The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill Read Free Page B

over the side.
    ‘You all right, sir?’ called an insufferably cheery voice behind him. ‘Yes,’ Stark lied. ‘Fine. Just fine. Carry on, sergeant . You’ve got enough on your hands,’ and he waved Lavery forward towards the abomination dripping onto the deck.
    The bulky, thickset Kentishman grinned and called forward two uniformed constables to take the weight of the obscene object, while the border patrol crewman used a hooked blade on a long pole, used for God only knew what obscure riverine purpose, to saw through the thick rope that held the thing dangling there like some rotted Christmas decoration.
    Stark let a few dangling threads of bitter bile fall into the stinking murk of the river, wiped his mouth and turned to watch them, a grim rictus on his normally placid face. He tried and failed to derive a note of optimism from the first signs of spring greenery on the vegetation growing from within the cracked eggshell of St Paul’s. Opposite, the great monolithic chimney of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s Bankside power station kicked out its own contribution to the spring smog as it struggled to provide the power for a city plagued by brownouts. Somewhere downriver, from one of the hulking Comecon freighters drifting out on the ebb tide from the Russia or East India docks, a ship’s horn sounded, like the cry of some plaintive primeval dinosaur.
    ‘Easy does it, lads,’ called Lavery as the last remaining strands of rope parted and the two constables on the slippery deck took the full strain of the dead weight fallen into their hands. For a second one of them, caught out by the sudden change in equilibrium, lost his footing and slippedto one side. Stark thought that the whole caboodle was going to come crashing down on deck transforming tragedy into farce. But the man righted himself at the last minute, losing only his helmet, which Stark grabbed even as it rolled towards the edge of the deck.
    He picked it up and held it in both hands. It occurred to him that if he had had it earlier, its bulbous shape might have been a tempting receptacle for the meagre contents of his bilious stomach.
    Lavery awkwardly helped the two uniformed men lay the body horizontal on the deck. Stark turned the helmet around in his hands, instinctively giving a quick polish to the familiar enamel badge – the red-on-white cross of St George with the party’s superimposed red rose that marked its owner as an officer of the Metropolitan People’s Police. Once upon a time, when he started out in the force as a lowly beat bobby, he had worn one himself. He handed it back to the constable, who thanked him with just the ghost of embarrassment and put it back on, adjusting the strap around his chin. Propriety restored. We’re still English after all, thought Stark.
    ‘All right, all right,’ called Lavery. ‘Let’s have a look then, shall we?’
    Stark nodded, though the question had been rhetorical and directed to the two constables. Lavery was already grappling with the rope, trying to loosen its grip around what they assumed to be a human neck. The blood oozed on either side of it, in crimson bubbles. Stark looked away.
    ‘No good, sir. I shall have to cut through the sacking.’
    ‘Whatever you have to, sergeant. Whatever.’
    They both knew there was no point. Whatever – whoever, Stark corrected himself – this gruesome parcel containedwas already dead. The real work would be for the pathologist . But they had to be sure. If there was any chance …
    ‘There we go. Oh, bloody hell …’
    Lavery had used one of the constables’ standard police-issue Red Army knives to slice through the sacking and reveal a human face. Or something that had once resembled one. Of the facial features themselves there was almost nothing left: just a mass of seared and torn tissue where eyes and nose should have been, as if it had exploded from within.
    Even from where he stood, Harry Stark knew he had never seen anything like it in his life. But