The Cutthroat Read online

  “What’s that about?”

  “Division bell. Ringing a vote in the Commons. Members have eight minutes to get inside the chamber before the doorkeepers lock it up. The bells are all over the district, in pubs and restaurants and hotels. Those two will make it. No need to find their trousers.”

  “Would you join me in another?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  The barmaid drew more mild ale, filling their pints halfway and mixing in bottled brown ale.

  “Cheers, guv.”

  “If not the Ripper, who?” asked Bell.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I get the impression that you don’t fully accept Yard’s solution that Barrister Druitt was Jack the Ripper.”

  “Before you read too much into your impression, mind you, the list of ‘official’ suspects reported by the assistant chief constable of the Criminal Investigation Division included the suicide.”

  “Who else was on the list?”

  “A Polish Jew named Kosminski.”

  “What made Kosminski a suspect?”

  “He lived in Whitechapel.”

  “That’s the only reason?”

  “He was a foreigner. And a Jew. And in and out of the lunatic house. It added up. In the mind of the assistant chief constable.”

  “Any more?”

  “A Russian confidence trickster called Ostrog.”

  “Another foreigner,” said Bell. Joel Wallace’s assessment of Scotland Yard was beginning to sound generous.

  “Another regular guest of the lunatic house and Her Majesty’s prisons,” said the old man, and fell silent as he sipped his beer. The division bell finally stopped ringing.

  “Did the C.I.D. assistant chief constable favor one suspect over the others?”

  “He was not in the habit of confiding in constables, which was still my rank in 1888,” the old man answered drily. “But I do know, guv, that he struck from the list the insane medical student, and the doctor avenging his son who died of the clap, as well as a duke, a peer of the realm gone to ground in Brazil, and a horny painter.”

  “Who was the woman buried in New Scotland Yard’s cellar?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Isn’t it odd she was never reported missing?”

  “London’s gigantic. Still, she couldn’t have been from Whitechapel. Someone would have said, ‘Oh, that must be Maud or Betty, she’s gone missing.’ No one did.”

  “Unlike when Barrister Druitt was pulled out of the river.”

  “Right you are, guv. His family had reported him missing. It was in the record. They had people to identify his clothing . . . I thank you for the brown and milds, governor. I’m going to toddle along home now. Past me bedtime.”

  “Do you know anyone who could tell me more about the girl in the cellar?”

  The old man scratched his chin and eyed Bell speculatively. “Well, if you really care about her . . .”

  “I do.”

  “I’d talk to Nigel Roberts.”

  “Who’s Roberts?”

  “Retired early from the Yard. Used to be C.I.D.”

  “H Division?”

  “Detective sergeant.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He got himself made keeper of the Lock Museum. What would you call that in America? Manager?”

  “Or curator. It’s after hours. Where would I find him? Right now?”

  “He lives at the museum. They gave him a wee room up in the garret. But I would stay right where you are, if I were you.”

  “Why?”

  The old copper downed the last of his beer, licked his mustache, and flashed a yellow-toothed grin. “Word’s out, a Yank is asking about the Ripper. Nigel Roberts could never put old Jack out of his mind.”

  “Mr. Bell, I presume?”

  It was late, and the Parliament members who had run off to vote had returned, looking triumphant, when a striking figure with long white hair and glittering spectacles sidled up to Isaac Bell at the bar. He looked haggard but good-humored, and Bell had the impression of a man vaguely surprised to have awakened one morning to find himself old. There was a restlessness to him, a sign of the sort of impatience that Bell looked for in a top-notch detective.

  “Mr. Roberts?”

  Roberts returned a cheerful nod. “Servants are addressed by their surname in England. Better call me Roberts.”

  “Why does a retired Criminal Investigation Division detective call himself a servant?”

  “Coppers are ‘housekeepers.’ Which is to say, Scotland Yard keeps the wrong element out of the right element’s houses.”

  “Is that why you retired early?”

  “No. Sir-ing my governor because he sucked up to Commissioners born in Mayfair finally reminded me of a lesson I learned as a boy—but ignored when I joined the Yard.”

  “What lesson?”

  “Power pollutes. Obedience enslaves.”

  “Sounds like you were born in Whitechapel,” said Bell.

  “Close enough.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “A rich silk mercer died back in Shakespeare’s day. He left his fortune to found a school for penniless boys.”

  Bell said, “I saw you in the pub when I came in. Were you waiting for me?”

  “Word got around you were asking about the girl in the cellar.”

  “Sounds like the Jack the Ripper case is still alive.”

  “To me it is.”

  “Did Jack the Ripper put her body there?”

  “The newspapers said he did.”

  “I’ve read them.”

  “Everyone in London thought so, too. Do you know about the dog?”

  “The Commissioner’s bloodhound,” answered Bell. The newspapers had had a field day when the Police Commission tried to track whoever had left the body in New Scotland Yard with a bloodhound.

  “Not that dog. While the Commissioner was traipsing after his hound, a private citizen let his dog loose in the cellar. The Yard had searched high and low, but the dog dug up the girl’s leg buried a few inches under where they had looked.”

  “It was her leg?”

  “The Met surgeon conducting the postmortem thought so.”

  “How long had it been there?”

  “Around two months. The general consensus was he went to the cellar twice. Buried her leg first, then dropped off the bundle with her torso sometime later.”

  “Is it possible that our cellar girl was a foreigner?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  Bell said, “According to Mark Twain, London is a city of ‘villages.’”

  “Hundreds,” said Roberts.

  “The newspapers printed stories about her body being found in New Scotland Yard. And yet no one stepped forward to claim her body. No one said, ‘Oh, that’s my missing daughter, or girlfriend, or cousin.’

  “In actual fact, a girl from Chelsea went missing back in July. Her mother thought it was her. Her description fit the well-fed torso—a healthy young woman—and her mum had the impression that her daughter had taken a housemaid job in a rich man’s house. But there was no head to identify. Nothing to discourage the Yard from insisting that the Whitechapel Fiend was a homegrown working class fiend who restricted his depravities to penniless, drunken prostitutes. Much neater that way. Besides, who can be disappointed in our police if all the Ripper is killing are fallen woman who will die soon of drink anyhow? In the end, she is just another mystery.”

  Bell asked, “Could she have been his first victim?”

  “The one who started him off? What a marvelous question. She could be, except for one wide-open question.”

  “What question?” Bell asked, and Roberts said exactly what Bell had told his Cutthroat
Squad back in New York. “How many bodies did he hide so well, they were never found? All we do know is that our cellar girl’s killing predated Jack’s first ‘official’ victim.”

  “Polly Nichols. August thirty-first.”

  “You’ve been bit by the Ripper. You know the dates.”

  Roberts signaled the barmaid and ordered two whiskeys.

  “Why don’t we raise our glasses, Mr. Bell? To our Lady of the Cellar, a living girl who lost her life to the Ripper—or another monster like him. And then we’ll drink to the Yard that made nothing of her dying but a mystery.”

  Bell tossed back the whiskey and signaled for refills. “I wonder why she was different than his other victims.”

  “Other known victims. How do you mean different?”

  “Well-fed. Not poor. What if he had known her personally . . .”

  Roberts shrugged, apparently uninterested in that line of inquiry, and Bell changed the subject.

  “Have you ever heard of symbols being carved into his victims’ bodies?”

  “What do you mean by symbols?”

  “Not wounds that would kill, but . . . signals . . . ritualistic marks that might indicate something, send a message. Or a code.”

  Roberts asked, “What did they look like, the ones you heard of?”

  Bell had a curious feeling that the former police detective was testing him. He opened his notebook.

  Roberts tugged his specs down his nose and studied the marks over them. “No. I recall no shapes like that.”

  Bell asked, “Did Jack the Ripper ever drape his victims in a cape? A man’s cape.”

  “No, he covered their bodies with their own dress or apron.”

  “Did—”

  Roberts interrupted. “Mr. Bell, you look like a man who could do with a haircut.”

  The observation was as inaccurate as it was incongruous, and Bell said, “Just had one on the boat.”

  “Would you consider a shave?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to send you to Davy Collins. Tell him I said to tell you a story.”

  “Who is Davy Collins?”

  “A tonsorial practitioner in Whitechapel.”

  16

  Davy Collins’s barbershop had a red and white pole by the street door, which was wedged between a dark pub, where men and woman drank in silence, and a tiny grocery with empty shelves. Its twisting stairs were so narrow, it seemed a miracle that his red leather reclining chair had been carried up them. An ornately coiffed barber sporting an elaborate curlicued mustache greeted Bell in an Italian accent so thick, he sounded like a vaudeville comic mocking immigrants.

  “I am looking for a barber named Davy Collins,” said Bell.

  “Eet eez my Enga-lish-a name.”

  “Do you know Mr. Nigel Roberts?”

  “Meesta Roba-sa eez retire-a cop-a.”

  “He says for you to tell me a story.”

  “What-a kind-a story?”

  “A Jack the Ripper story.”

  The barber picked up a gleaming razor and demanded in harsh Londonese, “Who the bloody deuce are you, mate?”

  Bell said, “I’ll tell you who I am if you’ll tell me why you pretend to be Italian?”

  “Englishmen treat the barber from sunny Italy kinder than Davy Collins of Whitechapel by way of Ireland.”

  “I’m American. I’m kind to everyone.”

  Davy Collins laughed. “Fair enough. What story you want to hear?”

  “A true one.”

  “The only true one I have is about the time I saw the Ripper.”

  “You actually saw him?”

  “With these eyes.”

  “When?”

  “It was the ninth of November, 1888.”

  Mary Kelly, thought Bell. The murder that the inspector had insisted was Jack the Ripper’s last. “Night or day?” he asked.

  “Dead of the night. Past four in the morning.”

  “What were you doing out?”

  “Looking for a place to lay my head. I was knackered. Hadn’t a penny. I was peddling a magical hair-growth elixir, but no one was buying.” He flourished his razor again. “Suddenly I thought, to hell with the baldies, what did they ever do for me? Somehow find a way into haircutting instead of hair growing. That night, at four in the morning, I fell upon an honest trade, haircutting instead of hair growing. Took me two years of saving pennies to buy my razors.”

  “At four in the morning, was there light to see?”

  “Whitechapel was blacker than a mine in those days.”

  “Then how did you see him?”

  “When there is no light, your eyes see more.”

  “But not a man’s face.”

  “A man’s frame,” said Davy Collins. “The shape he cuts. How he moves.”

  “A silhouette?” Bell asked dubiously.

  “When he ran from the rents where Mary had her room.”

  “But only a silhouette,” said Bell. He was getting nowhere, wasting his time. Roberts, for some reason, had played him for laughs.

  “Until he ran through the light.”

  “What light? You said there was no light.”

  “At the end of the street was a lamppost with a light.”

  “Electric?”

  “In Whitechapel? Gas. Flickers.”

  “Dim.”

  “Like a candle in the wind—but bright, compared to the dark.”

  “How far away was the lamppost?”

  “Fifty feet? Maybe less.”

  “What shape did the man cut?” asked Bell.

  “Bounding like a hare.”

  “What do you mean by a ‘hare’?”

  “He ran like a boy. Fearless. Sure on his feet.”

  “But he couldn’t have been a boy. How old? would you guess.”

  “I don’t have to guess. I saw with these eyes. He was barely into manhood.”

  Which today, Bell thought, if true, would make London’s Jack the Ripper his Jack the Ripper—a killer no older than his early forties.

  “Did he appear to be a strong man?”

  Davy Collins shrugged. “All I know is, he was quick.”

  “Did you follow him?”

  “Why would I? I didn’t know why he was running. They didn’t find poor Mary until the morning.”

  Bell shook his head. “Wait. If they didn’t find Mary Kelly until the morning, then why was the Ripper running? What scared him?”

  “The knock at the door.”

  “What knock at the door?”

  “The fellow who came to collect the rent.”

  “At four in the morning?”

  “She was behind in her rent,” said Davy Collins. “Dodging the landlord.”

  “Did you see the collector?”

  “No. But he would knock whenever he saw a light. That’s why the Ripper ran. The knock surprised him.”

  “Did her room have a second door?”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “Did he go out the window?”

  “How would I know, guv? I’m just speculating.”

  “The shadow waited until you came out of the Yard,” Joel Wallace reported when Isaac Bell got back to Jermyn Street.

  “I saw him,” said Bell. “He followed me to the Red Lion.”

  Wallace nodded. “I reckoned he was about to go after you, but then I think he spotted me because he suddenly hopped a tram.”

  “You let him ditch you?” Bell hid neither his surprise—Wallace was top-notch—nor his dismay.

  “The man knew his business. Timed it perfectly. Left me standing on the bridge with egg on my face.”

  “Is he a cop?”

  “Too slick. More like military.”

 
; “Military?”

  “There’s a war brewing. London’s full of dreadnought spies—Germans, mostly, but Frogs, Japs, Eye-talians, and Russians, too—tripping over each other looking to lift new battleship plans.”

  “Was he shadowing you or me?”

  “You,” Wallace answered firmly. “I’m not working up any spy cases.”

  “Neither am I,” said Bell. “Besides, even Scotland Yard never suspected Jack the Ripper was a German spy.”

  “Maybe whoever sicced him on you thinks you’re up to something else?”

  Bell pondered that. It was the more likely scenario.

  “I locked horns with Lord Strone last year—Secret Service Bureau, Military Intelligence.”

  “The Thief case,” said Wallace. “But Archie said you worked things out.”

  “I thought we did. Trouble is, Strone knows I’m not a Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock insurance investigator.”

  “Spies think like crooks,” said Wallace. “Don’t trust nobody.”

  “I tangled with Naval Intelligence once. But that was years ago. Long before Mr. Van Dorn made me Chief Investigator . . . Do you know anyone to look into Strone?”

  Wallace nodded briskly.

  “Make it clear we don’t want to put the agency on the wrong side of the Secret Service Bureau—unless they give us cause.”

  “Understood, Mr. Bell.”

  “And cable Archie in New York. Strone keeps an estate in Connecticut.”

  “I’ll get right on it . . . Look, Mr. Bell, I’m sorry I let the guy ditch me.”

  “Did you do any better with the postmortems?”

  Joel Wallace had done much better with a postmortem witness, producing a Harley Street surgeon who had been a coroner’s assistant back when he was a medical student. It had been his job to take notes. The doctor had a sharp memory and a cold eye, and he presented Bell with grisly details in abundance.

  Bell asked him to comment on the speculation at the time that Jack the Ripper was a medical student.

  “They gave him far too much credit for surgical skills. His dismemberments struck me as the work of a deer stalker who had experience butchering game. Or even an actual butcher. It was clear he used a large knife, whereas an anatomy student would have been trained to use a small dissecting blade. No, this chap knew where to separate an arm from the shoulder at the joints, or a leg from the hip, but that doesn’t take a surgeon. Clearly, he was strong—he would have to be to wrench limbs apart the way he did.”