by H. B. Lyle
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Historical Notes
Acknowledgements
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © H.B. Lyle 2017
The right of H.B. Lyle to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 473 65536 2
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For Annalise
1
Leyton knew something was wrong.
He had a clerk’s eye for detail, for a set of numbers that didn’t quite match. The Underground train lurched and screeched over the points at Portland Road Station. Leyton ducked down and pushed through the crowded carriage, hurrying. ‘Watch it, mate,’ a coarse voice called after him. Someone laughed. Tobacco smoke hung above the nodding heads.
Leyton had seen the two men at Moorgate, their eyes flickering as the train steamed into the platform. He’d turned away but caught sight of a tall, angular thug with an outsized Adam’s apple and shovel hands. Beside the giant stood an ape-like accomplice, dressed in a sailor’s pea coat and a tweed cap. Leyton guessed they had boarded the train, but didn’t wait to find out. The latch between carriages pinched his hand as he forced it open.
‘Careful, dear,’ an old woman called. ‘Wait until the next station.’
He stopped, momentarily thrown by her kindness. The train clanked and clinked and he vaulted into the next carriage, acrid dust and smoke prickling his nose. Glancing back, he could see no sign of his pursuers.
The train rattled into the next station and Leyton took off his hat and mopped his brow, slick despite the December cold, his eyes smoke-stung. His thoughts jumbled and clattered – he suspected he’d seen the ape man, or rather his tweed cap, at the docks and again on Farringdon Road but he couldn’t be sure. He should never have tried to go to the telegraph office. Stupid mistake. Kell would be livid, if he ever got to Kell. He should have posted the information, as insurance, but they were watching every step. At least, he thought they were. The crowd swelled past him to the doors. ‘I say, mind out there.’ Leyton turned his head. A tweed cap blurred to his right. He felt a sharp pain in his back and a cold hand on his neck. The ape man in the tweed cap pressed towards him from behind, breathing stale gin and death. He gripped Leyton around the neck.
Leyton swivelled, panicked, afraid, invisible to the passengers streaming off the train. A mauling, sweating rugby scrum flashed into his mind, the hated schoolboy torture. In that same instant, Leyton, acting on instinct, drove his fist full bore into the man’s bollocks. The man’s cap came off and he released his grip. Leyton fled onto the platform.
The concourse teemed with New Year’s Eve revellers.
‘Help me,’ Leyton gasped to a station guard. ‘I’m an agent.’ He scanned the platform gates behind him.
‘It’s barely seven thirty, sir.’ The guard glanced up at the clock. ‘Bit early to be the worse for wear?’
‘No, you don’t understand.’
‘’Ere, look at that,’ a woman cackled to her friend. ‘’E’s got no hat.’
Leyton startled at her, confused. Over the heads of the throng, he saw the tall thug pushing his way through. Leyton ran. ‘That bloke looks like he’s pissed himself,’ the woman screeched.
The laughter of the two women pursued him out into the watery street, the two heavies hard behind.
He should never have gone to the telegraph office, not even tried to telephone. He should have gone to Kell instantly. What he had in his pocket would blow the whole thing wide open. He might even get a medal – he’d be back in the Admiralty and Kell would get his pound of flesh. But by God, Kell was right. It would blow Whitehall sky-high.
Leyton hurried out onto Baker Street, the pavement dark and slick beneath his feet, the rain loud and heavy. Faint pools of gaslight dotted the road, up towards the sinister mass of Regent’s Park to his right. He hesitated, took a few steps towards the park – thinking of the thick bushes and trees, the lack of street lighting. But that scared him even more and he broke into a run south towards Oxford Street and Whitehall, towards Kell. The rain thrummed hard on the pavement and he couldn’t hear the steps behind him, but he knew they must be there. His hand pressed against the bulge in his breast pocket, his head swivelled as he ran, looking for anywhere to hide.
‘Watch out!’ a cabby hollered as his taxi swung past, the two lanterns on the front flickering in the backwash of a passing omnibus. The motorised taxi splashed away from him, back towards Baker Street Station. As it reached the corner, Leyton saw the two men now following him, illuminated for an instant by the cab’s headlamps. The tall man stooped. Beside him his accomplice, tweed cap back on, his squat frame radiating violence even from a distance. They upped their pace.
Leyton sprinted. He vaulted over the wall to a churchyard, scampering between the gravestones. If only he could get to Kell, get to the War Office, this would all be over – once he’d delivered the package there would be no need to kill him, no need to— Bang! The bullet chipped the wall just as Leyton rolled over it and away into a deserted street. He dodged left down a side road, right, then left again into a dark street. Gasping for breath, he stopped for a moment. A light at the far end fizzed. Wheezing, Leyton knew he’d never outrun them. He ducked under a builder’s wire and felt his way into a half-built terrace. The walls felt dank and unplastered, the floor squelched underfoot and it was coffin-dark. He slumped onto the floor, propped himself up and waited. Above him, the rain rattled harder on what sounded like corrugated iron. Two sets of feet pounded past.
A heavily accented voice shouted, ‘Wigmore Street?’ Then footsteps petered out.
Leyton exhaled. He patted again at the documents in his pocket just above his heart and silently cursed the day he agreed to work for Vernon Kell.
‘I need a smoke,’ he said aloud, to reassure himself that he still existed as much as anything else. He shuffled his hips and pulled out a crumpled pack. His head twitched – was that a sound? No, the squeaking of his sodden clothes as he moved was all. An odd smell of burnt cloves pervaded the air. Leyton sniffed again, trying to place it. He must b
e in a warehouse, he reasoned, as he fumbled for matches.
‘At last,’ Leyton mumbled through his cigarette. The smell, it suddenly came to him, was that of the Batavian tobacco the Dutch sailors smoked in the docks. Strange smell for a building site in Marylebone. He dismissed the thought, struck the match in a bright bloom, and illuminated both his own face and then that of his killer.
* * *
So far, Wiggins hadn’t enjoyed 1909. Three weeks in, the rain hadn’t stopped, the wind sheeted down in icy blasts and the mercury seemed stuck at thirty-two degrees. And he still hadn’t paid his rent for the last month. He’d taken to leaving his window open, despite the wretched weather, and climbing up the drainpipe, so as to avoid Mrs Balducci and her baleful eyes asking for money in silent reproach.
He adjusted his elbows on the handrail of the iron fire escape, which scaled the side of a high brick warehouse. Below him, Wiggins could see the entire street – a shabby affair that ran into another even shabbier terrace. Pelham Road looked like a damp and miserable place to live. Wiggins’s two colleagues approached the door of number fifteen, their collars turned high, beetles inching down the road. The taller one turned towards Wiggins and raised his head. Wiggins lifted a tired arm in reply.
Go!
The two men paused for a moment, nodded, then pounded at the door with sledgehammer fists. ‘Open up!’ No reply. After a second attempt, they gave up and looked back towards the fire escape in mute enquiry. From his viewpoint, Wiggins took in the crooked terrace – the snub chimneys coughing out pathetic wisps of smoke, the mean and muddy roadway, unpaved, the stench. He saw, too, the back entrances that led to a small, crowded alley. The scene looked no different from the East End slums of his youth, twenty years earlier. London may be on the up and up, Wiggins thought, with its underground railway and traffic lights, with telephone exchanges and motor cars, and brickwork sewers – but as far as he could tell the poor still had nothing. He nodded his head at his colleagues down below. They lifted their feet in unison and battered at the door with sharp, heel-led kicks. There was a vicious grace to their movements that made Wiggins wince.
He kept his eye on the back of number fifteen and, just as the front door flew off its hingeing with a great crack, a small figure leapt from a window and flitted through the yard and into the alley. ‘He’s out the back!’ Wiggins shouted as he slid down the fire escape and hit the ground at a sprint.
Heart pounding, he ran left, then first right. Out in front, the prey popped out of the side alley, starting at the sight of Wiggins. ‘Stop!’ Wiggins shouted. The small figure, ragged shirt open at the collar, hatless, cut across the road and down towards Shoreditch. Wiggins ran on, his sinewy frame able to keep pace with the young man ahead, who slipped, catching his foot on the curb, one foot now shoeless.
Wiggins glanced down at the discarded boot: foreign-made, repaired many times, sole ripped from the upper, like a broken accordion. He saw this in the instant it took him to run past. Value: nil. The man’s debt: one pound, five shillings and sixpence, interest included. Leach and Son, Wiggins’s employer, wouldn’t take kindly to a single, tatty boot in lieu of such a sum. Wiggins lost sight of the man, but then he reappeared as he ran into a cigarette seller, the wares fluttering skyward. The man, now severely handicapped by his unclad foot, slowed and held up a hand to his ribs.
They ran past Liverpool Street Station through the ever-growing traffic, towards the river. Wiggins gained on him, dodging the trams, but suddenly the small, stumbling figure dropped out of sight in the sea of bowler hats and unfurled umbrellas. Wiggins came to a halt, head swivelling. City workers spilled out of Bank Station. To his left, King William Street tapered north.
A newspaper boy shouted out the headlines of the first editions: ‘Globe, Star, Standard, News. Globe, Star, Standard, News.’
Wiggins glanced up at the bank, squat, imposing. Rainwater tattooed the umbrellas above the rich felt hats, the long-striding pinstriped legs that rushed past the beggar tucked into a nearby arch, nothing more than a pile of clothes, a hopeful hand, too poor even for a bowl.
Wiggins cursed. He’d never lost a runner, at least not unless he’d wanted to lose one. He rubbed his hands on his sodden thighs, trousers slick with rainwater, the buildings closing in like an early night, grey as the sky. His eyes played over the faces rushing past him.
He looked again at the beggar, twenty feet away now, and shook his head in disgust. All this money, all these rich men – and not one able to spare even a penny for the poor. Rain pelted his face. He would go back to Leach and Son later that day and draw his measly retainer. No commission today. No money, just like the wretched beggar under the blanket. Empty-handed. He opened his eyes. Beggars never leave a bowl empty – you need a coin to start the flow, otherwise the punters walk straight past. And what kind of beggar ever goes empty-handed at Bank, surely the most lucrative pitch in the City? Didn’t Neville St Simon make tens of pounds a week?
Wiggins jerked his head round just as the beggar leapt from his place, tossed the blanket aside and ran. ‘Cheeky sod,’ Wiggins whistled under his breath. He heaved another lungful of London’s vile stink and resumed the chase.
As they approached London Bridge, the man ducked down to the right of the bridge towards the riverbank. Wiggins veered left and dodged between the ribbons of traffic and people crossing the great span. He jumped onto the balustrade, in front of hurrying women (machinists, judging by their fingertips). ‘Excuse me, ladies,’ he said and swung down to the walkway below, just as the beggar rushed towards him.
Wiggins grasped his prey between two hands. ‘That way’s been closed all week.’ He nodded at the work gang constructing the riverside path running west. The man felt slight and loose in his hands, like a child of twelve, a bag of bones. ‘I’m not the police,’ Wiggins said. ‘Mr Leach just wants his money.’
The boy – Wiggins could no longer think of him as a man – struggled in his grip. One of his eyes was almost closed and seemed sightless. The boy fought on for a moment but then relaxed, resigned. He looked up at Wiggins and, with an exhausted sigh, murmured, ‘Paljesta. Paljesta.’
‘Again!’ Tobias Leach boomed. ‘If you weren’t the best man I know at finding the blighters, you’d be fired by now the number you let get away.’ He wagged a fat, black-nailed finger at Wiggins, his arm barely squeezing through the glass hatch of the office.
‘He was too quick,’ Wiggins replied.
‘Too quick my foot.’ Leach puffed out his cheeks and ducked beneath the hardwood boards that served as his desk.
A piercing screech emanated from deep within the office. ‘Is that him lost another?’
‘Shut up, Ma, I’m running things.’
‘Drop him, I say. He’s too soft. Like that fat gut of yours.’
Leach snapped his head round and bellowed into the darkness. ‘I said quiet, Mother. I’m running things now. How’s a respected man of business to put up with this caterwauling?’
The unseen mother cackled. ‘Respected man of business? A fat piggy like you. Drop him, I say.’
Wiggins stood on the street and scratched at his chin. They’d all heard Ma Leach’s judgements before, though no one was known to have seen her outside since the death of Queen Victoria, all of eight years ago.
Leach and Son occupied a small yard off Commercial Road, just to the east of the City, from where the breathless Tobias despatched bailiffs to the worst areas of the metropolis, collecting money owed to one sharker or another, for a cut.
Tobias slapped a single coin on the counter. ‘Is that all?’ Wiggins said.
‘And think yourself lucky,’ Tobias belched through the hatch. ‘No collar, no commission.’
‘I’ve got rent to pay.’
Leach grimaced, his version of a smile. ‘You could always take out a loan. My rates are very reasonable.’
Wiggins turned away and looked down at the fat round coin in the palm of his hand. If it weren’t for Bill, he might soon end up
like the poor one-eyed bastard he’d let go by the river. ‘Oi, Wiggins!’ Tobias called after him. ‘Some toff was asking after you. Said he’d be back at three.’
‘I couldn’t care less about no toff,’ Wiggins muttered over his shoulder. He folded up the collar of his greatcoat and thrust his hands deep into its pockets.
‘Be here at eight tomorrow,’ Leach shouted.
Wiggins hadn’t gone ten yards when a crisp, cultivated voice sang out from a doorway. ‘Excuse me, may I have a moment of your time?’
The man stepped into the light, his eyes darting to and fro. He wore a grey wool suit, pressed collar and a polished watch chain. Wiggins stopped and eyed the man carefully, noted the hand-stitched shoes, the Jermyn Street umbrella. About his own height, five nine or so, he had a delicate manner and sharp eyes, partially hidden by small glasses: an elegant, glossy owl. ‘You don’t appear to be getting on too well with your employer,’ he said.
‘What’s it to you?’ Wiggins replied.
The owl smiled.
‘My name’s Kell. Vernon Kell.’ He held out his hand.
Wiggins regarded the offer of a hand but didn’t take it.
‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ Kell returned the outstretched arm to his side.
Wiggins looked along the street, the claxons sounding, the clopping of the dray horses, the smell of beer, the chugging of the motor cars, the street. The dirt. A lamplighter edged his way along the curb – a memory of running under the wheels of a hansom cab, hanging off an omnibus, the first time he bunked a tram, stealing apples from Mr Jones’s cart on Kingly Street, the shit, the dirt, holding the horses for the gentlemen of Mayfair for a shilling if you were lucky, for the back of their hand if you weren’t, the dirt, the light, hiding in the rafters of the music hall on Swallow Street or the old Blockmaker’s before that – Get out of it, you dirty bastards, don’t come back – the sweating impresarios and painted whores tossing him a florin on Sundays. The street.
‘Here will do,’ said Wiggins.
