“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.”
17
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.”
18
“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—s
quat 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.”