“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 had served his entire career in Scotland Yard’s Whitechapel H Division, retiring as a sergeant. He had asked for a pint of “mild” but had accepted happily Bell’s offer to splurge on “brown and mild.”
“Did I meet him? Face-to-face, I did. He looked like a scrap of wet canvas. Been in the water a month. If his family hadn’t raised the alarm, we’d never have identified the poor sod. His brother recognized bits of his clothing.”
“Poor sod? You mean Jack the Ripper?”
“If you say so, guv.”
Bell looked at him sharply. He was a shrewd old man, the sort who chose his words carefully, and Bell heard a private message in his “If you say so” answer. The tall detective was couching his next question when he was interrupted by a sudden clanging of electric bells. A fire alarm, he thought, but no one in the pub took notice except two men at the bar who downed their drinks and belted out the door. The ringing continued, shrill and urgent.
“What’s that about?”
“Division bell. Ringing a vote in the Commons. Members have eight minutes to get inside the chamber before the doorkeepers lock it up. The bells are all over the district, in pubs and restaurants and hotels. Those two will make it. No need to find their trousers.”
“Would you join me in another?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”