The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  “Oh, come on,” Kell said eventually. “He’s not that bad.”

  The laughter came all the louder for the wait.

  “Is that with or without the false beard?” Constance said.

  Bywater pipped his eye. “He’s even got a swordstick in his room!”

  “Tell me he ain’t? Please.” Wiggins laughed again.

  Kell rapped the table and looked around at the three grinning faces. “He’s brave enough to travel hundreds of miles into Germany to rescue his men,” he said. “Risking his own life. How many commanding officers can you say that of? Eh, Wiggins? In the Boer War, how many did you know?”

  “None,” Wiggins answered after a moment. Kell was right. Mansfield Cumming had stuck his neck out. For all he lacked the chops for the job in the field, he didn’t lack the balls.

  “For God’s sake, sit down, and let’s hammer out the details.”

  And so they did, Wiggins, Kell, and Bywater around the table, Constance still on the settee. “An exfil,” she said, when they were done. “Wouldn’t it be nice in real life to know that if you ever were to get into a pickle, if things weren’t going quite as you planned, some clever, determined people would swoop in and carry you away back home, back to where it’s safe again?”

  No one, not even Kell, demurred.

  Kell woke with a start. He thrust his hand across the bed on instinct, but Constance was gone. The bathroom door stood ajar. Morning light filtered around the edges of the curtain.

  “Constance,” he called into the empty room. Nothing.

  She’d gone to bed immediately on the others leaving the night before, and they’d barely exchanged a word. The silence between them, established in London over the preceding months, had slowly solidified into a monstrosity, a beast of such size that it filled every room in which they were—be it the drawing room in Hampstead, their extravagant hotel room, or even the cabin on the ship over. The cause of it, as always, was suffrage. It was a silence now so profound that it covered even a Special Branch surveillance photograph. Why was Quinn interested? How could Kell even ask that of his wife? Was she having an affair? He began to get dressed.

  All he knew for certain was that she had become adept at avoiding his attempts to follow her—whether for political or romantic reasons, he didn’t know. She was also disconcertingly good at the mechanics of espionage. It was irritating, impressive, and—in the midst of the current mission—indispensable. (The dark corollary to this thought, of course, was that he hadn’t a hope in hell of discovering anything about her other life, what she did when she evaded him, what she knew of his life—anything.)

  It wasn’t yet seven, but he reasoned his wife and possibly Cumming were already at breakfast. He pulled open the door, only to be met by Constance and Bywater. They barged past him into the room. Constance had a heavy wodge of clothes over one arm, and a hatbox in the other hand.

  “Ring for W,” Bywater said. “Quick.”

  “What’s the matter?” Kell asked, as Constance pushed hard on the buzzer.

  “Cumming has gone,” Bywater said. “Lit out last night, milk train, so the night boy told me.”

  “You think he is scuttling home?” Kell said hopefully.

  Bywater confirmed Kell’s fears. “Not a chance.”

  “If Brandon and Trench weren’t in trouble before, they are now,” Constance said, brushing a flake of pastry from her face. “If our journey here was anything to go by, every train inspector from here to Borkum will issue reports up the line. They won’t have a hope.”

  This was a disaster. Kell looked between the two of them. If Cumming got himself arrested, then that really was the end of the Service. There would be no way to survive the embarrassment, and Kell, hanging by a thread as it was, would be brought down too. For while their departments and their work were nominally separate, they still constituted the Secret Service Bureau, it was still a new idea, it still had very few results. If one of those results was a spectacular failure with the foreign chief—the chief no less!—being arrested and imprisoned on German soil, then the whole enterprise would be over.

  A sudden rap at the door startled them all.

  Kell looked at the other two, then called out, “Eingeben. Enter.”

  Wiggins sauntered in, holding half a bratwurst. “First the beer, now the bangers. Why we fighting these people again?”

  Kell nodded at Bywater, who explained what had happened to Cumming.

  “We go after him,” Wiggins said, once he’d heard the news.

  “We have to,” Kell replied. “But how?”

  Wiggins looked at Bywater, at Constance. He slung the last of his sausage into the empty fire grate, while the three of them waited. “Stick with the plan. The big man back to Berlin or Dresden or wherever it is. Too valuable to lose now.”

  Kell nodded as Wiggins went on. “Run the dodge, like we said, yeah?”

  Bywater examined his fingernails. “I’ll start straight away. I think I’ve already made my man. A nasty-looking fellow, skulking around the lobby. I’ll take him to the Bahnhof. I’ve got an empty suitcase in the left luggage. I can fake a drop. It’ll send them loopy for hours.”

  “Meantime, we go to Emden and Borkum,” Kell said, curtly. “I shall pack.”

  “I already took the liberty,” Constance said. “And here, I’ve got you and Wiggins new jackets, German-tailored. Less conspicuous.”

  “How on earth . . . ?”

  “I ordered them from the concierge yesterday, just in case we needed to blend in. You want to be a spy, you learn how to shop.”

  He stared at her, open-mouthed.

  “And now I will try on my new Damenhut.”

  Kell gazed after his wife as she went into the bathroom. “A pleasure,” Bywater said, breaking the reverie. They shook hands. “I’d better go.”

  Wiggins saw Bywater to the door.

  “By the way,” Bywater said, “how did you know all that stuff about me? Come on now, no sauce.”

  Wiggins grinned. “Your name’s on your luggage, course I knew it. Or rather, you’s only the third guest staying with an English name, so I guessed.”

  “You saw it coming up in the service elevator. I get it.” Bywater nodded. “The rest?”

  “Newsprint on your fingers. Notepad in your trouser pocket. You ain’t no printer, so newsman.”

  “And the American thing? Is my accent that noticeable?”

  “A twang. But it’s how you carry yourself that’s the tell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like you don’t have a poker up your arse.”

  Bywater laughed, and held out his hand like an equal. “Brush up on your German. I fancy we may work together again one day.”

  “You think there’ll be war?”

  “There is always war, sooner or later.” And with that he was gone.

  The three took an express train to Emden. Wiggins looked every inch the part in his new German-tailored jacket, dark brown with a wide collar. He’d beamed when Constance presented him with it, almost pathetically, Kell thought. “Can I keep it?” he even said.

  Constance sat opposite them, her head in the little red Baedeker guide. She brandished it theatrically at every ticket inspection, and engaged the inspectors—who entered after each station—in her schoolgirl German. Wiggins dozed.

  Kell wondered to himself whether there was any way to put Constance on the Bureau’s payroll. It would go against all the rules of decency and military order; it would almost certainly be disapproved of by Soapy, by Churchill, by anyone, in fact, who happened to find out. But he could give her a code name, like the ones so favored by Cumming, and he could keep her anonymous. Most importantly, it might mean he could control her. On that happy thought, Kell nodded his head to the click-clack rhythm of the train and soon joined Wiggins in sleep.

  “Oof.” A sharp pain in his shin caused him to open his eyes. Constance, whose sturdy boot had delivered the blow, glared at him.

  “Wake up! W
e are nearly at Emden.”

  Wiggins stretched; Kell adjusted his glasses as she went on: “This train connects directly to the ferry for Borkum. And it was the first express of the day, so we have every chance of catching him.”

  “A ferry,” Wiggins cried. “Christ, if it’s an island, we are fu—”

  “Going to attend a festival,” Constance interrupted, with a faint smile. “And yes, Mr. Wiggins, it is an island. But we are in luck. Today and for the rest of the evening there is a festival of summer lights.”

  “What does that mean?” Kell asked.

  “It means that ferries will be going until late in the night.”

  “That’s if we find Cumming and the other two. How do we even know they are there?” Kell had woken up in a gloomy mood. The cozy idea that Constance could ever come under the umbrella of the Service was nothing more than a dream.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “We’re agreed that every policeman, stationmaster, and blind beggar between here and Holland could spot Cumming for what he is—even in the false beard? All we need to do is ask at the station and the ferry port.”

  “That’ll put us in the frame and all,” Wiggins said. “Three English, chasing another English.” He shook his head, unconvinced.

  “Why do you think I brought us German clothes? Once we get there, we can pretend to be German.”

  Wiggins remained unconvinced.

  “Vernon speaks German like a native. Better than a native,” Constance said.

  She picked up her hat. “You can claim to be a doctor of the mind—the Herr Freud of Hanover or some such. Cumming is your patient. Perhaps you are of the Vienna school? Yes, that’s it, you are a mind doctor, and Cumming is under the delusion that he is a British Army officer, when actually he’s a carpet-maker from Krakow, name of Pumpernickel.”

  “Steady on,” Wiggins said.

  “He’s not dangerous,” Constance said, warming to the task, “but you must recover him forthwith, and you’ve brought your wife as nurse, and a mute orderly from your private asylum in Hamburg.”

  It didn’t take long to confirm that Cumming had indeed passed through the station directly to the ferry port at Borkum. A talkative ticket clerk proved most useful, Kell playing up his part as the stern psychologist in his flawless German.

  “Oh, yes, I know the man. Mad, you say? Makes sense. He had the most peculiar beard. He was so British—remarkable what the brain can do. You’re a mind doctor, you say. I have this dream, on and on, once a week, about my mother-in-law. It’s most disconcerting. Do you have a moment?”

  Alas, the ferry to Borkum was due.

  Wiggins looked down at his watch, the Doctor’s old battered hunter, complete with the bullet mark. Peter’s bullet. He stood at the rail of the steamboat, two steps behind Dr. von Kell and his nurse wife, as the three of them gazed out onto Borkum harbor.

  The sky was a pink blue-black wonder, with faint wisps of cotton cloud hanging like freshly laundered handkerchiefs. “Dark soon,” he muttered.

  Kell looked back at him and said, “Mute, remember.”

  Borkum town was alight, its red-brick houses cheek by jowl with clapboard huts and beach godowns, the festival in full swing. Beer tents, a carousel, funfair stalls, and the jostle and hustle and jolly high spirits of Hampstead Heath on a spring bank holiday. Mechanical music competed for attention with the great oompah bands. The smell of grilled bratwurst hung in the air. Wiggins followed Kell as he cut through the crowd, wishing they could stop for a feed—and a stein.

  But Kell, with Constance on his arm, moved swiftly, like a Herr Doktor on a mission.

  “This must be the place,” Kell said.

  They’d reached a hotel on the beachfront, a terrace restaurant running to the beach, and the hotel building across the road, KOHLER’S STRAND HOTEL picked out in English above the door.

  “Second in the book.” Wiggins nodded. That was the rule he’d suggested to Kell and Cumming months before. In an unfamiliar town an agent should stay in the second-named establishment in the Baedeker guidebook. That was how Kell had known to find Cumming at Hillman’s in Bremen.

  A party of raucous pensioners in bath chairs had set up camp in one corner of the terrace and were in the midst of a heated debate. Kell and Constance went into the hotel, still acting the medical couple, while Wiggins took up station leaning against the hotel wall.

  The Kells came out moments later. “Let’s take a walk,” Kell said. He and Constance then ambled off, Wiggins two steps behind.

  “They are here,” Kell whispered. “Cumming got that right, he tracked them down. The old Frau reckons they’ve gone cycling, the three of them.”

  “You didn’t give your name?” Wiggins rasped.

  “Do you seriously suppose I’d check into a hotel without false papers?” Kell said icily. “We are down as Mr. Peter Huggins and wife.”

  “Huggins?” Constance cried. “Thank you so much. What’s my first name, Ethelbertha?”

  Kell looked at her for a moment. “No, you are Constance. You are always Constance.”

  She waved him away. “Enough of this nonsense,” she said. “We need to act. I presume Cumming has gone with them on some schoolboy escapade or other.”

  “That would make the most sense—sense?! We have to assume it’s the naval base, on the east of the island. There’s no other reason to be here. From what Bywater told me, there’s only one road out of town, two miles or so, then a barbed-wire perimeter.”

  “We’ve got to stop them,” Constance said. “Cumming is a walking diplomatic incident.”

  Cymbals crashed as another of the oompah bands went by. Smiling, shining faces jollied past. Wiggins almost filched a wallet, so lax and unaware were these German holidaymakers. Best not.

  “Me and the chief will go after ’em,” Wiggins said at last. “Or the old man, anyway.”

  “You should go back to the room, dear,” Kell said.

  “Like a good little wife?”

  “Like a leaf,” Wiggins said.

  She turned to him, questioning. He explained. “Take a butcher’s at their room—see what Bernie and Viv have left for the coppers.”

  “How?”

  Wiggins ripped a hatpin from her head in a sudden, violent movement. He bent one end. “Anticlockwise until the first click, real slow, then reverse until the shift. Got it?”

  She nodded. Her eyes sparkled in the gaslight. Kell pursed his lips. “Be careful, my dear.”

  “And don’t take anything that could put us in the shi—”

  “Yes, Wiggins,” Constance broke in. “I quite understand.”

  She always did.

  They walked back the way they came, past Kohler’s Strand Hotel, where they dropped Constance off, and then onward through the raucous pensioners in their bath chairs.

  “What’s their problem?” Wiggins said to Kell when they were out of earshot.

  “Eh? Oh. They are arguing about who has the best machine.”

  It took three-quarters of an hour of steady walking. Wiggins insisted they walk parallel to the road, through the light brush.

  Up ahead, a high wooden sentry post loomed like a shadow on a shadow against the black sky. Wiggins crouched down. He whispered, pointing, “There’s the wire. Which way?”

  “If they still have any sense of naval intelligence left at all, then they’ll want information on the guns facing west, placements, poundage, et cetera. Though heaven knows what they expect to find in this light.”

  Together, they dodged down the left-hand side of the road and began jogging alongside the wire. Sure enough, a few hundred yards from the sentry post—hidden by a large patch of scrub—Wiggins found a hole in the fence. Kell would have missed it, but Wiggins saw everything. He tapped Kell on the arm.

  “Ready?”

  Kell hesitated. “I should go in alone. Bywater was right. If I’m arrested it will most likely be prison. You are a private citizen, it could well be the rope.”

&
nbsp; “Ain’t no time to be a hero,” Wiggins said curtly. Then he squatted down and slithered through the gap in the fence, leaving Kell to follow.

  The going underfoot was easy, short, coastal grass, and with Wiggins in the lead they made quick time. They kept the fort to their right. It sat monstrous against the night sky, an unlit silhouette. Ahead of them, Kell could just make out a trio of gun placements, the huge cannons jutting out to sea. Tangled scrub ran from their position along and under the gun turrets, almost the perfect place to take photographs—were one there in broad daylight.

  He was just beginning to think he and Wiggins had made a terrible mistake, that of course Brandon, Trench, and Cumming wouldn’t be foolhardy enough to attempt such a futile task as sketching and photographing naval bases in the middle of the night, when, from deep in the bushes, they heard the unmistakable sounds of an argument. In English.

  “Curtain up at the Alhambra,” Wiggins whispered.

  Kell crept forward, behind Wiggins, approaching silent and wary. The voices suddenly grew in intensity. “I must have my go!”

  A figure burst from the other side of the bush. Kell could just make him out as the man stopped stock-still and held a box on his hip with one hand, while he thrust his other hand high in the air.

  “Christ,” Wiggins hissed.

  Light cascaded from the man’s fist, a burning torrent that bubbled and then disappeared. It was Brandon, lit up like a beacon. “A bloody flash,” Wiggins cried.

  All hell broke loose. Out of nowhere, a searchlight beam swooped onto Brandon. He dropped his camera and thrust his hands into the air. A second beam swirled amid the shouts and cries of the German sentries.

  Kell stood startled for a second, until Trench broke from the scrub and ran past him. The thickset Marine disappeared into the night.

  Cumming stumbled out of the bushes, brandishing his swordstick. Wiggins tripped him up, then dragged him back into the shadows.

  “Let me at my sword—my sword,” Cumming rasped.

  “Shut it, you old fool,” Wiggins whispered. “Gi’ us a hand, sir.”