The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  “Go, go, go.” He grabbed her and ran.

  More shots. One two three, a barrage.

  Mausers. Wiggins knew. Semiautomatic. But knockoffs, fake, inaccurate.

  He pulled Jax through the gate at the far end of the square. She cried out in pain, but carried on. More guts than half the army he knew. “Smithfield,” he urged her.

  “What?” she gasped.

  They heard their pursuers shouting now, scrabbling over the ground behind them. The gunshots would’ve woken half of Clerkenwell. But still they were pursued. These men meant business.

  Jax limped badly. Wiggins thrust his arm under her shoulder. “You go,” she said.

  “Smithfield.”

  He slung her over his shoulders, fireman style, and careened around the corner into Smithfield Market.

  At last, people! It wasn’t long past four in the morning, but London’s biggest meat market was already open. Wiggins, Jax still on his shoulders—this time like a cow’s carcass, carried up from the cold storage—jogged into the brightly lit east entrance.

  “Fack me, we selling scrote now?” a butcher called out.

  “A penny on the pound,” someone else said, and they laughed.

  Wiggins shrugged Jax to her feet. “Keep walking,” he said, glancing around.

  They moved through the market, under its great roof, as natural as they could. Pink carcasses swinging on long hooks, legs of lamb racked up like shells, a stall selling pig’s heads. Jax stopped in front of them. “Let’s stick here, till it’s light.” She winced.

  Wiggins looked back. Two bobbing heads, thick black hair on end, unhatted. They weren’t going anywhere. Up ahead, another shape. He pointed. “They’ve got us covered.”

  Jax’s eyes widened. They began again, slowly. Off to their left, through the hanging meat, she gestured. “They wouldn’t—”

  Two more men barreled toward them along a line of beef carcasses. Wiggins swung his feet at the beef, cannoning it into the men. “Run,” he shouted.

  They hustled down a side alley. Up ahead, another shadow, two, three, closing. Jax skidded to a halt. “What—?”

  A man with a mustache and thick black hair came toward them with a gun. Jax froze. Wiggins looked up. The man stopped, steadied himself, and pulled up the weapon with a straight right arm.

  “No!” Jax cried.

  Wiggins shoulder-charged her through a doorway off to their left. He helped her onto a ladder that led downward into the darkness. “Slide,” he said.

  They gripped the side rails one on top of the other and disappeared into the black.

  A clanking, groaning roar rose up the ladder. Jax exclaimed as she fell to the ground, and Wiggins dropped down next to her onto gravel.

  From above, Wiggins could hear the Russians arguing. And then the ladder began to wobble and bend in his hand.

  He looked around, peering into the night. Out of the blackness, two lights suddenly appeared, coming toward them at pace. A train, cranking up the speed.

  “Now!” He half hauled, half threw Jax into one of the cargo carriages as it accelerated past. He jumped in after her. The train picked up speed.

  “Ugh!” Jax cried out in disgust.

  They were both covered in blood and bones. The cargo car stank of death, but not their own. Wiggins bent out of the side and looked back. Their pursuers, moving shadows in the darkness, dropped down too late to get the train. He slumped back among the butchers’ waste.

  “Market has its own trains,” he said at last. “Brings the beasts in, takes the rubbish out.” He breathed, heavy and deep, and didn’t care a stuff about the smell. They were alive.

  “What the hell were you doing there?” he said eventually, as the train clunked and clicked south.

  “What was I doing there? What you asked me to, you nonce. Looking for Peter.”

  “You should’ve come straight to me,” he gasped.

  “I heard rumors, is all. What you want with him anyway?”

  “I told ya. He killed my best mate. I’m doing it for Bill.”

  Jax winced. The train swung left out of the tunnel and into the dawn, toward Blackfriars Bridge. “Yeah, but he’s dead.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Wot, he ain’t dead?”

  Wiggins said nothing. The train rocked over the bridge.

  “Do I get me fiver then?”

  He stood up. “Come on, this is us.” The train had slowed to the set of points between Waterloo and London Bridge. Wiggins clambered over the end of the cart. He pulled Jax to a stand next to him, on the running board. She clung to his waist, squeezed against him, stinking of blood and death and all, but still, it moved him, the physical contact. “Easy,” he said into her ear, then together they jumped and rolled onto the gravel verge.

  Jax’s ankle obviously stung something rotten. She could hardly walk. “Let’s go to Sal’s,” Wiggins said. They scrambled through the bush, over the wall, and out onto the road.

  Sal’s hut appeared through the gray mist. Wiggins heard the clack clack clack as she pulled open the shutters. Jax’s breath was fast and heavy, its plumes streaming out in front of them as she limped beside him. Sal turned. She waved first, then hustled toward them.

  “What the bleedin’ hell . . . ?”

  “Shut up, Ma.”

  Sal hugged her tight, glaring at Wiggins.

  Once inside, with hot tea and toast, and a compress on Jax’s ankle, Wiggins helped Sal with the doorsteps while Jax sat by the stove. He’d sponged down his jacket as best as he could, but his trousers were still streaked with blood, and he smelled of death and offal.

  “Ain’t you had enough of them bleedin’ anarchists?”

  “Sorry, Sal. I won’t ask her again.”

  “What about the coppers?”

  He looked at her for a moment.

  Sal sawed at the bread with venom. She turned to the cups and clattered them in rows by the urn, ready for the morning rush. “What’s she gonna do for brass? She can’t run.”

  “I’ll see her right.”

  “Yeah, you do that. And leave her out of it, whatever it is.”

  “I’m not sure myself,” Wiggins muttered.

  He’d found Peter. And whatever gang he was a part of now, they meant business. There must have been at least ten in that house, and they were obviously planning something. To risk running after them, to shoot too, even in Smithfield, meant they were either desperate or on the verge of doing something desperate. They were certainly tooled up.

  Another thing intrigued him. Although Peter had the charm and the brains, Wiggins guessed that the leader was the man with the gun in the market, handsome, with his mustache and thick black hair. Peter preferred to defer to—or lay the blame on, more like—someone else. That’s what he’d tried with Arlekin last year, and now the same again. He wasn’t the figurehead, but Wiggins would lay money that Peter was manipulating the direction of the gang.

  He couldn’t help but feel a surge of grim satisfaction, though, despite the near miss. For Peter was in London. He was preparing to show his face again. And Wiggins would be there when he did.

  Sal’s mention of the coppers got him thinking. They wouldn’t listen to him, but they might listen to Kell. He dusted down his hands, determined to get to him at once. If he could persuade Kell to talk to Special Branch, they might raid the house. Kell hated Wiggins talking to him about anything other than German spies, but at least this was a concrete tip-off. If nothing else, the cops might recover some guns. It would probably be too late anyway, but it was worth a shot.

  “Where now?” Sal said.

  “I’ve gotta get to work.”

  “I thought you was working down the docks?” Sal said, absently. She moved over to Jax and examined her ankle once more. “Put it up, girl. Rub some mother’s ruin in.” She measured out a glass of gin and handed it to her.

  “Take her to the bones,” Wiggins said.

  “You think I don’t want to?” She rounded
on him angrily. “Think we can afford the doc? Where do you think we’re living? We ain’t all got toffs looking out for us now, we ain’t yours to do what you like wiv, just cos you’ve got a shilling in your pocket.”

  Wiggins stepped back. “I’m just . . .” He shook his head, not quite sure what he was doing.

  She gestured at the door, pointing him on his way. Jax looked up at him, forlorn and pained. He turned to go.

  “Wiggins.” Sal called him back. Her face was hot and red, and she was still angry. She handed him a torn piece of paper. “I near forgot, what wiv you being a selfish arsehole and all. Here’s that list, from the drivers, ’bout the Embassy. Them’s some regulars.”

  “Ta,” he nodded. He glanced at the list. Then he looked more closely and counted them off: one, two, three, four at least. “I don’t bloody believe it!”

  16

  “Impossible,” Kell said, aghast.

  “Could be a coincidence. Then again, I could be the King of Siam,” Wiggins replied. “I don’t believe in ’em. Mr. Holmes didn’t believe in ’em neither.”

  “Show me again.”

  The two men bent over Kell’s desk and compared the lists. On one side, in elegant copperplate writing, Kell’s list of Committee attendees—prime suspects in the case of the Whitehall leak of information. On the other side, in Sal’s rough pencil markings, the return addresses of a number of Embassy “clients.” Those “regulars” used to taking cabs to and from the bawdy house of choice.

  Kell pointed at Sal’s list. “I recognize most of the names on here,” he said to himself in disgust. “It’s pitiful.”

  He’d put his key in the door that morning to yet again find out that his agent had somehow entered the office before him, although this time Wiggins had announced his arrival by smell alone. He stank. Kell had primed himself to upbraid Wiggins in the strongest possible terms, but the bedraggled, exhausted-looking man had leapt up from his desk and shown him the two lists almost immediately.

  Now, as Kell looked over them a third time, he could hear Wiggins pacing the room behind him, obviously agitated. “Another thing,” Wiggins said. “You’ve got to get on to Special Branch sharpish.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nasty gang. Wiv shooters.”

  The telephone buzzed into life on the desk. Kell ignored it. “Not now, Simpkins,” he shouted. The bell stopped.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Now,” Wiggins said. “Or it’ll be too late.”

  “Look here, Wiggins.” Kell moved behind his desk and adopted as stern a tone as possible. “I will not be lectured to by you, of all people. Why are you so anxious?”

  Wiggins stopped his pacing and glared at him. “There ain’t much time.”

  Kell held up the Embassy list. “What are we going to do about this?”

  Before Wiggins could reply, someone opened the door without knocking. Wiggins swung around. Kell looked up, startled.

  “Hello, Mr. Wiggins,” Constance said.

  “My dear? What are you doing here?”

  “Ma’am.” Wiggins nodded, and tried to brush down his filthy trousers.

  “Are you quite all right, Wiggins?” she said.

  The telephone burst into startling life once more. “Simpkins,” Kell bellowed. “Not now.”

  “How do you know where I work?” Kell said, once the phone had stopped ringing. He held up his hand in what he realized might be an aggressive way. Wiggins glanced at him, then at Constance.

  She broke the silence, unfazed. “I am your wife, if you remember. It’s natural I know where you work. I am curious.”

  Kell shook his head. His wife still surprised him. Not only could she evade a tail, now, it seemed, she could tail him. It was most irritating, and unsettling. She rarely did things without reason. “Wiggins is debriefing me.” Kell looked at him. “On the docks. If you could give us a moment.”

  The phone started once more.

  “Oh, don’t mind me. I popped in to say hello. I’m off to the Army and Navy Stores. Thought I’d pay my regards, though I didn’t expect quite such a warm welcome. Is someone going to answer that telephone?”

  “Simpkins!”

  Constance began an idle turn around the room, looking at the maps on the wall. She made absolutely no attempt to leave. The telephone finally stopped.

  “Go on.” Kell nodded at Wiggins. “What news of West India Docks?”

  Wiggins hesitated. “Don’t mind me,” Constance said airily.

  Kell flopped his hands by his side helplessly. He trusted Wiggins had read him well enough to know that he didn’t want to talk about the other matters in front of her.

  “All they’s want is a pay rise. I told you.”

  “Is that all? I hear the last meeting with the management was quite fraught.”

  “What you expect?” Wiggins said. “They’s gone piecemeal, costs ’em a tanner a day, lest they break a back. And no guarantee of any work, yet they can’t work elsewhere neither.”

  Kell sighed. “Spare me the soapbox speech. Just tell me—this being your job—is there any unrest planned? Any exceptional action?”

  “Is this your work now?” Constance interjected. “I thought you were about fighting dastardly Teutons, stopping world war, that sort of thing.”

  Kell looked at her. She held in her hand a small stuffed bird, a piece of dusty decoration that came with the rooms. She examined it a moment longer, popped it back on a side table, and smiled at him. “Isn’t domestic insurrection the business of Special Branch?”

  Yes, and your photograph is pinned to their wall, Kell did not say. Who are you seeing? What are you planning? Why are you here? He stared at her, almost reached out his hand . . . His mother on the platform at Paddington . . . Instead, he said, “There is an intricate web, my dear, stretching countrywide. Many mysteries that defy simple understanding. Much like the mysteries of the human heart.”

  She held his eye for a moment, searching.

  Wiggins coughed.

  “Well?” Kell turned to him. “I’m waiting.”

  “They’s just a bunch of lads who want to be paid.”

  “Anything planned? I repeat, this is your job, for which you are well paid.”

  Wiggins hesitated. “Wednesday,” he said. “A protest, down the offices.”

  “And the ringleaders?”

  “I didn’t catch a name.”

  “Well, invent one, for heaven’s sake.” Kell let out a sigh of exasperation.

  “Is this the Hidden Hand at work? The magic of spy-catching?”

  “Yes, thank you, dear. That is most helpful.”

  The telephone began to ring again. Kell looked down at it, then back at his wife. “As you can see, I am rather busy. Simpkins!”

  She raised an eyebrow and picked up her umbrella. The phone stopped ringing. “I wondered if you would like to have luncheon, in the Army and Navy, once I’m done. But I see that perhaps Mr. Wiggins needs you more urgently.”

  “I need to speak to Special Branch, as it happens,” he said, glancing at Wiggins. “Was there anything else?”

  She hesitated at the door. Once again, Kell regretted his tone. Much as he’d like her to be his employee, she was not. He tried to smile, but she didn’t respond. Instead, she nodded at Wiggins. “Good day, Mr. Wiggins. And please, don’t take it amiss if I say that you need a change of clothes. Perhaps you should come with me.”

  “Ta for the offer,” he said. “But the boss is driving me something awful.”

  “Yes, I can see that. Finding spies wherever he can.” She pulled open the door, stopped, and then delivered her final salvo. “Oh, by the way, Vernon, I’ve invited Lady Quinn and her husband to dinner next month.”

  “Lady Quinn?” Kell said, his heart dropping. He knew exactly who she was, who she was married to, and what Constance was going to say.

  “Sir Patrick’s wife. I met her the other day at a coffee morning. Absolutely delightful woman. We quite struck up a friend
ship. I hope that won’t embarrass you, dear?” she added, needlessly.

  She swept from the room, leaving Wiggins looking down in dismay at his clothes, while Kell looked to the future dinner date with Sir Patrick Quinn with equal discomfort.

  “Right.” Kell rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Get down to the docks on Wednesday. Give me names and details of the ringleaders—real or imagined, it doesn’t matter. Just make the report look genuine.”

  “You talking to Special Branch about them shooters out east? I’ve written the address down and everything,” he said, handing the paper to Kell, though even as he did so he knew in his heart that Peter would already be gone. The East End was a warren, and Peter’s mob knew every one of its holes.

  “I said I’d deal with it,” Kell replied icily. He couldn’t boss around his wife, but he’d have a good go at controlling Wiggins. He was the only person left who listened to him, and even then only when it suited. “Most importantly, we need to act on this blasted whorehouse.”

  “Can’t we raid it? Send the rozzers in.”

  “Why?”

  “Well . . .” Wiggins hesitated. His face colored. “It ain’t right.”

  “You seem to think that because you work for me, the Metropolitan Police Force is at your own private disposal. They simply won’t do as I say without good reason.”

  “What then?”

  The telephone began to ring again on the desk between them. Kell shouted, “Simpkins!” But this time, the phone kept ringing.

  Finally, Kell picked it up himself. “I’m not here,” he said into the horn, and put it down. Then picked it up again and said, “Get me Special Branch.”

  Wiggins popped a sweet into his mouth as he walked through the plush back garden of number 14 Ranleigh Terrace. He opened the back door without knocking, then took the servants’ staircase two at a time until he reached the very top of the house.

  He came to a long, thin corridor and opened the first door. “Anything?”

  Simpkins, Kell’s clerk, sat on an improvised stool at the window, looking down on the street with a Brownie in his hand. He turned to Wiggins, grinned, and put the camera down. “Nothing particularly suspicious,” he said. “Glad to see you. I’m famished.”