The Cutthroat

“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.