The Red Ribbon

by H. B. Lyle

  Every time she spoke, Kell fell more in love with his wife.

  “I would still have you,” he said.

  “You’ll always have me. You idiot.”

  “There’s one more thing. I will never inform on the movement, I will never lift a finger to help the police against the cause, and I will never let you be taken. You have my word.”

  She looked down on him for a moment, careful, appraising, but softly too, like she used to. “Thank you,” she said at last.

  “And did you know, Special Branch may be after you and your friends? There is a photograph pinned to the wall at Scotland Yard in which you appear—although I’m not sure if they can identify you yet.”

  To his surprise, she smiled. “I thought as much,” she said. “Shall I get Wiggins?” She bent down and picked up another newspaper from the side table. “Funnily enough, there’s another photograph doing the rounds which I think most people won’t be able to identify.” She handed him the Daily Mirror, and stepped out onto the landing. “Wiggins!” she hollered, as Kell stared agape at the paper.

  “It’s a good likeness,” Wiggins said, nodding.

  “It is not!” Kell said, and then, “You really think it looks like me?”

  “You’d have to be looking,” Wiggins said, soothing. “No one will know.”

  “Simpkins, perhaps. But he’ll say nothing.”

  Wiggins stood awkwardly by the window. Kell lay propped up against a mountain of brilliant white pillows, wearing a nightshirt open at the collar. Two electric lamps shed extra light onto the bed, though the last of the afternoon sun filtered in from the high windows. Wiggins held his cap in front of him and looked down. It was one thing to deduce things about Kell at the office or out on the streets, his public front, but this was the man’s bedroom. It made him uncomfortable; not just Kell’s appearance, his private world, but Constance’s too. A small pile of books by one side of the bed, reading glasses, handkerchiefs—he tried desperately not to look closer. He could smell her scent.

  He looked out the window and fiddled with the lock on the sash. “How’s the noggin?” he said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Ya bonce. Ya head.” He tapped his own.

  “I’ll live. And thank you, for helping me, for helping Constance.”

  Wiggins nodded. They held a silence for a moment, as Kell smoothed the covers over himself. Perhaps it was the mention of her name, her presence so immediate in the room even though she had now removed downstairs, that made them both self-conscious. Either that or, Wiggins thought, the last time they’d talked he’d been trying to get out of Kell what had happened at the Embassy. Not the easiest question in the world, asking your boss how his visit to a whorehouse went.

  For once, it was as if Kell read his mind. “Wiggins, can you ask Constance to come back in?” he said at last, taking a deep breath. “I will explain to you both what happened at the Embassy. We are the Secret Service, the Hidden Hand, at least until Christmas. Once the election is over a new government could ditch us, or this one for that matter, if they get back in. That’s our timetable. If we’ve cracked this leak by then, we survive; if not, who knows. Until that time, however, that is who we are: the Secret Service.

  “And now the time for secrets is over. I must tell Constance everything. God willing, we will find out enough to keep the nation’s secrets safe a little longer, and to keep our own jobs into the bargain.”

  Wiggins breathed out, relieved. “It ain’t just that, Chief, you’ll wanna know what I just found out in Fulham.”

  19

  From London to Ladysmith via Pretoria by Winston S. Churchill.

  “Liar,” Wiggins muttered to himself. He’d picked up the discarded book from an empty desk at the British Library Reading Room, and skimmed a few pages.

  Ladysmith was death all right, but there weren’t many heroes, and it weren’t blood and glory. It was disease and dirt and hunger and thirst; folk coughed up their own blood more often than they shed another’s. Poor Knightly bleeding out. He and Bill all bones and eyeballs with the hunger, waiting for relief. What if Bill had died at the hands of the Boer, out there in the heat and dust? Would Wiggins have pursued the killers of his best friend across that pitiless veldt?

  He’d been coming back to the library ever since the near miss at Smithfield, watching the Ivans sit at Marx’s desk, following them home when he could, sniffing around what Symes called the “blasted revolutionaries.” But he’d come up blank. And now, with Churchill’s account of the Boer War once more flooding his mind with memories of his dead best friend, he wondered whether his thirst for revenge would ever be quenched. Should he let it go, this burning sore in his soul, and turn his eyes to the future? Bill was never coming back.

  Wiggins put the book down, and began a final turn of the Reading Room’s outer ring. He thought of Martha, holed up still in the Embassy, under the malign command of Tommy. Wiggins had been there each night since, and each night she’d tied a red ribbon in the top right window. She was still alive, at least, but for how much longer? He was plagued by a sense of foreboding—Tommy’s hand pinned to her shoulder in that box, Poppy’s pale, dead face. But he tried to shake the feeling away. Sherlock Holmes would have told him he had too little evidence to suggest Martha, or anyone else, was in imminent danger. Cold, hard reason suggested she was safe enough. But cold, hard reason was all very well for the likes of Holmes and the Doctor, tucked up in their comfortable rooms, with a housekeeper and a roaring fire.

  If you’d grown up on the streets, you needed more than cold, hard reason to survive; you needed your instincts, you needed to act with no time to think, you needed to feel. And experience had taught him to trust his instinct for danger. He wouldn’t be alive without it, for all the cold, hard reasoning in all the books in all the world.

  Kell had turned his full attention to the Embassy as the best lead in uncovering the Whitehall leak, but had ordered Wiggins to wait, and to watch in the evenings. Hence he found himself again at the Reading Room during the day, in the fruitless search for Peter.

  He turned for home. No Ivans there today. But as he did so, he knew he’d be back. Bill was long dead. Revenge was a pointless emotion, a sore that could never be salved. But then what were you, if you weren’t a friend to someone? And did it matter if they were alive or dead? He would have pursued Bill’s killer across the veldt, had he died in the Boer War. He would pursue Bill’s killers across the world if necessary; pursue them to their death, or his own.

  As he drifted toward the exit, Wiggins caught sight of a reader stooped over a pile of books at a side desk all of its own. He would recognize that stoop anywhere.

  “Mr. Holmes!” he whispered.

  The great detective hurriedly pushed a book aside. “Ah, Wiggins, I was wondering how long it would take for you to see me.”

  “Sir.” Wiggins grinned.

  “You have a reader’s card?”

  “The underlibrarian, Symes, sir. If you remember, we helped him out.”

  “Ah, yes. A trivial matter, if I recall.”

  “Not for him,” Wiggins muttered under his breath, then nodded at the pile of books visible on Holmes’s desk. “Still on them bees, sir?”

  “I am writing my own text on the subject,” Holmes said. “I may be retired, but my mind rebels at stagnation. And I’ve promised the Doctor never to return to those other, darker pursuits.” Wiggins glanced away in embarrassment. He’d seen the little bottles, the syringes, even remembered Holmes in his younger days, red-eyed, pale-faced, and half cut on some skank or other, back in the early ’90s.

  He turned back to see Holmes giving him a long, hard stare. His eyes burned as bright as ever, but Wiggins noted the lines around them crackled deep and dark. Holmes shook his head sadly. “You’ve been away this year, at sea—and in Germany, with Kell, I trust? But it is regrettable that you’re still hell-bent on this foolhardy mission of revenge.”

  “It’s one man, guv’nor, one man
and I’m done.”

  “It’s a shame you don’t have your younger self to call on.” Holmes gave a weak smile. “He would find the man in a trice, would he not?”

  “It ain’t that simple, these Rooskis are a different breed.” Wiggins explained, in hushed tones, what he’d been doing on and off at the Reading Room for weeks. Holmes tented his fingers as he listened, then shook his head again as Wiggins finished.

  “Wiggins, the drink has addled your mind.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Ask Symes. To acquire a reader’s pass here at the Reading Room, you must provide a residential address. Symes will be able to provide you with the names and addresses of all these miserable republican scribblers. He will even be able to give you a list of the books they’ve been reading, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Why didn’t he say?”

  “He’s a librarian!” Holmes exclaimed. “You have to ask.”

  Wiggins stared at the detective and nodded slowly.

  “Now, off you go, young Wiggins. I have work to do. The queen is one of nature’s most humbling enigmas. She needs my full attention.”

  As he went in search of Symes at the main returns desk, Wiggins couldn’t suppress a smile to himself. For when he’d initially approached Holmes at his work, he’d seen him reading a quite different book from those academic tomes on beekeeping. The Great Detective, the Pure Thinking Machine, the font of Cold, Hard Reason, had instead been reading that most instructive of volumes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Dr. John H. Watson.

  Wiggins strode out into the late-afternoon gloom of Great Russell Street. The electric lights fizzed, buses clogged the road, and the clerks of the nearby publishing houses and bookshops, manuscripts stuffed under their arms, chopped their way through the museum tourists, fighting the long fight to get home after work. He set his sights southwest to Belgravia and the Embassy, as he had done every day that month—to keep up the watch and to make sure Martha’s ribbon appeared. Poppy’s death hung heavy on his heart, and he wouldn’t be responsible for another.

  He thought of getting the 24 straight to Victoria, but just then, and downwind of him as he stood on the corner of Tottenham Court Road, the gates of Meux’s Horseshoe Brewery swung open. Brewers spilled out onto the street smelling of yeast and hops, of fermentation and sweat and, most of all, beer. There’s always time for a swift one, he thought, as he ducked across the road. Symes had agreed to compile a list of the Ivans—“Why didn’t you ask, lad?” he’d said, bemused—and there was nothing to be done on that front. Martha wasn’t due to make a signal until six at least. And besides, something Holmes had said was jangling around his mind but he couldn’t quite grasp the meaning. He needed beer to help him think.

  It wasn’t until he reached the corner of Oxford Street, and the nearest pub, that he heard a hollering newsboy.

  “Murder in Houndsditch. Policemen shot dead. Murder in Houndsditch. Anarchist gang at large.”

  It had all started with a policeman shot dead on the streets. His policeman, his Bill. And now it had happened again, somehow. Wiggins felt it with ice-cold certainty.

  Peter was back.

  As Wiggins hurried southward, through Soho and toward Trafalgar Square, he hoped he would find Kell in his office. But he wouldn’t be there. No one with any official position in the security apparatus of Whitehall was in his office.

  They were all in a large Cabinet briefing room waiting for the police to report on events at number 3 Exchange Buildings, Houndsditch, in the City of London. Kell picked his usual position, standing at the back, and waited. Members of the Cabinet ringed the large table—Asquith, the prime minister himself!—Haldane, the secretary of state for war, and, of course, Churchill, always Churchill, though for once the home secretary was indeed needed at such a gathering.

  The story had broken in the papers already, but the panic had spread across Whitehall well before that. Kell had been at an early lunch with Soapy when a minion came running across the club dining room and whispered urgently in Soapy’s ear. He’d been with Soapy ever since as he tried to corral the dramatic evidence as it came in. Finally, Soapy had called a full meeting of the Committee.

  Kell had never seen any of the ministers looking quite as peaky as they did now, their faces creased with worry. A fevered anxiety crackled through the air, rippling out from the large table through the various ranks of assistants, who either sat or stood behind their chiefs in a clear demonstration of rank.

  Sir Edward Henry, commissioner of police, stood up at the far end of the table, flanked by Quinn on one side and on the other by a uniformed officer who, it turned out, was the head of the City of London Police. The bigwigs leaned forward intently. Kell bit his tongue. He couldn’t help it. The last time the Committee had been so outraged was over the problem in Tottenham the year before—when Wiggins’s constable friend, Bill Tyler, was slain by anarchists.

  Now, the atmosphere was even more charged, the anxiety palpable—and all because, Kell realized with a dull pang of despair, the country was midway through a general election. The polls had opened two weeks before, and still had days to run. The murder of policemen on the streets of London, under their watch, was therefore causing the prime minister and his senior men rather a deal of anxiety that had nothing to do with public safety.

  The chief of police began his briefing. “In the early hours of this morning, a City of London policeman noticed some unusual goings-on at Exchange Buildings in the City. He knocked on the door and found two or three foreigners, who did not answer his questions convincingly. He returned with colleagues, and a gun battle ensued. I say gun battle, but none of the constables were armed with revolvers or guns of any kind. Two of our men are dead already, another three lie gravely ill.”

  “Outrageous!”

  “Who are they?”

  “Have you made an arrest?”

  Sir Edward drew up to his full height. “Both the Metropolitan Police and the City of London force have dropped everything, my lord. We will find the gang who did this. It will not stand.” He gestured at Quinn, who continued.

  “My investigators are of a mind that the constables interrupted a robbery in progress. These men, this gang, you might say, were tunneling into a jewelers. The paraphernalia . . .”

  He savored the word, damn him, thought Kell.

  “. . . the accoutrements, you might say, of such a crime have already been recovered from the scene. We have witnesses that saw at least three men fleeing the scene and going into the East End—one of these men appeared to be injured quite badly. Shot in the act, of course, by one of his—are we saying ‘colleagues’? Such an injury will not remain secret for long, I’m thinking.”

  A murmur broke out in the room. “Is it normal for burglars to carry firearms?” Asquith said, silencing everyone. The prime minister rarely spoke at such events, in Kell’s experience. He was wise enough to know that most of the time speaking made him look foolish.

  “Ah, no, sir, it is not normal. But these men are not normal. They are revolutionaries, we believe, certainly Jews, foreigners—Russians or Latvians, we think. Anarchos.”

  “Good God,” Asquith muttered. And then, in a loud voice across the table, “Churchill, have you given the police everything they need?”

  “And more, prime minister, and more. We will cancel all leave, every available officer will be pressed into the investigation, Special Branch will be accorded all necessary funds. It will be the greatest manhunt in history.”

  “We don’t want this blowing up in our faces. Apprehend these men, sirs, and whatever you do, make sure you effect an arrest before the polls close.”

  Sir Patrick grinned. “Sure we will too, sir,” he said. “These are the wanted posters going up all over town. Please circulate them in your departments. I’m not thinking you will be bumping into any of these men, but it doesn’t do any harm to know the devil’s face, now does it?”

  The meeting broke up. Kell edged around the side of th
e table toward the doors.

  Houndsditch had already taken everything else off the front of the evening papers—the rest would follow tomorrow, and it would continue to dominate until the gang was rounded up. He cursed inwardly. He had spent the last three weeks setting a trap, a trap to be sprung on the eve of the election results, for maximum effect and to save his bacon when the new government formed. If the strategy worked, and his hopes were proved correct, then he would take out the foremost mole inside the British government and destroy a nexus of foreign intelligence-gathering at the heart of the diplomatic community. The Embassy, the brothel, would be done in. If he was right, of course, and if the plan worked. If not, he would fall into an embarrassing heap all of his own making, be sacked without appeal, and spend the rest of his days signing requisition forms for the catering corps.

  But now the police would as likely rob the Bank of England as jump to Kell’s request for a speculative raid on a house of ill repute, at least until Houndsditch was solved. The plan against the Embassy would have to wait a little longer.

  “You look as if you’re thinking deep, Captain Kell, if I may say so.” Quinn broke in on his thoughts as he drifted to the door.

  “Sir Patrick.”

  “Sorry for interrupting. There must be some grand strategies working their way around that fine mind of yours, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “I don’t mind,” Kell said shortly.

  “Ah, good. I’m thinking they’ll have to be mighty grand to save the Service, though, all the same. I’ll be getting more resources after all the shenanigans, what with the militant suffragettes and all—shocking they’ve become, don’t you think?”

  “Look, I thought we were here to catch some revolutionaries.”

  “Right you are, always onto the point,” Quinn said, as he scanned the room. “We’ll get back to the case, and leave you to the Germans, so we will. I’m thinking whoever solves Houndsditch will be in a grand spot, so he will.”

  Quinn said it to gloat, Kell knew, to show that he was the man with the chance to catch the devil. But it was the reverse thought that gripped Kell: what if he (or, more honestly, Wiggins) tracked them down beforehand? Wouldn’t that be a coup worthy of saving any Secret Service Bureau?