The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill

by Peter Millar

Genres: World War II; Dystopian

Synopsis

The year is 1949 and the Allied Powers' advance on Moscow in the wake of Nazi defeat has failed. As Stalin's tanks rumble through the streets of London, Winston Churchill decides to put an end to his life. Fast forward to 1989 and England is divided between the Soviets and the Americans, with the capital split in two. Metropolitan People's Police detective Harry Stark is called to investigate a corpse found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge. An American infiltrator tells him the body is linked to a dissident plot involving Churchill's notorious suicide...

Release date: October 1, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

Downing Street, London, September 1949

 

The house that sat at the heart of the world had no name, just a number like any other. And had long since been reduced to rubble. Like every other. War was the real great leveller. But even in destruction the semblance of similarity between this house and any other was false.


From the centre of a global web of countless colonies, domains and dependencies, a local filigree network spread beneath the ground. Beneath the fallen masonry, the eighteenth-century brickwork that had crumbled into dust, the shards of marble from staircases and fireplaces, emerging from what once had been cellars for wine and coal, a labyrinth of debris-littered tunnels still survived, leading like a choked artery to the crippled body politic’s residual nerve centre, which stubbornly still functioned even though its life support system was slowly, surely, failing.


Even here the dust permeated; the last tangible traces of grandeur ground to grit stuck to the skin and irritated the eyes. Dust to dust. The old man closed his eyes to shut out reality. But he could not shut out the noise, though it was more felt than heard: a dull, persistent rumbling, broken by intermittent juddering thuds. As if the earth was shaking. As well it might.


All eyes were on him, if only surreptitiously. In the specially designed, one-piece, grey pinstriped ‘siren suit’ that he referred to as his ‘rompers’, he had so long resembled a big, bumptious, cigar-puffing baby. But not any more. He looked shrunken, wizened, as though he had surrendered at last, if only to his years. He no longer paced, not even with the aid of his stick, but emerged from his sleeping quarters to stalk the Map Room sombrely, oblivious to the flickering light from the caged safety light that with every advancing shock wave swayed above his head like on the deck of a ship in a storm.


The telephone lines were silent now, the red, white and black on the centre table no longer linked their attendant lieutenant colonels to distant command centres that had long since collapsed. In the radio room pretty girls with drawn faces and tremblingly rigid upper lips, eavesdropped on the end of the world: a high-pitched, scratchy, chimpanzee chatter of distant voices interspersed with crackle and the soaring, dipping banshee howl as they chased up and down the frequencies for the ghosts on the airwaves. In an ever more alien ether. Tortuously twisted hairclips beside the mugs of half-drunk, cold, weak tea testified to the terrible tension that gnawed at their innards.


Occasionally, increasingly rarely, contact would be made. And held. Sometimes, only sometimes, the voices in the ether asked for orders. The answer they were given was always the same. The same as it had been for days now: ‘Hold on as long as you can.’ No one dared address the follow-up: ‘And then?’ Just as no one dared approach the old man. The rule had, in any case, always been ‘speak when you’re spoken to’. And he hadn’t spoken now for more than twenty-four hours. The man famed for holding forth for hours on end, with no more audience than a pet dog, had been reduced to a sinister silence. At least in what passed for public.


In recent days he had retired only rarely to the little bed in his cramped quarters off the Map Room, armed as ever
with whisky, though even that was now in short supply. The champagne had long gone, the empty magnums of Pol Roger a mocking memory of better times. He slept, if at all, for no more than an hour or two at a time, emerging, glass in hand, to stare at the ‘big board’, watching bleakly as one piece after another was removed. Like a giant chess game. An endgame.


Except that while the enemy had been playing chess, he had been playing poker. Bluffing to the end. He had taken the big gamble, and seen the cards fall against him, just as they had done more than thirty years ago at Gallipoli, on the Turkish coast. In another war. Another lifetime. Lady Luck favoured those who dared, he had believed. But Lady Luck was just another tart. All he had got was the quick fuck. And now it was his back against the wall. He almost smiled at the coarse metaphor, but the time for smiles was past. As was the time for metaphors.


Fine phrases had not been enough. The blood had run dry. The sweat had been wasted, the toil in vain. There was nothing left but the tears. He had been defeated on the beaches, defeated on the landing grounds, defeated in the fields and in the streets. He, and those who had put their trust in him.


On the wall next to his bed the great map of the British Isles, with its shoreline, cliffs and beaches colour-coded according to their defensiblity, was defaced with the string and pins that charted the inevitable encroachment of the red tide.


In the Map Room itself the great geophysical charts that had once allowed him to watch his erstwhile allies’ expansion from the depths of the steppes to Berlin and beyond had been torn down long before they became his enemies and reached the English Channel. The scale had changed by then; the global had become personal. The map now was one with which he had been familiar all his life – the map of London – one on which he had hoped he would never have to play the terrible game of war, let alone see his playing chips reduced to this. The markers with the familiar emblems of proud regiments represented little more than remnants, huddled together like sheep in a pen.


He could barely bring himself to think of the reality they represented, the reality above his head: London’s familiar streets transformed into a battleground with bus shelters turned into barricades, taxi ranks become tank traps, the last ditch defenders – little more than boys some of them – crouching with bazookas behind Regency balustrades and East End dustbins, from Peckham to Piccadilly, in burnt-out pubs and the smoking remains of Pall Mall clubs. All equal at last, in their final hours.


With a brusque, angry gesture he swept the markers away.


The old man took the smouldering stub of his fat Havana cigar reluctantly from his mouth and ground it out on the fine-tooled leatherwork of his desk. Then he stood for a moment transfixed by the sight of the crumbling ash. Ashes to ashes. Like the taste in his mouth. His heart was heavy as he took down the Sam Browne belt and the holstered semi-automatic Colt that had served him so well. He knew what he had to do. There was only one way out now.


The girls on the silent switchboard peeked out silently as he pulled on his khaki greatcoat and his peaked cap. Then, leaning heavily on his stick, he made for the door that he had not used for nearly three weeks. The door that led upstairs, to the world above, to Armageddon.


One of the girls made to go and help him, but her colleague held her back with a restraining arm and tears in her eyes. No, her look said, though like the rest of them she said nothing. If words failed even him, what could anyone else say? Let him go, her eyes said. To do what he has to do. It’s over. For all of us. Nonetheless, the girl got up to go and wash her face, to dry her tears.


Behind the eyes that held back tears, there was, for the first time, also fear. They had heard the stories, of the butchery, the wanton savagery and the wholesale rape. Of the women in Dover, Hastings and Brighton who had blackened their faces with coal dust, dressed in drab overcoats and pulled their grandfathers’ darned woollen socks over their legs. And still had not been spared.


As the old man passed them, those he was leaving to their own fate, he wondered if he ought to make a gesture, to say goodbye. But he no longer knew how to face them. He prayed they would escape the worst, though he doubted it.


Disguises would do him no good. His face was familiar the world over. Even in the benighted ranks of the ignorant enemy. He let his hand reach inside the greatcoat, settle on the familiar pistol grip. Then he turned the handle on the reinforced steel door and took the first step on the staircase that led up to what was left of the world, and to his own appointment with destiny.


And those that watched him go, or for form’s sake pretended not to notice, knew that what they were witnessing was a death. Not the death of a man – what was one more amid so many? – but of an empire. And an era. From now on there would be a new world order.


Already the world above looked changed beyond
recognitions,
a world turned on its head. His tired, bloodshot eyes blinked beneath the weary wrinkled lids and smarted from the cordite in the acrid air. A cacophony assaulted his ears, of screaming sirens, howling aircraft engines, the staccato chatter of distant machine-gun fire and the dull oppressive persistent percussion of artillery. Closer to hand, he could hear the mechanical screech of cogs and cranks that hauled heavy armour across the fallen brickwork and shattered Portland stone facades, the T-34s and the new, monstrous Stalin tanks, remorselessly grinding their way over the ruins. Coming closer by the moment.


Stumbling, frightened – he admitted it to himself as he would have done to no one else – he peered through the dust-choked air past the remnants of Downing Street to the ruins of


Whitehall, then turned his gaze in the other direction. Winston Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the Treasury, 41st Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Commander-in-Chief of imperial forces drawn from five continents, the man who had once boasted that the British empire and its Commonwealth might last a thousand years, wiped a tear from his eye. As he stumbled towards what had once been the green oasis of St James’s Park, its trees long since felled for firewood, he hefted the weighty revolver in his hand. He knew he no longer had a choice.


Behind the plinth of the Clive statue, peering over the toppled bronze statue of the empire’s first great hero, the insignificant little figure, with her woolly hat and tear-streaked cheeks could not believe her eyes but the image remained imprinted on her retinae forever.


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 P. . .