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

Sherlock Holmes himself discovered them in the daylight, even the great detective would deduce that Jimbo and Vern had killed each other in a drunken fight.

He wrapped the girl in his cape again and lifted her tenderly into his arms and continued walking to the coal wharf, marking its location by ghostly shadows that trees growing out of the long-abandoned structure thrust against the stars. Closer, he saw the silhouettes of mooring bollards. The dock planks were rotten, and he took care to walk where underlying joists would take their weight.

Her hair was bright as straw, and when he lowered her into the Ohio River, the water splayed it like a halo. Air captured in the cape held her afloat. An eddy formed a patch of still water beside the wharf, and it took a while before the current bit a hold and swept her into the dark.

“Good-bye. You were everything I hoped for.”

18

“Poor Detective Roberts.”

Wayne Barlowe laughed.

Isaac Bell had found the illustrator’s loft in a spacious Chelsea garret with a skylight in the north-sloping roof. While retired Scotland Yard C.I.D. Detective Sergeant Roberts could pass as an artist, with his long silver hair and glittery spectacles, the actual artist Wayne Barlowe resembled a policeman—squat as a fireplug, with an expressionless face pockmarked like a firing squad wall.

“What do you find funny about ‘poor Detective Roberts’?” asked Bell. Barlowe had already struck him as another game player like Roberts, and the tall detective was fed up with game players.

“Just when Roberts is finally on the verge of giving up identifying the ‘greatest monster of the Victorian Age,’ Mr. Isaac Bell, insurance adjuster and amateur sleuth, arrives from America with a beguiling theory that the ‘greatest monster’ is going strong abroad.”

Barlowe had works in progress on several easels, blank sketch pads on others. On the biggest, he was drawing, in fine-lined pen and ink, a sperm whale ramming a boat with its head and splintering another with its tail. Bell had never seen a whale more malevolent, and he said as much, reckoning that such skills might reproduce accurately a description of Jack the Ripper’s face.

Barlowe ducked his head modestly and thanked him for the compliment.

“Nigel Roberts heard a rumor that you interviewed a woman who saw Jack the Ripper up close. I’ve studied your drawings in the newspapers, but I have never seen one that includes his face.”

“I never drew his face.”

“But did you hear him described by the woman who saw him?”

“The rumor is true.”

“May I ask why you won’t tell Roberts what she said?”

“Roberts thought I was daft. But Roberts was a copper. So he couldn’t speak to the people who trusted me. He obviously did not admit it to you, but the fact is, I did tell him what she said. I just wouldn’t draw it.”

“What did he look like?”

“What did he look like?” Barlowe mused. “Angelic.”

“Angelic? Are you joking?”

The sketch artist picked up a pencil in his blunt fingers and walked to another easel. In seconds, a face was alive, its features and some hints of character distinguished by a few swift lines.

“A boy?”

“Handsome, isn’t he?”

Bell shook his head in disbelief. “A choirboy.”

“As I said, angelic.”

Bell stared, shaking his head. “Do you think he really did look like this?”

“Had the young woman ever made the acquaintance of a Bible, she’d have sworn on a stack of them. She truly believed he looked like this, even though he scared the daylights out of her.”

“How did he frighten her if he looked so innocent?”

“He cornered her in Hanbury Street.”

“That’s where he killed Annie Chapman,” said Bell.

“Same exact place. Number 29 Hanbury Street. An alley leads into a backyard. Chapman was next. First time he tried it was this girl. Grabbed her throat in both his hands.”

“How did she get loose?”

“I don’t know if you have any conception of the life these women live. It’s no better now than back then. You can see it in any slum street that hasn’t been cleared. And many that have . . . The girl had wandered all night in the rain, seeking clients to raise the price of a bed to sleep in but spending it on drink instead. Out in the rain to earn the money again. By the time the Ripper cornered her, she was soaked to the skin. Dripping wet, head to toe. His hands slipped. She ran.”

Barlowe tossed his pencil on the easel tray and stalked back to his whale.

Set in the back of the house away from street noise, the atelier grew quiet but for the occasional, distant huff of locomotives crossing the Battersea Railway Bridge and the scratching of Barlowe’s steel pen.

“What was her name?” Bell asked.

“Emily.”

Bell pondered what he had heard. “I think I understand why you never drew his face.”

“And why is that, Mr. Bell? I would like to know. Because I have asked myself a thousand times, could I have stopped the Ripper from killing God knows how many more girls if I had?”

“No one would believe that this handsome boy would hurt anyone. In fact, they would even find it impossible to believe he would patronize a prostitute.”

“Not when he could have any girl in London with his smile. My editors would have laughed me out of their office.”

Bell saw that Barlowe was deeply distressed and thought he knew why. The tall detective moved closer and arrowed the full force of his probing gaze into the artist’s eyes. “Or, were you afraid you might finger the wrong man?”

Barlowe stared, silent for a full minute, before he whispered, “What if . . .” He paused to compose himself. “What if in her terror and panic, she imagined another face? A different face. A boy she might have admired from a distance? Or a handsome young gentleman—it seems a gentleman’s face, wouldn’t you agree?—a youth in clean clothes and utterly unattainable? Couldn’t even the poorest creature experience a romantic crush? . . . But . . . What if he were recognized—this innocent, whose face I