The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (10 page)

The architecture alone was intimidating, Harry Stark thought as he walked along Great Russell Street. Even in the slanting rain that slicked the uneven cobbles of the courtyard the great fluted Doric columns, black with decades of encrusted soot and grime, looked less than welcoming. Only the presumption of global imperialism could ever have given the name ‘British’ Museum to one of the greatest collections of antiquities plundered from across the entire planet.

Was it possible that this was where he would find evidence to support the American’s outrageous challenge to everything he believed … in? He hesitated over the final preposition even as he asked himself the question. Was it really everything he believed
in
, or just everything he believed. Weren’t they the same thing anyway? Or were they?

The last time Harry Stark had been inside the Museum of Humanity, as it had been renamed in 1950, was as a child when his father had taken him to see what the old man had called ‘the mummies and the marbles’. Even then he could not believe such a sinister-looking building could contain such marvels: the graceful snow-white athletes with their rippling muscles and stretched tendons, the straining horses with flaring nostrils. The board next to the sculpture explained how this was one of the finest examples of socialist realism in art dating back to the ancient world and the first great popular democracy. The postscript read: ‘Loaned in perpetuity from the Hellenic People’s Republic.’

Young Harry had stared in wonder, impressed that all
his teacher had told him was true: that great art was indeed heroic like the official painters of the Republic whose depictions of sturdy Kentish farmers or Dagenham car workers adorned every public building. Rather than the decadent art from up North, the homosexual Hockney, with his endless swimming pools, and the pseudo-proletarian Lowry whose stick men were a calculated insult to the working class.

He had said as much to his father and the old man had simply smiled and patted him on the head. Now, crossing that bleak portal for the first time since, the adult Harry wondered what his father had really thought. Had he believed the official commentary or had he seditiously thought all along what Harry himself had only recently come to suspect: that there was not a direct line of artistic evolution from the Parthenon marbles to the Heroes of Dagenham. Could the old man have secretly thought the government-sponsored art to be as lifeless as the empty Egyptian sarcophagi?

But it was not in the museum itself that he intended to look for the answer to a question he had never imagined asking, but in the separate institution it contained, the fabled Reading Room housed in its heart. The Marx-Lenin Reading Room, named for the two great communist thinkers who had elaborated their theories in this very room, had rights to a copy of every book printed in what had once been the United Kingdom until 1949 and the English Democratic Republic since. Entrance was reserved for scholars only, and senior, politically reliable ones at that. But subsidiary regulations also allowed access by members of the state’s security services.

Stark believed, although he had yet to test it, that that definition could be stretched to include the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. He had thought about
putting on uniform for the occasion but decided he was not going to let himself be browbeaten by the system into behaving like one of its petty peacocks. In any case, he no longer had one that fit.

‘Next please.’ A large gruff woman with dyed auburn hair beckoned Stark brusquely forward. The inevitable portraits of the two great thinkers glared down at him from the oak-panelled wall, with Clem Attlee, their honoured disciple, and Arthur Harkness, the EDR’s current heir to their ideology.

Stark walked up to the desk, flipped open his warrant card with its imposing Scotland Yard crest and thumped it down in front of her.

‘Detective Inspector Stark, Metropolitan People’s Police CID. I’m here to research historical information relating to a current case.’

The woman harrumphed, but was visibly taken aback.

‘What case?’ she made a show of residual aggression. Stark was ready for her.

‘I’m afraid you don’t have the clearance to know that,’ he snapped, closing his warrant card and lifting it from the table.

The woman stiffened, then noticeably relaxed, as if somewhere in her regimented hierarchical brainstem a nerve cell had saluted and a ‘stand easy’ order been given.

‘I apologise, Detective Inspector. If I may …?’

Stark gave her another stern look.

‘Your warrant card, sir.’ The woman noticeably wilted. ‘For the log.’ She gestured towards a vast, black imitation leather-bound ledger.

‘Ah, of course.’ Stark produced the card again, laid it down on the desk and watched as the woman opened the heavy tome and made a careful entry in a vast grid of boxes. It
was something he hadn’t counted on. How often did anyone ever go through that list of names? Probably, he sighed internally, more often than he cared to imagine.

The woman looked at the clock between Marx and Lenin and entered the time, 10.32 a.m., next to his name.

‘Please go ahead, Detective Inspector Stark. I am sure the desk clerk will be most pleased to assist the People’s Police.’

Stark nodded with a brief smile, no more than minimally courteous – he did not want to give the impression that he had anything to be grateful for – and pushed open the heavy oak door that led into the Great Reading Room.

He had heard of it, of course, seen pictures probably, though he could not remember where. But nothing prepared him for the reality. Out of the dark, dingy antechamber with its wooden walls, utilitarian carpet and brown-painted ceiling he stepped into an expanse of soaring light and space, a huge circular amphitheatre of book-lined walls beneath a vast dome pierced by high vaulting windows through which even the pallid light of an indifferent English springtime poured like rays from heaven itself. For a moment Stark held his breath in pure wonderment. That the grim neoclassical museum with its austere black columns could have such a jewel of light and clarity at its heart was beyond belief, almost as if the architect of this magical rotunda had deliberately set out to conjure a metaphor in stone for the illumination held on its shelves. Providing, he reminded himself, that it had not been extinguished.

He walked up to the main enquiries desk, a circular structure, as befitted the building, with windows and counters behind which clerks busied themselves with card indexes, book request forms in pink, grey and green, and pile after
pile of the volumes themselves, pre-ordered and awaiting collection. Nothing, of course, could be removed from the Reading Room. That was a rule that had pertained even in Marx’s and Lenin’s day. Books were stored in the kilometres of shelving that surrounded the great circular building, built from ground floor up to just below the level of the windows, filling every inch of what had once been an empty courtyard in the middle of the museum. Those of sufficient status to merit a coveted reader’s card ordered their books at the enquiry desk, collected them there and returned them every evening until they were no longer required. Only reference books and non-fiction were actually stored on the premises, fiction resided in distant outhouses, from where it had to be ordered days in advance.

But Stark was not interested in either weighty works of non-fiction or the purest fantasy, he was interested in the library’s other great collection: ephemera. Newspapers. Only papers of record, of course, were stored, but that included not just
New Times,
the
Guardian
and the
Morning Star
but also pre-war papers and, most jealously guarded of all, papers from the other side, the other England: such blatant purveyors of anti-socialist propaganda as the
Daily Mail,
the
Daily Express
and the
Yorkshire Post
. There were even, Stark was led to believe, copies of the
New York Times
.

He approached the desk. A clerk who might have been a caricature of the breed looked up at him with watery eyes behind thick spectacles and pushed back a lock of hair.

‘Yes, can I help you?’

‘I need copies of foreign newspapers, this morning’s from Westminster. And some older ones too.’

Oh yes, the eyes seemed to say, you do, do you? The mouth said nothing. There was something about him that Stark
instinctively disliked, a sort of subservience that hinted at a concealed sense of superiority.

‘It’s quite important,’ Stark added, as if the man’s expression challenged him to justify himself.

‘I’m sure it is. Now, how old are we talking?’

‘Quite some time. September 1970 to be precise.’

‘Well, if you know what you are looking for, and the precise dates and publications, you can start by filling out one of these forms. One for each publication, that is, and for each date of publication, if you follow me. There are more over there if you need them.’

A flabby, age-spotted hand pushed a handful of pink and yellow forms with flimsies attached for the copies bureaucracy demanded, and gestured behind Stark to a row of benches, with wooden seats and cubbyholes filled with a host of other, similarly colour-coded forms.

Stark took a seat and set to work. He knew what he wanted: first of all to see if the copy of the
New York Times
the American had shown him was genuine, secondly to see if there were other, similar reports in the Northern or Westminster newspapers. Even if he found everything he was – hoping for or dreading? – that did not automatically mean everything the American had told him was true, but at the very least it meant there was another, secret side to his family history.

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.

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 had 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.