The Cutthroat Read online

  Bell was also intrigued by the coroner’s estimate that she had been dead as long as two months before her torso was discovered. If she was Jack the Ripper’s victim, could she have been his first?

  “Nowhere near half a body,” Wallace corrected brusquely. “A third, at most. Torso, no arms, no head. Wrapped up in her dress.”

  “Her dress?” asked Bell. “Or a man’s cape?” At the inquest, the cloth was described as “satin broche.” He had checked with Marion. Lightweight satin broche made dresses. But heavier broche weaves were fashioned into capes.

  “Good question, which I can’t answer,” said Wallace. “Who knows what happened to the evidence so long ago. Seeing as how Scotland Yard insisted the Ripper hadn’t killed her—some other murderer did her. A couple of weeks later they dug up her arm. The Yard still swore it was coincidence.” He laughed. “Like some other Londoner just happened to be stashing chopped-up women under H.Q. that year.”

  “Why would Scotland Yard lie?”

  “How could they admit it was the Ripper? First, they can’t nail the louse. Then he rubs their faces in it. Bad enough to have her body dumped in their cellar—a body never identified, by the way—but dumped by Jack the Ripper? Too much, Mr. Bell. They might as well admit they missed the boat.”

  Bell asked, “How corrupt were the cops back then?”

  Like any field office chief worth his salt, Joel Wallace had made many friends in many walks of life. “From what the old-timers tell me, they didn’t have their hands out as much as ours, but they kowtowed to the upper crust even more. Still do. A so-called gentleman has to go to a lot of trouble to be suspected as a criminal, much less arrested.” He mimicked an upper class English accent: “‘Our sort doesn’t do that sort of thing . . .’ At any rate, the newspapers thought Jack the Ripper buried his victim there. So did everybody in London. So did most of the cops, but not the bosses. Listen, he had turned the town on its ear. They’d believe anything, and they were scared.”

  “What do you think, Joel?”

  “He’d have to be one heck of an athlete to carry even half a dead body into an unlit construction works in the middle of the night.”

  “Why bother?” asked Bell. “Why risk getting caught or breaking his neck in the dark?” For a criminal who made a practice of not getting nailed, taking that kind of chance made no sense.

  “My personal theory? Jack the Ripper had it in for the Police Commissioner.”

  “Why?”

  “Revenge for Bloody Sunday. There was a working class mob in Trafalgar Square. Socialists, radicals, and the Irish—England’s three favorite bogeymen in one conveniently located riot. The Commissioner ordered a billy club charge. Cavalry blocked the exits.”

  This was news to Bell, who had had Grady Forrer’s Research boys go back only to the first Ripper killing. Proof—not that he needed it—of the value of traveling to the scene. “When was Bloody Sunday?”

  “Year before,” said Wallace. “Ten thousand men and women attacked by club-swinging ‘bobbies.’”

  “Does that make him a Socialist, or a radical, or Irish?”

  “He could have been trampled. Or just an outraged witness. Don’t forget why Britons hate each other’s guts. Most are starving in filthy slums. The Army rejects four out of five recruits ’cause they’re sick and underfed. Can you imagine eighty percent of American boys stunted by starvation? Sure, we’ve got poor folk, but ours can hope—better times next year. These miserable devils are stuck at the bottom forever. It’s a cruel nation, Mr. Bell. Jack the Ripper probably figured to get some back by making the honorable Police Commissioner look like a fool.”

  “Or toying with the cops just to show he was smarter. ‘My funny little games,’ he wrote to the Central News Agency.”

  “If he actually wrote that letter. The Yard and the papers got hundreds of letters claiming they were from Jack the Ripper.”

  “He wrote it,” said Bell. “Look at the order of events. The Yard posted copies, hoping someone would recognize the handwriting.”

  “No one did, and he never got caught. Fact-backed truth, he was smarter.”

  “I’ll see you later,” said Bell, and stepped into the street. “Meantime, find me someone who was at the postmortems.”

  “Coroner?”

  “Anyone who saw their bodies.”

  “Sure you don’t want me to go in there with you?” asked Wallace. “The inspector who my friends set you up with is a prickly son of a gun.”

  “I prefer to appear harmless,” said Bell.

  Good luck with that, thought Wallace as he watched the tall detective mount the front steps of New Scotland Yard like an angry lion.

  Police constables picked for imposing height and remarkable breadth guarded the entrance. Silver buttons fastened their high-collared navy tunics. Eight-pointed Brunswick stars glistened on their helmets.

  Isaac Bell presented his card.

  While he waited for his appointment to be confirmed, he turned around casually and cast the eyes of a dazzled tourist upon the barge-filled river, the busy bridge, Westminster Palace, Big Ben, the bustling street. The sweep of his gaze broke infinitesimally, just long enough to signal Joel Wallace.

  The rail-thin man in a bowler hat and guard’s coat loitering outside the office on Jermyn Street had made a second appearance in St. James’s Park. Now he was strolling nonchalantly along the Thames Embankment. A possible coincidence, but unlikely, as he had engaged in some camouflage by changing his scarf from blue to green.

  London was Joel Wallace’s town. It was his job to find out who was shadowing the Van Dorns. Chief Investigator Isaac Bell had bigger fish to fry in Scotland Yard.

  “Insurance, you say, Mr. Bell? What firm do you represent?”

  Bell had already presented a business card, and the Scotland Yard inspector had taken his time reading it. But the angry lion Joel Wallace had observed had glided into the depths of its cage as Bell tamped down his own impatience to present the picture of an earnest citizen deferring to the majesty of the police. He answered, politely, “Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock.”

  The inspector twirled Bell’s card in his fingers. Joel Wallace had chosen him because he had joined Scotland Yard in 1885, three years before Jack the Ripper’s rampage. That made him a man in his late fifties and facing retirement, and probably not happy about either. “Prickly” was putting it mildly. He was haughty, arrogant, and deeply disdainful—and in no mood, as Bell had presumed, to do the Chief Investigator of an American private detective agency any favors.

  “From Hartford.” He let the card fall to his desk. “In Connecticut.” He pronounced it Con-nec-ti-cut in the English manner, emphasizing syllables Yankees ignored. “Why have you come to Scotland Yard, Mr. Bell? Or should I ask, why did you prevail upon an associate of a Home Office undersecretary to ask me the favor of granting you an interview?”

  Isaac Bell managed a cordial smile. “I just crossed the pond aboard the Mauretania. I’m on the trail of a Chicago jewel thief who calls himself Laurence Rosania. Perhaps you’ve encountered him in London?”

  “I can’t say I have.”

  Bell mentioned a recent unsolved burglary at the Ritz Hotel. The inspector returned bland assurances that investigations were closing in on the actual thief, who was certainly not Rosania.

  Bell said, “I’m seeking certain connections between the victims and the thief.”

  “I should think the loss of valuables to a criminal would be connection enough.”

  “Fraudulent claims. Rosania lifts your wife’s necklace and you claim insurance on her bracelet as well.” He produced a photograph. A remarkably elegant figure for one so young, Rosania was gazing blasély into the camera.

  “This was taken upon his incarceration in the New York State prison at Sing Sing. Unfortunately, he gained a pardon and promptly went back to his ways. I’m fai
rly certain he has worked the liners, and I can’t help but wonder whether upon disembarking popped up to London to crack a safe, then home free on another ship.”

  “That would take nerve.”

  “Rosania knows no shortage of nerve.”

  “Are you requesting Scotland Yard’s assistance in the matter?”

  The deferential citizen permitted himself a nonplussed laugh. “No! Of course not. It’s not the sort of case I’d expect the police to grapple with. Conspiracy and all, if you can imagine. Far too complicated.”

  “Too complicated?” The inspector bristled. “Then what the dickens are you doing here?”

  “I just landed from the Mauretania.”

  “You’ve already said that.”

  “Aboard ship, I encountered a ring of operators in the smoker who should interest you.”

  “Jewel thieves?” the inspector asked, with an expression that combined a smirk and a sneer.

  “Blackmailers,” said Bell. When he spotted them working up their racket in the First Class Smoking Room, he had seen a golden opportunity to get Scotland Yard on his side.

  And indeed the inspector’s smirk faded. “Whom were they blackmailing?”

  “I don’t know if you are familiar with the expression ‘badger game’ over here, but it involves maneuvering the blackmail victim into a compromising situation where he fears exposure.”

  “I have heard of the badger game.”

  “I deduced that they were working the badger game on a rich old geezer.”

  “Did you happen to ‘deduce’ the victim’s identity?”

  “His name is Skelton. I believe you would know of him as the Earl of Milton.”

  The inspector sat up straight. “Do you have proof of this?”

  Bell pulled from his pocket five Kodak snaps of shipboard gatherings. He fanned them on the inspector’s desk like a royal flush. “Of course, you recognize Lord Skelton. This man here is the ringleader. The young lady with her hand on Skelton’s arm is the one who inveigled her way into the poor old duffer’s stateroom. This surly bruiser pretended to be her angry husband.”

  “Why would they let you take their pictures?”

  “They didn’t know I had a camera.”

  “How did you conceal it?”

  The tall detective smiled, a trifle less cordially. “How I conceal my camera could be called an insurance investigator’s trade secret.”

  Yet another of the joys of being married to a beautiful filmmaker.

  “The extortionists persuaded Skelton to withdraw money from his London bank and pay them off at the Savoy Hotel this afternoon.”

  Isaac Bell tugged his gold fob chain and drew forth a Waltham music pocket watch. The lid was engraved with a speeding 4-4-0 locomotive that sparked memories of his first encounter with the Van Dorn Detective Agency. It hinged open at his touch and chimed George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  “Three o’clock,” Bell said over the music. “They’ll be at the Savoy any minute. As Mauretania is a British liner, I believe the blackmailers land in your jurisdiction.”

  The inspector thought so, too. Detectives were summoned urgently.

  Isaac Bell filled them in on pertinent details including—thanks to the estimable Joel Wallace—the number of the room where the shakedown would take place. He declined a halfhearted invitation to tag along on the raid, claiming, “Anonymity is priceless in insurance investigation.”

  Alone with the now beaming inspector, Bell got down to business. “May I ask you a favor?”

  “Name it.”

  “If you would indulge a hobby of mine,” he opened with a self-deprecating smile. “A sort of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ hobby.”

  “Sounds like a busman’s holiday.”

  “Perhaps for a real detective, but for me it promises excitement I don’t often find in the insurance business.”

  “What sort of Sherlock Holmes case excites you?” the inspector asked with unconcealed condescension.

  “I’ve become obsessed with solving the identity of the long-ago mysterious perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders—I am referring, of course, to Jack the Ripper. I am fascinated by the case.”

  “Many are.”

  “It’s an astonishing mystery.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Would you happen to know anyone I could interview who served Scotland Yard that long ago? Acquaintances who might recall details of the case not found in the newspapers?”

  “You flatter me. I was serving then. Still only a constable.”

  “A young constable,” said Bell, laying it on thick. “I’d never have guessed. Well, this is my lucky day. Do you have a theory?”

  “Of what?”

  “The mystery of how the greatest police detectives in history never caught the cruelest murderer in England?”

  “There is no ‘mystery.’ The solution is simplicity itself.”

  “I am all ears,” said Isaac Bell.

  “The Whitechapel Fiend committed suicide.”

  “When?”

  “He drowned himself in the Thames in December 1888. Three weeks before Christmas. One month after committing his last outrage.”

  15

  “Who was he?” asked Isaac Bell.

  “His name was Druitt,” said the inspector. “Montague John Druitt, a barrister of good family. It was recognized by senior investigators that his brain had collapsed under the weight of accumulated horror. You see, the armor that deflects emotion in the lower classes wears thin as men advance up the scale. Druitt being of good family, his outrages were more than he could bear. He had no choice but to do the gentlemanly thing and hurl himself in the river.”

  “I see . . . But how does your theory explain—”

  “It’s not a ‘theory,’ Mr. Bell. It is fact. Just as it is a fact that if Druitt hadn’t killed himself, we’d have very soon had him dead to rights.”

  “You mean that Scotland Yard was closing in on him?”

  “It was only a matter of time.”

  “Fascinating . . . But how does your . . . ‘fact’ explain the Ripper murders after Christmas?”

  “The Ripper’s last murder was committed November ninth, 1888.”

  “Kelly.”

  “Kelly?”

  “His victim of November ninth, 1888. Mary Kelly.”

  “Of course. Learning the prostitutes’ names must go with the hobby.”

  Incensed, Bell said coldly, “Remembering their names reminds me that defenseless women were murdered.”

  “Quite. At any rate, that one was Montague John Druitt’s fifth and final murder. His body was pulled from the river at the end of December. There were no Ripper murders after November ninth.”

  “How do you explain the murders in ’eighty-nine and ’ninety that exhibited markedly similar maniacal butchery?”

  “Those were committed by other murderers.”

  “Also never solved?” Bell asked.

  “Correct.”

  “Did you actually work on the case?”

  “No.”

  “Would you know anyone I could interview about his suicide? Retired policemen possibly? Perhaps a constable who saw the Ripper pulled from the water? Or a detective who investigated subsequent murders similar to those that the barrister who killed himself had committed?”

  “Why are you harping on them? Those murders were wholly unrelated to the Whitechapel outrages.”

  Isaac Bell mastered his mounting anger to answer like an innocent hobbyist. “It would be a feather in my cap—and what a boon to my insurance business to establish friendships for life in Scotland Yard—if I were somehow able to turn up definitive proof that Jack the Ripper drowned in the Thames.”

  “Ancient history,” scoffed the inspector. “Stories of a quarter
century past. Think of it, man. It’s been twenty-five years.”

  “Twenty-three,” said Isaac Bell. “Tell your retired friends I’ll buy dinner for anyone who’s got a story.”

  The inspector stared long and hard. Then, without a hint of a smile or degree of warmth in his eyes, he said, “You’ll get more out of that lot standing drinks.”

  “Montague John Druitt. Oh, aye, governor, I remember Druitt.”

  “Did you actually meet him?” asked Isaac Bell.

  The Red Lion in Parliament Street was a loud public house, blue with tobacco smoke, a short way from the House of Commons. Back in New York, Bell would have called it a cop saloon. It was crawling with constables and detectives. Even the elderly potboy collecting empty glasses looked like a pensioned-off bobby. It was conveniently around the corner from the Canon Row Station in the back of Scotland Yard, and the landlady was a looker who had young and old eating out of her hand.

  The former constable drafted by the prickly inspector to meet with Isaac Bell had served his entire career in Scotland Yard’s Whitechapel H Division, retiring as a sergeant. He had asked for a pint of “mild” but had accepted happily Bell’s offer to splurge on “brown and mild.”

  “Did I meet him? Face-to-face, I did. He looked like a scrap of wet canvas. Been in the water a month. If his family hadn’t raised the alarm, we’d never have identified the poor sod. His brother recognized bits of his clothing.”

  “Poor sod? You mean Jack the Ripper?”

  “If you say so, guv.”

  Bell looked at him sharply. He was a shrewd old man, the sort who chose his words carefully, and Bell heard a private message in his “If you say so” answer. The tall detective was couching his next question when he was interrupted by a sudden clanging of electric bells. A fire alarm, he thought, but no one in the pub took notice except two men at the bar who downed their drinks and belted out the door. The ringing continued, shrill and urgent.