by Peter Millar
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.
Chapter 19
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.
Chapter 20
The architecture alone was intimidating, Harry Stark thought as he walked along Great Russell Street. Even in the slanting rain that slicked the uneven cobbles of the courtyard the great fluted Doric columns, black with decades of encrusted soot and grime, looked less than welcoming. Only the presumption of global imperialism could ever have given the name ‘British’ Museum to one of the greatest collections of antiquities plundered from across the entire planet.
Was it possible that this was where he would find evidence to support the American’s outrageous challenge to everything he believed … in? He hesitated over the final preposition even as he asked himself the question. Was it really everything he believed in, or just everything he believed. Weren’t they the same thing anyway? Or were they?
The last time Harry Stark had been inside the Museum of Humanity, as it had been renamed in 1950, was as a child when his father had taken him to see what the old man had called ‘the mummies and the marbles’. Even then he could not believe such a sinister-looking building could contain such marvels: the graceful snow-white athletes with their rippling muscles and stretched tendons, the straining horses with flaring nostrils. The board next to the sculpture explained how this was one of the finest examples of socialist realism in art dating back to the ancient world and the first great popular democracy. The postscript read: ‘Loaned in perpetuity from the Hellenic People’s Republic.’
Young Harry had stared in wonder, impressed that all his teacher had told him was true: that great art was indeed heroic like the official painters of the Republic whose depictions of sturdy Kentish farmers or Dagenham car workers adorned every public building. Rather than the decadent art from up North, the homosexual Hockney, with his endless swimming pools, and the pseudo-proletarian Lowry whose stick men were a calculated insult to the working class.
He had said as much to his father and the old man had simply smiled and patted him on the head. Now, crossing that bleak portal for the first time since, the adult Harry wondered what his father had really thought. Had he believed the official commentary or had he seditiously thought all along what Harry himself had only recently come to suspect: that there was not a direct line of artistic evolution from the Parthenon marbles to the Heroes of Dagenham. Could the old man have secretly thought the government-sponsored art to be as lifeless as the empty Egyptian sarcophagi?
But it was not in the museum itself that he intended to look for the answer to a question he had never imagined asking, but in the separate institution it contained, the fabled Reading Room housed in its heart. The Marx-Lenin Reading Room, named for the two great communist thinkers who had elaborated their theories in this very room, had rights to a copy of every book printed in what had once been the United Kingdom until 1949 and the English Democratic Republic since. Entrance was reserved for scholars only, and senior, politically reliable ones at that. But subsidiary regulations also allowed access by members of the state’s security services.
Stark believed, although he had yet to test it, that that definition could be stretched to include the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. He had thought about putting on uniform for the occasion but decided he was not going to let himself be browbeaten by the system into behaving like one of its petty peacocks. In any case, he no longer had one that fit.
‘Next please.’ A large gruff woman with dyed auburn hair beckoned Stark brusquely forward. The inevitable portraits of the two great thinkers glared down at him from the oak-panelled wall, with Clem Attlee, their honoured disciple, and Arthur Harkness, the EDR’s current heir to their ideology.
Stark walked up to the desk, flipped open his warrant card with its imposing Scotland Yard crest and thumped it down in front of her.
‘Detective Inspector Stark, Metropolitan People’s Police CID. I’m here to research historical information relating to a current case.’
The woman harrumphed, but was visibly taken aback.
‘What case?’ she made a show of residual aggression. Stark was ready for her.
‘I’m afraid you don’t have the clearance to know that,’ he snapped, closing his warrant card and lifting it from the table.
The woman stiffened, then noticeably relaxed, as if somewhere in her regimented hierarchical brainstem a nerve cell had saluted and a ‘stand easy’ order been given.
‘I apologise, Detective Inspector. If I may …?’
Stark gave her another stern look.
‘Your warrant card, sir.’ The woman noticeably wilted. ‘For the log.’ She gestured towards a vast, black imitation leather-bound ledger.
‘Ah, of course.’ Stark produced the card again, laid it down on the desk and watched as the woman opened the heavy tome and made a careful entry in a vast grid of boxes. It was something he hadn’t counted on. How often did anyone ever go through that list of names? Probably, he sighed internally, more often than he cared to imagine.
The woman looked at the clock between Marx and Lenin and entered the time, 10.32 a.m., next to his name.
‘Please go ahead, Detective Inspector Stark. I am sure the desk clerk will be most pleased to assist the People’s Police.’
Stark nodded with a brief smile, no more than minimally courteous – he did not want to give the impression that he had anything to be grateful for – and pushed open the heavy oak door that led into the Great Reading Room.
He had heard of it, of course, seen pictures probably, though he could not remember where. But nothing prepared him for the reality. Out of the dark, dingy antechamber with its wooden walls, utilitarian carpet and brown-painted ceiling he stepped into an expanse of soaring light and space, a huge circular amphitheatre of book-lined walls beneath a vast dome pierced by high vaulting windows through which even the pallid light of an indifferent English springtime poured like rays from heaven itself. For a moment Stark held his breath in pure wonderment. That the grim neoclassical museum with its austere black columns could have such a jewel of light and clarity at its heart was beyond belief, almost as if the architect of this magical rotunda had deliberately set out to conjure a metaphor in stone for the illumination held on its shelves. Providing, he reminded himself, that it had not been extinguished.
He walked up to the main enquiries desk, a circular structure, as befitted the building, with windows and counters behind which clerks busied themselves with card indexes, book request forms in pink, grey and green, and pile after pile of the volumes themselves, pre-ordered and awaiting collection. Nothing, of course, could be removed from the Reading Room. That was a rule that had pertained even in Marx’s and Lenin’s day. Books were stored in the kilometres of shelving that surrounded the great circular building, built from ground floor up to just below the level of the windows, filling every inch of what had once been an empty courtyard in the middle of the museum. Those of sufficient status to merit a coveted reader’s card ordered their books at the enquiry desk, collected them there and returned them every evening until they were no longer required. Only reference books and non-fiction were actually stored on the premises, fiction resided in distant outhouses, from where it had to be ordered days in advance.
But Stark was not interested in either weighty works of non-fiction or the purest fantasy, he was interested in the library’s other great collection: ephemera. Newspapers. Only papers of record, of course, were stored, but that included not just New Times, the Guardian and the Morning Star but also pre-war papers and, most jealously guarded of all, papers from the other side, the other England: such blatant purveyors of anti-socialist propaganda as the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Yorkshire Post. There were even, Stark was led to believe, copies of the New York Times.
> He approached the desk. A clerk who might have been a caricature of the breed looked up at him with watery eyes behind thick spectacles and pushed back a lock of hair.
‘Yes, can I help you?’
‘I need copies of foreign newspapers, this morning’s from Westminster. And some older ones too.’
Oh yes, the eyes seemed to say, you do, do you? The mouth said nothing. There was something about him that Stark instinctively disliked, a sort of subservience that hinted at a concealed sense of superiority.
‘It’s quite important,’ Stark added, as if the man’s expression challenged him to justify himself.
‘I’m sure it is. Now, how old are we talking?’
‘Quite some time. September 1970 to be precise.’
‘Well, if you know what you are looking for, and the precise dates and publications, you can start by filling out one of these forms. One for each publication, that is, and for each date of publication, if you follow me. There are more over there if you need them.’
A flabby, age-spotted hand pushed a handful of pink and yellow forms with flimsies attached for the copies bureaucracy demanded, and gestured behind Stark to a row of benches, with wooden seats and cubbyholes filled with a host of other, similarly colour-coded forms.
Stark took a seat and set to work. He knew what he wanted: first of all to see if the copy of the New York Times the American had shown him was genuine, secondly to see if there were other, similar reports in the Northern or Westminster newspapers. Even if he found everything he was – hoping for or dreading? – that did not automatically mean everything the American had told him was true, but at the very least it meant there was another, secret side to his family history.