“Then tell me what you’re doing in London. And spare me your masquerade about Jack the Ripper. Really, Bell, it seems below you.”
“I’ll do better than tell you. I’ll show you.”
“Show me what?”
“Someone I found.”
“Whom have you found?”
“A German who wants to sell a secret.”
“What secret?”
“A new fire-control device.”
Abbington-Westlake’s eyes went opaque as Bell was betting they would. Naval cannon range and speed of fire were increasing rapidly, demanding radically improved methods for the dreadnought battleships to aim their big guns. “Why would you share your treasure with me?”
“You’re better placed in London to do something about it. And I have no doubt you will do the gentlemanly thing and share it with us.”
“No doubt,” Abbington-Westlake lied. “Where is this Hun?”
“He has promised to meet me in a cab at Charing Cross.”
“When?”
“Eight o’clock tonight.”
“Do you trust him?”
“He’s scared and greedy,” said Bell. “All he wants is to get his money and board the first boat back to Germany.”
Abbington-Westlake’s expression hardened. “So the reason you are sharing this is you expect me to put up the money.”
“I don’t need your money,” said Bell.
“Really? Oh— Well, I stand corrected . . . Bell, this is all quite unusual.”
It occurred to Isaac Bell that this was as enjoyable as fly-casting for trout. It was time to set the hook. He said, “I think I made a mistake. I thought this was for a Navy man. Now it strikes me I should speak with a fellow I know at the Foreign Office.”
“Not if you’re expecting immediate action.”
“Then Military Intelligence.”
Abbington-Westlake regarded him shrewdly. “I regret to inform you that your old friend Lord Strone has been put out to pasture.”
“Leaving only you?”
“To your great good fortune,” said the commander. “I will have that cab surrounded by twenty picked men.”
“No,” said Bell. “Not one. This German is as sharp as they come. He’s survived twenty years’ spying in London and you never caught him. You don’t even know his name. He’ll spot your picked men in a flash. We will keep it simple—you, me, and him.”
“How did you stumble upon him?”
“Sheer luck,” said Bell.
“I thought so. How?”
“I was closing in on a Japanese. The German beat me to him. He wrecked everything I’d been working for. I lit out after him and caught up.”
“So you made your luck.”
“Exactly as you would, Commander. Shall we shake hands on it?”
Abbington-Westlake extended a soft pink hand. Bell gripped it hard. “Just so we understand each other, sir, I will spot your ‘picked men’ just as I spotted your shadow. Don’t try to slip them past me.”
“Wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”
Fog was thickening when Isaac Bell pulled up in front of the Charing Cross railroad station in a closed carriage, a roomy cab that Londoners called a growler. He opened the door and beckoned Commander Abbington-Westlake. The Navy spy was dressed identically to the hordes of City bankers rushing home in bowlers and raincoats, with one exception. Instead of an umbrella, he carried a walking stick with an ivory knob carved to resemble the head of a crocodile.
Bell moved over to make room on the seat beside him. Abbington-Westlake climbed in, and the Van Dorn driver set his horse at a quick trot up the Strand.
“Wait. Where are we going?”
“Our German changed his mind at the last minute. Trafalgar Square.”
“But—”
“But your picked men are at Charing Cross?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Because I suspect this fellow is going to run us in circles until he feels safe.”
At Trafalgar Square, a flower girl tapped the window and handed Bell a scrap of paper.
Bell read aloud, “‘Berkeley Square.’”
“How did that girl distinguish this cab from a hundred others?”
“The same way the German will. The driver has a white ribbon tied to his whip.”
The horse trotted up Cockspur to Pall Mall, up Pall Mall and across Regent Street to Piccadilly, where it turned at the Ritz Hotel onto Dover and down Hay Hill into Berkeley Square. It stopped abruptly. James Mapes flung open the cab door and climbed heavily inside with a strongbox under his arm. He was dressed in a fine suit of clothes, a rabbit-felt fedora, and the latest Burberrys waterproof. Bell could almost hear Joe Van Dorn’s howls of protest over his expense sheet.
“Took your time,” Mapes said in an accent so heavy that Abbington-Westlake, straining to see his face in the dark, said, “What was that?”
“He said,” said Bell, “we took our time.”
“Damn right, we took our time, and we’ll continue to take our time until we’re convinced you have something of value.”
“Vere ist der muny?”
“Where are the fire control plans?”
Mapes patted the strongbox. “In der buks.”
“Open it.”
“Show der marks.”
Bell passed him an envelope. “Give me the key.”
Mapes pulled a key from his pocket but held on to it and used it like a letter opener to slit the envelope. Suddenly a shadow loomed out of the fog. The driver knocked a warning, but he was too late, and the shadow took the shape of a constable’s helmet. A truncheon rattled the window.
“Ist der trick!” Mapes shouted. “Schweinhund!”
Bell snatched the key from his hand, but Mapes held on to the envelope as he pushed open the opposite door. Bell lunged for him, blocking Abbington-Westlake’s attempt to trip him with his walking stick. Mapes tumbled out, eluding Bell’s grasp, and ran into the gardens of Berkeley Square.
The constable lumbered after him, blowing his whistle. Abbington flung open his door.
Bell pinned his arm. “Let him go.”
“He’ll escape.”
“We have his strongbox,” said Bell. “There’ll be coppers all over us.” He called to the driver, “Get us out of here!”
The horse galloped onto Fitzmaurice Place, rounded the curve into Curzon Street at a speed that caused the top-heavy growler to careen on two wheels. The driver regained control before it fell on its side. Cracking his whip, he wove in and out of lanes. Suddenly they emerged into the flurry of Piccadilly traffic just west of the Ritz, where they blended in with a hundred other growlers, hansoms, and petrol motor taxis. At the edge of Green Park, he pulled under a streetlamp haloed by the fog. It cast soft light on Bell’s and Abbington-Westlake’s faces.
“Why is he stopping?”
“To give his horse a breather,” said Bell.
“Shall we have a look in the box?”
“Be my guest,” said Bell. He handed over the key.
“Wait!”
“Why?”
“Funny feeling,” said Isaac Bell. He leaned in and studied the box carefully. “I think it’s a trick.”
“What trick? I fail to see a trick. I see a strongbox filled with priceless information.”
“Let’s see your torch.”
Bell switched on the flashlight and played the beam over the lock and the keyhole.
“What do you see, Bell?”
“Give me your walking stick.”
24
Gingerly, Isaac Bell inserted the key partway into the strongbox lock.
Then he poked at the key with Abbington-Westlake’s walking stick.
“What the devil are you doing?”
“Le
t us pretend that you are turning that key,” said Isaac Bell. He turned the stick around and used the ornate knob to shove the key deeper into the lock. It engaged with a sharp snick. A sudden explosion of noise resounded in the closed cab like a thunderclap. The crocodile disintegrated, spraying Bell and Abbington-Westlake with splintered wood and ivory.
“What?” gasped Abbington-Westlake.
His shattered stick was pinned in the iron jaws of the wrist manacle that had sprung from the box.
“I had a funny feeling it was a thief catcher,” said Bell.
“A what?”
“Thief catcher. I read somewhere that accountants had to look out for them when they audited a dead man’s estate.”
Abbington-Westlake pulled what was left of his stick from the manacle. “This could have been my arm.”
“What’s in the box?” asked Bell.
“You open it,” said Abbington-Westlake. He jumped when the lid squealed on rusty hinges. Bell switched on the flashlight, fixed the beam on the manacle springs, then played it inside.
“Empty!” said Abbington-Westlake.
“No. Here’s something.”
The tall detective and the English spymaster stared. The box contained a single sheet of paper. Abbington-Westlake snatched it up. A steel-pen drawing depicted the ninety-eight-gun wooden battleship Dreadnought that had fought Napoleon’s navy one hundred and six years ago at the Battle of Trafalgar.
“Of all the bloody cheek.”
“He’s got a sense of humor,” said Bell.
“The Hun will stop at nothing.”
Isaac Bell hung his head as if equal parts embarrassed and apologetic. “I am sorry I let you down, but he really pulled the wool over my eyes . . . If it makes you feel any better, he got my money.”
Abbington-Westlake recovered quickly. “I suppose I would be somewhat more irritated if that had shattered my arm. As it is, I’m in your debt.”
“You can pay me off easily.”
“How?” Abbington-Westlake asked warily.
“Tell me about Jack the Ripper.”
“Bell, will you drop this bloody charade?”
“No, you’re wrong about the masquerade. I was trying to do two things at once. Back in America, I am tracking a monster who is killing girls and I am increasingly sure he is the same man.”
Abbington-Westlake shook his head. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Bell. He is not the same man.”
“Do you know for sure?”
“I’ll confide in you the solution to the Whitechapel Mysteries. It was proved for a fact who the Ripper was. He drowned himself in the Thames.”
“Stop! Next, you’ll name suspects, from an insane medical student, to suicides, to a doctor avenging his son, to a royal Duke, to a peer of the realm hiding in Brazil, to a famous painter, to a maniacal immigrant Pole.”
“All right. All right,” Abbington-Westlake rumbled on. “Look here, Bell. I don’t mind sharing a confidence with a man of your integrity . . . Give me your word as a gentleman it will go no further.”
“My lips are sealed,” said Isaac Bell.
“I have photographs. I will show them to you in gratitude for saving my wrist.”
“Photographs of what?”
“Mortuary photographs of his victims’ bodies.”
“Where did you get them?”
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“How did you get pictures?”
“I’ll show you— Driver! Whitehall. Number 26.”
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, Comman
der.” 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.
Isaac Bell drew a deep breath. “After ’eighty-eight?”
“’Eighty-nine, ’ninety, and the first half of ’ninety-one.”
“Why did the Yard deny it?”
“If they said he was dead, the case was closed. The most they could be charged with is incompetent detective work on only five killings. Subsequent murders could be blamed on copycats until the fiend finally ran out of steam or vanished.”
“What happened in the second half of ’ninety-one?”
“Vanished.”
“Not a trace?”
“Not a trace.”
“Any idea why?”
Abbington-Westlake shrugged. “In my humble opinion? Same reason he shifted operations to the suburbs. Wisely not pressing his luck in London. How long could he count on Scotland Yard bungling? By mid-’ninety-one, he probably reckoned it was time to stop pressing his luck in England.”