by H. B. Lyle
Wiggins looked at the logbook. “Three cabs, a car, and a couple of walk-ups?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Simpkins said, gathering up his hat, scarf, and coat. “I say, you haven’t seen my gloves, have you? It’s freezers. Haven’t been this cold since fourth form.”
“You’ve got them on,” Wiggins said, not taking his eyes from the log.
“Ha ha, look at me. Well, well, I better get back to the office. Have a good night of it.”
Wiggins grunted and picked up the camera.
Simpkins opened the door, hesitated, and then said in a soft tone, “I say, old man, if the chief does show, I’d pop another of those mints if I were you. Feel a bit squiffy myself, ha ha!”
Wiggins glared at him for a moment, then nodded. Simpkins was your typical public-school oaf—Wiggins had seen enough of them in the army—but he meant well. He certainly wouldn’t grass him up for being one or two over the odds. “Mind them stairs,” he said, and turned to the window.
They hadn’t gotten anywhere in weeks. Kell had ordered him, along with Simpkins, to mount a surveillance operation on the Embassy. They’d set up in one of the servants’ rooms in a house almost opposite. The family were away, and Kell had pulled a few strings to get them in there. Simpkins and Wiggins were left undisturbed. They had a high vantage point, but limited resources. They would take photographs with the Eastman Brownie, and make notes of the registration of the private cars and the license number of the hansom cabs. Simpkins would try to follow these up with names and addresses, but it was slow going.
When he’d first confronted Kell, Wiggins was outraged that they couldn’t just raid the place. Kell had warned against it, especially given the social standing of some of the customers. He’d been pleased with the bank of information he was growing. It was the place to be for the highest slice of London society. Tommy had really entered the top drawer. From lifting clicks off two-a-penny shoppers down Chapel Street Market and dipping the drunks at pitch-out, to the highest in the land. He’d risen, with the scum.
A motorized cab pulled up. Click, whirr, got the number. A tall, thin man in top hat and tails flitted across the pavement like a ghost. It was already beginning to get dark. He couldn’t get a view of the faces of the customers as they waited at the door, even when it swung open, spilling warmth and faint music and jollity onto the streets. It wasn’t so jolly for Millicent or Poppy, though, was it, Wiggins reminded himself. For all that Kell wanted to find out secrets and who had spilled them, Wiggins owed Poppy.
The man disappeared into the house, and Wiggins took the logbook in his hand once more. By the time they were done, Kell would have something on everyone in London. They had cabs delivering to American, French (of course), and Austrian embassies, picking up from most of the gents’ gaffes in club-land, the FO, Parliament. The Palace. They were a long way from Vere Street in Lambeth. Would any of ’em have given Millie a second look up that tenement building?
He thought again about Tommy, a mountain of anger and resentment, across the road. What was he going to do—march in there and fight him? Kill him? Go back to the Bloodied Ax? Wiggins couldn’t bring himself to move against him without more proof. Tommy must have had him shanghaied, but he didn’t know on whose orders, he didn’t know who’d killed Poppy, and he didn’t know where Millie was or what had happened to her. And brawling with Tommy weren’t going to change that. They needed to arrest him.
Peter was a different matter. Special Branch had missed him, so Kell said. Wiggins knew they would; it was the longest of long shots. He and his gang had disappeared back into the East End.
But Wiggins wouldn’t miss him again. Peter would show his face soon enough, or the gang would, anyway. You don’t pack a house like that, with people like that, and guns like that, unless you mean to use them. And whatever happened, he’d go back to the Library, go back to following the Ivans: it’d worked once and it would work again. It would just take one Ivan at a time.
He set his sights back on the Embassy and waited. Waited for evidence of murder, of spying, of smuggling, of anything at all to give them an excuse to go in—but so far nothing but people had gone in, and nothing but people had come out. The whores, very occasionally, the boy to and from school, and Tommy to the pub. And the endless supply of Freds.
The streetlights jagged and fizzed ever brighter in the night. Wiggins found himself waiting, hoping, wanting to see someone else come out of that door. He waited to see Martha.
“Now, why would you be wanting to sully yourself with all that dirty work, Captain Kell, when you come home to this every night?” Sir Patrick Quinn grinned ghastly at Constance.
A young footman lifted up a gleaming tureen from the table between them.
Kell tried not to stare at his wife in astonishment. She was actually smiling back at Quinn, seemingly charmed by his condescension, positively basking in his leers.
“Especially,” Quinn went on, glancing back at Kell, “as it’s not going so well, just now, is it?” He smirked. “If you were my wife, dear, and if this were my table, I’m not sure I would ever want to work again.”
“No shop, Paddy,” Lady Quinn snapped at his elbow. “Not in front of the ladies. And less of that Donegal charm too. You’re old enough to be Mrs. Kell’s father, so you are.”
Kell bent to the last of his soup before it was almost lifted out of his hand. He cast a quick glance around the table. To his left, Soapy and his wife, Alice (known to Constance as “silly, soppy Alice”), a nervous, angular woman with featherlight hair and an overbite. Soapy raised his eyebrows toward Kell and gestured at Quinn, who had somehow managed to seat himself at the head of the table.
A sumptuous array of plump white turbots appeared, with chilled Chablis glasses sparkling in the light of the electric chandelier.
That bastard Quinn, thought Kell with a bitter, Wiggins-accented pang. As soon as Wiggins had told him of the East End hideout of an anarchist gang, Kell had tried to get hold of Quinn on the telephone. They didn’t like each other, of course, but Kell had hoped that such a tip might thaw relations between them—the capture of such an armed gang would be quite a coup for Quinn and Special Branch.
It had taken days. First, Quinn wouldn’t take his call. Then he’d left him in the waiting room at Scotland Yard for three hours before leaving by the back way, claiming an emergency. Finally, Quinn had returned the telephone call and reluctantly agreed to send down some officers and an inspector to the address Wiggins had supplied. Kell went with them.
A large, multiple-occupancy house somewhere in the East End. Kell had rarely seen such dirt and filth. The beds were flea-ridden, human excrement caked the backyard, and the stench was unbearable. Police constables barreled through each of the rooms, shouting, while Kell took a look around. No wonder it was dirty, he thought. There was no running water. And now no people.
“Deserted,” said the inspector. “False lead,” he added, in disgust.
“Can’t you see who was here?” Kell asked. “The neighbors, the landlord?”
“No one will tell us nothing,” the inspector spat. “Unless we arrest ’em. And we ain’t got proof of stuff all. If you’ll pardon the phrase. The chief’ll be livid. We’re as busy as a knocking shop at Christmas. If you’ll—”
“Yes, Constable, I understand.” It was embarrassing, Kell reflected, as he returned to the office. The news was all round Whitehall within hours, how Kell’s specialized intelligence division had sent Special Branch on a wild-goose chase.
Judging by the smile on his face now, as he devoured the turbot, perhaps anger wasn’t the overriding emotion Quinn felt at Kell’s humiliation.
“I am sorry, my dear, I truly am,” Quinn said to his wife. “When you are a policeman it is very hard not to talk shop. When you are a policeman, everything is shop.” He burst out laughing at his own witticism.
Constance leaned forward. “I don’t think anyone minds hearing about your work, Sir Patrick.” She threw a witherin
g glance at Kell, and went on. “It’s so interesting.”
“This toast is absolutely marveloso,” Alice said. “I was prattling away to Cook only the other day. You know, they’ve made a little machine which means you can make your own toast, at the table.”
Constance flicked her eyes away from Quinn for a moment. “That too is interesting, Alice. Tremendously so. But it’s not every day we’re honored by the presence of the head of Special Branch.”
“I wouldn’t be saying honor, if I were you, Mrs. Kell. You’re buttering me.” He took a large gulp of wine.
“Excellent sauce, old boy,” Soapy said to Kell. “Montrachet?”
“No butter, Sir Patrick. Just admiration. Tell me, how many officers do you have under you?”
He put his glass down. The footman hurried around, removing the fish dishes. “Now, that’s an interesting question in turn, Mrs. Kell, so it is.”
Cook flitted between the diners, putting down the next course—a dial of perfectly grilled mutton cutlets. A bottle of claret appeared.
“It seems such a big job, that’s all,” Constance purred. “You have so many people to look after, and so many people to worry about. The Times is full of such ferment. Workers, the Irish, anarchists, the Indians . . .”
“Suffragettes,” he finished the sentence. He looked at her with level eyes over the rim of his crystal goblet.
“Pah!” Lady Quinn burst out. “Those silly women will lose their airs and graces soon enough.”
“Isn’t this politics?” Alice whispered to her husband.
“Why will they give up?” Kell asked. He tried not to look at Constance, who still seemed entranced by Quinn.
Lady Quinn shoveled a stack of finely cut fried potatoes onto her plate. “Isn’t this latest bill due to pass? Won’t landowning women be getting the vote soon? And then it will all be over and we can go back to having babies, and tending home, like we should.”
“This is definitely politics.”
“Hush, my dear,” Soapy murmured. “I say, old chap, is there another bottle of this stuff? It’s quite reminded me why I like to drink.”
Constance scraped back her chair. “I’m so sorry, Soapy. Wilkins! Another bottle of the ’96,” she hollered. Lady Quinn looked up from her food in astonishment. Quinn grinned. Constance bent back to the table and pointed a fork at Soapy. “Do you think the bill will pass?”
He licked his lips and offered a slow and lazy smile. “Lady Quinn doesn’t want us to talk shop. Alice here gets so upset when I talk politics. But what’s a man to do when his business is politics?”
“Ah, at last,” Kell said quickly, as the cook reentered the dining room.
She leaned in and placed in the middle of the table a glistening, smoking boulder of beef so big it cast a shadow. “The remove.”
“We want meat! We want bread! We want fair pay for a fair day!”
Across town from Kell’s sumptuous dinner party, Wiggins belted out a chant with the rest of the dockers. He was squeezed into the middle of a three-hundred-strong protest as they waited outside the warehouse headquarters of the Port Authority in Cutler Street. The protest had started earlier that day at West India Docks.
Wiggins had been to a couple of these strikes before, on Kell’s orders, posing as a casual docker. He had the look, he had the lingo; it was easy enough. What was hard was being anything other than sympathetic. Most of the lads were casuals too, which meant if a ship didn’t come in to West India that day, then no pay. Broke your ankle yesterday? No pay. In fact, We might pay the lot of you less because we can was the general drift. What was worse, the Port Authority had just taken over and cut the “plus” money. There was now no overtime.
They’d marched westward earlier in the day and Wiggins had moved himself nearer the front, to the leaders. Policemen dotted their course but made no immediate move to stop them. As the light had faded, Wiggins noticed more coppers in attendance, and more of them out of uniform.
“Spotters,” he called softly to those around him.
“Wot?” someone said.
One of the men in the front, a lantern-jawed titan with bucket hands, glanced back sharply at him. “Front, right, on the walls.” Wiggins gestured with his eyes. “Cover your faces. They’s Special Branch.”
Lantern Jaw pulled up a scarf over his face and many of the leaders did the same. “Wot’s a spotter?” a young scrap next to him asked.
Wiggins had looked up at the men peering over a high wall as the march wound into the City. “Looking for trouble, stirrers. Making memories, pictures, so they know who to target.”
“All’s we want is a fair wage,” the boy said. “Ain’t nuffin’ wrong with that, is there?”
“You new?”
“And poor. I worked one day last week, for a shilling. I’ve got nippers.”
Peter would love this, Wiggins thought, as the march funneled into the darkness around Cutler Street, torches bouncing and slicing in the wind. Real workers, taking on real bosses. Except maybe he wouldn’t. This lot didn’t care about a bollocks revolution. They didn’t care about imperialism. They just wanted a job that paid enough to feed their family. He looked around at the dockers, poorly shod, thin jackets pinned around their necks with gloveless hands, breath wreaths twisting into the air above them. They didn’t even want to fight; they just wanted to work.
Up ahead, the great warehouse loomed over them, the gates locked. Wiggins shivered and pulled his coat tighter. The crowd moved and whinnied like a dray horse pulling for the off; feet stamped, fag smoke plumed here and there; and the mass of men shifted and waited and cursed. Around them, it had gone quiet. Too quiet. The police so in evidence on the walk up had suddenly disappeared. Wiggins began to hustle forward to the leaders. “This ain’t right,” he hissed.
“Who are you?” Lantern Jaw turned to him. “And what do you know?”
“Trust me,” Wiggins replied.
A surge in the crowd slung him sideways into the face of the boy he’d been talking to. “Get out,” Wiggins said again. “It ain’t right.”
The boy looked up at him, before falling back into the crowd. Wiggins whipped his head around. First one whistle, then a second, and a third, until the blackness sang.
The warehouse gates swung open. Out of nowhere, a troop of police horses streamed into the crowd. Panic, fear, flight. A phalanx of police on foot appeared amid the crush.
Wiggins was pushed to the floor in the rush, the desperate scrabble for escape. Around him the whistles sang, but now they were drowned out by the shouts and cries of the men. Horses ten feet high, real, shod, deadly. Truncheons whirled, boots swung. Heads cracked. Dockers flailed arms helplessly. Outnumbered, out-armed, trapped.
A face screamed, silenced by a fist. More and more police came funneling out of the warehouse behind the horses, a black tide. The torches jagged and fell. “Run run run!” a voice cried above the din. The protest split apart. Wiggins was pushed and harried down a side alley and away. All around him, dockers fled, flitting into the side streets in desperation, despair, and blood.
Constance couldn’t wait long enough for the coffee to go cold. She spent an interminable twenty minutes in the drawing room with Lady Quinn and Alice, while the men smoked in the dining room.
“The pheasant was more than passable,” Lady Quinn said. “And the ices were exquisite. I do wonder about the sardines, though. Does your cook buy them tinned, do you think, Mrs. Kell? Constance?”
“Sorry, miles away. Gosh, is that the time?” She got up and moved to the door. “I’m sure the gentlemen will be leaving soon.”
Sir Patrick Quinn liked her, she could tell, but she hadn’t gotten far enough with her questioning. She’d told Dinah and the girls that she’d have some information for them soon, using her “contacts,” but she’d managed to unearth precious little. She didn’t even know how many men Special Branch deployed against their cause; she didn’t know whether they intended to scale up their operations; she didn’t eve
n know which of his detectives ran the surveillance against them.
“Perhaps you’re right, Lady Quinn.” Alice sipped at her coffee absently. “I am very suspicious of canning.”
“What are you talking about?” Constance couldn’t contain herself any longer. She glared at the two women.
They looked up at her, surprised. Just then, she heard the dining-room door open and the raised, half-drunk voices of the men echoed across the tiles. “Thank God,” she muttered, and threw open the door onto the hallway.
Her husband ushered Sir Patrick and Soapy out of the dining room. The former droned on in his excruciating Irish brogue. “That’s the view at the Yard, I’m thinking. It would be no dishonor, Captain, no dishonor at all.”
“To resign a command?” Kell hissed icily. Constance, even from across the room, could tell he shook with suppressed rage.
“Constance!” Soapy cried, alerting the two men to her presence. “A triumph of an evening, if I may say so. The cellar, the food, the company. Now, where is Alice, we must be going.”
The hustle and bustle of coats and scarves and goodbyes and see you soons began. Constance stood by Kell, an ice volcano, his antipathy to Quinn palpable.
“Sir Patrick,” she purred. “I would so like to visit you at work. Perhaps with our eldest, Victor? I visited Vernon but his operation is so very dull.” She cast Kell what she hoped was a pitying glance. “In comparison, at least, with the vital and energetic work that you run out of the Yard.” She rested a hand on his shoulder.
He leered at her once more, the port high in his cheeks. “Five years ago, maybe, Mrs. Kell, maybe you could have taken a gander. But we’ve become a very hard school now. I’m thinking it’s no place for a woman such as yourself. Thank the Lord, we now have a home secretary who knows the importance of a firm hand. We are taking ever sterner measures to combat society’s miscreants, so we are. It is manly work.”
“Victor will be so disappointed.” She squeezed his hand. “He so wants to be a policeman one day.”