by H. B. Lyle
Wiggins had never felt more disliked in his life than he did in his first two weeks at Woolwich. The workers regarded him with outright disdain or else they simply avoided his eye. Only one person went out of his way to be friendly. On his second day, as Wiggins strode across the workshop floor, someone ran into the back of him. ‘Ooof.’
He turned to see a boy of around seventeen sprawled at his feet. ‘Watch it,’ Wiggins grunted.
‘Watch me, why don’t ya?’ the boy said. ‘Watchman.’
‘Clever dick.’
The boy clambered up. ‘Milton.’
‘Is that a question?’
‘Nah, it’s me name, ain’t it.’ He thrust out his hand. His head jiggled from side to side, all abuzz. A lank flap of blond hair fell over his eyes.
Wiggins regarded the boy. He was one of the factory runners. They took messages from the floor to the office, to accounts, to security, outside. They went everywhere, saw everything.
‘We do the shit,’ Milton said by way of explanation. ‘Not as bad as working for Rayner, mind. See ya.’
‘Wait up. I’ll shout you a pint. You’re the only body who’s said a word to me since I got here.’
‘You’re the snitch, ain’t ya?’ Milton grinned. ‘But I talk to anyone, me. I’m not so popular myself.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m bad luck.’ Milton smiled, open and artless. ‘Cos of this.’ He pointed to his foot and then ran off.
As he loped away, he swung his right leg around in a swift arc. His head rose and fell in time with the strange, almost mechanical movement of his legs. The boy had a club foot.
Two weeks in, Wiggins had failed to speak to anyone else on the factory floor. Maybe he was bad luck too, he thought, as he wandered on through the factory, past the great whirring machines. Milton might be bad luck, but what of Bela, did her face mean ill fortune? He smiled at the memory of his successful meeting with her earlier in the day. Her birthmarked cheek must have been a cross to bear – the cruel jibes of children, the stunted interest of men. Perhaps it was good luck in Latvia? He didn’t know.
‘Have a good one, Jonny,’ Milton called out, startling Wiggins. ‘You look like a mouse couldn’t get past you.’ He laughed.
‘Cheeky,’ Wiggins said as he made it back to the guardhouse while the rest of the workers made for the gates.
‘You still owe’s me a beer,’ Milton said over his shoulder as he joined the stream heading home for the evening.
‘No fraternising,’ Rayner rasped. ‘And no kipping. I’ll be back at six tomorra.’
At eight o’clock the next morning, Wiggins kept his latest appointment with Kell. ‘It’s cracked,’ he said.
‘At last,’ Kell exclaimed. He sat behind Wiggins on a sparsely populated tram. They rattled round the corner at Westminster Bridge Road and headed up towards town. Kell hunched forward to hear. Wiggins looked out of the window. ‘Go on,’ Kell said.
‘Money, ain’t it? Who doesn’t have it, then gets it. You said your man, the dead man—’
‘Leyton.’
‘Right. He was numbers, in the clerks’ office? And they wanted him dead.’
Kell nodded quickly.
‘You’ve been through anyone who’s left since and they’re clear. Anyone stupid enough to spill the beans, then leave with the dough is asking for it. Besides, no point in binning Leyton if you’re gonna scarper. So, the rat’s still there and has access to shell design. Whoever they are—’
‘Germany, surely?’ Kell interrupted.
‘We know the information got to Krupp’s is all,’ Wiggins said. ‘Not who stole it.’ He closed his eyes and intoned: ‘“Do not theorise without data.” Do that, you get all out of whack. A wise man told me that, sort of,’ he went on in his normal voice. ‘Whoever it is, the Woolwich connection is too juicy to let go.’
The brakes kicked and screamed. Kell waited while a trio of new passengers swung down the aisle and the conductor cried out, ‘Off!’
‘And? Get to it, man.’
Wiggins paused. ‘The rat’s not from the factory floor, can’t be. Got to have access to the office, right? So – links in the chain, the old man says – it has to be either a clerk, management or a third man I ain’t sure of yet.’
‘Management!’ Kell gasped.
‘Or relations thereof.’ Wiggins took off his cap. Should he shave the sides of his head, he wondered suddenly – the Latvian look. Would she like that? ‘The rat’s close to things,’ he went on to Kell. ‘Has to be. There are two men we need to look into before we make a move.’
‘At last.’ Kell pulled a notebook from his breast pocket. ‘I’ll have the police bring them in immediately.’
Wiggins exhaled. The tram swung away from the river into Northumberland Avenue. He steadied himself on the seat in front. ‘Is that smart?’ he asked. ‘We don’t want ’em to know we know, do we, sir? Better if I worked out which one it was and who they report to?’ Wiggins swivelled in his seat to look at Kell directly for the first time since their meeting began. His chief’s eyes stared wide and puffy, long unclosed, and he clutched the pencil in his hand too hard. The tips of his boots twitched and his right knee rose and fell repeatedly. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that here was a man under pressure. Wiggins relented. ‘One of the under-clerks is up to no good. Name of Basil. I’ll look into him, sir, he’s my bag.’
Royston Basil, a round-faced and furtive man, occasioned much comment among the workers at Woolwich. He wore tinted glasses and had a haughty air that made him disliked. Wiggins didn’t care about his manners so much as his dress sense. He wore calfskin gentlemen’s shoes and a bespoke overcoat. A cursory examination of his cigar ash further confirmed Basil’s expensive tastes: he smoked Marquis No. 6, a rare and pricey brand. Suspect number one. Wiggins coughed into his hand, a new habit, and continued his rundown. ‘The second man’s one of your lot. A gent. Charles Tinsley?’
Kell gaped in astonishment. ‘Good God, you don’t think … He went to Eton.’
‘So did Colonel Sebastian Moran.’
‘But …’
‘And Jonathan Clay,’ Wiggins added under his breath.
‘Moran was an assassin.’
‘It takes all sorts.’
‘I mean, Tinsley’s the Deputy Assistant Director. He’s an Honourable.’ Kell shook his head. ‘No, I really think this is an outrageous suggestion. I can’t go to my chiefs with this.’
‘I thought your job was to find spies?’
‘Yes, but … It won’t go down well at all.’
‘Look, just cos I’m suspicious don’t mean he’s bent. Best if you look into him yourself, sir, he’s a man of your circles.’
‘How am I meant to do that?’ Kell asked.
‘Ain’t that your job?’ Wiggins dropped his voice. ‘Go gentle like, don’t ring his bells. What’s the word at his club – is he a gambler, is there a debt? Does he have German relations, say?’
‘Half the aristocracy are German.’
Wiggins shrugged.
‘Why don’t we bring in Basil, and the other man?’
‘Scotland Yard would trample over everything. And they’d take the credit.’
This last point struck home. Kell leant back. ‘You are sure this is progress?’ he said as he closed his notebook.
‘All we need to do is watch ’em. A tail is always progress, one way or the other.’
Kell looked up sharply as Trafalgar Square disappeared off to their left.
He got up but Wiggins thrust his hand out and grabbed him by the wrist. ‘You dandy, sir?’
‘I’m fine,’ Kell muttered. ‘Damned impertinence.’ He shook his arm clear and hurried to the doors.
The conductor bowed slightly as Kell fluttered off the tram and pigeon-toed back down the Strand. Wiggins gazed after him for a moment as Kell’s figure weaved along the busy street. The tram jolted forward. He wondered about his new boss. An improvement on Leach surely, but still, it worried him.
‘Wh
at can you deduce about me?’ Kell had asked at the Regent Street Theatre, after they’d first agreed to work together. Wiggins threw him some chaff but evaded the main deduction: Kell’s marriage was unhappy. At least, that’s what the signs suggested. Wiggins had already noted the absence of the wedding ring on at least two occasions and it was clear to him that Kell’s real mistress was his job. It made him untrustworthy in Wiggins’s eyes. Not because he couldn’t trust him with money or a woman (he was sure he could with both, if he had either), it was because Wiggins couldn’t know what he wanted. You can always trust a selfish villain to follow his self-interest, but when a man starts thinking of his duty, anything is possible. He’d seen it in the officer class in South Africa: a duty, so it was said, to dump the Boers into typhoid-invested camps and let them die of dysentery and measles. Wiggins sniffed. A man wedded to his job could disappear within it; you couldn’t fully trust him to do anything. The rules of the game were all that mattered. But Wiggins thought of himself too: what did the job make him? Was he a redcap now, after all – a policeman without a uniform, leading folk to the gallows all the same?
‘All change, all change,’ the conductor cried. ‘This is Aldwych.’
Kell raced back to the War Office, through the crowds of the lower Strand. He came out onto Trafalgar Square. A burst of pigeons made him jump. ‘Tuppence a bag!’ a seed seller cried.
‘Blasted menace,’ Kell muttered. Though whether he meant the birds or the seed sellers, or the gaggle of day trippers tossing out the scraps, wasn’t clear. The pigeons fluttered down again, obscuring his view.
He’d seen no one suspicious since Petersfield, though a policeman still stood guard at his Hampstead home. The Commissioner of Police Sir Edward Henry didn’t believe any ‘cock and bull’ story about spies running Kell off the road, but he gave him the guard all the same. Sir Edward wasn’t the only one to remain unconvinced of the German espionage threat. The swells on the Committee for Imperial Defence still openly derided the idea. In the last meeting a wag had even asked whether he should be worried about the number of German waiters in London. Only one man in the Cabinet took the idea seriously. Churchill, still President of the Board of Trade, had co-opted himself onto the committee and spoke up in support of Kell. ‘This Krupp’s business is worrying, is it not?’
‘What was that, Winston?’ Soapy said from the chair.
‘Is it not to be deplored that German industry has been found to be stealing our most valuable technology, right from under our very noses? Is it not doubly deplorable when these technologies are a means of war? Should we stand by and do nothing, or should we act?’
‘Steady on, Winston, this isn’t a public meeting, you know,’ Soapy said. ‘And that’s far from proven anyway.’
Churchill glared around the room. He looked like a starved baby, wispy-haired with a petulant, spoilt mouth. Kell remembered him from military college. A man who even then suffered from a surfeit of self-regard. His meteoric political rise had, in Kell’s eyes, only inflamed the affliction. ‘I knew Captain Kell at Sandhurst,’ Churchill continued, lisping. ‘We argued often. I would not call him a friend. But Captain Kell is not a man who starts at shadows, he is not a man who conjures up ghosts out of thin air, or who sensationalises for his own aggrandisement. In short—’
‘Yes, short would be good, Winston.’
‘In short, we should heed his words. We should empower him, give him every means at our disposal to find out and eliminate these threats to our great nation.’
As Kell walked up Whitehall, he sighed to himself. Nothing had yet come of Churchill’s fine words. Kell needed more substantial proof. His grand dreams of a Secret Service, fully funded, home and abroad, remained unrealised – ironically, for want of accurate intelligence. Even the Krupp’s link had failed to sway the committee. It could have been a coincidence, they muttered. Britannia Ruled the Waves. Why all this worry about Germany? And should we really be involved in spying? Isn’t it a bit like playing sneak? This was the sort of thing he had in his way. It didn’t help that Ewart was such a buffoon. Kell could hardly blame them for not taking the man seriously. He needed incontrovertible proof that German spies were working on mainland Britain, and that was that – otherwise the service would remain a dream, and he’d be out of a job.
Yet for all his thwarted ambitions, his fears of attack, the worries over Constance up in Hampstead; for all this, hope lightened his step as he headed towards the Savile Club. For the first time since Leyton’s death, he was following a lead, albeit one he doubted would go anywhere. The notion that Charles Tinsley was in any way involved in spying seemed absurd.
The Honourable Charles Tinsley’s nominal title at Woolwich was Deputy Assistant Director. It was a position handed out by the government to the son or nephew of someone important as a political sop and a way of keeping an appearance of nobility at the Arsenal. Tinsley came from an aristocratic family. Kell had seen him at society events, a lean, spry fellow of thirty-five with coiffured hair and a face like a hungry horse – too big and too toothy for his body. Not his sort at all. Wiggins had been even more disparaging when Kell pressed as to the reasons for his suspicions.
Kell called in at the Savile. He never felt truly at home there. Too many actors, writers and other unreliable sorts. He preferred the more formal atmosphere of White’s and the Bengal Lounge. Tinsley was a Savile man, though, and Kell was determined to prove capable of at least basic fieldwork – as much to himself as to Wiggins. The commissionaire at the club directed Kell north towards the Marshall Street Baths.
He strolled through St James’s and cut into Soho proper, trying to keep his bearing erect and formal – not easy when every second person was a whore. ‘Out for a morning stroll, sir?’ a middle-aged lady of the night winked at him. ‘Discounts for the ’andsome.’
‘No, thank you. I am quite well,’ Kell muttered as he passed through Kingly Street. Shit streaked the roads. Dogs barked unrestrained.
Ten minutes later, he stood swaddled in towels, steam prickling his beard, peering into the mist of the main Turkish bath. Many of the men chose not to cover themselves at all, which made identifying them all the harder. Nevertheless, he picked out Tinsley away to his left and tried to saunter past unawares. The effect was ruined when he lost his footing on the steam-slicked tiles and Tinsley himself offered a hand.
‘Watch out, old fellow,’ he said. ‘Floor’s deuced slippery.’
‘Thank you.’ Kell found himself locking eyes with Tinsley. ‘Yes, er, sorry.’
‘New here?’ said Tinsley.
‘Yes.’
‘No need to be shy.’
Kell nodded and took a seat across the room. He mopped his brow. Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades. He kept an eye on Tinsley, who lounged with a couple of other men. They talked in low tones. Occasionally Tinsley would glance at him and offer a lazy smile. Kell was loath to look too closely. The steam had misted his glasses and his sight was poor without them.
He thought again of his own position, vision clouded, opaque, enemy unseen, threats mounting. So far, he’d been a very poor spy. He peered again at Tinsley and his companions, huddled close together, conspiratorial. Perhaps Wiggins was right about him.
‘Bonsoir, monsieur,’ a voice whispered.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Kell stammered.
‘Your first time?’ the man went on in a French accent.
‘I can’t see you,’ Kell said in despair.
The voice chuckled. ‘Pardon, I am behind you. Voilà, I am here. Je m’appelle René. René LeQuin. You are new here?’
Kell squinted at the man, seeing little beyond a large black moustache.
The moustache grinned. ‘Bienvenue. Fresh blood is always welcome.’
‘Blood?’
LeQuin purred. ‘There is no need to feel intimidated.’
‘If you’ll excuse me.’ Kell rose unsteadily and stepped away. Great plumes of steam rolled into the room and he lost sight of Tinsley. He
gasped against the heat. Sweat poured into his eyes.
‘Are you quite top-hole, old chap?’ Tinsley asked.
Kell recoiled. ‘Sorry, I …’
‘The name’s Tinsley.’ He offered his hand, formally this time. ‘We met when you first came in, but I’m afraid I didn’t introduce myself.’
Kell hesitated then shook the proffered hand. He wiped his glasses on the towel and stared at the fine red hairs of the naked Tinsley’s legs. They quivered slightly. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I really must go. I quite lost track of the time,’ Kell stammered.
‘Oh, it’s easy to lose yourself here,’ Tinsley said.
‘Goodbye,’ Kell called over his shoulder as he left.
Kell dressed hurriedly. He couldn’t wait to be clear of the place. As he pushed through the swing doors of the dressing room, he suddenly turned – was someone watching him? He couldn’t shake the feeling. It gave him the creeps, all those men, all that tackle swinging free. He shivered despite the heat. What was it the Frenchman called him? Fresh blood.
9
The Anarchist Club wasn’t an obvious choice for courting. Wiggins had been there three times already and not seen a smile cracked once. That night, he arrived well before time. The club occupied a terraced house on a street off Commercial Road, in an area that straddled the Jewish quarters around Brick Lane. Inside, oil lamps cast yellow fans down each wall of the lecture room. At the far end, a small wooden stage had been erected. On it stood a locked upright piano, a stool and an improvised lectern. Wiggins entered, nodded to a man setting out chairs and took a position at the edge of the seating – from where he could see both exits, as well as being in reach of a large sash window. As ever, his biggest fear was coming across one of his attackers from the drinking den. A fear, as yet, unrealised.
Slowly the place filled up. The low murmur of voices grew. Wiggins picked lint from his new shirt and straightened his cuffs. The uppers of his leather boots shone dully in the light. He’d even gone so far as to oil his hair. A faint smell of almonds clung to him, not unpleasant.
He’d expected the club to be exclusive to bearded men, but women and children had come to hear the lectures. It was the women that surprised him most, for they spoke too – not much from the stage but in the question sessions and the debates. Where Wiggins came from, women didn’t really do politics; or at least, none of the men listened to them. Where he came from not many of the men did politics either – they kept their heads above water, did as they were told and got on with it.