The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  Stark took it and turned it over in his hands. It appeared to be a newspaper cutting, but printed only on one side.

  ‘It’s a photocopy, but it’s genuine. Not New Times, New York Times, September 1970.’

  Stark looked at it. There were people he knew, who could identify a newspaper just from the type font, but he was not one of them. Not that it mattered. The words would have had the same impact in any newspaper:

  EAST LONDON EXECUTION

  Secret Police in East London have executed a senior policeman believed to be an important member of an anti-communist dissident group, New York Times sources have confirmed. The man involved was named as Major John Stark, a high-profile officer in the Metropolitan People’s Police. Intelligence sources said Stark was one of the most important among many regime figures disillusioned by the recent events in mainland Europe.

  He was executed after the sinister Department of Social Security discovered that for the past three years he had developed and maintained links to a group known as The Underground. It is believed Stark had been feeding them official information.

  The Interior Ministry in the communist-occupied zone denied there had been an execution and said Major Stark was a ‘respected police officer who recently died of a heart attack’, a frequent euphemism on the other side of the London Wall for unexplained disappearances of public officials.

  Stark handed it back, shaking his head incredulously. ‘This is absurd. How do I know it’s genuine? And even if it is, why should I believe anything in the New York Times rather than in our newspapers?’

  ‘If you don’t know the answer to that, Harry, I can’t tell you. But I think you do. There again, you could always check out the facts. You are, I believe, supposed to be a detective.’

  ‘My father was a dedicated member. Of the Socialist Labour Party. This is some absurd form of disinformation. Some game you’re playing. You or whoever you work for.’

  Fairweather gave a mock laugh. ‘If only my editors had that much imagination! It’s disinformation, okay, but the other way around. The obituary you cut out and saved was an attempt to preserve a myth and cover up an inconvenient truth. It was honest enough, in a way, but only if he’d died four years earlier, before the events of ’68.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Harry, not even your historians try to cover up that, even if they do talk in a language all of their own. The events of 1968, the crushed liberalisation in Prague, the suppressed student riots in Paris and Amsterdam. What is it your press calls it? “The anarchist counter-revolution”? Call it that if you want, or “Paris in the Springtime” as the more romantically-inclined headline writers our side of the Wall did. But it still came to the same thing in the end. Tanks rolling down the Champs-Elysées and Dam Square, no talk about letting “a hundred flowers bloom” or “sewing the new seeds of socialism”. The men in Moscow back then had their own idea about how to run a garden – prune early and often: they used the hammer and sickle to good effect and didn’t bother to wipe the blood off either afterwards. How many do you think died?’

  For the second time in as many minutes Stark felt wrong-footed. He knew – everyone knew – that the official version, which accounted for only a couple of dead Soviet soldiers, hailed as ‘martyrs to the communist cause and universal brotherhood’, was a travesty. It was one of those little abstract lies that people lived with, not on a par with the big firsthand lie this man was trying to tell him about his own father. But even so, it put him at a disadvantage and he knew it.

  ‘A dozen. Maybe more. Maybe several dozen altogether. Okay, probably more than officially admitted. It was regrettable, but necessary … inevitable.’ That was what they said, the ‘they’ who said things about stuff like that. Ordinary people didn’t. Ordinary people didn’t even like to think about it.

  ‘Come on, Harry, you know better than that. Even in your benighted little offshore teapot republic everyone knows better than that. And was it really worth it? Three hundred dead in Paris alone, over two days. Another hundred and fifty in Amsterdam. The same in Prague. And those are only the round numbers.

  ‘Dozens more, maybe even hundreds, over the weeks and months that followed, in the purges, thousands of arrests, the scouring of party membership lists, the rounding-up of “off-message” intellectuals, which meant just about all of them. It went too far for many people, Harry, even some loyal old comrades, your father included. They did nothing immediately – it would have been suicide in the situation – but they made resolutions, private and in small groups, that the same thing could not be allowed to happen again. Oh, yes, even here. “We are the people of England who have not spoken yet” – they knew their Chesterton quote, turned it on its head and made it their motto; one or two of them found a voice, but they kept it quiet, working in the underground. Until the worms found them.’

  Harry Stark sat, silently, and looked at the man facing him, looked at his smart, expensive overcoat, with the fat wallet in the inside pocket, along with the Ronson lighter and the Marlboro cigarettes, and wondered if he was seeing surface or substance. None of it made sense, this absurd Alice-through-the-looking-glass version of events, of his own life. And yet somehow, at the same time, it did: the mood swings his father went through when Harry was in his early teens and his mother put down to the old man drinking too much. Then the calm after the storm, the period immediately before and after Katy’s birth when he seemed to be at ease with himself and his family, as if life had taken a decision for him, despite the scurrilous rumours behind his back, when he no longer seemed endlessly burdened by the cares of ‘the Yard’. At the same time he was working late regularly, even overnighting at the office, something his son in a dozen years there had never had occasion to do.

  Was it possible? Even remotely? That his father had had some ‘road to Damascus’ conversion, that for his last few years he had been living a double life? Living a lie? A lie that had been found out, and for which he paid the ultimate penalty? It was inconceivable, wasn’t it? Suddenly, Harry Stark was no longer as certain as he had thought.

  ‘Your father saw through it all, Harry. Don’t think it wasn’t hard. All of a sudden he started to question everything he ever believed in, stopped seeing the world in black and white. That’s when he realised he could make a difference. Just like you can …’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘By finding out how and why they killed the man whose body you found this morning.’

  ‘I’ll do that anyway. That’s my job.’

  ‘Sure it is. You don’t believe that any more than I do? How long will it be before the DoSSers close in and close it down. They hung him up there as a warning, a warning to the people he came over here to contact. The people who’re still following the path your father took. The only way you’re going to do that job, Harry, the only way you can be the man your father would have wanted you to be, is to get in touch with them.’

  ‘Get in touch with who …?’

  ‘With the Underground. Or whatever’s left of them.’

  Chapter 17

  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.

  Chapter 18

  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.’