The Red Ribbon

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The Red Ribbon Page 3

by H. B. Lyle


  Kell shook his head.

  “Exactly! There is no treaty. There should have been—we were poised to make a pact, to stand together in the event of war. But the Italian delegation got wind of some rather damaging information and called the whole thing off.”

  “What damaging information?”

  Soapy looked up sharply. “I can’t go into too much detail, you understand of course. Suffice to say that many in the Cabinet are not too keen on Italians as a race. Some rather disparaging remarks, often of a personal nature, came to be known to the delegation.”

  “Good God,” Kell exclaimed. “A minister leaked this?”

  “Not necessarily.” Soapy drew another cigarette, but left it unlit. “Some of the material appeared in the minutes.”

  “The departmental clerks saw it?” Kell did a quick calculation in his head. “Then it could be any one of a hundred people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who stood to benefit from the collapse of the treaty? Cui bono?”

  “And now we arrive at the point. The biggest beneficiary was, of course, Germany. Which is where you come in.”

  “You want me to investigate? Surely this is a matter for the police, for Special Branch?”

  “I hope you’re not this obtuse at home. Not with Constance around.” Soapy shook his head. “Your job is to find German spies, yes? Very well. My job is to protect the prime minister, to protect the integrity of the government. We can’t have the police investigating ourselves, can we? It would be unseemly and also bad politics. No, we need to do it quietly. Are you with me still?”

  Kell nodded.

  “You and your special . . . Agent W . . . can look into it.”

  “He’s a street man, Soap, a foot soldier.” This last made Kell wince, but he couldn’t have Wiggins under anyone else’s control. Known to his superiors only as Agent W, and to Cumming as Agent Oh Oh, Wiggins was still his alone. “He’d be lost in the governmental.”

  Soapy sniffed. “Well, have him look into the clerks at least. You can look into the Germans. Half of Germany will be over for the King’s funeral, whenever that is. Perfect opportunity to do some of the cloak-and-dagger—though none of the dagger, just the cloak.”

  “Why can’t this go through official channels?”

  Soapy lifted his arms in exasperation and got up. He took another cigarette, frowned at Kell, then spoke again. “The whole point of you chaps, as far as the PM is concerned anyway, is that you’re not quite official. So be not quite official, and find out how this information got out, there’s a good chap.”

  Kell hesitated, then got up and put on his hat. As he reached the door, Soapy called out again. “Oh, and Kell, not a word of this to anyone.”

  “But I was heading to Special Branch, to see if they had anything on the clerks.”

  Soapy waved his hand dismissively. “Try to look at their files, by all means, but don’t tell them why. Good day.”

  Good day, indeed. Kell smarted as he made his way across Whitehall toward New Scotland Yard and the offices of the Special Branch. The wide street thrummed with tourists clogging his every step. Motorized lorries coughed out fumes, private motorcars lurched and jagged between food carts, horses, and the bright red open-top buses. Fleets of bicycles sped by. Armies of clerks streamed out of the government buildings as the working day ended, queues formed at the bus stops, and people bustled and shoved. Any one of those clerks could be selling information, he suddenly realized, and it could take him months to find out who, even with Wiggins back in London.

  The charge sergeant at Scotland Yard directed him up the stairs. Kell walked through the public waiting rooms, barely glancing at the wanted posters that adorned the walls. Ugly “mug shots” in the American style and crude pencil portraits.

  Special Branch operated out of the third floor, most of which was taken up with their operations room. Kell stood in the doorway for a moment. He eyed up the filing cabinets opposite—a repository of all sorts of vital information. Evidence drawers. A great map of London was pinned to the far wall, flanked by chalkboards scored by the marks of old crimes.

  “What do you want?” A detective got up and walked toward Kell, in his shirtsleeves, with a five o’clock shadow and dark, hanging brows. Kell could smell his body odor. He came to a halt, half a head taller, five years younger, and bristling with hair on the backs of his hands. “We don’t allow visitors.”

  “Superintendent Quinn?”

  The detective pondered for a second. “Far corner,” he grunted, and gestured with his head. “Don’t open the other doors,” he hissed.

  Kell inclined his head and strode slowly between the desks. By now, everyone in the room was looking at him. No one spoke. Instead, to a man they leaned back in their chairs and drew heavily on cigarettes, sentinel fires lighting his way to Quinn’s office. The room reeked of nicotine and sweat and iron. Can’t be iron. Kell shook his head. Blood? His eyes flicked to the interview rooms on his right as he walked. Special Branch had a rough reputation, and getting rougher.

  Kell reached the far door and pushed it open. “Superintendent?”

  The man behind the desk did not turn. He sat facing away from the door, looking up at the wall behind the desk. Kell followed the man’s gaze. The wall was plastered with information. A huge grid, with scribbles, maps, and rubber bands connecting names, places, photographs. Kell thought of London: the telegraph wires, train lines, electric connections. Superintendent Quinn had his very own London on the wall, a complex connecting graph of threats, real and imagined, of political unrest, of terrorism. Kell noted some of the headings: Republicans. Fenians. Anarchists. The Gardstein Gang, with a question mark.

  Kell shifted his gaze to the right. Another great grid, this time headed with the names of each of the Cabinet ministers—including Prime Minister Asquith—as well as all the senior members of the royal family. One of Special Branch’s roles was to provide personal security and bodyguards, if necessary, to all the major figures of the British state. Kell saw at a glance where everyone was, who was looking after them, and where they intended to be the following day.

  Kell coughed. “Sir Patrick?”

  The man in the chair finally swiveled around. Sir Patrick Quinn fixed Kell with his lively, dark eyes. He had the bony, raw, and hollowed-out look of an aging vulture, with his beaked nose and the faint suggestion of a widow’s peak. In his fifties, he looked good on it, Kell had to admit. Quinn took a pull from his pipe, exhaled, and broke the silence with his mild, slightly accented Irish brogue. “Superintendent will do just fine, so it will,” he said at last.

  “I need to look in the files.”

  “Do you? To avoid any doubt here, I am thinking you mean Special Branch files?”

  Kell nodded. He glanced back at the filing cabinets in the large office behind him, and at the three locked cabinets in Quinn’s own office.

  “Now then, as a country man, I am not used to the ways of you city folk,” Quinn carried on.

  “City folk? You’ve been head of the Branch for the last seven years.” Kell couldn’t keep the irritation out of his voice. He never liked dealing with Quinn. Irish. Clever. Not his sort at all.

  Quinn grinned. “And I’m thinking, what would the War Office be wanting with such files, now. Can you tell me that?”

  “You know I’m not War Office anymore—I’m the Secret Service Bureau.”

  “Right you are, right you are. I remember the letterhead now.”

  “Letterhead?” Kell said, incredulous. “We’ve been in contact for months.”

  “There’s no need to be getting in all of a lather now, is there?” Quinn twinkled, enjoying himself. “I’ve recalled everything. You find the German spies, we arrest them. When you find them,” he added. “But as you can see, we are a little busy today—what with the King, poor man, and the very important people going hither and thither. It’s our job to protect them, you know, as well as deal with the many other threats to the nation. Now, is that all t
here is? Shall we be saying good day?”

  Kell bridled. He knew very well what Special Branch did. And he knew too how few spies he’d had arrested. “I need to see the files,” he said, again.

  “You have a letter of authority?”

  “It’s coming.”

  “Ah well, then I think I’ll be waiting for that.”

  Kell stepped forward, ready to deliver a “Damn it all, we’re on the same side” speech, about how one agency and another must work together to tackle ever-growing threats. He was about to deliver this when his eye snagged on one of the photographs behind Quinn. It was pinned to the wall, beneath a section marked Mid-level. The photograph, of five women on the street, had been taken at a distance, probably a surveillance shot. Three of the women had pencil lines drawn from them out to their names. The other two had circles, with question marks drawn next to them. The photograph wasn’t in focus, and Kell stood six feet away, but he recognized one of those circled figures only too well.

  It was his wife, Constance.

  “I . . .” Kell faltered. “Er, a lot of anarchist gangs up there,” he gestured, trying to recover himself.

  Quinn looked up at him. A shadow passed across his face, quizzical. “There are a lot of dangerous men in the country, sure enough. How do they concern you, I’m wondering?”

  “Me? Idle interest. Anyway, yes.” Kell stepped to the door. “I will do as you suggest, and wait for official permission. For the files, I mean,” he said. “Good day.”

  “Good day to you too, Captain Kell. Or is it the evening now? Have a bonny one, if I may so say. And give my best to your good lady wife.”

  “My wife?”

  “Indeed. I am a great supporter of the institution of marriage,” Quinn went on. “I encourage it in all of my detectives.”

  Kell held his eyes for a moment, unsure. Then he nodded and walked back to the door. As he reached it, Quinn called out softly, speaking as if to a child, so soft and lovely and lilting was his voice. “Captain. Never come to these offices again, uninvited. Now, you be careful on your way out.”

  Wiggins picked his way through the rubbish and the empty bottles collecting at the end of Vere Street, just as the last of the daylight faded. A fine rain fell. A fine rain always fell on Lambeth, at least in Wiggins’s experience, and certainly on a street like Vere. New and shiny twenty years ago, it stank of piss and pus now, ten years of neglect, unemployment, and gin.

  Children clumped here and there, huddling in doorways against the rain. A scrap of a boy peered skyward as Wiggins passed, in a futile effort to spot the sun amid the soot and smoke and despair. A drunk bawled at the far end of the street. Two stray dogs chased each other in a vicious, yapping circle.

  The southern side of the road had a row of small tenements, their doors open onto the street, the children threadbare sentinels.

  “Looking for Millie’s?” he said at the door to number 18.

  “Keep looking, ponce,” a small boy of eight or so said as he squatted next to a ragged young girl.

  “No one want an ha’penny?”

  “Fird floor,” the little girl barked quickly. “But mind your head, she’s steaming.” She held out her hand.

  “Ta,” Wiggins said and palmed her the coin.

  The girl grasped the money and then proceeded to follow Wiggins up the stairs, a few paces behind. He looked around at her once or twice, her blue eyes never off him. She was dirtier than hell and twice as sharp. “You ain’t no rozzer,” she said at one point.

  “You think the rozzers are after Millie?”

  “Is that my Millie, is it?” a throaty female voice rasped through an open door.

  Wiggins stepped inside. He couldn’t help holding his hand to his mouth. If the street smelled bad, this room stank like the pit. Rag-covered beds ran along three walls, while a fireplace stood empty on the fourth, the door in one corner. A few kitchen utensils cluttered a table opposite, and in the center of the room sat a woman, the owner of the voice, slumped in a wicker chair.

  “Millie? My poor Millie, where is she?” the woman said.

  Millie’s mother, Wiggins guessed, though he couldn’t pin her age. He couldn’t pin much about anything in the unlit room, other than that in between her legs Millie’s mother had a metal bucket—the source of much of the smell. Wiggins hoped it contained vomit.

  “Where is my poor dear?” the woman wailed again.

  Behind him, the little girl whispered, “She don’t give a stuff ’bout Mills. Watch.”

  “Me heart is cleft, good sir.”

  “It’s coming,” the little girl said. “It’s coming.”

  “My only breadwinner gone. It’s not the money I miss, it’s my poor Millie.”

  Wiggins coughed. “I am come to find her, on behalf of a friend.”

  The woman heaved in her chair. “Fank God, sir, fank God. You have delivered me. You are an angel, like my poor gone Millie, an angel of light and the Lord.”

  “Do you mind if I look at her stuff?” Wiggins said, pointing at one of the bedrolls, as directed by the little girl.

  “Fank you, fank you. Anything to find my poor Millie. I am willing to do you that favor, good sir.” The woman leaned forward, a gin reek wafting off her. “Although one favor deserves another, don’t you think? A shilling, sir, can you spare?”

  “There it is,” sighed the little girl.

  “Is she ya ma?” Wiggins whispered back.

  The little girl nodded.

  “Of course, madam,” Wiggins said loudly, “I will pay for your time. I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  Under the little girl’s direction, Wiggins picked his way through Millie’s meager belongings. A few old clothes, a dried and dead lavender posy, a handkerchief, a tram ticket. The little girl squatted down beside him.

  By this time her mother had started singing wildly.

  “Last time she came she had new fings on.” The little girl pushed her hair out of her eyes. Wiggins knew that gesture, one move away from tears.

  “What things? Clothes?”

  “Scanties. She showed me. Flash ’uns.”

  “She had a fella?”

  “Not so as I know. Just the scanties.”

  Wiggins pocketed the ticket and stood up. “Thank you, madam,” he said loudly. “I will do my best.”

  She broke off from her song. “You do that, good sir. For my Millie. And the shilling?”

  “I’ve given it to the nipper here, for safekeeping.”

  “That little bitch?” she shouted and raised an empty bottle.

  Wiggins and the little girl ducked out of the room and ran down the stairs, giggling as they did so. On the landing, Wiggins stopped and gave her the shilling.

  “It’s for you. Do what you can.”

  “Fanks, mister. I’ll snag a pot of gin and water for her, and keep the half for mesel’. And mister. If you find Millie, tell her little Els says wotcha.”

  “Wotcha.”

  Wiggins took a tram along the Albert Embankment and over into Belgravia. He made a note of all the stops and got out on the edge of the diplomatic district. It made no sense, but it was his only clue.

  He walked around the streets in a grid formation, scanning the grand stucco houses, keeping his ears open. Millie’s tram ticket had come from a stop between Victoria and Hyde Park Corner—the fare points—so he knew she’d gotten on somewhere along this road. The idea that she’d been in and around Belgravia seemed far-fetched on the face of it, but it was the only lead he had. That and the expensive underwear.

  It took him nearly two hours (including a stop for a swift pint at the nearest boozer), but as it grew late, one road in particular caught his attention. On the face of it, Ranleigh Terrace was similar to the other streets in the area. Huge houses, with big white porches, large gardens, and embassy insignia on every third building. The ones that weren’t embassies looked like the kind of society piles that were empty half the time, with the rich owners in the country. The street traff
ic consequently was either the posh crowd, all top hats and pearls, or else their servants.

  Ranleigh Terrace had more cars on it than the other nearby streets. More taxis, more often. It also had the strangest embassy Wiggins had ever seen. Bright light burst from every window, despite the late hour. A huge electric light illuminated the entrance porch and he could make out from the curbside the lettering above the door: THE EMBASSY OF OLIFA.

  It was a rum-go all round. He’d never even heard of Olifa, yet they had one of the biggest houses in one of the best areas. Fully electrified too, and not afraid of showing it. He hurried on, not wanting to attract attention.

  At the end of the street, he took a left and then a left again down the mews that ran parallel to the terrace and along the back. It was darker there but Wiggins had no trouble in identifying the embassy. They had more lights on than all the other houses combined. His boots slid on the cobbles and his stomach rumbled. He suddenly realized he hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, other than the three pints at the Cheese plus the extra one around the corner. It made him feel light-headed and a little wobbly. He almost stopped there and then. What the hell was he doing? He was meant to be finding German spies for his day job, and looking for that bastard Peter the Painter when he had the time. But he’d promised Jax. And something told him all was not what it seemed at the Embassy of Olifa.

  A noise sparked him into life once more, a copper walking past the end of the mews. Wiggins slunk back into the shadows, then hustled toward the embassy’s ivy-clad back door. He took a quick glance around, burped, and heaved himself up onto the wall.

  The embassy was alive. Cracks of light striped every window. A gramophone gently wheezed and crackled over the night air. Right up to the very highest windows—it was as if even the servants were partying. Wiggins looked along the garden. A covered walkway ran from the back of the house to the door he’d just tried, out onto the mews.

  This was like no embassy he’d ever seen. These Olifans must be fun-loving sorts. But where there’re fun seekers, there’s also darkness. Where there are parties, there are girls. He took tight hold of the ivy, then dropped down into the garden.

 

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