The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  ‘Anyhow,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s my gran who’s the real hero in our house, holds the family together. Always has done.’

  Stark gave her a questioning look. Her face brightened.

  ‘A tough nut, the old lady. Came over here as a little kid way back in the thirties, from the Ukraine. Jewish, see. Like me. Married a local boy. No shortage of eligible Jewish lads in the old East End. Done well for herself, she did. Fluent Russian, German, English. Got a job in the war office. Secretarial just, but to the higher-ups. But that’s another story.’

  ‘Not like the one they were on about?’ said Stark with a wry laugh, almost dismissively waving a hand at the gaggle at the bar.

  ‘Sort of,’ she said with a strange, lopsided smile. ‘Nothing’s exactly what you read in the history books, is it?’

  ‘You can say that again.’ Without meaning it, and with a flood of unanticipated relief, it flooded out of him. Only leaving out the details about St Bride’s, Harry Stark gushed out the story of how he had come to doubt the legend of his own father’s lifetime.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t even know if it’s true. Or how I’d tell my mother if it is. Or Kate. She hardly talks to me as it is these days. I have no idea how she’d react if she were told the father she never knew was an imposter involved with some shady underground?’

  Lizzie was silent for a minute and then said. ‘You never know, she might not think that was all that bad.’

  ‘You think so?’ Stark smiled and looked back at her. ‘What I want to do,’ he said, staring at the backs of his hands laid flat on the table between their drinks, as if they belonged to somebody else, ‘is to make a difference.’

  ‘Sure, Harry, don’t we all? Don’t we all?’ She put her hand on one of his, her long fingers cold from the ice in her gin and tonic glass, and Stark let them rest there, afraid to say anything that might cause her to move them. But in the end, of course, she did.

  He lifted his beer and raised his glass to her, and she raised hers to him, and they clinked them and Stark said, ‘I’ll drink to that,’ all too conscious of the stupid grin on his face.

  ‘To what?’ she said.

  ‘To not doing something silly,’ he said, and they caught one another’s eye and both burst into laughter at the unacknowledged innuendo.

  Some time and several drinks later, it might have been an hour, or maybe less, but it was certainly gone 11 p.m. and Del had rung the bell and called closing time and was noisily putting upturned seats on tables in the public bar, Stark and Lizzie left the snug almost surreptitiously, but not before the landlord could eye their unsteady gait and open the door for them with a good-humoured ‘Mind how you go,’ before going back to his die-hards at the bar with a markedly less gentle, ‘Let’s have your glasses now. It’s long gone time.’

  Arm-in-arm, supporting each other, the inebriation providing the perfect excuse for physical contact, they stumbled steadily to the end of the street. That was where their ways parted. Stark stopped first, bringing Lizzie up short with an amused, ‘Whoops!’ She put her hand to her chest as if to relieve a moment of indigestion. Stark put his arm around her to steady her and silently cursed the English Democratic Republic’s accommodation crisis.

  If he’d had a flat of his own he might have asked her back, but there’d be his mother who’d fuss like an old hen if he brought a ‘young lady’ home, and then be censorious afterwards when she found out it was just some common barmaid. Anyway, what was he thinking? She had just been nice to him, nothing more. It was time to say goodnight, or he thought it was until Lizzie turned to him, smiled that smile and, lurching with a giggle against the wall, said softly, ‘C’mon then, Harry, you’d better walk me home.’

  He did. Down dark, dirty, blissfully empty streets, towards the river and the ancient warehouses that nestled in the shadow of Tower Bridge.

  In the distance the neon radiance from Westminster cast its artificial glow into the night sky obliterating everything else, but above their heads the weak glimmer from Ber-mondsey’s under-powered streetlights allowed them still to glimpse, if not the stars, at least two glittering pinpoints, Jupiter and Venus. Stark put his arm around her and held her close. She giggled and laid her head against his shoulder.

  ‘This is it, Harry. This is where I live.’

  He looked up. Devon Mansions was one of the old nineteenth-century blocks erected by wealthy philanthropists to house London’s poor, six stories high in crumbling yellow London brick. More than a few had survived the bombs and bullets to become models for the ‘new’ socialist housing that in most cases had still to be built.

  She pulled him into a doorway. ‘I’m on the third floor,’ she said, and Stark’s heart raced.

  She put her arms around his head, and slid her tongue between his teeth. She pulled him towards her and he felt her soft breasts press against him and the urgency in her kiss as she ran her fingers through hair that he suddenly wished he had washed that morning. He breathed deep, inhaling her perfume, and his: gin and beer and an acrid forenote of pungent sweat. He thought he had never smelled anything more arousing in his life. And his body testified to it. He let his hands run down her back, clutching her taut buttocks through the cheap raincoat and pulling her hard against him. She moaned softly, sank her teeth into the lobe of his ear and then pulled back and said: ‘You can’t come up.’

  Stark felt the words land on him like a lead weight in his pocket.

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ she whispered. ‘But we have the world’s nosiest communal caretaker. It’s not just the party he reports to, but every twisted-tongued old gossip for miles around. And anyway, you forget – I have a little sister too.’

  He nodded, groaning inwardly, and fighting the hormones that were forcing their attention on him physically.

  ‘And I have to be up before dawn.’

  ‘Hmm, an early riser, eh. So I see.’ She put a hand down and felt him through the front of his trousers, licked her lips and kissed him gently on the mouth. Stark moaned aloud.

  ‘Who knows, eh? Another time.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Stark. ‘Another time.’

  ‘I didn’t intend this, Harry. But I don’t regret it either.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  She kissed him again, and turned into the dark outside stairwell. ‘Good night, Harry Stark,’ she called softly from the darkness. ‘Look after yourself. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  She might as well have told him not to fly.

  Chapter 37

  The good sentinel never sleeps. Nor does an old one worried about his job and his pension, thought Colonel Charles Marchmain as he put down the telephone.

  It was a long time since he had taken a call from an IA, an ‘Informal Agent’, in person. These days he had a whole battery of staff to funnel and filter the vast array of information that such a continuously surprising number of upstanding citizens thought the authorities ought to know about their friends and neighbours.

  But this was different. He had placed the surveillance of Detective Inspector Harry Stark and the American Benjamin T. Fairweather in a special category, a category all of its own. All operational intelligence was to be directed to him personally and immediately, all verbal contacts relevant to the case rerouted directly to him when possible.

  If there were questions to be asked he wanted it done straight away rather than rerouted through the Informal’s usual handler. There was a risk involved, of making the Informal feel too important, of attaching a level of interest to the party under observation that could lead the IA to give himself away and thereby negate any future use. But in this case it was a risk Marchmain had unilaterally decided was worth taking.

  They said there was a new mood in Moscow, a new broom in the Kremlin. Marchmain was not sure if it was true – he was old enough to have heard rumours like that before and seen the consequences, or lack of them, right back as far as Khrushchev’s day – but he knew one thing: if the
re was any ‘sweeping out’ to be done, it was not going to include him. He was a survivor, and survival meant staying ahead of the game, rewriting the rules when necessary and cheating if you had to. It was a rough game; Marchmain had seen enough blood to know. And spilled enough himself.

  So when the call had come through from the Rose public house in Bermondsey around 11.20 p.m., just after closing time, the young man’s usual handler had noted as he asked his contact if he would mind holding a second while he was put through to a ‘senior officer’, and pressed the buttons that patched the call directly through to Marchmain’s tenth-floor Barbican flat.

  The colonel, as always, had been briefed. Kevin Atkinson was an ambitious young actor, just a bit-part player in a television soap at the moment but grateful that the unchallenging role was slowly winning him street recognition and hoping that he would sooner rather than later gain promotion into the heady ranks of the National Shakespeare Company. That meant membership of the Arts Academy, a job for life, access to the same exclusive shops as Department staff themselves, and, most important, opportunities for foreign travel.

  To get there, however, he would have to attain party perfection on topics such as ‘Popular Wisdom: the role of the proletariat in the history plays’, ‘The Malvolio model: Shakespeare’s debunking of the dynastic class system’ and ‘Shrew Syndrome: gender politics in Elizabethan England’. But most importantly he would need a clean bill of political health from the Department, and that implied voluntarily assisting its work. He had been taught to be controversially outspoken in public: there was no better way to get someone else to incriminate themselves.

  Nonetheless, he needed to learn a thing or two about respect, Marchmain thought, when the young man’s nasal tones inquired: ‘Who am I speaking to, please?’

  ‘The right person. Please go ahead.’

  ‘Ah, yes, well, it was just about DI Stark. I know he’s just someone whose welfare is important to …’ he could almost feel the man searching for the word ‘… security … the state.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Marchmain sighed inwardly, tired already of the weary clichés used by Informals to justify themselves to themselves.

  ‘Well, it’s probably nothing …’ Marchmain sighed to himself again – everything was nothing and nothing was everything, that was up to him, not some Informal whose insight into human psychology came from soap opera scripts. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘It’s just that he got a bit squiffy tonight, a bit tight, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes. And?’

  ‘Well, he seemed to be getting on well with the barmaid, Lizzie Goldsmith, very well, if you know what I mean.’

  Marchmain was silent. He wondered what the man was trying to say. It was true that the sex life of anyone the Department was interested in was, by definition, a matter of interest, but usually those who reported relatively routine liaisons had an interest of their own. He wondered if the aspiring great actor saw himself in a Casanova role and felt jilted.

  ‘It’s just that, her father, I mean you probably know, he used to have connections with the fraternal forces, out at Woolwich barracks. I thought, I don’t know what I thought really.’ There was, entertainingly, just a note of embarrassment now creeping into his voice.

  That Goldsmith, thought Marchmain, the old pimp. Of course. He had quite forgotten. Amazing really, some of these Informals were wasted in civilian life. That said, he couldn’t really see any significance in the fact, but it was another little item for the dossier.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ he said quickly. ‘Was there any suggestion of sexual congress?’ The formal language was calculated to make it easier to talk about, as if they were talking to a doctor instead of gossiping about saucy details from their friends’ and neighbours’ sex lives.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean, not in the pub obviously, but they left together. I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a barmaid, and you know, good-looking, dark eyes, alluring but in the end she’s still … well, let’s just say she’s not quite the sort of girl I’d expect a Detective Inspector to be interested in.’

  Marchmain shook his head. Would Britain ever shake itself free of the class system. He thanked Atkinson politely and told him to be in touch as usual if there was anything else that struck him. Like Harry Stark’s fist, if the detective ever found out, he thought as he put the phone down.

  So Stark was doing a line with the little barmaid, eh? Well, why not? Sooner or later sex always raised its ugly head. Or maybe not that ugly: from what Atkinson had implied she was quite a looker, and that from a man who earned his living alongside actresses. Oh well, maybe she too could play a role in this little drama. If Stark was forming an attachment to her, it could prove useful. The Department had a healthy respect for personal relationships: there was nothing like having a few extra hostages to fortune.

  Chapter 38

  Sometimes, Harry Stark thought ruefully, the blind leading the blind makes sense. He could see hardly anything and despite the sleep dust in them at such an ungodly hour of the morning he at least had eyes, unlike the wizened old man who held his hand, helped him find his way down the uneven steps without the need of the priest’s torch. They negotiated a second set of stairs that led from the crypt beneath St Bride’s down to a lower level. The only light came from somewhere beneath them, a dull glimmer.

  ‘We’re below the level of the eighth-century Saxon church now,’ Ransom said. ‘Can’t be certain, but this probably dates from Roman times.’

  The space they had entered was wider and had lighting, of a sort: dangling forty-watt bulbs. At one end there was a small table draped with an altar cloth. A makeshift place of prayer. Against the side wall a wooden trestle table held two antiquated Roneo copying machines. Stark could not help staring at items that seemed so out of place in the cellar of a catacomb.

  ‘Actually, we have a licence for these,’ Rye explained. ‘This is where we produce the leaflets about the church’s history I sell for the restoration fund upstairs.’

  Stark picked up a leaflet from a small pile next to one of the machines. It was entitled ‘St Bride’s, the Cathedral of Fleet Street’. The quality and grain of the paper were identical to that of the note found in the dead man’s pocket. He had come across printed material like this before: copies of texts the authorities didn’t want given a wider distribution. Chunks of poetry, short stories, even whole novels by dissidents or Northern propagandists. They existed even in Moscow where they were known as samizdat, Russian for self-published. He had found something similar underneath Katy’s bed: a satirical anti-socialist novel called 1984 by a satirical product of the old empire who went by the pseudonym George Orwell.

  In the EDR, for reasons Stark had never been certain of, they were known as ‘winkies’.

  ‘You’ve come across the product of our presses before,’ said Ransom. ‘Pity they can’t do ’em in Braille,’

  ‘A nod’s as good as a winkie to a blind horse,’ said Stark.

  ‘What?’ said Rye.

  ‘That’s what people say when they come across this sort of thing. That’s what they’re called, isn’t it, “winkies”?’ For the first time since Stark had met him something remotely akin to mirth came through in the canon’s voice. ‘I’d never thought of that. How very apt. I always thought it was homage to our spiritual mentor.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Winkyn de Worde. The first real English printer. Assistant to William Caxton who brought the first proper printing press to England. He was the man who really sparked the print revolution. From a cellar somewhere around here. You could say he was the man who founded Fleet Street. In the old sense, I mean, before it became just the Guardian and New Times.’

  ‘Are you telling me this is where this thing,’ he produced the folded leaflet with the Churchill image, ‘was turned out. An image of an arch-imperialist aristocrat masquerading as some icon of free speech?’

  There was a sudden frostiness in the canon’s repl
y: ‘I’m not telling you anything, Mr Stark. That is something for others to decide. One way or the other. Come.’

  Stark followed him further along a half-lit passage, until they came into a low room, barely two metres high but some six metres square that had been cleared of bones or whatever else it had originally been carved out of the London clay for. Another half a dozen passageways led off it in various directions, dark spaces of various dimensions, like wormholes leading down into the London clay.

  ‘Storage, some of them,’ the canon explained. ‘Others, tunnels of various sorts. Some filled with bones, unsorted bones, maybe from as far back as Roman times. This would have been a good site for a graveyard, just outside the city walls. Others may have been used by smugglers, leading down to boats on the Thames, long before the embankment was built. But this space serves our purpose.’

  The ‘room’ itself was lit by a single bulb which was fixed to the ceiling near the door and cast long shadows. There were three rows of seating: a number of chairs and several benches, some with backs, sections of pews rescued from the church. It reminded Stark of old carvings of ‘hides’ where religious dissidents in the sixteenth century gathered together in secret to profess a faith different from that prescribed by their ruler. Maybe the situation wasn’t that different.

  ‘Please sit down for a moment,’ the canon said, gesturing towards a seat in the front row.

  Stark did as he was told. The old man Ransom sat beside him, still touching Stark’s arm with his hand, not so much to compensate for his blindness, Stark thought, but to reassure himself of his presence. He felt a sense of unwanted obligation weighing heavily on him: like a promise to repay a debt he had never incurred.