The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  And then Stark realised instantly where they were. The tunnel from St Bride’s had led them not immediately into the Victorian sewers, but into a much older, more natural water system, although one long since tamed by man. The pavements they had been walking along were the long-since canalised and eventually covered-over banks of the Fleet River. The Fleet flowed down towards the Thames entering it at almost right angles, or had done before the embankment had been built and the sewer intercepted it. And besides, there was daylight.

  On the opposite wall of the tunnel, a few metres downstream from where they stood and at least a metre off the sewer floor, was a wide opening. All of a sudden it made sense: the buried Fleet emptied into the main sewer but the outlet opposite was an overflow that in times of flood or heavy rain would allow the ancient river – and sewage – to spill out again directly into the Thames.

  Stark turned to Fairweather but the American was already with him, staring out from their subterranean labyrinth to where the dull light of a grey spring day fell across the river. Noting the intensity of his gaze, Stark followed it, and realised that what they were looking at was not just visual confirmation of their underground orientation. Barely 100 metres away was a span of metal that could only be the underside of Blackfriars Bridge. If he had been standing in this position two dawns earlier, he might have seen a corpse wrapped in blood-soaked sacking hanging from it.

  ‘Okay,’ said Fairweather. ‘I guess there’s no doubt about where we are now. Though we could maybe get out of here through there …’ There was almost, but not quite, a note of optimism in his voice.

  ‘It wouldn’t do us any good though. Not if we want to find the people we’re after. Besides, even getting swamped by sewage is probably less dangerous than taking a dip in the Thames these days.’

  They turned right into the new stream. It was a decidedly less pleasant experience, the tunnel was loosely egg-shaped and the sewage regularly lapped at their feet. At one moment it seemed as if the fetid waters were coming alive. Stark sprang out of the way as an army of rats routed by their passage rushed by.

  One thing still worried him: how would they know when they were at the point where the sewer crossed over the Tube? He needn’t have worried. The American saw it first.

  ‘Harry, up there, on the wall, to the right. About a hundred yards ahead.’

  Stark instinctively found the right spot with his beam. Funny, how the Americans and Northerners used the same old measuring systems. He wondered, briefly, if both – or either – still called it ‘imperial’. But why not? It was the Americans’ empire now.

  ‘I hadn’t expected it to be that obvious.’

  It could scarcely have been more so. A proper door, albeit half-height and set about two metres from the sewer pavement. Reaching it would not be a problem either: there was a set of narrow brick steps with an iron handrail. It was obviously in regular use; the door swung open easily.

  Beyond was a full-height narrow corridor that extended half a dozen metres to where a spiral metal staircase descended, as if down a vertical bore hole around a wire-caged central shaft. The shaft contained a lift, or what had once been one; all that remained were cables, dangling in an empty space, descending into the darkness.

  ‘The Victorians built this?’ Fairweather was either sceptical or impressed.

  ‘No. The materials are all wrong. These walls are concrete, not brick. This is twentieth century.’ Stark looked up. The staircase and lift shaft continued upwards, but in the torchlight it was easy to see that not far above them the stairs were increasingly clogged with debris. ‘It must be something left over from the war. That’s all I can think. Blocked at street level, probably.’

  ‘Do we know where street level is? Here?’

  Stark was nowhere near as confident as he had been. ‘I’m assuming we’re near Charing Cross. That somehow this leads to the room I woke up in, between there and …’ the unfamiliar words stuck for a moment, ‘between there and Leicester Square’.

  ‘You think. Don’t you know? Jesus Christ, Harry, we could get lost down here.’

  ‘It’s okay. So far at least, we know the way back.’ But Stark could see from the American’s face that that was scant consolation.

  Chapter 46

  ‘So now we go down again. Is that it?’

  Stark nodded. He could see little alternative.

  The steps were rough pre-cast concrete; slabs laid in a spiral pattern. It had all the hallmarks of wartime civil engineering, rough and ready, practicable without being pretty. One thing testified reliably to the staircase being in use: the debris so evident above was signally absent, as if someone had cleared it away to avoid the risk of accident if it had to be used in a hurry. Nonetheless, they moved carefully, without speaking, watching their footsteps in the torchlight. Stark was thankful that the batteries seemed to have been in good condition.

  About thirty or so steps beneath where they had encountered the shaft the beam revealed a short corridor going off to the side with, once again, a metal door at the end. Stark tried to work out if it was the same direction as that which led to the sewer but discovered the spiral descent had confused his sense of orientation. He approached it, listening for sounds from the other side. Nothing. He looked at Fairweather who shrugged. He tried the door. It opened. Inwards. Flooding their world with light.

  For a moment Stark could only stand and blink. Then he realised he was looking into an empty room, small, square, with a table and four chairs, and a single fluorescent strip light on the ceiling. There was a further door on the other side. He crossed the room and, almost without thinking, opened it. The chamber beyond was dark, with no obvious light switch to hand. Stark turned his torch back on and swung the beam to and fro. It was as strangely familiar as he expected. On the wall opposite hung a rack of fire extinguishers, clunky, heavy old bottles that looked more like antiques than modern equipment. And next to them was another door that Stark had no doubt would lead into a tunnel where trains from another world ran under the streets of his. Nonetheless, just to be sure, he walked across and opened it.

  ‘This is it, all right. This is where I was.’

  The American nodded, watching him carefully. Stark had opened the door on the facing wall in the second chamber just a fraction, then closed it again quickly.

  ‘But where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought …’ He didn’t know what he’d thought really: that they’d still be here, playing cards and waiting for their escaped prisoner to wander back and say sorry? And yet that, in a way, was precisely what he was trying to do. ‘They said they would be meeting later. They talked about the “others coming”.’

  ‘Are you sure they said here?’

  ‘No. I just presumed … I don’t know … I’m not quite sure what we do now …’

  ‘Aren’t you, Harry? There’s only one thing to do. We go on down.’

  Fairweather was right, of course. The steps in the shaft led further down. Whatever they had been constructed for, it was not this. These two little rooms, with their access to the branch of the Northern Line were incidental. Whatever the shaft had been constructed to give access to lay deeper.

  Stark descended first, the torch beam as ever playing on the walls below first, then hovering in front of them on the steps. Most probably they were simply dropping the distance between the Northern Line and the Holborn Line – Piccadilly Line, he corrected himself: like Alice in Wonderland he had gone down a rabbit hole and ended up in another world.

  But surely they had gone deeper that that. He had no idea how many steps they had already descended; now he started counting them. They kept going, at least another thirty, maybe forty. Then, all of a sudden, they stopped.

  They were at the bottom of the shaft, but not yet as deep as they could go. The wire cage contained a lift car, but not one that had been used for many years. The torchlight revealed an old, rusty concertina gate to the lift, pulled half open. The car within was thick with cobwebs.
Straight ahead of the lift door a gently sloping tunnel still faced with concrete led further down into the earth. From deep within the tunnel came the faint glow of another source of lighting. And something far more significant: sound. The sound of human voices. Faint but unmistakable. Arguing.

  Stark turned the torch off and pocketed it. Together he and Fairweather, moving as quietly as they could, descended the sloping tunnel. The light grew stronger. Before them they could see what appeared to be a well-lit concrete-walled room, not unlike those above, but with a ceiling of reinforced iron.

  ‘I think I know where we are,’ said Stark suddenly, quietly.

  ‘Good, I’m glad.’

  ‘No, I mean, I think I know what this is.’

  ‘A disused Tube, I thought you already said.’

  ‘Yes and no, this is different. It’s far deeper, and the ceilings and walls are reinforced. This has to be a Deep Level Shelter.’

  ‘Like an air raid shelter?’

  ‘Sort of, except not for the public. They had to make do with the ordinary Tube tunnels and even then they had to fight to get into them at first. Places like this were constructed for the politicians and the military. During the war there were all sorts of tunnels and shelters underground in the Whitehall area. Most of them would have straddled what’s now the border. I imagined they’d all been filled in.’

  ‘Well, it seems this one wasn’t. You go first,’ whispered Fairweather.

  Stark stopped. Exactly how he planned to confront his former captors and convince them they were on the same side was something he had worked out only sketchily at best. The American, according to his own plan, was to figure as an ambassador from ‘the other side’ and the guarantee of his newspaper’s publicity, if that was what they wanted. But these could be dangerous men and might even be armed. They had one gun at least: his. There was no telling how they would react to the presence here, somewhere they assumed was totally safe, of a total stranger. Would they react any differently to a known policeman?

  The ‘room’ was more like a junction box: a concrete-walled interchange with exits at either side. It was empty. The voices were coming from the exit on the left, but still sounded distant. He turned and looked at Fairweather.

  ‘It’s better like this,’ the American whispered. ‘Show them you’ve come back, of your own free will, without a backup posse. They ought to give you a chance to at least explain yourself, and then you can produce me as proof you’re on the level. If they react otherwise, then I can step in, from the wings as it were. As backup.’

  Stark nodded uncertainly. It was hardly best police procedure, but then this was nothing like normal police business. This is the sort of stuff the ‘Department’ do, he thought, and that was scarcely reassuring.

  He edged forward, across the little antechamber towards the exit on the left. It was a tunnel barely three metres long, like the entry or exit of a Tube platform, except that it was lined with concrete rather than tiles. The voices were louder now, and one dominated. Stark recognised it at once as the more aggressive of the two he had overheard earlier discussing his fate. Once again he was struck by something about it, as if he had heard it before, but in a context that was so alien that it got in the way of recognition. And then it came to him, in a flash, along with a vision so absurd that he almost wanted to laugh.

  The first time he had heard that voice was not from someone hostile or aggressive, but subservient and wheedling, if a little snide. He could see him now: owlish, pasty-faced, pushing back a heavy oily wodge of hair that kept falling over his thick spectacles. It was the clerk from the Marx-Lenin Reading Room. The clerk at the submissions desk. The one who had been so helpful, if over-interested, in his requests. The one who had seen his warrant card, who knew the one thing Stark had foolishly failed to reveal to these people whose trust he was trying to win: that he was a policeman. Like his father. Except how like his father really was he. He was unsure himself. How could he have expected them to know.

  The thought that he had been afraid of this man though seemed absurd, but only for a moment. Physical strength was far from everything. Little men with glasses, who in other circumstances might have lived out their lives as chicken farmers or architects, given the right circumstances and the reins of power, had been responsible for the deaths of millions. He was thinking of Himmler and Beria. But these people were supposed to be on the right side. Weren’t they?

  Eager to confirm the man’s identity, though in his heart he was already convinced, Stark moved to the end of the little tunnel and crouched down. If he could he wanted to see exactly how many of them there were and what their dispositions were before he threw himself onto their – not necessarily so tender – mercy. What he saw took him aback.

  Under the circumstances, it ought not to have been a surprise, but somehow it was. He supposed he had been expecting another room. Instead he saw what appeared to be a Tube tunnel, but a Tube tunnel like no other. For a start it too had no tiling, just bare concrete as if the boring machines had only recently gone through and the intermediate work in preparing for passengers had been abruptly abandoned. The platform was there, but bare, with no seats or hoardings against the wall. Instead there were bunks, a long line of them, like crew sleeping quarters on board a ship. Or a submarine. Here and there were items of what looked like military communications equipment, except that it was hardly modern, even by southern English standards: radios with valves, Morse code machines, piled on tables and against walls.

  Halfway along the platform a group of people sat, like a casual card school, around a wooden table. Hunched behind one of the bunks Stark could see only a few of them, but there, unmistakable in profile even if it had not been for his voice, was the Reading Room clerk, wagging his finger in the air, as he might do, in other circumstances, at someone talking too loud in the hallowed library.

  The Museum Man, as Stark now thought of him, was talking loudly. Talking, it was suddenly clear, about him. ‘You’re right, of course, it was a mistake. It was probably a mistake to take him in the first place. We should just have left him to the DoSSers. If you’re right – and I know, I know, you usually are – then he wasn’t a threat. And still isn’t. If you’re sure you know where he is. So what do you say, boss, do we go for it?’

  Stark half-smiled to himself. The one thing he was certain of was, whatever information they might think they had, at this precise moment they had no idea where he was. It was good news, however, to hear that whoever the Museum Man was talking to had pronounced him not to be a threat. He gathered himself. It was now or never: time to stand up and be counted, to face these people and find out if they had goals he could share, and if they had evidence he could use to bring killers to book so much the better. One way or another it was time to face his father’s legacy.

  And then he heard another voice. To his astonishment one that he also recognised. One that he had last heard, also, in a very different context. Only a few short hours before. It couldn’t be. Despite himself he stood up, needing the clear view, and suddenly heedless of exposing himself to theirs. But there was no mistake. There, facing him from the other side of the table, sleeves rolled back and for all the world like a general at a military briefing, was …

  ‘Lizzie?’

  Chapter 47

  ‘Harry! My God, Harry, you’re such a fool. A fool.’

  The tunnel echoed with her words. The empty, hollow, gaping tunnel of an underground railway with no trains, in a station with no name, leading nowhere.

  ‘I told you to stay away from this. Why couldn’t you just for once do what you’re told?’ Stark could say nothing.

  The Museum Man interjected: ‘This is absurd. We shouldn’t even be talking to people like this now. We should …’

  ‘Shut your mouth, Malcolm,’ snapped Lizzie. There was no doubt who was in command here. ‘I told you not to do this, Harry,’ she continued, as if the slack-faced man had never spoken. ‘You don’t know what you’re involved with. I told
you, you were better off that way.’

  ‘I can’t …’ Stark stammered at last, ‘I can’t believe that you …’

  ‘That’s your problem, Harry, you believe too little. And too much.’

  He had had a speech prepared, words he had strung together in his head to address the people who had been his father’s ideological comrades, the people for whom he had given his life. Harry would do the same. He would risk all in challenging the lawless hegemony of the DoSS. He would appeal to them to believe that the system could be reformed from within. He had no idea whether he believed it himself. Now it seemed a piece of overblown rhetoric hardly suitable for a woman with whom he had been on the brink of intimacy.

  Instead, he said simply: ‘I don’t want to live a lie any more than my father did.’ The Museum Man rolled his eyes. Stark ignored him. It was the truth, he now knew it, whether they believed him or not.

  ‘I am my father’s son. Maybe I didn’t know it, but I do now. And I want justice for the way he died. He deserves it. As does the man who came to meet you, the one we found, the police I mean, hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge, trussed up like a piece of meat with the top of his head blown off.’

  Lizzie had her eyes closed, as if she was shutting out the vision. He was getting through to her. He had to be. He knew her, after all. Or did he? Did he know anything about her at all?

  ‘I’ve got a contact, an American,’ he tried hard not to look behind him, to see if Ben was about to come out and join him, ‘a contact in the American media who will publish all of this, your point of view, who will expose the popular resistance to the system. We might not win, but we can’t lose, not from the point of view of history.’

  Lizzie opened her eyes with a look of immense weariness: ‘My God, history! History! You don’t understand, Harry. I told you that. And I don’t think your American friend would publish the truth even if he knew it. The media on the other side may claim to be totally free, but ask them if even they believe it. Ask their reporters about their proprietors, powerful men with powerful interests. Interests in the status quo, the status quo they created and have nurtured for forty years. It’s too late for that, Harry. There’s not just a military-industrial complex, there’s a media-industrial complex. The same people own them all, the press and the studios. They’re still lying now.’