘I don’t suppose it could have been anything to do with the upcoming
Bulldog Breed
movie?’

‘I doubt even the advertising boys from MGM have those sort of contacts,’ he replied. And they both laughed.

Lavery looked at his boss in open-mouthed astonishment, a look Stark had to try his hardest not to reciprocate as his thoughts flicked from the piece of paper found in the pocket of the Blackfriars body and the conversation in the Rose last night.

Instead he dropped his head and stared at his desk for a few seconds, then got up and with a glance out the window towards the rain clouds coming in again, pulled on his coat and opened the door.

‘Sir?’

‘Carry on, Dick, you’re doing a good job. I think it’s time I paid a visit to the museum.’

Stark was already closing the door behind him without a second thought for the expression of blank perplexity on his sergeant’s face.