by H. B. Lyle
Churchill grunted. “That would be a first.”
“What about the anarchists?” Grey asked quietly. “Some of our friends are very worried about anarchists.”
“Hardly a surprise, sir, most of them being royalty and so on,” Quinn almost twinkled in reply. “But I believe that even the worst of the anarchos, say the Gardstein Gang, won’t put in an appearance. At least, that’s our information.”
“The Archduke Franz Ferdinand is coming.”
“It’s the kings we have to worry about.”
“And the Tsar.”
Soapy rapped his knuckles on the table. “Yes, the Tsar. Captain Kell foiled a plot against him last year, I believe,” he said, glancing first at Kell, then at Churchill.
“Did he indeed?” Quinn said, putting his hand to his chin, but maintaining the look of faint amusement. “I was wondering why . . .”
“We have a watching brief only,” said Kell. He sounded stilted to himself, unsure. Unlike the eloquent, confident Quinn.
Quinn stared at him for a moment too long.
“You were talking about the anarchists?” Soapy prompted.
“Of course, who could be forgetting the anarchos. We have men at all the ports. Any of the anarchos coming in from Paris will be stopped.”
“Very good, Sir Patrick. Now, I’m sure there are many around this table who would be interested to hear your plans for their own security.”
Quinn nodded and went into another of his elaborate speeches. Kell blocked out the words and instead turned his thoughts to his most pressing task: the Whitehall leak. He was convinced that if a mole could be found, he would be among one of the copying clerks. But a very small part of his mind wondered about those sitting around the table, the various Cabinet ministers who had been in attendance when the dangerous remarks about Italy were made.
His eyes kept returning to two men. First was Winston Churchill, late of the Board of Trade, now home secretary and surely on his way to even higher office, such was the towering size of his ambition. Was that ambition powerful enough for him to sabotage his own prime minister in his search for the very top job? He’d crossed the floor already in his career; perhaps anything was possible? The second man Kell looked at once more was Sir Edward Grey. He was Asquith’s closest rival for the premiership, and had apparently seethed in private when Asquith took over ahead of him in ’06. Had the sleek fox set a trap for the PM?
It was no secret that both ministers, along with half the Liberal Party, had been incredibly angry when Asquith called the general election earlier in the year in order to increase his majority, only to fail to gain overall control. The Liberals were still in government, but only by virtue of an uneasy coalition with the Irish. It made for a nasty atmosphere in political circles. Could this be enough for Churchill or Grey to upset the applecart?
Kell shook these suspicions from his head. It was preposterous. The Cabinet might be a hotbed of intrigue, monstrous ambition, and ruthless personal disloyalty, but neither of these men would turn their backs on England, on the Empire. Churchill was a Harrow boy; Grey had gone to Winchester College.
Quinn had finally finished speaking and Kell pricked up his ears once again.
Soapy shuffled the papers in front of him. “Thank you very much, Sir Patrick. The detail you’ve gone to is absolutely exhaustive. On that note, I think we can adjourn.”
“Conceited bloody Paddy,” the man from the FO whispered under his breath.
Kell stifled a guffaw.
“Sorry, not a friend of yours, is he?”
“Good God, no,” Kell said.
“You didn’t look like a policeman.” The pristine young man put out his hand. “Moseby-Brown, FO.”
“Kell. Intelligence.”
“Glad to see someone’s got it.”
“I say,” Kell said under his breath, “you couldn’t help me with something, could you? Very quietly, shall we say?”
Moseby-Brown lifted his eyebrows, a little taken aback. Just then, Grey rose in front of them, collected his ribbon-bound ministerial papers, and inclined his head to the door. Even the red tape looked ironed, Kell noticed idly. Moseby-Brown removed an invisible piece of lint from his cuff. “My lord and master,” he said. “Must dash.”
Awfully young for the FO, Kell thought as he watched the young man sleekly follow in the sleek footsteps of his sleek master. Still, it was the kind of youth that could be used if he approached him carefully.
Kell got as far as the door before he was buttonholed by Quinn. “So, you’re an interesting man, Captain Kell, so you are. I never knew you were involved with the Tsar last year, when Mr. Churchill called the whole thing off.”
“Really?”
“And so, do you have any other secrets you’ll need to be telling me?”
Kell paused. Despite the hubbub of the room, committee men exiting around them, Quinn only had eyes for him.
“I’m not in the business of keeping secrets from colleagues.”
“Is that so? There was me thinking that was your very business.”
“Need I remind you that it was you who refused me access to your files. If anyone’s holding secrets around here, Sir Patrick, it’s you.”
Quinn nodded to himself. “That’s a point, that’s definitely a point,” he said, though he showed no signs of agreement. “Sometimes we don’t know that we know.”
At that point Sir Edward Henry bellowed for Quinn, and Kell made good his escape.
Wiggins pulled his cap low and pretended to be asleep. It never made sense to catch a copper’s eye, least of all when you were actually in a police station.
He sat on a hard bench in the hallway of New Scotland Yard and waited. A desk sergeant stared at him across the empty room and glowered. Wiggins could hear his disapproval, the tuts and sighs, the unspent aggression.
“How long?” Wiggins said at last, unable to contain himself.
The sergeant leaned forward over the front desk. “Who knows,” he said, pleased to disappoint. “Special Branch are very important people. It could be days. In fact, why don’t you just—”
At that moment, the doors that led to the staircase swung open and an ape of a man in plain clothes came out. “This him?” he said to the sergeant.
“It is.”
The ape pointed at Wiggins. “What do you want?”
Wiggins stood up and glanced at the sergeant. The ape nodded and the sergeant stepped away from the desk. “I got gen, ain’t I?”
“On what?”
“Who are you?”
“Do you want me to lock you up? Spill or hop it.”
Wiggins leaned close. “I knows of an anarchist plot. To attack the King’s funeral, sure as eggs.”
“Really?” The detective patted himself for a smoke, supremely uninterested. “How much you charging for this?”
“Bint I’ve been seeing. Her mates. Straight up. Body by the name of Peter the Painter?”
The detective paused, the cigarette between his lips unlit.
Twenty minutes later, Wiggins sat in a grimy, windowless interview room opposite the ape detective and another man. “Say that again,” the ape demanded.
Wiggins repeated himself to the other detective, a pale man with jet-black hair and dirt under his fingernails. “I thought Gardstein was in Paris,” the ape muttered.
“They’s know the route of the procession and all,” Wiggins added.
“What?” The ape slapped his hand on the table. “Wait there,” he cried and pulled the other man out of the room.
Ten minutes later, the ape came back. “Stand up,” he ordered. “There, four feet from the table. Don’t speak unless the chief asks you to; don’t swear; don’t slouch; and don’t fucking lie, understand?”
Wiggins tipped his cap.
The ape stepped to the wall and then an altogether different man came in. With his long nose, widow’s peak, and unmistakable air of command, the man—the “chief”—stepped to the free chair, sat down, and cross
ed his legs. He looked Wiggins up and down, raised his eyebrows at the ape, then said: “Now, Detective Jackson here is telling me you know things you should not know; he is telling me you know people you should not know; and he is telling me it does not sound right.”
“Is that a question?” Wiggins shot a glance at the ape Jackson.
“Ah, I see, you’re by way of a card. The wit of the native Londoner. I’m thinking it would be a shame to crush that. Tell me, what roads does the funeral procession take from Hyde Park to Paddington?”
Wiggins rapped out the answer, as given to him by Kell the day before. The chief—Wiggins recognized him from one of Kell’s newspapers as Sir Patrick Quinn, head of Special Branch—nodded slowly. “How did you come by this information?”
“Overheard. I’m seeing a Rooski bird, ain’t I? Drinking with her down the ’Chapel, off Jubilee Street. She’s tight with a bloke named Peter. Some’s call him the Painter.” Wiggins watched Quinn’s reaction closely. Quinn crossed his legs again, examined his fingernails, and finally fixed Wiggins with a stare. “What’s the girl’s name?”
Wiggins hesitated. “Bela,” he said at last. It was the first time he’d said her name in months, and still it hurt. “But she ain’t important.”
Quinn swatted an invisible fly. “Why are you here?”
“They’s up to no good. I’m a patriot, me, always have been.”
Quinn thought for a moment. He pulled a watch from his waistcoat. “You will meet Detective Jackson tomorrow at eleven in the morning—I am trusting you will be waking up in time for that—whereby you will furnish him with all the information you have on Peter the Painter and any gang he’s working with.”
“I’ve told you all I knows.”
“But you’ve not told us all the information you will be finding out tonight, understand?”
Wiggins nodded.
“If Detective Jackson is satisfied with the information you provide, then he may, at his own discretion, reward you in a financial manner. Yes?”
Wiggins nodded once more.
Quinn got up then, without any further acknowledgment. He shot a look at Jackson and was gone.
Jackson marched Wiggins out of the interview room and down a small, dark staircase. He pushed Wiggins through a narrow exit and out into a side street around the back of New Scotland Yard.
Wiggins straightened his cap and ambled off toward Charing Cross Station. He bought a return ticket at the crowded office on the concourse—busy even though it was Sunday. London never sleeps, he thought with a smile. Drinkers spilled from the station pub in the corner and Wiggins almost checked his stride. But he pushed on—their beer was rank. Instead, he got on the first train south. He walked through the carriages to the front of the train as it trundled over the river.
As the train slowed into one of the platforms at Waterloo Junction, he quickly moved into the final carriage. It was a smallish but very busy station, with four platforms set across two double sets of tracks. He hurried past the people collecting in the corridor and reached the final doors. He checked his watch, then as whistles burst the air and the engine let off a great gust of steam, he opened the door on the other side from the platform. He dropped down onto the gravel, obscured by the whirls and gusts of steam and smoke.
In one swift movement, he stepped across to the train on the other platform. The wheels squealed and ground as it started to move off. He clambered up onto the side of a second-class carriage, calmly opened the door and stepped inside. A small boy in shorts and a cricket cap stood in the area at the end of the carriage and stared at him, mouth agape.
“Maintenance,” Wiggins said. “Hobbs is your man.”
The boy ran off, startled. Wiggins glanced back through the window in the door as the train accelerated toward Charing Cross. As he did so, he caught sight, for an instant, of the bewildered Special Branch detective who had tailed him from Scotland Yard standing in the other train, head swiveling as he searched in vain for Wiggins.
Wiggins got off the train at Charing Cross and hopped on the number 11 bus down the Strand, energized by the whole exchange at Scotland Yard. He had no intention of giving them any more information, of meeting Detective Jackson the next day. He had no information, of course. He hadn’t seen Peter in almost a year.
What Special Branch had told him, on the other hand, was notable. It had been a risk for Wiggins to go in there, but he’d found out a number of things. One, Peter had probably been in Paris, which suggested why Jax couldn’t find him in the East End. Two, there was a very real chance that Peter was back in London. Certainly, the police took the idea seriously. Sir Patrick Quinn wouldn’t interview just any Tom, Dick, or Harry off the street. This suspicion had been confirmed when Wiggins realized they’d sent a detective to follow him.
Peter was in London, Wiggins could feel it. And he wouldn’t put it past him to try something at the funeral, though he’d lay long odds that it wouldn’t be Peter himself plunging the knife or holding the bomb or firing the fatal shot. Peter would slide into the background and let someone else take a bullet for his revolutionary beliefs. The detective had mentioned the name Gardstein; perhaps he was Peter’s latest patsy.
Wiggins swung off the bus at Liverpool Street and went to find Jax, his energy renewed.
“Up there, on the corner,” Jax pointed, although she had her back turned.
“Show me,” Wiggins said.
“Not now,” she said. “You can see it, there, just round the corner, ’bove the market.”
Wiggins gripped her shoulder. “Show me.” He’d met Jax just by the station and was eager to get on.
They’d walked up to edge of Petticoat Lane Market, busier than Piccadilly Circus on a Sunday afternoon. A soapbox orator tried to shout above the din: “Throw out the evil alien, send ’em back to Russia, to Afreeka, to the hellfire pit they came from. Our island is too small.” Market traders called out their wares: “Three candles a penny, get ’em before they’re lit”; “Bagel, bagel, bagel!” Wiggins and Jax moved through the crowd. “Mind out there, love,” a woman cried as she captained a pram like an icebreaker. Chestnuts spat and crackled in a brazier, a sweet, burnt, smoky smell wafting through the throng. The market stalls burst with clothes, live chickens, pots and pans, shoes, hooky fags, knock-off silver plate, and sweetheart trinkets, with racks of hats, with purple slabs of meat, flies abuzz, and hot cider and cold ice cream in tubs on wheels and fruits fresh in from the docks, tea from Assam, sugar from Jamaica, Colchester oysters, Nottingham lace, Bermondsey bourbon biscuits, china from Stoke, and sad, wilting flowers nicked the day before from down Columbia Road Market, secondhand, the florist-thief swore.
Wiggins hadn’t yet told Jax about Millie. He wanted to get all she knew on Peter first. One thing you learned living on the streets, and one thing you certainly learned working for Sherlock Holmes: knowledge was worth something, you didn’t give it away for nothing. Not even the great detective did that, unless there were extenuating circumstances. You said what you knew when you had to. Jax had obviously gone to the same school. Which is why he found himself having to almost drag her through the market.
“I tell ya, I sees them blokes go in once, after a powwow up at Jubilee Street. It ain’t nuffin’, I’m telling ya. Let me go, ya nonce, else I’ll scream for the rozzers.”
“No you won’t,” Wiggins said, and she didn’t. She was doing her utmost not to attract attention.
They entered a small yard, just off the market, with high walls and a low stench. “In there.” She pointed at one of the four doors. “Last Tuesday night, two of them came back.”
“Russians?”
“Can we go now?”
But Wiggins was already knocking on the door. No answer. The door was locked, but it had a flimsy, old-fashioned latch lock, which he fiddled open in a trice. “Wiggins,” Jax hissed, her head buried into her chest. “We gotta go.”
Wiggins stepped through the door, without anxiety. He knew it would be empty. Fro
m what he remembered of Peter’s mob, they never stayed anywhere long. The door opened into a single room, which ran into a smaller, windowless anteroom. He sat down on the only chair and cast his eyes around. Jax slunk in behind him.
“Told ya,” she said.
“Shut it.” He got on his knees and thrust his hands out onto the floor. Slowly he examined in between the floorboards with his long, thin fingers. He picked up a few scraps of litter, then leapt up and ran his hands across the walls. Apart from the chair, the only furniture was two bedrolls and a piss bucket, which Wiggins all but ignored. Finally, he turned the chair upside down and examined the underside of the seat.
“Christ alive, anyone would fink you were Sherlock Holmes himself.”
Wiggins shot her a foul look, thrust the litter in his pocket, and nodded.
Again, Jax pulled her cap down low and walked behind Wiggins, as if in his shadow. They went back into the market. “So tells me about Millie,” she muttered. “Ya promised.”
Before he could answer, a commotion broke out behind them.
“Gotcha, ya facking thief!”
Jax leapt away, whippet fast, but a huge arm swung through the crowd and caught her by the collar. She squealed as she was dragged away.
“Oi!” Wiggins ran after them, toward a butcher’s cart.
“Fack off out of it.” The enormous butcher glared at Wiggins. He held Jax hard by the collar in one gigantic fist, while with the other he scrabbled on his bench of tools. “Sid, where’s the facking cleaver?” he cried.
Wiggins hesitated. If anything, the butcher’s mate, Sid, was even bigger than his boss. The butcher grasped the cleaver and pulled Jax over to the block with his other hand.
“What ya doing?” Wiggins said. “Ya can’t just—”
“This ’un’s a facking leaf, and I’m gonna cut ’is facking hand off.”
Jax stared wide-eyed at him, her head bent low, her wrist clamped to the wooden block. Wiggins stepped forward and placed a hand on the butcher’s side. “Come on, mate,” he said.
