The Red Ribbon Read online

“I say . . .”

  “—and still not know their arse from their elbow.”

  “Please,” Kell interjected quickly, glancing at Brandon and Trench. He bent to the partition. “Anything you can say in a few short, preferably non-obscene words. Which might help?”

  More glugging. Cumming rattled his glass on the table, impatient. “How should we get information out? Documents.”

  “Does, er, Tiaria have the post?”

  “As good as ours, I’m told.”

  “Then post it.”

  “Oh, this is ridiculous. Should we address it to the Admiralty?” Trench scoffed.

  “Post it to a box somewhere else in . . . Tiaria . . . then forward it on later. It’s a cutout.”

  “Hmm, I see,” Kell nodded.

  Wiggins went on. “But same rules using the post as anything else—keep consistent with the cover.”

  “This is stuff and nonsense,” Brandon said. “I can hardly make out a word the man says.”

  “He means,” Kell said slowly, “that whenever you use the postal system, send another letter at the same time—a letter that is consistent with your cover story.”

  “Handwrite one envelope—the neutral—type the other,” Wiggins finished.

  Cumming nodded at Kell slowly. “In case you are being watched.”

  “Zackly.”

  “Yes, yes, I see. The Ger—er . . . the TRs would search the post and find the handwritten letter, but not the treasure.”

  “Is this all really necessary?” Brandon piped in. “We’re due at the Army and Navy Stores at four—we need to get our kit.”

  “Of course. Thank you, Kelly, for the advice,” Cumming said.

  “Much obliged, I’m sure,” Trench added through reed-thin lips.

  Kell nodded. No one thanked Wiggins. Cumming got up, as did Brandon and Trench.

  “One more thing,” Wiggins whispered through the shutter. “Bernie and Viv here . . .”

  “How does he know our names?” Brandon said, to no one.

  “They should play up the couple. Act like that’s what they’re hiding.”

  Brandon turned to Trench. “What does he mean?” Trench ignored him, but his cheeks had begun to redden. He clenched his fists.

  Wiggins carried on. “Then it will make sense, if they’re acting a bit dodge-like. I mean, anyone would think these two are au fait, if you get the drift.”

  Brandon didn’t. Trench, on the other hand, had gone a deep purple. A vein throbbed in his temple. Kell coughed. Cumming stuttered, “Ah, well, yes. Gentlemen, shall we—”

  “Scoundrel!” Trench cried and leapt across the table. He ripped open the shutter. “How dare he . . .”

  Wiggins was gone. All that remained was a foam-licked glass, glistening wet, empty.

  Brandon scowled at Kell. “Keep your . . . man . . . away from us.”

  Kell pulled on his gloves carefully. “As you wish,” he said finally and got up. “But ignore his advice at your peril. He is the finest man in the Service. And if you’re going where I think you’re going, then you’ll need every ounce of help you can get. Your lives depend on it. Good day, Cunni—oh, Cumming. Gentlemen.” He planted his hat on his head, tipped it slightly, and left the three men standing around the table confused, outraged, and affronted.

  Kell turned right out of the pub and crossed the road to an apartment building on Victoria Street. A squadron of pigeons swooped past the bell tower of Westminster Cathedral. Kell watched as one of the birds, unquestionably white despite a mottling of soot, dipped beneath the others and disappeared, alone.

  “Any messages, Simpkins?” he called out as he entered the hallway of the fourth-floor flat that served as his office and HQ.

  He heard the clerk scrape back his chair, garble something through a stuffed mouth, and then break a teacup. “Coming, sir.”

  Kell turned to his office and pulled the only key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and stepped into the room.

  Wiggins sat at Kell’s desk, feet up, waiting for his boss.

  Kell stopped the curse on his lips and instead, despite his better judgment, couldn’t help but say, “How do you do that?”

  Wiggins swung his legs to the floor and sprang up. “What was the point of all that, then?”

  Kell said nothing. He took his coat, hat, and gloves off carefully, eyeing Wiggins all the time. His agent prowled around the room, picking up objects at random, placing them down, moving on.

  “He sending them jokers to Germany?” Wiggins said at last.

  “Tiaria, Cumming calls it.”

  Wiggins rolled his eyes. Kell sat down at his desk and removed his glasses. “I understand your frustration.”

  “You think them’ll track Van Bork?” Wiggins said.

  “I doubt they even know he exists.” Kell replaced his glasses. “Listen. The work you’ve done here in England is exceptional. Together we’ve identified a number of potential German spies—”

  “Small fry!”

  “Who nevertheless will need to be arrested in the event of war. There’s Helm in Portsmouth, Leitner in Chatham, Sternberg in Sunderland.” As he reeled off this list, Kell pointed to his elaborate filing system of Roneo cards. “You found them all.”

  “Nobodies,” Wiggins said. “And we got no proof they are spies, only that they might be when the time comes. We’s still missing the big wheel.”

  This was true. The year before, Wiggins had helped Kell break up a spy ring, a success that had led to the creation of the Secret Service Bureau itself. As head of the home section, Kell had been given the express task of rooting out German spies on British soil. But Wiggins and he had failed to find the German kingpin behind the spies, a man known to them only as “Van Bork.”

  “We’ve done what we could for the moment,” Kell said. Wiggins had staked out the German Embassy for months, but had found no leads relating to Van Bork. “Besides,” Kell went on, “we don’t even know what he looks like, no small thanks to you. If you hadn’t let our one witness go, we might have had a decent shot.”

  Wiggins scowled. Kell didn’t know the whole story, but he’d guessed Wiggins had been romantically involved with a Latvian woman who’d turned out to be an agent provocateur working for Van Bork. The woman had fled the country, and Wiggins hadn’t lifted a finger to stop her.

  “Send me to Germany,” Wiggins said at last. “I’ll find him. I’ll find Van Bork.”

  “You? Oh, yes, I can quite see that. A slovenly dressed guttersnipe without a word of German, swanning around the salons of Berlin? You can barely speak intelligible English, man, you’re a street urchin grown up, not some diplomatic lounge lizard. Sherlock Holmes may have taught you, but we both know you’d stick out like a sore thumb anywhere other than the streets, amongst your own class.”

  Wiggins glowered at him. Kell reached for a cigarette and looked away. He fiddled with a match, then ribboned smoke into the air and went on. “I know you feel guilty about the boy in Woolwich. But you didn’t plunge the knife, Van Bork’s men did.”

  “I’d have a better chance of getting him than Bernie and bloody Viv,” Wiggins replied.

  Kell shook his head. “Firstly, we don’t even know if he is in Germany. If he sticks to his guns, then I presume he’s still operating here at least some of the time. We must wait.”

  “For what?”

  “He will show himself again, I know it. We have to be ready to recognize him when he does.” Kell stubbed out his smoke and fixed Wiggins with a stare. “Secondly, it’s not our business chasing spies in Germany. We operate here. We leave the foreign stuff to Cumming. If he asks for our help, well then . . .”

  “Is that what you brought me back for? Teaching them toffee jokers to wipe their own arses?”

  Kell winced. “I had hopes for a spy school.”

  “Them’ll never listen to the likes of me.”

  Kell nodded slowly. Wiggins had a point. Cumming had made it clear he only wanted agents of impeccable lineage—Oxb
ridge, Sandhurst types. And they wouldn’t listen to Wiggins—a mistake that could cost them their lives. “As it happens, I did bring you back to London for something else. The King’s funeral.”

  “The King’s dead? No one told me.”

  Kell tutted. “Not yet, but he’ll go soon. And we’re to help with the security.”

  “You asking me to wait around for someone to die?” Wiggins grinned, disbelieving.

  The telephone rang, startling them both. “Simpkins,” Kell called. “The telephone.”

  Wiggins pulled his cap from his pocket. “I’ll be back tomorra. For orders,” he said.

  Simpkins scuttled into the room, pausing briefly at the sight of Wiggins. He reached for the telephone and looked up at Kell. “It might be your wife, sir.”

  “I know.”

  As the secretary took the call, Wiggins hesitated, a worried look crossing his face. Kell gestured vaguely with his hand and Wiggins strode to the door.

  Simpkins gave Kell the message. “It’s the Cabinet Office, sir. Secretary Pears. He wants to see you at once.”

  2

  “Oi, that’s my snag.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says this!” A punch flew.

  Wiggins stepped past the two lads as they closed in a violent scuffle. Behind them, a reporter turned away and called for another boy.

  He was in the alleyway next to the Cheshire Cheese pub. Wiggins pushed his way through a gaggle of boys who crowded around the entrance like a colony of birds on the edge of a cliff, flitting to and fro nervously.

  The place was rammed, printers on one side, pressmen on the other. It was the best pub on Fleet Street, and everyone knew it. Wiggins went into the public bar. It stank of printers’ Woodbines, press ringers’ pipe smoke, and cheap whisky. It stank of ink and sweat and unwashed clothes. It stank of home. After months away, Wiggins savored London’s stale air, the glorious sounds of a City boozer, swearing, joking, spilled beer, and no one giving a toss who you were, or why.

  He ordered a pint of half-and-half, took a long gulp, then stuck his head into the alley outside. “A general for a day’s tail,” Wiggins called.

  Fourteen hands shot up in unison.

  “’Ere ya are, guv.” “Experienced, me.” “I do MailExpressEveningNews.” “Liar.”

  Wiggins paused as the boys horseshoed around him. Most were aged between twelve and seventeen, Wiggins reckoned; hard to tell exactly because no one had a scrap on them. All bones and baggy trousers. These were the runners on the lookout for a job, or “snag.” Employed freelance by the newspapers, they did all sorts of things (following celebrities, running errands and the like) that the reporters didn’t have time for. Those pints in the Cheese wouldn’t drink themselves.

  Wiggins made a show of scanning all the eager faces, the sharp, bright eyes like mirrors. Then he thrust out his hand, pointing beyond the crowd around him to a solitary figure who hadn’t moved. “You’ll do,” he said.

  The figure, who until that moment had lounged against the railings, shrugged and the rest dispersed, muttering darkly.

  “He don’t want it anyway.” “It’s a gyp.” “Fucking ponce, is he?”

  Wiggins waited. The skinny figure, dressed like the other boys but if possible even slighter, slunk toward him.

  “Jax,” Wiggins said quietly.

  “I’m Jack here,” she hissed under her breath.

  Jax was the daughter of Wiggins’s oldest friend, Sal, and they’d run into each other the year before when Jax had been inadvertently working for a spy ring. Wiggins had helped her out of that scrape, but she’d kept running—and kept up pretending to be a boy. He didn’t blame her for that.

  He finished his pint and was about to say more when a great commotion swept through the ranks of runners. First one, then two, then more messengers came hurtling down the alleyway and barreled into the Cheese. Moments later, the pub emptied of reporters. They came bolting out one at a time, screaming for runners.

  “What’s up?” Wiggins said.

  “King’s all in. He’s about to snuff it.”

  The runners pegged off one by one, dispatched westward by the inebriated newspaper men—to Clarence House, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall. The papers needed eyes everywhere, and the runners were cheaper than dust.

  Jax looked on longingly at all this work going begging. “Oi, mister, I can do Downing Street,” she called to a harried newsman, who glanced up at Wiggins.

  “He can’t,” Wiggins said, resting a hand on her shoulder.

  “Ignore him, mister. I’m raring.”

  But the reporter had already engaged another boy. Jax slumped back, upset. “Still gotta work, ain’t I?”

  “What do you mean still?”

  “I’m on a missing persons, but it don’t pay.”

  Wind whipped stray biscuit wrappers and dust in little eddies about them, the alleyway now deserted. Even the clinking glasses and roar of chat from the Cheese had quieted. The King’s imminent death was big news.

  Wiggins looked closely at Jax’s face. He stilled an impulse to brush the tears from her cheek. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay you.”

  “It’s not . . .” She sniffed.

  “What missing person? You a consulting detective now?”

  “Don’t laugh at me.”

  Wiggins patted her shoulder. “Come on, girl, what’s up?”

  Jax sniffed again. She pulled herself up straighter and began to talk in her proper voice—higher, not quite as barked. “My mate Millie. Ain’t seen her for months—she ain’t home neither.”

  “She your age, seventeen? A few months, that’s nothing.”

  She looked at him. “She would’ve said. She’s disappeared.”

  Wiggins cracked his fingers and examined the backs of his hands. Soft. Hadn’t been this soft since forever, now he didn’t have to work for a living. Not real work anyways. “Anything on Peter?”

  “Who?”

  “Jax. I have been paying you something, remember.”

  “I tell ya, I’m on a missing persons. And you paid me ’alf a crown. Once. That’s sod all.”

  Wiggins took her by both shoulders and fixed her with a glare. “Where is Peter?”

  Jax shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried, but no word, not at Jubilee Street, none of the dives you told me. He’s gone.”

  “I paid you more than ’alf a crown,” Wiggins said.

  She rounded on him. “Why don’tcha find your precious Rooski yourself?”

  “I’m known,” he said. And I’m dead, he did not add.

  “Why the hell you care, anyway?”

  Wiggins glanced down the alleyway. His best friend Bill had been killed the year before by a gang of anarchist terrorists. Wiggins had tracked down one of their number, a Latvian who went by the name of Peter the Painter. He’d been out for revenge, but in the end it was Peter who’d put a bullet in Wiggins’s shoulder and left him for dead.

  “I never leave a debt unpaid,” he replied. She was too young to know what revenge meant, to understand how much he’d lost and what he was prepared to do to right that wrong. He’d give all he had to pay that debt.

  “Bollocks,” Jax said. “You’s just a skank, grown up.”

  Wiggins grinned and shook his head. “I’ll buy you an ’alf.”

  Back inside the pub, they sat at one of the now free tables and pushed aside a great splay of the latest newspapers. The Cheese had all the papers, up to the moment. After all, Wiggins thought as he placed a drink in front of Jax, that’s where the journos got most of their stories—from the other papers.

  Wiggins flicked through the first editions of the evenings as Jax rattled on about her missing friend. “It’s just not her, it’s not her,” she kept repeating.

  Every now and then, Wiggins asked a question, but Jax didn’t have much information on her friend. That’s how it was when you met people on the streets. There was nothing to tie them down, nothing to pin them.

  “Where she from again
?” Wiggins said.

  “Her ma’s in Lambeth. Vere Street or something.”

  “Ouch. And you’re surprised she scarpered.”

  Jax glared at him with such hurt and disappointment that Wiggins put down the paper. “All right. I’ll take a look-see.”

  “Would ya?”

  “No promises, like.”

  “Fanks, Wiggins,” she smiled shyly.

  “In return, yous take another nose around out east. For Peter.”

  “I’m telling you, he ain’t there.”

  Wiggins frowned at her, and kept the stare until she shrugged. “Good,” he said. “Now hop it.”

  She dragged herself from the table. “If you find Millie . . .”

  “I’ll tell her to write. Say bollocks to your mum for me.”

  Jax sloped toward the door. “Oi,” Wiggins called out, holding up a large dull shilling between finger and thumb. “You forgot your general.”

  “Good of you to come,” Soapy drawled.

  Kell scratched at his beard. He’d known Soapy for years and yet he was never quite sure how genuine anything he said ever was. “It’s not every day I’m summoned to the Cabinet Office,” he replied. “Simpkins even referred to you as Secretary Pears.”

  Soapy glanced up at Kell. “I didn’t realize you had a clerk,” he said, gesturing to the empty chair opposite his desk. “Pew?”

  Kell sat down, slightly uneasy. Soapy was something big in the civil service, and seemed to wield more power with every passing month. He sat in the Cabinet Office like a lazy cat that never quite went to sleep. But he’d rarely summoned Kell in such a way, and they never met at the office.

  “Sorry we couldn’t meet at the club, old man,” Soapy spoke to Kell’s thoughts. “Bit delicate.” He leaned forward and offered Kell a cigarette from an ebony box on the desk.

  They smoked for a moment. Kell waited. Saying too much in Whitehall could get you into trouble.

  “Asquith doesn’t like you chaps.”

  “So you tell me. Often.”

  “Hmm. Yes. But he doesn’t like the sewage workers either—doesn’t stop him, well, yes, ha ha, you get the point.”

  “I do,” Kell said.

  Soapy stubbed out his smoke. “And do you know about the latest treaty with Italy?”