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Synopsis
'Skilfully mixing real history with action sequences worthy of Lee Child, this is historical crime-writing at its best' John Williams, the Mail on Sunday on The Year of the Gun
The follow-up to the acclaimed The Year of the Gun and the fourth book in 'a great new series' (Mick Herron, author of Bad Actors).
1914.
Sherlock Holmes has been murdered.
Nobody knows who did it, but Wiggins, former Baker Street Irregular and Holmes' protégée, suspects a German spy.
However, Europe is descending into the chaos of the First World War. Captain Kell of Military Intelligence has limited resources, and more pressing matters on his mind.
Wiggins is on his own. Almost. He pursues Holmes' killer across the continent, but as grief and rage close in it's not just the killer that eludes his grasp . . .
'Engaging series of historical thrillers... The story rattles along at pace, the characters are engaging and the fight scenes burst with action. But Lyle's great strength is in his depiction of time and place; from its stinking tenements, where babies cry from hunger, to its sinister docks and upmarket brothels, the Edwardian city - then still part of Britain - is brought to life in all its squalid, magnificent glory' Financial Times
'Impressive period detail and sharp dialogue add charm to the strong plot' Daily Mail (on The Irregular)
'Full throttle ... delivering entertainment in spades' Myles McWeeney, Irish Independent
(P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Release date: November 23, 2023
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Print pages: 320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
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Spy Hunter
H.B. Lyle
Magnificence on wheels. The most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. A line of them, catching the sunshine in metallic bursts. A motorcade of power. Mehmed Mehmedbasic watches as the glorious cars go past and onwards down the Appel Quay. His hand closes around the pistol in his pocket but he does not draw it, does not do what he promised.
Nedeljko Cabrinovic did not care so much for cars. He stood on the thin riverside pavement, pressed between idiots waving imperial flags. The approaching cars winked and glared in the flitting sunshine. Heat crinkled the dusty quay. Faint cheers rolled towards the nineteen-year-old Serb. Young girls crowded the upper windows of the school opposite.
He could see the Archduke, now, fifty yards and closing. The purpled plumes of his ridiculous hat bent and fluttered in the wind. Twenty yards now. The third car in the line. Light blue, like the clear Bosnian sky, his country’s sky, not Austria- Hungary’s.
Cabrinovic ripped the cap from his grenade and stepped forward. He flung it at the car. But the speed of the magnificent motorcar surprised him. He threw too late. The grenade bounced off the rolled-down roof at the back and trickled along the road.
Kaboom! The grenade detonated under the car behind, blowing it over. The explosion shocked even Cabrinovic. His ears rang. Women screamed. Men roared out in pain. The Archduke’s car burst forward, a smacked horse.
Cabrinovic cursed. Across the road a man stared at him, pointed, shouted. Then another. Then a gendarme came running. Whistles blew. More police now, and other men, shouting, running, screaming. Cabrinovic turned, vaulted over the wall and dropped fifteen feet into the Miljacka river.
The water only came up to his knees and for a moment the shock stalled him. But gendarmes streamed over the wall after him, and he began to stumble across the stones out into the river. He fumbled the cyanide pill from his pocket. He had no idea if the dose would be enough. None of the Black Hand did, but they’d all vowed to go down in glory. Death and glory and the Empire would never be the same again.
He jammed the pill into his mouth just as the gendarmes closed. The public too, each to get a boot or fist in where they could, before Cabrinovic was hauled away. The cyanide had failed to kill, just like he had.
Further up the Appel Quay, the Archduke’s car sped on. It passed Trifko Grabez, Cvjetko Popovic, Vaso Cubrilovic and Gavrilo Princip. The men, teenagers, students, each alone in the crowd at points along the route, each armed with pistol, grenade and cyanide, could only watch on as the limousine raced by.
Once they realised that the Archduke had survived the blast – his speeding car, his ridiculous plumage signalling to all that he lived – Grabez, Popovic and Cubrilovic presumed their deadly game was up. Their chance had gone, and so they slunk away. News of the bombing rippled along the crowd, but they had seen Franz Ferdinand motor by at pace. He was alive. They had failed.
Princip, nineteen, did not make that decision. He had smuggled into Bosnia from Belgrade, hiding in his own country, a Slav, and he would not give up so easily. He felt the FN10 Browning semi-automatic pistol in his pocket. Cold comfort, but comfort all the same. The flag-waving disciples dispersed around him. Some complained about the Archduke’s rudeness, the speed of his car, while others speculated about the commotion further along the river. Princip too wondered about this and he set off towards the site of the first bomb, to see what damage had been wrought. But then he stopped, and turned back. He remembered the Archduke’s itinerary.
The bombing will have thrown those plans awry but he looked up at the street sign on the wall. Franz Joseph Street. On his left, the Latin Bridge over the Miljacka. Behind him, the smell of dark, thick coffee caught in his throat. Schiller’s, a German cafe. No, Austrian. Here on Slav soil. A reminder he needed. For if the Archduke did stay on schedule, he would come back down the Appel Quay and turn right here, into this street towards the old town. Princip decided to wait.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, together with his wife Sophie, did indeed change his plans. He spoke at the town hall, he joked about the ‘warm’ welcome the city had given him, and then he resolved to skip the tour of the old town and head straight to the hospital to look in on those injured by Cabrinovic’s grenade. Unfortunately, no one told his driver.
The magnificent motorcar trundled back down the Appel Quay, this time with the river on its left. The crowds had thinned, especially on the river side of the road, for the sun burned fearfully hot, despite the early hour.
Princip sensed the car’s approach before he saw it. A throaty roar, a ripple among those watching on. He stepped back, around the corner into Franz Joseph Street, out of the glare of the sun and the oppression of the blue, blue sky. He waited. Hoped, hand on the FN10 Browning in his pocket.
The motorcar did indeed slow when it came to the bridge, and turned right into Franz Joseph Street. An army officer riding the tailboard shouted out. Someone cried. The car screeched to a halt. Another shout, then the engine stalled. Finally, the magnificent Graf and Stift PS 28/32 Double Phaeton failed.
Gavrilo Princip saw this all happen, right in front of him. He stepped forward and discharged two bullets at the passengers in the car. The first bullet lodged deep in Sophie’s stomach. The second nicked the jugular vein in the Archduke’s neck.
Gendarmes scragged Princip in seconds. He stood as they engulfed him, shocked and stilled by what he had just done. He did not feel the blows, nor hear the shouts and screams.
Nor did he hear the man, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, utter the words which turned out to be his last. ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing.’
1
‘Wiggins,’ a faint cry went up.
‘Wiggins!’ Another voice, louder now.
‘WIGGINS,’ cried a third, closer still.
‘Wot?’
‘I don’t know wot fucking wot. Get your arse down here!’
Wiggins sighed. The best thing about his job was the inaccessibility of it, the sheer impossibility of being reached by mere mortals, those who could not climb the towering cranes and traverse from iron beam to iron beam, carefree of the drop. He leaned out, over the side of the criss-crossed iron structure, and glanced down to the distant ground. ‘Give us a mo,’ he said to the red-faced bellower below.
He knew what they wanted. He’d watched from his vantage point on top of the crane. He’d been sent up, with ropes slung over his shoulder, to rig, up in the sky, where the gulls cawked and swooped. The Thames, a river of work and history, bending below past the Houses of Parliament in one direction and along underneath the bands of bridges, twisting out through the heart of an empire, where nations are traded and fortunes lost, to the busiest port in the world, wreathed in industrial smoke. Stood atop this, Wiggins could see the shimmering heat haze of the hills in the distance, and sighed once more.
He knew why they called his name. He’d seen the reason, pigeon-toeing his way across Westminster Bridge twenty minutes earlier, the high sheen of his top hat catching the sun even from a distance. A man, even at two hundred paces, dressed so perfectly, so just so, that the very idea of him turning into a building site – even one so vast and grand as County Hall – was an anathema to common sense. No one on Westminster Bridge, as it reluctantly approached more down-at-heel Lambeth, would fail to be surprised to see such a well turned-out gent picking his way off the main road and through the ruts, shouts and dust of the big dig.
Wiggins clambered expertly down. He had been halfway up one of the tendrils of the great crane. There were fifteen or so cranes arrayed across the site, and each had a long bending shaft that rose up into the sky. At the base of these shafts stood a platform, raised off the ground by three iron ‘legs’ each criss-crossed with iron supports. These platforms themselves were enormous, monuments of industry. Those without a head for heights would sway and wobble, clinging to the central shaft. The angled spindles that rose above, tapering into the sky, were the domain only of the ‘spidermen’, men and boys like Wiggins, who had a stomach for the height and the balance to stay alive. They didn’t let women onto the site at all, and so no one knew if women had the chops for it – other than, of course, the tightrope walkers and trapeze artists who swung and sparkled in the vast big tops of Blackheath, or the cavern of Alexandra Palace.
Wiggins slid down the last ladder from the platform and went to meet his one-time boss, Captain Vernon Kell, head of the domestic arm of the British secret service.
Kell stood not to attention as such, but so straight and solitary, as if he were a toy soldier placed there by those giant cranes. Wiggins walked towards him with a slow, considered tread – it’s never a good idea to show the quality you’re keen. Wiggins hadn’t seen Kell in a long time, and him showing up never meant good news. Still, he treated Wiggins better than most toffs did.
‘Big show’s coming, is it then?’ Wiggins said, without preamble.
‘How did you? Have you read the papers, I mean, what?’ Kell spluttered. ‘I didn’t think . . .’
Wiggins grinned. ‘I ain’t read nothing, except your face. Your eyes, even. You’re on. They’re blazing.’
Kell coloured slightly. ‘Right, yes well,’ he said at last. ‘I resent the implication that I’m excited about the prospect of war.’
‘Resent away, I’ve got work to do.’
‘You’ll come back?’
‘Nah, up there.’ Wiggins gestured skyward with a thumb.
‘But you must,’ Kell insisted. He glanced around at the builders traipsing to and fro, the constant clouds of dust rising from their boots, and drew Wiggins to the side. ‘The spring is wound too tight. This assassination, in Bosnia.’ He tapped the paper in his hand. ‘It’s the trigger, I’m sure of it.’
‘No ta.’
‘You gave me your word. If it ever comes to war, you’ll come back. Your word, man.’
‘I ain’t no gentleman though, am I?’ Wiggins gave a half-smile. ‘Besides. War’s a rich man’s game, scored in the lives of poor men.’
‘Bolshevism?’ Kell looked questioningly, disgusted.
‘Ere, did you come straight from the office? Were you followed?’
‘No one cares about you,’ Kell said bluntly. He had forgotten how insubordinate Wiggins could be, how seemingly unaware he was of their difference in status. He wanted to remind him.
Wiggins looked away, beyond the great cranes out to the river, prickled sweat on his neck, unsurprised Kell had missed his point. Instead, he imagined the taste of the first beer in his mouth later that day. ‘I’m alright here.’ Wiggins gestured around him. ‘Another Monday morning, building a temple of democracy.’
‘County Hall?’ Kell scoffed. ‘Look across there. The mother of all parliaments. That’s your temple. That’s what we’ll fight to save.’
‘That knocking shop? Do me a favour. I don’t get no vote for that. Not Constance neither.’
‘Mrs Kell, to you!’ Kell said indignantly.
Wiggins grinned. ‘She’d do a better job than half the drunks in there. She should be running the place. I bet you wouldn’t be coming round to the likes of me with ya begging bowl if she was in charge.’
Kell scowled. He still had no idea how Wiggins could be so right, so often. He’d spent the first part of the morning pacing the corridors of Whitehall trying to find anyone to agree with him about the importance of the Franz Ferdinand assassination. He had found that no one, not one official, minister or War Office functionary, thought anything of it. Even his friend Soapy in the Cabinet Office was blithe: ‘Let them squabble amongst themselves. Have you heard the news from Larne?’
‘Yes, well,’ he said to Wiggins and dusted away a patch of clay dust from his pinstripes. ‘I’m at Watergate House, as I’m sure you know.’ He gestured down river. ‘If you deign to reconsider, we’ll be waiting.’
‘There’s not going to be a war!’ Mansfield Cumming blasted. ‘At least, not for a year or two.’
Kell clicked his tongue. His counterpart at the foreign branch of the secret service, Sir Mansfield Cumming, stood up at his desk and waved his hand across the room, as if surveying the globe itself. ‘Unless you mean the bloody Irish.’
‘I didn’t mean the Irish.’
‘They’re going to rip each other apart if we let them.’
‘In Europe,’ Kell said, trying not to rise to the older man, who now paced up and down, pointing his pipe.
‘None of my agents have reported anything amiss.’
Why would they? thought Kell. Cumming – the foreign service chief – had a rash of incredibly unreliable ‘agents’ across Europe, most of whom were worthless. They were amateurs, with names like Ruffian, Counterscarp and H2O, who drained Cumming of his budget while providing almost no intelligence at all. It was a racket. At least Kell could rely on the British police to act when he called anything in. That and Wiggins, if he could be persuaded.
Wiggins. The impudence of the man. That Wiggins could refuse his country was one thing, but taking Kell’s wife’s name in vain was beyond the pale. It made him angry still. Kell had left him an hour earlier, extracting himself from the vast and filthy building site as quickly as possible. He hadn’t gone back to Watergate House. Instead, he’d crossed back over Westminster Bridge and made his way to Cumming.
Kell was unsurprised at the older man’s reaction. He’d already tried every other door in Whitehall, and it was perhaps too much to hope that Cumming might buck the trend of bureaucratic complacency and indifference. In his view, it was the job of the secret service to jump at every shadow, to fear death and destruction at every turn; it was for them to live the fears no one else dared speak.
‘We should let them fight it out,’ Cumming broke back in on his thoughts. ‘The micks I mean. I’m more worried about these blasted women.’
Kell’s ears pricked up at that. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Haven’t you been following the news, man? These bloody suffragettes.’
‘I see,’ Kell said slowly. It was a difficult subject. Kell’s wife, Constance, had been an active suffragist years earlier – an activism that had sent her into a riot on Parliament Square. She’d actually saved his life that day. The Metropolitan police had succumbed to a kind of madness, beating and hitting women protesters – one woman even died, although officials managed to suppress that story. Kell had stepped in to help, and was truncheoned by a huge sergeant. He escaped further injury only thanks to Constance’s newfound skill at ju-jitsu.
Subsequently, she’d promised to step back from the movement, to avoid any embarrassment. But he suspected her interest had been reignited. How could it not be, if you believed in a cause so stark? When hunger-striking women were being routinely force-fed in prison, so brutally as to amount to torture?
He could only hope that she had the sense to keep herself out of prison. For the moment, she’d stopped telling him where she went in the day, and he’d stopped asking. That’s how they protected each other.
In any event, Kell silently recused himself from the subject of suffragism whenever it came up in government. He left Cumming fulminating and went back to Watergate House, just south of the Strand by Charing Cross. He took a cab this time, eager to escape the complacency and ignorance of Cumming, the blindness.
His branch of the secret service – the home section – would not be so stupid, he vowed. Immediately on his return, Kell went upstairs to the roof. He disliked smoking in front of the staff if he could help it. He didn’t want them to see his agitation, either. For while the assassination was far off in the Balkans, he knew it meant war. A modern war the likes of which the world had never seen. And he knew Britain was unprepared, in warships, in arms, in training; and most of all (as far as he was concerned) in intelligence. A whole network of German spies was surely at work in the country, had been for years, and their time was coming. He’d barely scratched the surface of this network, he knew, and his ignorance of the rest burned him like a fresh scald. He knew enough to know he knew nothing.
He smoked two cigarettes alone, as a pleasing coolness finally began to settle on the day. He gazed out along the river now, at those great cranes that dotted the vast building site on the southern bank of the Thames. A gigantic grid. It was another thing that troubled Kell, this palace of local democracy, facing Parliament. He saw it as an affront. What right did the people of London have to challenge the government? It would not end well.
Was Wiggins still there, stepping from bar to bar, with the elegance of a dancer? Was there nothing he could not do? Certainly, he had no other agents like him and now he was needed more than ever.
Kell peered at the far-off cranes, but could not see him. Off to drink, no doubt. He didn’t need any convincing about the coming war. He’d read the truth in his face, damn the man. Like his teacher, too clever to be with, too clever to be without.
‘Sir?’ The voice of Simpkins, his long-standing secretary, carried across the empty roof.
Kell tossed away his half-smoked cigarette and nodded. ‘Coming,’ he said, as he watched the tobacco burn and fizzle in the dust.
‘Get out of it, you stinking diddycoy fuck.’
A man flew out of the Kings Arms and sprawled onto the street at Wiggins’s feet. The pub’s door slammed shut and the owner of the voice disappeared back inside.
‘Tosher?’ Wiggins said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Big Ed’s in.’
‘Not for fucking long,’ Wiggins said. He grabbed Tosher by the arm and pulled him back into the pub.
‘God’s sake,’ someone muttered as they came through the doors. ‘He facking stinks something rotten, worse than rotten.’
This was true. Tosher, a man in his thirties, was named after his profession. His real name had long been lost and all the folk round Waterloo knew him as Tosher. A tosher was someone who earned their living by scavenging in the sewers, mostly for copper but anything of value. There weren’t many left, but Tosher didn’t know what else to do. His old man had been a tosher, and his old man before him too, in the golden age of toshing. It was a dying art. He lived in a shed in the backyard of the boarding house where Wiggins lodged, a few streets away.
Wiggins ignored the snide remarks of the others packed into the pub and fixed his eyes on Big Ed. Big Ed worked on the railway engines at Waterloo station and every evening he’d come into one pub or another in the area, stand at the bar and drink his first pint of bitter in a very peculiar way. Wiggins waited and watched, as Big Ed took his red, spotted handkerchief out of his pocket and twisted it into a cord. Then he held each end, reached behind him and drew it tight across the back of his neck. He then leaned down, picked up the pint pot in front of him with his teeth, and slowly tipped his head back. Big Ed drank the entire pint this way, with the glass clamped between his teeth and the beer dribbling around his mouth. Everyone in the pub watched on, conversation stilled, as they did each day he came in. Children would sometimes poke their heads in to watch the sight too, to giggle and cheer this mountainous engineer and his party trick.
Big Ed finished the pint, placed the glass down and held his hands up in triumph. As he did so, Wiggins stepped towards him. ‘Aht of it, Ed. Piss off, you’re not wanted here.’
Ed glanced sideways but otherwise said nothing. He pointed to the ale pump for another and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. ‘He’s not wanted here, the stinking diddy—’
SLAM!
Wiggins smashed Ed’s face into the bar.
‘Oi!’ the landlord cried. ‘No fighting.’
‘I ain’t fighting.’ Wiggins glared at him. ‘I’m just keeping a good and orderly house cos you don’t seem able. And two pints of half and half.’
Big Ed grasped his face and groaned in shock. Wiggins took hold of his collar and dragged him out into the street.
He flung him to the ground. ‘I said, piss off.’ With that, he turned and went back into the pub.
Tosher stood alone at the bar. Wiggins could hear a couple of comments too, for Tosher did smell a bit. But then, everyone smelled. That was why they were in the pub. That was why most of them smoked. ‘He’s got a point,’ someone muttered. ‘The bloke’s rank.’
‘Cos he’s a tosher, not cos he’s a diddycoy,’ Wiggins snapped back. Then he turned and looked around at everyone in the now silent pub. The two women, sat close by the door, nursing their gin and water. The lined-up pints on the bar in front of the builders from the site, most of whom he recognised. A cabby, his cap resting on a weary shoulder. A knot of young lads, who joked and drank and spent some windfall on the lash. And the old, broken men, scanning the tables for spare booze. Wiggins glanced around at them all.
‘This is London,’ he slammed his chest. ‘Not some shite pile in the sticks. We are everyone. This is who we are.’
The silence went on, a curious sound in such a place. Until finally one of the builders leaning against the bar straightened, picked up his glass, and said, ‘I thought drunks is wot we are?’
Wiggins softened. ‘Well, if you’re buying?’
‘Nah, just drinking.’
Wiggins picked up his glass and nodded. The pub breathed again, and turned back to the business of relaxing and drinking. The two women by the door fell back into conversation, and Wiggins heard the gist of it. ‘I ain’t been the same since those pills the doc gave me, to bring it off.’
There was nowhere like a pub. Wiggins soaked it in, the smell of burning tobacco, stale beer and fresh piss. Toffs had their drawing rooms, their dining rooms, galleries, even a fucking room for billiards. He had this. The women by the door. ‘You should be ashamed, looking so antique.’ The professor in the corner, reading the Daily Sketch. (They called him the professor because he was a numbers clerk at Legal and General, and could tell you the chances of getting run over by a train at the drop of a hat.) Little Ronnie who ran bets for the bookie down The Cut, who refused to wear a hat cos he said it’d make him go bald, snicking a half of mild before he was off again. Even the mugshots on the wall made Wiggins feel at home. The police insisted all the local prostitutes had their photographs pinned to the wall, as the landlord had to bar them. To protect the morals of this lot, Wiggins smiled. The women didn’t mind. The punters used to come in and use it like a menu. It was good for business.
Tosher touched Wiggins’s elbow gently, and took his pint. ‘I’ll be outside,’ he said quietly.
‘Alright, Tosh, I’ll join you,’ he replied. ‘And remember, always keep your mouth shut when you’re under.’
‘Always keep it shut,’ Tosh smiled sadly. The gypsy, a settle. . .
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