by Peter Millar
The spiral had left him quite dizzy by the time he arrived at the corridors immediately beneath the dome. But it was only at the top of the last small flight of stairs that led into the gallery itself that the horror overcame him. In huge, sweeping, biliously nauseous waves. His eyes, which had rapidly become accustomed to the dark of the stairwell, suddenly reeled at the sudden glare of daylight pouring into the void of the dome through Wren’s meticulously placed area of portholes, designed in an age without power. The sun had come out and celestial light was pouring into the house of God.
But it was not just the sudden eruption of light that sent Stark reeling. At the same time the world fell away beneath him like a giant bottomless well, sucking him towards it with a fatal seduction more powerful than gravity. Urging him, goading him, pulling him onwards, to throw himself over the narrow rail, to hurtle headlong to the welcoming embrace of infinity. Go on, it urged, go on, you know you want to! In a moment of sheer, unbridled, unanticipated terror Stark closed his eyes tight shut and turned to clutch the smooth unwelcoming plaster of the wall.
He had had attacks of vertigo before, but nothing like this, and he had not expected it inside a building. But the vast scale of the cathedral, the fact that the height above him was at least as great as that below, and with the all too visible crack that ran like a jagged lightning bolt down one side of it, all magnified the sensation unimaginably. His head was reeling, his heart pounding. Slowly, biting his lip, ashamed of the irrational fear and angrily aware that he was probably cutting a less than impressive spectacle for the man he had come to interview, he opened his eyes to the mouldy yellow stucco in front of them, and then more slowly still forced himself to turn around.
Michael McGuire, at least that is who he assumed it to be, was sitting calmly watching him from the other side of the dome. Stark managed a brief wave, still pressed against the wall. He had not expected this, in fact he had no idea how he was even going to edge his way around the circumference of the open maw that yawned in front of him. But the man opposite smiled and gestured with his hands to indicate Stark should sit down. He breathed a sigh of relieve. Perhaps he was going to have mercy and come round to this side. But as soon as he sat down he realised that that was not what was going to happen. To his astonishment, stupidly when he thought about it, he immediately heard someone say his name. Quietly. Almost a whisper.
Of course, they were in the Whispering Gallery. His father had told him about it when he was a child, but never brought him here. He supposed it had been closed for safety reasons even then. Wren’s architectural skill was such that the circumference was an almost perfect circle and words whispered against the wall were audible to anyone who leant their ear against it even on the far side. It was the perfect place, provided there was no one else in the gallery, to conduct a conversation in total secrecy.
‘Sta-k, Harry Stark,’ he heard as if a ghost was speaking from the wall itself. ‘Welc-me’.
‘You are Mi–’ Stark began, then realised he was doing it wrong, speaking aloud as if trying to talk across the void to the man who had to be at least fifty metres away. The man frowned, looked down pointedly towards the floor of the cathedral, something Stark felt nauseous even considering, and then gestured towards the wall behind him.
‘You are Michael McGuire,’ Stark whispered to the wall.
The figure opposite nodded.
I’m here because I want to find out what you know about the murder of an unknown man I believe to have been an American by the name of Bloom. That was what Stark had planned to say to this mysterious churchwarden who might or might not be a link to a group of organised anti-socialist dissidents. What he actually said was: ‘You knew my father.’
The man opposite nodded again, turned to the wall and whispered: ‘Yes, I did. You- father, John, was a g--d man.’ Stark was struggling to make out the words clearly. The gallery wasn’t working as well as it should have done. Clearly the fracture in the great dome itself had had a detrimental effect on the acoustics. The light faded and a couple of drops of water fell in front of his eyes. He looked up. There were dark clouds overhead, rainwater coming through the crack.
‘I need to find out more about him,’ Stark whispered to the wall. ‘I need to meet some people he knew. The same people an American came looking for a few days ago. A man called Martin Bloom.’ Stark was speaking slowly, quietly, but as clearly as he could. He wondered how much of what he was saying the man on the other side could actually hear and understand. He glanced across and thought for a moment he caught a glimpse of movement in the door that presumably led to the ‘down’ stairwell on the other side. McGuire had his ear pressed to the wall attentively and was nodding. He had obviously done this before. Stark wondered how many politically incorrect conversations had taken place in this way, far removed from the listening devices of the men from Social Security.
‘I --ow what you a-- -alking about,’ the wall whispered. ‘But I -elieve Mr -loom is no longer -ith us.’ That was saying the least of it, Stark thought. ‘I can help you. But --is is not the -ight place.’
Stark was getting cross. He needed to ask the man some more direct questions. Sitting whispering against a wall was not the format he was used to for conducting police interviews. He looked across the vast empty space at the man with irritation, wishing he could pluck up the nerve to just march round there and collar him. And then he noticed it again, a flicker of movement in the stairwell entrance behind him. He went to call out, then turned to the wall to whisper but it was speaking to him.
Stark had missed his first words: ‘… -nderground,’ he made out, but it was like weather conditions harming radio reception, perhaps the rain coming through the crack ruining the acoustics. ‘You need -- talk to another man … love … the church … bride … Christ …’ and then suddenly the same word only this time not whispered, but shouted, ‘CHRIST’. Stark spun round from the wall and jumped to his feet.
Opposite him the physical form of Michael McGuire was rising. And not just rising to his feet. He was lifting himself, or being lifted, up, up against the balustrade, almost to the point of no return when his own centre of gravity would take over and the laws of physics, irrespective of human insanity and irrational death wishes, would assume final fatal command.
And then he was gone. A split-second cry, lasting half an eternity, in truncated echo amidst the great marble columns and rising into the imperfect vault above, and then a horrible, dull, ineluctably final crunch from below.
Stark reeled as if he had been physically struck, and fell to the floor, his head hitting the wooden boards as he retched, clutching the cold stone of the balustrade with clenched knuckles. Jesus Christ, he told himself. Two murders in two days and each time you throw up. What kind of policeman are you? Against instinct he forced himself to look up, across the void that had swallowed McGuire. Disappearing into the stairwell opposite was a short, stocky, heavily built figure. Proof of what Stark already knew: McGuire hadn’t jumped – he had been pushed! Taken by surprise, grabbed suddenly from behind before he knew what was happening and lifted bodily over the balustrade.
Swallowing down his terror with the taste of his vomit, Stark pushed himself to his feet, pulled his service Makarov pistol from his shoulder holster and did his best to run the half-circumference of the gallery, his eyes studiously fixed to the wall next to him, not daring to look up and least of all down, to the horrible sight he knew awaited him. It was easier than he thought. This was work, running for dear life in pursuit of a murderer.
Only when he gratefully dived through the doorway, into the relative darkness, away from the gallery’s deadly whirlpool of light and space, did he realise his error. The doorway did not lead, as he had expected, to a separate stairwell, but into a corridor that led him back around the dome to the same stairwell he had come up. If he had simply turned around where he was and gone back, he would have been waiting for the killer. Now, instead, he could hear the feet receding rapidly into the distanc
e down the wooden steps beneath him. Stark plunged after them, reckless of the danger of slipping on the worn treads.
He emerged into the nave of the great cathedral to the sound of a penetrating scream. It was the woman from the kiosk, her head darting back and forth between the crumpled corpse and Stark standing there with a murderous expression on his face and a gun in his hand.
‘Where did he go?’ Stark shouted, only to be met by expressions of uncomprehending terror on the faces of the woman from the kiosk and the tourists, most of whom were clumped by the marble bases of the great memorials, while a few ducked down behind a pew. The wicket gate opposite flapped open in the rain. Michael McGuire’s killer was gone, melted into the streets of the metropolis, beyond pursuit. Stark had no obvious way of finding him. No clear idea of what he looked like. No murder weapon to be found.
He turned his attention to the ruin of a human being that lay sprawled in an unnatural heap, a sinister pool of red spreading across the cold stone floor. The crowd of cowed onlookers retreated as he walked towards the body, holstering his weapon.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m a police officer.’
Not one of them looked reassured.
Chapter 24
They gathered together in the dark, faces lit only by candlelight, for they were, in the very real sense of the word, underground. About six metres underground by the roughest of reckonings.
There were eight of them in all. The tall man standing at the little square metal-legged table was speaking, addressing his comments primarily to a slight figure slouched against a wall in the corner with a hood pulled up, as if hugging the dark and shunning even the flickering candlelight.
‘You’ve done well,’ he said, his normally quiet voice resounding unfamiliarly in the echoing darkness. ‘Put the cat among the pigeons and no mistake. Gave the buggers the shock of their lives, I shouldn’t wonder, seeing old Winnie staring out at all and sundry across the Thames, large as life and twice as scary.’
There was a rumble of muted laughter at that. Although notably not from the figure in the corner.
‘A true mark of brilliance, I reckon, using stencils and spray paint. Makes putting up a picture as easy as daubing a slogan. And they say a picture is as good as a thousand words. I bet there’s been a damn sight more than a thousand words expended down the Mansion House and up the Barbican since this morning. Most of them not repeatable in polite company.’
He looked around at his audience as if anticipating another laugh, louder this time. He was disappointed. There was an edginess in the air, a sense that they’d somehow stepped off a cliff and there was no going back.
‘I’m not kidding. I reckon we have a tool here that’s not just a powerful weapon of protest, but a new art form. You watch – there’ll be people talking about “the phantom of Bankside” before long.’
That did get a subdued rumble of amusement, including this time from the figure in the hood.
‘That’s if anyone ever sees them,’ said the man seated at the table, his hands folded in front of them. He peeked briefly over the top of half-moon glasses at the elderly woman next to him and the tall man whose self-confidence he clearly didn’t share.
‘They had the area closed off and the paint erased within an hour or so. If it hadn’t been for the BBC photographer passing by, with a camera and long lens, nobody would have noticed it.’
The big man shrugged. ‘Maybe, but that was just a trial run, wasn’t it. And it’s hardly as if the photographer was there by chance now, was he?’
The bespectacled man looked up at him sceptically.
‘Oh, come on, Malcolm, there are ways of doing things, you know. It’s not that hard to tip off a foreign news organisation, you know. Especially in the current climate. An anonymous call from a phone box, saying nothing but a location and a time. Nothing incriminating in that. Yes, the DoSSers were probably listening in, but that doesn’t do any harm either. Every time they interfere with the Northern press only increases the perception of this place as the police state it is.’
The man called Malcolm was shaking his head.
‘It also increases the danger. To everyone involved.’
‘We were never going to get anything done without exposing ourselves to danger. We all knew that. Have known it all along. But this is the best chance we’ll get in a lifetime. You know it. There’s a new mood in the air. Maybe not here, yet, but we’ll never have a better chance. And time is against us.’ The last phrase was said with a pointed if deliberately oblique sideways glance at the old lady who seemed almost to have dozed off.
‘Bankside’s one thing. This next step is a lot more risky.’
‘We’ve got cover. You know that. Two lads on the detail. They’re going to supply cover for the few minutes the job itself will take, then cover it up. Until we’re ready.’
‘There’s a chance it’ll be found beforehand. It’s very risky. You know that. A site like that.’ He looked over at the slight figure in the hood, but wasn’t rewarded with so much as a glance in acknowledgement.
‘Come on, that’s what it’s about in the end, isn’t it. Publicity. Free speech. The truth?’
‘Like the pictures they got of the body?’
There was a minute’s silence, a tangible tension in the air.
‘Yes,’ the big man said at length, quietly as if by his very understatement he was emphasising his point. ‘Like the pictures of the body.’
‘It’s just a bit unfortunate that the man they put on the case happens to be one Harry Stark.’ He could not help but let his eyes fall on the figure in the corner, as if waiting for a reaction from that direction. A few seconds of silence passed first, and when there wasn’t one, he added: ‘Then again, maybe not. Maybe it was fated. For better or worse, eh?’
The figure in the corner shrugged, then as if on a whim, produced a coin, flipped it in the air, caught it and turned it over on the back of one hand. The others watched, craned their necks to see which side up it had landed: the cross of St George or the Kentish plough. And wondered, in this case, which was heads and which was tails.
But the hand did not lift enough for anyone else to see. Seven pairs of eyes, including those of the old lady who had raised her nodding head, watched silently as the coin was replaced in a pocket and its owner stood up, pushing a stray lock of hair back inside the hood and lifting a holdall from the floor.
‘Best be getting on with it then,’ were the only words spoken, in a small but determined voice, as the slight figure made its way to the door.
Chapter 25
If Ruth Kemp was overawed by either the architecture or the religious significance of St Paul’s cathedral, let alone the desecration of a murder committed in its heart, she gave little sign of either. She continued chain smoking as she examined the bloody mess that had been Michael McGuire sprawled on the marble floor. Behind her, technicians wearing rubber gloves were unrolling a tarpaulin. St Bart’s morgue would be receiving another customer. Kemp took a long pull on her cigarette and ground out the stub beneath her heel next to the corpse.
‘What is it with you, DI Stark? Got the idea I have too much free time on my hands or something?’
Stark gave her a look that said this time he was not in the mood for laconic world-weariness.
‘At least there’s not much doubt about cause of death with this one,’ Kemp said, taking the hint. ‘Skull smashed on impact. Brains splattered all over the floor. Looks to me like a fall from a great height.’ She stared up into the cracked dome. ‘A fall from grace?’ she added, in a deadpan voice that suggested she wasn’t so much wisecracking as following Stark’s dangerous train of thought. Stark gave her a look, and Kemp raised her hands in a defensive gesture that said, I don’t need to know.
‘At least there’s no doubt about this one’s identity,’ Kemp added, handing over the grubby laminated ID card she had extracted from the dead man’s thin wallet.
‘Michael McGuire, St Paul’s churchwarden.
Been in the job for more than fifteen years, according to his colleague.’ She nodded at the woman in thick glasses who now sat on a seat next to her desk, sobbing into a grubby handkerchief.
Kemp had got more out of the woman in two minutes than Stark had in the more than half an hour that had passed between his call to the pathologist and her arrival. Stark had questioned the dozen tourists and other visitors, all of whom insisted they had noticed nothing other than the scream and the horrible impact of the body on the floor. Nobody even admitted noticing a man emerge from the stairwell door and rush out of the cathedral. They had been too shocked, they insisted. Each and every one.
Neither EDR citizens nor foreign tourists were keen to be involved in an investigation by the Metropolitan People’s Police. Only some had more choice than others. Stark took their details, including visa numbers in the case of the tourists, most of whom would be out of the country by midnight. They breathed an audible sigh of relief as Stark let them go, vanishing through the wicket gate without so much as a glimpse back at the bloody mess on the cathedral floor.
From the phone in the cathedral office, he called Forensics, told them to search for traces of fibres or anything else up in the Whispering Gallery. Not that he had much hope they would find anything. Or even look very hard. The only witness was Stark himself. Two men were dead, both murdered, both linked to an American reporter who had thrust his way into Stark’s life and done his best to turn it upside down. Harry Stark had been presented with an agenda. A personal agenda. Only he had no idea what the next item might be.
Stark had never had time for the grey-faced men of the Department of Social Security. There were questions better not asked about some of the interrogation methods in the cellars of the Barbican. But ‘persuasion’ was one thing. Murder was something else. And if the Department did something, usually they did it in secret. They didn’t hang their wares out for everyone to see. A gesture intended to intimidate? Most people were intimidated enough just by the sight of a black Bevan. But the missing newspapers suggested not everything the American said had been a lie. And the McGuire man had been trying to tell him something. Something important enough to get him killed?