by H. B. Lyle
‘No.’
‘Money?’
Wiggins looked between his feet. ‘Some,’ he said. Then he looked up. ‘I’m ready to sign up. Mr Holmes said you might have use of my talents.’
Kell nodded. ‘Indeed I do. Or rather, the country does.’ He stood up. ‘But this isn’t the time or place. Tomorrow, we should meet – I’ll have to check a couple of things, make sure everything’s in order.’
‘But what about the work? What is it?’
‘That can wait. Suffice to say it is of the utmost importance to the security of the Empire.’
Wiggins rose slowly and followed Kell to the door. ‘You’ll be working for me, directly, of course. My agent, as it were.’
They faced each other by the open office door. Wiggins paused, pulled his fingers through his hair and nodded again. It felt to Kell like a handshake.
‘Here.’ Kell dug into his pocket and pulled out a few coins. ‘For this evening. Find somewhere to stay, temporary, where you’re not known. It is important that you keep all this to yourself. We’ll work everything out tomorrow. I’ll expect you here at three.’ Kell felt his equilibrium restored.
Wiggins looked at the money in his palm. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he said.
‘What do you mean? Why?’
‘I take it when you say agent you mean the secret kind, judging from what Mr Holmes says. And there ain’t that much secret about you or your office.’
Kell felt himself flush as Wiggins went on.
‘I found you, and I’m just a nobody off the street. There’s a bloke outside in a tweed cap with one eye larger than the other and a sailor’s tattoo who, I’d wager a pound to the penny, is watching you. He didn’t see me come in, because he’s waiting for you to come out. So if you want to keep me secret, we should meet secret.’
Wiggins was right, Kell now knew. True counter-intelligence work required secrecy, not just from the enemy but from everyone. Especially if you didn’t know who the enemy was. He resolved in that instant to keep Wiggins’s existence a secret from all but his immediate superiors, and even then never to identify him by name. Kell had lost too many men to be careless again. He nodded. ‘Where?’ he said.
‘Outside Fortnum and Mason’s, main entrance.’
Wiggins stepped into the corridor. ‘But how will you get out?’ Kell said. ‘Won’t he see you?’
‘He won’t see me.’
Kell sat at his desk, confused, unnerved, yet elated. He wasn’t used to being ordered about by a man as socially inferior as Wiggins; a man with barely a guinea to his name, a torn cap and ragged clothes. It was unnerving, too, to be so thoroughly out-thought. For Kell had no doubt Wiggins was right: any meeting between them should be conducted in secret and certainly away from his office. Wiggins would be a difficult agent to control.
But what an agent he could be, Kell smiled to himself. He lit a cigarette. No one on his staff could have stolen into the building so effectively, past the policemen and the most officious doorman in Whitehall, let alone found his office – not even with their best Sandhurst accents and fine manners. And what of the reverse? Could any of them melt into a working-class milieu like Wiggins? A pub, a music hall, a munitions factory? Wiggins was like a stray cat, a lifetime spent keeping to the shadows, working for Holmes, the army, London. In that moment Kell believed the great detective was indeed right: Wiggins could be the best.
7
Wiggins scrabbled on the road for stones. It had taken him days to track down little Sal. The Blackheath Orphanage for Girls rose grim against the sky. A huge building, with sharp turrets and black windows, it was designed to eat motherless children. Wiggins kept to the shadows as he paced around its walls.
Sherlock Holmes had told him to find friends, and after his escape from St Cyprian’s, Wiggins realised he had only one. Sal. He watched (or observed) as a row of girls came out into the yard. They walked in desultory circles, heads bowed, while a black-clad spectre oversaw them from a high doorway. Wiggins spotted Sally, her red curls uncovered. A proper girl.
He crept across the road and scouted down the side of the building, stones at the ready. Then he took aim and hurled the pebbles at the large, high windows, cracking one and smashing a second outright.
The girls cried out and their gaoler shouted. As she hurried from her post round the corner, Wiggins called in a soft, high voice: ‘Sal, Sal, over here.’
Her head whipped round. As the rest of them rushed to the scene of the damage, she hurried over to the gate.
‘Wiggins, what are you doing here?’ she whispered through the railings.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
Sal glanced back, excitedly. ‘Where?’
‘Paddington. I’ve found a spot.’
‘But what will we do for poppy?’
‘I’ve got a job, ain’t I,’ Wiggins said proudly. ‘It’s irregular, but it’s a job.’
Wiggins had followed Sherlock Holmes’s advice as a seven-year-old, and he followed it now, more than twenty years later, as he stepped across the traffic-choked Strand. He had until the afternoon before he had to meet Kell at Fortnum’s. The morning was his.
While Wiggins was in prison, both the police and the press had lost interest in Bill’s death. Fresh murders decorated the front pages; society scandals; rumours of a state visit by the Tsar; the Imperial Exhibition at the White City; the touring Australian cricket team; Blériot’s flying machine; Harvey the Notting Hill strangler and his sensational trial; the people’s budget – the world kept on turning, the presses rolling, Tottenham and Bill Tyler soon forgotten.
But not by Wiggins. He knew someone else had been in Oak Cottage that day. He’d seen the boot marks, the bloodstain – and what about the stolen money? There must have been a third man, a mastermind behind the whole bloody scene. The eight-pointed star held the key. The police had closed the case, and wouldn’t want to know. Holmes had told him not to let Kell in on his ‘interests’, and so Wiggins was going it alone. He was determined to find out who was behind Bill’s murder, who gained by it – and who would pay for it, at his hands. Street justice, just like the old days. Bill deserved it.
He hustled down Villiers Street to the river, noting the new stallholders and the old, the vintners, Faulkner’s hotel and washroom – for toffs in need of a bath and a piss – and the aged beggar. ‘Morning, Otto,’ he called out to the hunched mendicant.
‘Shsss,’ the beggar hissed and beckoned him over. ‘Arthur now, Viggins. Un gut English name.’
Over the years, Wiggins had come to know many of central London’s regular panhandlers and Otto had been working around Charing Cross since Wiggins was a boy. ‘You’re as much a Londoner as me,’ he said.
‘Vor is coming,’ Otto said. ‘Arthur is better than Otto, no?’
‘I always liked Otto,’ Wiggins said almost to himself. He looked down on the top of Otto’s head, noticing the few strands of thin white hair, the dry, peeling skin. ‘There’s always talk. If you believed half you heard on the streets, we’d be fighting the Americans next, then the Russians, then the French, the Austrians, the Spanish, and not forgetting the Turks. Germany can wait.’
Otto wagged his finger. ‘Beware the Turk,’ he said. ‘You can call me Otto, if you vont, but quiet, quiet. Where have you been anyway? I don’t see your old friends, no.’
‘The Irregulars? Way too old for that.’
‘Young vons, I don’t see so much now. It makes me sad.’
‘You can still pick up a runner at the Cheese, down Fleet Street, but they’s older now.’
‘Ach, I miss the young vons. Spare any change?’ Otto gestured at a passer-by.
Wiggins plunged a hand into his pocket and flipped one of Kell’s last shillings into the hat. ‘Don’t die thirsty,’ he said in farewell.
He stepped between the boatmen on Embankment pier, a faint smell of tar and coal and damp wood and the memory of brine hanging off them. He quickly found out who was
going east and cadged a lift from a cargo launch heading back to the docks.
After a jaunty trip down the Thames, flitting between the thick traffic, the launch pulled in at Wapping. The wharf was alive with steamboats and sailing skiffs dwarfed by the towering sea ships moored in dock. Wiggins made his way up Red Lion Street, the London Docks to his left. A city all of its own, the ships like great buildings straining for the sky, the quays awash with citizens of all the world: thin, straggly-bearded Lascars, Negroes from the West Indies, Portuguesers, dash blond Swedes, all crying out in their different tongues amid the tar-barrel reek and the smell of cinnamon from the East, tea from Assam, and tobacco from all over. The dock echoed with the yells of traders, warehouse hands and two-a-penny street sellers.
Wiggins pushed north up on to Cable Street and towards the Russian drinking den where he’d so nearly met his end. He’d been so boozed that night he couldn’t have sworn to the identity of any of his attackers, bar the man with the scarred chin.
He took up a position on the corner with a clear view of the drinking-den door. Two hours later a man bustled along the alleyway jangling a floret of keys. This was no bearded Russian, though, no hardened immigrant drinker with a chin scar and a three-foot razor-sharp blade. The man stood barely an inch over five feet, wore a loud chequered suit and had bright ginger whiskers that crept from beneath his hat like a fox’s ears. A property agent on his daily rounds.
‘Is this the laundry?’ Wiggins asked, just as the man thrust a key into the door.
Ginger Whiskers contrived to look down his nose at Wiggins, even though he was nearly a foot shorter. ‘May I help you?’ he said.
Wiggins put on his haughtiest voice. ‘I am prospecting for rental properties on behalf of my employer, with especial regard to the proximity of laundries. He is of a very particular bent when it comes to matters of hygiene. Has this property been long empty, may I ask? And is there a laundry hereabouts? The agent on Whitechapel, Nelson, he says there’s nothing around here and that I should look elsewhere.’
‘Ha!’ the man crowed. ‘Nelson is a damn fool. This is a new rental.’ The agent smiled. ‘Very desirable location, close to all amenities, reasonably priced. I’m sure your employer wouldn’t be disappointed. Although I should say I’ve already had interest. If you don’t snap these up, they go quickly.’ He lowered his voice. ‘We are even prepared to let to the Sons of Judaea, if you take my meaning – for a premium, of course.’ The man winked.
Wiggins cast his eye at the line of derelict houses opposite, the half-mooned glass in the windowpanes and the peeling paint. ‘How long has it been empty? And who was the last tenant?’
‘Oh, well, you can’t expect me to reveal such details. Commercially sensitive, I’m sure you understand.’
Wiggins sighed. ‘Is there a laundry nearby?’ he said again.
‘Of course, of course – all conveniences here. There are two down Whitechapel – Chinese.’ He whispered this in a deep undertone. ‘Or back along the passage, past the pub. Mostly Eastern European, but some locals.’
‘Aren’t they all locals?’ Wiggins said and turned up the alleyway towards the pub.
‘Discounts are available, bite now or be sorry,’ the agent called after him. He had confirmed what Wiggins suspected: the Russians were long gone.
The laundry belched steam. Wiggins felt it on his face before he saw it, the hot moisture prickling his cheeks. A faded sign marked the laundry’s huge doorway in an alley off an alley with cobbled stones running into a bubbling drain. Wiggins walked past to a courtyard further along. A gang of children played in one corner, their squawks and jibes rattling off the high walls. They threw and kicked a rag ball among them, made from the laundry scraps, no doubt. He knelt down and retied his bootlaces, scanning the children as he did so. None of them had shoes.
One of the children stood out, or rather stood apart. Moving towards the ball in half-apology whenever it came near, but too slight to make his presence felt. Wiggins noticed him. The last pick, the weakest; spent their lives on the sidelines, watching. He beckoned him with a long finger.
The small boy padded over. His clothes hung off him. ‘Speak true, and I’ll sort you.’ Wiggins held up a penny. ‘Lie, and you’re mince.’
‘You ain’t no nonce?’
Wiggins smiled. ‘Does one of the laundry girls have a birthmark, right across one side of her face from here to here?’
‘Yeah, I seen her.’ The boy thrust out his hand.
Wiggins held the coin. ‘But you ain’t seen me, right?’
‘You are a nonce. Give me my money.’
He handed over the penny and shook his head. ‘When does she work?’
The boy chewed for a second and grabbed his chin. ‘If only I could remember …’ He posed deep thought.
Wiggins pulled another coin from his pocket and the child smiled, fat and broad, as he took the second penny. ‘I seen her in the mornings. Once anyways. Want to know anything else?’
‘I doubt I could afford it.’
The boy skipped away, past the others and out along the alley, suddenly aware of his new-found riches. Wiggins fished out the old Doctor’s battered Hunter: still two minutes slow. He turned westward. On the way, he made sure to pass the Anarchist Club on Jubilee Street. One of the cons in Brixton, a peterman working out of Lewisham, had spoken of it. That’s where it all happens, he’d said, all those Eastern European nutters, Jews, Bolsheviks, spouting their claptrap. The peterman had even been to a lecture there, he said, but found it absurd. He worked hard for a living, he told Wiggins, and didn’t expect to have to give it away to the poor. He’d dedicated his life – and his father before him – to blowing safes and why couldn’t the likes of these wasters also learn a trade?
Wiggins examined the crude posters stuck up outside the club. They listed guest speakers, times, places, extolling revolution. He jotted something on his shirt cuff, checked the corners for a tail, then set off once more.
Kell stood by the entrance to Fortnum’s, jostled and harried at every turn as the masses strolled down Piccadilly. Idle shoppers, the new ‘tourists’, loafers, pests all. Wiggins was already seven minutes late. Kell despised tardiness. He began to regret his high spirits of the night before. He’d gushed to Ewart that morning about recruiting a new kind of agent, gushed like a fool.
A mama went past, a governess and two children in tow. She didn’t look like a suffragist, Kell thought as his eyes dwelt on the disappearing governess’s behind. His case against votes for women, he decided, rested on War. He’d yet to outline this theory to Constance in full, but surely, he would argue, one couldn’t expect a woman to command armies, to fight at all, which was the chief purpose of government. Ergo, they couldn’t be expected to vote. He sighed inwardly: if ever there were a woman fitted and prepared to be a minister of war, it would be his wife.
Eleven minutes late. On hearing about Kell’s new agent, Ewart had muttered about recruiting from the proper class, the right sort of people. Kell was loath to admit his boss might be right, that Wiggins was and always would be too much of the street. He’d wait the time it took him to smoke, he decided, and dug into his pocket with weary despair. As he pulled out his cigarette case one of his battered visiting cards came with it, fluttering to the ground. He stooped to pick it up, and noticed unfamiliar writing on the back of the card, etched in pencil – a note:
You are being followed. Take underground from Pic.
Cir. 2 stops, then cab to Regent St Theatre.
Take aisle seat stalls. W.
Kell whipped his head round. There was no one there. Ever since the attack in Hampshire, he’d checked every street he entered, watched for exits. Even at the height of a bustling afternoon in town, he was on guard. He examined the card again. Placed there when the delivery men buffeted past, he assumed. Christ, the man could have taken his wallet and watch without a by-your-leave. Of course, he could simply wait, flush Wiggins out, or return to the office even. He disliked bei
ng told what to do. Except that Wiggins infuriatingly had a point. Certainly, he had the upper hand. Kell rammed the card back into his pocket, tossed the cigarette aside unsmoked and headed to the station.
He glanced about nervously as he walked, hesitated at the window of Hatchards to see if he could spot anyone suspicious in the reflection of the bookshop’s convex windows. Nothing, apart from the omnibuses, motorised taxis, horse-drawn four-wheelers, hansom cabs, costermongers’ carts and the hundreds of hurrying pedestrians that made up the traffic of a normal spring day on Piccadilly.
As he descended the station stairs towards the lifts, a first-class ticket in hand, a great hubbub broke out behind him.
‘He’s fell,’ someone called out. ‘Mind out there, watch it, give him space.’
A crowd bunched at the bottom of the stairs. Kell caught sight of a hand splayed onto the tiles, heavy knuckles briefly visible through a thicket of legs. ‘Careful, it might be broken,’ a voice said.
Kell knew enough to keep moving. He took a train two stops to Down Street and then hailed a cab.
The theatre had been newly converted into a cinematograph. Kell found his way down the aisle and took a seat. As he slumped back he lit a cigarette, sending a twisting stream of smoke out into the light spilling from the screen. A man leapt in and out of a bedroom, at great speed, but Kell was too distracted to work out what the images meant. They never stopped, never settled. It was impossible. He closed his eyes.
‘You took your time,’ Wiggins whispered in his ear.
Kell started and turned in his seat. ‘Stay looking at the pictures,’ Wiggins said from the row behind.
‘Is this all really necessary?’
‘You saw him at the station?’
‘I saw someone,’ Kell said. ‘Did you injure him badly?’
‘I tripped him, is all.’