The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  September 17, 1970 was the date that had been scrawled in the margin of the cutting the American had given him.

  He filled out a form for the first time in his life to gain access to the organs of the ideological enemy: the New York Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Telegraph. In his mind he already envisaged the carbon copy of his request making its way that very evening in a sealed envelope to the Department of Social Security’s Barbican headquarters, his file being called for, amended. And marked ‘for action’? He wondered how long it would take before the inevitable interview followed. Not long.

  For balance, or a semblance of it, he ordered New Times for the same date, and also for 23 September, the day after his father’s funeral and the date of publication of the obituary he had tearfully cut out for the special memorial scrapbook he had made for his mother, for all of them. Then for safety, he bracketed the 17th for the New York Times and applied for the 18th and 19th too in the Northern papers. For today’s papers he restricted himself to the main Westminster rags. Even so, altogether it made nineteen forms. He passed them over the counter to the flabby-handed clerk who took them without a word.

  For the next forty minutes, Stark sat at one of the tables and studiously ignored the day’s copy of New Times that he had brought with him to pass the anticipated time waiting for the papers he really wanted to read. Instead, he leaned back and let his eyes drink in the splendour of the great dome, its windowed segments meeting like those of an orange in the circular skylight at the apex. It was like looking at a formalised, manmade recreation of the sky itself, with the pastel blue highlighted by the lines of gold that marked the segments.

  What must it have been like when it was new nearly a century and a half ago, the Victorian gold leaf still glinting in the sun? Karl Marx would have been one of the first to use it. Had he too been tempted to lean back and look at this magnificent display of bourgeois opulence in the service of learning, or had he just kept his head down and got on with Das Kapital? The idea that Lenin should have studied there too was one of those coincidences that inspire belief in fate. But then so had Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling, the heroic-sentimental bard of empire.

  Stark was still lost in his historical daydream when the surly clerk called him over.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit of a problem with your requests.’

  ‘What sort of a problem?’

  ‘They’re missing.’

  ‘Missing? I thought you had a copy of every … Are you telling me someone has lost part of your archive.’

  ‘I didn’t say lost. I said missing. All of them.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  The clerk shrugged and gave Stark a distinctly sceptical look. ‘Really? I thought someone in your position would understand. Things don’t get lost here. But that doesn’t mean they are available.’

  Stark stared hard at the man, as if reluctant to take in what he was telling him. What was rapidly becoming painfully obvious.

  ‘If something from the archive is missing. Unavailable.’ The man was talking to him as if to a particularly dim child. ‘It usually means someone else has requisitioned it. On the orders of one or other government department.’

  The emphasis on the last word made it clear that there was only one ‘department’ under consideration.

  Chapter 21

  Benjamin T. Fairweather crossed his legs and leaned back in the elegant Regency armchair, rocking the antique dangerously on its spindly rear legs. One of the things he liked about staying at the Dorchester was the olde worlde atmosphere, the feeling of being in Europe but a Europe that worked, rather than the grey and dreary inefficiency that communism had spread across the mainland.

  He smiled as he picked up his early edition of the London Evening Standard. A hovering waiter replenished his tea, the line reached by the hot, dark liquid clearly visible through the fine bone china of the cup. Fairweather smiled and nodded. He knew when a man was angling for a tip. Even at the Dorchester.

  He liked London, this bit of it anyhow. He liked that unique mix of old world style and conspicuous consumption. He admired the sheer chutzpah of the place, the way West Londoners carried on as if they were still the heart of an empire instead of an isolated enclave in an occupied country. He admired the way they threw money about like there was no tomorrow, even if it was American money. One way or another. This was Uncle Sam’s showcase in Europe. That meant big bucks and big Buicks. Parked alongside the Bentleys and the Rolls Royces, impudent signs of affluence ready to be compared with the crappy little Sputniks on the other side of the Wall. Tanks on the enemy’s lawn.

  The locals knew how to milk it for all it was worth, saved from the fate of their fellow citizens by a last-ditch armistice – when the Red Army had already swallowed half their country, south of a line from the Avon to the Wash, save for that isolated enclave around the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, defended by US troops under orders to fight to the death. The history books recorded that the nuclear standoff, implemented overnight when the Russians successfully tested their own atomic device, had sealed the status quo. A snapshot of a war in its closing stages, frozen in time forever. Or for at least the past four decades. Appropriately enough nicknamed the ‘Cold War’.

  From his table in the elegant, dining room of the Dorchester with its great bowed bay windows at treetop level Fairweather could watch the smart cars jostle with the panoramic tourist buses in the rush-hour traffic buildup along Park Lane. To the sharp-eyed observer, there was another side of London on show too, the side the communist propaganda machine tried to play up as exploitation whereas anyone with a brain knew it was just the free market in action. Sex was a commodity like any other. He had no doubt that worked the same on the other side too: except over there access was a question of status rather than price. One way or another, those who toed the line and played the game reaped the rewards. Though Fairweather had no doubt which side of his bread he preferred buttered.

  From his current, ostentatiously impeccable position he was ideally situated to observe one of West London’s less salubrious evening rituals: the dusk shift-change of the whores in Hyde Park. The chic, high-heeled ladies of the night with their fox furs and thigh-slit Burberry trenchcoats, were coming on duty, replacing the day shift’s motley crew now strutting blank-faced and surprisingly straight-legged towards the Tube and their suburban child-minders. The Burberries were almost an item of uniform, mostly worn with nothing underneath.

  He wondered, fleetingly, what the ‘day-girls’ earned, dropping their drawers behind bushes or on the back seats of Jeeps for GIs as famously oversexed as the generation over here before them, and even more overpaid. The West London US garrison, with its inner-city Kensington barracks and the crowded airbase centred on the suburban Heathrow airstrip, was his country’s biggest outpost in alien territory. West London – ‘Westminster’ as the commies called it, in their comic quaint pretence that it was and always had been a separate city – was the showpiece of how freedom, democracy and the capitalism that provided the riches which contrasted with the impoverished oppression of a supposedly egalitarian police state.

  Fairweather turned his attention to the paper. The Evening Standard, like its stablemate the Daily Express, prided itself on being an institution. No, more than that, an institution with a mission. A mission from God. Both papers carried a stencilled image of a red crusader alongside the masthead, an indication that they were not just chronicles but ideological warriors. The owner of both papers, the late Lord Beaverbrook, had been a fervent admirer of the British empire, and one of the last to acknowledge – if indeed he ever had – that its days might be numbered. Or over. Since the outbreak of war in 1939 the crusader had been in chains, at first to symbolise the travail or conflict but for decades assumed – as intended – to represent the ‘enslavement of our brothers’ on the other side of the Wall. The Beaverbrook ‘stable’ unashamedly preached ‘reunification of the United Kingdom’, as if recent history ha
d never happened, as if there was still a ‘kingdom’ or ‘queendom’ or whatever they wanted to call it, instead of the truncated, identity-challenged ‘British Commonwealth’, with its capital in Durham, and its fractious federation with the constituent elements of Northern England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

  The Beaverbrook paper never asked the nationality of the men who, under whatever coercion, had built the Wall, erected barbed wire and automatic weapons along the frontier and shot those of their fellow citizens who voted with their feet against the ‘common good’ of socialism. The Express, and those West Londoners who read it, thought – when they thought at all, Fairweather reflected – of the ‘other side’ in terms of occupation, rarely of collaboration. At most they preferred to think of a small communist elite who had sold out and ‘kidnapped’ their fellow citizens. It was a point of view, like any other. And Fairweather was more aware than most people that points of view could be what defined the world.

  The waiter approached again and made for the silver teapot, but the American held up a hand. Tea made him pee.

  ‘No thanks,’ he said, and then added, as if an afterthought, considering that after all a little celebration might be in order: ‘Do you know, what I really would like is a glass of champagne.’

  The waiter, doing the habitual twenty per cent gratuity calculations in his head, beamed his approbation of transatlantic largesse: ‘Certainly, sir. Napa or Sonoma?’

  The American waved his hand expansively.

  ‘Whatever. We’re in London. You guys are in charge.’

  The waiter gave him a thin-lipped smile in return. You had to hand it to them; waiters always knew the real odds. Then he dismissed the man from his thoughts and turned them back to Harry Stark. He wondered how he was getting on. After all, he expected a lot of him. A lot more than the detective knew.

  Chapter 22

  St Paul’s Cathedral in the rain cut a desolate spectacle. Stark still retained an image of the great baroque dome, bigger than any in what once was Christendom save St Peter’s in Rome, floating ethereally above the smoke and flame of the Blitz, a photograph he had found in his father’s wardrobe, clipped from the front page of some wartime newspaper.

  He had meant to ask the old man about it, but had never quite got around to it mainly because he could not think of an easy explanation for poking around in his father’s things in the first place. Now he only wished he had done it more. The photograph had gone by the time he and his mother sorted out the old man’s things after his sudden death.

  The photograph, he knew, had to have been taken during the first phase of the war, when the capitalist government played up an imaginary image of such a national landmark’s invulnerability. In reality the cathedral had been hit several times, though only by minor incendiary bombs that had been extinguished quickly by fire crews who had been ordered to ignore damage to people’s homes to preserve this great symbol of empire and religion. To prove God was on their side. At least that was how Stark had been taught it in school.

  The cathedral had not been so lucky the second time around when the Junkers and Heinkels had been replaced by MiGs and Antonovs. God had thrown in the towel. The apse had suffered a direct hit, the altar itself shattered by falling debris, the interior scorched by a fire that raged for nearly two days. That the great dome itself had survived was indeed something of a miracle, though due more to Wren’s architecture than the will of God: a glancing blow from a Soviet howitzer shell had left a crack nearly ten metres long in which, thanks to some wind-blown or seagull-dropped seeds, a scrappy pine tree had managed to take root. Its straggly branches dipped disconsolately in the rain, like some frayed feather in a mad monk’s headdress.

  Stark looked instinctively up at the clock on the tower. The hands pointed to twenty past four, as they had, he realised with a bitter laugh, for the past forty years. Right twice a day, as they said. His own watch told him the right time was 1.45 p.m. He was late, but only just. After his tellingly futile search in the Reading Room, he had decided he had little choice but to follow the American’s other lead. A quick call from the phone box on the corner of Great Russell Street to the cathedral offices had ascertained there was indeed a deputy churchwarden called Michael McGuire. It was he who answered the phone. The man seemed cagey, but then people often did when rung up out of the blue by a policeman. Stark said only that he wanted to have a face-to-face chat, gave no details. But when he gave his full name the man’s tone changed, the latent hostility suddenly dissolving. He would be available during his lunch hour between one and two, he said, adding cryptically, ‘Upstairs. Ignore the sign.’

  Stark hurried the last few metres up Ludgate Hill past the statue of Lenin on the round pedestal before the cathedral steps. Once upon a time there had been a queen there. Victoria or Elizabeth, Stark had supposed, until Kate told him it had been Anne. Stark hadn’t remembered an Anne. The great doors at the front, intended by Wren for use on royal occasions, were as ever closed. Stark had never seen them open. He walked round to the south side and pushed open the wicket gate set in the scarred wooden portal.

  It was uncannily quiet. The cathedral nave was used as a practice or performance venue by music groups, playing anything from Shostakovich to Tchaikovsky. The party liked to boast of its sponsorship of culture, always providing, of course, that the culture in question had been previously approved. Although still in theory consecrated and available for religious use, St Paul’s was in reality primarily used as a concert venue. Stark had vague memories of his father bringing him to hear a performance of the Nutcracker Suite, by the Woolwich Working Men’s Symphonia. He remembered the architecture more than the music.

  Even now the building impressed him, not just the scale but the relics it retained of a past otherwise consigned to oblivion. Around the walls, rain-streaked and soot-blackened, great sculpted chunks of marble statuary recreated in pseudo-classical heroic mode the last moments or noble poses of an entombed military aristocracy. It could have been Thebes or Karnak transported from the desert shores of the Nile to the soggy banks of the Thames. Even the names of these dead captains of empire interred around him had an eerie resonance as powerful as that of any pharaoh: Gordon of Khartoum, Nelson of the Nile, Wellington, the Iron Duke, his great black catafalque gathering dust and smeared with dirt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Like his father. Like Martin Bloom. Like himself one day. One day all too soon if he was not careful.

  Here and there a few tourists, whose accents and designer clothing suggested they came from up North, but also a tour party of French trades unionists, identifiable by the Compag-nie Touristique des Syndicats Socialistes placard held aloft by their guide, wandered around talking amongst themselves and stopping for the occasional photograph. Unsurprisingly Wellington’s tomb was the greatest draw for the Frenchmen. They wanted to make sure he was dead.

  But of church personnel, secular or spiritual, there was little sign. A pool of water on the floor under the dome could have done with some attention, but there was no sign of a caretaker, or churchwarden, just a yellow plastic sign that said ‘Wet Floor’. Stark needed someone to ask what constituted ‘upstairs’. He assumed some sort of administration offices, though it seemed unlikely these would be anywhere but on the ground floor. The door marked Sacristy was locked. But there was a woman with thick glasses and a worn cardigan sitting reading a knitting magazine behind the desk of a dowdy little souvenir shop by the door. Stark approached her gingerly. She seemed unwilling to be distracted from her reading material. It was clearly a long time since anyone had purchased any of her wares, which was hardly surprising seeing as they extended only to a few black-and-white postcards showing the cathedral in the immediate aftermath of the war, with the red flag flying from the damaged dome, and a well-thumbed book on the works of Sir Christopher Wren.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. The woman paid him no attention. Stark was tempted to produce his warrant card but thought better of it. Under the circumstances. ‘I’m look
ing for Michael McGuire.’ No reaction, beyond a slightly dismissive glance over the top of her almost opaque spectacles. ‘He said I’d find him “upstairs”. Do you know where that might be.’ The woman looked up, considered Stark as if he were some village idiot and then nodded, upwards towards the great concave expanse of Wren’s dome, and pointed to a door in the wall opposite. As Stark turned towards it, she added, ‘It’s closed.’ And went back to her reading.

  Stark walked across to the door. It was open. But a sign placed centrally in the doorway said in large faded letters, ‘Whispering Gallery. 259 steps. No lift.’ Another sign, newer with more legible lettering, was hung over it, proclaiming: ‘Strictly No Admittance. Loose Masonry.’ Stark turned and looked back at the woman by the kiosk who despite her warning was showing no interest in him whatsoever, then up into the great void of the dome. And sure enough, there was someone up there. A figure just distinguishable beyond the balustrade. For a moment Stark was tempted to call out to him, to tell him to come down. Then he looked around at the milling dozen or so tourists and realised how ridiculous that was. The man was clearly mad, or paranoid, or both, but there was no alternative. He pushed past the sign and with a sigh he took in the ‘259 steps. No Lift.’ Started up, instinctively reverting to a habit of his childhood, and counting: ‘One, two, three …’

  Chapter 23

  Harry Stark was panting heavily. He had not realised quite how unfit he was. He had started almost at a run but slowed to a veritable policeman’s plod after the first 150 steps. They were low, to be sure, wooden, but dark and cluttered with bits of rubble and abandoned tools, here a brush, there a chisel. The restoration work on St Paul’s had been going on for the best part of forty years and by the rate of progress it would be at least another forty before it was anywhere near finished.