The Cutthroat

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?”

25

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.