The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill Read Free

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 morecolour. 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