The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  Kell rubbed his eyes, stung by tobacco smoke, and got out at Embankment station. He stood in a lift much like the one Constance had used to evade him and thought more on Wiggins. His agent almost certainly wouldn’t advise him to follow her. Indeed, if pressed for advice (something Kell imagined Wiggins would be loath to do in the area of women), Kell guessed the advice would be to talk to her. As if talking to anyone you loved was easy. He could never even talk to his mother.

  Standing by a cab at Paddington Station, twenty-odd years previously, was the last time he had tried. Porters heaved his trunk down from the four-wheeler as the horse whinnied and neighed in the bustle and hustle of that great gateway to the west. Or, in Kell’s case, Eton College. He looked at his mother, who fussed and harried the men as they pulled and tugged at his supplies. He wanted to say something, something with a heart and stamina that would stay with them both; he wanted to say he loved her; he wanted to say, Don’t leave me, don’t send me away, I love you, I need you. He wanted to say all this. Instead, he said, “Leave them be, Mother, they know what they’re doing.”

  She turned to him, and for a moment he thought she might voice a feeling like his own, something that spoke to the little child within his thirteen-year-old frame. “All grown up,” she said and nodded. He stood straighter and lifted his chin, ignored the painful pinch of the collar, like his father would have done, in the manner he thought his mother would expect.

  A gang of street urchins ran past, wild, free, hanging off each other like monkeys, laughing. It was only later, much later, that he realized she’d wanted him to deny it, at least for a moment; she’d wanted him to step into a hug, to touch him one last time as a child. But he’d missed his cue, and that hug never came.

  Eton had made him a man, he thought bitterly as he strode down the north bank of the river and into Parliament Square. A man who could not talk to his wife, let alone his children; even when he suspected, indeed was convinced, that she was having an affair. There could be no other explanation. The stolen words on the telephone, her laughter, her flushed face. And, most damning of all, the lies. Or one lie in particular. Three weeks previously—the day after he’d last seen Wiggins—he had detoured from his usual route home and sat outside at Marinello’s. Hampstead community hall stood opposite, the scene of Constance’s many meetings. She did not go in with the other ladies at the appointed time. She did not leave with them afterward. Later that night, he had asked her how the meeting went. She spoke of it. She lied. He knew.

  As he entered Victoria Street, Kell suddenly felt eyes upon him. Was he being followed? A man in a heavy overcoat, despite the summer heat, had been with him since the river. He didn’t twist or turn, instead he thought again: What would Wiggins do? He went into the Duke of Cambridge and ordered the best Scotch they had. It wasn’t yet ten, but there were a few shift workers already setting about pints of porter, and no one gave Kell a second glance. He kept his eye on the door, but no one followed him in. He drank the whisky anyway.

  Twenty minutes later, now convinced he was starting at shadows, he walked the final few hundred yards to his office. He made his way up the stairs, breathing the smell of the Scotch in and out with every step. At the door he waited a moment, then pushed in and offered Simpkins a breezy “Good day” without stopping. He hoped that this time, as he opened his office door, Wiggins would be waiting for him, smug smile spread across his face like a sated cat.

  No Wiggins.

  Instead, Simpkins coughed behind him. “A letter, messengered over direct from Cabinet Office this morning. Would you like a glass of water, sir?”

  Kell took the letter, waved the offer away, and sat at his desk. As he opened the envelope, a scrap of paper fluttered to the floor. He looked at the letter first, for he recognized the handwriting at once—all sharp lines, jumpy and erratic. Soapy, on Cabinet letterhead.

  Dear Captain Kell . . . Not a good start. Too formal. Means he’s writing with the possibility that someone higher up the chain, someone with the power to fire both of them, might read the note at some point. Apropos—apropos, what a pompous ass—our meeting of the 23rd ult. I write to inquire of progress in the matter of internal government security. Please report forthwith.

  Yours etc. etc.

  Tobias Etienne Gerard Marchmont Pears MBE

  Kell frowned and leaned down to pick up the scrap. On this, scrawled in a much messier, rushed hand, it simply read: Without a breakthrough on this, you’re all in, old man. Best Soap.

  There it was in black and white. The threat, not of ruin exactly, but of total abject failure, humiliation in the Service, embarrassment.

  He called out to his clerk, “Here, did you sign for this letter?”

  “Of course, sir. You always said—”

  “Very good,” Kell said, indicating the opposite. He waved Simpkins away once more and eyed the drinks cabinet in the far corner of the room. Not yet eleven.

  Eventually, he cleared the blotting paper, took a half-written sheet of paper from his desk, and began writing. Not, however, to Soapy.

  At the top of the page, it read: Report on Insurgency in the Rhondda Valley coalfields, prepared for the Honorable Winston Churchill, Home Secretary. Classified.

  He continued:

  As of June 16th, there is no evidence that the miners of Rhondda have any intention to stray outside the bounds of industrial action as detailed in the public utterances of their trade union. While there is a rumbling of discontent around payment restructuring . . .

  Kell put down his pen. Churchill had requested the report almost immediately after their meeting the month before, convinced that the Welsh miners were about to pose a significant threat to what he so pompously referred to as “national security.” Kell had heard mutterings in the club about various sites of industrial unrest throughout the country. Churchill’s fears of insurrection may not have been so overblown after all. The worst of it for Kell, though, was that Churchill had specifically requested that Wiggins be placed undercover at one of the pits in Wales, and Kell had reluctantly agreed.

  He took a new piece of paper and began again.

  There is “no chance of the Taffs kicking off this year. A march, a barney, but they’ll do what the union bosses say.” These are the words of Agent W, who returned to London earlier this month with said report, including some more detailed particulars about the leaders of the dissent and their lack of support.

  Kell put the pen down again, aghast at how easily the lies came. Churchill had asked for Wiggins to be deployed precisely two days after Wiggins had disappeared. Kell had taken the commission—it was hard to say no to Churchill—and now he was in a hole. He had no way of finding out about industrial relations in Tonypandy, other than from the press reports (notoriously biased, of course, given that all the local papers were owned by the same people who owned the mines). On the other hand, he couldn’t very well tell Churchill that Wiggins had disappeared. To do so would risk revealing his own uselessness in such a matter, just when Kell suspected that it was only Churchill keeping him in a job at all.

  He could only hope that Churchill was keeping the “Wiggins reports” to himself, rather than sharing them with his inner circle. Churchill wasn’t a details man, but it would be quite a stroke of bad luck if he noticed anything amiss.

  Kell’s hunt for the mole was also grinding to a halt without Wiggins. In his absence, Kell didn’t feel able to take on the task of tailing the assistants of all the Cabinet ministers in attendance at the meeting—for one thing, he was known by sight to half of them. Instead, he’d been going over masses of government papers looking for anything that stood out, sets of data that didn’t quite match. And what he had discovered didn’t make pleasant reading.

  For while so far he’d found no clue as to the identity of the mole, he was convinced he’d uncovered even more evidence of information leaks, dating back to the beginning of the year. A naval review of the fleet in Plymouth had had to be aborted when a pleasure cruiser happened
upon it. The pleasure boat had had a number of foreign tourists aboard, including Germans. This wasn’t deemed suspicious at the time, just bad luck. But had it been luck?

  In April, a long-gestating plan by the Colonial Office to solidify relations with the locals on the southern edge of Lake Tanganyika had proved a failure when it was discovered that a German rubber company had already given them all jobs.

  Kell had found three or four of these odd little reverses; things that hadn’t gone smoothly. There was never anything large enough, though, to suggest that someone had blabbed. None of these instances had been marked down as a failure of security; Soapy knew nothing about them. And yet, in one way or another, Germany seemed to be the beneficiary every time. Kell sensed the hand of Van Bork.

  He got up and poured himself a glass of whisky, and thought again about the Committee for Imperial Defence. Perhaps this was Van Bork’s mistake, his one false move. Soapy had only found out that the Germans knew about the route because of a stray diplomatic boast; a mistake, in other words. There were so few people in that committee room. It had to be one of them.

  This didn’t disguise the fact that he still had no idea who had leaked the information, nor any evidence that could convict anyone of such a crime. The irony wasn’t lost on him that after almost a year of not finding any important German spies, when there was evidence of a very real spy operation at the highest levels of government, his department might be wound up for being ineffectual.

  The whisky slipped down easily. And with it, a far less palatable thought: was he being threatened with the sack precisely because he was getting closer? Did it run that deep?

  His head ached. He put his hand to the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to dull the pain. Where the hell was Wiggins?

  Wiggins opened his eyes. At least, he thought he opened his eyes. He lay flat on his back. His head hammered. He felt a lurch in his stomach. But he could see nothing. It was as dark as death and twice as cold. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. A metallic sound echoed around him.

  He drew his hand up to his face, invisible in the blackness. A great white mist filled his mind. He remembered coming out of the Bloodied Ax, he remembered twisting around, and then the blow, the poisonous vapor. Then nothing. The floor lurched beneath him once again. Bile rose in his throat, an acrid stench—had he been drugged? His mouth was as dry as the Band of Hope on Sundays, and his head swam.

  The floor pitched and yawed beneath him. He sat up and shivered. Took a few quick breaths. The cold air pinched his lungs. This was the coldest place he’d ever been. His mind was catching up with his body, then stalling. He tried to get up but could only reach one knee. He was weak, he couldn’t think straight, his head was mush, his muscles jelly, and he realized—with the kind of clarity that comes in the midst of a maelstrom, the quiet heart of the storm engulfing his mind and body—that if he didn’t get out in the next ten minutes, he would die.

  He got on all fours and with both hands began feeling in front of him. The floor was icy wet metal, with a strange, granulated dust. What felt like metal shelves lined first one wall, then the second and the third. His breath was failing him, the cold pinching at his chest. He crawled around to the final wall. His hand caught on the first rung of a ladder. His limbs shook and he couldn’t find his bearings in the pitch black. But he had to climb.

  As he rose, he neared the clanking sound. His hand slipped, his jaw shook with the cold, but he climbed on. Finally, his hand touched a hatch. Feeling to the side, he found the source of the clanking—an iron spike tied to a hook on the wall. He took as deep a breath as he could, jammed his left arm between the top rung of the ladder and the side of the wall, and grasped the spike in his hand. The room lurched again and Wiggins’s feet slipped.

  He held on, gathered his footing, and swung the spike against the hatch. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Nothing. “Help!” he croaked. All rasp, no power. “Help,” he screamed. He brought the spike crashing against the hatch, once, twice, three times.

  He tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and screamed into the darkness again—this time a scream from the depths of his hollow belly, a rage, a final song. Of all the places to die . . . He’d bled on the veldt, in the dirt and shit-encrusted alleys of the Jago; he’d had Rijkard’s cleaver at his neck, Peter’s bullet in his shoulder in Holborn . . . Of all the places: a cold, pitch-black hellhole, God knew where. He screamed again, surprising himself with the sound, the pain. Of all he’d left undone, unsaid; poor, dead Bill still unavenged, Peter free and easy; Millie missing, Poppy dead.

  And Bela. Bela, Bela . . .

  His hand sagged on the ladder, his head swung back. The pain seeped from his body. All he could see was her and all he could feel, now, as his life ended, was a strange, bitter relief. It flooded through him as she smiled, her oval face, the birthmark splashed across it. Bela. She reached out her hand for him, opened her mouth . . .

  “Hallo, darr?”

  “Hallo, daar,” someone shouted again, muffled.

  The hatch creaked. Wiggins barely registered the noise but his eyes fluttered open, waiting, wanting it to end.

  His vision filled with first a brightly lit slither, then bleaching out. He blinked. Bearded angels ringed the view.

  He closed his eyes once more, spent. All he heard, as hands reached down to grab him, was an astonished voice cry, “Verstekeling!”

  Strange, thought Wiggins as he passed out—always thought the God fella would speak English.

  In the weeks following the near disaster at the funeral procession, Constance Kell became more careful than ever. When out on the streets, she routinely doubled back; when getting on the Tube she would take the lift, then reascend; and when entering a cab, she would inform the driver a general direction (“South!”) and then be specific only when the car was well on its way. These were all tricks picked up from Wiggins.

  “Molinari’s, just off Soho Square!” she called to the cab driver as they sped out of Belsize Park.

  “Now you tell me,” he muttered.

  She’d felt someone following her once or twice, though she’d nothing definite to say one way or the other. She took particular care whenever she went to see Dinah and her girls. Their conversations, ever since the failure at the procession, had begun to get dangerous.

  It wasn’t that she disapproved of more aggressive action—she could see the need, indeed she fed off Dinah’s energy and enthusiasm. Taking the fight to the streets, forcing the powers of the state into reaction was what she wanted; not the dreary recitation of albeit reasonable arguments to rooms full of other women. The whole problem was that the government and the state—their opposition—were not being rational, they were not listening to reason. And so, as Abernathy and Dinah argued, something more had to be done.

  No, the problem for Constance was the risk.

  She arrived at Molinari’s coffeehouse to find Abernathy holding court to four or five young women, including Nobbs, Dinah, and Tansy.

  “Constance!” Dinah cried, and pulled out a seat.

  Abernathy ignored her and continued. “We should do something about the post.”

  What followed was an urgent discussion about how best to disrupt the postal system. Constance looked at the young women as they calmly discussed various acts of vandalism as if they were planning a garden party. A far cry from the Hampstead ladies. It felt both immature and electrifying at the same time. Their confidence, their bounce. Constance tried to remember whether she had ever had so much—before the children, perhaps? Eventually, the women settled on the use of acid thrown directly into postboxes.

  “I know someone at Imperial College,” Nobbs said. “Used to be a student. Supporter. We could get some there.”

  “But shouldn’t we take precautions?” Constance said at last.

  The women all trilled with laughter. She went on. “Isn’t it dangerous? I mean, the police. Surely Special Branch?”

  “Special Branch know nothing about us,
” Abernathy said. “Unless you’ve told them.”

  “That’s settled,” Nobbs said.

  Constance looked around her as each of the women got up and headed for the door, as if by prearrangement. “Will you, now?” Constance said. Abernathy looked down her nose at her, and turned to the door without uttering a word. “Take precautions, I mean.”

  The other girls went with Abernathy and only Dinah stopped to say goodbye. “Don’t worry,” she said.

  Constance followed her out onto the pavement. Dinah smiled and whispered, “And don’t be too hard on Abernathy. Her cousin did something unspeakable to her last summer. Now she can’t have children or anything like that.”

  “What?” Constance said, appalled.

  Dinah pulled a sad smile. “You know how it is. Boys rollicking around these country houses in the long vacation. Experimenting, so her papa said.”

  Constance shook her head, and looked up. Abernathy and the other women waited for Dinah at the corner of Dean Street and Soho Square.

  “But do help us with the postboxes. And come to Golden Square—you must!” she said and sped off.

  “What on earth’s in Golden Square?”

  “Jew-jew Sue,” Dinah shouted. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like to Constance.

  Who on earth was Jew-jew Sue?

  Kell paced up and down the drawing room, cigarette at his lips. Every now and then he stopped at the drinks cabinet for a nip. He’d spent the rest of the day writing up Wiggins’s (fictitious) reports for Churchill, as well as being sidetracked by naval reports. Some duffer in naval intelligence seemed to think the Germans were in regular cahoots with a small fleet of Chinese junks, of all things.

  His mood was ragged. He couldn’t shake the worm of suspicion from his thoughts. Grey, Churchill, Soapy, one of their assistants? How would he ever know? Was he nothing without Wiggins?