The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  Stark pulled back and opened his eyes wide.

  ‘What?’ He held his breath a second. ‘A suicide. That’s what … You’re telling me Marchmain rang you up and told you it was suicide?’

  ‘Yessir. I didn’t even know what he was talking …’

  ‘Never mind. Never mind.’

  ‘He said forget about it, sir. I mean, he said you were to forget about it.’

  Stark closed his eyes.

  ‘I’ll bet he did. I’ll bet he did.’

  ‘It wasn’t though, was it, sir? Suicide, I mean?’

  Stark almost laughed.

  ‘No, Lavery. It was most certainly not suicide.’

  ‘Who was he? Why? How? The colonel mentioned a name. Michael Mac something or other. Said he was, you know, a homo. One of them. Said that was why … why he done it.’

  Stark shook his head. ‘Is that what he said? Michael McGuire. He was a churchwarden, Lavery, and as for his particular sexual orientation, I neither know nor care. But that is not the reason he met his end. He was killed because he was trying to tell me something.’

  Lavery looked more confused than ever.

  ‘About … about the murder. The other murder, I mean.’

  Stark shrugged.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I never will. It was just then that …’ His mind flashed back, a sudden queasiness washing over him as he remembered sitting there next to that precipitous beckoning void, and then seeing the man opposite him lifted up and plunged into it. He tried to conjure up the man’s last words, what it was he had been saying when … Had something he said been equivalent to pulling a trigger against his own head?

  There had been some mention of ‘underground’, ‘the Underground’? The Tube? Or the American’s shadowy conspiracy?

  ‘What was it, sir? Maybe something …’

  ‘Something about “another man”, and “love”, maybe he was right, the old DoSSer …’

  Lavery suppressed a look of shock. The common street nickname was frowned upon in work circles, even though everybody used it at home.

  ‘Something about “love … the church …”, he mentioned a bride and then said “Christ”, though the second time I think it was more an imprecation than a theological reference.’

  ‘A bride?’

  Stark shrugged. ‘Doesn’t make sense to me either. Though it is something they say, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘About the Church, with a capital ‘C’ being the bride of Christ.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I have heard that. Not much of a churchgoer myself. I thought there for a minute …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No nothing, it’s just …’

  ‘What? Come on, Lavery, spit it out.’

  ‘It’s just, just that I thought of something else. I mean, if it was true …’

  ‘If what was true?’

  ‘What he said. That colonel. I mean if this bloke, Mac …’

  ‘McGuire.’

  ‘If he was, you know, a bit …’

  Stark closed his eyes and nodded.

  ‘It’s just that it’s a bit of a coincidence, that’s all.’

  ‘What is, man? For God’s sake.’

  ‘Well he might not have meant the Bride of Christ. He might have meant St Bride’s Church. Just down the road like. I mean, it’s well known the priest there, old Arthur Rye like, I mean he’s as bent as a nine-bob note.’

  Stark’s eyes opened wide. He turned and stared his sergeant directly in the eyes.

  ‘Come on, Lavery. What the hell are we doing sitting here?!’

  Chapter 29

  The slight unassuming figure of Canon Arthur Rye, sitting upright on his hard-backed chair gazing up at the slow trickle of raindrops from the corrugated iron roof above his head, was deep in meditation. An innocent passer-by might have thought him rapt in profound contemplation of the divine. In fact, he was trying to think of a birthday present for his lover of ten years’ standing.

  What Michael would most appreciate, he knew, although he disapproved of the habit – apart from anything else it made the man’s mouth taste like an ashtray – was American cigarettes, Lucky Strike or Marlboro, though anything would be better than the ‘bloody Balkan baccy’ he complained about relentlessly.

  But American cigarettes were hard to come by, unless you were in possession of hard currency. Arthur Rye had never even seen the hallowed grail of hard currency addicts, a US dollar. B-Pounds were a different matter; enough of them found their way into the coffers of the Church of England, thanks to its officially tolerated links to the sister church across the border (tolerated specifically because they brought money south). But they did not find their way into the stipends of middle- and lower-ranking clergy. Even those whose churches were in ruins.

  The only access Canon Rye had to that sort of money was through the generosity of a rare visitor from the North or Westminster paying in hard cash at the official rate for one of the postcards of the church as it had once been and with luck would one day be again, though privately he thought a miracle would be needed, given the far greater draw of St Paul’s just a few hundred metres away.

  It really had been a miracle that the Luftwaffe bomb, which gutted Sir Christopher Wren’s beautiful baroque interior, had struck on the night of Sunday, 29 December 1940 rather than four days earlier when it would have been full. But perhaps the greatest miracle of all was that it had left standing the soaring, tiered seventy-metre spire, with its diminishing octagonal archways stacked one above the other. On its completion in 1701, it had inspired a local baker to imitate it in a wedding cake, setting a style that spread across the world.

  Once, in a flight of unimaginably foolish fantasy Arthur Rye had looked up at the great spire, imagining he and Michael might one day have a wedding cake. Now, used to the bitter taste of reality familiar to those whose sexual orientation was a crime, he no longer saw a wedding cake in white Portland stone, just the defacing black streaks left by tongues of fire. At least the Church understood the quality of mercy, especially to its own.

  He got to his feet, dismissing the problem of the birthday present for the moment, and began mechanically sorting through the collection of material on sale at his little desk: the postcards with their before and after images of the church’s destruction and the badly-reproduced roneotyped history of the site, going back to its sixth-century foundations. He shook his head. They were barely legible, some of them, roneoed on to pale green recycled paper. But other than for government publications, printing materials of any sort were scarce, good paper and inks hard to come by. He was deeply grateful that the church had access to them. For more reasons than one.

  He stretched and looked up once again at the sky. The thick grey clouds that had overcome the early overoptimistic glimpse of sunshine and loomed ominously overhead ever since had settled down now like a sodden blanket. There would be a downpour at any minute, unless this soul-eroding half-hearted spatter of dirty heavy raindrops continued indefinitely. Which was always a depressing possibility. The only thing that seemed certain was that there would be few, if any, more casual customers for church memorabilia. It was time to shut up shop. The only passers-by after nightfall were regulars.

  Except that the two men looking at him from the far end of what had once been the chancel were definitely not regulars. For a start, one of them was dressed too well. Not well enough to be a Northerner – his clothing was definitely from the Comecon zone (the canon had an eye for well-cut clothes, at least good enough to know when someone’s weren’t). He was wearing a beige raincoat, not the classic trench favoured by the DoSS but the old-fashioned, short type that had been popular in the sixties. The canon wondered if he might have inherited it.

  The two were walking towards him now, as if they’d only just noticed him. That at least suggested he wasn’t a DoSSer. In any case it wasn’t their ‘time of the month’. There was a certain unwritten code that covered dealings with the DoSS these days,
an uneasy ‘live and let live’ that might or might not reflect the recent changes in the Kremlin even if they were not reciprocated in the Mansion House. The canon felt certain that if he was about to receive an unscheduled visit from the DoSS, he would have had advance warning.

  In any case that was not his biggest worry. There was something about this pair, the way the taller man carried himself that suggested he wielded authority, and the way the shorter one deferred to him, that suggested a partnership of unequals. Like a pair of plainclothes policemen. That was the possibility that worried Arthur Rye most. The DoSS interest lay only in the activities they almost certainly suspected were carried out in his crypt. But he was all too conscious of the fact that they – or almost anyone else with a grudge against him – could pass on information to the Metropolitan People’s Police that could see him end up in Brixton Prison on the same charge that had confined Oscar Wilde to Reading Gaol. In Arthur Harkness’s strait-laced workers’ and farmers’ republic, a longing for political freedom was not the only ‘love that dare not speak its name’.

  He bit his tongue for even having the thought. There was no one amongst the regulars who’d blab, was there? The last thing anyone wanted to do was to attract undue attention. Particularly now. Even amongst one or two of those hard cases. He did nobody any harm. And Michael, for God’s sake, wouldn’t hurt a fly. Even still, you could never be too careful. Six months in Pentonville Prison would leave the canon a physical and psychological wreck; but it would kill Michael. He continued packing away his bits and pieces in the fervent hope they might just go away. They didn’t.

  The canon turned around, reluctantly. The kiosk was raised up on bricks above the mud and rubble of the church’s ruined nave, and he found himself almost at eye level with the taller of the two. The man facing him was tall, with dark hair, a square jaw, in his mid-thirties or thereabouts and good-looking in a butch sort of way. Except that his eyes seemed somehow too soft for his face. And there was something eerily familiar about him.

  Which only partly explained the tremor in his voice when he turned and said with as unforced a smile as he could manage: ‘I was just closing down. Is there some way I can be of help to you gentlemen?’

  It was the shorter, stockier one that answered: ‘Yes. Did you know a certain Michael McGuire?’

  ‘Why, yes of course,’ the canon answered, trying his level best to keep his voice neutral in tone. Never incriminate yourself if you don’t have to was a lesson he had learned hard. ‘He’s the churchwarden at St Paul’s.’ And then he tripped over the tense like a man stumbling into darkness. ‘Did … did you say “did”?’

  The short man nodded and was about to open his mouth, when his obvious superior intervened.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s been an … incident.’

  As one man Stark and Lavery rushed forward to help as the slight figure in the dog collar and dark tweed jacket collapsed to the ground. Harry Stark had seen grown men cry before; but never one whose world he had so obviously pulled from beneath him.

  Chapter 30

  ‘Wh … what happened?’

  Stark turned to Lavery. They had rehearsed this bit, in advance: Lavery would tell him the bare facts. Stark would confirm with whatever detail seemed appropriate. But now that it came to it, looking at the broken man in front of them, trying desperately to summon up the strength to confront such a terrible truth, he felt he had to do it himself. As gently as possible.

  ‘I’m afraid he fell to his death. From the Whispering Gallery.’

  ‘But how? And how do you know this? Who are you anyway?’

  ‘I was there. I was a witness.’

  ‘But how …? It’s not possible. Not simply to fall.’

  ‘The Department of Social Security has declared it was suicide.’

  Stark was not happy about the line, but he had to test the man’s response. Had the Department lied to him? How honest would this man be?

  ‘Suicide! That’s ridiculous. He would never. Why?’

  ‘They said he was afraid. About his relationship. With you.’

  Both policemen felt acutely embarrassed. Neither believed it was the truth about what actually happened. One knew for a certainty it was not.

  Yet for a moment it looked as if their words had beaten the man in front of them from his knees to the floor, as if they had piled not just grief but guilt on top of tragedy.

  And then suddenly something changed, something wholly intangible. Arthur Rye lifted his head and got to his feet and stared at a point in space between both of them with red eyes.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s a lie. Michael was not a strong man. But he would have rather been a martyr than a coward. That is not what happened. Is that who you are? DoSSers? Did you kill him, or have you locked him up, shut him away in some dark cell, using … using “whatever”, some sort of pretext?’

  Stark could see from the man’s eyes that his defiance was a cloak for hope. But he had already said enough to get himself locked up for months, if not years, had he and Lavery really been from the DoSS.

  ‘Tell me the truth,’ the priest challenged him, more anger in his voice than grief, until he asked the question that mattered: ‘Is he really dead?’

  Stark nodded slowly. And said: ‘I’m afraid so. I saw the body.’

  The canon’s head fell to his chest. Then he looked up and said: ‘He didn’t jump, did he?’

  ‘No. He was pushed.’

  The canon closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. Stark turned to Lavery and said, ‘Dick, let me have a quiet chat with the canon here for a minute, will you? Why don’t you nip out onto the street there and have a fag. I’m sure you could do with one.’ He took from his pocket the packet of Marlboro the American had given him and offered one first to the canon. Rye shook his head, obviously suppressing another flood of tears. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But Michael did. They were his favourite.’

  Stark handed the pack to Lavery. ‘Make sure we’re not disturbed, will you?’

  The sergeant took the pack and vanished down the alleyway that led out onto Fleet Street.

  Stark turned back to the churchman and watched as he lifted red eyes to look at him squarely. He could almost sense the anger welling up in the sparse, emotionally drained figure of the man in front of him. ‘I knew it,’ Rye said at length. ‘I knew something like this would happen one day. But why, why now?’

  There was something in the way the man looked up at Stark that made him think he already knew the answer. He dug into his pocket and produced the piece of paper found in the pocket of the corpse hanging under Blackfriars Bridge.

  ‘Does this mean anything to you?’

  He watched as Rye took the paper and unfolded it, and noticed the slight intake of breath when his eyes fell on the image printed on it.

  ‘How did you come by this? How did you come to be there when …’ he let the words trail off. ‘Who the hell are you anyway?’

  It was a question Stark had been waiting for. He had prepared his response, as far as he could. In truth he was not at all sure how to play this, how much to say, how much not to say, and not at all sure what he was looking for, and what he hoped or feared to find.

  ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Harry Stark. ‘I wanted to speak to Mr McGuire because somebody told me he could help me find out something important about my family. About the death of my father, nearly twenty years ago.’

  The canon was shaking his head as if all this was an irrelevance.

  ‘I don’t see how … What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Stark. Harry Stark. My father’s name was John. John Stark.’

  ‘John Stark?’ The canon repeated, as if the name rang a distant bell. A distant bell in an empty long-unused chapel. Then he looked up at Stark again, scrutinising his facial features.

  ‘Your father,’ he said. ‘What did he do?’

  It was another moment Stark had anticipated, and for the moment he was grateful he had been as economical as h
e had been with details about himself.

  ‘He was a policeman. In the Metropolitan People’s Police. Major John Stark.’

  The canon put his hand to his forehead and ran his fingers through what remained of his thinning hair, then looked Stark in the eyes and produced a line Stark was more used to saying than hearing.

  ‘Young man, you’d better come with me.’

  Chapter 31

  The man lingering in the doorway of the little newsagents on the corner of Fleet Street and Ludgate Circus lit up a cigarette and looked on with mild envy at the dumpy plain-clothes policeman opposite.

  The policeman was holding a packet of Marlboro and tapping it with obvious satisfaction to produce a second cigarette, having only moments before ground out the stub of his first one beneath his heel. He rubbed the cigarette under his nose, clearly savouring the aroma of the tobacco before lighting up.

  Nonetheless the man in the doorway opposite was impressed. Either pay in the People’s Police had risen substantially recently or he was looking at a detective sergeant with rather better contacts than usual. It was not that he didn’t have access to such foreign luxuries himself – he could use the special shop in the Barbican – but he was not allowed to enjoy them on the job. That would have been a dead giveaway.

  He had been put on this particular job barely half an hour ago, alerted by one of the two cars which had tailed the pair of policemen from New Scotland Yard on the Embankment. He had no idea why precious Department resources were being used to tail two detectives from the Metropolitan People’s Police, but then it was his job to obey orders not question them. He had followed a senior member of the Party Central Committee in the past, reporting his every contact and movement. He had no idea in what way his own activities had contributed but he was not in the least suspected when several weeks later the man had resigned ‘for health reasons’.

  The portly figure opposite was walking up and down every couple of minutes, clearly waiting for his colleague who had not emerged from the alleyway that led up to the steeple and ruined nave of old St Bride’s church. He was obviously not happy in the drizzle which was slowly but surely getting heavier and took frequent covetous glances towards the door of the The Olde Bell public house just a few metres away. There was little doubt that was where he would rather be.