The Cutthroat by Clive Cussler (popular books to read txt) 📗

eighty percent of American boys stunted by starvation? Sure, we’ve got poor folk, but ours can hope—better times next year. These miserable devils are stuck at the bottom forever. It’s a cruel nation, Mr. Bell. Jack the Ripper probably figured to get some back by making the honorable Police Commissioner look like a fool.”

“Or toying with the cops just to show he was smarter. ‘My funny little games,’ he wrote to the Central News Agency.”

“If he actually wrote that letter. The Yard and the papers got hundreds of letters claiming they were from Jack the Ripper.”

“He wrote it,” said Bell. “Look at the order of events. The Yard posted copies, hoping someone would recognize the handwriting.”

“No one did, and he never got caught. Fact-backed truth, he was smarter.”

“I’ll see you later,” said Bell, and stepped into the street. “Meantime, find me someone who was at the postmortems.”

“Coroner?”

“Anyone who saw their bodies.”

“Sure you don’t want me to go in there with you?” asked Wallace. “The inspector who my friends set you up with is a prickly son of a gun.”

“I prefer to appear harmless,” said Bell.

Good luck with that, thought Wallace as he watched the tall detective mount the front steps of New Scotland Yard like an angry lion.

Police constables picked for imposing height and remarkable breadth guarded the entrance. Silver buttons fastened their high-collared navy tunics. Eight-pointed Brunswick stars glistened on their helmets.

Isaac Bell presented his card.

While he waited for his appointment to be confirmed, he turned around casually and cast the eyes of a dazzled tourist upon the barge-filled river, the busy bridge, Westminster Palace, Big Ben, the bustling street. The sweep of his gaze broke infinitesimally, just long enough to signal Joel Wallace.

The rail-thin man in a bowler hat and guard’s coat loitering outside the office on Jermyn Street had made a second appearance in St. James’s Park. Now he was strolling nonchalantly along the Thames Embankment. A possible coincidence, but unlikely, as he had engaged in some camouflage by changing his scarf from blue to green.

London was Joel Wallace’s town. It was his job to find out who was shadowing the Van Dorns. Chief Investigator Isaac Bell had bigger fish to fry in Scotland Yard.

“Insurance, you say, Mr. Bell? What firm do you represent?”

Bell had already presented a business card, and the Scotland Yard inspector had taken his time reading it. But the angry lion Joel Wallace had observed had glided into the depths of its cage as Bell tamped down his own impatience to present the picture of an earnest citizen deferring to the majesty of the police. He answered, politely, “Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock.”

The inspector twirled Bell’s card in his fingers. Joel Wallace had chosen him because he had joined Scotland Yard in 1885, three years before Jack the Ripper’s rampage. That made him a man in his late fifties and facing retirement, and probably not happy about either. “Prickly” was putting it mildly. He was haughty, arrogant, and deeply disdainful—and in no mood, as Bell had presumed, to do the Chief Investigator of an American private detective agency any favors.

“From Hartford.” He let the card fall to his desk. “In Connecticut.” He pronounced it Con-nec-ti-cut in the English manner, emphasizing syllables Yankees ignored. “Why have you come to Scotland Yard, Mr. Bell? Or should I ask, why did you prevail upon an associate of a Home Office undersecretary to ask me the favor of granting you an interview?”

Isaac Bell managed a cordial smile. “I just crossed the pond aboard the Mauretania. I’m on the trail of a Chicago jewel thief who calls himself Laurence Rosania. Perhaps you’ve encountered him in London?”

“I can’t say I have.”

Bell mentioned a recent unsolved burglary at the Ritz Hotel. The inspector returned bland assurances that investigations were closing in on the actual thief, who was certainly not Rosania.

Bell said, “I’m seeking certain connections between the victims and the thief.”

“I should think the loss of valuables to a criminal would be connection enough.”

“Fraudulent claims. Rosania lifts your wife’s necklace and you claim insurance on her bracelet as well.” He produced a photograph. A remarkably elegant figure for one so young, Rosania was gazing blasély into the camera.

“This was taken upon his incarceration in the New York State prison at Sing Sing. Unfortunately, he gained a pardon and promptly went back to his ways. I’m fairly certain he has worked the liners, and I can’t help but wonder whether upon disembarking popped up to London to crack a safe, then home free on another ship.”

“That would take nerve.”

“Rosania knows no shortage of nerve.”

“Are you requesting Scotland Yard’s assistance in the matter?”

The deferential citizen permitted himself a nonplussed laugh. “No! Of course not. It’s not the sort of case I’d expect the police to grapple with. Conspiracy and all, if you can imagine. Far too complicated.”

“Too complicated?” The inspector bristled. “Then what the dickens are you doing here?”

“I just landed from the Mauretania.”

“You’ve already said that.”

“Aboard ship, I encountered a ring of operators in the smoker who should interest you.”

“Jewel thieves?” the inspector asked, with an expression that combined a smirk and a sneer.

“Blackmailers,” said Bell. When he spotted them working up their racket in the First Class Smoking Room, he had seen a golden opportunity to get Scotland Yard on his side.

And indeed the inspector’s smirk faded. “Whom were they blackmailing?”

“I don’t know if you are familiar with the expression ‘badger game’ over here, but it involves maneuvering the blackmail victim into a compromising situation where he fears exposure.”

“I have heard of the badger game.”

“I deduced that they were working the badger game on a rich old geezer.”

“Did you happen to ‘deduce’ the victim’s identity?”

“His name is Skelton. I believe you would know of him as the Earl of Milton.”

The inspector sat up straight. “Do you have proof of this?”

Bell pulled from his pocket five Kodak snaps of shipboard gatherings. He fanned them on the inspector’s desk like a royal flush. “Of course,