The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  Together, Kell and Wiggins manhandled Cumming into the night, following in the footsteps of Trench. Kell glanced around.

  Brandon was ringed by three or four German sentries, illuminated on two sides. He held his hands up, still, while the soldiers jabbed long rifles at him. As yet, no pursuit.

  Together they pushed Cumming back through the hole in the fence and frog-marched him out into the darkness. The old man was breathing hard, too hard to speak, and his limp was exaggerated.

  No one said anything for a good twenty minutes, until it became apparent that the sentries had not seen them.

  “A fucking flash!” Wiggins grunted. By this time he had his neck under Cumming’s left arm, while Kell supported the right.

  “I didn’t . . . it didn’t . . .” Cumming’s voice faded.

  “They are going to connect the dots soon. Even if they don’t know about Trench yet, they’ll follow Brandon’s hotel booking.”

  “And they’ll speak to the Frau at Borkum,” Wiggins spat.

  “You’ll be a wanted man soon,” Kell said to Cumming, who hung heavier and heavier on their shoulders.

  “We have to get the ferry, sir, else we’re roasted,” Wiggins said.

  As they limped on toward Borkum, they began to hear a soft, high voice singing. Someone was on the road ahead of them.

  “Constance,” Kell trilled, his heart pounding. And not just with the effort of carrying Cumming, nor with the excitement of the evening. There was nothing in his life that had ever sounded as sweet and soft as that song.

  She stopped. “I am on the road. It is perfectly safe.”

  He and Wiggins hauled Cumming up onto the raised road. The clouds shifted and a moonbeam cast his wife in a striking pose, hat ajaunt, shoulders square, and hands on some sort of machine in front of her.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “A bath chair!” Wiggins whistled in admiration.

  “When a young man came barreling into the hotel muttering in English, I guessed it was either Trench or Brandon and something had gone awry,” she said to Kell as Wiggins helped Cumming into the bath chair. “I remembered our friend here’s leg wasn’t quite at its best, so I thought I would take a saunter along the road to see if I could help.”

  “They have Brandon. But, my dear, you are . . .” Kell struggled for the word.

  “A bloody marvel, ma’am,” Wiggins said as he roughly stuffed the blankets around Cumming, right up to his neck. The old man seemed beyond protest, and Wiggins pushed him back down the road. “Where you get this?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Those pensioners. By the time I went to see them, they really were very drunk. And they showed a surprising interest in a woman who bent down.”

  “Enough,” Kell said. Constance’s appearance had reinvigorated his mind, and he was starting to see a way clear. Reading dusty naval reports was not always a waste of time. “We must get to the ferry,” he went on. “This chair is perfect cover. Cumming, play it straight. You are a mental patient, name of Pumpernickel. And I will only speak to you in German from now on.”

  “What about Trench?” Constance said.

  “Trench can go hang.”

  12

  A cheerful rabble crowded the ferry quay at Borkum. Wiggins pushed Cumming through the throng. Kell had plied him with the contents of a flask, and now the old man snuffled and snored, chin resting on his chest.

  “This way, my dear,” Kell said in German to Constance. He looked back and gestured Wiggins on.

  “The bag?” Constance asked, also in German, more quietly. She had rested her head on his shoulder. Kell knew it was part of the act, feigning tiredness so as not to attract any undue attention, completing the picture. Yet for all he knew it was an act designed to establish that they were married in the eyes of the onlooking officials, for all he knew it was for show, he couldn’t stop the surge of physical pleasure it gave him to have her so close once more.

  Kell shook his head. “We’ll leave the bag.”

  “Guten Abend.” He handed the tickets to the seaman at the foot of the boarding gangway. He thanked Constance’s quick thinking at Emden, buying three spare tickets for the way back, just in case. He stood at the plank and waved to Wiggins, pointing to the wide promenade foredeck. “On the deck, he needs the air,” he said, again in German. Wiggins nodded.

  Kell and Constance then followed them aboard. Wiggins wheeled the bath chair past the lifeboat and out onto the wide pleasure deck. It was a warm night. Wiggins placed them in such a position that they had an easy view of the boarding plank, were one of them to lean forward, though anyone coming onto the boat would not immediately see them.

  Wiggins sat behind Cumming with one hand on the bath chair, like a good, solid attendant. A reek of booze came off the two of them, though Kell chose to think most of it came from Cumming. There was a long way to go if they were going to get clear, and he didn’t want Wiggins drunk.

  Constance and he sat a row back, on a wooden bench. He found a blanket from under the bath chair and handed it to her. “Danke, Liebe,” she said. With her basic German and Wiggins’s nonexistent language skills, the three of them did not think it safe to converse on the ferry. The deck filled up. Drinking songs burst out from young men; families huddled together, cradling small, sleeping children; old couples held hands.

  Wiggins twisted around in his seat, and Kell saw his shoulders tense. A commotion rose from the quay beneath them, and the band stopped mid-tune. Kell stood up to see for himself.

  Brandon.

  Five policemen came marching through the quayside crowd. The leader, a six-foot titan, strode ahead of them, while Brandon—hands in front of him, head hung low—walked in between the other four. A loud hum rose from the onlookers, and several of the drunken young men on board flitted to the rail, eager for the show.

  Kell went for a better look. A police inspector led Brandon up the gangplank. Kell strolled toward them as they came aboard. “In there,” the inspector barked. “Guard him with your life,” he added in a loud voice, enjoying the attention.

  Kell glanced through the door. Brandon sat on one of the benches, flanked by policemen, and began writing in his notebook. Too many police to overcome, Kell thought, and far too risky with Constance and Cumming in tow.

  He pulled his hat lower and turned to go, but walked slap bang into a man bounding up the gangplank. “Ah, excuse me,” Kell said in German, keeping his head low.

  “Mind where you’re going, can’t you,” the man replied, in English, as he strode off without a second glance. It was Trench!

  Kell instinctively made to stop him, but it was too late. He looked on, horrified, as Trench walked into the large cabin where Brandon and the police were, and sat down opposite. As cool a bird as you might meet, or the world’s biggest fool, Kell couldn’t be sure. Trench had no traveling bag with him, just a satchel. Kell hesitated. Behind him, the rail swung shut. They pulled away from the quay. A great cheer went up from the revelers still on shore.

  Kell turned away. His thoughts now were on saving Cumming, Wiggins, and Constance.

  Wiggins rested one hand on Cumming’s bath chair and breathed in the last of the slivovitz vapor. The old man had settled down into a deep, shivering sleep, and judging from the look Kell gave them when he came back, there was nothing to be done for Brandon.

  Around them, the high spirits of departure had dampened down. A gaggle of young men still boozed at the rail, although their conversation had become quieter, more intense. Some passengers dozed. One of the students played a pennywhistle, piercing over the whirr of the steam engines. A faint ditty, it reminded Wiggins of the folk songs some of the Irish used to play in the Strand Union; a bone-shop jig, they’d called it, though none of the grown-ups had the energy to dance. He closed his eyes. That was the joke—a bone-shop jig was played last thing at night, to send you off to the Old Man in the sky. Most of them hoped they’d wake up in the morning. Some of them didn’t.

  A ta
p on his shoulder. “Hans,” Kell said loudly, and pointed. “Emden.”

  Wiggins shook his head awake. Passengers congregated at the rail to look on as the port terminal came into view, startlingly bright with a string of electric lights running along the quay. Cumming stirred too. Wiggins glanced back at Kell, then leaned forward and whispered into Cumming’s ear, “Stay asleep. Or I’ll kill you.”

  Constance and Kell got up and went to the rail themselves, and Wiggins risked joining them. Not only was the port lit up, but by the terminal point stood a phalanx of police, with two police cars at the waterside.

  “For Brandon?” Kell whispered.

  “Or for us?” Constance asked.

  “Or ’im?” Wiggins nodded his head back to the bath chair.

  The ferry juddered into position by the two cars. Wiggins glanced along the rail. “Yous take ’im,” he hissed. “I’ll run a dodge. We’ll meet at the motor garage we saw on the way in, down the side road.”

  “Why there?”

  “We will steal a motorcar.” Constance said this under her breath, but Wiggins couldn’t miss the glee.

  He ran back to the bath chair and scrabbled underneath. As he did so, Cumming whispered, “Leave me. Save yourselves.”

  “I ain’t a gentleman, but I ain’t scum neither.”

  He pulled Cumming’s stick from the chair and hurried along the seaward side of the boat. He scooted around the back and came up to the land side of the ferry just as the gangplank swung down to the quay. There was chatter and excitement as Brandon and his police escort appeared at the top of the plank, the inspector making a great show of going first.

  Wiggins crouched under the lifeboat. In its shade, shielded from both the seamen and the passengers, he took the sword from the swordstick’s sheath. Twenty feet long by five, the lifeboat hung off the side of the ferry rather than needing to be lowered. And it was held in place by rope, not cable.

  Working as fast as he could, he sawed through two of the guy ropes, leaving a small twine intact at each end. Up to his right, he heard the first of the passengers clambering down the gangplank. He pulled himself into the swinging boat itself, teetering against the weakened ropes. Then he glanced back at the quay. The waiting police closed around Brandon as he and his escort arrived on shore, but two more had stayed to watch as the rest of the passengers disembarked. He took the sword to the final, large rope that fixed the lighter to an iron stanchion and began sawing.

  A shout rang out from the quay, and another, and sounds of a scuffle. A bottle broke. Wiggins didn’t flinch. He sawed through the final strands of the rope and tossed the sword aside.

  The lifeboat tilted, swung, and then—with Wiggins crouched inside, holding on—plummeted to the quay.

  It landed at an angle, like a perfectly sighted Congreve shell, prow first, into the windscreen of the stationary police car. Wiggins was thrown clear. He caught his shoulder hard, but managed to roll away into the cargo stacks.

  On the deck, with Cumming in the bath chair and Constance on his arm, Kell waited. The police at the gangway questioned everyone disembarking, clearly trying to establish whether or not they were German. He whispered to Constance in his superb French, “I’ve put some marks in your handbag. Stand behind Cumming and myself now, act separately. If we are stopped, you go ahead. Take the first train to Rotterdam. You will not be arrested.”

  She hissed back, “Non—”

  Just then, Kell saw a plainclothesman in a felt hat approach the policeman on the gangplank. He flashed a piece of paper. “Naval intelligence. There is no need for this,” the man in the felt hat said. “We already know who we are looking for.”

  “But, the inspector . . . I must—”

  “I said, there’s no need—”

  CRASH!

  The crowd turned as one to see the lifeboat sticking up from the front of the police car. The police on the gangway shouted out, and ran toward their stricken steed.

  Many of the passengers followed, while the rest streamed from the ferry, unimpeded by officialdom. Kell glanced at the man in the felt hat—German naval intelligence—but he simply stepped aside and let the passengers past.

  “Oh, I say, he is clever,” Constance murmured as they reached the quay and walked off among the rest of the travelers. “I hope he hasn’t hurt himself.”

  “Not Wiggins,” Kell replied out of the corner of his mouth. “He always lands on his feet.”

  Wiggins pulled his cap low and joined the returning passengers as they walked back into Emden town. It was easy enough to blend in among the long shadows. The pools of electric lights didn’t spill into the side streets and soon enough he was almost ready to join the Kells at the rendezvous. But he had one last task.

  He slipped into step behind one of the ferry passengers as they walked into town, unnoticed. He waited until they were out of earshot from anyone, and said in a low voice:

  “You’ve got to come wiv us.”

  The man, Captain Bernard Trench, turned around angrily. He peered through the gloom. “It’s you!” he said. “How dare you speak to me.”

  “Come, now. Else you’re kippered.”

  “The police know nothing of me,” he said. “I will go back to my hotel. I’m sure they’ll let Vivian go in the morning. We will claim a misunderstanding.”

  Wiggins reached forward and took Trench’s collar. “Now,” he said.

  Trench angrily pushed his arm aside. “Touch me again, and I’ll knock you down. I will not take orders from the likes of you, and I will not wish you good night.” He turned on his heel and marched away into the darkness.

  Wiggins sighed. You don’t tell people twice. He looped through the backstreets until he found himself on the side road by the garage. Only the far lights of the main seafront illuminated the road, but he caught the shape of the bath chair first, jutting out between two cars.

  As he neared, he heard Cumming grumbling incoherently. Kell and Constance manhandled the old man into one of the cars, a grand machine with a huge engine and an open top.

  “He ain’t coming,” Wiggins hissed. “Where’s the crank?”

  Kell handed him the crank without saying a word and got into the passenger seat, with Constance and Cumming in the back. Wiggins bent down and wound the handle. The engine caught at the second attempt. Wiggins raced around to the driver’s seat, released the brake, and they were away.

  “Trench will be discovered,” Kell said. “They knew already. About him and Brandon.”

  Wiggins shot him an alarmed glance. “The leak?”

  “Probably. In any case, we don’t have long. As soon as the police collate reports from the hotel and the station, they’ll realize there are more of us.”

  “Westward ho!” Constance said.

  “No.” Kell put his hand on the wheel. “Straight on. We head east.”

  “Ain’t it a spit to Holland? What’s the dodge?”

  “We won’t be able to get there in time,” Kell said, looking up at the stars and pointing along the road. “Have you got the Baedeker?” He stretched back to get it from Constance. “It’s got a map.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “That means going deeper into Germany.”

  “I did do geography at school,” Kell said, squinting at the map in the darkness. “Remarkably.”

  “Sarcasm isn’t very attractive in a person.”

  Wiggins rolled the car out of town onto a deserted road and then cranked up the accelerator, eastward. As they cleared the last of the lighting, and the road was plunged into utter darkness, they heard the church bells ring out furiously.

  “The hue and cry all right,” Wiggins said.

  “Blasted Trench,” Kell said, then added, “Open her out. We must get to the Weser before sunrise.”

  “Then what?”

  “We must hope it is the Year of the Rat.”

  The car handled like a dream, despite the harum-scarum pace. They pushed on hard through the night, stray villages punching by in secon
ds. Even so, it wasn’t until the dawn light began pricking the horizon ahead that the sea came into view.

  “Where we going?” Wiggins said at last.

  No one had said much after leaving Emden. Cumming had slumped back to a disturbed and shivery slumber. “I hope it’s not far,” Constance said from the backseat. “I fear our passenger is somewhat the worse for wear, and my stomach positively aches for sustenance.”

  Kell steadied himself with the windscreen and stood up. “There should be a coastal road north before we get to Wilhelmshaven.”

  “Wilhelmshaven? Isn’t that a naval base?” she replied.

  “One of the biggest,” Kell said.

  “Otherwise known as the lion’s den.”

  Kell sat down and glanced back at Constance. “We have one chance,” he said. “It won’t be comfortable and it won’t be pretty. I urge you again, my dear—we can drop you somewhere. I’m convinced that you’ll be able to get a train to Rotterdam without difficulty.”

  “What, and miss the fun?”

  For the second time that night, Kell was struck silent by a show of loyalty. First Wiggins at the wire on Borkum, and now Constance. He nodded. “Left there,” he said. “Slow.”

  They skirted the edges of Wilhelmshaven and reached a secluded road that ran along from the northernmost tip of the port. A watery pink light stripped the far horizon. As Wiggins slowed, he looked out across the black-gray sea and across to a far, far shore. “It’s a river mouth, the Weser,” Kell said, and then: “There!”

  Up ahead, pitched up on a thin spindle of a pier out into the sea, were three small and low-slung sailing ships. “Stop here,” Kell said. “Wiggins, with me. Constance, make sure Cumming doesn’t wake up.”

  “But—”

  “These people won’t like you. You’re bad luck.”

  “Because?”

  “You’re a woman,” he said.

  “What the hell are them, then?” Wiggins asked, as he and Kell walked down to the pier.

  “Junks,” he said. “Chinese vessels. These will carry low-level contraband mostly.”