by H. B. Lyle
The Red Ribbon
Also by H.B. Lyle
The Irregular
New York • London
© 2018 by H.B. Lyle
Jacket design by Daniel Rembert
Front jacket image: The Siege of Sidney Street, 3 January 1911 (Public Domain)
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2018
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eISBN 978-1-63506-006-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952421
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Annalise, R & E
Contents
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part 2
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part 3
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Historical Notes
Acknowledgments
PART 1
1
Millicent tried not to hurry.
No one suspected anything, she was sure. But she tried not to hurry. She flicked on the electric light and looked at her face briefly in the silver platter on the kitchen dresser. It would have to do. No time. She left a small package out for Poppy. No one at the Embassy had ever been mean to her, exactly, but she couldn’t stay. Not once she’d found out. And there was Harold.
She put her hand to the back door, listened to the cries above for a moment—ecstasy, real and fake. The hinges creaked. She peered along the covered walkway to the back gate, saw no one. It was now or never—
“Evening, Millie.” A voice came out of the darkness, soft and sinister.
She hesitated. “All right, Big T?”
“Off out?”
“My shift’s done. I cleared it with Delphy, check if you like. You?” Millicent’s voice trembled.
Big T, or Tommy, scratched his chin. Millicent could hear the stubble bristle. Her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and she picked out his long, heavily muscled form leaning against a post, as if he was waiting for her. He wore no hat and he stood still, but his shoulders seemed to twitch and ripple under his shirt. After a moment, he cracked his enormous knuckles and replied.
“Me? Came for a snout, didn’t I?”
Millicent saw no smokes. She nodded, pulled her handbag close, and stepped past him along the walkway. Don’t run. Don’t hurry.
As she reached the back gate, she heard Big T’s muffled voice carrying through the night. “Mind how you go,” he echoed.
She closed the gate behind her, looked left and right, then headed south to Buckingham Palace Road. Don’t hurry. With every step, with each yard she put between herself and the Embassy, her spirits lifted. Never again. The number 11 bus turned the corner off to her right and she flitted across the road just in time to step onto the plate.
Each advertisement inside offered comfort, normality, a reminder that life existed outside the Embassy. Her eyes flicked along the strips above the windows. DAILY MAIL MILLION SALES. COLEMAN’S MUSTARD. HEINZ 57 VARIETIES. MAKE 1910 SPECIAL WITH WHITE STAR LINES. FOR COUGHS, COLDS AND INFLUENZA, VENO’S LIGHTNING COUGH CURE. She checked and rechecked her bag, jangled the contents. A well-dressed gent in a bowler glared at her sharp. “Quiet there, girl.”
She cast her eyes down and stopped fidgeting. Only eighteen but she knew more than the old man would ever know. She let the duffer have his moment, then looked up at her reflection in the glass and recognized something there, something she hadn’t seen in a long time. Hope.
What she did not do was look out the back of the bus.
She hadn’t had a chance to say her good-byes, but that could wait. She really only had one anyway, and she could write to Jax at her mum’s taxi hut, when she got the chance.
“All change, all change,” the conductor cried as the bus pulled in at Hammersmith. Millicent hoped he was right. He’d promised, her man, dear Harold, her big-tooted lisper. But could it be so easy? Easier than staying at the Embassy, mind.
She set off down Hammersmith Bridge Road, her heart a jumble of nerves and excitement, the Embassy feeling further and further off as she walked. A great sign flapped in the wind: Polling Booth, with a large arrow pointing down a side alley. There was a general election on. It took weeks, and wasn’t due to end until the middle of February. Not that she’d ever have the chance to vote, nor anyone she knew neither, other than dear Harold.
It grew colder as she approached the river. The traffic had thinned. A fine sleet drifted in and out of the streetlamps. Up ahead, the bridge. Why did they have to meet here? She wished she’d asked Harold.
The lighting on the bridge was even worse than on the road. A high wind rattled the lamps. She could hear the river ripple and swell beneath her. She stopped, listened, and squinted into the night. Was that a cab? Her hand leapt to the small St. Christopher usually hanging around her neck on a red ribbon. Then she remembered she’d left it behind.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, a solitary figure appeared on the bridge, walking toward her very quickly, with purpose.
“Harry,” she called, unsure. “Harold, is that you?”
Wiggins changed caps. He stuffed the flat cap in his pocket and unfolded a sharply peaked tweed number from his inside pocket, all without breaking stride. His right leg swung round in an awkward limp because of the pebble hidden in his shoe.
The two men in front of him talked loudly, seemingly unaware of their tail. Wiggins kept his eyes fixed on the taller of the two. He wore a straw boater, set at a jaunty angle, and his side whiskers were a shocking red. At almost six foot, thin and angular, he was a Swan matchstick of a man. His companion, more compact, barrel-chested, wore a three-piece tweed suit despite the warm spring day and strutted along the pavement, shoulders back. The pair pushed through the tourists outside the House of Commons. Wiggins kept pace as they moved into the back streets, away from Millbank and the river. It was emptier here, even in the afternoon, and Wiggins hunched his shoulders and slowed down. The two men showed no sign of being noticed. Yet.
Wiggins’s boss, Captain Vernon Kell, had briefed him that morning. They sat in the apartment on Victoria Street that served as the office of the Secret Service Bu
reau’s home section. “The two men are booked to lunch at Scott’s. Follow them afterward,” Kell said.
“What for?”
Kell looked up sharply. “Because I order you to.” He sighed. “I will tell you when you need to know. Is that sufficient?”
Wiggins nodded. It was. After the work he’d been doing for the last six months, following someone through the streets of London felt like a godsend of a task. “What if they split?”
“If they do, you must follow the leader—I’m not sure which it is, so you’ll have to make a judgment.” Kell fixed him with a stare. “But whatever you do, don’t stop them—they are probably armed and definitely dangerous.”
Wiggins kept his face hidden by the cap and limped on. The two men turned into a busier street. Watery sunlight bounced off a pub’s windows. A jeweler’s sign seesawed in the wind. An argument started up ahead, two streetwalkers fighting over scraps. Wiggins flicked his attention away for a second, then pulled his eyes back to his target.
Suddenly, the two men stopped. They began to cross the road, then doubled back toward him. Wiggins didn’t break stride. As they neared, he dipped his head still further. Both men held their chins up high. He limped past them and half nodded, in recognition of his lower status. The two men barely batted an eye, although it was quite clear to Wiggins that they were deploying countersurveillance maneuvers.
“Hold on a sec, Bernie,” the taller one said in a loud voice. “My laces.”
Wiggins ducked into a doorway and listened in. Which wasn’t hard, as both the tall one and his mate spoke in such booming voices that he could have been in the boozer opposite and still heard.
Bernie turned back to his friend. “Hurry up, Viv, we’re late.”
Wiggins spirited the pebble out of his shoe, changed his hat once more, and waited for the two men to walk back the way they’d come. They set off again, and Wiggins went after them, hidden behind a nanny pushing a huge pram. He tried to collect his thoughts. They were military, certainly: you could tell that by their bearing, the folds in their clothes, and their shoes.
The shorter man, Bernie, scoped the road behind him once more. Again, Wiggins didn’t break stride. The two men continued onward. Wiggins cursed. He hadn’t been spotted but they were looking out for him, for someone.
Bernie and Viv (Wiggins couldn’t think of them in any other way now) reached Victoria Street. The main road buzzed with veering motor cars, buses and fast-stepping government types, messenger boys and tourists staring up at Westminster Cathedral. The two men stopped for a moment. Wiggins walked close behind them now, a tight tail in the crush. He knew what was coming and grinned. This was the most exciting thing he’d done in months.
Captain Vernon Kell, head of the Secret Service Bureau’s home division, drummed his fingers on the table and contemplated a glass of milk. He disliked public houses. They never had anything decent to drink, to say nothing of the mixed clientele. The Duke of Cambridge just off Victoria Street was no different.
He sat, as previously arranged, at a table abutting the wooden partition between the lounge bar and the saloon. It was genteel enough on his side of the screen, though the polished oak panels couldn’t shut out the noise from the far more raucous saloon. A glass smashed, a loud cheer followed. At three in the afternoon? Kell looked up at the gap between screen and ceiling, as if the void itself might explain the gulf in class.
“Good day, Kelly.”
Kell looked across the table. “Good day . . . er . . . C?”
“Cunningham. In public.”
“Sorry,” Kell muttered.
Sir Mansfield Cumming sat down opposite with a glass of blood-red port and an air of undiluted subterfuge. He undid the button of his jacket and tried to look relaxed.
“Not drinking?” he said.
“I didn’t see a premier cru,” Kell replied.
“Hard to trust a man who doesn’t drink,” Cumming said, as if to himself. The two regarded each other in silence for a moment. Cumming’s brow pinched to an angry point above his eagle nose, and his stiff movements showed his age. Their collaboration hadn’t been a roaring success so far. In the days when they’d first gotten the commission—Kell to head a home service, Cumming a foreign one—it had seemed like a grand new beginning, a secret service designed to counter the threat from German spies at home, while at the same time seeking information about them abroad. A fully funded, flexible, and alert Secret Service Bureau for the twentieth century. It hadn’t turned out that way.
They did not get on. Cumming was a high-handed, self-important bore as far as Kell was concerned, obsessed with code names, secret protocols, and needless subterfuge. Every time they met, he insisted on being addressed as Cunningham, while he called him Kelly.
Kell sipped his glass of milk. They sat in silence for a moment longer.
“What time do you expect—”
“It’s fluid.” Cumming cut him off. “You can’t put a stopwatch in the field.” He hesitated. “But I myself do happen to have an appointment at around four . . .”
Kell raised an eyebrow. He heard a single tap on the partition by his ear, then a double rap. Cumming didn’t notice. Kell put his glass down heavily. “Well,” he said at last. “I hope we can be of some help.”
Cumming sniffed.
“I’ve wondered why you haven’t called on us more, to be honest,” Kell went on.
“You mean Agent Oh Oh?”
Kell nodded. “I know that you like to work alone, or at least you don’t like to share your plans. But you must understand, while our work is separate, we stand or fall together. If one of us fails, we both fail.”
“I hope you’re not telling me how to do my job, Kelly, because if you are—”
“I am not telling you how to do anything,” Kell snapped. “I am merely pointing out the facts. We are a new service. In the eyes of our masters, we are two sides of the same coin. Our fates are entwined.”
Cumming glared for a moment. “I don’t like your Agent Oh Oh, if you must know.”
Kell lifted a hand to interrupt, but Cumming sailed on regardless.
“I simply can’t believe he’s trustworthy. His deductive tricks were quite diverting when you introduced us. And I’m sure he can fight well enough in a street brawl. But I need intelligence on German military activity on the Continent. I need men whom I can trust in a clinch. Would you really trust Agent Oh Oh not to be bought off by the Germans? His low-born type respond to money first, and money always.”
Kell tried to interrupt once more but Cumming waved him away.
“No, no. Gentlemen make the best agents. Men of honor, men of breeding, men of character. This current scenario is the only one when such a man as Oh Oh really has any use.”
At that moment, two men of military bearing came into the bar. Cumming stood up and waved them over. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Good afternoon.” Kell rose as Cumming introduced him. “This is a good friend, Mr. Kelly. Kelly, this is . . .”
“Captain Bernard Trench.” The tall man thrust out his hand.
Cumming stammered. “I-I was rather hoping . . . No matter, this is . . .”
“Lieutenant Vivian Brandon. Delighted, I’m sure.”
“Bonfire . . .” Cumming muttered. “Your code name is Bonfire.”
“Sorry, still getting the hang of it.” Brandon didn’t look sorry in the least. They all sat, Brandon and Trench with broad grins written across their faces, every inch young, off-duty military men out for a jolly in town.
Cumming tapped his walking stick on the floor. “Were you followed?”
“Absolutely. Reggie told us it was a training exercise—”
“Reggie told you?” Cumming said, appalled.
“Rather. So we were on the lookout as soon as we left Scott’s.”
Cumming shook his head but gestured for Trench to continue. “We were followed by a woman outside Westminster Abbey. A streetwalker. She trailed us into Millbank. Luckily Viv here spotted her, and we
doubled back to make sure. She scuttled off as soon as she saw us.”
“She weren’t a streetwalker.” A small shutter in the wooden partition by Kell’s shoulder scraped open, and a voice rasped through the hole. “And she weren’t following anyone. She was selling flowers for evensong.” Wiggins glugged at his beer audibly.
“Who the devil’s that?” Trench snapped from across the table. “Show your face!”
“He’s the man who followed you from Scott’s,” Kell said.
“Damned sneak,” Brandon exclaimed.
“And don’t ever try to look at your tail—you’s just telling them you know you’re being followed, giving gen away for nothing.”
Trench turned to Cumming. “How dare he speak to us this way. I can barely understand a word, to be honest, but I simply refuse to be addressed so.”
“Steady,” Cumming said. “This was the exercise. It’s Oh Oh.”
“It’s outrageous. He’s . . . drinking in a saloon bar. A sneak, I tell you. I’m an officer and a gentleman.”
Kell sighed and looked at Cumming. The older man raised his hand to silence Trench and hunched over the table.
“Look here, Kelly, is there anything your man could tell us here and now? Advice?”
“You could ask him yourself—he can hear, you know.”
Cumming pursed his tight lips, glaring at Kell as he spoke. “Any advice for men in foreign climes?”
“What climes?” Wiggins answered.
Cumming growled. “Tiaria,” he said at last. “I can’t say more.”
“Do they have the death penalty there?”
“Of course.”
“Then don’t send them.”
Brandon slapped his hand on the table. “This is ridiculous.”
“Come on,” Kell hissed through the screen.
“You’s just sending them to the grave,” Wiggins persisted.
Kell rapped the partition with his stick.
Wiggins sighed theatrically. “Look,” he said, “these jokers could be in training for months—”