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.
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.”