The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

  Chapter 26

  At his desk in New Scotland Yard, Detective Sergeant Dick Lavery scratched his head and let his eyes wander out across the river to the great chimney of Bankside power station belching out black smoke in the distance.

  He was not a man who involved himself much in politics. He believed, even more than his boss, that being a policeman was about the simple business of keeping the peace, nicking thieves and solving crimes. Ordinary, everyday crimes, not ‘political crimes’ whatever those might be. He knew, just as everyone his age knew, there were things you didn’t say, not because they were right or wrong, but because that wasn’t the way the world worked.

  There were tramlines. And as long as you ran along them, life ran smoothly enough. Try to deviate, to follow a route the tramlines didn’t run along and you crashed. Simple as that. Your career got derailed. Fast. He had heard people say it was different up North, or in America. But Dick Lavery had never been up North, and nor had anyone in his family. And as for America, well that was another continent, an ocean away. About as accessible as Mars.

  And in any case he was by no means sure things were as different as all that. He knew all about the McCarthy business in America back in the 1950s. He had learned about that in school. America had its ‘dissidents’ too: people who believed in the socialist system. What had happened to them? They had been hounded. People who admitted to being communists could end up in jail, and if not, then certainly out of work. In fact, anyone could be suspected of ‘left-wing’ leanings, even the rich and famous, the big stars of Hollywood. People famous all over the world could be hauled up in front of a committee, little better than a kangaroo court, accused of ‘un-American activities’.

  Those who were found ‘guilty’ could expect never to work again. Was it that different really? Even those who talked – and Lavery did not know many – about them having a ‘freer’ system up North admitted that the McCarthy period – named for the American senator who had spearheaded the witch-hunt – had been a ‘mistake’. But there were people on this side who admitted ‘Uncle Joe had made a few mistakes’ too. No, Lavery knew only one thing about that sort of stuff: it was a kettle of worms and one he was not going to lift the lid on, if he could possibly avoid it.

  Which was why he was in such a despondent mood as he gazed at the chimney of the power station. As far as he was concerned, Winston Churchill was a bogeyman from another generation. Definitely not someone you expected to be involved in a present-day investigation. It was like interviewing a witness in a murder inquiry only to find out it was the ghost in Hamlet. Lavery was quite proud of himself for that little Shakespearean analogy. He hadn’t read much of the great man, but Hamlet had been a set text at school. A great play about the sort of corruption and evil doing that went on in monarchies, if he remembered right. Also a lesson that putting your head above the parapet only made it more likely to get shot off. There were certain things it just didn’t pay to find out. That was what he felt about the current case. It was one for the Department of Social Security and the sooner they took it off the hands of ordinary decent policemen the better.

  Why his boss had all of a sudden taken it into his head to go tearing off to a museum when he had a murder to deal with, even one that really shouldn’t be on their plate at all, was beyond him. Museums were about history. Winston Churchill belonged to history. And as far as Dick Lavery was concerned, history was the past. And the longer it stayed there the better.

  It was precisely at that moment he was rudely dragged into the present. By the shrill ring of the telephone on his boss’s desk. Lavery hauled his increasingly corpulent frame out of his chair and answered it: ‘DI Stark’s phone.’

  The voice on the other end was instantly recognisable. ‘Is the DI there?’

  ‘Due back any moment, sir. Detective Sergeant Lavery here.’ Lavery had only rarely had occasion to converse with Colonel Marchmain of the Department of Social Security, but that had been enough to convince him the best answers to give the man were always those closest to what you guessed he might want to hear.

  For a microsecond Marchmain sounded nonplussed.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, Lavery, can you give him a message. An important one. I think he’ll find it good news.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’

  ‘It’s about the incident. At the cathedral.’

  ‘Incident, sir?’

  ‘Yes. I see you aren’t aware yet. There’s been a death. Most unfortunate business. DI Stark was there, by coincidence I believe. Dare say that’s what’s detained him. Though, as you say, I would expect him back by now.’

  Lavery kept quiet. Another death? Another murder? The more he heard about the events of the last forty-eight hours, the less he wanted to hear.

  ‘Anyway, as I say good news. Although I suppose that’s a rather cynical way of putting it. But I’m sure you appreciate, Detective Sergeant, and I’m sure your boss will appreciate even more that, with your hands full with a murder case, the last thing you need is an extra complication.’

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ said Lavery who had not the faintest idea what the colonel was talking about.

  ‘Anyway just tell Stark, DI Stark, I mean, that the case was brought to my attention very quickly. Given the man’s position in the church, de facto curator of a national monument and all.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said Lavery, his confusion growing.

  ‘Name of McGuire. Michael McGuire. I had my people do some quick background research on the man.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Lavery hoped to God he would never be in a position to discover the DoSS had done ‘quick background research’ on him. It almost certainly meant they had a file going back years.

  ‘Turns out he was a homosexual, you can tell Stark. A right bugger in fact.’ Lavery could hear a snigger in his voice, the sort of conspiratorial innuendo that was intended to make clear this was ‘lads’ talk’. ‘Seems he was rogering another of the clergy and was about to be outed, have his pants pulled down in public by some foreign press busybody. You know how the party looks at that sort of thing. It was going to mean immediate loss of his job and public disgrace. More than the bugger could cope with. His death, therefore, is clearly a case of suicide. Tell Stark he can forget all about it. Got that?’

  ‘Yes sir. A suicide. Forget all about it.’

  ‘Good man.’

  Lavery put down the black plastic receiver, wishing to hell he could forget he had ever picked it up.

  Chapter 27

  The spring storm clouds were rolling over as Stark pushed open the door of the Corner House restaurant on The Strand. He had decided to walk back to the office. He had too much on his mind and walking was something he had done ever since his teens when he needed to clear his head. So far, however, he had not succeeded. And he was hungry. He had swallowed no more than a cup of coffee at breakfast and most of that he had puked over the balustrade.

  A Corner House would not normally have been his first choice but it had the advantage of being there, and being open. The chain had altered little since being introduced as a wartime austerity measure to provide cheap, filling sustenance and the residual morale-boosting illusion of ‘eating out’. He ordered a sausage roll and washed down the doughy pastry and gristle with a cup of weak milky tea. It was not much better than the office canteen, but not much worse either. They probably had the same bulk suppliers from the same government stockpile as they had had in his father’s day.

  His father’s day – all of a sudden the cliché no longer had the same meaning. There was a certain seductive magic in the dream of a truly egalitarian society, but Stark was beginning to wonder if his father too had realised the dream had long since been stifled by a drab monotone mundanity and the blatant abuse of privilege. He cleared away his teacup and walked out, around the corner and into Stalingrad Square. Once named for a different battle in a different war, between old empires, now it bore the name of the great turning point in the Great Peoples’ War. The
few buildings around it, scarred and mutilated, still housed the ghosts of their previous imperial incarnations, the great chiselled letters that spelt CANADA and SOUTH AFRICA still visible through the pockmarks left by shell and shrapnel.

  Stark had seen pictures of the statue of the old one-eyed, one-armed admiral which used to dominate the square but he was so used to Motherland on her plinth that he could no longer imagine it; any more than he could imagine the square crowded with taxis and buses. Today this was nothing more than a turning circle at the end of the Strand, dominated by the neoclassical bulk of the Soviet Embassy that ran along the northern side and had allegedly once been the National Gallery. The Wall ran just behind it, as was so often the case. It had a habit of running behind things, as if scurrying away from prying eyes.

  Only at the edge of the Square had the Wall itself been incorporated into the landscape, running like a whitewashed garden fence across what had once been the busy entry to the gentlemen’s clubland of Pall Mall, now a few ruins on the little visited eastern edge of West London. Around the grandiose isolated monument that was Admiralty Arch, the Wall looped out again, though it was only a few feet high here to allow a view of the uniformed sentries of the English People’s Army who proudly guarded the Anti-Capitalist Protection Barrier. Work was almost completed on the tribune erected in front of it, the porticoes of the gallery adorned with pictures of the ‘four great thinkers’: Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Attlee.

  The American’s depiction of traffic once again streaming through the Arch in both directions was beyond Stark’s powers of imagination. For his entire life the Arch had represented not so much a gateway as a closed door. Beyond it, he knew, an old royal road led through parkland to what had once been a royal palace, but that – like the very idea of royalty itself – seemed something out of another, ancient world.

  Stark had no Latin, but a defence lawyer had told him the shrapnel-scarred letters, still just about visible, carved above the gateway described its dedication to Victoria, Queen and Empress, by her son Edward VII. There was an irony that a monument to monarchy now provided a reviewing point for the Socialist Labour Party leadership to take their annual salute, their rostrum mounted so that they showed their rear ends to the ideological enemy.

  Stark turned left down Whitehall. It was impossible to imagine that the great slabs of government offices on the left had once had alter egos on the right. Now there were just a few nondescript flat blocks, thrown up in the early sixties to house party officials, and of course to hide the Wall that once again ran behind them. The most miraculous survival on Whitehall was the seventeenth-century Banqueting Hall, where King Charles I had been forced to march through the window onto a hastily erected scaffold. A memorial plaque informed visitors that this was where the first, sadly short-lived, English Republic had been born. It was a matter of pride to the Central Committee to remind their French and Russian comrades that the English had killed a king more than a century before it became fashionable in Paris or Petersburg.

  On the other hand, there was nothing whatsoever to indicate where, beneath the great plot of devastation beyond the Wall across the street, somewhere under the earth, lay the remnants of the bunker where the last great drama of the old empire had been acted out. They said the old ogre’s body had been burnt after he cheated the hangman; that there was no last resting place for the truly wicked.

  Out of curiosity, Stark did something he had never done before. He crossed the street to where the Wall itself ran along the scarred edge of the pavement, where once the walls of government buildings had stood. Signs at fifty-metre intervals proclaimed, ‘Warning: State Border’. Yet there was a distinct anonymity to the Wall on this side: a stained concrete structure, little more than two metres high. A tall man might almost stand on tiptoes and look over it, if he was foolish enough to dare. The actual Wall, the one Stark had only seen on Northern television, the one the non-communist world was familiar with, three metres high, graffiti-daubed and topped with concrete curves like giant barrels with a circumference too great to grant human hands a purchase, was at least ten metres away, across a strip of sand laced with barbed wire and constantly patrolled by armed men and dogs. All to stop, so Attlee had said, innocent southern Englanders being seduced by empty greed into becoming wage slaves of the capitalist multinationals.

  Stark had never once thought about crossing the frontier. But he knew more than a few of his fellow citizens, lured more – as Attlee had warned – by the television advertisement-driven images of the consumer lifestyle than by any political philosophy, had done so illegally, or more frequently died in the attempt. The Wall was a draconian – Northern propaganda said ‘inhuman’ – measure to prevent the haemorrhage of a state and a system. It was not an argument Stark had ever been encouraged to have. Not with himself or anyone else. Until now.

  Up ahead of him, on the other side, the battered tower of Big Ben, pockmarked with the craters of howitzer shells, poked its head over like some sinister scarred night watchman. Just in front of Harry a few hardboard hoarding panels, probably surplus material from the stands and backdrops erected for the parade, leaned against the Wall partly obscuring one of the ‘State Border’ signs. Instinctively, the policeman who believed in orderliness over anything else taking command, he pushed them along to reveal it. Only when the sign was completely visible did he notice the red paint next to it, in the unmistakable shape of an elbow.

  With the trepidation born of anticipating the unthinkable he pushed the hardboard panel to one side. And immediately recoiled, stunned by what confronted him. Larger than life in the red paint of the Republic. Winston bloody Churchill himself. Trilby on his head, right hand raised in the trademark V-sign that had become synonymous with savagery. The same image that had been on the note in the murder victim’s pocket. The same image painted on the wall of Bankside power station.

  No, not quite the same. The left hand held a pistol pointed at his head. But beneath it was a question mark.

  Filled with an overwhelming sense of both shock and awe, Stark, in a reflex action, put out his hand to touch it. The paint was still wet.

  Chapter 28

  For the second time that day DS Lavery jumped to his feet at the sight of his boss entering a room. But instead of the turret office they shared in New Scotland Yard, it was the snug bar of the Red Lion on Whitehall. Lavery was wondering how to tell Stark that whatever it was he had accidentally or otherwise walked into this afternoon, the DoSS was determined he should forget it. The Harry Stark he knew was not a man to forget things to order, especially if he thought it was a murder. Especially one he had witnessed himself.

  One look at Stark confirmed his fears. The detective had seen more than one corpse in his career; right now he looked as if he had seen a ghost.

  ‘A beer, now please, and a chaser,’ Stark gabbled out at the barman, who was used to not asking questions of policemen in a hurry. Within seconds there was a pint of Red Barrel and a double vodka on the bar. Stark took a large swallow of the beer and downed the vodka in one. Lavery sensed his job was getting harder by the minute.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. Stark turned, noticing him for the first time. His expression suggested surprise to find his sergeant here rather than at the office. It was only 5 p.m. He had no way of knowing his sergeant had decided he needed a large dose of Dutch courage. To Lavery’s surprise and intense gratification, however, Stark actually seemed glad to see him. But it was the sergeant who found his voice first: ‘I’ve … I’ve got something to tell you.’

  There was a noticeable stammer to his voice. Stark picked up on it.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know,’ and put a hand on Lavery’s sleeve. ‘I’ve just seen it. Unbelievable. Right under our very noses.’

  ‘Sir?’ Lavery wanted to be sure they were talking about the same thing.

  ‘What the hell is going on, Lavery?’

  The sergeant shook his head. The one thing he was sure of was that on that score he had absolutely no id
ea.

  ‘For half a century nobody mentions the old bastard. The initials WC reduced to a toilet joke. A bogeyman dead and buried. Then all of a sudden he’s everywhere. The Yanks are making a film about him, asking God knows what sort of awkward questions that don’t want asking. We find a corpse with its head half-off and a stencil drawing of the bogeyman in its pocket. Then a larger than life-size image, almost identical, appears on Bankside power station. And now there’s one on the bloody Wall itself!’

  ‘What wall? Oh … that wall? You don’t mean?’

  Stark nodded, looking at Lavery as if his sergeant had suddenly lost his wits.

  ‘Right across the bloody road.’ He nodded backwards towards the saloon bar doors. ‘Half covered up with a couple of plywood hoardings. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. It’s …’

  ‘What? You haven’t seen it? I thought …’

  ‘No. I mean, no. I mean I got a phone call. From the Department. Him. That colonel. You know the one, with the posh voice. Marchmain. About something that happened this afternoon. You told me you were going to the museum. But he said something about St Paul’s Cathedral. What happened?’

  Stark narrowed his eyes, looking at Lavery as if he were trying to read the man’s mind. Or remember what was supposed to be on his own.

  ‘What did he say? What did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, nothing much. There was an incident? A …’ he hesitated over the word, ‘a suicide. Right?’