The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  ‘What if I told you,’ the American leaned forward conspiratorially, ‘that there are people here, in this society, who feel it is time for a change. People who have a story to tell. A great story, one that could change your world and maybe mine too?’

  Stark sat back. He felt like saying he sincerely hoped he was not going to be told anything of the sort.

  ‘That’s what Martin Bloom was doing, Harry. Trying to talk to people, trying to give people over here something they desperately lack – a voice.’

  Stark could have replied that his father had always taught him it was all right having a voice as long as you knew the consequences of what you said. But deep down there was a part of him that understood what the American was saying, even if he could not quite believe it.

  ‘It’s not a crime, Harry. At least it shouldn’t be. It’s not subversion or starting a revolution. It’s just letting people have a discussion. Is that really such a bad thing?’

  ‘And for this, you’re saying, this Mr Bloom was …’

  ‘For this, Mr Bloom was killed.’ For the first time, there was anger in the American’s voice. ‘For this he was hung like some piece of carrion underneath a bridge over the Thames. I’m not saying journalists are one hundred per cent on the side of the angels, here. Maybe he had no right to expect kid-glove treatment but he sure as hell didn’t deserve to be murdered in cold blood and strung up like some piece of butcher’s meat.’

  ‘And who are you suggesting is responsible?’

  The American drew on his Marlboro and exhaled a long grey plume of smoke towards the solitary low-wattage light bulb that dangled in its drab shade from the ceiling: ‘Jesus Christ, Harry, don’t give me that. You know who killed him as well as I do: your so-called Department of Social Security.

  ‘The same people who killed your father.’

  Chapter 15

  High in his Barbican tower, Col Charles Marchmain opened the buff file on his desk and perused the details of the day’s surveillance of the American whose passport and press card proclaimed him to be Benjamin Fairweather, special correspondent of the New York Times.

  Such a status on its own marked him out as a PIN, a Person of Interest. The Department liked acronyms; it removed the inconvenience of thinking of human beings. Fellow Travellers were FTs. But a PIN was also a Potential Nuisance (or as Marchmain privately put it a Pain In the Arse), and Fairweather undoubtedly fell into that category. That was to say he belonged to a whole regiment of foreign journalists, Northerners or Americans, who made it their business, or at least the business of their press baron masters, to create the worst possible image of the Workers’ and Farmers’ State.

  Until his meeting with Detective Inspector Harry Stark, however, it had not been known just how much of a nuisance Fairweather in particular could be. Now it was. He had graduated to the higher category of CN, a Confirmed Nuisance, an acronym for which Marchmain also had his own private alternative.

  Fairweather had entered the capital over the Oxford Street/ Tottenham Court Road crossing point at 2.27 p.m. March-main quietly applauded the admirably precise timings kept by the border guards. That was approximately two hours after the BBC midday television news had, inevitably but regrettably, carried the story of the body under the bridge.

  Marchmain had made a point of watching the broadcast. It followed a familiar format – the party press referred to the BBC as the Bigoted Bourgeois Channel – making the most of blurred footage shot from a distance and backed up by the strident tones of that dreadful Mancunian woman with a chip the size of Mother England on her shoulder. The camera showed the police holding them back, a glimpse of Stark putting his hand over the camera, and there, in the background, an unfortunate glimpse of his own black Bevan saloon, number plate happily unreadable at that distance. Back to the female commentator for a few unsourced, contentious comments about the ‘shady world on the other side of the Wall’ and the obligatory closing shots of the cheap plywood crosses by the foot of ‘Big Ben’ – the tacky so-called ‘memorials’ erected by Westminster’s propaganda department to make martyrs out of traitors. The insinuation was as insidious as it was contrived.

  When the American journalist crossed the border little more than two hours later, a team of low-level Department minions latched onto him within 100 metres of the checkpoint as they usually did with visiting PINs. At that stage it was just routine. Nothing elaborate, just the day-to-day passing of target to target among the teams who usually worked the tourist trail from Stalingrad Square to St Paul’s.

  Fairweather had initially blended in with the sightseers, gawping at the Admiralty Arch as if he’d never seen it from the other side, where tourists and celebrities alike were taken to stare over the Wall. He took a few photographs of the fountains and the great bronze Landseer lions controversially rehabilitated from their exile as imperialist symbols, now nestling by the feet of the great Boudicca-like figure holding aloft a rose symbolising the English Motherland. The symbolism was not wasted on Marchmain: the imperial lions tamed by a replica of the towering Soviet colossus on the Volga.

  Fairweather appeared to be a perfectly standard tourist, up to a point. Occasionally he lingered too long at one spot or another, took too few photographs. Significantly he never once had to be reprimanded by the uniformed beat bobbies used to gently informing visitors that what they called ‘the Wall’ was the state frontier, not a tourist attraction, and definitely not for posing against.

  But there Fairweather had parted company with the usual tourist round. He had shown no interest in the National Gallery, or heading off towards the great damaged dome of St Paul’s. Instead Fairweather had repaired for refreshment, to the Red Lion on Whitehall, the uninviting watering hole whose usual regular company of police regulars, notably taciturn towards outsiders, deterred all but the most determined drinker. He had sat near the window, as if keen not to miss a detail of the capital’s passing pedestrian traffic, and scrutinised with eager anticipation every new arrival. It looked, the early afternoon shift reported at knocking-off time, as if he were waiting for someone.

  Someone who never arrived. By five thirty as the evening shadows began to lengthen over the Embankment, genuine tourists started wondering whether to use up their remaining ‘English pounds’, the E£25 per diem they had been obliged to exchange at the official one-to-one exchange rate, on some of the uninspiring ‘honest English fare’ in one of the state-run Corner House restaurants. But instead of searching out an eating house without a queue or making for a cab back to the checkpoint, and the supposed culinary delights of Westminster, he ambled the hundred metres or so down to the Victory Embankment.

  He looked like nothing so much as ‘some poor bloke stood up by his bird’, one of the more colloquial junior observers had reported. And indeed, it could have been a poignant spot for a lovers’ tryst by the river as the daylight faded. But if Fairweather had come to gaze on the grimy Waterloo sunset he was doing so alone. No one came to meet him as the American stood and smoked his Marlboro on the waterfront, apparently rapt in admiration of the more exotic elements of Norman Shaw’s architectural flourishes on the turrets of New Scotland Yard.

  In fact he had shown a greater than usual interest in one monument on the banks of the Thames, the tank that sat on its pedestal outside New Scotland Yard. Indeed he had gone out of his way to take an artistic photograph of it, from an angle that would have included in the background the Gothic turret that housed the offices of CID. And one corner office in particular, that of Detective Inspector Harry Stark.

  That was when, a little later perhaps the colonel would remark in caustic comments to his surveillance teams, the penny finally dropped. The call to the Barbican had quickly been routed to Marchmain’s office and within seconds an unmarked car with siren sounding and lights flashing was pushing through traffic down Ludgate Hill, along Fleet Street and the Strand. Sirens and lights had been doused by the time it drew up to the faded splendour of the Savoy Hotel’s main entrance, whe
re it delivered four very ordinary-looking members of the public. The porters and receptionists took no notice of them whatsoever as they quickly passed through the down-at-heel grandeur of the public rooms, descending a level en route to the River Entrance, the grand name for the hotel’s back door, where they left again to blend with the stream of nobodies jostling along the Embankment. These were professional nobodies, the crème de la crème.

  They were already there, one buying cigarettes from the kiosk by Charing Cross Tube station, one buried deep in the bus queue on Northumberland Avenue and two shuffling arm-in-arm along the Embankment by the time DI Stark, the crime scene detective from the morning’s incident, instantly recognisable in the same grubby trench coat in which he had made his reluctant cameo appearance on the BBC lunchtime news, emerged, head down like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and plodded in the direction of Charing Cross Tube, with Benjamin T. Fairweather (PIN rapidly upgrading to CN) immediately in ill-concealed pursuit.

  Nobody followed him; the sort of nobody who wore the drab brown suit that defined the lower-ranking apparatchik civil servants who formed the bulk of inner-city commuters, and kept his eyes as blank and unfocused as the rest of them. The second nobody was a youth in the universal jeans and trainers outfit worn by a southerner with good connections or a slightly dowdy Northern tourist kid, who clicked his fingers annoyingly and whistled a poor version of some Merseyside beat anthem. Stark, who might be presumed to have more of an eye for a tail if he were at all suspicious, which he had no obvious reason to be, could not help but notice the shabbily-dressed middle-aged woman who affected a virulent early spring cold. She was, as she put it later with a laugh, ‘right in his face’; certain conspicuous behaviour, she was fond of saying, was even better than invisibility.

  Nobody else was a wet-nosed myopic old man with thick glasses, a flat cap and a grubby scarf pulled right around his neck, who sat seemingly staring into past memories. In fact the only thought that ever distracted him from his duty was the occasional wistful reflection that if a different fate had caused his birth thirty-six years earlier to have occurred a few miles to the west of his Bethnal Green birthplace he might one day have won an Oscar. But there was no such thing as a different fate. Everyone knew that.

  Only in the less crowded streets around the Elephant was there a risk of even the most competent team being too obvious. As they emerged from the Tube, the bronchitic woman duly disappeared into the night, the boy to the news stand, while the old man easily kept up with Stark’s unhurried pace as far as the chip shop where he stopped to stare into the window, deciding it gave him a good opportunity to drop well behind. He was much amused when the detective pressed a coin into his palm but still managed to mutter an appreciative guttural, ‘Thanks comrade’.

  The boy in jeans had watched from a distance as the American followed the detective into The Rose, before walking on to the phone box on the corner. The man in the brown suit had followed Harry’s normal routine, changing to the Northern Line and emerging at Borough he picked up the duty Sputnik and Marchmain’s instructions from the Department branch office.

  He had been on spot, parked within sight of the Rose exit before the boy, who had lit up and given every impression of settling in to ring a series of girlfriends, left the phone box.

  When the policeman left, the watcher let him go. He was for the moment at least a secondary target. They knew where he lived. Fairweather came out of the pub only a few minutes later, at least a minute longer than he obviously felt comfortable with to judge from the pathetically furtive and clearly panicky way he scanned the streets before deciding which way Stark had gone.

  The watcher watched, faintly amused at their pas-de-deux in the all but deserted dark wet streets. He waited until Fairweather had turned the corner before he started up the engine, then drove around the block doing a quick pass in the opposite direction, and parked at the distant end. Engine off, lights out.

  He watched from afar the altercation in the doorway with a wry smile. DI Stark had behaved almost as exactly as he would have done himself. Obviously a man who favoured a ‘hands-on’ approach. Whatever was going down, it appeared, was not a pre-arranged rendezvous. He watched however with greater interest when Harry Stark picked up the man whose head he had threatened to blow off, and then, apparently, invited him to his home. On the colonel’s express order, crackling over the radio, he waited until the pair had crossed the road and turned the corner. From the moment the two men had set off together their destination had been obvious. But just because something was obvious did not make it comprehensible. And it certainly did not make it acceptable.

  He was unsurprised therefore when the order came through to position himself with a clear view of the front door and remain there, with instructions to report any development. By then he was envying his colleagues, imagining they might have been released from duty. Though he was not surprised the following day to be told that that had not been the case, that in fact another team had been called in to watch the streets around, the alleyways, back gardens and any other way in which someone could leave the little house in Pankhurst Street without being spotted.

  Benjamin T. Fairweather had been given his rope, a lot of it, and now it remained only to be seen if he would hang himself with it, even if that was an unfortunate turn of phrase under the circumstances.

  Chapter 16

  ‘What the hell do you think you mean by that?’

  One moment Harry Stark had been sitting with his head on one hand smoking the best cigarette he had tasted in years and listening to a man he should consider an enemy of the people pretend to solve a murder case for him. The next he was on his feet glaring down furiously at an arrogant liar he suddenly wished he’d gone ahead and shot dead when the bastard mugged him an hour ago.

  ‘Hey, easy on,’ said the American, just sitting there, his own cigarette glowing between the finger of his outstretched hand as if he had just said the most reasonable thing in the world rather than spat on scared ground.

  Stark’s memories of his father were complex, a mix of youthful hero-worship and posthumous disillusion in the old man’s ideals. A cruel blow of fate had taken his father away from his family just when they needed him most. All that was left was his memory and his status as a hero in the society he had helped rebuild after the most devastating war in world history. And that was a private history that no jumped-up Yankee journo was going to rewrite to his own rule book.

  ‘Come on, Harry,’ the American continued, as if he hadn’t noticed the seething expression on the face of the man whose world he had tried to shatter from within. ‘I’m just trying to treat you like an equal human being.’

  ‘Don’t give me that crap!’ Stark barked, more angry than he had expected. ‘I don’t know what your game is, or who your missing person is or was. And I don’t need to listen to any more of this. You follow me in the streets, then lure me with some tease about something that in no way concerns you, spin me a yarn about espionage and then try to tie my private life into it. Whatever game you think you’re playing, it’s over. You’re leaving. I should have arrested you for prowling.

  ‘And,’ he glanced theatrically at his watch, ‘you’re about to be in breach of your visa regulations.’

  The afterthought sounded slightly ridiculous, Stark realised as he uttered it, though it was almost certainly true.

  The American stayed where he was, but his eyes narrowed as he looked up through a swirl of smoke. For more than a second Stark was sorely tempted to smash his fist into the man’s all-too complacent face. Instead, he gestured abruptly upwards with a single finger, little caring if the American misinterpreted it:

  ‘Come on. Up. Out.’

  Fairweather didn’t move. He shook his head gently, almost imperceptibly from side to side, like someone comforting an ailing relative, and said in a calm, quiet voice:

  ‘My God, Harry, you didn’t know? I mean, you really don’t know?’

  ‘W
hat I know is bullshit when I hear it. And I’ve heard just about enough of it …’ He made to grab the American by the collar.

  ‘Wait a minute, please, Harry, just a minute.’ The tone had suddenly changed. ‘Hear me out, just a second, please, then if you want, I’ll go. I’m sorry, I really am. I thought … I thought you would have known; I thought everyone knew, and just pretended not to. It never occurred to me …’

  ‘What?’ Stark snapped.

  ‘That …’ Fairweather sighed, tired or exasperated, it was hard to tell. ‘Harry, please, sit down again. Give me just five minutes, please. And then, if you want, if you’ll let me, I’ll be gone and you’ll never see me again.’

  Stark sat down, wondering as he did, why he was doing what he was told in his own home. But there was something in the American’s tone, something in the way the man’s eyes behind his mangled spectacles searched for Stark’s and then rapidly left them.

  ‘Harry, how do you think your father died?’

  ‘I don’t think. I know …’

  The American nodded rapidly in hasty acquiescence. ‘Just tell me.’

  Stark closed his eyes. ‘A heart attack. Nearly nineteen years ago. On duty. I remember. You don’t forget something like that, you know, losing your father as a teenage boy. I cut out the obituary, from New Times, for my mother. We made a scrapbook. He was a hero,’ and then, as if the term needed elucidation, ‘a socialist hero.’

  Fairweather had extinguished his cigarette and was rolling the stub between his fingers at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘He was a hero all right,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry but I don’t think I need to listen to anything you can tell me about my father.’

  ‘Don’t you, Harry? Are you sure?’ The American had reached into the depths of his overcoat and once again produced the bulging wallet, rooted in it for a second and produced a small square of paper that he handed across without a word.