The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“The Commissioner’s bloodhound,” answered Bell. The newspapers had had a field day when the Police Commission tried to track whoever had left the body in New Scotland Yard with a bloodhound.

“Not that dog. While the Commissioner was 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.”