The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  Kell held the cigarette to his mouth unlit, nodded, and got up. “Sir,” he said. It took all his resolve to keep his walk steady, to pull open the door without shaking, and to walk away without trying to listen in. Churchill had engineered Quinn’s appearance at the meeting, that was for certain. He was playing them off against each other, clearly, but to what end? Almost overnight, Kell had found himself in the middle of some political game that he didn’t understand.

  One thing he did understand, though, was that both Quinn and Churchill knew more about his wife’s activities than he did.

  “Sir!”

  Kell snapped out of his reverie and looked up across his desk at Wiggins. “What was that?”

  Wiggins snapped his fingers. “Who should I tap up next? I ain’t hit anyone from the FO since Carter.”

  “I need you down at West India Docks first,” Kell said, his mind still on Churchill. “There’s growing unrest and we have no idea who’s instigating it, or why.”

  “Not hard to guess why. You ever worked a shift on the dock? It’d break your back. And your wrists. And your fingers.”

  “Yes, thank you for the poetry. I need you to go down there. Blend in. Find out who the troublemakers are—not the official union leaders, the real ringleaders. Get what you can on them. Their names, where they live, who they associate with, you know the drill.”

  “They’s all German spies, are they?” Wiggins sneered. “We gonna find Van Bork hauling bananas off the quay?”

  Kell paused. “You will find out what I tell you to find out. Or it’s over.”

  Back at his digs, Wiggins dodged the side door and went into the pub proper for a drink. The ten pounds Cumming had paid him wasn’t going to last forever, especially since he’d started paying Jax to scout out the East End, but there was always change for a livener. Even the down-and-outs knew that.

  She sat alone, facing away from the door, but Wiggins recognized her immediately. Shoulders square, back so straight it didn’t even touch the chair. She didn’t flinch when he came in, nor when he ordered his drink, not even when he walked over toward her and stood for a moment. But he knew she waited for him.

  “You’re a sharp ’un,” he said as he slid into the seat opposite.

  Martha blinked. “Never underestimate a whore.”

  “You said that with pride.”

  “I am proud. Look at me. My mother was born on a slaver, my daddy worked the fields—rice fields too, and if you don’t know how hard that is, then you’re a lucky man—and yet here I am, promenading the streets of Belgravia, drinking sherry wine and keeping a most attractive gentleman’s rapt attention.”

  “Sorry about that.” Wiggins blushed and looked away. It was the way she held herself, or her dress or he didn’t know what, but it was hard not to look.

  She laughed, sweet and light, not the deep, throaty laugh he expected. “Big T’s not so bad,” she said after a moment. “What did you do to him?”

  “What did I do to ’im?” He drained the last of his pint, shook his head, then called out to the barman, “’Ere, Ralph. Another half-and-half and . . . ?” He looked at Martha. “Sherry, large.”

  She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything. Instead, she looked him over with a faintly amused air, unashamed, undaunted by his stare. Wiggins shifted his eyes down to her chest, then quickly away. Her dress was made from a fine purple material, with embroidered flowers around the collar and frills on the hem. She wore long lace gloves, with a red ribbon poking out from one cuff. He guessed she was the same age as him, but somehow she seemed younger and yet older at the same time. Her skin shone like a youth’s, but the way her eyes sparkled, the way her mouth turned up at the ends, told Wiggins that she knew more than him about a lot. Most importantly, she’d found him. Did that mean Tommy had found him too?

  The barman slapped down the drinks. Wiggins pulled long at his pint, then looked at Martha once more. “We knew each other once, as little ’uns. Street kids. But Tommy never cottoned to me. Or my boss, anyways.”

  “You always do what the boss says?”

  “No,” Wiggins rapped back. “I just . . . Me and Tommy, chalk and cheese.”

  She sipped her sherry.

  “He send you?” he said.

  Martha looked surprise. “He’s not my master.”

  “Does he know?”

  She drummed her gloved hands on the table in a rare show of impatience. “I didn’t take you for a dummy,” she said.

  The double doors crashed open and knot of transport workers came in—a driver and a couple of conductors, Wiggins saw from a glance. He took another swig and ran his hand through his hair.

  Martha twirled the glass by its stem. “What do people do for amusement round these parts?”

  He looked up, surprised. “Other than head to your gaff?”

  “You don’t approve of prostitution?”

  “It’s not that, it’s . . . I don’t know.” He clammed up. He didn’t know quite what to say to Martha, or what she even meant half the time.

  “It’s an escape for some people. All they want is an escape. You ever want that?”

  He shrugged. “I’m London, me.”

  “So you can tell me. What do courting couples in London do?”

  “Ya want me to say?”

  “In public. Where do they go out?”

  “Ain’t my scene,” Wiggins said. “The boozer?” He swilled the beer in his glass, and looked down. She arched her back, slow and languid, then sighed.

  “Not used to this, are you?”

  He shook his head, unsure. She smiled suddenly, bunching up her cheeks. “What do you do, then?”

  “What do I do?”

  “For money. You have the advantage on me—you know what I do, don’t you?”

  He felt the heat in his cheeks once more, and flicked his eyes to the window. She laughed lightly. For some reason, everything she said embarrassed him. He’d known streetwalkers his whole life, running around Soho and Marylebone. They’d call out to him as he ran past, their jokes getting bluer as he got older. It was all good-natured, and he looked on them like aunties rather than whores. But when Martha opened her mouth, he didn’t know what to say or where to look.

  She put down her glass with a heavy clunk. “Poppy ain’t your fault,” she said.

  Wiggins nodded. “What happened?”

  “It happens all the time. It’s a hard life, ’specially at the start. Some of the young girls can’t see no other way.”

  “And you can?”

  She wiped a stray fleck from her lips. “Maybe. We’s all waiting for the shining white knight.”

  Wiggins eyed his near-empty glass, glanced up at the bar, then back at Martha. But rather than offering her another, he said, “Have you told Tommy where I am?”

  “What do you take me for?”

  He looked at her. “Once of Sierra Leone, spent time down Haymarket in the old days. Eye trouble. Smoke with an ’older, but not often. Interest in needlepoint. And you’re a senior whore at the plushest knocking shop in London. That’s what I take you for. I need to know what you told Tommy.”

  She shook her head. “Thank you for the drink, Mr. Wiggins.” She got up with the same grace and languor as all her movements, but her face was set.

  “I didn’t mean . . .” Wiggins reached toward her helplessly as she gathered her bag from the floor.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she said into her shoulder. Then she walked across the bar, turning the head of each and every man as she did so, pushed out of the pub doors, and was gone.

  “I’ve been rumbled.”

  “Wot?” Jax said through a mouth stuffed with bacon sandwich.

  “Tommy’s got the gen on me and all. Had to move out of the pub, sharpish. And don’t talk with your mouth full, you might drop some of it.” He took a bite of his own sandwich and began to chew carefully.

  They sat at one end of Sal’s cabby hut during a lull in business, sharing an enormous baco
n sandwich. “Ow!” Jax put her cup down hurriedly. “Ma,” she screamed. “This char is bloody scalding. Near ripped my lip off.”

  “Chance would be a fine thing.” Sal ambled over and sat next to her, looking at Wiggins. “How’s my Holmes and Watson of the gutter getting on? Out of leads?”

  “That place is dark, Sal, I’m telling you.”

  “Leave it then.”

  Wiggins shook his head slowly and glanced at Jax. Sal put her hands on the table and said, “All right. What would Mr. Holmes do? If he wanted round-the-clock gen on an whorehouse, the comings and goings and whatnot?”

  “He’d ask us,” Wiggins said.

  “Cos we could go everywhere, see everything, and not be seen.”

  “Zackly.”

  “Well,” Sal said with a smile.

  “Well what?”

  She gestured at the cab drivers’ paraphernalia littered around the cabin, the whip above the door, the lanterns hanging at each end of the long trestle table, and a stuffed tiger’s head in pride of place, winner of the weirdest left-item prize since forever. “I got the best network in London, ain’t I?”

  Wiggins grinned. “Can’t send a cabby to an whorehouse,” he said. “They’d only start competing for a fare. Putting it on the meter.”

  “You really have gone soft,” she said.

  Jax scraped back her chair. “I’m going for a slash.”

  “I’m so glad I shelled out for charm school,” Sal said.

  “Can’t teach class.”

  They watched her crash out of the back door of the hut. Sal held her eyes away from Wiggins for a moment. She pushed a ginger curl out of her face. “I’ll put the word out. It’ll take time, but I reckon we’ll get an addy for every sad sod that visits the place. In the end.”

  “Could work. Better than sod all.”

  “You’re not gonna get in there anytime soon, not if Tommy’s on the watch. And before you say anything, I ain’t having Jax sent in.”

  “She’s busy on something else.”

  “I noticed—you paying her proper?”

  “I’m paying her. It’s safe, she’s just taking a look-see, keeping an ear to the old horseshit.”

  Sal pursed her lips. Wiggins could still see the child she used to be, around the mouth and cheeks, and her bright sparklers. But her back was bent, the skin on her hands red raw, and she couldn’t shake her frown no more. “What’s wrong?” she said suddenly.

  “Nothing. Just thinking about the old days.”

  “Wot for? You miss living in the streets, do ya? Miss scrabbling around, dodging beatings, eating scraps, picking up fag ends on Baker Street?”

  “I miss the old you,” he said. “You used to be all right.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I gotta get down the docks yesterday.”

  She looked at him carefully. “You all right?”

  Wiggins felt the wooden table under his hands, bent his fingers, realized they’d been drumming. “I got a lot on.” And then, while Sal still stared at him, “I’ve got to find the Painter. That’s what Jax is helping wiv, till my blunt runs out. And that’s dark stuff going on at the Embassy. Tommy tried to have me killed, sure as eggs.”

  “The rozzers?”

  Wiggins raised an eyebrow at that. “Yeah, right.”

  Sal’s spoon tinkled in her teacup. “You don’t have to stay, you know.”

  “Leave London?”

  “You could find her?”

  Wiggins shook his head. “No, no. That ship’s sailed. Any roads, I can’t leave. I’ve got a debt to pay. Two debts. Bill and the girl, Poppy. I won’t let Tommy get away with that. And I need a job—and time—to pay ’em off. Even if it takes me until nineteen bloody thirty, I’ll pay me debts.”

  “Be a hero, what do I care?” Sal said.

  “You owes me a tanner.” Jax burst back through the door and pointed at Wiggins. “Expenses. Bus fares.”

  “You ain’t paid a fare in your life.” He flicked her the coin nevertheless.

  She pulled a huge cap over her eyes. “See ya,” she said, and was gone.

  They both looked after her. “No word of a lie, she’s your spit,” Wiggins said, almost to himself.

  “You think so? She always reminds me of her dad.”

  Wiggins gathered up his coat and hat and appeared not to hear.

  “I’ll let you know how we get on with those addies. Pass the word. Free cup of cha for each. You might not get inside that bloody place, but you’ll know who else does.”

  “That’s jam that is, Sal. Always the brains of the operation.”

  “And yous was the face. Where you get those strides, by the way? You look like a docker on the skids.”

  “Master of disguise, like the Great Old Detective.”

  “You never did see the old man straight.”

  Wiggins left then, and it wasn’t until later that he thought about Sal’s parting comment, and what it might mean.

  Kell watched from his bedroom window as Constance strode purposefully toward Hampstead Underground station. He’d given up trying to follow her; she was too fly. Any thaw that the trip to Germany had effected between them had been shot to pieces by those blasted women in Holloway refusing to eat. He couldn’t see what was wrong with trying to feed them, even if they didn’t want to be fed. Were the authorities really to sit by and do nothing while women in their care died? What else could they do? Either way, the government’s response had led to a string of furious rows, and now Constance was barely speaking to him at all.

  He looked out the window once more. A figure in a flat cap and baggy trousers stood at the corner around which his wife had just disappeared. He crouched down, his back to Kell, and peeked after her. Then he too went around the corner.

  Kell rushed down the stairs and out into the hallway. He thought of the man he’d found following him outside the house months earlier. Kell had assumed at the time that the man was tailing him—indeed, had suspected that the man might be in the pay of the government mole. But was it in fact Constance, not he, who had the tail? Who would be following her? And why?

  He stepped out of his front door, only to realize he didn’t have his shoes on. He hadn’t breakfasted either. And when he came to think of it, what would he do if he did catch up with the suspicious man? He hadn’t been able to follow his wife successfully, and he felt damn sure that she’d lose the man on the corner soon enough. He gave it up and went back inside.

  “Cook!” he shouted. “I shall take a rack of toast, and a kipper. Make that two kippers.”

  He padded barefoot into the breakfast room and tried to organize his thoughts about something other than his wife. Wiggins had turned up some useful information on the Cabinet, but as yet no smoking gun as far as the Committee meeting was concerned. None of the twelve men on the list had been definitively ruled in or out. His Foreign Office source, Moseby-Brown, had been supplying him with all sorts of Foreign Office gossip. A shifty chap beneath the sleek exterior, but he was prepared to give Kell an inside scoop.

  There had been no breakthrough, though, and it was now October.

  “Mrs. Kell has gone out already?” the cook said, bustling through the door with a tray.

  “An excellent observation. Thank you, Cook.” He snapped open the newspaper.

  Dr. Crippen was all over the front page. His trial had just begun. A man so sick of his wife, he’d poisoned her and then buried what was left of the body under his house before setting up home with another woman. Was the unfortunate Mrs. Crippen a suffragette? Kell wondered idly as he bit into a corner of lightly buttered toast.

  “Let’s get nearer the front,” Nobbs said. “My cousin Clarrie is to speak.”

  Constance followed the four women—Nobbs, Abernathy, Dinah, and Tansy—as they filed through a mass of demonstrators on the eastern edge of Hyde Park.

  She thought of the King’s funeral, her first day out with these young women, when Wiggins had stepped in. But this time, it was all w
omen. This time, no one would look askance at their banners; this time, they were getting somewhere, for all Abernathy’s grumbles.

  “Keep up,” Dinah grinned. “We don’t want to lose you.”

  They were the same words she’d used the month before when Constance had jumped into the cab at Oxford Circus with Dinah, Abernathy, and Nobbs.

  Constance had run from the police. She’d thrown down the club in front of Boots, grabbed her skirts, and run. Run like she hadn’t done since she was seven, so that her heart hammered, her hat flew off, and her feet sang with pain. But she’d also felt the power surging in her legs, and by the time they got to the cab, idling at the corner of Great Marlborough Street, she’d almost caught up with Dinah.

  “Go,” Abernathy yelled at the driver.

  The gears ground as the cab leapt away from the curb toward Soho. “North,” Constance called, and Abernathy leaned toward the driver, knife in hand.

  Five minutes later, Constance called again. “Out!”

  “Now?” Abernathy said. “Why?”

  The taxi screeched to a halt. Abernathy waited on the pavement as the others got out. The cabby drove off, mouthing obscenities out of the window.

  Constance shepherded them round the corner of Euston Square and out by Euston Station, which was still abuzz with business. The trains had ceased for the night, but the milk train would be going soon, late-night buses stopped by, and the post was being hauled through the station. They could also see the odd cab scouting for early trade.

  “Brilliant,” said Nobbs.

  Abernathy nodded at Constance. “Good idea, Euston.”

  “A triumph,” Dinah trilled.

  The moment of triumph hadn’t lasted long, Constance reflected as she followed the girls to the front of the crowd, at least not for Abernathy. But she felt hopeful for the cause, despite the horrors of Holloway. A bill was to go before Parliament, offering limited voting rights for women. And once it started, she knew, it would not stop until they all got the vote. It felt closer, it felt real, and the thrill of being with these young women as they pushed it forward, whether it was acid-bombing postboxes or smashing windows, was something she’d been waiting for her whole life. It was real; it was progress.