The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  He rounded the corner into his road at pace and suddenly saw a privet hedge rustle.

  Then he saw a hand.

  “You there!” he shouted, surprising himself.

  A man shot out of the bushes in a blur. His head down, he barreled into Kell.

  Kell crashed to the pavement, winded. He scrambled to his feet, but the man, now hatless, hared around the corner in a swirl of dust. Kell pushed to his feet and picked up the attacker’s cap. It had all happened so quickly. He tried to describe the man to himself: a heavy chin, broad-shouldered, dressed in a black suit.

  He crossed the road to his house, sat on the front step, and applied Wiggins’s methods.

  The cap was dirty and well worn, but of reasonable quality. From Arding and Hobbs, Battersea, according to the label. Grease stains marked the inside lip, and a few black hairs clung to the lining. He tossed it aside and got up.

  He castigated himself for ignoring Wiggins’s most basic piece of advice when it came to evading a tail: “Don’t let him know you know he’s there. Act natural, act normal. Lose him by accident.” Kell had let on—had shouted it out in the street. He yanked open his front door in annoyance, then snatched his briefcase from the hallway. He regained the street without bothering to call out to Constance. He didn’t want her to see him like this, tie askew, trousers and coat dusted, a sheen of sweat on his brow. He didn’t want her to see him scared either.

  The other thing Wiggins would have done, on losing a tail, was follow the man himself. It was not enough to know that you were being followed, you had to know why.

  Kell hurried to Hampstead station, replaying in his mind all the mistakes he’d made. This last question was the one that really meant something. His breathing had slowed by the time he reached the platform and he felt settled enough to light another cigarette.

  Who could be following him, and why? He tried again to build a picture in his mind of the man in the bushes. He’d meant him no harm, that was for sure—the violence of pushing Kell to the ground had merely been a means of escape. And he was probably working for someone else. The train clattered into the station and he pulled out another smoke for the journey. Was it a three-cigar problem? Sherlock Holmes had advised him once—in addition to advising him to hire Wiggins—that the smoking of a pipe was the greatest aid to thought invented by man. Kell could never stand a pipe.

  A twenty-five minute journey in a London Underground train carriage, however, was as good as bathing in tobacco smoke. By the time Kell got out, his mind was clearer on the matter. For one thing, a man who could afford to pay someone else to tail him was a man who had significant funds at his disposal. Or a government department.

  Rather than walking toward his office in Victoria Street, he turned his sights to Whitehall.

  “You want to what?” Archibald Carter repeated, all semblance of official calm gone.

  “To see the foreign secretary, at once,” Kell also repeated in turn. “It is not an unusual request, is it?”

  Carter shook his aged head, as if in disbelief that this man in front of him, walking in off the street, would think it possible to gain an audience with the foreign secretary, Grey himself.

  “It’s an issue of national security,” Kell said at last, hating himself for aping the pompous Churchill. Still, the phrase seemed to impress something on the clerk, for he disappeared down the corridor, head still shaking.

  He returned thirty minutes later. “You can have five minutes.”

  Kell floated through the magnificence of the Foreign Office. Past the heavy gilt frames, the majestic paintings, the sculptures, the Chinese vases, the antiquities from every corner of the globe, the Persian rugs beneath his feet, the deep red wallpaper. Stepping into the FO was like stepping into a dream, a world put together of all the best and most expensive things the five continents could provide. It didn’t feel like the civil service at all.

  Sir Edward Grey sat at his huge oak desk, and—unusually for a Cabinet minister—actually appeared to be working. He didn’t look up as Kell came in, but continued writing. “What’s this I hear of national security?” he said. “I hear of it everywhere now, but I’ve no idea what it means.” He finally put down his pen and glanced up at Kell.

  “I apologize for the dramatic phrasing, Foreign Secretary. I’m not sure I quite know what it means either.”

  “It sounds like an excuse to do something of which one might be ashamed.”

  “Foreign Secretary.” Kell dipped his head slightly.

  Grey sighed. “Go on, then.”

  Kell hesitated. He would have liked to trust Grey implicitly, to give him all he had. But then what use would a secret service be—at home or abroad—if it couldn’t keep secrets? And—that small, burrowing worm of doubt in his head—he still hadn’t cleared Grey of guilt either: this sleek fox in front of him might be on the hunt for the prime minister after all.

  Nevertheless, Kell gave a precis of some of the problems involving the leak, in particular that something had come from the Committee meeting itself.

  Grey listened, the lines in his frown growing ever deeper. “But why come to me?” he said at last.

  Kell told him. Told him the reasons why, the reasons he’d found so compelling on his Underground journey that morning. The edited version. He cast all this in language that suggested the Foreign Office might contain the leak, not that the foreign secretary himself might be implicated. He eyed Grey carefully as he spoke, looking for anything suspicious.

  Grey glared back in silent outrage. But Kell held his stare, stood upright, still in good Sandhurst fashion, four steps from the desk. Someone knocked on the door and came in.

  “Not now, Gorot,” Grey snapped.

  The underling did an elegant and swift U-turn. Kell kept his eyes front. The interruption had done the trick, though. Grey’s flash of anger had subsided.

  “Very well,” he said. “I don’t approve, you understand, and I am sure you are entirely mistaken. But if you must follow the ball of wool to its end, then you must. Good day.”

  As Kell left the building, he bumped shoulders with a young man coming in.

  “I do beg your pardon,” Kell said, staring at the man. “My fault entirely.”

  “Think nothing of it.” The sleek fellow, clothes creased like razors, nodded absently.

  “I say, haven’t we met before?” Kell said, as government flunkeys passed to and fro.

  “I don’t think so. Would you mind, I—”

  “Wasn’t it at the embassy?”

  The young man looked up sharply and glanced down the street. Kell leaned in and whispered, “It’s all right, Moseby-Brown, no one suspects us.”

  “It’s just I . . .” Moseby-Brown hesitated, then spoke in an undertone. “I thought we should never meet at the office. That was what we agreed.”

  “Let’s walk,” Kell said. “I’ll keep up the charade. Play along.” He then spoke much more loudly. “No, it wasn’t the embassy, you work alongside the foreign secretary. We stood next to each other at the Committee for Imperial Defence.”

  “Ah, yes,” the young man fell into step beside him and joined in. “You are intelligence?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” They’d arrived on Whitehall itself and Kell fixed Moseby-Brown with a stare. “That’ll do,” he said. “We’ve maintained your cover. Now, you had better come for a quick livener and tell me everything you know.”

  Moseby-Brown nodded and Kell smiled. Bumping into his source at the FO was good news in two ways—he could go for a drink without it occasioning comment, and more importantly, it meant he didn’t have to go to the office.

  “Have you seen today’s Times?”

  “Sybella’s great-uncle used to own it.”

  “Shut up, Nobbs,” Abernathy said. “This speech from Asquith. Says we’re all hysterics and troublemakers, says we haven’t a leg to stand on. It makes my blood boil.”

  The four women stood in a loose circle in the middle of a windswept Golden
Square. A few sad trees bent in protest while furtive figures scuttled by. It was at the respectable end of Soho. But it was still Soho. Constance, a late arrival, hovered slightly back from the circle. Abernathy, battered straw hat pulled tight against the wind, held court. Dinah, Nobbs, and the ethereal Tansy listened attentively as Abernathy swept her eyes from one to the other and back again.

  “It’s not as if they’ve even got a majority,” Abernathy went on. “Propped up in Parliament by the Irish, clinging on to power like croissant-munching French aristos.”

  Dinah snorted.

  Abernathy glared at them, resting at last on Constance. “The movement’s going nowhere,” she finished.

  “Oh, don’t be such a student.” Constance could restrain herself no more. “If Asquith—the prime minister, remember—is forced to make such a comment, and if it is reported in The Times, then it’s hardly going nowhere. Nowhere would be silence.”

  Abernathy looked away, chastened or contemptuous, Constance wasn’t sure. She believed what she said, of course, but a part of her felt Abernathy did have a point. She’d been marching for years, had attended Lord knew how many meetings, and the vote seemed as distant as ever.

  “Here she is,” Dinah suddenly cried, waving both hands wildly above her head. A tall, thin woman swept over, toting an umbrella like a lance. She engulfed Dinah in a tight hug, then they all turned to the west side of the square. “Now we can start.” Dinah grinned, without bothering to introduce the stranger.

  “At last,” Abernathy said. “All this lecturing is soo tiring.”

  “My friend Dorothea says St. Hilda’s is a total bust. They still don’t graduate you.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of lecturing,” Abernathy said, glaring at Constance.

  Dinah, arm in arm with her new friend, twisted around to the group. “Mustn’t be late.”

  “Why are we here anyway, if not to attend a talk?” Constance said.

  “A talk?”

  They’d reached a big green door. Dinah reached up to the doorknob. “I thought we were to hear Jew-jew Sue,” Constance went on.

  Dinah’s laugh was so loud and hearty that passersby turned to look. “Not Jew-jew Sue,” she whispered, still giggling. “Jujitsu.”

  Far off, over the dark gray Thames, through the Sussex Downs where an aging detective tends his bees, along the chopping Channel and out out out into the Bay of Biscay, the SS Friendship cuts a jaunty dash.

  When first he comes aboard, Wiggins is delighted with Kell’s choice of passage. The berth is small but clean, the ship is well run, and it weighs anchor last thing at night—leaving Wiggins to tumble aboard with a bellyful of Canaries wine and a sunburnt face, thinking good, kind thoughts of his far-off boss. A toff to be sure, but he sees a fellow right.

  It is not until the first full day at sea that Wiggins’s ordeal is completely clear to him. No bar? What about the galley?

  Dry.

  Dry?

  The ship is Quaker-owned; Friendship is the hint. Not a drop of alcohol on board. A whole Quaker line, in fact—the import-export of chocolate, and the ingredients to make it. There’s a hunk of sweet black chocolate with every meal, but for Wiggins this journey has turned into hell on sea. He doesn’t want to dream the dreams of a sober man.

  Kell flicked through the pencil-written messages pinned next to his home telephone in the hallway. All had been left by Constance in her slapdash scrawl.

  Soapy called. Please get back to him as soon as possible.

  Soapy again.

  Office. Simpkins for you.

  Is this now the role of wife? To answer the telephone for you.

  Soapy once more. He really is the most tiresome bore. Seemed annoyed.

  Simpkins.

  Now I’m starting to wonder where you are.

  Where are you?

  Kell swiped the messages from the stand and exited the house again, having only been there for a few minutes.

  He looked both ways on the pavement, checked the corner, then hurried on toward Hampstead. Without breaking stride, he slipped into the Flask, nodded conspiratorially to the barman, and stepped through into a back room where, remarkably, they had recently installed a telephone.

  “Simpkins, it’s me,” he whispered into the horn.

  “Thank God, sir. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, actually, sir, Secretary Pears has been trying to reach you. He has telegrammed, government-messengered, telephone-called, written, and this morning . . . well . . .”

  “Yes, in your own time, Simpkins,” Kell said. Simpkins had always been afraid of Soapy.

  “He came in person, to the office, sir, looking for you.”

  Kell hesitated. He knew Soapy was exasperated, but getting him to leave the Cabinet Office was something else, a different order of annoyance altogether. Especially in the height of summer. It probably meant the sack.

  “He rather threatened me with the chop, sir, if I’m honest with you.”

  “Threatened you?”

  “Well, the department.”

  The news was clear enough—Soapy was intent on his destruction.

  “Anything on that other matter I asked you to look into, at the FO?”

  “As a matter of fact, some documents just came in from the Land Registry that are rather interesting.”

  “Send them to the house. No, wait. Have them held for me at the club.”

  “But, sir, what about my job?”

  “Don’t worry about that now. Is there anything else?”

  “A flash telegram came in from the Continent this morning.”

  “My God, man, why didn’t you say? Read it at once.”

  Kell heard the crackle and jag on the line, like the sound of a piece of paper being screwed up in one’s ear. Simpkins’s reedy voice finally came back on the line. “It’s marked ‘Most Secret,’ sir. Should I really, over the—”

  “Just read the damn thing,” Kell urged.

  “‘FAO Mr. Kelly, United Importers’—are we sure it’s for you, sir?”

  “Simpkins, just read it out.”

  “It says: ‘Send bananas to Bremen. C.’”

  Kell put the phone down. He got up, then stepped back into the bar. He glanced at the publican, nodded, and got a small Scotch in return, which he downed in one.

  He looked up at the flags and memorabilia that dotted the aged pub, crowded out now by the advertisements. YOUNG’S BITTER. GUINNESS STOUT. TOLLEMACHE’S ALE. Legends of a history not yet lived. He took out his watch and wound it up, a ritual he always savored. Then he stepped back behind the bar to the telephone once more.

  Before picking up the horn, he wrote Soapy a short note. The future of the Service, the whole Secret Service Bureau, hung in the balance, and he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

  Then he made three calls, culminating in one back to Simpkins. He walked through the bar, this time ignoring the drink poured for him by the obliging publican. Instead, he turned his sights back home, for his sternest task yet.

  He had to talk to Constance.

  10

  “By the powers vested in me by the Port of London Authority—”

  “Port of London?”

  “—I hereby arrest you.”

  “You ain’t even a real copper.”

  Wiggins tried to sidestep the two policemen, a sergeant and a gorilla of a constable. “What’s the charge, eh? ’Ere, get your hands off me.”

  The gorilla punched Wiggins so hard in the stomach that he winded him. “That real enough for you? In the cells, now.”

  And so ended Wiggins’s homecoming, at the passenger terminal of Tilbury Docks. He was dragged across the expanse of the quay, the shocked Quakers eyeing him askance.

  Thirty minutes later, he sat at a plain table, in a plain, windowless room, staring at the steamy swirls coming off a plain cup of plain tea.

  “Tea?”

  “It’s that or a smack in the mouth,” said a
hatless copper as he withdrew from the table.

  “Tea it is. And they say manners is a dying art.”

  The policeman drew his upper lip back in an ugly sneer. “Manners is wasted on the likes of you.” He turned toward the door.

  “No use kicking against the prick, eh?” The policeman paused. Wiggins held his hands on the table. He watched as the copper’s fists flexed. The broad, black-clad shoulders rolled for a moment, then the policeman opened the door, closed it, and turned the key.

  Wiggins called after him, “Let me know the charge. When you’re ready, like.” Then he blew on his tea and waited.

  Two hours later, the door swung open and in walked Captain Vernon Kell, resplendent in full traveling suit, with a peaked cap to boot. “Did they mistreat you?” Kell asked sharply, glancing at the copper who stood in the doorway.

  “They’re rozzers, what do you think?”

  “Yes, well, sorry about that.”

  “You didn’t have to arrest me.”

  “We sail in an hour. I couldn’t guarantee that you wouldn’t—how shall I say it—decamp to the nearest public house.”

  “Zackly.” Wiggins got up and marched to the door. The policeman stepped aside at a nod from Kell.

  “No time for the saloon. We must get aboard.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere. You put me on the slowest boat known to man, stopping at every bleeding port from here to kingdom come, and not the sniff of a drink. It’s August, and no booze?”

  “Now listen . . .” Kell said. They stopped outside the police station.

  Wiggins rounded on him. “No, you listen. You stuff me on that bloody Quaker line and what I is now is thirsty. And then I’ve got business to attend to back in the Smoke, and then I’ll come help you.”