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

traipsing after his hound, a private citizen let his dog loose in the cellar. The Yard had searched high and low, but the dog dug up the girl’s leg buried a few inches under where they had looked.”

“It was her leg?”

“The Met surgeon conducting the postmortem thought so.”

“How long had it been there?”

“Around two months. The general consensus was he went to the cellar twice. Buried her leg first, then dropped off the bundle with her torso sometime later.”

“Is it possible that our cellar girl was a foreigner?”

“What makes you ask that?”

Bell said, “According to Mark Twain, London is a city of ‘villages.’”

“Hundreds,” said Roberts.

“The newspapers printed stories about her body being found in New Scotland Yard. And yet no one stepped forward to claim her body. No one said, ‘Oh, that’s my missing daughter, or girlfriend, or cousin.’

“In actual fact, a girl from Chelsea went missing back in July. Her mother thought it was her. Her description fit the well-fed torso—a healthy young woman—and her mum had the impression that her daughter had taken a housemaid job in a rich man’s house. But there was no head to identify. Nothing to discourage the Yard from insisting that the Whitechapel Fiend was a homegrown working class fiend who restricted his depravities to penniless, drunken prostitutes. Much neater that way. Besides, who can be disappointed in our police if all the Ripper is killing are fallen woman who will die soon of drink anyhow? In the end, she is just another mystery.”

Bell asked, “Could she have been his first victim?”

“The one who started him off? What a marvelous question. She could be, except for one wide-open question.”

“What question?” Bell asked, and Roberts said exactly what Bell had told his Cutthroat Squad back in New York. “How many bodies did he hide so well, they were never found? All we do know is that our cellar girl’s killing predated Jack’s first ‘official’ victim.”

“Polly Nichols. August thirty-first.”

“You’ve been bit by the Ripper. You know the dates.”

Roberts signaled the barmaid and ordered two whiskeys.

“Why don’t we raise our glasses, Mr. Bell? To our Lady of the Cellar, a living girl who lost her life to the Ripper—or another monster like him. And then we’ll drink to the Yard that made nothing of her dying but a mystery.”

Bell tossed back the whiskey and signaled for refills. “I wonder why she was different than his other victims.”

“Other known victims. How do you mean different?”

“Well-fed. Not poor. What if he had known her personally . . .”

Roberts shrugged, apparently uninterested in that line of inquiry, and Bell changed the subject.

“Have you ever heard of symbols being carved into his victims’ bodies?”

“What do you mean by symbols?”

“Not wounds that would kill, but . . . signals . . . ritualistic marks that might indicate something, send a message. Or a code.”

Roberts asked, “What did they look like, the ones you heard of?”

Bell had a curious feeling that the former police detective was testing him. He opened his notebook.

Roberts tugged his specs down his nose and studied the marks over them. “No. I recall no shapes like that.”

Bell asked, “Did Jack the Ripper ever drape his victims in a cape? A man’s cape.”

“No, he covered their bodies with their own dress or apron.”

“Did—”

Roberts interrupted. “Mr. Bell, you look like a man who could do with a haircut.”

The observation was as inaccurate as it was incongruous, and Bell said, “Just had one on the boat.”

“Would you consider a shave?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m going to send you to Davy Collins. Tell him I said to tell you a story.”

“Who is Davy Collins?”

“A tonsorial practitioner in Whitechapel.”

16

Davy Collins’s barbershop had a red and white pole by the street door, which was wedged between a dark pub, where men and woman drank in silence, and a tiny grocery with empty shelves. Its twisting stairs were so narrow, it seemed a miracle that his red leather reclining chair had been carried up them. An ornately coiffed barber sporting an elaborate curlicued mustache greeted Bell in an Italian accent so thick, he sounded like a vaudeville comic mocking immigrants.

“I am looking for a barber named Davy Collins,” said Bell.

“Eet eez my Enga-lish-a name.”

“Do you know Mr. Nigel Roberts?”

“Meesta Roba-sa eez retire-a cop-a.”

“He says for you to tell me a story.”

“What-a kind-a story?”

“A Jack the Ripper story.”

The barber picked up a gleaming razor and demanded in harsh Londonese, “Who the bloody deuce are you, mate?”

Bell said, “I’ll tell you who I am if you’ll tell me why you pretend to be Italian?”

“Englishmen treat the barber from sunny Italy kinder than Davy Collins of Whitechapel by way of Ireland.”

“I’m American. I’m kind to everyone.”

Davy Collins laughed. “Fair enough. What story you want to hear?”

“A true one.”

“The only true one I have is about the time I saw the Ripper.”

“You actually saw him?”

“With these eyes.”

“When?”

“It was the ninth of November, 1888.”

Mary Kelly, thought Bell. The murder that the inspector had insisted was Jack the Ripper’s last. “Night or day?” he asked.

“Dead of the night. Past four in the morning.”

“What were you doing out?”

“Looking for a place to lay my head. I was knackered. Hadn’t a penny. I was peddling a magical hair-growth elixir, but no one was buying.” He flourished his razor again. “Suddenly I thought, to hell with the baldies, what did they ever do for me? Somehow find a way into haircutting instead of hair growing. That night, at four in the morning, I fell upon an honest trade, haircutting instead of hair growing. Took me two years of saving pennies to buy my razors.”

“At four in the morning, was there light to see?”

“Whitechapel was blacker than a mine in those days.”

“Then how did you see him?”

“When there is no light, your eyes see more.”

“But not a man’s face.”

“A man’s frame,” said Davy Collins. “The shape he cuts. How he moves.”

“A silhouette?” Bell asked dubiously.

“When he ran from the rents where Mary had her room.”

“But only a silhouette,” said Bell. He was