The Irregular: A Different Class of Spy Read online

The two men stood six feet apart and waited. ‘You don’t strike me as a spit-and-sawdust man,’ Wiggins added, nodding at the beer hall across the road.

  ‘What I have to talk about is sensitive,’ Kell said.

  Wiggins glanced back along the street but did not speak.

  Kell clucked his tongue. ‘Can we at least walk?’ he said after a moment, pointing along the pavement. The tip of his umbrella twitched.

  The two men fell into step westward, towards Aldgate and the City. Kell placed his feet carefully, high knees, stork-like, his umbrella keeping time on the flagstones. Wiggins ambled beside him, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his greatcoat. He gripped an inkpot in his pocket, filched from Leach’s desk moments earlier. A horse-drawn bus clip-clopped by, passengers huddled on its open top deck. The wind bit. ‘You come highly recommended,’ Kell said as they approached the bustle of Aldgate East.

  ‘Mr Holmes was always good to me.’

  Kell blinked back surprise. ‘How …?’

  Wiggins shrugged.

  ‘The debt business doing well?’ Kell resumed.

  They stopped to watch a man heave beer barrels off a cart in front of them, his bare arms glistening despite the cold. ‘You asking what I get paid?’ Wiggins said.

  ‘Yes. I suppose I am,’ Kell replied as they set off once more.

  ‘Is that something you always ask down your gentlemen’s club? Polite conversation, is it?’

  Kell inclined his head in apology. ‘Nothing more than a professional enquiry,’ he said.

  They’d reached Aldgate East Station and Wiggins drew to a halt, pointing north. ‘This is me. And not you.’

  ‘Back to Mrs Balducci?’

  ‘Now look here, Mr Kell, what exactly do you want?’ Wiggins snapped. ‘You may be pally with Mr Holmes and God knows, you know things you shouldn’t, but I don’t need a job. Specially not with the army, I’m done with the military.’

  ‘What makes you say military?’

  Wiggins cast his eyes over Kell as he spoke, pointing gently with a half-raised finger. ‘When I see a man hold his umbrella like a swagger stick, then I think he’s military. When he holds his feet together at the heel, carries his chin yea high above the horizontal and wears an Albany collar that’s more starch than cotton, then I know so. Infantry?’

  Kell’s eyes widened for an instant. As he recovered himself, Wiggins grinned. He liked this owl better than most officers he’d come across. He at least looked as if he knew one end of a gun from the other.

  ‘It’s not army,’ Kell said at last.

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, not now. Not yet.’

  Wiggins snorted. ‘That ain’t much of a show.’ He smoothed his hair. ‘You’ve got an offer, you just can’t say what it is?’

  Kell clenched and unclenched his fist. ‘Shall we just say His Majesty needs you?’

  ‘You mean government?’

  Kell nodded.

  ‘Sorry,’ Wiggins said. ‘Ain’t my style. I don’t do official. Now, if you don’t mind, Mr— Kell, was it?’

  ‘We need good men, Wiggins. Do you love your country?’

  ‘Don’t give me that bollocks, Mr Kell. I’m not some kid. I’ve fought the Boer, as you probably know, and I ain’t going to take that horseshit from you or anyone else.’ Wiggins cleared his throat, spat and set off up the hill.

  Kell reached for his arm. ‘Wait! I apologise. As you say, I know of your war record. I don’t doubt your patriotism for a moment. I am just in a very difficult …’ Kell stopped and took a deep breath. ‘Please, take my card. Telephone the number, or leave word at my club. I urge you to consider my offer.’

  Wiggins looked down at the address:

  Kell, Whitehall 412. White’s.

  ‘Good day.’ Kell tipped his hat and stepped away, stooping only to release his umbrella.

  ‘Here,’ Wiggins said as an afterthought. ‘How about my mate Bill? Constable William Tyler. He’s police, Tottenham station.’

  Kell paused, dipping his head sideways.

  Wiggins held up the card. ‘I’ll tell him you’re looking.’

  Kell stopped in his tracks then he pivoted and marched back towards Wiggins. His face loomed close. For the first time, Wiggins could see Kell’s strength, his resolve, perhaps even ruthlessness. Kell’s voice remained as soft as before but each word sang cold. ‘Tell no one. Mr Sherlock Holmes assured me you were a man of utmost discretion. It would be unfortunate, for you, if you were not.’ Kell enunciated each word carefully. ‘I repeat. Tell no one.’

  Kell didn’t like it underground. He steered between the people spilling out of the station and marched instead towards Fleet Street. The traffic thickened and he could barely make out the advertisements painted above the shops opposite. Pears Soap Cleans.

  Wiggins impressed him, the quick deductions but also how he stood up for himself. Kell needed good men. The boys sent to him were all very well with their impeccable French and German (not to mention Latin and Greek), their long sleek bodies and first-rate swordplay, but they were useless agents. Martindale had sheared off his own thumb while undercover at a factory in Liverpool; Russell had been run out of Tilbury Docks on the first day – a gentleman con man, or so everyone there thought, with his manners and his haughty lisp; and his best man Leyton was missing.

  Kell caught sight of his own reflection in a shop window and pulled his collar straight. Wiggins looked a mess. He wore his hair too long, a whore’s length, and he couldn’t have shaved within the week. An athletic build, however, Kell reflected, with strong hands – strangler’s hands – and the kind of loose-limbed gait that wouldn’t look out of place in even the poorest neighbourhoods. A former street kid, no doubt, but something other-worldly about him too: his skin was ivory and his eyes shone an electrifying blue – as if plucked from some Nordic prince. Perhaps he had Irish blood in him, Kell mused. Whatever else, though, the man dressed an absolute fright.

  The steeple of St Clement Danes reared up as Fleet Street turned into the Strand. Kell strode on. Something was definitely up at Woolwich. Otherwise why would Leyton disappear? One of the few men he had at his disposal who could go undercover at the country’s most important munitions factory had vanished. Kell had always enjoyed hide and seek as a child, but then he knew the rules, knew his opponents. Here, now, in a city of six million souls he had no idea who was friend or foe, or how to go about telling one from the other. He was a blind man. Great Britain stood in grave but ill-defined danger from the other imperial powers across the Channel, the Empire’s wealth too ripe to ignore, and its leaders, his leaders, too full and fat to notice.

  His boss at the Ministry, Major General Spencer Ewart (Director of Military Operations for the British Army), was gravely concerned with the threat from Germany. He had a degree of authority within the army but no one beyond that listened, certainly not in Whitehall. The high-ups in the Liberal Party were wilfully blind to the potential dangers of espionage, apart from the insufferable prig Churchill, but he didn’t have the clout to raise the budget of Kell’s meagre counter-intelligence unit.

  He had to make do with fools, and too few of them at that. What he needed was a good agent, someone who could actually find things out – then at least he might get the money to expand. But right now, all he wanted to do was find out what was happening at Woolwich Arsenal. And find Leyton.

  His secretary’s light was one of the few still on when he arrived back at the War Office. ‘Any word?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the secretary, a pink-faced, chinless young man with girl’s lips.

  ‘Thank God.’ Kell pounced on the list of messages. ‘But what’s this? Nothing from Leyton?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir. Sorry. It’s Lieutenant Russell, actually. He’s written, telephoned and even wired. He’s eager to be employed, I think. Tired of kicking his heels.’

  Ewart wanted Kell to appoint Russell as a nominal deputy. Kell sighed. He’d probably have to find some har
mless task for the well-connected fool. ‘Take this down, and wire it immediately to Mr Holmes.’ Kell paused while the secretary grasped a pencil. ‘He said no stop. Other ideas question mark. Kell stop.’

  Later, as Kell prepared to dine alone – his wife now a regular attendee at meetings of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies – the great, retired detective’s reply clattered along the corridor in the form of the commissionaire. ‘A telegram, sir.’

  It comprised three words: WIGGINS THE BEST.

  2

  ‘It’s bitter out, ain’t it?’

  ‘The usual,’ Wiggins grunted at the barmaid. ‘And rum, with a slice.’

  ‘Charmer.’ She turned to the bottled wall behind her. ‘And we’re out of lemons.’

  ‘Not my fault your little ’un’s ill.’ He placed a shilling on the bar, the same shilling he’d palmed from Vernon Kell’s expertly tailored pocket earlier that day.

  ‘Oh, a cough is all.’ She planted a tankard on the bar and thrust out her left hip. ‘I’m not gonna ask how you know. And trust me, Wiggins, you’ll never get a woman with those tricks. It’s unsettling, so it is. A woman’ll think you know what she’s thinking, and she don’t want that, whatever she says.’

  ‘I’m flirting,’ he said.

  ‘Ha! You don’t need to flirt, darling, you just need to smile. And don’t be so curious – we don’t like it. No wonder they’s always running off.’

  Wiggins grunted. He rarely revealed how he deduced things. It was a question of looking: the bottle of Labo-Cooper medicine by the till, the small rattle set beside it. Throw in the heavy bags under the barmaid’s eyes and the little patterned handkerchief poking from her bustle (quite separate from the beery bar cloth slung over her shoulder) and it was quite clear to him the child was ill.

  A hand smacked the bar. ‘Missus, service here. Service.’

  ‘Jesus, gi’ us a moment,’ she said. ‘Wiggins, you’re the peachiest bloke I ever did see. Why, if I weren’t married I’d …’ She grinned. ‘But why is you always alone?’

  Wiggins held up his drink. ‘Don’t die thirsty,’ he said and wedged himself into a corner.

  A hand slapped the bar again. ‘Service! Heavy,’ he shouted. ‘I want heavy.’ Draymen stamped their feet as they pushed through the swing doors, the tram drivers laughed loud. A trio of signalmen played dominoes, slapping down the tiles staccato. The piano struck up and a deep baritone bawled out: ‘The night was mighty dark so you could hardly see …’

  ‘Shut up, you!’

  The piano twanged.

  ‘Where’s that blasted key? Lock it, I say,’ the landlord roared. ‘If I hear another line about that fucking shining harvest moon I’ll brain you. This is Tottenham, we don’t have harvests here.’

  As one, the whole pub broke into the song, spiting the landlord in good humour. And then a shout once more above the hubbub. ‘I said HEAVY.’ Wiggins stood up. The barmaid glanced back along the bar. ‘It’s all right,’ she mouthed.

  The man, cheeks blood-cracked, glared along the bar at Wiggins. ‘Want some, do you, squirt?’

  Before Wiggins could answer, a familiar figure materialised behind the loudmouth. ‘No, he doesn’t,’ the policeman said.

  ‘Hello, Bill.’ The barmaid smiled.

  ‘Best get off, eh?’ Bill addressed the loudmouth.

  ‘It was him,’ the man spluttered. ‘He was threatening me. All I wanted was a pint of heavy.’

  ‘That squirt? He threatened you? Do me a favour.’ Bill stood broad and true, his pinched moustache an afterthought on his wide face. The angry man looked about him. His mouth opened and closed and opened again. ‘Oh, fack off,’ he said and stomped to the doors.

  Bill and Wiggins shook hands. ‘I had it.’

  ‘I know that.’ Bill smiled. ‘I just didn’t fancy arresting you for disorder. Ta, Elsie,’ he called as two pints of half and half with rum chasers appeared.

  ‘Good day?’

  Wiggins gulped down the rum. ‘Let another lad go. Bag of bones, he was. Worse than Knightly.’

  ‘Thinner than a streak of piss, him. How he got into the gunners I’ll never know.’ Ale foamed on Bill’s lips and a tiny splatter dribbled down his chin. ‘You should get another job, mate. You’re wasted at that.’

  Wiggins drew his hand across his mouth. Vernon Kell had said something similar.

  ‘Join the force. Better than the army, so it is. You can go home for one thing. Seriously, you’ve got more brains than half of Scotland Yard combined.’

  ‘You think they’d make me a detective?’ Wiggins swirled the rum in his glass.

  ‘If you put the time in.’ Bill paused. ‘Twenty years?’

  ‘Orders don’t sit well.’

  ‘Probably best,’ Bill said after taking another gulp of beer. ‘You’d do half of us out of a job. And I’d have to put up with all that clever-clever crap.’

  An oil lamp burnt in the window. ‘Quiet, now, quiet,’ Bill said as he crashed the door open on its hinge. He turned back to Wiggins. ‘Em’ll be asleep, so take your boots off here.’ His whisper echoed down the hallway like the rush of an Underground train as it entered a station. He motioned to Wiggins and began pulling off his own boots, bumping against first one wall, then the next before settling for the floor with a heavy thud.

  ‘Bill!’ Emily Tyler appeared from the parlour door, fully clothed and holding a lamp in her hand. ‘Look at the state of you. You’re on the morning shift, you great lummox.’

  He righted himself with Wiggins’s help and turned to his pocket-sized wife. ‘I shall be on the front line, at seven sharp. London’s finest.’ He hiccuped and she laughed. ‘We aim to uphold the law, to …’ he slurred. ‘What’s the rest?’

  ‘Bullshitter,’ she said, her round nose wrinkled in amusement. ‘You stink of beer.’ She looked at Wiggins. ‘I’ll take him up. There’s a cot made up in the kitchen for you.’

  ‘No need,’ Wiggins said.

  Emily tutted. She pushed her head under Bill’s arm and moved to the stairs. ‘Don’t be daft. Get to bed.’

  Wiggins pulled the coarse blanket around him and closed his eyes. The cot creaked with every move. Smoke tickled his nose from the smouldering kitchen fire. His dreams ran back to the streets, the barkers, the gangs, the horseshit. Wiggins, a voice in the darkness. Fuck off, you little shits. Vermin, you are. Where’s me leather? Want your boots polished, guv’nor? A penny a time. Nobody wants you, she’s gone, even your own mother, you miserable scrote. It’s for your own good.

  ‘Your mother is no longer with us, Wiggins. This gentleman will look after you now.’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ Wiggins, seven years of age, looks up at the Doc, the presiding benefactor of the Strand Union workhouse. ‘Can’t I stay here?’

  ‘You cannot. You are an orphan now.’

  Orphan.

  ‘We will take good care of him, Doctor, do not worry.’ The Master of St Cyprian’s grins.

  Tommy, Willis and Sal – the rest of the Irregulars – encircle him then disappear once more. And the tall, thin man with the piercing gaze. Can you do a job for me? I’ll pay.

  A small boy running. Wiggins, get back here! Where are you, Ma?

  In the early-morning gloom, a little boy runs across the heavy mud of the riverbank. The lights on Tower Bridge picked out against the waning night. He runs up the tidal steps, his feet sure and soft despite the darkness. Batters through a back door left swinging on its hinges. A body, Ma, a body, the boy cries. She flashes a look that says Do not lie to me, and then rouses her old man with the news. He coughs a cough that tells of brick dust, smoke-filled rooms and a life not long to go. But he pulls on heavy boots and thrusts his hand towards the boy. His hand is calloused and heavy. It is the first time his father has held the boy so and the child will remember it long after the cough has sent the man the same way as …

  ‘It’s a body all right,’ the man says. ‘My old man used to pull ’em from the water. From his own
boat.’

  The man takes a different direction from the house; the boy told to hurry home. He interrupts a constable’s morning tea. The constable wakes the coroner, who in turn demands a detective on the case. The waterman trudges back to his son and wife. A young sergeant rifles the pockets of the body and tries not to look at the second mouth agape across the neck, washed grey by river water.

  ‘Anything?’ the inspector asks.

  The young sergeant hands him a single embossed card. The inspector trudges through the station to the one, prized telephone and shouts into the horn. After clicks and whirrs and two false starts (the inspector is still suspicious of the device and even pens a telegram while he waits) an irritated voice comes on the line.

  An hour later, Vernon Kell appeared to view the body. ‘His name is Leyton,’ he said to the inspector. ‘He worked for me. There was nothing on his person other than my card?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I’ll have it back if you please.’

  The policeman hesitated, then picked up the soggy card and handed it to Kell. ‘Do you know if he, er, had any enemies, sir? Or next of kin?’ Kell stared at the inspector. ‘Not that I’m suggesting they’re the same, of course, just for the formalities …’ he tailed off. ‘Perhaps I should call in the Yard.’

  ‘I’ll deal with matters from now on, Inspector.’ Kell pulled a letter of authorisation from beneath his overcoat. ‘Have your men take the body to Barts. And if I see any of the details of this affair in the newspapers, I shall know what to do and who to do it to. Understood?’

  Kell followed Leyton’s body to the basement of Barts Hospital, where he had already sent the Home Office pathologist. It didn’t take a genius to work out what had done for Leyton. A deep slash across his throat that sliced the windpipe in two, the poor man’s head attached to the body as if by the starch of the collar alone.

  ‘Didn’t drown,’ the pathologist said.

  Kell clicked his tongue. ‘How long ago did he die?’

  ‘Impossible to say.’

  Kell’s temper cracked. ‘You’ve given me about as much as the wretched flatfoot in Rotherhithe.’ He thought of Leyton’s pretty wife in Croydon, a picket fence around the small front garden, a life Leyton might have had; a War Office functionary instead of the dead man he, Kell, had turned him into. Kell didn’t actually know if he lived in Croydon, if he had a pretty wife or a wife of any kind. Next of kin, the inspector had said. Next of kin. ‘Is there nothing you can tell me?’ he pressed. ‘Other than that a rather obvious flesh wound nearly took the man’s head off?’