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

you recognize Lord Skelton. This man here is the ringleader. The young lady with her hand on Skelton’s arm is the one who inveigled her way into the poor old duffer’s stateroom. This surly bruiser pretended to be her angry husband.”

“Why would they let you take their pictures?”

“They didn’t know I had a camera.”

“How did you conceal it?”

The tall detective smiled, a trifle less cordially. “How I conceal my camera could be called an insurance investigator’s trade secret.”

Yet another of the joys of being married to a beautiful filmmaker.

“The extortionists persuaded Skelton to withdraw money from his London bank and pay them off at the Savoy Hotel this afternoon.”

Isaac Bell tugged his gold fob chain and drew forth a Waltham music pocket watch. The lid was engraved with a speeding 4-4-0 locomotive that sparked memories of his first encounter with the Van Dorn Detective Agency. It hinged open at his touch and chimed George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“Three o’clock,” Bell said over the music. “They’ll be at the Savoy any minute. As Mauretania is a British liner, I believe the blackmailers land in your jurisdiction.”

The inspector thought so, too. Detectives were summoned urgently.

Isaac Bell filled them in on pertinent details including—thanks to the estimable Joel Wallace—the number of the room where the shakedown would take place. He declined a halfhearted invitation to tag along on the raid, claiming, “Anonymity is priceless in insurance investigation.”

Alone with the now beaming inspector, Bell got down to business. “May I ask you a favor?”

“Name it.”

“If you would indulge a hobby of mine,” he opened with a self-deprecating smile. “A sort of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ hobby.”

“Sounds like a busman’s holiday.”

“Perhaps for a real detective, but for me it promises excitement I don’t often find in the insurance business.”

“What sort of Sherlock Holmes case excites you?” the inspector asked with unconcealed condescension.

“I’ve become obsessed with solving the identity of the long-ago mysterious perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders—I am referring, of course, to Jack the Ripper. I am fascinated by the case.”

“Many are.”

“It’s an astonishing mystery.”

“You could say that.”

“Would you happen to know anyone I could interview who served Scotland Yard that long ago? Acquaintances who might recall details of the case not found in the newspapers?”

“You flatter me. I was serving then. Still only a constable.”

“A young constable,” said Bell, laying it on thick. “I’d never have guessed. Well, this is my lucky day. Do you have a theory?”

“Of what?”

“The mystery of how the greatest police detectives in history never caught the cruelest murderer in England?”

“There is no ‘mystery.’ The solution is simplicity itself.”

“I am all ears,” said Isaac Bell.

“The Whitechapel Fiend committed suicide.”

“When?”

“He drowned himself in the Thames in December 1888. Three weeks before Christmas. One month after committing his last outrage.”

15

“Who was he?” asked Isaac Bell.

“His name was Druitt,” said the inspector. “Montague John Druitt, a barrister of good family. It was recognized by senior investigators that his brain had collapsed under the weight of accumulated horror. You see, the armor that deflects emotion in the lower classes wears thin as men advance up the scale. Druitt being of good family, his outrages were more than he could bear. He had no choice but to do the gentlemanly thing and hurl himself in the river.”

“I see . . . But how does your theory explain—”

“It’s not a ‘theory,’ Mr. Bell. It is fact. Just as it is a fact that if Druitt hadn’t killed himself, we’d have very soon had him dead to rights.”

“You mean that Scotland Yard was closing in on him?”

“It was only a matter of time.”

“Fascinating . . . But how does your . . . ‘fact’ explain the Ripper murders after Christmas?”

“The Ripper’s last murder was committed November ninth, 1888.”

“Kelly.”

“Kelly?”

“His victim of November ninth, 1888. Mary Kelly.”

“Of course. Learning the prostitutes’ names must go with the hobby.”

Incensed, Bell said coldly, “Remembering their names reminds me that defenseless women were murdered.”

“Quite. At any rate, that one was Montague John Druitt’s fifth and final murder. His body was pulled from the river at the end of December. There were no Ripper murders after November ninth.”

“How do you explain the murders in ’eighty-nine and ’ninety that exhibited markedly similar maniacal butchery?”

“Those were committed by other murderers.”

“Also never solved?” Bell asked.

“Correct.”

“Did you actually work on the case?”

“No.”

“Would you know anyone I could interview about his suicide? Retired policemen possibly? Perhaps a constable who saw the Ripper pulled from the water? Or a detective who investigated subsequent murders similar to those that the barrister who killed himself had committed?”

“Why are you harping on them? Those murders were wholly unrelated to the Whitechapel outrages.”

Isaac Bell mastered his mounting anger to answer like an innocent hobbyist. “It would be a feather in my cap—and what a boon to my insurance business to establish friendships for life in Scotland Yard—if I were somehow able to turn up definitive proof that Jack the Ripper drowned in the Thames.”

“Ancient history,” scoffed the inspector. “Stories of a quarter century past. Think of it, man. It’s been twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-three,” said Isaac Bell. “Tell your retired friends I’ll buy dinner for anyone who’s got a story.”

The inspector stared long and hard. Then, without a hint of a smile or degree of warmth in his eyes, he said, “You’ll get more out of that lot standing drinks.”

“Montague John Druitt. Oh, aye, governor, I remember Druitt.”

“Did you actually meet him?” asked Isaac Bell.

The Red Lion in Parliament Street was a loud public house, blue with tobacco smoke, a short way from the House of Commons. Back in New York, Bell would have called it a cop saloon. It was crawling with constables and detectives. Even the elderly potboy collecting empty glasses looked like a pensioned-off bobby. It was conveniently around the corner from the Canon Row Station in the back of Scotland Yard, and the landlady was a looker who had young and old eating out of her hand.

The former constable drafted by the prickly inspector to meet with Isaac Bell