The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill Read Free Page A

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.’

Chapter 3
    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 Paul’s loomed against a morbid yellow sky, still fractured after all these years like the cracked open shell of a bad boiled egg. It was as if the war had ended yesterday rather than forty years ago. The struggle for socialism, it seemed, was never ending.
    The lumpen object hanging from the underside of Blackfriars Bridge, seeping already congealing blood. The cutter heaved to almost immediately beneath it and a crewman dropped anchor. Stark looked up reluctantly. Blood oozed through rough sacking like the pectin his mother squeezed through muslin at jam-making time, and dripped in slow, heavy globules to form a viscous puddle on the rusty deck: reddish brown and slimy, adding its own rich copper and iron aroma to the fetid cocktail of the ambient atmosphere. There was also the unmistakable smell of human faeces.Stark took two swift paces to the port rail and threw up