by Peter Millar
‘It ended the war, though, didn’t it?’
‘Only because we – the forces of progress and socialism, that is – had one too, and they didn’t know it. Mutual Assured Destruction, that’s what gave us the ceasefire. And peace ever since.’
‘MAD, I believe they call it,’ said Stark. It was his first intervention in the discussion. He hadn’t intended it, just couldn’t resist reminding them of the extraordinarily apt acronym.
‘Call it whatever you like,’ said Hindsmith. ‘That’s history. And anyone who doesn’t believe it is deluding themselves. Dangerously.’
Chapter 11
For a second Harry Stark almost thought he had misheard, that he had conjured up the words his own imagination had been haunted by all day. But in that same second he realised with an absolute certainty he had not.
What other subject was likely to cause as much automatic, awkward controversy or inspire Del to come straight in with the ‘guvnor’s sanction’? Shut it, he had said. No surprise there.
The real surprise, Stark realised, lay in hearing something like that discussed publicly at all. Okay, neither man had mentioned the WC words out loud, but everyone involved, including Del and the other couple of less voluble hangers-on who had simply stood there gaping, knew what they were talking about. It was not that long ago that a conversation of that kind other than among trusted long-time friends and close family would have been asking for trouble. Maybe it was something to do with the new mood in Moscow, all this talk of a new official ‘transparency’. Glasnost!? Harry Stark would believe in that when he saw through it.
If any of the others in the bar had noticed the brief altercation, they showed little sign of it. The young couple at the table nearest were too engrossed in each other to notice anything short of an armed assault on the premises, while old Stan and Mary sat side by side on the green imitation-leather banquette near the door staring silently into their gins, as they had done every night for as long as he could remember, the contented quiet calm of an old and settled relationship, or perhaps just senile stultification, Stark had never quite been sure. The tall man in the corner had unfolded a copy of the Morning Star and sat with his nose deeply buried in it, as if he was the one individual who really cared what Comrade Harkness had told the fortieth anniversary Congress of the Essex Autoworkers’ Union.
Without him even having to raise his glass or wave the customary pound note over the counter, Lizzie was there, the usual, almost wicked wry smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Stark gave her a questioning look to which she replied with a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders. Stark went to open his mouth but realised he had no idea what to say. Lizzie mouthed ‘another time’ at him and said:
‘Another one, Harry?’
‘Not tonight. Tired. Time I went home for my tea.’
He wrapped his scarf around his neck, flicked a hand at Del by way of farewell and got a brusque nod in return as he pushed open the door into the blustery night,
What Harry Stark meant by tea at that moment, looming vividly in his mind’s eye, was a fish and chip supper, just as he had promised himself half an hour earlier. There was no point in waiting until he got home. His mother was used to his unsocial hours and Katy was always out with her friends these days, which made Stark more of a regular at the fish and chip shop than was good for his waistline.
The smell of cheap cooking oil sharpened by the tang of rough vinegar evoked an almost Pavlovian reaction from his senses. Stark stopped abruptly in front of the familiar frosted-glass door of the chip shop, only obliquely aware as he did so of causing someone behind him to lurch out of his way, muttering what sounded like a curse before scurrying past. Stark paid no heed. What he wanted was a fat piece of cod in crispy batter and a packet of greasy chips to go with it. His humour had recovered to the extent that his usual pessimistic precognition failed to recognise the expression on the face behind the counter.
‘Evening, Mr Stark,’ said Johnny, a spotty boy of barely seventeen who had been taken on just before Christmas and seemed to always do the early evening shift now. The greeting was as pleasant as always; the look on his face, however, was apprehensive.
‘If it’s your usual, Mr Stark …’
‘It is indeed, Johnny. Cod and chips and don’t stilt on the salt and vinegar.’ Stark could feel a benign glow of satisfaction settling on him, the product of good beer and anticipation of familiar food.
‘It’s just that we’re out of cod, sir.’
Stark blinked, as if he hadn’t heard, but he had. ‘Out of cod? Well, what …’ but the words faded away as he surveyed the empty top tray of the fryer where at least one or two pieces of ready-cooked fish usually sat in their batter waiting for the impatient customer.
‘It’s just temporary. Least, that’s what the bloke on the truck said. Billingsgate market’s rationing at the moment. Said it should be all right again in a couple of days.’ The boy shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t his fault, which it wasn’t. But Stark’s bubble of contentment had been deflated, his mood of peaceful resignation punctured by a sudden anger. He muttered an obscenity almost violently under his breath. The boy behind the counter looked alarmed.
‘Chips then,’ growled Stark. ‘A bag of chips, please. I assume they’re still delivering fucking potatoes.’
‘Yes, Mr Stark. No problem.’ Johnny bent his head and began shovelling chips generously into a greaseproof bag.
Stark closed his eyes and let the disappointment subside. Just another hitch in the supply chain. He pushed a tenpence piece over the counter and took the warm reeking parcel, wrapped as usual in that day’s copy of the New Times. Some traditions survived: the need to save on scarce resources meant the party stomached seeing its leaders’ otherwise hallowed words and faces used as wrapping. Stark barely noticed the picture of Harkness, the elderly General Secretary, giving serried ranks of Dagenham car workers a foretaste of his speech on the forthcoming holiday.
Outside it was just starting to rain, a fine misty drizzle, the sort that was persistent rather than aggressive but sank into clothing, skin and hair almost by osmosis, the sort that could give you pneumonia before you knew it. The detective’s fingers grubbed open the package and a rash of vinegar spread across Comrade Harkness’s serious face.
The street was empty, quiet, save for the occasional swoosh of car tyres on wet tarmac. Stark dipped his fingers into the warm carbohydrate mush of his vinegar-sodden chips and tried to take what comfort he could in his fishless supper. He pulled his coat collar up, heedless of the grease marks left by his fingers, and quickened his pace. It was a good ten minutes’ walk home, long enough for him to finish his chips and get comprehensively soaked.
He ducked into a doorway for a minute for the sake of enjoying a few mouthfuls unadulterated by rainwater, and noticed a shadow move in the insipid lamplight across the street, as if someone else had done the same thing. It was no night for anyone but an idiot to be tramping the street. Like the idiot who had almost tripped over his feet as he entered the chip shop. And was now sheltering in the doorway opposite? Waiting for Stark to emerge?
Stark watched the spot where he had seen the movement, but there was nothing apparent. He put another chip in his mouth and moved out into the rain. Four doorways on he stopped again, suddenly, and ducked once more into shelter, turning as he did so. Once again he caught a glimpse of movement, as if someone on the other side of the road, maybe forty metres back, was shadowing his steps. Could it really be that he was being followed? Policemen sometimes followed other people. No one followed policemen. Except – the thought crept up on him like a mugger in an alleyway – except for those who thought themselves above the law.
The sight of the black Bevan lurking on the Embankment had lingered with Stark all day. Not just its presence, but its peremptory disappearance, as if arrogantly dismissing them. Stark, like most ordinary CID men at the Yard had little love for ‘the Department’ and less for those who worked in it. It was nothi
ng to do with politics, or so he told himself. More a matter of taste.
He knew also that in the scheme of things, in the world of Realpolitik, the DoSS carried the clout that counted. Even if he was not technically outranked by a DoSS officer of similar status, he was always outflanked. They were playing a different game: one in which only they knew the location of the goalposts. And even then they kept moving them.
And now they were playing tag in the rain, were they? Or was it Harry Stark getting paranoid just because some rain-soaked drunk on the other side of the road was ducking into doorways just like he was? Maybe, but somehow he doubted it. And the doubt irritated him immensely.
Stark moved out of the doorway and quickened his pace. From the corner of his eye he caught a flicker in the lamplight, enough to convince him that the figure on the other side of the road had done the same. Instinctively he moved his left arm against his body to feel the reassuring bulk of his shoulder-holstered pistol. There was always the outside possibility that he had been spotted by some amateur footpad new to the district and unaware of the identity of his mark. If any would-be mugger really was targeting him, then he would be in for a very nasty surprise indeed. Stark doubted it. The streets were dark but generally safe. This was Bermondsey, not Soho where, according to ‘Wicked Auntie’ at least, muggings were a part of daily life. He laughed a silent, bitter laugh. It was a comparison he was unlikely ever to make in person.
No, the more he thought about it, putting one chip after another into his mouth, the more he was certain that his clumsy tail was wagged by the men who were ferried around in shiny black Bevans, and considered honest coppers like him lumps of pig iron to do with as they pleased. If that was the case Harry Stark would show this one what sort of metal he was made of.
He quickened his pace again, then stopped. Abruptly. Fumbling in his pocket as if he had forgotten something, he found a coin and let it slip through his fingers and rattle into the gutter. He bent down as if to pick it up, using the opportunity to glance between his legs and see the figure on the other side of the road moving with improbable slowness. Apart from the two of them, the road was deserted. A few cars were parked here and there, one still covered in its winter tarpaulin, waiting for the coming of spring. A solitary battered Fellow Traveller, trusty workhorse of the upmarket proletariat, splashed by in the opposite direction, taking some functionary home from his day at the bureaucratic coalface. There were no other pedestrians. The man stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. It was hard to believe they could be so incompetent. The idea that they were ‘secret’ police was a serious misnomer; sometimes they could hardly be more obvious. But then that was part of the arrogance.
The same arrogance that sent someone to follow him home, as if they didn’t know where he lived. It was a culture not of surveillance but of intimidation that made you feel you had something to hide, even when you hadn’t. Well, if they acted like backstreet muggers, Stark was willing to treat them as such.
He stood upright and walked on, maintaining a brisk but unhurried pace as far as the junction with Pankhurst Street, where he routinely took a right. The rain was heavier now, big full-sized drops that splashed on the kerbstones. The figure behind had lagged back, as if he knew that too. Pankhurst Street was long, straight with terrace houses on either side, easy to keep an eye on someone from a more discreet distance than this amateur had so far managed. But this was Harry’s home turf.
The house on the corner had once had grander pretensions than its neighbours, exemplified by stucco pillars projecting from the yellow London brick. The impression of a porch, as well as the reality, had long since been shattered, probably by stray shellfire, but what remained was an alcove easily deep enough to conceal Harry Stark. Reluctantly jettisoning the few remaining chips in their vinegar-saturated newsprint, he folded himself into it, wiping the grease from his fingers on his coat sleeve before closing them around the grip of his handgun.
Within seconds he heard hurrying footsteps. His tail would have reached the corner only to find the long stretch of Pankhurst Street unexpectedly empty. A figure appeared in view almost directly in front of him, tall, angular. There was something in the hunch of the shoulders, a stance that appeared both timorous and unaccustomed, like a man playing an unusual role, that seemed obliquely familiar.
A mental picture came to him, of an awkward figure emerging from the Tube, head and shoulders above the crowd but pushed by it to one side. Had he been following him since then? In the pub? The solitary figure in the corner absorbed in his copy of the Morning Star? He might as well have been reading the Guardian, the DoSS house journal. He turned his head towards the ruined porch.
Stark launched himself from the doorway, bringing the butt of his revolver sharply down behind the man’s ear as his left foot lashed out at the vulnerable back of his knee. The figure crumpled. Stark fell on him. His right knee pressed down on the small of the back, his left hand seized the man’s hair and jerked his head back sharply, to feel the muzzle of Stark’s revolver pressed against his temple.
‘Armed police! Identify yourself.’ Stark bellowed the words. Over the top, but according to the rulebook.
The response was a half-choked gurgle, then a gasped oath: ‘Jesus fucking Christ! Okay, okay, don’t kill me!’
Involuntarily Stark pulled back, instinctively relaxing his grip, almost foolishly releasing it. He let the muzzle of the revolver retreat to the point where it no longer made an indentation in the soft, painfully vulnerable flesh of the temple. It was not the old-fashioned obscenity that had shocked him, but the accent in which it was uttered. He craned his neck forward to get a look at the incalculably alien life form sprawled beneath him.
‘You’re an American?’ he said.
Chapter 12
Stark stood in the rain, water streaming down his face and stared into the eyes of the man he had just pulled to his feet. Small rabbit-eyes, still in shock, lower lip visibly trembling as he replaced a pair of spectacles with hopelessly twisted frames on the bridge of his nose. Despite his size he looked lost, nervous, more a frightened gazelle than a hunting dog. A far cry from the trained hoods of the Department. But then his accent alone proved that.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Stark asked, authority rather than anger in his voice.
The reply bubbled up like a spring in flood: ‘Fairweather, Ben, Benjamin Fairweather, New York Times. Pleased to meet you. I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean … I’m sorry. I …’ He wiped his nose with his sleeve.
‘What? The New York …?’
‘Times. I’m a reporter.’ Rain was dripping in a steady stream of droplets from his lank hair. ‘Can we …? I mean, you don’t need that.’
Stark looked down and realised he was still pointing his pistol point blank at the man’s heaving chest. Still watching him carefully, he put it away.
‘Why were you following me?’
‘I wasn’t. I mean, that is, I wanted to see if you were being followed. And to be sure I wasn’t.’ He looked around, warily, at the empty street, as if to prove it.
‘What?’ Stark had heard tales of the way the foreign press, Americans and Northerners, worked: sitting in their offices making up stories about the imminent collapse of socialism when all along it was their own societies that were on the brink of anarchy. Stark wasn’t sure just how much all of that was true, but he did know that western newspapers printed stories alleged to have come from ‘dissident sources behind the wall.’ Stark knew some of these ‘sources’: drifters who grumbled because they were too incompetent or lazy to do a proper job, and only too happy to take convertible ‘British’ pounds as opposed to English ones, cultivating malcontents and petty criminals, those who refused to accept proper jobs, and elevating them to the status of ‘dissidents’. The sort of people who painted honest policemen as the devil’s disciples and called them PeePees (though never to their faces).
Why an American journalist might be following Stark around the back streets of Bermondsey on a
stinking April evening he had no idea and he could not imagine any he might approve of. This dripping youth did not exactly look like a shock trooper of capitalist imperialism but he still had one hell of a lot of explaining to do.
‘ID.’
The American fumbled in his overcoat, produced a thick wallet and from it a yellow laminated card with a photograph of a smiling young man in thick-framed spectacles, with a tan that suggested he was more used to Florida beaches than English rain, and in Gothic lettering the words New York Times.
‘I … I’ve changed my glasses,’ he stammered, answering the question Stark hadn’t asked and fiddling with the thin wire wreckage on his nose.
‘Passport.’
‘Look, you have to listen to me.’
‘Passport. Please.’
From the same pocket emerged a leather-bound US passport. Stark thumbed through it, scanning the stamps and the visas: République Populaire Française once in June the previous year and again in September, Deutsche Volksrepublik once, three years ago, and then a flurry of red and white, blurred crosses and roses for London, capital of the English Democratic Republic from Westminster, through the Oxford Street/Tottenham Court Road border checkpoint. A frequent visitor but not an overnighter. Today’s stamp was no different; he had to be out by midnight.
‘Detective Inspector Stark. I need to talk to you.’
Stark shook his head. How the hell did some American reporter know his name? The rain was pouring down, bouncing off the tarmac. Whatever Stark needed it wasn’t this. Or double pneumonia.
‘So talk.’
The American looked around him, every minute more like a drowning rat.
‘Is there anywhere we could go. To get out of this.’
There was, just two minutes away, with a hot cup of tea waiting and a warm bed that Harry Stark was looking forward to climbing into. But he was damned if he was inviting some suspicious representative of the ideological family into the bosom of his dysfunctional family.