The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  Ever since he’d gotten back from Germany, though, Kell had sent him about town following government bigwigs. It was slow work, for most of the men on Kell’s list were far above him socially. He’d had to make friends with the servants, ask around, and observe from a distance. Kell had balked at his offer to break into the houses and root around their personal effects. This meant that so far they’d turned up very little. Wiggins was on his own, furthermore, and consequently it was almost impossible to mount adequate surveillance on more than one person at a time. Still, he’d reasoned, he’d do the work and take his wages—the rest was Kell’s concern.

  Jax stood up and idly paced the room. She tugged at Wiggins’s small pile of clothes, kicked the bed leg, then peeled off a thin strip of sagging wallpaper. She glanced at a half-empty bottle of gin, then up at Wiggins.

  “Helps me sleep,” Wiggins explained. Not that he’d been sleeping much recently. The opium vapors had put him to sleep on the Chinese junk, but ever since dark dragons had invaded his dreams. And they breathed out blood.

  He took hold of Jax’s wrist. “I’ll find out what happened to Millie, I promise. Now, what about Tommy—he go anywhere else than the Ax?”

  Jax hesitated. “I don’t know.” She pulled her arm free and stepped away.

  “Jax,” Wiggins said. “Spill.”

  “First time I followed him, I lost him. Up Victoria.”

  “How did you lose him?”

  “It was busy. I came back here. Then a coupla hours later, so did he—with an ’eavy bag on his shoulder, like.”

  “And the second time?”

  “He goes back up Vicky, but he takes a bus. Doesn’t get out there but goes up Hyde Park Corner, then drops the bus and picks another one going the other way. Then he takes a cab, so I lost him.”

  “Bastard,” Wiggins said. “He made you.”

  “He didn’t make me.”

  “Believe me, he made you. He was taught by the best.”

  “Who that?”

  “Me.” Wiggins shook his head. “You can’t come back here. Never come back here, understand?”

  “But—”

  “Let’s go,” Wiggins said, taking her by the shoulder. He surprised himself by the vehemence of his words. But the thought of Tommy on Jax’s tracks scared him. He didn’t want another death on his conscience, and certainly not Jax’s.

  She swore blue as they trundled down the back stairs and out into a side street. “Get off me, you ape,” she cried.

  “Shut it. Move.” He near pushed her along the pavement as they walked in the opposite direction from the Embassy.

  She calmed down after a while. Wiggins breathed a little easier as they broke out onto the main road and into the traffic. “You giving me the old heave-ho? I ditched running for you. I’ll be brassick.”

  “I’ve got another job for you.”

  “Wot’s the pay?”

  “Don’t you want to know what the job is?”

  Wiggins stopped at a street stall and ordered scaffold and pole for two. They watched as an enormous, red-faced man flipped fried fish and potatoes into a fold of newspaper.

  Vinegar reeked off them. Wiggins passed a packet to Jax, then popped a chip into his mouth.

  “I’ll pay you a fiver if you find Peter the Painter before me.”

  “Again? You’re cracked, you are. I ain’t never gonna find him, that’s daylight robbery that is, a fiver. It could be a year’s work, least. Is there a sub?”

  Wiggins grinned. “A pound down.”

  “Done.”

  Jax ran off to bunk a train soon after. Wiggins hoisted himself onto the back of a passing tram, like the old days, but instead of hanging off the back, he clambered into the door and nodded at the conductor. “I should fine you,” he said.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” He held out his fare.

  He picked up a discarded newspaper and scanned the headlines. Strikes in Liverpool. Suffragette vandalism. Naval build-up. Nothing about anarchists, no terrorist incidents, no clues as to where Peter and his gang might be hiding—and Wiggins was taking the longest of long shots on that hunt.

  Only one item really took his eye. In the case of the captured British Marines, Brandon and Trench, new evidence had come to light. Under interrogation, Brandon had given the German authorities permission to open his post held in Holland, which revealed a further tranche of incriminating documents. This had led to a search of Captain Trench’s hotel room in Emden, which led to the discovery of more hidden photographs, sketches, and the like—all hidden under Trench’s bed. The report concluded with a rather tart comment about the lack of common sense shown by the two officers, and compared it unfavorably with the so-far honorable restraint shown by the German authorities.

  Wiggins left the paper on the tram at Tottenham Court Road and walked toward the British Museum. Poor Bernie and Viv, he thought with a smile, what greater shame than to be deemed worse than a German. Anything but that.

  “Quick!”

  Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

  “I can’t,” Dinah giggled. The large front window of Boots the Chemist remained unbroken.

  “Come on, you two,” Abernathy cried from further up Regent Street.

  Dinah turned to Constance, her round face poking out from a swaddling of clothes, a huge knobkerrie brandished rather pathetically. Constance looked behind her. The streetlights arced away from them toward Piccadilly Circus. It was gone three in the morning and the traffic had finally stilled. It was now or never.

  “Give it here,” Constance said.

  CRASH!

  Abernathy smashed a window farther up the road. Dinah squealed.

  Constance lifted the knobkerrie above her head. Suddenly, out of the night to her left, Nobbs screamed, “Peelers!” She ran full pelt past them.

  A policeman’s whistle pierced the air. Then a second, and a third. Constance froze.

  It was a long way from Lyons’s Corner House. And that was part of the problem.

  As soon as she’d returned from Germany, Constance had tried to get in touch with Dinah, never the easiest thing to do. Dinah rarely answered her telephone, and going to the place she shared with Abernathy, out in Barons Court, always felt like too much of a chore, except in Queen’s Week.

  She’d gone back to the Hampstead Society for Women’s Suffrage. For once, the meeting contained some positive news—a march planned for Hyde Park and the Conciliation Bill, which proposed a vote for older, property-owning women, to go before Parliament. Two years previously, such a development would have put Constance in a good mood for weeks. Yet she failed to feel the excitement, the thrill, that those teas at the Lyons’s Corner House had given her. That Dinah had given her.

  Dinah had agreed to come to a meeting in Hampstead again, to accompany Constance on her own, but the trip to Germany had scotched all that. Worst of all, though, Constance hadn’t been able to get hold of Dinah beforehand and had stood her up. A week or two had gone by with the telephone still unanswered, and nothing to be seen of Dinah or the rest of the girls at Golden Square. Constance was on the verge of swallowing her embarrassment and heading out to Barons Court one morning when the telephone rang.

  “Constance!” Dinah bawled down the line. “Where have you been?”

  “Where’ve I been? I—”

  “Never mind. I’m so bricked you’re still alive. Abernathy spoke darkly.”

  “Of course I am alive. Why—”

  “Lyons’. Four,” Dinah went on breathlessly. “Do say you’ll come.”

  “I . . . well—”

  “Bonzo,” she said, and rang off.

  Dinah hallooed her over to the usual spot in the Corner House. “At last,” she said, excitedly kissing Constance on both cheeks.

  “Lost your cold feet?” Abernathy drawled.

  “I beg your pardon,” Constance said as she sat down. “I’ve been more than—”

  Nobbs broke in. “You know, I really think Tansy’s onto something.”

>   “Not now,” Abernathy hissed. “Pass those cheroots. I feel like a decent smoke.”

  Constance had squeezed next to Dinah and turned to her while the others chattered on. “I am so very sorry about the meeting up in Hampstead.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I was called away unexpectedly,” she whispered.

  Dinah tossed her head. “Don’t be a silly goose. I didn’t go, of course. I don’t want to listen to a roomful of old ladies.”

  “Oh.” Constance puffed her cheeks out, blinked, and tried to smile. Dinah reached for a scone. She tapped it on the table with a thud.

  Abernathy funneled cigar smoke above the round table and glared at Constance. “Where did you go?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said you were called away unexpectedly. Where?”

  A waitress slapped down a plate of gray sandwiches and four more raisin-studded grenades. “Butter’s extra,” she said. “Pay at the till.”

  Dinah groaned. Constance picked up one of the limp sandwiches, ignoring Abernathy’s dagger eyes. “Why don’t we go to Rumpelmayer’s for a change? I know we’re campaigning for suffrage, but that doesn’t mean we have to suffer.”

  Nobbs’s cup clattered into its saucer. She put a hand to her mouth. No one said a word. Constance knew it wasn’t that funny, but she wasn’t expecting this.

  Finally, Dinah coughed. “Nobbs’s cousin is being held in Holloway.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “She’s on hunger strike.”

  “Oh.”

  Nobbs sniffed. “And they’ve started to force-feed her, the beasts.”

  “Ah.”

  Abernathy stubbed out her cigar violently into one of the sandwiches. “She’s got the stomach for the fight. Have you?”

  “What do you know about this?” Constance cried, as soon as Kell came in the door.

  “About what?”

  “They are force-feeding women in Holloway—again!” She took a step toward him.

  “Ah, I see.”

  “Well?” She’d been waiting in the drawing room for him to come home, yet her anger had not abated. If anything, his appearance—top hat, Whitehall pinstripes, cane, the very epitome of male power—enraged her even more.

  “Really, this is not my department.”

  “It is your government.” She threw her hands up in the air. “The government I so stupidly helped save from embarrassment. Why?”

  “Why? Surely, that is a question for you.”

  “Not that. I have no idea why I helped the British government, a government that does such terrible things. Why are you force-feeding them again?”

  “I’m not the governor of Holloway!” he snapped, then took a breath. “It is for the prisoners’ good. Otherwise they would die,” he said more carefully. The gentle rapprochement that their shared mission to Germany had effected seemed to be disintegrating. “The prison authorities have a duty of care to all their inmates, however unhinged. They simply cannot be allowed to die. It’s for their own good. This is what government is,” he said finally. “It’s civilization.”

  “It’s barbarism!” She headed to the door. “I’m going out,” she cried.

  He shot out his hand and caught her arm. She glared at him and he let go, as if scalded. “Are you involved?” he asked. “In any of this illegality, vandalism?”

  She glared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you?”

  “No,” she said. Then she shrugged on her overcoat and left him there, staring into the empty room.

  And so it was that Constance found herself, heavy wooden club in hand, at three in the morning, contemplating in a split second whether to break the window, to run with Dinah, Nobbs, and Abernathy, or to take her chances with the burly constables of B Division bearing down upon her.

  14

  “You’ve got nothing?”

  “Nuffin’ worth a spit.”

  “Very pleasant, I’m sure,” Kell said. “But it won’t do. Report, military style—we are military intelligence, after all.”

  Wiggins arched his eyebrow. “Bethell at the Admiralty. I think he’s clean but it’s hard to confirm it. His habits are regular, from what I can see he don’t have any hobbies that would put him in the red, and he ain’t got any German connections. Clean as an RSM’s backside, in other words.”

  “Must everything be obscene?”

  Wiggins relented. “I can’t watch ’em all on my tod, all of the time. And I can’t say what they’s get up to behind closed doors. None of their gaffs would let in the likes of me.”

  Kell looked at him. It was true. Wiggins wouldn’t get past the door of any club in Pall Mall. “No,” he said.

  “I didn’t say nuffin’.”

  “But you thought it. I will not let you burgle these people’s houses.”

  “I wouldn’t take anything.”

  “What if they’re innocent? We would have been breaking and entering the most powerful households in the land. We would go to prison.”

  Wiggins shrugged. Kell glanced down at the list in front of him. “Twelve names. It must be one of these twelve men. And you’re saying we can’t eliminate any of them?”

  “Not yet.”

  Kell threw his hands up in exasperation. He thought of Constance and their horrible argument of the night before. He would never forgive himself for grabbing her arm. She hadn’t come back in the morning—or else she’d slept in the guest room and got up early—and he wondered for a moment if she ever would. What he really needed to do was put Wiggins on her, see where that ball of thread unraveled to, but that was part of the problem—and it was the reason for his agitation, he realized now, his aggression.

  He’d come back home late in the evening, directly from a meeting with Churchill, who had summoned him angrily on the telephone.

  “Why do you not return my messages?” he’d demanded as soon as Kell came through the door of his office.

  “The Service, sir, is stretched. We are under—”

  “—resourced. It is all we ever hear. You do realize I am the only thing keeping you afloat. Whenever it comes up, the rest of the Cabinet is all for folding you into Special Branch. Is your heart not in it, man?”

  Kell stood in the doorway still, unable even to take a seat. Churchill glowered through a plume of swirling smoke. “My heart’s in it, sir,” Kell said through gritted teeth.

  “Capital. Now, I’ll have whisky.” He jabbed his cigar at the drinks cabinet, and rounded his desk to sit down. “I read your man’s report on the situation in Wales—can’t say I wholeheartedly agree with him. You are sure he is reliable?”

  “Agent W is the best man I have.”

  “He’s the only man, isn’t he?” Churchill snapped. “Never mind. You’ll have heard, I’m sure, about the growing unrest in Nottingham? The shipbuilders in Belfast. The boilermakers. And the dockers—the dockers everywhere are revolting.”

  Kell nodded as Churchill lectured on. Industrial problems were breaking out all over the country. Whisper it quietly—as Soapy sometimes did—but one of the reasons for the mooted general election was to distract people from their current concerns. If people thought that an election was coming, that an election might usher in change, then they might leave off. Of course, this wasn’t even mentioned as a reason in the press. To them, the election might be necessary to stop the Liberals’ reliance on the Irish in the coalition and ultimately to overcome the Lords on the question of the budget.

  Kell listened to this political lesson from Churchill in silence.

  “Kell?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I said, send him in. Agent W.”

  “Where?”

  “The docks this time. We have no reliable informants inside the unions—at least, Special Branch don’t in London—and I need to know who the ringleaders are, why they are striking, and what they plan to do.”

  “But surely . . .” Kell hesitated. He could almost hear Wiggins’s repl
y in the room. They’s striking cos their job’s shit and they’re paid shit.

  A sharp rap at the door saved Kell from actually uttering this thought. “Enter,” Churchill cried. He grinned crookedly and Kell turned to see Sir Patrick Quinn, head of Special Branch.

  “Quinn,” Churchill said. “Good of you to join us. You know Captain Kell, of course.”

  “That I do, sir, that I do.” Quinn looked down his long nose and nodded, infuriating as ever.

  “Good day,” Kell said. It was a nasty shock to see him, but judging from the look on Quinn’s face, he’d had no idea about the meeting either.

  “I wonder, Quinn, if you could update us on the unrest out at West India Docks?”

  For once discomfited, Quinn glanced at Kell, then back at Churchill. “It’s the usual stuff,” he said at last. “Mild discontent, whipped up by a few troublemakers. Nothing serious.”

  “Which troublemakers?”

  “I am wondering, if I may, sir,” Quinn said slowly, recovering from the initial surprise, “what such information has to do with the Secret Service Bureau?”

  Churchill exhaled. “Well, wonder on, till truth makes all things plain.”

  “Just so,” Quinn nodded. “We haven’t yet identified the exact identity of the troublemakers, sir, but we will do, we will do.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t have much confidence in your record so far,” Churchill said, taking a gulp of his drink.

  Quinn hesitated and then, to Kell’s surprise (and grudging respect), answered back. “We only have so many bodies, sir, and there’s much trouble being made just now, so there is.” He paused, looked over at Kell, then went on. “There’s a deal of prioritizing going on, sir, if I may say. The suffragettes, for example, they are getting ever more militant. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a death at their hands soon.”

  As he spoke this last sentence, Quinn looked hard at Kell. Kell felt in his pocket for a smoke and glanced up at Churchill, only to see that the home secretary was also looking hard at him. “Indeed,” Churchill said at last. “Thank you, Captain Kell, that will be all.”