The Cutthroat

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.”

21

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.