The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (2 page)

Bermondsey, East London, 1989

Fog makes fools of us all. You see shapes in the shadows, where there are no shadows, no shapes. In a fog, without noticing it, you can bump into reality. Or worse.

His heart was pounding, his pulse loud in his ears. He breathed, when he dared, in short, wheezing gasps. The fog was already deep in his lungs. At his back the brick wall was cold, damp, slimy with mould, the broken paving slabs beneath his feet wet, slippery and treacherous. A wrong step risked a fall. If he fell they would be on him in a heartbeat.

He sniffed the fetid night air, a hare seeking the scent of the fox. How far away were they? These were their streets. Their city. Their goddamn fog. It was in streets like these, just across the river, that Jack the Ripper had eviscerated a dozen young women. Was this how they had felt as the predator closed in?

Footsteps sounded in the opaque yellow-grey emptiness behind him. Uneven. Hesitant. Those who made them were as aware as he was of the slightest noise in a world without vision. They were near. Nearer than he had thought
possible
. He didn’t know for sure how many there were. Three. Maybe four. Maybe more. More than enough to take him down.

He had to move. But the sound of running feet would be like a homing beacon. Even if he knew which direction to take. He strained his hearing, moving his head slowly
from side to side as if his small, tightly pinned-back ears were radar scanners. But there was nothing. Just the fine rain falling invisibly on wet streets. A sinister susurrus that seeped from the smog might have been guarded
whispering
. Or distant car tyres in the drizzle. It faded away.

Hugging the slimy wall behind him, he slid his foot silently along the pavement, holding his breath, his fingers creeping along the damp brickwork, until they reached a window, a cold glass pane of unthreatening darkness. There would be no muted glimmer to betray his passage.

Beyond the window, a door, old wood with peeling paint, fronting right onto the street. Then another window, also in darkness. Then another door. Even in bright daylight he could get lost in these alleyways that ran between ancient warehouses, punctuated here and there by a rubble-filled gap, like the remains of a rotted tooth: the lingering legacy of the Blitz. Or the Liberation. Whatever they called it. Whatever.

He could hide amidst the rubble. But not forever. There were hours before dawn. He imagined himself crouching in frozen numbness behind some toppled chimney stack until the weak grey daylight revealed his pursuers sitting there watching him with sardonic smiles.

He paused. And caught the ghost of other footsteps
stopping
too. Almost an echo, but not quite. Too close for that. Involuntarily he caught his breath. With the chilling
casualness
of an old friend putting a hand on his shoulder to soften the blow of bad news, someone, in terrifying
proximity
, said his name aloud.

He ran then. As he knew they meant him to. Feet slapping on the wet pavement, his feet and theirs, loud after so much studied silence. The distance that separated them rapidly
shrinking. Straight ahead. A wall loomed. Faceless brick. Too high to scale. Right, then left. How regular was the street pattern? How well did they know it? Was he running nowhere? In circles? Into a trap? Into the river?

The river. A fool’s gamble. But the leanest odds were better than none. A mouthful of polluted water could be fatal, but less certainly than a bullet in the brain. Which way? The Thames here twisted in giant loops permeated by the docks. And in any case he had lost all sense of direction.

He took a left. There was a distinct slope away from him. Fuzzy dark angular shapes of iron pulleys and winches protruded overhead. If he could find a way into one of the ancient Victorian structures they might never find him. But the iron doors would be locked, with steel bars on the few accessible windows.

The street was cobbled here, treacherously slippery. The long line of warehouses curved around towards the left, broken by tiny alleyways, some barely the width of a man’s shoulders. Some, he knew, were dead ends, giving access only to locked side doors and cellars. Somewhere around here was the area known as Jacob’s Island, which Charles Dickens had called the ‘most pestilential part of the
metropolis
’. The villainous Bill Sykes had lost his footing here and been sucked under by the Thames mud.

Cold sweat poured down the inside of his shirt. Too damn old for this game. But then he hadn’t expected to be playing it. Somewhere along here there was an old public house that backed onto the river. If only he could find it. From his left came a low, eerie groan of metal on metal that could have been an inn sign creaking on its chains. He stopped and held his breath and in that instant realised that he could no longer hear the sound of his pursuers.

Was it possible? Did he dare believe, even for a second, that he might have evaded them? They would have expected him, after all, to head west. He knew, of course, only too well the temptation of the desperate man to clutch at any straw of hope and was determined not to yield to it. Even so, the emotion that flooded through him – along with sheer
unbridled
terror as something rough and hairy descended over his head and constricted his windpipe in a brutal choking grip – was acute disappointment.

‘Ssshh!’ said the voice in the darkness, strangely,
terrifyingly
familiar. ‘Ssshh!’

The most sinister thing about portraits of the dead,
Detective
Inspector Harry Stark had always been told, was the way their eyes followed you. He had heard how in old castles there used to be peepholes concealed behind the eyes of ancestral images on the walls, and that those who were spied upon could not tell the difference. It was not a rule that applied to the two dead men whose photographs hung on the wall behind his desk in New Scotland Yard: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Clement Richard Attlee.

Every time Stark turned to glance up at the two
photographs
looking over his shoulder what struck him first of all was indeed their eyes. Far from following you, the eyes of both men stared straight ahead, full of certainty, seeing nothing. There could be no peepholes hidden behind those dead eyes. But then who needed peepholes when the walls had ears?

Stark had not been born when Attlee had ‘seen the light’, as the history books had it, and trampled on the old ogre’s fresh grave. But he did not question the presence of the two portraits on his wall, any more than he questioned that of their latter-day incarnation, the portly, grey-haired Arthur Harkness, in the trades union and city council offices, national railway stations or in the shabby surgeries of the National Health Service.

Stark looked around at the walls of his own office and let out a soft sigh. There were times when he wished the Metropolitan People’s Police would splash out on a bit more
colour. Nothing gaudy or extravagant, just an alternative to the ubiquitous government magnolia emulsion. Even just a fresh lick. It must have been a fine room once, back in the 1890s when the great Gothic palace of New Scotland Yard with its high gables, mansard windows, tall Tudoresque chimneys and fairytale turrets in red-and-white-striped brick had soared above the recently laid out Embankment, then named for Queen Victoria rather than the ‘Victory of Socialism’. He would have looked down on the river across a sea of pale green leaves on the young lime trees that lined the pavement as the horse-drawn carriages of the gentry trotted by.

Hard to imagine now. The trees were chopped down in the winter of 1949–50 to provide fuel for the freezing
population
in the bombed and blasted ruins. The building itself bore the usual pockmark shrapnel scars from the last-ditch defence put up by those who had failed to recognise their impending liberation. Not to mention the great hole carved in the Portland stone of the main entrance,
prima facie
evidence
of a direct hit from a T-34 tank shell.

It was widely believed that the shell had been fired by the selfsame T-34 that now stood a hundred metres or so away on a plinth by the river, where once an ancient
Egyptian
obelisk had stood, as a permanent memorial to the Liberation. On any ordinary day, when the long hours of the afternoon ticked away with nothing more challenging on his desk than another mound of perennial paperwork, Stark would look down on the old tank, before
involuntarily
letting his eyes drift along the Embankment to that other memorial of the dark days of 1949, the blackened stump of the great Victorian tower that had once housed a bell called Big Ben. And in front of it, closer, more familiar, the long,
barrel-topped, three-metre-high concrete symbol of the post-war order: the Anti-Capitalist Protection Barrier. Or as most people called it, on either side, the Wall.

Was it really that different, he wondered sometimes, late at night, on the other side of the Wall, in the other London, ‘Westminster’, the anomalous enclave left behind by the sweeping red tide of the Liberation? An occupied colonial outpost under American imperialist control, the official press called it; a consumer paradise of free speech according to the radio and television broadcasts that found their way into the ether. But then they were paid for and run by the Americans. And the Yanks would say anything. Wouldn’t they? ‘The American dream is the workers’ nightmare’ the slogans said. ‘Not so much free men as wage slaves!’ Stark knew them as well as everyone else. But ‘wage slave’ was only a label, Stark mused to himself as he fed another triple carbon-flimsied form for recording the grievous crime of ‘Misappropriation of the People’s Property’ – party jargon for someone nicking a jar of pickled eggs from the
People’s
Own Pickled Eggs production line – into his ancient Hermes typewriter.

The paperwork was nothing new. His father had told him that. His father was why he had joined the police in the first place. Following in the old man’s footsteps. There were those, both in the force and outside it, who respected him simply because he was ‘Comrade Stark’s Boy’. Not that he had been ‘comrade’ Stark when he first entered the ‘old Met’ back in the mid-1930s. The old man had been a staunch trades unionist but also a believer in the rule of law. He had joined the army on the outbreak of war in 1939, believing strongly in the need to fight the Hitler-fascists, but had not taken long to express his doubts after the 1945 ‘continuation’
when Churchill and the Yanks had enlisted the remnants of the post-Hitler
Wehrmacht
in their crusade to stop the spread of communism into the heart of Europe. They were ‘fighting history’, old man Stark had muttered privately to trusted friends. And so it had turned out. He had been one of the first to sign up enthusiastically for his old job in the rechristened Metropolitan People’s Police.

Adding a single word to the force’s title hadn’t changed the essence of what they did, he had told his son, and that was catching crooks, street-robbers, wife-beaters, rapists and conmen, making the world a decent place for decent folk. Solid working-class values. English values. Those were the words still ringing in young Harry’s ears when he signed up on his eighteenth birthday in 1975, barely eleven months after the old man’s all-too-early death. He had either never heard or forgotten the stuff about endless forms detailing snaffled jars of pickled eggs.

The late afternoon sky was rapidly darkening over the Thames, rain spattering on the windows. Stark was sitting over a fifth mug of barely drinkable tea, literally twiddling his thumbs, when the telephone rang. The co-occupant of his office, a rotund, middle-aged, rosy-cheeked man with flat estuary vowels picked it up, listened for a few minutes, then turned to Stark with a mixture of astonishment and anxious excitement showing on his owlish face:

‘We’ve got a murder, sir,’ he said. ‘Border police have found a body. Hanging underneath Blackfriars Bridge.’

Stark felt sick. Sick to his stomach. Sick in his soul. It was partly a hangover from too many after-work pints with Lavery in the Red Lion the night before, but mostly the foul stench from the sludge of effluence called the River Thames, its repetitive heaving motion beneath him and the reek of diesel from the smoke-belching engine of the chugging little cutter belonging to the border patrol. But there was also something deeper, underlying, an intangible lingering melancholy of depression and disillusion.

Black smoke belched out of the rear end of the little grey-painted boat as it puttered through the murky river water. Up ahead the great black sooty dome of St Paul’s loomed against a morbid yellow sky, still fractured after all these years like the cracked open shell of a bad boiled egg. It was as if the war had ended yesterday rather than forty years ago. The struggle for socialism, it seemed, was never ending.

The lumpen object hanging from the underside of
Blackfriars
Bridge, seeping already congealing blood. The cutter heaved to almost immediately beneath it and a crewman dropped anchor. Stark looked up reluctantly. Blood oozed through rough sacking like the pectin his mother squeezed through muslin at jam-making time, and dripped in slow, heavy globules to form a viscous puddle on the rusty deck: reddish brown and slimy, adding its own rich copper and iron aroma to the fetid cocktail of the ambient atmosphere. There was also the unmistakable smell of human faeces.
Stark took two swift paces to the port rail and threw up over the side.

‘You all right, sir?’ called an insufferably cheery voice behind him. ‘Yes,’ Stark lied. ‘Fine. Just fine. Carry on,
sergeant
. You’ve got enough on your hands,’ and he waved Lavery forward towards the abomination dripping onto the deck.

The bulky, thickset Kentishman grinned and called forward two uniformed constables to take the weight of the obscene object, while the border patrol crewman used a hooked blade on a long pole, used for God only knew what obscure riverine purpose, to saw through the thick rope that held the thing dangling there like some rotted
Christmas
decoration.

Stark let a few dangling threads of bitter bile fall into the stinking murk of the river, wiped his mouth and turned to watch them, a grim rictus on his normally placid face. He tried and failed to derive a note of optimism from the first signs of spring greenery on the vegetation growing from within the cracked eggshell of St Paul’s. Opposite, the great monolithic chimney of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s
Bankside
power station kicked out its own contribution to the spring smog as it struggled to provide the power for a city plagued by brownouts. Somewhere downriver, from one of the hulking Comecon freighters drifting out on the ebb tide from the Russia or East India docks, a ship’s horn sounded, like the cry of some plaintive primeval dinosaur.

‘Easy does it, lads,’ called Lavery as the last remaining strands of rope parted and the two constables on the
slippery
deck took the full strain of the dead weight fallen into their hands. For a second one of them, caught out by the sudden change in equilibrium, lost his footing and slipped
to one side. Stark thought that the whole caboodle was going to come crashing down on deck transforming tragedy into farce. But the man righted himself at the last minute, losing only his helmet, which Stark grabbed even as it rolled towards the edge of the deck.

He picked it up and held it in both hands. It occurred to him that if he had had it earlier, its bulbous shape might have been a tempting receptacle for the meagre contents of his bilious stomach.

Lavery awkwardly helped the two uniformed men lay the body horizontal on the deck. Stark turned the helmet around in his hands, instinctively giving a quick polish to the familiar enamel badge – the red-on-white cross of St George with the party’s superimposed red rose that marked its owner as an officer of the Metropolitan People’s Police. Once upon a time, when he started out in the force as a lowly beat bobby, he had worn one himself. He handed it back to the constable, who thanked him with just the ghost of embarrassment and put it back on, adjusting the strap around his chin. Propriety restored. We’re still English after all, thought Stark.

‘All right, all right,’ called Lavery. ‘Let’s have a look then, shall we?’

Stark nodded, though the question had been rhetorical and directed to the two constables. Lavery was already
grappling
with the rope, trying to loosen its grip around what they assumed to be a human neck. The blood oozed on either side of it, in crimson bubbles. Stark looked away.

‘No good, sir. I shall have to cut through the sacking.’

‘Whatever you have to, sergeant. Whatever.’

They both knew there was no point. Whatever – whoever, Stark corrected himself – this gruesome parcel contained
was already dead. The real work would be for the
pathologist
. But they had to be sure. If there was any chance …

‘There we go. Oh, bloody hell …’

Lavery had used one of the constables’ standard police-issue Red Army knives to slice through the sacking and reveal a human face. Or something that had once
resembled
one. Of the facial features themselves there was almost nothing left: just a mass of seared and torn tissue where eyes and nose should have been, as if it had exploded from within.

Even from where he stood, Harry Stark knew he had never seen anything like it in his life. But only because he had been lucky. This was the face of a man who had been executed, and not by hanging. That had been as gratuitous as it was grotesque. This was the unmistakable remains of someone shot in the back of the head. At close quarters. With the muzzle placed at the soft spot behind the base of the skull.

The two constables stood back, as did Lavery, waiting for the detective inspector to approach. But Stark was in no hurry. There was something deeply wrong about this.

When Lavery had first mentioned the scene in his
telephone
call, before the circumstances had been described, Stark had assumed it was a suicide; that was what a ‘body at Blackfriars’ usually meant. Over the years the bridge had become a favourite spot for suicides, most of them old men, sad derelicts who had once been bankers and
stockbrokers
, regarded in the bad old days of pre-war capitalism as masters of the universe but since the Liberation scorned by the party as usurers and leeches. Eventually more than a few of them decided they could take no more and had come to end it all in sight of ‘the City’, the little square mile of ancient
London from where their finance houses had once
dominated
the planet.

There was, of course, always the other alternative.
Blackfriars
Bridge was the frequent scene of another kind of foolishness: failed attempts to commit what the state
considered
treason. Every now and then some deluded soul – fewer over the years – would throw him- or herself onto a passing upriver barge, usually under cover of night, in the futile hope that they would go unspotted by the vigilance of the river border control, the frontier guards at Westminster Pier, or their canine companions. None succeeded. At least none that Harry Stark had ever heard of.

This was something at the same time simpler and much more complicated. Murder was not exactly unknown in the English Democratic Republic, although it was rarely
publicised
. Humanity, even under developed socialism, was not yet wholly free of its baser side. The party admitted that. Ordinary people killed for many reasons: out of blind,
irrational
fury, out of drunkenness, out of passion, for love, for sex. Even for money.

But most murders were committed out of sight, down dark alleyways, in crumbling tenement blocks, the bodies disposed of in shallow woodland graves, on bombsites or abandoned wasteland, at worst dismembered and hidden amongst the household trash. Murder was a crime the
criminal
tried to hide. This was different. That was what worried Harry most: this open flaunting of an atrocity, this obscene two fingers in the face of authority was something unheard of. It was a gesture.

More than that, it was a challenge, and not only to the police. This had all the trappings of a crime much more dangerous than mere murder: subversion. Subversion was
a crime that could be dangerous not only to the victim, but also to the perpetrator and – what worried Harry Stark most right at this moment – even the investigator.

He told the helmsman to turn the wheel and steer the grimy little boat with its unwholesome burden towards the north bank of the Thames.

On the Victory Embankment the ambulance stood waiting, dirty white, spattered with rainwater from the gutters, defacing the red cross and red rose that on the battered vehicle looked less impressive than they did on the policeman’s helmet. The emergency equipment inside, Harry knew, would be of a similar standard: old, worn-out, over-used. Amongst all the drains on the state’s resources, the National Health Service, much trumpeted as the pride and joy of the English Democratic Republic, always seemed to trail near the bottom of the list. Just above repairing St Paul’s.

Not that it mattered in this case. The ambulance was merely a mode of transport. To the morgue, via the forensic pathology department at St Bartholemew’s hospital and the tender loving scalpel of Dr Ruth Kemp. Stark wondered if the good doctor would be with the ambulance, already waiting for her charge. He knew Kemp well, liked her, but found her enthusiasm for fresh corpses disconcerting at the least. He wondered what she would make of this one. He wondered how many she had seen before in this condition. But that was the sort of question Harry Stark knew better than to ask.

The cutter pulled up at the rusting iron pier where two burly medical orderlies in soiled green hospital fatigues were already waiting with a trolley. Stark nodded to them and with the constables’ help they manhandled their unwieldy
burden onto the trolley, and rattled it up and down the gangplanks onto the pavement. Kemp was indeed there. Stark made a brief gesture of acknowledgement to the small, stout figure in a thick coat stamping her feet and pulling on a cigarette next to the open rear doors of the ambulance. She nodded back. But her attention was elsewhere.

Stark followed the line of her gaze and spotted it almost immediately; the long low black Bevan saloon that could have been a hearse but wasn’t, although some of his fellow citizens considered the sight of one as ominous an omen. The black tinted windows were supposed to add to its aura of anonymity but in fact only shouted all the louder the identity of its occupants, the sober-suited, quiet spoken men who prided themselves on being the ‘sword and shield of the party’: the Department of Social Security. Stark swore under his breath.