The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  As Stark approached, the man behind her thrust a television camera forward and the long grey furry zeppelin of a microphone boom appeared over the helmet of one of the uniformed policemen.

  ‘Can you put that away, please,’ Stark said in his sternest voice, extending a hand at the same time to block the lens that swung automatically in his direction.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, we just want to know what’s going on. We’re only doing our job.’ The woman’s voice was like a cheese grater on a blackboard.

  ‘I’m sorry, this is a police matter. You have no authorisation.’

  ‘We’re a news team, BBC. We have a permit. Is that a dead body you’ve found?’

  Stark sniffed and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. You have to leave.’ He was polite but firm, the way he had been trained to behave should such an eventuality ever arise.

  ‘We have every right …’ the woman said. ‘Is this an escape attempt? What don’t you want us to see?’ Morris looked younger in person than she did on the box, Stark noted, quite pretty really if it wasn’t for that awful voice. And her attitude. He shook his head.

  ‘Move these people back, please,’ he said quietly. The constables, five abreast, advanced at a steady pace. The BBC team retreated, the cameraman still trying to film through the thicket of police gloves raised in front of his lens.

  ‘Who are you then?’ the woman was yelling, as she was forced along the Embankment. ‘Secret police, are you? One o’them Dossers? Or just an ordinary old PeePee in a suit?’

  Stark clenched his fists involuntarily, then, realising that provocation was exactly what the woman had in mind, with a determined effort closed his eyes and his ears, turned his back and walked away.

  ‘What did they want?’ asked Kemp, briefly removing the glowing stub of cigarette from her plump pale lips.

  ‘The usual. News. Bad news.’

  ‘Is there any other sort?’

  ‘I heard on the radio this morning industrial production figures were up again.’

  Kemp smiled at the irony: ‘Onwards and upwards for the people’s economy then. Not everyone seems to be cheered up though,’ she gestured towards the grim figure of the corpse on the trolley. ‘What do you think of that one?’

  ‘I don’t think. There’s no future in it.’

  ‘Nice line, I must remember that one.’ Kemp gave him a thin smile. They walked back towards the ambulance together. The black Bevan by the far kerb remained inscrutable as ever. Its occupants, if there were any, showed no sign of emerging.

  Kemp’s two hefty helpers had manoeuvred the corpse, still wrapped in its damp and bloody sacking, into the back of the ambulance and were standing along with Lavery by the open doors, wiping their hands on their overalls and lighting up.

  ‘Charming. All your lot smoke? I thought they’d discovered it was bad for the health.’

  Kemp dropped her own cigarette butt and stamped it out beneath a surprisingly elegant shoe that looked as if it might be real leather. Stark had never noticed before that she wore heels at work. Particularly her work. Kemp moved across to the ambulance and clambered in. Stark noticed her attempt to conceal an involuntary intake of breath.

  ‘There’s a lot of things bad for the health, DI Stark, as I’m sure you know. Not least what happened to him.’

  Stark raised his eyebrows but kept his distance. ‘That’s for sure.’

  Kemp had pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, prised back a bit more of the sacking and was prodding at what remained of the corpse’s jaw. Stark turned away as he watched her dip a finger into the bloody mess.

  ‘Gelling nicely. Rigor started already. Probably been dead a couple of hours at least. Any idea who he is?’

  Stark shrugged and called: ‘Lavery.’

  ‘Sir?’ The sergeant left off his desultory conversation with the ambulance men.

  ‘See what you can find, will you.’

  With a face that showed how much he appreciated the high-end tasks entrusted to him, the heavy sergeant clambered into the back of the vehicle next to the pathologist and used his knife to enlarge the rent he had made in the sackcloth. Stark kept his distance. He still wasn’t sure his stomach was up to it. Ruth Kemp had no such qualms.

  Stark turned around, looking back up towards the bridge. Traffic had resumed. Lines of chugging red buses filled with early morning commuters heading for work in the ministries, torn between brooding frustration at yet another traffic hold-up and relief at a few more minutes saved from the stultifying boredom of the workplace.

  ‘No ID, sir.’

  Lavery’s head sticking out of the rear of the ambulance. Stark went across to him. The body bag – which was, after all, what it was, he reflected – had been cut open from head to toe, revealing, beneath the bloody ruin of its face, the remains of a tall, stocky man in what appeared to have been smart casual clothing: jeans, an open-necked check shirt and a reddish-brown jacket, although it was hard to be certain about the original colours given the quantity of blood and other bodily fluids. The stench was overpowering. Stark found himself gagging again.

  ‘What do you mean, no ID?’ Everyone carried something. It was illegal not to. Citizens were obliged to carry their state-issued ID cards at all times. Even visiting foreigners, including those from ‘up North’ were supposed to carry their passports and valid visas.

  ‘Just that, sir: no ID. No wallet. Not even any money. Not in his jacket pockets, or in his trousers. And I’ve looked as close as I can. In the circumstances.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Nothing to identify him. Only this.’

  Lavery was holding a square of unfolded paper. ‘It was in the side pocket of his jacket. I thought it might be a document of some sort. But it’s not.’ He turned it over in his hands as if doing so might encourage some strange metamorphosis.

  ‘It looks like one of those whatchamacallits, you know, “winkies”.’

  Stark frowned. He knew the term of course, he had always assumed it was some form of rhyming slang he wasn’t quite familiar with, like saying ‘dog’ for phone, because it was short for ‘dog and bone’. ‘Winkies’ was what people called books or poetry or pamphlets frowned on by the state and printed on illegal presses. They existed in Moscow too, where they called them samizdat, ‘self-published’. Stark had considered them more or less an urban myth: the only one he had ever seen had been a scrappily printed version of a Northern television schedule.

  ‘What does it say?’

  Lavery gave him a wry grin. ‘I think it’s Shakespeare. Unless of course, it’s a message for you, guv.’

  Stark snatched the paper from his hand. It was the same, poor quality greenish paper the television schedule had been printed on. But there was only a date, 23 April, the national holiday in four days’ time, printed large, and beneath it a single line capitalised in a similar huge typeface: AND ENGLISHMEN AT HOME NOW ABED SHALL THINK THEMSELVES ACCURSED THEY WERE NOT WITH US AT THIS HOUR.

  Stark sniffed at the irony, turned it over and felt his heart stop. The image was unmistakable, in socialist red of all colours, the great ogre himself, the bogeyman used to scare children to sleep at night, sporting the twin symbols of capitalism – fat cigar and bowler hat – leering, his hand raised in that trademark gesture that summed up what he thought of the world. Two raised fingers: Fuck You!

  Chapter 5

  Col Charles Marchmain of the Department of Social Security steepled his fingers as his black Bevan saloon pulled away from the pavement. Through the indigo-tinted side windows, which obscured vision into the vehicle but not from it, he watched the little tableau as its participants – the two lumpen ambulance orderlies apart – affected to ignore the big black car accelerating past them.

  He noticed, and appreciated, their studied lack of interest. It was something he was used to, expected even. The more anyone assumed the DoSS was interested in them, the more they affected not to be aware of their existence. It was often a useful indicator of guilt. Not in this case
of course, at least not as far as he knew – Marchmain was not a man to take anything for granted – but it was extremely unlikely. Extremely. He had encountered this sort of attitude before too: a deliberate attempt to feign total indifference on the part of those who feared their own competence was being questioned, or in danger of being usurped. They too hoped, in their own way, that if they ignored the men from the DoSS, they would simply go away. Of course, they never did.

  Marchmain had taken particular care to arrive on the scene just after the detective inspector, his sergeant and two constables had climbed aboard the police river boat. He had ordered his driver to wait in a side street until he was sure the little party had embarked, then pulled out. The cordon of uniformed officers that closed off the Embankment to other traffic parted as soon as they saw the Bevan approach, the marque alone being enough identification. Nonetheless Marchmain had told the driver to stop and show his badge. Respect was one thing, but sloppiness another.

  Then he had done what he did best: sat, and watched and waited. He was an excellent observer, not so much trained as impassioned. There was much more to be learned, he resolutely believed, by careful observation than from most direct questioning, even when physical or psychological incentives were involved. Getting the right answer, after all, wasn’t always the point. In this current little matter, for example, he was absorbed more by the questions posed than by any possible answers.

  He watched as the boat came to the pier, the trolley was wheeled up by the ambulance apes, the body loaded and unloaded, noticed how the senior man hung back, as far as possible from the gore, how he greeted the portly little pathologist with her passé fashion pretensions.

  He had watched as the policeman went to deal with the irritating Northern news team, and was impressed with the calm and level-headed manner with which he removed them, despite the woman’s taunts. Marchmain wondered if he would have been quite so level-headed himself at that age, and decided on balance probably not. People like that were an aggravation that in the old days did not have to be shown quite such exaggerated tolerance.

  He noticed however, that the policeman’s sangfroid seemed to evaporate somewhat however when his tubby little sergeant set about searching the corpse for identity papers and found nothing. Yes, he thought, that would unsettle anybody. He watched as the detective took the piece of paper his sergeant proffered to him and noticed the expressions of puzzlement and then shock on his face as he turned it over.

  Interesting, Marchmain thought as he gave the man in the front seat the curt order to drive off. It would be more interesting still to see what the policeman made of this case. In particular given that the policeman in charge was Detective Inspector Harry Stark. John Stark’s son.

  He was young for the job. But perhaps, under the circumstances, that was not wholly surprising. Marchmain had known Stark senior well. He had been a remarkable man. In many ways. One of the best party cadres of his generation. He had played a key role in the early post-war years, when there was still a degree of demoralised uncertainty, not just among older members of the force, but amongst the much-needed new recruits, many of whom had served in the army, and fought against those they were now told to regard as their liberators. Those had been difficult times, and John Stark, an experienced trades unionist, had blossomed amidst the rubble; he had been a realist, a rational-iser and an optimist. And he could inspire those qualities in others. He had been a leader of men. What had happened to him was a genuine tragedy.

  Marchmain wondered which, if any, of the father’s qualities his son had inherited. In particular he wondered if they included the one that in his experience was simultaneously most dangerous and most useful: an independent mind.

  Yes indeed, he would watch developments closely.

  This had the potential for being interesting. ‘May you live in interesting times’ was said to be an old Chinese curse. Col Charles Marchmain considered it his personal motto. And what was more interesting still was that Stark had found something: a piece of paper from the dead man’s pocket that he was now thrusting towards the dowdy middle-aged pathologist with a look of incredulity on his face. Very interesting indeed.

  ‘What the hell am I supposed to make of this?’

  Ruth Kemp glanced down at the sheet of unfolded paper in the detective’s hand then recoiled in horror as her hand automatically pulled back from accepting it. She stared at the image, then looked up, not so much at Stark as beyond him, through the still open ambulance door.

  As if on cue, the black saloon had slid away from the kerb, pulled out slowly into the middle of the empty road and moved forward towards them. Only as it drew level did it accelerate and disappear, heading east, under the bridge, into the bowels of the City.

  ‘Maybe you should ask them,’ she said.

  Chapter 6

  Clement Attlee was not amused. The stern dead eyes on his portrait made that perfectly clear. But then Harry Stark wasn’t exactly having the time of his life either. A murder investigation did not land on his desk often. The trouble with this one was that it didn’t want to land at all. The lack of an identity not only hampered the investigation, it buggered up the paperwork.

  There were forms to be filled in. Almost as many for a suspected murder, it turned out, as for stolen jars of pickled eggs. But pickled eggs were a known quantity. Unidentified corpses were not. And a name was what the mutilated body now enjoying the careful attention of Dr Kemp and her assistants on a slab at Bart’s mortuary signally lacked.

  Lavery had gone through the missing persons list. There were no more than a dozen adult males unaccounted for in the whole of the city. A countrywide request would take longer, at least another day or two. Neither would account for those who had gone missing voluntarily in a, usually futile, attempt to commit the treasonous act of emigration.

  Theft of ID papers was almost unheard of, even in rare cases of aggravated robbery. Or at least the ordinary ID papers of the average citizen, which unlike those of the party nomenklatura conferred no benefits of access to special shops or travel privileges, and those were so tightly controlled that anyone attempting to use stolen documents ran a risk many times greater than the potential advantages.

  Stark fed his first form and accompanying flimsies into the rollers of the old Hermes and began typing. In the box which required ‘complainant’s’ name he typed out the usual sobriquet for anonymity: ‘Joe Bloggs’. There was almost nothing else to add: no address, no next of kin, no national identity card number, no National Health Service number, no trade union affiliation, no party membership, nor reason for refusal of membership. Most significantly of all, no Social Security number. Nothing to identify him to the omniscient ‘Department’. There was another possibility, one that Stark was reluctantly coming to consider.

  It had been an afternoon of blank walls and dead ends. Like the dead ends and blank walls all over the great map which covered the far wall of Stark’s office. Unlike most maps available to ordinary citizens of the English Democratic Republic, that which covered the detective inspector’s wall did not have blank space in the area marked ‘Westminster’. It had a black-and-white tracery of streets with names, half of the city reflected in a ghostly mirror. The Wall had gone up in 1961, when Harry was little more than a toddler. He had no memory of the ‘other side’, the part of London his mother still occasionally, politically incorrectly, referred to as ‘up West’.

  As far as Harry and anyone under forty was concerned, what Northerners called ‘West London’ was effectively another city, one the party referred to as ‘Westminster’, purposely making the point – valid in theory – that it had been a separate city, the royal residence. For centuries the two might have been fused together. The party insisted it had merely performed a life-saving operation by severing a Siamese twin, wracked with the contagious disease of capitalism.

  The Wall – the ‘state frontier’, Harry corrected himself, as he traced out the scale of the barrier that cut not just through the city
but surrounded the western enclave – in the north separated Barnet from Enfield, Hampstead from Highgate, Kentish Town from Camden Town, Marylebone Station from Euston, and in the south Lambeth from Southwark, Clapham from Dulwich, Croydon from Bromley. But it was in the heart of the old metropolis that the scar still proved most visible, where it ran concurrent with the boarded-up facades of former shops along Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross Road down into Stalingrad Square, once named for another battle between other empires, then the flattened western side of Whitehall before crossing the river over Westminster Bridge and turning south along the Albert Embankment from where the Thames was suddenly an alien waterway.

  The phone rang. Stark picked it up with something bordering on relief.

  ‘Stark here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, though if you weren’t so absurdly squeamish about the Technicolor wonders of the human anatomy, you should really be here.’ Stark recognised the gruff tones of Ruth Kemp. ‘I’ve done the autopsy.’

  For all his frustration at their lack of leads, Stark had not quite been able to bring himself to spend the afternoon in the formaldehyde-scented atmosphere of St Bart’s forensic lab while the good doctor performed her grisly rituals upon the corpse. He had tried before and been evicted after emptying the contents of his stomach into a kidney dish for the second time.

  ‘What have you got for me?’ he said, ignoring the barb and lifting his pen to take notes, to go through the ritual motions that would give him something at least to fill a few of the empty spaces.

  ‘The deceased was a well-built, relatively fit male, one metre ninety in height, aged somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five.’

  ‘Well, that narrows it down.’

  ‘Cut the sarcasm, DI Stark. You might recall the condition the body was in.’

  Harry tried not to. ‘Do we have a time of death?’

  ‘We do. That too, however, is approximate, I’m afraid. As ever.’