The Cutthroat

“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?”