The Red Ribbon
Page 26
Moseby-Brown hesitated, and shook his head.
“Sweetheart? Is that the word they use nowadays?”
Moseby-Brown dropped his cigarette box. “I, er . . .” He’d lost all his normal poise. His cheeks reddened slightly, and he tugged at his collar in a swift, nervous movement.
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you, old man. Just seeking enlightenment, wherever I can. I’ll let you get on. And thank you, once again. Your reporting may seem trivial, but it is vital to the nation’s safety.”
Moseby-Brown nodded, and left. Kell watched him go, hurrying through the ancient chairs in his pristine suit of clothes sharply creased in all the right places, monogrammed. Since they’d met in the Committee, Kell had been using him as a source inside the Foreign Office, collecting any titbits that might help identify a leaker or—more usually—add to Kell’s growing store of information on those in important positions. Moseby-Brown had been remarkably keen to help—as any good patriot should, thought Kell—and had provided interesting snippets on a number of people. The undersecretary who gambled, the chap with French family, the ambassador who liked young boys: all grist to his intelligence mill, names for a watch list, but nothing that had yet led to the breakthrough. Still, Kell reflected in the taxi back to the office, it was always nice to spend time with a Thomas Hood enthusiast.
Back at the office, Wiggins was waiting for him in the usual style, feet up on the desk.
“We gotta get inside,” Wiggins said as soon as Kell opened the door.
“Impossible,” he snapped. He wafted Wiggins’s feet off the desk. “How many times have I told you, the police won’t do my bidding without evidence.”
“Don’t talk to me about the cops.” Wiggins spat the last word out, as one would turned milk. “They’s damned near killed a boy out east. Maybe they’s did, I don’t know.”
“Are we going to fight again?” Kell said, sitting down at his desk. “I can’t fight on every front.” My wife is bad enough, he did not say.
Wiggins glowered at him. “I said my piece. I mean it—I’ll go back in, if you pay me, but I’m never going to give you another name again. Ever. We’s about protecting the country from the bloody Germans, not snitching on our own.”
Kell sucked in but said nothing. He wasn’t going to force Wiggins back into the unions, it was Churchill’s bugbear, after all. But he’d have to find a way to placate the home secretary, whether through lies, exaggeration, or some version of the truth, he didn’t know. Wiggins himself was almost certainly exaggerating. As was common with so many of his class, he held the law in utter contempt. Anything he said about police violence had to be treated with caution, if not flat disbelief.
What was certain, however, was that Churchill had ordered an escalation in the way such disturbances were handled. Quinn had said as much at dinner—a hard school, getting harder—and Kell hadn’t picked up on it. He’d been so angry at the suggestion of his own resignation, the insinuations that he was out of his depth, over the hill, that he’d missed the suggestion of a change in policy.
The West India dockers weren’t the only workers in the firing line. Rumors were bouncing around government circles about trouble brewing in the Rhondda Valley. There was even talk of sending in the army against the miners. Kell hoped his false report, in Wiggins’s name, wouldn’t come back to bite him.
“Very well.” He gave Wiggins a hard stare. “I thought you had more backbone than that, I must confess.” He let that hang in the air for a moment. Wiggins was busy enough at the Embassy, and Kell himself felt a certain distaste for Churchill’s commands when it came to infiltration and political meddling, but he wanted to let Wiggins stew a little. It did no harm to make your underlings feel indebted to you.
Wiggins tilted his head in disdain.
Kell tsked. “Now, the Embassy—I hate calling it that. This house of ill repute. We still have nothing definite? No link to Germany, say?”
“Germans are about the only mob who don’t go there,” Wiggins said. “We need to get in there, I keep telling you.”
“But how?”
Wiggins nodded at him, and waited. And waited.
“Well, speak up, man. What?” Kell felt the heat rising in his face. “You don’t mean . . . No, I . . . well, I couldn’t possibly do . . . It’s impossible. In no way . . . never.”
And so it was that, on the evening of the seventeenth of November 1910, as Welsh miners fought running battles with the army, as cavalry soldiers charged on their own countrymen in the Rhondda Valley, and as Wiggins looked on from his vantage point high above Ranleigh Terrace, Captain Vernon Kell, late of the South Staffordshire Regiment and the Staff, veteran of campaigns in China and South Africa, now head of the Secret Service Bureau, found himself staring up at the door of the Embassy of Olifa, knocking shop to the quality.
He hesitated, hand at the doorbell, even at this stage unable to go through with it. What the hell was he doing? He was on the verge of turning back, to hell with Wiggins, when the door sprang open.
“Good evening, sir.” A woman had opened the door. She had tight black curls bound up on her head and a darkness to her skin. She smiled. “Would you like to come in?”
“Er, I . . .”
“This is your first time, I see,” she went on kindly. She wore a long golden dress that shimmered when she moved. Kell shifted his eyes from her décolletage, and looked beyond her into the room. “Come this way. There is nothing to fear.”
“I was recommended by . . .” He tailed off. The woman sashayed away from him across the large hallway, her heeled shoes tapping ever so gently against the chessboard tiles. She turned, and beckoned him on. Her walk was most disconcerting, and Kell could do nothing but follow.
Get a grip, man! He tried to take in the room. Doorways left, right, and center, as well as a grand staircase up to the first floor. Immaculate decoration, he noted, gilt-framed portraits, the lot. The black woman reached a door at the far corner of the hall and gestured him over.
As she did so, a great Atlas of a man picked his way down the stairs. He glanced at Kell in a way that suggested he’d been watching him all along—certainly from the time he entered, but even before that too. He had the same kind of penetration in his look that flashed across Wiggins’s face every now and then, like he was reading your secrets. Kell nodded at him and hurried over to the woman, who held open the door.
Inside, an older lady sat at a quaint little writing desk. “Good evening. Please, take a seat,” she said. “My name is Delphy.”
Kell sat down. The room was much like a respectable lady’s small sitting room, with clumpy pot plants and a compact suite of easy chairs complete with heavy antimacassars. He placed his cane on the floor and tried to concentrate.
“How did you hear about us?” She peered at him over her glasses. He thought of his prep-school matron, asking him how often he went to the lavatory.
“Er, Middleman, at the Admiralty,” Kell said, as he’d prepared with Wiggins. Using one of the names from the list supplied by the cabbies. “He’s a member of my club. Said this place is just the ticket, for, um . . . a chap like me?”
Delphy clicked her tongue and made a note in a large leather-bound ledger. “First-timers need to place a deposit.”
“Will five pounds do?”
She nodded. “And the name of your banker? For the future, we try to deal with cash as little as possible.” Kell wrote down the name on the paper supplied. “And your signature,” Delphy pointed, then slipped the paper into the ledger.
“And your work? What is your position?”
“Civil service,” Kell muttered. “Former staff captain.”
“Ah, yes, life can be so dull in the service. We’ll mark you down as an attaché.”
When going through his cover story with Wiggins, his agent had advised him to stay as close to the truth as possible. Constructing cover was all about making yourself credible—and nothing was as credible as the truth.
“Just
so,” Delphy said and looked up from the ledger, her pen poised. “And what do you like?”
“Er, claret?”
She tsked with impatience. “You predilections? Peccadillos? Types? Oh, for heaven’s sake. We offer new guests a parade of the girls . . .”
“Yes, I see,” Kell croaked at last. His collar pinched, his breath was short, and his fingers tingled. He wondered if he was having a stroke.
“Or Martha here.” Delphy gestured to the black woman in the golden dress, who stood at the door.
Something inside Kell died. Or at least, that was the sound that emanated from deep within him. “Martha?” he said, in a high-pitched, reedy voice that he didn’t recognize as his own.
“That will do for the moment. We can set you up an account if the service is satisfactory. There will be more conditions then.”
Kell tried to collect his thoughts, tried to resort to Wiggins’s methods, tried to see around the furniture, Delphy’s school-matron act, for clues.
“Off you run then, chop-chop,” Delphy said.
Kell stood up, shaken. The black woman, Martha, smiled and sauntered toward the stairs. Kell could only follow, mute.
“Boy, get out of it,” the huge man cried as a small boy sped past him. Kell turned back to Martha, who was already swaying up the stairs. He gulped.
“Oh, I forgot my cane,” he said and strode back to Delphy’s room. He pushed open the door and crouched to retrieve it from the floor.
Delphy swiveled around and straightened, surprised. In her hand, she held the leather ledger and behind her, in what Kell had previously thought a standard living-room armoire, the open door of a safe.
“I beg your pardon,” Kell said. “My cane.”
Delphy slammed closed the heavy safe door and glared at him. “Back to your room,” she rasped. He nodded and fled. It hadn’t escaped his notice that along with the ledgers and a pile of banknotes, Delphy’s safe also contained a revolver.
Martha waited for him at the top of the first flight of stairs. “Naughty,” she said.
Kell coughed and followed her as they rounded the landing and took the next flight. He stared at the heels of her feet. Any higher was too disconcerting. She led him down a plush corridor, with doors off it either side.
He tried to shut out the sound of groaning, the squeals of ecstasy, the fake laughter, a strangulated scream that ended with a high-pitched “Hallelujah!”
Martha glanced at him. “Don’t mind the bishop,” she said, as she opened a door. He kept his eyes down as he followed her in. It wasn’t just her sheer physicality that was so disconcerting, or her beauty. It was her manner, her air of sophistication and poise. He’d expected the whole experience to be sordid, dirty even, but this was very different. She was very different. The air smelled good—lavender, musk, and something else, something heady. It reminded him of somewhere that he couldn’t place.
“Let me take those for you,” she said.
He stood stock-still, unable to move, beguiled.
“Your hat, coat, and cane?” she went on.
“Oh, of course,” he fumbled.
The room was large, with a big sash window and framed paintings on the wall. A red velvet curtain hung over one wall, but all Kell could really see, and feel, was the bed, which dominated the space. He turned away in embarrassment and pretended to study the apparently bland watercolor on the near wall.
He looked closer. Japanese, he guessed, with a man and a . . . It was actually an erotic print depicting the most unnatural human act, something he thought physically impossible. He averted his eyes hurriedly, only to see Martha leisurely shrugging off her dress from the shoulders. “Interesting, don’t you think,” she said. “The Japanese exhibition has brought us all sorts of curios. You can wash there,” she said, nodding her head at a basin and jug on a small side table.
“Righty-ho,” he said. He rolled up his sleeves and lathered away with a will, relieved to have something to do with his hands, something to concentrate on. When he’d finished, he turned around to Martha and shook his hands. “You don’t happen to have a towel, do you?”
She looked at him in astonishment for a moment, then burst out laughing, all façade of sophistication gone in an instant. “I didn’t mean your hands, dear.”
“I . . . ?”
18
Constance waited for her husband. Waited for no other reason than to confirm her worst fears, so she could report back to the Hampstead ladies, and to Dinah and the girls. She waited, dressed and ready to go.
“Apparently Asquith’s going to kill the Conciliation Bill.” The chairwoman of the Hampstead branch (and confidante of Emmeline Pankhurst herself) rang that afternoon and told her the news, or the rumor. “Do you know anything?”
Constance hung up. She called Dinah, out in Barons Court, only to find out they already suspected. She called every campaigner she knew. The telephone line crackled with rumor, outrage, and suppressed hope. No one had confirmed with any certainty what Prime Minister Asquith was actually planning to do the following day in Parliament, but the mood was black and angry. It appeared the ruling Liberals were about to call another general election, thereby consigning their halfhearted suffrage bill to the scrap heap. All those she spoke to, Dinah, Hampstead, and the rest, urged her to find out more.
And so she waited for her husband. She would wait all night if she had to.
Her detective work on behalf of the others hadn’t come to what she’d hoped. The first thing she’d realized in trying to ascertain the movements of Special Branch, what the police did and did not know, was the extent of her husband’s influence. It had proved to be surprisingly, and disappointingly, meager. At the rounds of social gatherings she usually eschewed—charity shindigs, coffee mornings for army wives—it was clear that Kell was a star descending. No one spoke in such crude terms, no one mentioned details, no one even referred to her husband. But the way they treated her was enough. In government and army circles, the professional standing of one’s husband bore a direct relationship to the social standing of his wife. And she was washing up the coffee cups.
These suspicions were confirmed when she’d surprised Kell at his office. It was a paltry setup, without much activity. A clerk, some dusty furniture, and the ubiquitous Wiggins hardly made for the pulsating center of a web of spies.
If anything were needed to further add to her disappointment, the dinner party with the odious Sir Patrick Quinn and that snake-in-the-grass Soapy was the final straw. Quinn was clearly deep in the midst of a scheme to oust Kell completely from the government security apparatus, while Soapy looked on. To make matters worse, it was obvious that whatever cooperation Quinn might offer Kell, it would not involve information on the suffragettes. The dinner party at least confirmed this: not only was Special Branch closely involved in monitoring the movement, it seemed that Quinn suspected (or knew of) her own commitment to the cause. He’d implied as much as they had parted—he would never trust Kell with any intelligence bearing on his wife.
No, Kell wasn’t the inside man she’d hoped. Nevertheless, he was still on good terms with Soapy—who was Asquith for all intents and purposes, certainly when it came to parliamentary business—and so she waited, waited on for a man diminished.
She stood up when she heard his key in the front door and went to the drawing-room window. He swept in and made straight for the drinks cabinet, at first unaware of her presence.
“Vernon!”
“Good God,” he started. “You near frightened the life out of me.” Sweat streaked his brow despite the November cold, and he wore full evening wear, right down to the top hat and tails.
“Tell me it isn’t true.”
He took a step back. “I don’t know what you mean.” He looked away, then downed his drink in one swift movement. “Shouldn’t you be at a meeting?”
“I was waiting for you.”
He poured himself another drink, and held the cabinet with his free hand. “So I see.”
He looked at her strangely, a mixture of awe and fear in his face. “I really don’t, I couldn’t . . .”
She strode right up close to him in her anger. “Is Asquith really withdrawing the bill tomorrow? Is he ditching suffrage?”
“Oh.” Kell stared blankly back at her.
“What do you know? What’s the point if you won’t tell me anything? What’s the point?” she repeated.
He blinked. “He’s going to dissolve Parliament tomorrow. They are calling a general election.”
“And the bill will go to blazes,” she cried. She pushed his shoulder in frustration and anger, then stormed out into the hallway. He didn’t go after her. She bustled with her umbrella, bag, and scarf, and wiped away the first prickle of tears.
She put her hand to the front door and then hesitated. Something snagged, something not quite right.
“Where have you been?” she said as she strode back into the drawing room. It wasn’t just his shifty manner that didn’t ring true, it was his smell. “I can smell you from here.” She had to go. She had to know.
His hand shot to his neck suddenly. “It’s not what you think,” he said.
“My God,” she cried. “You’ve been with a woman!”
As she said this, Kell opened out his hand in a reflex movement. It was smudged with rouge. He looked up at her, lies spread across his face like a rash.
“Who is she?” Constance asked, pulling her coat tightly. The tears came to her eyes at last, tears of frustration and anger. She dashed them away.
“No, honestly, I can explain,” Kell pleaded. “It really isn’t what you think.” He took a step toward her, clearly fumbling for the right thing to say. “I was in a brothel.”
“We may have to go in hard. It’s regrettable, but necessary.”
“Quite right too, this kind of illegality needs to be crushed.”
“Hear hear! They are inhuman.”