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

pulled what was left of his stick from the manacle. “This could have been my arm.”

“What’s in the box?” asked Bell.

“You open it,” said Abbington-Westlake. He jumped when the lid squealed on rusty hinges. Bell switched on the flashlight, fixed the beam on the manacle springs, then played it inside.

“Empty!” said Abbington-Westlake.

“No. Here’s something.”

The tall detective and the English spymaster stared. The box contained a single sheet of paper. Abbington-Westlake snatched it up. A steel-pen drawing depicted the ninety-eight-gun wooden battleship Dreadnought that had fought Napoleon’s navy one hundred and six years ago at the Battle of Trafalgar.

“Of all the bloody cheek.”

“He’s got a sense of humor,” said Bell.

“The Hun will stop at nothing.”

Isaac Bell hung his head as if equal parts embarrassed and apologetic. “I am sorry I let you down, but he really pulled the wool over my eyes . . . If it makes you feel any better, he got my money.”

Abbington-Westlake recovered quickly. “I suppose I would be somewhat more irritated if that had shattered my arm. As it is, I’m in your debt.”

“You can pay me off easily.”

“How?” Abbington-Westlake asked warily.

“Tell me about Jack the Ripper.”

“Bell, will you drop this bloody charade?”

“No, you’re wrong about the masquerade. I was trying to do two things at once. Back in America, I am tracking a monster who is killing girls and I am increasingly sure he is the same man.”

Abbington-Westlake shook his head. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Bell. He is not the same man.”

“Do you know for sure?”

“I’ll confide in you the solution to the Whitechapel Mysteries. It was proved for a fact who the Ripper was. He drowned himself in the Thames.”

“Stop! Next, you’ll name suspects, from an insane medical student, to suicides, to a doctor avenging his son, to a royal Duke, to a peer of the realm hiding in Brazil, to a famous painter, to a maniacal immigrant Pole.”

“All right. All right,” Abbington-Westlake rumbled on. “Look here, Bell. I don’t mind sharing a confidence with a man of your integrity . . . Give me your word as a gentleman it will go no further.”

“My lips are sealed,” said Isaac Bell.

“I have photographs. I will show them to you in gratitude for saving my wrist.”

“Photographs of what?”

“Mortuary photographs of his victims’ bodies.”

“Where did you get them?”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“How did you get pictures?”

“I’ll show you— Driver! Whitehall. Number 26.”

Abbington-Westlake tossed his broken cane in an elephant-foot umbrella stand and turned up the lights in a windowless office in the back of the Old Admiralty Building. He unlocked a closet, twirled a combination, and opened a Chubb fireproof safe. From it he pulled a thick manila file.

“Of course I didn’t believe your story about looking for the Ripper. But I sent around for these anyway, reasoning that I should bone up. Do you recall that you asked a certain Harley Street surgeon whether the Ripper carved symbols on his victims? Yes, yes, yes, of course I know you talked to him. I just didn’t believe why, at the time. Look at these L-shaped marks. Not crescent-shaped. They’re L-shaped.”

He flipped through photographs of mutilated bodies and tossed each to Bell.

Bell said, “The surgeon insisted a slip of the blade could not make an L look like a crescent.” Indeed, the L’s were sharply defined by straight lines.

“The V-shaped cuts, too.”

“Look at these.”

“Squares, don’t you see?”

“They’re not square.”

“Not that kind of square. The stone mason’s square. His ancient instrument of measurement.”

“Masons?” Bell asked, not entirely sure he had heard right.

“These are signs of the Freemason. The Masonic Brotherhood.”

“What do the Masons have to do with murdering girls in Whitechapel?” asked Bell. Was there anyone in all of England who didn’t have a lunatic theory about Jack the Ripper?

“Clearly, the fiend was sending a message.”

“What message?” asked Bell.

“Invert the V. What do you get? You get a compass. The compass is a mason’s drafting tool.”

“These V slashes, like the L’s, mock the police. He is saying, I am a Freemason.”

“Why?”

“To throw the police off the scent and besmirch the Brotherhood. Whom, obviously, he hated.”

“Why would he hate the Masons?”

“Who knows how he thinks?”

“Are you a Mason?” asked Bell. He reckoned that Abbington-Westlake probably was, if England was at all like the United States, where half the men in the country had banded into one fraternal order or another. Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Owls, Knights of Columbus—the list was endless, and many Americans claimed brotherhood in more than one of them.

Abbington-Westlake did not admit to being a Mason, saying only, “That’s neither here nor there. Point is, old boy, he didn’t send that message on your bodies. Our man carved L’s and V’s, not crescents. So our Jack the Ripper is not your murderer.”

“Unless he changed the message.”

Abbington-Westlake crossed his arms triumphantly over his chest like a man who had won an essential argument. “There you have it, Bell.”

“There I have what?”

“The question you must answer: What do the crescents mean?”

25

What the Cutthroat meant by the crescents was a question that Isaac Bell was acutely aware he had to answer.

“There’s another question much more vital,” he told Abbington-Westlake.

“Oh?”

Bell watched the naval commander for signs of a lie, no easy task with a man so good at it. For the answer to this question was core to the reason he had come to London. “Why is Scotland Yard so bent and determined that Jack the Ripper stopped killing in 1888?”

Abbington-Westlake sighed. “How should I know? I’m a simple practitioner of naval espionage.”

“Commander, you are cynical. And you are treacherous. But what makes you most dangerous is that your ambition is served by first rate ingenuity. If you saw any hint of Scotland Yard being vulnerable on this issue, you would mine it for every ounce of advantage you could wring out of it to hold over their heads. What caught your attention? What made you smell blood in the water?”

Abbington-Westlake lit