“Fact-based truth, Mr. Bell,” Joel Wallace told Isaac Bell. “High-and-mighty Scotland Yard never nailed Jack the Ripper.”
When Americans ran into trouble abroad — businessmen swindled, tourists with daughters excited by shady suitors, art collectors worried that bargain-priced Rembrandts and Titians might have been lifted from their rightful owners — the lucky ones landed in Jermyn Street at the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s London field office.
Joel Wallace ramrodded the outfit. He was a short, rugged man in a loud suit, and he had made the Van Dorns a formidable presence in the capital city of the British Empire. The stuffier sort of Englishmen might be put off by his cocksure manner, but his brash ways assured Americans that Wallace was an aggressive detective they could count on, and word soon got around the expensive hotels and four-day ships: See Joel Wallace. The Van Dorns’ll set you straight.
“The Ripper ran circles around Scotland Yard. They won’t love a Yank reminding them.”
Which was precisely why Isaac would not want to present himself as Chief Investigator of a private detective agency. Better to let the high-and-mighty peer down their noses at a humble insurance sleuth who was indulging an eccentric hobby on his day off.
“Toyed with the coppers,” said Wallace. “Played tricks on ’em. You’re looking at his biggest joke right across the street — Metropolitan Police H.Q.”
It was a cold spring day, and the rain that greeted Bell’s ship at Southampton Docks and pelted the boat train was soaking London. Canvas topcoats were in order, for the walk past the cherry blossoms of St. James’s Park and across the Whitehall government district to the Victoria Embankment. Backs to the Thames, they faced New Scotland Yard, a double-wing, four-story building striped in horizontal rows of stone and brick. Soot-black Parliament buildings loomed just upriver. Scarlet trams rumbled on Westminster Bridge. Big Ben was striking two o’clock.
“New Scotland Yard — built the same year the Ripper started killing. One guess what the workmen found where they were laying the foundation.”
“Half a body,” said Isaac Bell. Five days steaming across the Atlantic Ocean in the Cunard liner Mauretania had been time to reread and ponder Research’s newspaper clippings and memorandums word by word. A phrase from the inquest stuck in his head. The butchered woman found in Scotland Yard’s cellar had been “well-nourished.” Hardly a description to fit the alcoholic prostitutes Jack the Ripper had murdered in the Whitechapel slum.
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 fairly 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.”
“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.
“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.”
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.”
“What about his ability to remove organs?”
“Again, he’s earned far too much credit. His method of removing organs was to slash open the general area and tear loose what he was after.”
“Did you see any symbols cut in the skin?”
“Symbols? What sort of symbols?”
“Did he carve shallow marks on the victims?” Bell described the crescent shapes he had seen carved on Anna Waterbury’s and Mary Beth Winthrop’s corpses.
“No crescent shapes,” said the surgeon.
“None? I don’t mean wounds. Marks.”
“But they weren’t crescent-shaped,” said the surgeon.
“You did see them?”
“I saw L-shaped marks. Like this— May I?” He reached for Bell’s notebook and fountain pen, turned to a blank page and drew:
Bell shook his head… Unless… “Could a slip of the blade make an L look like a crescent?”
“No, the L’s were sharply defined by straight lines. L-shaped cuts, made with two strokes of the blade, on perpendicular courses. If that’s what you mean by a symbol.”
“That’s what I meant. But not that shape.”
“You could say the same about the V-shaped cuts, too.”
“V-shaped cuts?”
The surgeon drew:
Bell flipped pages in his notebook.
“No,” said the surgeon. “Not at all like yours. L’s and V’s. Yours look like horns.”
The British Lock Museum occupied a three-story brick row house several doors down from the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The hall porter invited Isaac Bell to browse the collection while he went in search of “Keeper Roberts.”
Bell roamed the centuries-spanning displays of safes, handcuffs, door locks, and keys with an expert’s appreciation. He admired a working model of an Egyptian pharaoh’s pin tumbler lock and examined skeptically a German chastity belt. Draftsman’s drawings detailed the workings of the 1861 Yale cylinder pin tumbler that had elevated lockpicking to a fine art.
A thief-catcher lock — which Bell had heard of but never seen — was accompanied by an eighteenth-century lesson book for accountants. The book warned auditors tallying the estates of the deceased to beware of safes armed with spring-loaded manacles to trap a thief who tried to pick the lock. This one protected a strongbox, left open to show springs that had the power to shatter wrist bones.
A lock dubbed un-pickable caught his eye. The museum challenged the visitor to try, and even supplied a set of picks. Isaac Bell was using his own when Nigel Roberts walked in.
“You’re wasting your time, Mr. Bell. No one has ever succeeded in picking that lock.”
“It’s got a lot of pins,” said Bell, who maintained a light pressure on his turning tool, which he had inserted vertically to leave room for his pick. “Or it could be because they tried it using your tools.”
He lifted the final pin and increased pressure on his turning tool. The un-pickable lock rotated open, and he looked Roberts full in the face.
“Davy Collins thinks that Jack the Ripper was as agile as a young man. Which you could have told me yourself, if you cared to. You also could have told me that Davy himself admitted he was ‘speculating.’ Whoever he saw running wasn’t necessarily the Ripper.”
“Who are you, Mr. Bell?”
“‘Power pollutes,’ you told me. ‘Obedience enslaves.’ Who do you obey?”
“No one.”
“What game are you playing?” asked Bell. “Why did you send me on a wild-goose chase?”
The tall detective and the white-haired old man locked angry eyes.
“Those girls he slaughtered aren’t my ‘hobby,’” said Roberts. He started blinking behind his spectacles. “They are not pieces in a game.”
Isaac Bell recalled that the retired constable at the Red Lion had told him, “Nigel Roberts could never put old Jack out of his mind.”
Despite the games, Bell had to concede that something about Roberts rang true. Did he find the murderer as repulsive as Bell did? Did he truly care about the women the Ripper had killed so long ago?
“Calling him a monster,” said Bell, “or naming him the Whitechapel Fiend, somehow denies that he was a human criminal.”
“It also somehow denies that the girls were human beings,” said Roberts. “And that makes me almost as angry as their tarting up their failure to catch him with a word like ‘mystery.’ It makes the Ripper seem like an unstoppable force of nature instead of the product of incompetent investigators.”
“Jack the Ripper is not my hobby, either,” Bell said bluntly. “I am not an insurance investigator on a busman’s holiday.”
“Then what’s your interest— Don’t worry. I won’t tell. Besides, they wouldn’t listen.”
“O.K.,” said Bell. “But tell me something first. A professional operative has been shadowing me since I got to London. Is there anything in the Jack the Ripper case that my asking questions would get me shadowed?”
“We’ve already established that Scotland Yard did not solve at least five murders by the same killer, plus ten or more after he supposedly drowned. Were they incompetent or did they prefer not to? If they were incompetent, they don’t want to be reminded. If corrupt, then they don’t want you to expose them.”
“But I don’t think the shadow is a cop,” said Bell.
“Why?”
“I know cops. This guy is different. Besides, the inspector helped me talk to retired coppers. He must have known if I came to the Red Lion, I would meet you.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Roberts.
Convinced that Roberts knew nothing about the shadow, Bell palmed his Van Dorn badge and showed it to the old man.
“I am Chief Investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency. I am hunting a murderer who operates similarly to your Jack the Ripper.”
“Do private detectives investigate murder in America?”
“Ordinarily, murder is a matter for the police,” Bell admitted.
He told Roberts about his role in Anna Waterbury’s death.
“I let her down,” he said. “I let her father down. I will make amends the only way I can — by strapping her killer in the electric chair.”
“I wish you the best of luck,” said Roberts. “But I fail to see similarities to Jack the Ripper, who killed many, many women.”
Bell described the subsequent murders of Lillian Lent and Mary Beth Winthrop.
Roberts grew excited. He demanded details.
Bell reported the patterns: fair, petite young women; their necks broken; their bodies wound in capes. He gave him the murders turned up by his All Field Offices Alert: the slaying in Albuquerque that Texas Walt unearthed; Tim Holian’s account of girls killed in rising numbers that paralleled the movie business shift to Los Angeles; Bronson’s raw assessment of relentless slaughter in San Francisco.
Roberts asked, “Are you saying that your murderer operates similarly to Jack the Ripper? Or are you saying that he is actually one and the same, Jack the Ripper?”
“I was told at the Yard that Jack the Ripper drowned himself in the Thames.”
“I do not believe you left America in the midst of a murder investigation to study the habits of famous killers. I ask you again, are you speculating that your man is actually Jack the Ripper?”
“Whether he is hinges largely on how old he was when he killed in London. Was he as young as Davy Collins suggests? Keeping in mind that no one knows for sure whether Davy Collins saw the actual Ripper or someone else.”
Roberts shook his head and marveled, “It doesn’t seem possible… But now I see why his age is so important to you.” Abruptly he smiled and looked satisfied. “You’re ready for Barlowe.”
“Who is Barlowe?” Bell was wary. It sounded like Roberts was back to his games.
“Wayne Barlowe was a newspaper artist who drew for the Illustrated News. You’ll have seen his drawings in your research. Try to get him to tell you a story. Tell him I told you to ask him to tell you a story. If he asks which story, tell him the one I never believed.”
“Will his story tell me the Ripper’s age?”
“I was told that Wayne Barlowe interviewed a woman who saw Jack the Ripper up close. I asked, repeatedly, whether what I heard was true. Barlowe won’t tell me. In fact, he cut me off. You may have better luck, not being with the Yard.”
“Will he tell me the Ripper’s age?” Bell repeated harshly.
“With any luck, you can tell his age yourself.”
“How?”
“When you see the Ripper’s face.”
The Cutthroat walked on a railroad track with a girl in his arms.
“I love American rivers,” he told her.
The Ohio River was tearing alongside them in the dark. It made a sound that seemed to blend far-off thunder and the slither of an enormous snake.
“Your rivers are mighty compared to the Thames.”
He laughed softly. “Even in flood, the Thames can’t hold a candle to your rivers. Yours drain mountains — ours mere hills — and valleys as broad as all England.”
Swelled by melting snow and spring rains, they uprooted trees, smashed steamboats, scoured soil, and swept drowned cattle, men, and women to distant oceans. A floating body raced on the surface, pummeled by waves and driftwood. A body that sank was hurtled over the river bottom in a corrosive slurry of mud and water.
“The Mississippi is my favorite,” he said. “But we’ll make do with the Ohio tonight— Not to worry. It will take you to the Mississippi in a week or so.”
Scraped, battered, and unrecognizable where the rivers joined at Cairo. A month or so later, seagulls would feast in the Gulf of Mexico. “Show me no body,” he told her, “and I’ll show you the perfect crime… Let me count the ways.”
Fires — that’ll teach her to smoke in bed. Fresh-dug cellars before they cement the floor. Shallow graves where only coyotes sniff her out. Played-out quarries. Smelters. Oil refineries. Distilleries. An overgrown mine shaft in Pennsylvania once, where, judging by the stink, someone else had the same idea. “But this is true, my dear — for crisp, clean, ease of disposal, nothing beats a river.”
His night vision was superb, and he walked sure-footedly toward an abandoned coal wharf where riverboats took on fuel before the railroads put them out of business. Suddenly he stopped, cocked his ear, and listened hard.
“Do you hear that?”
Voices singing:
“Put your arms around me, honey, hold me tight.
Huddle up and cuddle up with all your might.
Oh, babe…”
The Cutthroat spotted them in the starlight, stumbling toward him on the train tracks. A pair of drunks harmonizing, or so they thought, Collins and Harlan’s hit Victor recording from Madame Sherry. Strapping men, he saw as they drew closer, work-hardened day laborers, young, quick, and barely slowed by the booze. Even though they were having trouble remembering the words:
“When they look at me, my heart begins to float,
Then it starts a-rockin’ like a motorboat.
Oooh-ooh, I never knew any gal like you.”
They finally noticed him ten feet in front of them, lurched to a halt, and looked him over.
“Whatcha got there, mister?”
“The young lady had a bit much to drink,” said the Cutthroat.
They snickered.
The bigger one said, “So now you’re gonna have a bit much of her.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, you’re carrying her down the tracks into the dark so you can have her before she comes to.” He turned to his friend. “You know somethin’, Vern? Seeing as how there’s two of us and only one a him, we’re going first.”
He turned back to the Cutthroat. “You can have seconds.”
“Thirds,” said Vern.
The Cutthroat opened his arms. The girl fell hard, audibly cracking her head on one of the rails. The cape he had wrapped around her flew open.
“What did you do that for?” the bigger drunk howled. “You want to kill her?”
“Ain’t gonna be no fun dead…” said Vern. His voice trailed off as he moved closer.
“Jimbo, you see what I see?”
“Oh, man, she fell on her head, busted her neck.”
“Look again, you idiot. She was already dead.”
Jimbo leaned over the body. He fumbled a match from his clothing and raked it across his belt buckle. The Cutthroat closed one eye and slitted the other. Sulfur flamed, half blinding them both.
“I’ll be damned. He cut her head almost off.”
“And look what he did to her—”
The Cutthroat’s cane hung from a strap looped around his wrist. When the match went out, he drew his sword from the cane and whipped the bloody blade to the bigger man’s throat. “Do exactly what I tell you, Jimbo.”
Jimbo’s hands shot up in the air. “Easy, mister. Easy. Take it easy. We’re not telling anyone, we’re just going to—”
“Do exactly what I tell you, Jimbo. Are you ready?”
“Yeah, yeah, just don’t—”
“Punch that man in the mouth as hard as you can.”
“What—”
“Don’t hold back. If you hold back, I will slash your throat wide open.” He could have said “like hers” but did not have to. Jimbo had seen plenty in the flare of the match. “Now!”
The smaller man didn’t move. He just gaped in disbelief. Jimbo’s fist struck him full in the mouth, knocking in teeth, and slamming him half conscious on his back.
Jimbo said, “I’m sorry, Vern. He made me—”
“Turn around, Jimbo.”
“You said you wouldn’t stick me.”
“I will not ‘stick’ you. Turn around!”
The Cutthroat swung his cane with all his strength. Reinforced with steel, heavier than it looked, it caved a shard of bone into Jimbo’s temple, dropping him on top of his groaning friend. The Cutthroat sheathed his sword in his cane and picked up a chunk of heavy track ballast in each hand and pounded at both men’s heads. When they were dead, he felt in their clothing for their rotgut bottle.
He raised it by the neck, high to the stars, and smashed it down on Jimbo’s shattered temple. Broken glass and whiskey sprayed the bodies. Then he stepped back and cast a shrewd eye on his handiwork. Whether or not a train ran them over in the dark, if Sherlock Holmes himself discovered them in the daylight, even the great detective would deduce that Jimbo and Vern had killed each other in a drunken fight.
He wrapped the girl in his cape again and lifted her tenderly into his arms and continued walking to the coal wharf, marking its location by ghostly shadows that trees growing out of the long-abandoned structure thrust against the stars. Closer, he saw the silhouettes of mooring bollards. The dock planks were rotten, and he took care to walk where underlying joists would take their weight.
Her hair was bright as straw, and when he lowered her into the Ohio River, the water splayed it like a halo. Air captured in the cape held her afloat. An eddy formed a patch of still water beside the wharf, and it took a while before the current bit a hold and swept her into the dark.
“Good-bye. You were everything I hoped for.”
“Poor Detective Roberts.”
Wayne Barlowe laughed.
Isaac Bell had found the illustrator’s loft in a spacious Chelsea garret with a skylight in the north-sloping roof. While retired Scotland Yard C.I.D. Detective Sergeant Roberts could pass as an artist, with his long silver hair and glittery spectacles, the actual artist Wayne Barlowe resembled a policeman — squat as a fireplug, with an expressionless face pockmarked like a firing squad wall.
“What do you find funny about ‘poor Detective Roberts’?” asked Bell. Barlowe had already struck him as another game player like Roberts, and the tall detective was fed up with game players.
“Just when Roberts is finally on the verge of giving up identifying the ‘greatest monster of the Victorian Age,’ Mr. Isaac Bell, insurance adjuster and amateur sleuth, arrives from America with a beguiling theory that the ‘greatest monster’ is going strong abroad.”
Barlowe had works in progress on several easels, blank sketch pads on others. On the biggest, he was drawing, in fine-lined pen and ink, a sperm whale ramming a boat with its head and splintering another with its tail. Bell had never seen a whale more malevolent, and he said as much, reckoning that such skills might reproduce accurately a description of Jack the Ripper’s face.
Barlowe ducked his head modestly and thanked him for the compliment.
“Nigel Roberts heard a rumor that you interviewed a woman who saw Jack the Ripper up close. I’ve studied your drawings in the newspapers, but I have never seen one that includes his face.”
“I never drew his face.”
“But did you hear him described by the woman who saw him?”
“The rumor is true.”
“May I ask why you won’t tell Roberts what she said?”
“Roberts thought I was daft. But Roberts was a copper. So he couldn’t speak to the people who trusted me. He obviously did not admit it to you, but the fact is, I did tell him what she said. I just wouldn’t draw it.”
“What did he look like?”
“What did he look like?” Barlowe mused. “Angelic.”
“Angelic? Are you joking?”
The sketch artist picked up a pencil in his blunt fingers and walked to another easel. In seconds, a face was alive, its features and some hints of character distinguished by a few swift lines.
“A boy?”
“Handsome, isn’t he?”
Bell shook his head in disbelief. “A choirboy.”
“As I said, angelic.”
Bell stared, shaking his head. “Do you think he really did look like this?”
“Had the young woman ever made the acquaintance of a Bible, she’d have sworn on a stack of them. She truly believed he looked like this, even though he scared the daylights out of her.”
“How did he frighten her if he looked so innocent?”
“He cornered her in Hanbury Street.”
“That’s where he killed Annie Chapman,” said Bell.
“Same exact place. Number 29 Hanbury Street. An alley leads into a backyard. Chapman was next. First time he tried it was this girl. Grabbed her throat in both his hands.”
“How did she get loose?”
“I don’t know if you have any conception of the life these women live. It’s no better now than back then. You can see it in any slum street that hasn’t been cleared. And many that have… The girl had wandered all night in the rain, seeking clients to raise the price of a bed to sleep in but spending it on drink instead. Out in the rain to earn the money again. By the time the Ripper cornered her, she was soaked to the skin. Dripping wet, head to toe. His hands slipped. She ran.”
Barlowe tossed his pencil on the easel tray and stalked back to his whale.
Set in the back of the house away from street noise, the atelier grew quiet but for the occasional, distant huff of locomotives crossing the Battersea Railway Bridge and the scratching of Barlowe’s steel pen.
“What was her name?” Bell asked.
“Emily.”
Bell pondered what he had heard. “I think I understand why you never drew his face.”
“And why is that, Mr. Bell? I would like to know. Because I have asked myself a thousand times, could I have stopped the Ripper from killing God knows how many more girls if I had?”
“No one would believe that this handsome boy would hurt anyone. In fact, they would even find it impossible to believe he would patronize a prostitute.”
“Not when he could have any girl in London with his smile. My editors would have laughed me out of their office.”
Bell saw that Barlowe was deeply distressed and thought he knew why. The tall detective moved closer and arrowed the full force of his probing gaze into the artist’s eyes. “Or, were you afraid you might finger the wrong man?”
Barlowe stared, silent for a full minute, before he whispered, “What if…” He paused to compose himself. “What if in her terror and panic, she imagined another face? A different face. A boy she might have admired from a distance? Or a handsome young gentleman — it seems a gentleman’s face, wouldn’t you agree? — a youth in clean clothes and utterly unattainable? Couldn’t even the poorest creature experience a romantic crush?… But… What if he were recognized — this innocent, whose face I sketched for the newspapers and posters? If the mob didn’t kick him to death, they would hang him from a lamppost.”
“Didn’t you think to ask her again later, after she calmed down?”
“Of course! I waited a week. I went to her regular spots. Couldn’t find her. Spoke with a woman who had known her. She told me that Emily was afraid the Ripper would come back for her. She was so frightened that she kept running. She left Whitechapel. Left London — half mad with fear, she must have been. I was told later that the poor thing ran all the way to Angel Meadow.”
“Where is that?”
“Manchester. And if you think Whitechapel is rotten, you should see Angel Meadow. Thousands of workers’ tenements built on top of a paupers’ graveyard. Twenty-five years back, it was even worse. Engels, who you may recall wrote the Communist Manifesto, and had seen a thing or two, called it Hell on Earth.”
“Were you there for the newspapers?” Bell asked.
“I wrangled a commission. But I went looking for Emily.”
“Did you find her?”
“Easily. She was famous, having come from exotic London. Slum dwellers’ lives were so tightly circumscribed in those days. The Manchester folk called her London Emily.”
“Did you ask her?”
“She saw me coming and she let out a shriek and ran for her life.”
“I need something to take to Manchester,” said Isaac Bell.
Joel Wallace unlocked the two-inch oak door to the closet that housed the field office arsenal.
“What part of Manchester?”
“Angel Meadow.”
“The poor folk are too beaten down to trouble you much. But for the gangs — they call them scuttlers — I recommend a U.S. Marines’ landing party.”
“I was thinking more in terms of an alley gun.” Bell was opting for close-quarters stopping power that wouldn’t mow down innocents.
“Number 4 lead bird shot,” said Wallace, “will change minds up to five yards.” He handed Bell a double-barreled derringer. Bell practiced loading the two-inch .410 cartridges into the stubby pistol until he could reload without taking his eyes off his target.
Bell settled his hotel bill with the Savoy’s cashier and exchanged pound notes for a sack of shiny half-crown coins. In an old-clothes shop at St. Katharine Docks, he bought a sailcloth seabag, a pair of rugged trousers, a rough wool undershirt, a frayed jacket bursting at the elbows, a pair of heavy boots that the shopkeeper said came from a steamship stoker’s widow, a length of rope for a belt, and a sweat-stained stoker’s cap that he inspected closely for lice.
He hailed a hansom to Euston, and changed clothes in the station lavatory. His disguise passed early tests with flying colors. The train ticket clerk assumed without asking that he was traveling third class, and a porter who bumped into him barked, “Make a lane, mate,” instead of, “Beg your pardon, governor.”
Drawn by the new Prince of Wales class 4-8-0 locomotive, the Manchester Limited glided from the station. Bell’s train, a local destined to make many stops, chugged after it, accelerated in fits and starts between dark, seemingly endless walls of slab-sided brick factories, and lumbered suddenly into open fields that seemed impossibly green in contrast to the city. The fields were speckled with snowy sheep and, as the train continued north, were laced by narrow canals.
In four and a half hours, the train passed through factory towns on the outskirts and arrived in Manchester, an industrial city of immense modern cotton mills and a thousand tall chimneys. The opulent railroad station, banks, stock exchange, and sumptuous hotels and palaces, were monuments to the yearly weaving of eight billion yards of cheap checked gingham cloth that made “Cottonopolis” so wealthy that the only city richer in the world was London.
Isaac Bell walked to the slums. It was raining hard. The last time he had seen smoke so thick was Pittsburgh’s infamous oily “black fog” that hurt to breathe.
Twelve pence made an English shilling, twenty shillings a pound. For fifteen pounds, grandees like the Earl of Milton and Lord Strone could charter a private train. Or a village could pay a schoolteacher’s salary for a year. The prostitutes Jack the Ripper murdered had been hoping to earn four pence to sleep indoors.
Isaac Bell’s half crowns — two and a half shillings — equaled thirty pence, and word raced like fire through the narrow lanes and fetid alleys that ringed the thundering mills. A tall sailor with yellow hair was handing out “two-and-six” to anyone who could tell him anything about an old woman known as London Emily.
Astonishment on the slum dwellers’ faces told Bell that a single shilling would have done the job. Work in the mills was sporadic, depending on the markets, and low-paying. There were lines outside the workhouses that traded a night out of the rain for a day of work, breaking rocks or picking oakum out of old hemp rope. The Salvation Army soup kitchens were crowded.
He described London Emily as short and thin, with gray or white hair. Even if she had been only sixteen when Jack the Ripper attacked her, from what he saw of Angel Meadow, twenty-three years in the slum would have long since turned her into an old woman.
A pale creature dressed in a ragged shawl tugged his sleeve. “I’m her. I’m London Emily.”
Isaac Bell shook his head. “I’m sorry, but you’re half a foot taller than she was on her best day.”
Against his better judgment, Bell gave her a half crown. It was a mistake that he would not make a second time. Flocks of old women descended from every point of the compass. Fights broke out as they struggled to get near him.
Bell took off at a long-legged run down lanes and through alleys until he lost them. But soon another flock gathered.
He was thinking he had to come back another day in a different guise when he heard a frightened cry. “Scuttlers.”
The women scattered.
The street gangs had come hunting for the sailor with half crowns.
Bell had not seen a bobby since he entered the slum and did not expect to meet one now. They came at him from two directions. It took a moment to realize they were separate groups who had spotted him simultaneously and would fight for the right to attack him. Swinging spiked pickax handles, short, thin, scarred, and tattooed men and boys exploded into bloody battle. The winners dispersed the losers with a bombardment of dead dogs and rats, stomped the fallen with nail-studded clogs, and charged Isaac Bell.
Bell had already fished the derringer out of his seabag. Waiting for the leaders to close within fifteen feet, he braced against the recoil and fired one barrel. The hail of lead pellets knocked the legs out from under four men leading the charge. The remainder gazed into the as-yet-unfired second barrel and cocked their skinny arms to throw their clubs.
Bell fired his second barrel and ducked the only club they managed to launch. His hands flew. He broke the gun open, pulled the spent shells, loaded in fresh ones, flicked it shut, and took deliberate aim.
A flicker of motion in the corner of his eye made him jump back and protect his head as the body of another dead animal plummeted down from a rooftop. The scuttlers charged. Bell fired, backed into a wall, and fired again. In New York, he would expect Number 4 lead shot at point-blank range to send the toughest Gophers fleeing — the same for a mob of strikebreakers in Colorado. The scuttlers were more hopeless, more accustomed to pain, or more anesthetized by booze, and when the bird shot only penetrated a half inch into their flesh, they charged again, bloody and limping.
Bell tried to reload. The lead scuttler swung a spiked club.
Hands busy on the gun, eyes on the threat, Bell stepped into the charge, kicked hard, snapped the barrels shut, fired twice, and reloaded. The man he kicked was writhing at his feet. Two more were down on the greasy cobblestones, pawing at their legs and trying to stand. Bell took aim and walked toward the rest.
There was ice in his eyes, and even the bravest broke and ran.
Bell vaulted a wooden fence. He had seconds before they regrouped.
He tore through twisted rows of reeking backyards, vaulted another fence, sidestepped an open sewer, and emerged in a section of the dense slum where no one had heard the gunfire. Or maybe they had, for the lane he found himself in was empty of people, and the silence was so deep that he could hear the hollow roar of gingham looms shaking wooden floors behind the high stone walls that guarded the mills.
An old woman poked her head from a window with no glass.
Staring at Bell, she disappeared, then reappeared in an alley. She edged closer, stepped into the lane, then edged back, restless as a cat. She was tiny, her wrinkled skin pale, her hair white. Bell stepped toward her. She glanced about fearfully but stood her ground. When she opened her mouth to speak, he saw she had no teeth. That lack could be what slurred her tongue so badly that he could barely hear her. Addiction to laudanum — a tincture of opium suspended in alcohol — was the likelier cause, and laudanum would also explain her restlessness.
“What did you say?”
“London Emily. I hear you’re giving two-and-six fer London Emily.”
“So did everybody in Angel Meadow.”
“I’m London Emily.”
“A dozen ladies told me the same. How can I believe you?”
“’Cuz I know what they don’t.”
“What’s that?”
“I know what yer gonna ask me.”
Intrigued, though not yet hopeful, Bell said, “Go on. What do you think I want to ask you?”
“Jack the Ripper.”
Bell shook his head. “Everyone knows that London Emily ran from the Ripper.”
The old woman stepped closer to Bell and spoke in a stronger voice. “Not in Manchester.”
“What do you mean?”
“I never told a soul. He’d-a found out.”
Isaac Bell moved subtly to corner the old woman. Would she scream when he showed her Barlowe’s sketch of a face that had been emblazoned in her memory before the Ripper attacked and long after the night of mind-rending terror? Would she run at the sight of the man who nearly killed her?
He pulled the stiff protective envelope from his seabag and carefully slid the sketch from it. London Emily fixed her eyes on it. She stiffened under her shapeless shawl. She stared. She broke into a toothless smile.
“Do you recognize him, Emily?”
She whispered.
Bell asked, “What did you say?”
“So handsome.”
“Do you remember?” Bell asked gently. “Where did you see him?”
“Hanbury Street.”
“Do you remember what number?” He was making a conscious effort now to quiet his excitement.
Emily nodded vigorously. “Number 29.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He asked me, ‘What’s your name?’”
Bell waited. She said nothing more. He asked, “What did you tell him?”
She stared at the sketch with a half smile.
“What did you tell him when he asked your name?”
“I told him, ‘Emily.’”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘What a lovely name.’ He said it suited me.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Thank you, sir.’”
“What next?”
“We went in the backyard and he grabbed me by the neck.”
She was getting agitated again, and Bell tried to ease her mind. “Was he really this handsome?”
“Oh, aye. Even more.”
“Emily,” Bell asked gently. “Could you have confused him with a memory of a different man? Some man you had known before? Or seen on the street?”
“Who could forget such a beautiful face?”
“Was he really this young?”
She shrugged. “I was young.”
“Are you absolutely sure he was the Ripper? Not someone else? Not a different handsome man?”
“Not someone else.”
“Even though you had only seen him once.”
“Not once! Not once! What do you mean?” she asked indignantly.
Bell felt the ground reel under his boots. He himself had speculated. Had the Ripper known his first victim? Obviously, Emily was not the woman buried under Scotland Yard. But was she someone else he had known, too?
“You saw him before you saw him in Hanbury Street?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember where you saw him?”
“Oh, aye.”
“Where?”
“Wilton’s.”
“Wilton’s? What is Wilton’s?”
“Wilton’s Music Hall. In Wellclose Square. I went if I could find a penny or a man to pay my way.”
Isaac Bell felt as if the black sky had fallen on his head.
A young girl’s crush, just as Wayne Barlowe had guessed. If not the angelic gentleman the illustrator had proposed, could a handsome actor have caught her eye? All the more dazzling in limelight and theater makeup?
“He was an actor?”
“No.”
“No?” Bell’s hopes soared as quickly as they had fallen.
“They never let him act — except once he carried a spear.”
“Then what did he do at Wilton’s?”
“Everything. He wore a sandwich board to tout the show. He ran for beer. One day, I watched him paint the scenery in the backyard. He sold sweets and passed out programs. Sometimes, he was a callboy, knocking on dressing room doors. And he stood right at the elbow of the prompter himself.”
An all-rounder, thought Bell. A boy-of-all-work assigned every job that needed doing in the theater. But how deep was their connection?
“Did he hand you a program?”
“I couldn’t get in that night. I had no money. By the time I earned it, he was gone.”
“Did you help him paint scenery in the yard?”
Emily’s face fell. “He chased me off.” She grew restless, her hands fluttering.
Bell asked, “How often did you see him on the stage with a spear?”
“Once.”
“Only once?” How did one sighting on the stage stick him so deep in her memory?
“And once when he carried a lantern.”
“So only twice?”
“Twice.”
“But you said you went often.”
“He wasn’t always there.”
Bell was aware that laudanum addicts were prey to hallucinations. As hallucinations went, her handsome callboy was a doozy.
“Emily, would you like to keep his picture?”
“Yes, please.”
Bell helped her work it inside the envelope. She hid it in the folds of her shawl.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“They give me a cot at the Salvation Army. I help in the kitchen.”
“I’ll walk you home,” said Bell.
“Why?”
“Because I am going to give this sack of half crowns to the Army commander to be sure you’re taken care of.”
Emily got a crafty look in her eye. “If you give it to me, I can take care of myself.”
“I would rather give it to someone I can trust to keep you safe.”
“You think I might spend it on laudanum.”
“No ‘might’ about it,” said Bell so firmly that she dropped the subject with an abject nod.
At the door of the soup kitchen, she blurted, “Don’t tell nobody what I said.”
“I won’t.”
“He’ll come for me.”
“Don’t worry,” said Isaac Bell, hearing his own words ring hollow, “I’ll make sure he doesn’t… Emily? What was the callboy’s name?”
“Jack.”
“Jack? Do you remember his last name?”
“Spelvin.”
“Jack Spelvin?”
“Handsome Jack.”
“Here’s a strange one,” said Harry Warren, reading from the Research Department report that Isaac Bell had ordered sent every morning to the Cutthroat Squad.
Helen Mills, James Dashwood, Archie Abbott, and several other detectives in the New York field office bull pen not of the Cutthroat Squad looked up from their work.
“What’s strange?”
“Woman throat slashed and carved up in Cleveland.”
“Sounds like our man.”
“Except she was a six-foot-tall brunette.”
“Prostitute?”
“Banker’s wife.”
“Crescent carvings?”
“None reported.”
“Shouldn’t Cleveland send a man to the morgue?”
“Already did. No carvings.”
“Sounds like a coincidence.”
“Who wants to tell Mr. Bell it’s a coincidence?”
A profound silence settled over them — the Chief Investigator took a dim view of coincidences in general and an even dimmer view of coincidences offered as explanations. The silence was broken suddenly by James Dashwood, who was thumbing through a pile of old issues of The Clipper, the actors’ weekly that listed jobs.
“There you are!”
“Who?”
“Stage manager I told you about. For Jekyll and Hyde? I knew I recognized him.” He held up The Clipper. “Henry Young.” He pointed to a line drawing of an actor playing a villain in an 1897 melodrama.
“That’s not a wanted poster.”
“I know. But now I know he was working in a Syracuse stock company in the late nineties.”
Joseph Van Dorn burst into the bull pen. Last heard from, the Boss was in Washington, and the detectives jumped to their feet. “Who’s heard from Isaac?”
Archie Abbott said, “He had Joel Wallace cable me to check up on Lord Strone. He’s the—”
“British spy. What does he want with a British spy?”
“To see if Strone’s still in business.”
“Is he?”
“He’s kind of disappeared on his yacht.”
“That’s all you’ve heard from Isaac?”
“Well, he cabled Marion when he arrived in London.”
“Maybe we should install his wife down here to keep up with him.”
Van Dorn stormed off. Looks were exchanged. The Boss was losing patience with the Cutthroat Squad.
Archie Abbott waited until the front desk telephoned that Van Dorn had gone downstairs for a late breakfast. Quickly, he stood up and gathered his things. “See you tomorrow.”
“You’re going home at ten in the morning?”
“I’ve got tickets to see Jekyll and Hyde again.”
“It closed. It’s on the road, remember?”
“I’m seeing it in Columbus.”
“You’re going all the way to Ohio to watch a play?”
“Lillian invited Marion Bell. Marion missed it in New York, and now she misses Isaac, so we’re taking her with us.”
“Still, a long ways to go for a play.”
“My father-in-law is lending us his train.”
Detectives who rode to work on streetcars rolled their eyes.
“It will get us there in time for the curtain,” Abbott explained blithely. “On the way home, we’ll tuck into bed for a good night’s sleep.”
Harry Warren said, “Of all the girls I could have married, why did it never occur to me to nail one whose father owns a railroad?”
“Numerous railroads.”
Marion Morgan Bell hung back a step when Lillian and Archie walked down the center aisle and the audience craned necks for a glimpse of the famously beautiful railroad heiress and the man who had been the New York Four Hundred’s most eligible bachelor before he fell for her. As Isaac put it, “Detective disguises don’t come better than man-about-town who married well.”
They were the last to take their seats. The orchestra began to play, and the curtain rose on a set that depicted a light and airy apartment in a New York City skyscraper, an up-to-date image that captured the attention of every Columbus lady in the audience. The story moved with great speed, and when night transformed the apartment for Mr. Hyde’s entrance, the modern home seemed deeply sinister. It was impossible to tell whether Barrett or Buchanan was playing Hyde, so convincingly evil was the character.
But only when women began gasping and crying out did Marion realize she was not as caught up in the play as the rest of the audience. She glanced at Lillian, a brave and steady young woman. Lillian looked terrified. Even Archie, who had seen it before, appeared so riveted that Marion half expected him to pull a pistol to protect them.
As it raced on, as a huge airplane swooped over the stage, as Hyde leaped on the roof of a speeding subway car, as the utterly compelling Isabella Cook came within inches of destruction — prompting more than one man to start from his seat to help her — Marion wondered why she was not quite so engaged as the others. The answer was simple, and no fault of the brilliant production. She so admired every bit of craft that was stirring the audience that her mind had shifted to the technical details of how she could re-create and embellish those effects on film.
The play ended to standing ovation, shouts, and cheers.
Lillian said, “Let’s go backstage and meet the actors.”
“No,” said Marion. “Not me.”
“Why?”
“I want to see them as I saw them.”
A little pout started to form on Lillian’s face, but it melted into a smile. They were very close, with Marion sometimes in the role of big sister. “I know what you mean. You’re right. Let’s remember them as we saw them.”
Archie said, “I sense a ‘Marion plot,’ don’t I?”
Marion Morgan Bell clutched the program in her fist. “I am going to make a movie of Barrett & Buchanan’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Isaac Bell rode the London & North Western back to London, retrieved his clothing from Euston’s baggage office, and changed in the lavatory. Then he telephoned Joel Wallace from a coin-operated call box. The box he chose was at the end of the row, with cut-glass windows overlooking the station’s Great Hall.
Wallace asked, “How’d you make out in Manchester?”
“Found out why they hate each other. Otherwise, a bust. The poor girl fell for a good-looking theater callboy who may or may not have been the guy who tried to kill her. That’s who she remembered… Any more cables from New York?”
“Testy one from the Boss.”
“Another ‘Report now’?”
“‘Report immediately.’”
“What does Research say?”
“No new bodies since you sailed. Except a tall brunette they don’t think counts.”
“Missing girls?”
“Chicago, Pittsburgh, Columbus.”
On Bell’s orders, Grady Forrer’s boys were querying field offices daily for reports of missing girls who resembled the fair and petite murder victims.
“None out west?”
“None we hadn’t heard about earlier.”
Bell pondered the report. Missing girls, no bodies. Young women disappeared for all sorts of reasons. But this murderer so often succeeded in hiding his victims.
“Have you ever been to Wilton’s Music Hall?”
“In Whitechapel? No, the Methodists took it over for a mission twenty years ago. Why?”
“Just a thought. Ever hear of a guy in the theater named Jack Spelvin?”
“On the stage?”
“Could be anything — an all-rounder, or even a scenic designer, director, actor, manager.”
“Not here in London. I think I heard of a George Spelvin back home. Not Jack. Why?”
“Emily’s crush,” Bell answered distractedly. His eyes roamed the train travelers crisscrossing the Great Hall.
“What’s the word on Lord Strone?”
“Out of business,” said Wallace. “The Secret Service Bureau gave him his walking papers.”
“Are you certain?”
“As certain as I can be about spies. Cabled a fellow I bank on to confirm. He cabled back that Strone’s gone fishing in Florida.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Bell. “I’ve got another job for you.”
“When?”
“Right this minute. On the jump!”
Isaac Bell took an escalator deep underground to the tube train and rode east for several stops. He returned to the surface at Moorgate. A misty drizzle mingled with the coal smoke. It was hard to see fifty feet ahead. He walked into the East End and onto Bishopsgate, a busy commercial street jam-packed with wagons and double-decker horse trams that cut through the Whitechapel district that Jack the Ripper had terrorized.
The Range Riders, a Tom Mix Western, was showing at the Electric.
Bell bought a ticket. The movie theater sat more than a hundred and was so recently built that he could smell the paint. He found a seat in the back row. Before the Western started, they showed a Picture World News Reel of “Old King Teddy’s”—King Edward VII’s — funeral processing through London. Bell grinned with delight. Wait ’til he told Marion that the newsreel she had shot a full year ago — five hundred and twenty feet of what the movie people call topical film — was still playing in the theaters.
A man in a bowler and a long black coat entered from the curtained lobby and took a seat one over in the row in front of Bell. In the light flickering from Marion’s film, Bell saw he was in his thirties and impeccably dressed. He had walked ramrod straight, and he sat similarly stiff and upright. Neither his bowler and walking stick, nor his civilian topcoat, could disguise the proud badge of lifelong military service.
Isaac Bell leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “My wife made this film.”
The icily supercilious retort matched his posture: “Are you addressing me, sir?”
“Why did you follow me from Euston Station?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You and I caught the Tube to Moorgate. Then we walked — London Wall on to Broad Street, Liverpool, and up Bishopsgate. We could have taken London Wall direct to Wormwood and Bishopsgate, but I wanted to be absolutely certain it was you again before I punched you in the nose.”
The shadow jumped up and sprinted from the theater.
Bell pounded after him.
Coattails flapping like a startled crow, the shadow fled through the lobby and out the door. He shoved through the rippling wall of pedestrians blocking the sidewalk and plunged over the curb into the truck and wagon traffic inching along Bishopsgate High Street. Isaac Bell was catching up when a burly man in a tweed coat and workman’s cap shot a scuffed, lace-up boot in his path. Bell tripped and went flying headlong into the street, rolling on his shoulder when he hit the cobblestones and tumbling under the ironshod wheels of a giant hay wagon trundling fodder to the horse-tram stables.
Bell heard shouts of alarm. Traffic came to a standstill. People reached under the wagon and helped him to his feet. He looked around confusedly, retrieving his hat and assuring passersby that he was not injured. He could see neither the shadow nor the backup operator waiting to trip him. But Detective Joel Wallace’s broad back was disappearing into a lane on the far side of Whitechapel, hot on the trail.
Isaac Bell chased after Joel Wallace, who was following the man in the bowler hat. The operator in tweed had peeled away early on, scurrying up Bishopsgate without looking back. The Van Dorn stayed with his boss as the man negotiated the ill-clad crowds on greasy cobblestone streets littered with scrap paper and horse manure. Bell caught up when Wallace stopped behind a cart with a broken wheel that was blocking the sidewalk.
“Heck of an acrobat,” Wallace said over his shoulder, his eyes fixed on an alley. “For a moment there, I thought he really got you.”
“Ran off with the circus once— Where’d he go?”
“Ducked into that beer house. We’re looking at the back door. Ought to be out any sec.”
The drizzle changed abruptly to cold rain that poured down from the dark sliver of midday sky that showed between the houses. “Here we go! No, that’s not him— Wait, who is that?”
“Quick-change artist,” said Bell. “Turned his coat inside out.”
Their quarry edged from the alley, wearing what appeared to be a light-colored canvas raincoat. He looked around the lane and stepped briskly away.
“I’m getting me one of those,” Joel Wallace whispered.
As the Van Dorns trailed the shadow through Whitechapel, trading the lead, and several times removing their hats and exchanging them with one another, it occurred to Isaac Bell that Jack the Ripper would not have worn gentleman’s clothing when he haunted these streets. Certainly not after the first killing. Even procuring prostitutes, he would have stood out like a sore thumb. He had to have blended with the poor. Or had Ripper outfitted himself with a shabby variant of the shadow’s reversible coat?
“Spotted us!” said Bell. The man had glanced over his shoulder at just the wrong moment and glimpsed Joel Wallace sprinting for a doorway. He ran.
“Get him!” So much for following him back to whoever gave him his orders. They would have to interrogate him instead.
Ironically, they caught up with the shadow on Hanbury Street, and when he sidestepped into an alley, it was not Number 29—but close. Bell tore in after him and grabbed him by his canvas collar.
“I beg your pardon. What do you think you are doing, sir?”
“Interviewing you.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“I will when I’m done.”
“I am a police officer.”
“No you are not,” said Bell. “Police officers work shifts. They spell each other. You’re shadowing me around the clock. You followed me around London; you followed me to Manchester. About the only place you didn’t follow me was into Angel Meadow, where I could have used a hand. Now you’re following me in London, again. All by your lonesome. That makes you a freelance. If you’re freelance, I want to know who’s paying you. If you’re working for Military Intelligence, I want to know what the blazes you think you are doing shadowing an American citizen on legitimate business.”
Bell lifted him an inch off the ground and shook him hard.
“Which is it?”
“I could have you shot!”
Bell lowered him until his feet touched the mud, loosened one hand, and drew his derringer. “I’m better fixed for shooting.”
He let the operator peer into the immensity of twin barrels, each nearly half an inch wide. “Who are you?”
The man dropped his gaze. “Freelance.”
It was almost certainly a lie, but Bell went along, asking, “Who are you working for?”
“Military Intelligence.”
Bell regarded him sternly. “That is ridiculous. I have nothing to do with Military Intelligence, if such a thing even exists.”
“I’d expect you to deny it.”
“Deny what?”
“We know who you are.”
Bell tightened his grip and backed him hard against the bricks. He pressed the barrels to his cheek. “Tell me who I am.”
“We know who you are, Mr. Isaac Bell. What we don’t know is who you are spying for. The United States or Germany. Or both.”
Bell snapped his fingers in sudden comprehension. “Abbington-Westlake.”
The operator’s eyes widened. He recovered in an instant and desperately tried to backpedal from his mistake. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”
“Tell that underhanded rat I know he’s your boss,” said Bell, and stalked away.
Joel Wallace trotted after him.
“What the heck was that about?”
“Commander Abbington-Westlake, British Admiralty, Naval Intelligence Department, Foreign Division.”
“Fancy name for ‘Royal Navy spy.’ Told you, it was dreadnoughts.”
“I caught him snapping Kodaks of ours in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Back in aught eight.”
“Wha’d you do to him?”
“Promised I’d throw him off the Brooklyn Bridge if he tried it again. He turned out to be very helpful.” Bell shook his head. “Abbington-Westlake is one of those operators who acts like he’s a stuffy old duffer before his time. Behind the bumbling front he’s slick as ice. Should have thought about him first time around. I just assumed he was too sharp to make this stupid a mistake.”
“Like I say, spies don’t trust nobody.”
“The thing is,” Bell mused, “he is such an insider… If anyone knows what the Yard won’t tell me about the Ripper, it’s Abbington-Westlake.”
“Will he talk to you?”
“Not unless he sees a payoff.”
“What can you offer him?”
Bell thought hard for a full minute. “We need a German.”
“Where do we get a German?” asked Wallace.
“I’ll get the German. You find out which of Abbington-Westlake’s London clubs he’ll eat lunch at tomorrow. Can you do that by midnight?”
Wallace nodded. “Bank on it.”
“Report to me in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”
“At midnight?”
“I’ll need you to stand lookout.”
“What’ll I be looking out for?”
“The cops.”
“Why?”
“Because it won’t do me or you any good if Metropolitan Police constables arrest the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Chief Investigator.”
“For what?”
“Burglary.”
“Fact-based truth,” Joel Wallace agreed. But he blinked like a man whose head was spinning. “Mind me asking what’re you planning to break into?”
“The Lock Museum.”
At seven o’clock, the bar at the Garrick Club emptied out as actors hurried off to the West End theaters to dress for the evening shows. The few who remained nursed their drinks with an eye to keeping them going until some prosperous soul offered to buy a round for a player “at liberty.”
The obvious candidate was a tall, amiable American in an expensive white suit. He was a guest, the barman confided to the members, who had presented a letter of introduction from The Players, an actors’ and writers’ club in New York that had a reciprocal membership arrangement with the Garrick.
Sadly, the guest was already buying whiskeys for James Mapes, a handsome leading man whose great mane of wavy hair was laced with silver. Despite his years, Mapes, whose mane might once have been as golden as Isaac Bell’s, still cut a commanding figure. Only his frayed cuffs suggested that he had been refusing to play character roles for longer than he should.
“‘Reckless,’ the critics call me,” he told Bell. “‘Deluded.’ Granger — the cruelest of those scribblers — actually wrote of my last Count of Monte Cristo, and this I quote from memory, ‘Mapes ought to have switched to character parts whilst Queen Victoria reigned.’”
“Why would the critics pile on like that?” asked Bell sympathetically.
“Because they’re right! Who wants to see an old warhorse making love to a filly?”
“Half the men in the audience.”
Mapes laughed. “Ah, you’re a generous soul, Bell. Yes, sir. Generous.” He peered into the diminished contents of his glass.
“Would you join me in another?” asked Bell. “Not to worry, it’s on the firm.”
“Then I thank you, and I thank the firm.”
Bell signaled the barman, who poured fresh doubles.
“Cheers!.. Mr. Mapes, have you ever played a German?”
“Not in donkey’s years. Way back when I was too young to carry leads.”
“What sort of Germans did you play?”
“Villains. Heavies. Vhut utter Shermans ah zere?”
They took their drinks and wandered through the handsome club, which was hung with oil paintings of members, present and deceased, in famous roles, and decorated with costumes and stage props. Bell pointed out an empty space. “Waiting for you, perhaps?”
“More likely, my friend Vietor. He’s made a ‘sudden smash sensation’ in Alias Jimmy Valentine.”
“O. Henry’s safecracker story. My wife and I saw it on Broadway.”
“What did you think of Vietor’s reformed criminal?”
“I believed Jimmy Valentine intended to go straight. Even though I knew the short story, he had me worried for his fate.”
“He asked me to coach him in the role,” said Mapes. “Subduing the dark side of Vietor’s character was like pulling teeth. Now he’s touring your provinces, raking it in hand over fist. Hope for us all! When last I last saw him in New York, he was cadging drinks at the Waldorf-Astoria. Now he’s ready to return to England, equal parts rich and famous.”
In the well-appointed library, Bell found the privacy he was seeking. He had spent an hour in it earlier, poring through a collection of old programs, but had had no luck finding any from Wilton’s Music Hall. “Do you know anyone in the theater named Jack Spelvin?”
“No.”
“He was a callboy at Wilton’s back in the eighties.”
“You’re sure you don’t mean George Spelvin?”
“Jack.”
Bell wondered whether Emily could have confused the name of the boy she fell for. It seemed unlikely. “Did you know George Spelvin?”
“There is no George Spelvin. It’s a pseudonym, a nom de guerre, when we don’t want the audience aware we’re on the stage. Rather more commonly used in America.”
“Is it used in London?”
“Occasionally. The language volleys of back and forth; actors who tour across the pond end up speaking almost similar English. Here, we’re more likely to bill ourselves as Walter Plinge instead of George Spelvin.”
“But not Jack?”
“Never heard of a Jack Spelvin.”
Bell had to wonder. The Ripper loved his games. Maybe Emily’s callboy actually was the same man who tried to kill her, a murderer with a sense of humor.
“I gather,” said Bell, “he was a sort of boy-of-all-work.”
“Excellent means for an apprentice seeking a toehold on the stage,” said Mapes. “Callboy, prompter, assistant stage manager, a walk-on, and up you go. Or if he discovers he’s got a head for business, he’ll shift to the front of the house — sell souvenir programs, rent opera glasses, assist the treasurer in the box office. By now, Jack Spelvin could own a bloody theater — though you can be sure he’d have changed his name from Spelvin.”
Mapes gazed mournfully into his glass, which was empty again, and Bell realized he had better get to business before any more whiskey went down the hatch. “Mr. Mapes,” he said, “it is my honor to offer you a job. It’s only a one-night stand, but it will pay equal to a full month on the West End.”
“May I presume wardrobe is included?”
“My tailor will fit you for whatever suit of clothes, shirts, ties, hat, and coat you decide that you need for the role. The costume, of course, is yours to keep.”
“Railway tickets?”
“It will be right here in London. We will go by cab,” said Bell, keeping to himself that the entire job would likely take place inside a cab.
“Why me?”
“The role demands a charismatic actor with nerves of steel.”
Mapes considered the prospect. “‘Nerves of steel’ implies some possibility of danger.”
Isaac Bell looked him in the eye, and the actor saw the American’s amiable expression harden perceptibly as he reassured him with a promise. “You will never be out of my sight.”
“When will the curtain rise?”
“You’ve got a busy morning with my tailor. Curtain rises tomorrow evening at eight.”
“Do you remember Nellie Bly?” asked the Cutthroat.
The girl — her name was Dorothy — was silent.
“Famous newspaperwoman?… No?”
Dorothy lay on her back beside an empty steel oil drum in the warehouse of a Cleveland refinery. She was wrapped head to toe in his cape. He had left her face showing. Her blue eyes had popped open, staring at a sky she would never see.
“What am I saying? Nellie Bly was famous before you were born.” He glanced again at the girl. Still staring, still silent.
“Beautiful girl. Nellie had a lot of nerve. She got herself locked up in a lunatic asylum once just to report on what it was like to be locked up in a lunatic asylum. She wrote a book about it: Ten Days in a Mad-House. I always wondered — did Nellie worry that her editor would forget to get her out? What if he fell off a train or died in a fire while she was still locked up?… But the reason I ask is, Nellie went on to be a wealthy businesswoman. Not only that, she became an inventor. In fact, she invented this astonishing new kind of barrel.”
He slapped the steel drum and it gave a melodious boom.
“That’s right — an easily sealed fifty-five-gallon oil barrel that never rots or leaks and is strong enough to hoist onto ships and railcars and be transported anywhere in the world. John D. Rockefeller is forever in her debt. And so am I. For another ‘perfect crime.’”
He scooped Dorothy into his arms and lowered her into the barrel. He banged on the head and sealed it tight with a simple wrench.
“See, Dorothy? All gone.”
Clocks were striking midnight in London.
Across the street from the wrought-iron-fenced lawns of Lincoln’s Inn, the windows were dark in all three stories of the Lock Museum. Lights out except for a garret dormer in the roof, which told Isaac Bell he had assumed correctly that there would be no hall porter guarding the front door at this late hour. If the porter lived in a servant’s room in the cellar, he had gone to bed, since no lights showed in the tradesman’s entrance under the front steps. But the light in the window garret indicated that Nigel Roberts was home, either awake in his room or, hopefully, falling asleep reading in bed.
Isaac Bell hurried up the front steps and pretended to knock at the door. He held his other hand at waist height, assessing the lock, first with his turning tool, then with a pick. He waited, looked around, and pretended to knock again. With only the gardens across the street, no one could see him from a window. Still, he pantomimed disappointment, descended the steps slowly, and walked around the corner onto Gate Street.
Joel Wallace was waiting inside a two-wheeled hansom cab. The cabby, seated high up behind the passenger box, was an ex — Royal Marine who drove regularly for the Van Dorn field office. His horse was feeding from a nose bag.
“How’s the lock?”
“Brand-new Yale.”
Joel Wallace groaned. “Why don’t you just borrow the thief catcher? I bet Roberts would lend it to you.”
“He’d be happy to help,” Bell agreed. “But if it goes sour, the old boy’s out of his job. And his home.” He took out his watch. “Time. I’ve got twelve-ten.”
Joel Wallace moved his ahead twenty seconds. “Twelve-ten.”
“Bring the cab around the corner at twelve-fifteen.”
“You can’t jimmy the Yale and lift that strongbox in five minutes.”
“If I don’t, I’ll have a bobby wondering why I’m hanging around the Museum’s front steps at midnight.” He jumped out of the cab. “Five minutes. I’ll pass you the box on the garden side. Don’t stop. I’ll catch up at the office.”
Bell hurried around the corner and up the steps. The lock was a standard six-pin, new and well made, probably by an English firm licensed by the Yale company. He reinserted his turning tool, put on light pressure, and worked in his pick. He found the pin that was most out of alignment in its hole — the candidate to be picked up first. He lifted it, which allowed the pressure on his turning tool to rotate the cylinder tube slightly. Then he felt for the next pin made to bind most tightly by the cylinder’s rotation.
He heard footsteps on the sidewalk, the measured tread of a big man in heavy shoes. At this hour in this wealthy district, a firm stride and menacing swagger announced a police constable on patrol.
Isaac Bell stood tall and kept working his picks at waist level.
He lifted the third pin, and the fourth. Two to go. But the fifth and sixth were both binding. Rushing to unlock the door before the bobby reached the steps, he had applied too much torque with his turning tool. He eased it slightly, prayed, and got one pin to go up, freeing the cylinder from all but the final pin. The footsteps stepped behind him.
“Good evening, sir.”
The constable’s imperious tone demanded an immediate response. The lack of the deference ordinarily accorded a well-dressed gentleman implied that a housebreaker with a brain in his head would dress the part to blend in with the residents of the neighborhood — wouldn’t he, sir?
The sixth and final pin resisted the pick.
“Good evening, Constable,” Isaac Bell tossed over his shoulder, shielding his hands with his torso.
“Have you business here, sir?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing?”
The sixth pin finally let Bell lift it. He increased pressure on his turning tool and the Yale clicked open. He palmed his picks, turned the doorknob, and faced the constable. “I am a guest.”
“Seems a late hour for a visit to a dark house.”
“I am staying the night,” said Bell. “The British Lock Museum hopes to acquire my father’s collection. They’ve put me up in the director’s suite.”
He stepped inside the front hall.
“As I was dining late at my club, they lent me a key. Good night, Constable.”
“Good night, sir.”
Bell closed the door on the officer’s salute, locked it, and glided silently from the front hall. The collection room was lit dimly by the gleam of a streetlamp that penetrated the curtains. Bell went straight to the German chastity belt, guided by reflections off its glass case.
The thief-catcher strongbox was next to it. He closed the lid carefully, pocketed the key, and slung the heavy box under his arm. He counted a full two minutes and then glided to the front window to check the street.
He could not see the constable.
Joel Wallace’s hansom cab rounded the corner at a quick trot. Bell had no choice but to ease out the door, hoping the constable had moved on, close it behind him, and hurry down the steps. He crossed to the garden side of the street, let the cab overtake him, and passed the strongbox into Joel Wallace’s hands.
“Where did the constable go?”
Joel Wallace pointed.
Bell went the other way.
“And then the Frenchman said to me…”
Commander Abbington-Westlake was holding forth at the long and raucous members’ table in the dining room of the Savile Club in Mayfair. A wine bottle stood beside each of the dozen men at lunch. When its contents drained low, a white-coated steward replaced it from the member’s personal stock.
Formed by wealthy writers and artists, and currently occupying a pleasant house on Piccadilly, the Savile prided itself on a distinct absence of stodginess. This would have surprised the many who had fallen for Commander Abbington-Westlake’s pomposity act, proof that, as espionage masquerades went, stuffed shirts were as likely to be underestimated as drunkards. He was a large, round man, with fleshy cheeks, an officer’s mustache, and hooded eyes. His plum-toned voice carried.
“So the Frenchman said to me, ‘I’ve learned enough about you English to know that one is in deep trouble when a gentleman addresses one as “sir.”’”
He paused for a significant glance up and down the table and twitched a bushy eyebrow. “I replied, ‘You are correct, sir.’”
The dining room echoed with laughter, cries for new bottles.
After lunch, he joined the others for cigars and bustled into the bar, calling, “A very large brandy, my good man.”
“Make it a double,” said Isaac Bell, materializing from a dark corner. “The commander is buying.”
Abbington-Westlake covered his surprise. “How the devil did you get in here, Bell?”
“My introduction from the Yale Club of New York City was greeted hospitably.”
“Standards are falling everywhere.”
“Especially in the quality of shadows.”
“All right!” said Abbington-Westlake. The bar was crowded with after-lunch cigar smokers. “Perhaps we should—”
“Find a quiet place to talk about why you’re having me followed?” asked Bell.
“I said, ‘All right!’”
The club had a little patch of garden in the back. They sat there and smoked.
“Why have you tackled me here in my own club?” Abbington-Westlake asked aggrievedly. “It’s not done, Bell. Not at lunch. What is it you want?”
“In addition to calling off your shadows?”
“They’re off. What do you want?”
Bell said, “I told you years ago, that behind a scrim of amiable bumbling, upper-crust, above-it-all mannerisms, and a witty tongue, you are extremely well informed about your fellow spies.”
“Competitors,” said Abbington-Westlake. “Not fellows.”
“Then what made you leap to the absurd conclusion that I am spying for the United States?”
“Or freelancing for German Kaiser Wilhelm’s intelligence service,” Abbington-Westlake shot back. “Can you blame me for being suspicious in a dangerous world? Why wouldn’t the Van Dorn Detective Agency go into the spy business? Pinkertons spied for your President Lincoln.”
“Don’t tar me with the Pinkerton brush,” Bell said coldly. “Van Dorns are not company cops and strikebreakers. Nor are we spies.”
“Bell, England is staring down gun barrels. The Hun is on the march. He’s building dreadnoughts faster than we are. Why wouldn’t I expect the worst?”
“Why didn’t you just ask what I was up to?”
“Would you have admitted it?”
“Of course. We’re on the same side.”
“What side? Your government is maddeningly neutral.”
“The United States steers clear of Europe’s squabbles. But when push comes to shove, we stand against tyrants. The British Empire is greedy, but the king of England is not a tyrant. The Russian tzar is a tyrant. So is the German kaiser.”
“Then tell me what you’re doing in London. And spare me your masquerade about Jack the Ripper. Really, Bell, it seems below you.”
“I’ll do better than tell you. I’ll show you.”
“Show me what?”
“Someone I found.”
“Whom have you found?”
“A German who wants to sell a secret.”
“What secret?”
“A new fire-control device.”
Abbington-Westlake’s eyes went opaque as Bell was betting they would. Naval cannon range and speed of fire were increasing rapidly, demanding radically improved methods for the dreadnought battleships to aim their big guns. “Why would you share your treasure with me?”
“You’re better placed in London to do something about it. And I have no doubt you will do the gentlemanly thing and share it with us.”
“No doubt,” Abbington-Westlake lied. “Where is this Hun?”
“He has promised to meet me in a cab at Charing Cross.”
“When?”
“Eight o’clock tonight.”
“Do you trust him?”
“He’s scared and greedy,” said Bell. “All he wants is to get his money and board the first boat back to Germany.”
Abbington-Westlake’s expression hardened. “So the reason you are sharing this is you expect me to put up the money.”
“I don’t need your money,” said Bell.
“Really? Oh— Well, I stand corrected… Bell, this is all quite unusual.”
It occurred to Isaac Bell that this was as enjoyable as fly-casting for trout. It was time to set the hook. He said, “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was for a Navy man. Now it strikes me I should speak with a fellow I know at the Foreign Office.”
“Not if you’re expecting immediate action.”
“Then Military Intelligence.”
Abbington-Westlake regarded him shrewdly. “I regret to inform you that your old friend Lord Strone has been put out to pasture.”
“Leaving only you?”
“To your great good fortune,” said the commander. “I will have that cab surrounded by twenty picked men.”
“No,” said Bell. “Not one. This German is as sharp as they come. He’s survived twenty years’ spying in London and you never caught him. You don’t even know his name. He’ll spot your picked men in a flash. We will keep it simple — you, me, and him.”
“How did you stumble upon him?”
“Sheer luck,” said Bell.
“I thought so. How?”
“I was closing in on a Japanese. The German beat me to him. He wrecked everything I’d been working for. I lit out after him and caught up.”
“So you made your luck.”
“Exactly as you would, Commander. Shall we shake hands on it?”
Abbington-Westlake extended a soft pink hand. Bell gripped it hard. “Just so we understand each other, sir, I will spot your ‘picked men’ just as I spotted your shadow. Don’t try to slip them past me.”
“Wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”
Fog was thickening when Isaac Bell pulled up in front of the Charing Cross railroad station in a closed carriage, a roomy cab that Londoners called a growler. He opened the door and beckoned Commander Abbington-Westlake. The Navy spy was dressed identically to the hordes of City bankers rushing home in bowlers and raincoats, with one exception. Instead of an umbrella, he carried a walking stick with an ivory knob carved to resemble the head of a crocodile.
Bell moved over to make room on the seat beside him. Abbington-Westlake climbed in, and the Van Dorn driver set his horse at a quick trot up the Strand.
“Wait. Where are we going?”
“Our German changed his mind at the last minute. Trafalgar Square.”
“But—”
“But your picked men are at Charing Cross?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Because I suspect this fellow is going to run us in circles until he feels safe.”
At Trafalgar Square, a flower girl tapped the window and handed Bell a scrap of paper.
Bell read aloud, “‘Berkeley Square.’”
“How did that girl distinguish this cab from a hundred others?”
“The same way the German will. The driver has a white ribbon tied to his whip.”
The horse trotted up Cockspur to Pall Mall, up Pall Mall and across Regent Street to Piccadilly, where it turned at the Ritz Hotel onto Dover and down Hay Hill into Berkeley Square. It stopped abruptly. James Mapes flung open the cab door and climbed heavily inside with a strongbox under his arm. He was dressed in a fine suit of clothes, a rabbit-felt fedora, and the latest Burberrys waterproof. Bell could almost hear Joe Van Dorn’s howls of protest over his expense sheet.
“Took your time,” Mapes said in an accent so heavy that Abbington-Westlake, straining to see his face in the dark, said, “What was that?”
“He said,” said Bell, “we took our time.”
“Damn right, we took our time, and we’ll continue to take our time until we’re convinced you have something of value.”
“Vere ist der muny?”
“Where are the fire control plans?”
Mapes patted the strongbox. “In der buks.”
“Open it.”
“Show der marks.”
Bell passed him an envelope. “Give me the key.”
Mapes pulled a key from his pocket but held on to it and used it like a letter opener to slit the envelope. Suddenly a shadow loomed out of the fog. The driver knocked a warning, but he was too late, and the shadow took the shape of a constable’s helmet. A truncheon rattled the window.
“Ist der trick!” Mapes shouted. “Schweinhund!”
Bell snatched the key from his hand, but Mapes held on to the envelope as he pushed open the opposite door. Bell lunged for him, blocking Abbington-Westlake’s attempt to trip him with his walking stick. Mapes tumbled out, eluding Bell’s grasp, and ran into the gardens of Berkeley Square.
The constable lumbered after him, blowing his whistle. Abbington flung open his door.
Bell pinned his arm. “Let him go.”
“He’ll escape.”
“We have his strongbox,” said Bell. “There’ll be coppers all over us.” He called to the driver, “Get us out of here!”
The horse galloped onto Fitzmaurice Place, rounded the curve into Curzon Street at a speed that caused the top-heavy growler to careen on two wheels. The driver regained control before it fell on its side. Cracking his whip, he wove in and out of lanes. Suddenly they emerged into the flurry of Piccadilly traffic just west of the Ritz, where they blended in with a hundred other growlers, hansoms, and petrol motor taxis. At the edge of Green Park, he pulled under a streetlamp haloed by the fog. It cast soft light on Bell’s and Abbington-Westlake’s faces.
“Why is he stopping?”
“To give his horse a breather,” said Bell.
“Shall we have a look in the box?”
“Be my guest,” said Bell. He handed over the key.
“Wait!”
“Why?”
“Funny feeling,” said Isaac Bell. He leaned in and studied the box carefully. “I think it’s a trick.”
“What trick? I fail to see a trick. I see a strongbox filled with priceless information.”
“Let’s see your torch.”
Bell switched on the flashlight and played the beam over the lock and the keyhole.
“What do you see, Bell?”
“Give me your walking stick.”
Gingerly, Isaac Bell inserted the key partway into the strongbox lock.
Then he poked at the key with Abbington-Westlake’s walking stick.
“What the devil are you doing?”
“Let us pretend that you are turning that key,” said Isaac Bell. He turned the stick around and used the ornate knob to shove the key deeper into the lock. It engaged with a sharp snick. A sudden explosion of noise resounded in the closed cab like a thunderclap. The crocodile disintegrated, spraying Bell and Abbington-Westlake with splintered wood and ivory.
“What?” gasped Abbington-Westlake.
His shattered stick was pinned in the iron jaws of the wrist manacle that had sprung from the box.
“I had a funny feeling it was a thief catcher,” said Bell.
“A what?”
“Thief catcher. I read somewhere that accountants had to look out for them when they audited a dead man’s estate.”
Abbington-Westlake pulled what was left of his stick from the manacle. “This could have been my arm.”
“What’s in the box?” asked Bell.
“You open it,” said Abbington-Westlake. He jumped when the lid squealed on rusty hinges. Bell switched on the flashlight, fixed the beam on the manacle springs, then played it inside.
“Empty!” said Abbington-Westlake.
“No. Here’s something.”
The tall detective and the English spymaster stared. The box contained a single sheet of paper. Abbington-Westlake snatched it up. A steel-pen drawing depicted the ninety-eight-gun wooden battleship Dreadnought that had fought Napoleon’s navy one hundred and six years ago at the Battle of Trafalgar.
“Of all the bloody cheek.”
“He’s got a sense of humor,” said Bell.
“The Hun will stop at nothing.”
Isaac Bell hung his head as if equal parts embarrassed and apologetic. “I am sorry I let you down, but he really pulled the wool over my eyes… If it makes you feel any better, he got my money.”
Abbington-Westlake recovered quickly. “I suppose I would be somewhat more irritated if that had shattered my arm. As it is, I’m in your debt.”
“You can pay me off easily.”
“How?” Abbington-Westlake asked warily.
“Tell me about Jack the Ripper.”
“Bell, will you drop this bloody charade?”
“No, you’re wrong about the masquerade. I was trying to do two things at once. Back in America, I am tracking a monster who is killing girls and I am increasingly sure he is the same man.”
Abbington-Westlake shook his head. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Bell. He is not the same man.”
“Do you know for sure?”
“I’ll confide in you the solution to the Whitechapel Mysteries. It was proved for a fact who the Ripper was. He drowned himself in the Thames.”
“Stop! Next, you’ll name suspects, from an insane medical student, to suicides, to a doctor avenging his son, to a royal Duke, to a peer of the realm hiding in Brazil, to a famous painter, to a maniacal immigrant Pole.”
“All right. All right,” Abbington-Westlake rumbled on. “Look here, Bell. I don’t mind sharing a confidence with a man of your integrity… Give me your word as a gentleman it will go no further.”
“My lips are sealed,” said Isaac Bell.
“I have photographs. I will show them to you in gratitude for saving my wrist.”
“Photographs of what?”
“Mortuary photographs of his victims’ bodies.”
“Where did you get them?”
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“How did you get pictures?”
“I’ll show you— Driver! Whitehall. Number 26.”
Abbington-Westlake tossed his broken cane in an elephant-foot umbrella stand and turned up the lights in a windowless office in the back of the Old Admiralty Building. He unlocked a closet, twirled a combination, and opened a Chubb fireproof safe. From it he pulled a thick manila file.
“Of course I didn’t believe your story about looking for the Ripper. But I sent around for these anyway, reasoning that I should bone up. Do you recall that you asked a certain Harley Street surgeon whether the Ripper carved symbols on his victims? Yes, yes, yes, of course I know you talked to him. I just didn’t believe why, at the time. Look at these L-shaped marks. Not crescent-shaped. They’re L-shaped.”
He flipped through photographs of mutilated bodies and tossed each to Bell.
Bell said, “The surgeon insisted a slip of the blade could not make an L look like a crescent.” Indeed, the L’s were sharply defined by straight lines.
“The V-shaped cuts, too.”
“Look at these.”
“Squares, don’t you see?”
“They’re not square.”
“Not that kind of square. The stone mason’s square. His ancient instrument of measurement.”
“Masons?” Bell asked, not entirely sure he had heard right.
“These are signs of the Freemason. The Masonic Brotherhood.”
“What do the Masons have to do with murdering girls in Whitechapel?” asked Bell. Was there anyone in all of England who didn’t have a lunatic theory about Jack the Ripper?
“Clearly, the fiend was sending a message.”
“What message?” asked Bell.
“Invert the V. What do you get? You get a compass. The compass is a mason’s drafting tool.”
“These V slashes, like the L’s, mock the police. He is saying, I am a Freemason.”
“Why?”
“To throw the police off the scent and besmirch the Brotherhood. Whom, obviously, he hated.”
“Why would he hate the Masons?”
“Who knows how he thinks?”
“Are you a Mason?” asked Bell. He reckoned that Abbington-Westlake probably was, if England was at all like the United States, where half the men in the country had banded into one fraternal order or another. Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Owls, Knights of Columbus — the list was endless, and many Americans claimed brotherhood in more than one of them.
Abbington-Westlake did not admit to being a Mason, saying only, “That’s neither here nor there. Point is, old boy, he didn’t send that message on your bodies. Our man carved L’s and V’s, not crescents. So our Jack the Ripper is not your murderer.”
“Unless he changed the message.”
Abbington-Westlake crossed his arms triumphantly over his chest like a man who had won an essential argument. “There you have it, Bell.”
“There I have what?”
“The question you must answer: What do the crescents mean?”
What the Cutthroat meant by the crescents was a question that Isaac Bell was acutely aware he had to answer.
“There’s another question much more vital,” he told Abbington-Westlake.
“Oh?”
Bell watched the naval commander for signs of a lie, no easy task with a man so good at it. For the answer to this question was core to the reason he had come to London. “Why is Scotland Yard so bent and determined that Jack the Ripper stopped killing in 1888?”
Abbington-Westlake sighed. “How should I know? I’m a simple practitioner of naval espionage.”
“Commander, you are cynical. And you are treacherous. But what makes you most dangerous is that your ambition is served by first rate ingenuity. If you saw any hint of Scotland Yard being vulnerable on this issue, you would mine it for every ounce of advantage you could wring out of it to hold over their heads. What caught your attention? What made you smell blood in the water?”
Abbington-Westlake lit a cigar without offering one to Bell, got it going, and puffed smoke. “Do you recall, old boy, what I taught you years ago about the rules?”
“Something about don’t tell the servants and don’t frighten the horses?”
“Top marks for retention.”
“Or was it ‘don’t tell’ the horses?”
“Now, Bell…”
“Now, Commander.” Bell fished the broken cane out of the elephant foot and shook it under Abbington-Westlake’s nose. “You seem to have forgotten that this could have been your arm. Come clean.”
“Truth is, I looked into it, on a purely informal basis, for the Home Office.”
“Why?”
“Favor for a chap I was at school with.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“The Home Office oversees Scotland Yard.”
“I know that, but I don’t believe you. You did it on your own, figuring to gain leverage for the next time Naval Intelligence wants a favor from the Yard. You don’t ask favors, you collect debts.”
“All right, Bell. There were hints of irregularities in the investigations. And, frankly, the reasons for the irregularities came down to clumsy attempts to cover up sheer incompetence.”
“My field office chief suggested that the day I arrived in London.”
“Joel Wallace is a bright fellow. Yet another reason I suspected you were spying.”
Bell asked the key question that had brought him to England: “Can you tell me whether Jack the Ripper killed more women in London after 1888?”
“London and the suburbs,” Abbington-Westlake answered blandly.
Isaac Bell drew a deep breath. “After ’eighty-eight?”
“’Eighty-nine, ’ninety, and the first half of ’ninety-one.”
“Why did the Yard deny it?”
“If they said he was dead, the case was closed. The most they could be charged with is incompetent detective work on only five killings. Subsequent murders could be blamed on copycats until the fiend finally ran out of steam or vanished.”
“What happened in the second half of ’ninety-one?”
“Vanished.”
“Not a trace?”
“Not a trace.”
“Any idea why?”
Abbington-Westlake shrugged. “In my humble opinion? Same reason he shifted operations to the suburbs. Wisely not pressing his luck in London. How long could he count on Scotland Yard bungling? By mid-’ninety-one, he probably reckoned it was time to stop pressing his luck in England.”
“Thank you,” said Isaac Bell. He headed for the door. “Tell me one more thing, Commander.”
That drew another elaborate sigh. “Now what?”
“Why should I believe you?”
An uncharacteristically bleak expression crossed over Abbington-Westlake’s face, and his poignant reply reminded Bell of a shaken Captain “Honest Mike” Coligney the day they found Anna Waterbury’s body in the actor’s flat on West 29th Street.
“Because I have three daughters.”
“I never thought of you as a family man.”
“It sneaked up on me,” said Abbington-Westlake. “When I wasn’t looking.”
“I thank you for your help,” said Bell, and headed for the door.
“On the contrary,” Abbington-Westlake replied in cold, measured tones, “thank you, Mr. Bell, for spending more time with me while we sorted out what you are up to.”
The door opened, swinging inward. The tall, thin shadow Bell had cornered in Whitechapel entered.
“Not so fast, Mr. Bell.”
Behind him were his heavyset partner in tweed, whom Bell had encountered outside the Electric movie theater, and another, who had the height and heft of a Marine sergeant out of uniform. They crowded into Abbington-Westlake’s office, blocking the door.
Isaac Bell gave them a quick once-over and looked at Abbington-Westlake.
The British spymaster said, “I do not like being hoodwinked nor made sport of.”
“I would think by now you’ve gotten used to it,” said Bell. To the shadow and his men he said, “Gents, get out of my way.”
They spread out, left and right, with the shadow in the middle.
Bell looked the shadow over again, and admitted, “You surprise me. I hadn’t realized you’re more of a fighting man than a spy.”
“I restrained my better instincts on orders. My new orders mesh with my instincts. Are you familiar with the Gurkha fighters’ kukri?” He took a leather sheath from his coat and pulled out of it a foot-long curved knife made of heavy steel. It looked like a boomerang with a razor’s edge.
His men whipped service revolvers from their coats, cocked them, and aimed them at Bell’s head. Bell looked at Abbington-Westlake. “I seem to be the only one who doesn’t know his new orders. Care to fill me in, Commander?”
“We’ll start with your accomplices. The agent who pretended to be a German, and the agent who pretended to be a police officer, and the agent driving your growler.”
“I hailed the growler on Oxford Street. The bobby was an unemployed potboy. The German is a Dutch tulip salesman.”
“Their names?”
“Didn’t catch them.”
“My offices,” said Abbington-Westlake, “are in the back of the building and encompass the rooms above, below, and next to this one. You may yell in outrage. You may scream in pain. You may weep with dismay. No one will hear you. And, frankly, if by a miracle they do, I will send them packing with a word. We will start with your accomplices and work our way slowly to what you are really up to. Enjoying a bit of vengeance on the way.”
Isaac Bell opened his hands and addressed Abbington-Westlake. “I’m embarrassed. Not only did I fail to see that this fellow who’s been following me around is an actual fighting man, I also fell for your pomposity act. It never occurred you were vicious as well as unpleasant.”
“Slashing with the Gurka kukri requires a very fine touch as its primary purpose is to sever bone and muscle.”
“With a single blow,” said Bell. “I’m familiar with the kukri. It is the Nepalese weapon of choice for beheading people who annoy them.”
“Reginald has that fine touch,” said Abbington-Westlake. “He can use it as a skinning knife. I’ve seen him flay a man’s arm from wrist to shoulder, removing a layer so thin you could read your morning paper through it. Name your accomplices.”
“Now I’m really embarrassed. I completely forgot to ask.”
“Hold his arms,” said the shadow.
“Wait!” said Abbington-Westlake. “Take his gun.”
Isaac Bell had been trying to distract the gunmen with bravado and sarcasm while weighing his chances of shooting both with a quick draw of his Browning before they shot him. As practiced as he was at clearing his holster and firing fast, the odds were abysmal. Even if he managed to shoot them both, the kukri knife would take his head off.
“I am opening my coat slowly,” he said, “to hand you my automatic, butt first.”
He did. Abbington-Westlake took it and swung it like a club. The heavy barrel raked Bell’s forehead and smashed his hat to the floor. Head ringing from the blow, Bell heard the spymaster say, “I’m informed he carries a derringer in his hat.”
They fished it out.
“Take his arms.”
Isaac Bell stepped back and played his last card. “Do you know what makes a fighting man?”
The man with the knife answered with cold certainty, “It takes fatal wounds to stop him.”
“Then you’ll forgive me.” Bell dove to his left. For the barest fraction of a second, he caught all three off guard. He hit the floor rolling, tucked his knees, and got his fingers inside his boot and around his throwing knife. The gunmen were recovering, tracking him with their pistols, and the shadow was raising the kukri for a killing blow.
A gun went off, thunderous in the small room, the slug throwing splinters from the floor into Bell’s face. He hurled his blade underhand. A flicker of steel and light disappeared in the shadow’s throat.
Bell saw a gun sight-line up with his head. He was moving forward, reaching. The kukri fell from the shadow’s hand. Bell caught it and slashed with all his might.
A hand grasping a pistol fell to the floor.
The other gunman gaped, horrified, and when Bell lunged at him, he whirled out the door. Still moving, Bell whipped around with the knife drawn back to slash.
Abbington-Westlake screamed, backpedaled as the blade whistled through the air, and dropped Bell’s Browning. Bell snatched it off the floor and sprang to his feet, breathing hard.
“This is your mess. Clean it up, stay out of my way, and we are even.”
“Even?” Abbington-Westlake gestured at his fallen men, one squeezing his tweed sleeve to his bloody stump, the other clutching his throat. “How are we even?”
Isaac Bell picked up his derringer and his hat.
“You still have two hands, don’t you?”
Isaac Bell stalked into the British Lock Museum with the thief-catcher strongbox under his arm. “I found this with a note attached that said return to Lost & Found care of keeper Roberts.”
What happened to your face?”
“Slipped shaving.”
Nigel Roberts closed both arms around the heavy chest and lugged it to its spot beside the German chastity belt. “I’d have lent it to you.”
“I would not have you lose your job and your home on my account.”
“It’s the Ripper’s account.”
“I thank you for all your help. Maybe I can pay you back. Abbington-Westlake has a theory that the Ripper was sending messages to, quote, ‘besmirch the Freemasons.’ What do you think?”
Nigel Roberts’s eyes glittered. “I’ll look into it. But I will tell you right off, it would be far more complicated than the spy supposes. And much, much more interesting.”
“I hope I haven’t sent you down a rabbit hole.”
“I like rabbit holes.”
Maybe it wasn’t as lunatic as it sounded, and Bell had a strong feeling that the old cop would devote the rest of his life to investigating the Freemason angle. No doubt that if there were such an angle, Nigel Roberts was the man to nail it down.
Bell extended his hand. “I’ve got to catch the boat train.”
“Are you convinced the killer who murdered your Anna is Jack the Ripper?”
“I’m pretty sure he’s a man in his forties. I’m pretty sure he never stopped killing. I am pretty sure he is carving a message into these poor girls’ bodies that says who he is. But the only fact I know for sure is that until I decipher his message, he’s still on the loose.”
Bell stopped at the Jermyn Street office on his way out of London.
“What happened to your face?” Joel Wallace asked.
“Ran into a door. I want you to see what you can turn up on Jack Spelvin.”
“Who?”
“The Wilton’s Music Hall callboy Emily remembered.”
“Oh, yeah. But I thought she was confused.”
“Just in case I’m the one confused, I’d like you to find out where Mr. Jack Spelvin was acting in 1889, ’ninety, and the first half of ’ninety-one. And where did he go from there?”
“Tall order, Mr. Bell.”
“Do you have any friends in the music halls?”
“Couple of chorus gals, of course, but, uh—”
“Start with them.”
Joel Wallace shrugged dubiously. “Before their time.”
Bell said, “Maybe their mothers remember him.”
Aboard the Jekyll & Hyde Special highballing to Toledo and Detroit, Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan were ensconced in their private cars, Buchanan closeted with the company treasurer, Barrett entertaining a clutch of newspaper reporters with a bottomless whiskey bottle and a font of theater stories.
“Mr. Barrett?” asked an attractive woman representing a Chicago paper. “You alternate the roles of Jekyll and Hyde, seemingly at random. Do you ever forget which role you are playing?”
The big baritone voice lowered conspiratorially: “Well, I’ll tell you. When in doubt, I glance into the wings and steal a look at Mr. Buchanan. If he’s made up like Hyde, I know I’m Jekyll.”
The reporters laughed, and scribbled.
The company publicist, standing guard, beamed.
The Boys, as he called Barrett and Buchanan, had always been geniuses at booming a tour, but for Jekyll and Hyde they were outdoing themselves, and the bookings more than made up for the expense of freeloading journalists. On this leg of the tour, they had even attracted a wire-service writer, whose nationally published articles would boost ticket sales in Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Denver, all the way to San Francisco.
Barrett took a sip from his teacup, having apologized for not joining the drinkers with a solemn, “Duty calls at eight-thirty.” A second sip, and he added, “If Mr. Buchanan looks like Jekyll, I am almost certainly Hyde.”
“But how do you slip so effortlessly from Jekyll into Hyde?”
“Slip? One never slips from Jekyll into Hyde. One emerges from Jekyll into Hyde!”
It was not all a bed of roses. One crotchety writer — a failed thespian, Barrett had no doubt — asked, “What, exactly, happened that stopped the show last Thursday in Columbus?”
The publicist answered smoothly, without mentioning the dread Rick L. Cox by name. “A man in the audience suffered some sort of attack of agitation. He became so disturbed that he began shouting while the actors were performing. The theater’s house manager decided, cautiously but wisely, to lower the curtain while the ushers attempted to calm the man and until he could be escorted from the auditorium.”
The crotchety writer checked his notebook, and asked, “What did the man mean by shouting, ‘Those are my words! I wrote that’?”
Barrett stepped in. “Mr. Buchanan and I asked that very same question after the show. We were informed that the poor fellow was so confused that he literally didn’t know his own name. The doctors ordered him removed to an asylum, where they could examine him thoroughly. I’m afraid that is all we know at the moment.” He shook his head, and those nearest thought they saw his eyes mist with tears, an arresting sight in such a leonine head.
“Isn’t it a sad reminder that the mask of tragedy is not worn only on the stage?”
They were nodding reflectively when John Buchanan strode in from his car, bellowing, “Forgive me, lady and gentlemen of the press, forgive me. Mundane duty called. When our generous backers catch up in Toledo, they will expect an accounting of our production, accurate to the penny… Are you enjoying the Jekyll & Hyde Special?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Buchanan.”
“You run a mighty hospitable train.”
“Can I ask you, Mr. Buchanan? Examining your tour schedule, I note that after one week each in Toledo and Detroit, you will play a full extra week in Cincinnati, which is longer than you’re scheduled for St. Louis and Denver. Are you at all nervous about committing to such a long run in Cincinnati?”
“Not in the slightest. We’ve always encountered the most astute audiences in Cincinnati. And it’s good for the company to settle in now and then for a longer run.”
Jackson Barrett stole a look at the Chicago lady’s notebook and winked at the publicist. Her opening sentence would practically pay for the train.
Two of the handsomest actors that ever graced the modern stage are heading for Chicago with hope in their hearts and charm to burn.
The wily old publicist nodded a clear signal that The Boys better toss a coin to choose who would thank her at an intimate supper after the show.
Buchanan finished his answer.
Barrett picked up the cudgel.
“Cincinnati is a splendid omen for the continued success of Jekyll and Hyde. The Civil War general who commanded the troops that saved Cincinnati from Confederate invasion was named Lew Wallace. I am sure that each and every one of you remembers that when he retired in peacetime, Lew Wallace wrote a famous novel called… Lady? Gentlemen?”
“Ben-Hur,” they chorused.
“The novel that inspired the play Ben-Hur.”
“The most successful play in the history of the American theater.”
“Which,” Barrett fired back, “launched the most lucrative road show ever!”
“At least,” said Buchanan, “until the good people of Toledo, Detroit, and Cincinnati buy their tickets.”
More scribbling, more grins from their publicist.
The clock struck the hour, and things got even better.
Isabella Cook breezed into the car in a diaphanous tea gown. Two qualities struck anyone who had only seen her on the stage. Up close, she was tiny. And, seen in person, her big, round eyes were bigger, her bow lips more sensual, and her aquiline nose straighter than seemed possible on a mortal.
“I hope I am not interrupting.”
The male reporters leaped to their feet. The lady from Chicago wrote,
Isabella Cook’s melodious contralto voice sounds as if Our Maker had chosen it to harmonize with each and every one of her beautiful features. The winsome blonde wears her hair in the modern style of the heiress Gabriella Utterson, who is key to the terrifying plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Barrett and Buchanan had risen with a flourish, exchanging a private glance. Say what they could about their leading lady — and they could say plenty — the “Great and Beloved” never missed an entrance nor any opportunity to boom a show in which she had negotiated a percentage of the take. Another glance said, Worth every penny.
“My dear, how good of you to stop in.”
“Come sit between us.”
And she did, prompting the first question, which started, of course, with condolences.
“With the greatest sympathy for the recent loss of your husband, Miss Cook, may I ask you, as a recent widow, do you find it terribly difficult having to perform night after night in such an arduous role?”
Isabella smiled bravely. “It would be much harder, if not impossible, without the firm shoulders of Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan to rely on, and to lean on, and, I am grateful to say, occasionally weep on.”
The lady from Chicago wondered how to couch the big question in her readers’ hearts. “Would it be fair to say they make you feel a little less lonely?”
Isabella Cook smiled at one, then the other. “More than a little.”
Now — how to ask? — which of the handsomest actors that ever graced the modern stage made the widow feel the most less lonely? But the male reporters were growing restive, and whiskey had made one cocky.
“Jekyll or Hyde?”
Isabella obliterated him with an innocent, “My favorite Jekyll and my favorite Hyde do everything necessary to make the show go on.”
Their stage manager entered on cue. “Excuse me, Miss Cook. Excuse me, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Buchanan…”
“Yes, Mr. Young?”
“You scheduled a principals’ rehearsal.”
The actors rose as one. “Duty calls, gentlemen and lady. Mr. Young will see you back to the dining car.”
But before the reporters could drain their glasses and close their notebooks, it suddenly all went to blazes. “Just one more question, please?”
The wire-service reporter, an old man reeking of whiskey and nickel cigars, had yet to speak. He had come aboard at Columbus. The publicist didn’t know him, and they had assumed he had been put out to pasture, covering theater news. He had put a dent in the whiskey, and had nodded amiably at the actors’ jokes. Now, just as they were wrapping things up, he had a question.
“Have you run into any difficulty selling tickets owing to the reports of murdered women?”
Jekyll and Hyde’s publicist stood, wild-eyed and speechless, in the swaying car.
John Buchanan said, “What?”
Jackson Barrett asked, “What do you mean?”
All three of the showmen noticed belatedly that the old man reeking of whiskey and nickel cigars had the crafty eyes of a seasoned police reporter with a nose for a big story. Or the cynicism to create one. “What I mean,” he said, “is that since you’ve been on tour, young girls have been getting murdered and mutilated. I’m curious whether the horror of these crimes has affected ticket sales?”
“Why would it?” blurted Barrett. Buchanan tried to stay him with a gesture, which would have been futile if Isabella Cook had not laid her hand on his arm.
“Well, you boys may be too young to remember, but when I was a young pup reporter in New York, Richard Mansfield’s Jekyll and Hyde company came back early from London with their tails between their legs. They had opened to wonderful reviews, as good as they got here. ‘The curtain fell upon a shock of silence,’ said the Telegraph, ‘followed by a roar of sympathetic applause.’ But then Jack the Ripper started murdering. Girl after girl, like is happening here. London audiences stopped buying tickets. As if they were saying, Too much blood in the street. Who wants to see it in the theater, too?”
Buchanan said, “We’ve noted no falloff in bookings.”
“No empty seats?”
“None,” said Barrett, and the publicist finally got a hold on himself to claim, “The wraps are actually increasing.”
The “wrap” was the money taken in at the box office, counted when the curtain went up, stacked in brick-size packs wrapped in paper, and delivered under armed guard to the Jekyll & Hyde Special’s steel safe, to be divvied up at prescribed intervals with the Deaver brothers.
“Why do you suppose your ticket sales have not been affected yet?”
“Audiences love the play,” said the publicist, “because it is a piece with class written all over it, and it has a great plot.”
“What about Alias Jimmy Valentine?” asked Barrett.
“What about it?”
“Jimmy Valentine’s been dogging us in every city we’ve played. Why blame us? Why not blame them?”
The wire-service man pounced with a cold smile. “Because Alias Jimmy Valentine doesn’t have murdered girls in its show.”
“Nonsense,” said Buchanan.
“Fact is, I hear in many quarters that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is jinxed.”
“Nonsense,” said Barrett.
“Add it up — Mr. Medick, the previous holder of the rights, tumbled to his death from a fire escape. Poor Miss Cook’s husband, the late Theatrical Syndicate booking trust magnate, Rufus S. Oppenheim, was blown to smithereens, along with his yacht, before you opened in New York. And now all these girls are getting murdered. Is there anything you would like to say to reassure audiences?”
The other reporters had pencils poised.
Buchanan stepped forward before Barrett could speak. “Yes. Please write that John Buchanan and Jackson Barrett hope that their play will offer audiences a respite from the cares of the world.”
“Tell ’em it has an exciting plot,” said the publicist. “They’ll kick themselves if they fail to see it.”
The reporter wrote down both answers, and turned to Barrett. “Mr. Barrett, have you anything to add?”
“Our hearts go out to the poor women and their families who loved them, and we pray the killer is arrested very soon.”
John Buchanan was red-faced and seething when he finally got Jackson Barrett alone in his Toledo dressing room. “Did you have to say that to that infernal reporter?”
“Say what?”
“‘Our hearts go out to the poor women and their families who loved them, and we pray the killer is arrested very soon.’”
“Somebody had to say it.”
“Did you hear what our publicist said? Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes. That’s why I said what had to be said.”
“You gave that reporter exactly what he wanted. You made a direct connection between those murders and our show. That story will dog us around the country, slashing sales just like Jack the Ripper did to Mansfield.”
“Nonsense! We live in modern times,” said Jackson Barrett. “Jack the Ripper was a Victorian fiend. We don’t have fiends in the twentieth century. Our audiences will mob the box office for blood and gore.”
“Is that a fact? Would you like to hear what that son of a bitch reporter said when he barged back into my private car after the others left?”
“If it will make you happy, of course I would like to hear what he said. What did he say?”
“He asked, ‘How will we answer a murder victim’s father and mother who claim that our Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde provoked her killing?’”
“‘Provoked’? Ridiculous. It’s a play.”
“‘Ridiculous’? Tell that to Richard Mansfield.”
“Mansfield died in aught seven.”
“I know that,” shouted Buchanan. “But in London, according to that bastard reporter, that was the main thing that killed Mansfield’s box office. People asked, did the play provoke Jack the Ripper?”
“Absurd.”
“I know it’s absurd. You know it’s absurd.”
“That reporter knows it’s absurd.”
“But what if ticket buyers don’t know it’s absurd? What if they blame us?” Buchanan sank in a chair and put his head in his hands. “We are sunk… Jackson, how in blazes can we get around this?”
Barrett grinned the way he did whenever he came up with a big idea. “Tell you what. We have an airplane, right?”
“What airplane?”
“Flying over the stage. The one you said cost too much. Fortunately, I prevailed. Audiences love it.”
“So what?”
“So we paint an airplane red. We paint ‘Jekyll’ and ‘Hyde’ on the wings. We fly it over the city where we’re playing. A billboard in the sky.”
“It’s not a real airplane. It’s a stage prop.”
“We rent a real one that looks like ours. With an aviator to fly it.”
“That would cost a fortune.”
“We’ll save a fortune in billboard passes. Why give free tickets to shopkeepers who put our ads in their windows when we have a billboard in the sky?”
Buchanan took a deep breath. A billboard in the sky was a bold idea. If the publicist could make hay with it, it might actually save them.
“I know a pilot.”
“Wire him!” said Barrett.
“Her.”
“Oh, one of your ladies?”
“No, it’s not like that. She’s happily married, she has children, and I know her father.”
“Ugly, too, I presume?”
“Driver! Stop. Head for Chelsea.”
Isaac Bell was on his way to Waterloo Station to take the boat train to Southampton Docks. Acting on sudden instinct, he ordered the cabby to make a detour.
“Ain’t you got to get to your ship, guv?”
“I’ll be quick, and triple your fare when you get me to the station on time.”
Wayne Barlowe was working in his loft, putting finishing touches on the whale.
“What happened to your face?”
“Slipped in the bath.”
“Did you find Emily?”
“She loved your sketch,” said Bell, and told him about Jack Spelvin. “Did you ever see Spelvin perform at Wilton’s?”
“No.”
“You’d remember his face if you had?”
“Of course.”
“I gave her your sketch. Could you make me another?”
As happened on their last meeting, Barlowe’s hands flew without hesitation.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Alive — barely. She seems to have landed in some sort of safe berth at the Salvation Army. How long she’ll stay there will depend on whether she goes back to the laudanum.”
The sketch was in Bell’s hands in moments, a near replica of the first. He asked, “Could you draw another of him when he’s older? The way he’d look today, if he’s still alive.”
“Are you assuming that Spelvin was not an innocent actor?”
Bell said, “I have to consider every possibility. Including if Emily was not hallucinating, Spelvin was not innocent.”
Barlowe hesitated. “I have to consider twenty years of variables, twenty years of events, that changed him. Drink, tobacco, illness, accident, grief.”
“Joy,” said Bell. “If it is he, I doubt he feels grief.”
“I’m asking you, is he Jack the Ripper?”
“Draw him like he is the Ripper,” Bell said brusquely. “I want to see what he might look like now. Start with what people saw when he was young — bounding like a hare, handsome, angelic — and imagine he’s been lucky, no illness, no accidents, few disappointments.”
Barlowe picked up his pencil reluctantly. He worked for a few minutes and handed Bell a sketch of a pleasant-looking, somewhat elegant man in his forties. The face lacked the eye-catching qualities of Jack Spelvin in his youth.
Barlowe said, “It’s too general, Bell. Do you see what I mean? He could be anyone.”
“You are too modest,” said Isaac Bell. “Far too modest.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are an artist.”
Barlowe had captured the face of a chameleon.
Twenty-three years after the so-called Jack Spelvin mesmerized Emily, this man in his forties could indeed be anyone — almost invisible in one instant, bland in another, and striking in the next. A girl might not even notice him until he was ready to be noticed. She might see him as innocuous. Or harmless. Or intriguing. Or dazzling.
He would choose.
The Cutthroat dipped an artist’s brush in a vial of spirit gum. He painted the adhesive on the lace backing of a gray mustache made of human hair. Then he dipped the brush again and coated the skin above his upper lip, exhaling through his nostrils to dispel the nauseating odor of alcohol and pine resin. To make the glue dry faster, he fanned it with an old souvenir program stolen the night that Mansfield’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opened its ill-fated London run at the Lyceum.
He had carried it everywhere in his vagabond life and cherished the illustrations of scenes from the play. An ordinary paper program the theater gave away would have disintegrated years ago, but the souvenir was printed on strong silk. Though mottled from the oil on his fingertips, and drips of spirit gum, the colors had never faded. Every page transported him back to a haunting night of melodrama, mastery, and death.
He tapped the brush handle to his lip. When it stuck to the spirit gum and lifted the skin, it was ready. He pressed the mustache to his lip and held it firmly. The coupling of gum to gum felt warm for a few moments and then it was on good and tight. He tested the mustache in the mirror with a gentle, fatherly smile. It flexed naturally.
He grayed his hair, dabbing in pressed powder with a densely bristled goat-hair makeup brush. Old-fashioned gold wire-rimmed spectacles aged him further, while their tinted glass shielded the fire in his eyes. He worked a wedding ring on his finger; few married men wore a wedding ring, and the girls took it as a sign of extreme fidelity. His detachable shirt cuffs — instead of up-to-date sewn-on cotton — were as behind the times as his specs and made of stiff celluloid that protected his wrists from their fingernails.
Before he stepped out into the night, he gazed upon the program cover.
Richard Mansfield in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A Souvenir of the Lyceum Theatre
Lessee and Manager, Mr. Henry Irving
August 8, 1888
The Cutthroat felt his heartbeat quicken. He had scrounged pennies for the cheapest seat in the back of the Lyceum. The play was a culmination of an obsession that had deepened nightly since he first feasted on the Robert Louis Stevenson novella and the lightning bolt of recognition that the story struck. It was an entirely new way to regard what every man knew in the darkest part of his heart. Everyone knew that good and evil resided in every man. Everyone knew he had to resist evil. Until Jekyll and Hyde promised what everyone wanted: the means to have both.
There had been rumors of a play. An American actor was said to have bought dramatic rights from Stevenson. Then came word it had opened in New York to magnificent notices. London was next, and opening night from even the cheapest seat in the house was everything the Cutthroat had hoped for.
And more. In Mansfield’s adaptation, Hyde attacked women as well as men. For the Cutthroat, everything he wanted fell into place. It took only a few short hours after the curtain fell for him to murder a woman who denied him. By a miracle and some good luck, he didn’t get caught. A cask of spoiled wine in the St. Katharine Docks storehouse, where he paid for his bed as the night watchman, preserved the body while he got rid of it in pieces.
He would be more careful next time. He would plan. Savor. Anticipate. Returning to the theater repeatedly, he had prepared for that next time. Prostitutes were safest, he decided, the nature of their bargain being privacy. It was safer to kill them in their places, leave their bodies, and sleep safely in his own place. Three weeks later, he killed his first prostitute. Set off by the play, he let the demon in him come and go. In between, he led a blameless life. He was in every aspect Jekyll and Hyde. But unlike Jekyll, he needed no secret potion to become Hyde. The play was his potion.
But suddenly he was punished. Returning to the Lyceum one evening, he found the theater dark and shuttered. The Mansfield play had failed, driven out of business by his own Jack the Ripper murders. The audience had dried up. Who wanted to watch a play about horror when the horror of real-life killings gripped London? He would wait three long years before he saw Jekyll and Hyde performed in New York.
He tested the mustache with another smile, took one of the capes hidden under a false bottom in his trunk, and swirled it over his shoulders. He snatched up a walking stick and strode into the dark streets at a jaunty pace. When he saw her, fair-haired in the glow of a streetlamp, he slowed his pace and transformed the walking stick into an old man’s cane by the simple act of leaning on it.
She looked him over, saw he was old and rich, and gave him a hopeful smile.
“Would you tell me your name, miss?”
Isaac Bell had fired off two final cables to New York before he boarded his ship at Southampton. To his Cutthroat Squad:
LUSITANIA
PILOT BOAT
To Grady Forrer in Research:
MURDERED GIRLS
MISSING GIRLS
TRAVEL PATTERN
Lusitania flashed past sail-driven pilot boats as she raced along the Fire Island coast at her twenty-five-knot service speed. Slowing at last for the first time since she put to sea at the Needles, the four-stack Cunard liner stopped beside the lightship Ambrose at the entrance to the channel. The steam-powered Sandy Hook pilot boat New York launched a heavily laden yawl in the lee of Lusitania’s cliff-like black hull. The yawl’s oarsman rowed to the ship. The harbor pilot climbed her rope and wood Jacob’s ladder.
An agile quartet of Van Dorn detectives clambered after him. Lusitania’s assistant purser, as lavishly tipped as the pilot-boat crew, took them directly to Isaac Bell’s stateroom.
“Grab a seat. The Cutthroat Squad has four uninterrupted hours, until the tugboats land us at 13th Street, to think out loud. I expect bright ideas to spark others.”
Archie Abbott, Harry Warren, James Dashwood, and Helen Mills crowded onto chairs and the edge of the bed. Grady Forrer leaned quietly against the bureau. Bell paced.
“The question is no longer whether Anna Waterbury’s murderer is Jack the Ripper. The question is how has he managed not to get caught for the twenty years he’s been murdering women in our country?”
“But is he Jack the Ripper?” asked Harry Warren.
“Here’s what he might look like if he is.”
The ship’s photographer had made copies of Wayne Barlowe’s aged drawing. Bell passed them around.
“This could be any gent in his forties,” said Archie Abbott.
“A rather handsome ‘any gent,’” said Helen Mills. “Outstanding.”
“But not unique.”
“Looks like a grown-up altar boy,” said Harry Warren.
“This eliminates men who look older and younger,” said Dashwood. “He’s not thirty. He’s not fifty.”
“Why don’t we print these up like wanted posters?” asked Mills. “Warn street girls about a man who looks like this.”
Isaac Bell thought of Wayne Barlowe, caught in a similar bind, refusing to draw the angelic and possibly innocent youth for the police posters, and second-guessing himself ever since. “No,” he said. “Archie’s right. This drawing could be many gents in their forties. If we print these up, we’ll get bullies forming lynch mobs and a bunch of innocents dancing from their necks.”
“That’s a valid point,” said Helen. “But the girls he’s killing are innocent, too.”
Bell said, “I’ll consider it after we isolate the city he’s operating in. Meantime, a better angle is to decipher the crescent shapes he carves in the bodies.”
“Did the London Ripper do this to his girls?”
“He cut symbols. But they were different. We need to know what his crescents mean.”
“How come no one’s seen him attack?” asked Helen. “No one’s even heard a scream?”
“Three reasons,” said Bell. “One, he’s a predator. That means he’s extraordinarily alert and aware of his surroundings. Probably the last time he had to run was the night when a con man named Davy Collins caught a glimpse of him in ’eighty-eight. Two, he never frightens his victim before he has complete control of her. He’s made an art of putting her at ease. Three, America is a big continent. When he arrived, he reckoned he’d never get caught if he kept moving around. If the Van Dorn Agency hadn’t been working up the Anna case, no one would have noticed the connection between her and Lillian Lent in Boston and Mary Beth Winthrop in Springfield. Fortunately, we are working the case, so the All Field Offices Alert turned up a slew of his killings. We know he’s still in business. We know what his victims look like. And I’m betting he looks something like this picture.”
“He’s killed girls in twenty cities,” said Harry Warren. “How does he get around?”
“Precisely what we will focus on,” said Bell. “How does he travel? Why does he travel? What line is he in?”
“A drummer,” said Archie Abbott. “Who travels more than a traveling salesman?”
“He’s an executive,” said Helen. “He travels city to city visiting his company’s factories.”
“He’s a bank robber,” said Harry Warren. “The new breed that cross state lines in autos.”
Bell shook his head. “He’s been murdering since 1891. How’d he cross state lines before autos?”
“Covered wagon.”
Isaac Bell did not smile. The detectives exchanged wary glances. The stateroom fell so silent, they could hear stewards hustling luggage in the corridor and the faint piping of pilot whistles as Lusitania crept toward Quarantine.
“Sorry, Isaac.”
“A circus performer,” said Archie Abbott. “They’re always on the move. Or a vaudevillian.”
Now Bell had his people where he wanted them — the best minds in the agency, working full steam at turning speculation into facts. He looked at Abbott. “If he had been a London music hall actor, could he play vaudeville here?”
“Why not? Music is music, and the jokes work the same: Set-up. Premise. Punch line. Was he on the bill?”
“I have no playbills or programs from back then. The music hall isn’t even a theater anymore.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jack Spelvin.”
“Sounds like he had a sense of humor. Spelvin’s a pseudonym.”
“The Ripper liked his games.” If the crescent cuts were the murderer’s idea of a joke, thought Bell, what was the punch line?
“He could be a hobo,” said Harry Warren. “Stealing rides on freight trains.”
“Except,” said Helen Mills, “where does a hobo get cash in hand to show the girl?”
“But what if he isn’t stealing rides? What if he’s a railroad man?” said Warren. “They’re on the move. Brakemen invented the red-light district with their red lanterns.”
Bell said, “I find it difficult to imagine a railroad man dressing in a cape and homburg to convince Anna Waterbury he was a Broadway producer. Though he could be an express agent.” The well-paid operators who guarded the express cars could afford to dress like dandies, and often did.
“Union organizers travel,” said Harry Warren.
“An engineer,” said Helen Mills. “They travel for work. So do specialist doctors and surgeons. So do actors. As we just said.”
“A private detective.”
Everyone stared at Archie Abbott.
Bell nudged them back on track. “There are three or four hundred thousand commercial travelers in the country. If he is a traveling salesman, then he’s probably a commission man. They make their own schedules. Union organizers, engineers, and specialists who travel might number in the low thousands. Archie, how many actors are there?”
“All told? Maybe thirty thousand.”
“All men?”
“Men, maybe twenty thousand.”
“Not exactly what I’d call narrowing down,” said Harry Warren.
That was followed by a deep silence. Helen Mills broke it. “Speaking of a cape and homburg, how did Jack the Ripper dress in London?”
“That was a long time ago, and it depends on who thinks they saw him. The illustrators mostly agreed on a gentleman’s cape and top hat, but that was the image they expected of a man who could afford to pay a prostitute.”
“In other words, we don’t know what he does, and we don’t know how he gets around.”
“We can assume,” said Bell, “that he must be of some means to afford to dress well and travel. Unless he is wealthy and doesn’t have to work, whatever his job, it almost certainly requires him to travel.”
“Right back where we started,” said Harry Warren.
“Not quite,” said Isaac Bell. “We’re miles ahead of where we started.” He looked at Grady Forrer, who remained silent through the speculation.
“We have a pattern,” said the Research chief. “We can match our pattern to the travels.”
“What pattern?”
“His route,” said Isaac Bell. “Tell them, Grady.”
Forrer ticked cities off on his enormous fingers. “New York, Boston, Springfield, in the order petite blond girls were murdered. Albany, Philadelphia, Scranton, Binghamton, Pittsburgh, Columbus, in the order girls disappeared. Ten days ago, a girl was reported missing in Cleveland.”
“He’s back to doing an expert job hiding bodies,” said Bell. “Or luck’s on his side, again.”
Grady Forrer tugged a map from the folds of his tent-size coat and unrolled it on the stateroom bed. The route was marked in red. Looping north from New York to Boston, the red line meandered over the densely populated northeastern section of America, crossing each other occasionally, the size of the cities diminishing as it progressed westward.
“Why did you circle Cincinnati?”
The big manufacturing and trading city on the Ohio River nudged the Indiana and Kentucky borders a hundred miles beyond the westwardmost Columbus.
“Cincinnati breaks the pattern. There’s a girl missing in Cincinnati who resembled his other victims. But she disappeared months before Anna was murdered. A singer at the continuous vaudeville house. Happy in her job, according to the other performers. No hint that she was about to run, nor any reason why she would.”
Bell gestured at the map. “Before all these?”
“An anomaly,” said Grady Forrer. “But anomalies sometimes make a point. So I circled her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rose Bloom.”
“There’s a stage name,” said Archie Abbott.
“Actually, she was born with it, a pretty little Irish girl— There you have it, gents,” Forrer said. “And lady,” he added with a courtly bow to Helen Mills. “Two questions for you to contemplate: What takes our man on this route? Which is to ask, what’s his line? And where is he headed next?”
“Three questions,” said Isaac Bell. “Can the Cutthroat Squad detect where he is headed next before he kills some poor girl when he gets there?”
Prospering for a century on a big bend of the Ohio River, Cincinnati was accustomed to spectacular arrivals. Eight thousand steamboats had landed in the single year of 1852, with priceless cargo, and with ambitious passengers eager to share in her boomtown riches. In the dark days of the Civil War, Cincinnatians improvised a pontoon bridge of coal barges for fifty thousand Union troops who had arrived in the nick of time to block a Confederate Army invasion. And when the Kaiser’s brother — the much-loved Prince Henry of Prussia — arrived on his American tour, the police had to shoo adoring mobs off the roofs of his train cars while the United German Singing Societies serenaded him.
But no arrival could prepare Cincinnati for the Jekyll & Hyde Special.
For days in advance, newspaper writers described the show train in awed detail — Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan’s private cars, decorated to the actor-managers’ personal taste; the leading actors’ and actresses’ lavish staterooms; the dormitory cars, stacked with Pullman berths, for players, stagehands, carpenters, electricians, clerks, publicists, accountants, and musicians; the dining car, “the heart of the train that serves mouthwatering repasts all round the clock”; the freight cars that carried the elaborate sets; and the express/baggage car, with its monumental steel safe for the box office receipts, guarded by a heavily armed, ice-eyed agent of Van Dorn Protective Services, the trusted subsidiary of the famous detective agency that furnished house detectives for first class hotels, and as jewelers’ escorts, bodyguards, and for discreet assistance to William Howard Taft’s Secret Service squad when the president ventured from the White House — ten gleaming red cars in all — cannonballed from city to city by a high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2 Deaver-built locomotive that was, her engineer confided to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “a good steamer and rides easy.”
Telegraph operators relayed its progress as it thundered south through Detroit. Would the Jekyll & Hyde Special deliver actors, scenery, and musicians in time to stage the show for their first-night curtain?
No one knew that Barrett and Buchanan had deliberately scheduled a close-run arrival to build suspense and encourage the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad to clear tracks for their special rather than risk the wrath of a city that loved its theaters. Betting pools sprang up in saloons, beer gardens, and gentlemen’s clubs, and fortunes changed hands for side bets on the precise moments it would tear past intervening stations.
Suddenly, when it was ten miles out and no greater excitement could be imagined, a blood-red biplane — the spitting image of the airplane everyone had heard was in the play — soared over the city, skimmed the river, and swooped under the Roebling suspension bridge.
The most unlikely event tripped up the Cutthroat.
This sweet little dancer’s upturned nose was as sensitive as his.
“I smell spirit gum.”
He had stuck to his rules. He had practiced self-discipline and restraint. He had planned. He had anticipated. He had hoped. But still he was tripped up: Little Beatrice’s nose was as sensitive as his. In Cincinnati, of all places, despite laying extraordinarily elaborate groundwork.
“Is that a false beard?”
She actually reached up to tug it. He recoiled, jerked his head away from her hand.
“It is, isn’t it?” She laughed, and stood on tiptoe to inspect it closely. “That’s the best one I’ve ever seen.” Her laughter died as she considered the oddity.
He was quick, he reminded himself. He had better be. The suspicion of danger had narrowed her eyes. Still, he was confident that he held the advantage. She was only operating on instinct. He had at his command decades of know-how.
“Why are you wearing a false beard?”
“To hide…” he said, then cast his eyes down as if too dismayed to complete his thought. He could still control her.
“From what?” she asked sharply. Her voice had an unpleasant edge, a grating noise that he longed to silence. But he couldn’t silence her before he coaxed her to join him inside his cottage. It was next to the river at the end of a dark lane. The last girl he had brought here, Rose — Rose Bloom — had entered willingly. But Rose had not smelled spirit gum, nor noticed anything to trip him up.
It was all too easy to imagine how the cottage would look to a girl who was already wary: remote, tucked away in a storehouse district, the only dwelling on the lane. He had had the front porch painted a warm yellow so that it looked welcoming and had installed an electric light on the front porch, and had left another burning inside. Pleasant, lived-in, welcoming, a cosy cottage on the outskirts of town, with a rowboat dock convenient to the Ohio.
“For you,” he answered.
“I don’t understand.”
She stopped walking abruptly and looked around as if noticing for the first time that the street was devoid of people. They had just reached the storehouses at the corner of his lane. They could smell the river. “What do you mean from me?”
“Not from you,” he stammered. “To protect you. To hide my face.”
“From what?”
“Scars. I was wounded horribly in the Spanish War.” The false beard was so gray, it was nearly white, which would make him rather too old to have fought in the 1898 War. But hopefully for a girl so young, a war of thirteen years ago could have been fought a hundred years in the past. Ancient history. Civil War. Revolutionary War. War of 1898.
She said, “Oh.” Still standing there, still gazing around — looking for help, he feared — she said, “Well, so am I.”
He searched her pretty face by the streetlamp. “Scarred?”
“From a fire.”
“Where?”
“Where you can’t see.”
“Can’t see? I saw you dance on the stage.”
“The corset covers it. A lamp exploded when I was a little girl. It looks horrible. I’ll never let anyone see.”
“You poor thing.”
“Well, you’re a poor thing, too.”
“Aren’t we a pair?”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so. And I promised you supper. My housekeeper will be quite put out if we let it get cold.”
“Is she there now?”
“She better be. Who do you think serves supper and washes the dishes?”
Still, she hesitated.
He took a chance and went for broke. “You know, Beatrice, in all my days of booking national tours, I’ve never met a dancer who wasn’t famished after her show.”
That got him a grin that wrinkled her pretty nose, and suddenly they were friends.
“I’m starving!”
He shrugged his cape off one shoulder and offered his arm.
“Step this way.”
Late that night, he propped Beatrice in a kitchen chair while he ate a cold supper. Just before dawn, he tied his cape around her, gathered her in his arms, and climbed down the steep stairs to the dock. The river smelled rank. The fierce current was so loud, he could barely hear her splash.
“Good night. You were lovely.”
How wrong he was about that.
Isaac Bell jumped off the extra-fare St. Louis Limited at Cincinnati and headed straight to the morgue in City Hospital. The talkative coroner, who greeted him on the front steps, started apologizing for the condition of the old building. “Dates back to the 1860s. We’re building a fine new hospital across town.”
“May I see the girl?”
A barge hand had spotted her butchered body jammed under an Ohio River wharf. The Van Dorn field office had already reported a dancer missing from the continuous vaudeville house where she worked, the same theater where the singer Rose Bloom had disappeared months earlier.
Beatrice Edmond had told a friend she was trying to land a part in a road company, but she had not said which one. The field office chief had found no one who had seen her at any of the Cincinnati theaters where tours were playing — not Tillie’s Nightmare, the Marie Dressler show at the Bethel, nor Alias Jimmy Valentine at the Lyric, nor Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Clark, and surely not Salome at the German.
“Her cape snagged on a wharf,” said the coroner, “or she’d have drifted to New Orleans before anyone noticed.”
“May I see her?” Bell asked again. Twenty-to-one, “her cape” was a standard department store item and twice the size a tiny girl would wear.
“Not much to see. The current banged her around, and the city sewage is as corrosive as you’d ex—”
A racket in the sky cut him off in the middle of a sentence.
BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT!
Isaac Bell looked up, astonished. He recognized the sound instantly, but the last thing he expected to hear over Cincinnati was the staccato blast of a rotary airplane engine at full throttle. A red streak of lightning shot past the hospital fifty feet above the Miami Canal and vanished in the direction of the Ohio River.
“Bet you don’t know what that is,” said the coroner.
Bell was an avid airman and knew exactly what it was. “A new Breguet Type IV tractor biplane with a Gnome rotary engine. But what’s he doing here?”
“Advertising! That’s—”
BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! drowned him out again.
The Breguet skimmed the mansard roof of the four-story hospital so close, it sent tiles flying, and Isaac Bell could not help grinning in envy of the lucky pilot. Then he saw the advertisement painted on the underside of the wings touting the show that Anna Waterbury had hoped would have a place for her:
JEKYLL
on the left wing and
AND HYDE
on the right.
The red plane flashed by trailing castor oil smoke that smelled like someone had blown out candles.
“First airplane that ever flew over Cincinnati,” said the coroner. “Booming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Tickets are going like hotcakes. I’m taking the wife on Saturday.
“Come on in,” said the coroner. “I have her on the table.”
Later, Isaac Bell wandered Cincinnati’s theater district, reading marquees and playbills and collecting programs. He stopped in front of the vaudeville house. Beatrice Edmond’s name was still on the bill. Her cape had been too big.
He took the theater programs to the two-room Van Dorn field office on Plum Street. The chief — Sedgwick, an eager young detective they had hired away from the Police Department and who had gained a reputation in New York for snappy telegrams in the middle of the night — was working late. Bell spread the programs on a table and opened his notebook.
He juggled the symbols in his mind, inverted the crescent moons, angled some horns, and tried to group them in patterns. Then he took out his fountain pen. He was sketching freehand in the margins of the theater programs when, reaching for another, he suddenly saw the crescent shapes as Jack the Ripper carved them.
“I need your private wire.”
“Want me to send for you?”
“I remember my Morse.”
Bell sat at the key and tapped out orders to New York in cipher.
CINCINNATI
ON THE JUMP
FORRER — LINK ROAD SHOWS TO MURDERS MAP
DASHWOOD — ASSIST CINCINNATI FIELD OFFICE
BRING RIPPER WARNING POSTERS
ABBOTT, MILLS, WARREN — ON THE QUIET
“Why on the quiet?” said a voice over his shoulder.
“Hello, Joe.” Bell stood up and shook Joseph Van Dorn’s enormous hand. “I thought I heard you come in.”
“New York told me you were here. I caught the B&O from Washington.”
“Why?”
“To determine where your investigation is going.”
Isaac Bell’s face lighted in a triumphant smile.
“It is going to town with bells on.”
“Why on the quiet?”
“I’m disguising my operators.”
“As what?”
“I’ll show you.”
Bell led Van Dorn to the table where his notebook lay open among the programs.
One by one, he pointed to the crescents with his pen.
“Here’s a smile,” he told Van Dorn.
“So?”
“Here’s a frown.”
“If you say so.”
“Mouths! Eyes!”
“Isaac!” Van Dorn exploded. “What in blue blazes are you talking about?”
“Mouths. Upturned and downcast. Eyes. Upturned and downcast — the raw ingredients.”
“OF WHAT?”