by H. B. Lyle
Kell was unnerved by this but listened as Constance went on. ‘I know you find this a little distasteful, Vernon, but women also have what I believe they call Sex Appeal.’
‘Sex Appeal?’
‘Yes. A woman can often find it very easy to get a man to do something, given the right circumstances. Take your Monsieur LeQuin.’
Kell goggled at his wife. ‘What have you done?’
‘You didn’t think I stayed with that tiresome lieutenant all night, did you? Monsieur LeQuin was most charming. He became particularly attentive when I let slip – ever so accidentally – that I was married to a man in the War Office. I, of course, was most interested in his musical career and his artistic sensibilities. “Tell me …”’ her voice lifted to a girlish lilt ‘“… where did you get your great gift for music, monsieur? I so admire it.”’ She laughed.
Kell couldn’t believe his ears. ‘That could have been incredibly dangerous – what were you thinking?’
‘What was he going to do, brain me with one of the prize pineapples? No, it was perfectly safe. You needed to know more about this man, it would have been pointless for you to talk to him yourself – you would have found out nothing. The empty-headed wife, however …’
‘Constance, I really don’t know what to say.’
Half of him raged with anger at the danger of it, the impromptu folly; the other half blazed with admiration for the woman beside him.
‘Well, I am your wife, I should be able to help every now and then. And in any case, why should you have all the fun?’
‘So what happened?’
‘We’re to meet again next week, at the National Gallery. He’s desperate to show me the Delacroix, apparently. I think he’s also interested in seducing me. Don’t worry, Vernon, I would never go for a man with a waxed moustache. In any case, I’m sure he’s not interested in my body. I’m under no illusions about my own attractiveness.’
‘But my dear—’
‘Bless you. No, he may be as sex-obsessed as the next Frenchman, but I get the distinct impression that he fancies you too.’
‘Good God.’
‘No, dear, not like that. He likes the idea of you and your position. He wants to seduce me to get information. I don’t know how he got the idea that I might be prepared to do that.’ She laughed again. ‘Silly old me.’
Kell shook his head. ‘Where the duece is Wiggins?’
Wiggins sat in the car, his knuckles shining white against the wheel. He’d ducked as Bela walked past, her boots clip-clopping along the cobbled mews. In her wake trailed the faint smell of carbolic and too many questions for comfort.
‘Kell,’ the butler sang out. ‘Kell! This is a call for Kell.’
Wiggins brought the motor round to the front.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Kell snapped.
He put the car in gear and headed north. They’d gone straight over Marble Arch and up Edgware Road when a bus pulled out in front of them. Wiggins swerved and narrowly avoided smashing into a shop window. He pulled on the handbrake.
‘Wiggins, are you quite all right?’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘You’ve been all over the place. Why are we up in Marylebone?’
Wiggins shook his head clear. ‘Miles away,’ he muttered.
‘Stay here for a moment. Let’s catch our breath.’
Kell looked at the back of Wiggins’s head, concerned. Wiggins twisted in his seat to face them. ‘Sorry, ma’am, about the fright.’
‘Any news on LeQuin? What did the servants say?’ Kell pressed.
Wiggins gestured to Constance. ‘Oh don’t mind her,’ Kell said airily. ‘She knows more about him than any of us.’
‘Rijkard definitely works for him. Driver. Bodyguard. In the Daimler.’ He took a deep breath. ‘What did you make of LeQuin?’
Kell outlined the observations he’d made, down to the letter.
‘Right. That matches. But you’ve missed out anything of any use.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You saw but you didn’t observe. It’s the details what counts, the details. You’ve given me almost nothing. Or at least, your deductions are all skew-whiff.’
‘What about the shoes, and that he’s putting on weight—’
Wiggins sighed. ‘No one puts weight on like that. The thickening around his ribs but no gut? That’s not fat, sir, that’s paper. Documents most like. He must be the type who carries his most important stuff on him, if we’re right about him.’
‘And the lifted heel?’ Constance asked.
‘Probably false. Seen that dodge in the nick – hollow out the heel and you can put all sorts in there. Money, keepsakes – or, in his case, I’ll take a shot at keys. His business is secrets, right, so he needs the means to lock ’em up.’
Constance clapped. ‘Wonderful.’
‘It’s just a trick,’ Kell said. ‘I could be right.’
Wiggins and Constance shared a look.
Kell continued. ‘I’ll wager you don’t know where LeQuin will be next Monday?’
‘That I do not know.’
Kell enjoyed explaining the gallery date, although by the end of his explanation, he realised that the three of them were now locked into a plan to trap LeQuin. He’d gone to a party and ended up launching a covert, unofficial spying operation with his wife.
Wiggins drove them home. Constance fluttered up the steps, hallooing to the police constable, but Wiggins called Kell back. ‘That LeQuin, is he a stirrer? Might someone sling him a few quid to make trouble?’
‘I don’t see why not. From what we know of him, he buys secrets but also employs murderers. He killed Milton, probably Leyton and Sixsmith too – it seems he’ll stop at no degradation to make money. But we must concentrate on his connections with Germany, how the information got to Krupp’s. That’s our only concern, that’s what I need.’
Wiggins nodded absently. ‘And what’s his full name again?’
‘LeQuin. René LeQuin.’
Wiggins caught a late bus from Hampstead down to the Euston Road. The air around the station was still thick with smoke and soot. Fine grains pricked his eyes as he cut south of St Pancras and dived into the Wounded Hart. He’d hardly drunk since meeting Bela. She was the first girl ever to get him off the sauce, but right now he needed a drink. He wanted to push through the elephant and the Hart stayed open until the last drunk croaked.
It was gone one by the time Wiggins neared his room off Essex Road. He struggled to force the key home, cursed, tried again and dropped it. Only then did he notice the ‘tell’ on the floor. Every time he went out, he wedged a sliver of wood between the door and the jamb. The sliver had fallen.
As he squatted down, his own door swung open. ‘What the—’ A boot caught him under the chin.
Wiggins fell back to the pavement. A blade flashed. The assailant pressed in. The knife point at his throat. He flung off the man with one great heave.
They regained their feet. The man thrust at him, knife first. Wiggins sidestepped and the knife caught in his heavy jacket. He grasped the man’s hand.
‘Who are you?’ he shouted.
The blade sprung free, clattering against the flagstones, Wiggins’s jacket torn. The man looked up. Then he ran.
Wiggins pulled at his ripped coat and ran after him. He recognised the blue woollen hat from the day at the exhibition. The man’s face played in his mind too.
He followed, straining his eyes each time the man darted through the bright islands into the unlit spaces between the gas lamps. Then the hat disappeared. He must have dropped down onto the towpath of the canal. Wiggins ran down the steps to the canal and stopped to catch his breath. Up to his left lights twinkled from the warehouses at City Road Basin. The water lapped gentle. Someone was opening the lock.
Wiggins heard the cries of the boatmen. He could just make out their narrowboat entering the lock. Wiggins took in the length of the canal past the wharfs. Off to his right, the canal van
ished into a pathless tunnel. Wiggins turned to his left towards the lock and inched along the path, wary of the undergrowth and the water. He came level with the end of the lock, the boatmen ahead oblivious.
A rustling to his left, a blur and his jaw sang with pain. The man’s fist caught it flush, but as he fell Wiggins grabbed hold of his attacker’s lapels.
He bucked and fought, but the blue-hatted man smothered him. He had weight on Wiggins. And he had him by the throat.
Wiggins’s head hung over the side of the emptying lock. His eyes bulged. Rushing water sounded in his ears. The sluice roared.
He gurgled, struggled. His vision blurred. A last breath died in his throat.
With one final effort of will, he relaxed. Unbalanced, the attacker jolted forward and Wiggins used the momentum to tip them both over the edge into the lock.
In this topsy-turvy moment, as their heads plunged side by side into the void, Wiggins caught sight of the scar on his chin. The last time he’d seen him, the man was about to behead him with a scimitar outside the drinking den. Bela had saved him then.
The attacker’s head crunched on the brick sill, before plunging into the deep. Sucked under by the current, Wiggins struggled for purchase on the slime-slicked sides. He realised in horror that he’d been sucked under the boat. Foul water filled his nose, his eyes, his mouth. He didn’t give a second thought to his attacker as he scrabbled against the hull, his limbs heavy, weak. The boat creaked.
Wiggins couldn’t swim.
To die in the shit and the stench and the litter-filled waters of an industrial canal, to drown, with all those unanswered questions … Pressure built in his head. Scrabbling. Why was Bela at the embassy? Bela, Christ, he didn’t want to die. Bill, Kell, Holmes, they’d think he fell in drunk. Not Bill, Bill’s dead and so would he be unless—
Suddenly, the boat shifted free of the lock. Wiggins rose to the surface, gasping for air. He shouted. Nothing came out.
The backwash engulfed him once more.
18
Bela breathed in the smell of books. She loved it. Not just the dry paper aroma, but the silence too – so different from the constant cries and traffic of Stepney, or the steamy belches and incessant chatter of the laundry.
Newspapers rustled on the reading tables. An elderly man glanced at her as she passed. Bela headed straight for the Fiction section, nestled in the far corner of Whitechapel Free Library. Free. Books teetered high above her. She could read any of them she liked. No one commented, no one complained. Once a week, on her day off, she would spend the time reading, improving her English, learning about the world. Today, she wandered down the Romance aisle. Her boots tapped out a slow rhythm on the polished floorboards.
Unseen, one aisle across, another pair of shoes beat out a similar tempo. Bela stopped. So did they. She started again, hurried. The steps followed, at a quicker pace. She turned at the end of the aisle and passed through into History at the back, glanced around. Saw no one. Heard them. The library shelves pressed in, no place of comfort now. She pushed through the fire exit, and ran.
Vincas was eight months dead. Lost to the North Sea. Bela was teaching herself not to fear. She’d even stopped looking over her shoulder.
When she first went back to the steerage deck after his death, she had expected to be hauled away at any moment, a hue and cry to break out above deck. But there was nothing. A couple of the men asked around. No women did. Bela kept her eyes down, but she felt the gaze of the other women, an old one in particular. One man kicked up a bit of a fuss – ‘Hey, your husband, where is he? He owes me fifty kopeks.’ Bela shook her head, shrugged.
‘No one cares,’ the old woman whispered to her the next day. ‘That man was a monster. Where are you going?’ She sucked at toothless gums.
‘We – I – have passage to London. I don’t know anything else. I have no money.’
‘Help me with my bags, girl. I can’t promise anything. I am Marta.’
They disembarked in London, surrounded by all kinds of vessels from tiny fly-pricks to great clippers and steamers. Bela was used to feeling small but never had the world around her felt so big. People buzzed about the huge ships like flies around a horse in summer. She and Marta edged warily into the East End, north of the river. Bela carried Marta’s bundles, as well as her own small one. On the steerage deck, their fellow passengers chatted mostly of the money they would make, how London could offer a better life for them and their children, as yet unborn. Bela did not join in such talk. Now in London, as she and Marta walked through the shit-streaked streets, with dirty children barefoot and ragged women spilling out of small doorways, Bela’s heart surged. Marta spieled on, disgusted at the poverty, but Bela simply stared, awestruck. The streets went on and on, with no end in sight. London was immense. And in an immensity, you could get lost, start anew, become something else, anything else.
The two women passed a bar with frosted windows. A gaggle of drinkers lounged out front, loud and looming. Marta shrank behind Bela. A man stepped forward and called out in a language Bela didn’t understand. He gestured with his hand and his friends laughed. Marta and Bela carried on. But then Bela stopped, turned and took two steps towards the man. He grinned, spoke again. She simply stared at him, unafraid, steady. The man, red-faced with drink, faltered under her glare, silenced. Bela turned in her own time and took Marta by the arm as they continued. In this city, she could be whoever she wanted to be. Not Vincas’s wife, not her father’s daughter, not a victim, not a mute, not one of the suppressed. That time, her old life, was over. No one would know who she used to be, and they need never know. She’d killed a man, justly, and she would fear men no more.
Marta’s family lived in a tiny room north of Cable Street and her son was aghast when his mother turned up with an extra body to house. But Bela soon proved herself valuable. She got a job at the laundry and helped fund a move into bigger rooms. New York was still an ocean away. It might take Bela years to raise the money to get there, even if she could find out where Sarah lived. Marta introduced her to the Union, a society of mutual aid in the East End, and Bela started to investigate people-finding agencies in America.
‘We must help each other,’ Marta said.
Bela went further. She found the Anarchist Club in Jubilee Street and would attend meetings whenever she could. Pamphlets like the one she found at the Plovs’ were allowed in London and there seemed to be nothing like the Okhrana. Her greatest discovery, though, was the free libraries – islands of books in the urban grime.
And yet what a fool she’d been. You never truly left a man like Vincas. Evil never dies. She hustled down the alley behind the library, sick with fear. Was it Arvo? Had Vincas’s brother come back to avenge his death? Or was it the law?
She burst out onto the street and straight into the chest of a heavily built, well-dressed man.
‘Don’t be scared,’ he said, in perfect Russian. He clamped his hands around her wrists. ‘Vincas can’t hurt you now.’
* * *
The klaxon sounded the end of the shift. Wiggins approached the gates at Woolwich with a hurried step, his last weekend on the job. Rayner would have another go at him for tardiness. But then that would be refreshingly normal compared to the last few days.
A hand on his arm.
‘Keep walking,’ Peter said.
‘What are you doing here?’ Wiggins hissed, startled.
He’d only just recovered from his near death in the canal. With his very last ounce of energy, Wiggins had caught a trailing slip rope. The boatmen came to his aid and, amid much excitement, pronounced him a lucky swine. They gave him shots of gin and slaps on the back. He didn’t tell them about the other man, the man whose head wound must have sent him to the bottom. The Russian with the blue hat and scarred chin, who’d followed him in White City, been in his room, tried to kill him, and who had now met his end in the oil-slicked soup of Regent’s Canal.
Peter stood too close to be friendly, breathing in his ea
r. ‘I worry. When you throw a stick, you expect your dog to bring it back.’
‘I ain’t no dog.’
‘A saying.’ Peter’s eyes sidled to and fro as people passed. ‘Of course you’re not dog. But you are only one man. I think it’s not so easy to steal from this factory. You need help.’
‘I don’t need no help,’ Wiggins snapped.
Was he really about to steal highly combustible material from a government armaments factory, where capture meant the death penalty? So far he’d become involved in Kell’s hare-brained plan to honeytrap a murdering spymaster; his girlfriend had some connection with the German Embassy she’d somehow forgotten to mention; and now he was being physically manhandled by a gun-toting Russian who expected his help in making a bloody great bomb.
He could have been standing in a railway carriage, like any normal person, on his way home from work, looking out over the chimney stacks of South London, bracing himself against the jolting of the points.
Instead, he was in the grip of Peter the Painter. It was a long way from Baker Street.
‘We’re on for tonight.’ Wiggins softened his tone. ‘What’s the rush?’
Peter studied him intently and shifted his body slightly. Wiggins noted the heavy hang of his right pocket – the gun.
‘Good,’ Peter said at last. ‘I will wait. Tomorrow I will collect it. Here, this is for you.’ He handed Wiggins a carpet holdall. ‘I am a generous man, no?’ He slipped into the crowd of workers leaving the factory.
The fact Peter had turned up made it unlikely that he was behind the blue-hatted assailant at the canal. A small comfort, but Wiggins nevertheless took heart from it as he waited for Rayner’s torrent of abuse. He approached the guardhouse.
Rayner appeared in the doorway.
‘You’re facking late.’ He spat a ripe phlegm ball on the ground between them. ‘If I’d shown that kind of ill discipline in my unit, half the men would have been killed.’