The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  Martha looked at Wiggins. “I don’t know what happened to Millie, honest.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Wiggins said, and sighed.

  She fiddled with the ribbon on her arm. “You found her?”

  Wiggins shifted in his seat. He leaned forward and looked at her, tiredness hanging off him like a shroud. “Spill it, else we can’t help you.”

  “She had a Fred, a sweet one. I don’t know his real name. Fallen real hard, so she said. Big T, Tommy, he sold her to the Fred.”

  “He sold her? For information?” Kell asked, appalled.

  Martha nodded. “And once he sold her, what was the Fred to do? Tommy had him then. Could blackmail him in spades, couldn’t he? I know posh folk don’t give two stuffs about a young whore, but buying one as your slave is probably going a bit too far—even for the likes of you.” She gestured at Kell.

  “Tommy kept going back to the well,” she went on. “We met him at the Standard, night you showed.” She nodded toward Wiggins. “In the box.”

  Kell reread the letter in his hand. Addressed To Whom it May Concern in the most perfect German, it instructed whoever read it to afford the bearer—one Thomas Clay—every assistance, on behalf of the German government. It was signed, in a flourish of red ink, Van Bork. Kell moved to the door and then nodded at Wiggins. “It’s time,” he said.

  Wiggins stood up slowly and limped after him. Kell went out, calling for the inspector. Wiggins turned back to Martha. “The name of the Fred, in case you’re wondering, like, is Harold Moseby-Brown.”

  They left then, Wiggins and Kell. They left the Embassy, Martha, and all the pale young women in police custody. They did not speak much in the cab. The name on Tommy’s letter, Van Bork, hung between them. They had thwarted yet another of his information-gathering networks, they had rooted out another spy—and yet still the kingpin remained unfound.

  It was almost seven in the morning by the time they arrived at Kell’s house in Hampstead. A baby’s cries greeted them when they came into the hallway. Constance opened the drawing-room door at their approach. “Don’t worry, Vernon,” she said. “It doesn’t happen that quickly. Did you succeed?”

  “We did.”

  She ushered them into the room. Jax sat next to a young woman who held in her arms the baby, her child. It had stopped crying and now offered up a milky smile. “There you go, girl, ain’t too bad, am I?” She offered a finger, then looked up at Wiggins. “This is Millie, but I fink you know that.”

  Wiggins nodded.

  Millie glanced up, distracted and red-eyed. “Don’t blame Harry, sirs. He did all he did for me.”

  Constance nudged the two men back into the hall. “I had no trouble bringing them back here. But she is a little addled.”

  “She’s a drug addict,” Wiggins said. “Moseby-Brown’s had her there for months, on the drip drip.”

  “Is he in custody?”

  “Yes,” said Kell. “Grey detained him at the Foreign Office last night while you went for the girl, and now the police have him.”

  “I need to go to bed,” Wiggins said. He hung up Kell’s silk top hat on the hat stand. “You got anything more my style?”

  Kell handed him a flat cap. “Take this. It belonged to someone who was following me. Working for Moseby-Brown, I thought.”

  “Nah.” Wiggins looked at the cap carefully for a moment, then put it on his head. “It’s Special Branch, sure as.”

  “But—”

  “Doing a tail in an hat like this, the hair oil, the grease, the close-cut hair. Fair ’nuff, but the maker’s name is the tell—it’s next to the Special Branch training HQ, out Battersea. Simple, if you look.”

  Kell was about to make some objection, but a sadness had come over his agent while he made this speech. He delivered his deduction without the usual sass, and his shoulders shrank into his jacket. “Get some rest,” Kell said. “Come back when you’re ready.”

  Wiggins nodded to Constance, then Kell. He limped to the front door, opened it slowly, and stood looking out into the dawn.

  “You’ve done your King and country proud,” Kell called out.

  His agent seemed not to hear. He stood still, head bowed, waiting. Finally, he lifted one hand in the air in a solitary salute, and was gone.

  “Ah ha, Captain Kell, it’s good to be seeing you again, under happier circumstances. That business in Sidney Street, a dark day. But it is over now.”

  “Indeed,” Kell said, eyeing Sir Patrick Quinn carefully.

  They were in the corridor outside Briefing Room A in the Cabinet offices, waiting for the Committee for Imperial Defence to reconvene. Kell, for once, was early.

  Quinn smiled. “I hear it was one of your men who found the hideout.”

  “It was.”

  “And congratulations on uncovering the Whitehall mole. I am thinking this is a triumph, of sorts. A triumph that took almost a year. I was half hoping you would fail in that task, I must admit it to you.”

  “Good of you,” Kell said, and nodded at a couple of men who went past into the committee room.

  Quinn stepped closer, so that only Kell could hear. “Nevertheless, Kell, I am thinking it best if you stepped aside. I am not sure what our superiors would say about a man with a militant, potentially criminal suffragette wife running the Secret Service Bureau, eh? We wouldn’t want to be embarrassing anyone, now would we?” He let the words, the threat, hang there for a second. More men pushed past them into the room. “My recommendation is for Special Branch to take over, so it is. I’m sure you won’t demur. Mr. Pears is entirely behind me on this one, so you know.” He grinned at the last.

  Soapy’s entirely behind you, is he? Kell thought, but did not say. Instead, he nodded slowly and then leaned right into Quinn’s face. “I am much obliged, Sir Patrick. I would say only this. While you may think my wife’s perfectly legal activities are embarrassing, I rather think they are not quite as dangerous—or as publically damaging—as the head of Special Branch employing a police-murdering anarchist as an informant. Peter sends his regards.”

  The color drained from Quinn’s face.

  “Nor are they as damaging as taking the word of this said murdering anarchist to put a perfectly innocent individual on a wanted poster. It was Peter who gave you the final description, was it not?”

  Quinn nodded mute.

  “As I thought,” Kell went on. “So, I’ll be thinking that we can all get along just fine as we are, to be sure, to be sure.”

  “That’s blackmail,” Quinn whispered.

  “It’s secret intelligence,” Kell said finally. “I have my own Bureau. And by the way, I’d take that last wanted poster out of circulation if I were you. Good chap.”

  Kell turned into the committee room. Soapy stood at the head of the large table, shuffling papers, checking that everyone was in their right position. Kell walked straight up to him and pulled him aside.

  “What’s troubling you? We’re about to start. Just waiting for Haldane, I think.”

  “Is the Bureau’s future on the agenda?”

  “Sorry, old man, Quinn’s been making quite the case to take you over.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Oh, really?” Soapy scoped the room with his eyes. He raised an idle hand as Haldane entered the room.

  “And I wouldn’t be if I were you, either.”

  “Why?”

  Kell whispered into his ear. “I have the Embassy of Olifa’s client list. Interesting reading.”

  Soapy straightened. He smiled around at the room, then put his hand on the small of Kell’s back. “Why don’t you take a seat today, Captain Kell,” he said loudly, and then under his breath, “You know, on reflection, I think I’ll recommend an expansion.”

  “Just so.”

  And that was that. The meeting passed off in triumphant fashion. Kell announced the uncovering of Moseby-Brown, with thanks to the Foreign Secretary for confecting the false letter; he went on to mention the exclusi
ve “establishment” he’d uncovered in Belgravia, and its links to spying. In the same breath, he also happened to mention that he had a ledger listing the names of all that establishment’s many customers. He glanced around the table when he made this last point, and noted with satisfaction that few of the men met his eye.

  The rest was a formality. He was praised for providing the information that led to the siege at Sidney Street; the police were commended on their bravery and told to buy better guns; and Churchill was mildly rebuked for turning up at the scene himself. The news that Brandon and Trench had been sentenced to four years apiece was to be regretted, but, as Soapy remarked, this was a failure of naval intelligence, not the Secret Service.

  The meeting closed with a renewed commitment from all to the Secret Service Bureau. Quinn said nothing at any point, while Soapy was particularly voluble in his support.

  Kell skipped out onto Whitehall, whistling. Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, I shall never never never be a slave.

  Later that same day, Wiggins drank. He stood outside the same pub where he’d tailed Bernie and Viv so many months ago, and waited. From his position on the corner, he could just see the entrance to Kell’s building on Victoria Street.

  Finally, she came out. “Over here,” he called, waving.

  She hesitated, then crossed the road toward him.

  “Sherry, right?” he said.

  They sat in the saloon bar. Wiggins stared at his beer. “I’m sorry I said you’d get on your back for anyone. That was out of order.”

  She waved it away.

  “What you gonna do?” he said.

  “They didn’t tell you?” She glanced behind her, as if a minder stood at the door. “Captain Kell got me a job with your Mister C.”

  “Doing what?” Wiggins said, surprised.

  She looked at him as if he was a fool. “Brussels, I think, first. I speak French and German, and the Belgians have a particular taste for the exotic.”

  Wiggins shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  She held his gaze questioning, then she took a sip of her drink, set the glass down, and spoke very slowly. “C wants me to set up an Embassy of my own, run along the same lines, do Delphy’s job, keep the girls sweet. Not on my back at least. We’re to collect military and diplomatic secrets.”

  “Fuck sake,” Wiggins said, disgusted. “You can’t do that.”

  “What else am I meant to do?”

  He shook his head. “The others?”

  “Boy’s coming with me, a couple of the girls.”

  “But we freed you,” he said at last.

  “Freed us to do what? We’re whores. If we had choices, you think any of us would be?” She set down her glass in exasperation.

  Wiggins looked away, embarrassed, ashamed again. “I thought . . .” he stuttered.

  She went on more softly. “Look, mister, you’re not interested in me. You’re a little bit interested in what I look like, sure, but your heart’s elsewhere. What’s she called, by the way?”

  “Bela,” Wiggins muttered.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. New York, maybe.”

  Martha pulled at her hands gently. “Even if you do like how I look, I won’t look like this for much longer. And then where would we be? I’ve got to think of the future, for me and Boy.”

  Wiggins swilled the beer in his glass but did not drink. He could barely breathe.

  “It’s what there is for people like us, Wiggins. We get used, and we try to make the best of it. I thought you’d be pleased. At least now I’m on your side.”

  “My side?” Wiggins said, appalled.

  “You know, King and country.”

  Across town, at a corner table in the first-floor tearoom of Heal’s furniture store on Tottenham Court Road, another watcher waited.

  Constance sipped her third cup of tea and gazed out the window, as she had done for a number of days and hours that week. The building she looked at stood across the road at an angle. Picked out in large, sparkly letters above the frontage, one word: FAIRYLAND. It was an amusement arcade, with a wide, open doorway and various carnival-style games, like a miniature fairground in the middle of London. Constance had been in a number of times since she’d first discovered it, and the only way in or out was through this front door.

  The arcade’s chief attraction was its firing range, which provided shooting practice for any member of the public at the back of the building. Constance had never been in Fairyland without hearing the continual pop pop pop of rifle fire.

  She put her cup down and checked her watch in irritation. She thought of the poor girl she’d rescued from Fulham, with Wiggins’s young friend Jax. A tiny baby, a drug addict, and a man who’d bought her. Jax had told her something of Millie’s life before the brothel, the poverty, the mother drunk, and for a moment Constance understood—or understood, at least, that living in hiding, in squalor even, with a man who could not marry her was still better than that.

  Millie had stayed the night, but soon after, using Constance’s charitable contacts, they’d found her space in a home for fallen women. Although how she would get up, Constance did not know.

  The tea tasted suddenly bitter in her mouth. There was only so much Lapsang souchong she could endure.

  Then she saw them. Swaddled in thick overcoats and fur hats, it was Dinah’s red hair that gave them away: Dinah and Nobbs, entering the arcade.

  By the time Constance got to them, Nobbs was already in position on the range, firing wildly at a wax dummy. Dinah waited her turn.

  Constance tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped round, startled. “Oh, hello,” she said.

  Pop! Pop! Pop!

  “Can we talk somewhere?” Constance cried, her hands over her ears against the noise.

  Dinah shook her head slightly. “It’s my turn in a mo.”

  “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to find you.”

  Dinah shook her head again, almost annoyed.

  “This isn’t the way,” Constance went on.

  “What?”

  “You saw at Parliament how ugly violence is—don’t give in to it. That’s their way.”

  Dinah looked over at Nobbs, firing at the target. “Abernathy hasn’t been the same since that day. She’s had a headache for weeks. It’s not fair.” A tear began to form in her eye.

  Constance searched her face. Pop! Pop! Pop! “Are you lovers?” she asked, suddenly.

  Dinah stared at her but did not reply. She did not need to.

  “Look, you must do something else, not this.” Constance gestured at the guns and the range. “You’re young. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Oh, bother you, Constance. You’ve had your fun with us dippy girls. Now it’s all got too serious, you can leave us alone. You’ve seen how we live, you’ve had your holiday.”

  “No, no, not that,” Constance said loudly, above the gunfire.

  “We are real people. We are adults too.”

  Nobbs stepped back from the range, and glared at Constance. She leaned over toward Dinah without a word.

  “Goodbye,” Dinah said and took the gun.

  Constance left then. Dinah put the rifle to her shoulder and pinged the target repeatedly, dead center every time.

  “Why so glum?” Kell asked. “You look as if you found a penny and lost a pound, as Granny would say.”

  He sat at his desk, smiling, while Wiggins paced to and fro in the office, a face like thunder. He’d marched straight up there after his meeting in the pub with Martha, steaming inside.

  Kell, on the other hand, couldn’t contain his good mood. “We’ve got everything we ever wanted,” he went on, unperturbed. “The future of the Service is guaranteed, we are to be expanded even. Your friend Peter the Painter is dead. Our Foreign Office leak is discovered. How did you cotton on to Moseby-Brown in the end, by the way?”

  Wiggins stopped pacing. “Lover boy? He offered to be your spy, that was the clincher. Nev
er trust a man who’s willing to sneak on his mates, for nothing. He reckoned it would be the perfect cover. And it was.”

  “Yes, I see that.”

  “And I found his hankie at the music hall. When you let on his name, I took a look-see down Fulham way.”

  “That poor girl, with child too.” Kell shook his head sadly.

  “She sorted now?”

  Kell nodded absently.

  “What about him?”

  “Moseby-Brown? Oh, he’ll never work in the Foreign Office again. I think the plan is to send him to somewhere in Africa, in the Colonial Service.”

  “He ain’t going in stir?”

  Kell shook his head. “If we put him in prison, we’d have to make it public and the Foreign Office simply can’t countenance such a disgrace.”

  Typical, Wiggins thought, as he scuffed at the floor with his feet. Typical, but not surprising: the same thing had happened last year. They’d never nail a toff unless they really, really had to.

  “But none of this explains why you’re so angry.”

  Wiggins sat down. “I just spoke to Martha.”

  “Ah.”

  “Was you gonna tell me?”

  Kell pulled out a cigarette from the case in front of him. “You must admit, it’s a good idea for intelligence-gathering. Van Bork was definitely onto something there. But it’s nothing to do with us now. That is C’s department.”

  Wiggins scowled. “It ain’t right. You’s pimping out girls.” He leaned forward in his seat, heat rising to his face. It wasn’t just the three pints of Watneys talking. He thought of those Embassy girls and where they’d come from; he thought of the ragged dockers being beaten up by the police; he thought of Millie’s sister, little Els, piss-poor and no one lifting a finger to help; he thought of Sal, hard at work her whole life long, and still nothing more than a shilling to show for it. He even thought of himself, his younger self, scraping a living from the age of seven on the streets, trawling Paddington Station for scraps, watching as the rich kids boarded trains for Eton with more luggage, more stuff, at fourteen than he’d own in his entire life.

  “What we doing here?” he said. “Nothing’s bloody changed. Them girls is still whores, Millie’s still on the dope, Moseby-Bollock’s not inside. It don’t make a blind bit of difference.”