The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  And that meant he was not only waiting for his colleague but supposed to be watching his back. In which case he should have spotted the obvious figure lurking in the doorway opposite pretending to shelter from the rain. Clearly counter-surveillance techniques in the MetPP were not what they ought to be. Even so, this was not a ‘show and silence’ operation, the type in which persons under observation were deliberately allowed to become aware of the fact in order to intimidate them. The man in the doorway dropped the stub of his own cigarette to the ground and stamped on it – he hated bloody Bulgarian baccy anyhow – and with a grumbling, resigned look up at the glowering rainclouds walked into the street.

  Just for the hell of it, he crossed the road, right in front of the plainclothes policeman. He was almost tempted to walk up St Bride’s Passage to see if he would try to stop him. Or better still, go up to him and ask for a light. Just to see what would happen. Probably be told to ‘move along, sir’, he thought with a smile. Instead he made do with a cheery, ‘Evening mate, nasty night, innit?’ as he passed, and was rewarded with a frown but one that showed no indication of suspicion. Just to rub it in, he turned in the door of the Bell.

  He had already spotted his replacement coming down Ludgate Hill and knew that by the time he was inside the warmth of the public house, there would be someone else keeping an eye on the poor little plod. He passed straight through the pub and out the back door into the part of St Bride’s Passage that curved left by the side of the ruin into the side street below, and out onto New Bridge Street where there was a public call box. He closed the heavy red door behind him – how useful it had been that the old imperial colour had necessitated no rebranding, just the crown moulding chiselling from above the doors – and dialled the unique number that would put him straight through to the Barbican.

  Chapter 32

  There was a moment’s silence, in which Stark could feel the cold water creeping down his neck and hear the swish of tyres on busy Fleet Street just a few metres away. Raindrops spattered on the remnants of what must once have been a chequerboard marble floor protruding from the mud.

  ‘Come with me,’ the churchman said again, quietly this time as if he were offering Stark a passageway into another world. Stark watched him cross to a piece of wall behind the wooden information stall where an old wooden curtain hung. He pulled the curtain aside to reveal not some fresco or memorial plaque as Stark had suspected, but a steep staircase descending into the bowels of the earth. He beckoned Stark to follow.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  The churchman turned and with a wry, inestimably sad attempt at a smile said: ‘Where else but into the realm of the dead?’

  Despite a creeping feeling of apprehension, Stark knew he had no alternative but to follow. From a niche in the wall the canon removed a large, rubber-handled torch and turned it on, casting a yellow pool of light on the dark stone stairway that turned on itself back under the main body of the ruined church. ‘Watch your step,’ he said.

  In front of them was a blackened wooden door. The churchman turned a heavy, rattling iron handle and it swung gently open.

  ‘They say that every cloud has a silver lining. Even the very darkest. This is ours – the entry to the crypts.’

  ‘How long has this been here?’

  Stark had no idea that such a thing existed underneath the ruins of a church in the heart of London.

  ‘It was only rediscovered in the aftermath of the bombing. It would appear that when Sir Christopher built his St Bride’s in the seventeenth century he built over the remains of the six previous churches on the sites. There were land shortages in London even back then. To save space, bodies from overcrowded churchyards were often disinterred and rein-terred as bones. It was commonplace and not as macabre as it sounds. There are the remains of over 7,000 human beings down here, but after a cholera epidemic in the nineteenth century crypt burials in the City of London were banned and they were all sealed. It took a 200 kilo bomb to reopen this one.’

  Stark didn’t know what he expected. Something macabre. Stacked skulls and crossed bones. Whole skeletons dangling from hooks. Instead he saw a plain, stone-walled chamber, gently lit by a single hanging light bulb and two candles on a table dressed as a simple altar.

  ‘This is where we worship,’ the canon said, ushering him in. Who were ‘we’, Stark wondered. How many Christians came here, to this cellar, rather than attend one of the admittedly dwindling number of still functioning churches in better repair? To the left and right were openings into unlit passageways.

  ‘That is where the bones are stored. Our catacombs, you might call them, though they are hardly on a scale with those in Paris. Nonetheless, this place is something of an underground warren. There are still parts that are inaccessible, or at the very least unsafe. But come along, there is someone here I think you need to meet.’

  ‘Someone here? Who?’

  ‘Come with me.’

  Stark followed the canon gingerly along the passageway to the left. The torchlight revealed that here indeed were the bones Stark had been anticipating: neat piles of them, all identical.

  ‘The mediaeval monks were very methodical, you see. They matched all the bones and stored like with like. I suppose they might have thought it would make reassembly simpler on the Day of Judgement, although I can just as easily imagine it causing some confusion. But then not for the Creator, I suppose. All the skulls are in a separate chamber. A regular little Golgotha.’

  Stark shivered.

  They turned a corner and found themselves in another chamber, almost as big as the first, and also lit by a solitary bulb, with what appeared to be – and almost certainly was – row upon row of femurs lining one wall. The wall opposite was lined with camp beds.

  ‘People live here?’ said Stark.

  ‘Not exactly. Let’s just say the church has always provided sanctuary to those in occasional need of it. And some have more occasion than others. This gentleman here is one of those. Isn’t that so, Mr Ransom?’

  For the first time Stark noticed that there was someone else in their presence: a small, slight figure sitting hunched against the wall on one of the beds in the semi-darkness just beyond the yellow pool of light cast by the solitary bulb. He might as well have been a bundle of discarded rags and didn’t move even when his name was mentioned.

  ‘Mr Ransom,’ the clergyman repeated. ‘I’ve brought you a visitor.’

  The small head turned and in the half-light Stark could just make out a wizened face with eyes screwed tight shut.

  ‘Who is it?’ the little man barked out in a surprisingly shrill, angry voice. ‘You know I don’t like strangers. It’s not your pooftah pal again, is it?’

  The canon flinched visibly.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Mic … he won’t be coming here anymore.’

  ‘Coming somewhere else I suppose then,’ the old man said, with a gruff chortle.

  Stark, taken aback, glanced at the clergyman beside him and noticed the reddened cheeks and pursed lips.

  The canon shook his head. ‘It’s okay. He gets like this. It’s understandable.’

  Stark looked sceptical.

  ‘No really, you see …’ he shone the torch fully onto the face of the old man who stood there totally unblinking. Stark immediately realised why.

  ‘Oh my God, what happened to him?’

  Stark had bent down to the old man’s level with the intention of looking him in the eyes only to recoil with horror. The canon put his hand upon his arm.

  ‘It’s all right. He doesn’t feel any pain. Not any more.’

  ‘But how …? What …?’

  ‘It was an accident. Or so they said.’

  ‘Who?’ though he already knew.

  ‘The Department of Social Security, who else? They took him prisoner about five years ago, accused him of organising the riots in Bristol.’

  ‘What riots? I’ve never heard of any …’

  ‘No. You wouldn’t have. They t
ried to get him to talk, reveal some links to mysterious figures they believed were trying to destabilise the regime. He said he knew nobody, had seen nothing. So they took him at his word – they sewed his eyelids up. Except that somebody wasn’t very careful with the needle. Twice.’

  Stark swallowed hard. He felt bitter bile rise in his throat.

  ‘It’s unbelievable.’

  ‘Yes, but then that’s what they say about Christianity too. I know which I prefer.’

  Stark gulped. ‘He’s lived here ever since?’

  ‘More or less. Somebody has to look after him. And he has friends, people with a long association with this church. That’s why I brought you to see him. There’s just a chance he might be able to tell you something about your father.’

  ‘Tell whoever it is to get out of here,’ the old man said. ‘I ain’t playing some fucking question and answer machines for some geezer I don’t even know. Pretty boy, is he?’

  The churchman turned his torch away and looked down at the ground. Stark could hear the hurt in his voice and knew the man was only waiting for him to be gone to give full vent to his grief.

  ‘But if he doesn’t want to, there’s nothing to be done. I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d better leave. Mr Stark.’

  It was not what he wanted to hear. But then he no longer knew exactly what he did want to hear.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ The old man’s voice had risen slightly, though the initial anger in it had not quite returned.

  ‘What did you say his father’s name was?’

  It was the detective who answered.

  ‘Stark. Major John Stark. He was …’ hesitantly, he didn’t know what effect the words would have, ‘he was a policeman.’

  There was silence. A silence that seemed so long to Stark he wondered if the old man had not heard him, or had maybe even fallen asleep. Then suddenly, in a version of that rasping voice that was subtly different, the old man said: ‘Come here. Down here. In front of me, let me feel your face.’

  Stark knelt down before him, trying his best not to look into the scarred, mucus-lined scabs of flesh that covered the misshapen eyeballs. Ransom put his hands out and Stark guided them onto his own face, only too glad of the excuse to close his own eyes. The hands crawled across his face, feeling the breadth and curve of his forehead, the lobes of his ears and particularly the shape of his aquiline nose, the nose that he hated but shared with his father. Stark found it a disconcerting experience, but not entirely unpleasant.

  Then all of a sudden, the old man drew his hands back and made the sign of the cross over his sunken chest. Stark thought he could see traces of moisture seep out from the corners of his mutilated eyes.

  ‘It can’t be. But maybe it is. It has to be. Bless my all too mortal soul. Little Harry Stark. Your father was a hero, son. A hero of the Underground. He hated the fucking commies.’

  Chapter 33

  Lieutenant George Henry of Second Regiment, Order of Lenin, English Democratic Border Control Service glanced at his watch and sighed as he watched through binoculars the growing queue of cars snake past the American checkpoint fifty metres away on the other side of the Wall.

  He had come on duty at 1400, which meant there was more than another seven to go before he could relinquish his post, and leave the night shift to secure the borders of socialism during the hours of darkness.

  He was not looking forward to the next couple of days. All leave had been cancelled as the state was expecting record numbers of dignitaries to mark the fortieth anniversary of the English Democratic Republic’s inception. That meant there would, more than likely, be more tourists than normal from ‘Westminster’ and ‘up North’.

  The foreigners, the Yanks in particular, made a fuss about being obliged to change a minimum of £20 a day at the official 1:1 rate between ‘British pounds’ and the English pounds of the Democratic Republic. Henry knew as well as anyone you could get four or five times that on the black market, but he resented the way the foreigners who earned vastly more than he and his comrades sneered at the notes they were handed and called them ‘Mickey Mouse money’. Mickey Mouse was, after all, one of theirs.

  He could see the American marine on duty in the little glass shed peering back at him through binoculars of his own. The big sign on the edge of the street facing him said ‘You are now entering the American Sector’. He supposed on the other side it said ‘You are now leaving the American Sector’. They still called it that, a sector, refusing to recognise, even forty years on, that this was an established international boundary.

  He knew, like everyone else knew, that on the other side they called the Oxford Street/Tottenham Court Road border crossing ‘Checkpoint Charlie’. That too was a leftover from the tense few days that followed the 1949 ceasefire, when the lines were drawn but the frontiers not officially established. ‘Checkpoint Alpha’ was the entrance to the transit road which crossed into the territory of the Democratic Republic just south of Birmingham, ‘Checkpoint Bravo’ the spot where the Oxford Road crossed the old Grand Union Canal to enter the enclave the party called ‘Westminster’, but many ordinary folk, not least on the other side, still called West London, and sometimes bizarrely just ‘London’. Some people never learned.

  The tall man in the raincoat with the glasses, the breezy easy smile and the little wheelie bag bouncing along behind him as he stepped off the pavement walking towards the EDR frontier looked a classic of the kind. He presented his passport to the guard at the pedestrian entrance to the border control zone and then proceeded, still beaming broadly, to the Immigration and Customs Control shed where it would be checked thoroughly and his visa issued. Lieutenant Henry waited a few seconds before, as he expected, the telephone on his desk rang. He put down his binoculars, picked up the receiver and gave a curt response to the duty passport officer. A minute or two later the door of his office opened and a female corporal entered, saluted and handed him the tall man’s documents. As he had anticipated, he was American.

  Lieutenant Henry examined them carefully, made a few notes, then told the corporal to photocopy them and bring them back to him. He lifted the second telephone on his desk, the red one, and made a call to his superior. Not the Regimental colonel, his real superior.

  High in his office in the Barbican like a spider at the edge of a well-spun web, Colonel Charles Marchmain sat picturing in his mind the flies fumbling their way towards its sticky centre. It was an analogy he savoured. If things went as he anticipated it would be a right royal feast at the end.

  Stark was at St Bride’s and had made contact. The precipitous disposal of Michael McGuire had not been exactly what he intended. There were always over-enthusiastic idiots who took things too far. People who thought they could presume to anticipate orders rather than simply obey them. He would deal with that later. In the end it hadn’t really mattered. It had probably proved a catalyst. Stark had made the connection anyhow. What mattered was where it went from here. The game was afoot. And moving fast.

  The watching detail in Fleet Street’s report made clear that Stark and his chubby little sidekick had put two and two together after all, and made the right answer. But the sergeant had been left on the street, which meant Stark was aware there was an uncomfortable personal dimension to this case. So far, so good. It now remained to see how far it got them. And him.

  His musings were interrupted by a trilling ring of the third phone from left on his ample desk, the one directly connected to the crossing points between the capital city and ‘Westminster’. Benjamin T. Fairweather, it seemed, had arrived at precisely 5.21 p.m., and this time had requested an extended visa, ‘in order to cover the official celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of the English Democratic Republic’.

  Marchmain ordered that he should be granted a seventy-two-hour visa. Single entry and exit. He had no intention of allowing the man to flit back and forth. What did he think this was: a free country?

  Chapter 34

  Harry Stark left St Bride�
�s churchyard by the alleyway that led down past the ancient Olde Bell public house, grateful for the falling dusk to conceal the tears that to his irritation uncontrollably welled in his eyes.

  He walked out onto New Bridge Street almost bundling into a man with a foul-smelling cigarette hanging out of his mouth leaving a phone box.

  ‘Sorry guv,’ the cigarette-smoking man said, before apparently remembering he had another call to make.

  It was only then that Stark remembered Lavery. He turned left and left again into Fleet Street and saw his sergeant still pacing up and down outside the other end of the L-shaped alley. He started when he spotted Stark approaching from a different direction as if he thought his boss was playing tricks on him, and bustled up: ‘How’d it go, boss?’

  Stark pulled up his coat collar as if against the rain, but in reality to stop Lavery noticing the lines on his face. He did his best to shrug dismissively.

  ‘He’s taken it bad. Obviously. Whether it gets you and me anywhere for the moment, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I’m beat for today. See you tomorrow, Dick.’

  Lavery looked fazed a moment and Stark realised his sergeant had been expecting they’d talk things over with a beer or two in The Olde Bell. He put on a smile and said, ‘Have one for me, mate. Bit wrecked after today. I need some fresh air. Catch up tomorrow, eh? Oh, and don’t worry if I’m a bit late.’

  Stark didn’t really notice his sergeant’s reaction, or whether or not he made for The Olde Bell, though knowing Lavery he couldn’t imagine anything else. He needed a drink all right. But not here. Not in this company. He needed air. It took one hell of a deep breath to accept that everything he had ever believed might have been a lie. And if that was true of his own family, how much more might it be true of the world at large? He was going to find out. Maybe.