The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“I locked horns with Lord Strone last year—Secret Service Bureau, Military Intelligence.”

“The Thief case,” said Wallace. “But Archie said you worked things out.”

“I thought we did. Trouble is, Strone knows I’m not a Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock insurance investigator.”

“Spies think like crooks,” said Wallace. “Don’t trust nobody.”

“I tangled with Naval Intelligence once. But that was years ago. Long before Mr. Van Dorn made me Chief Investigator . . . Do you know anyone to look into Strone?”

Wallace nodded briskly.

“Make it clear we don’t want to put the agency on the wrong side of the Secret Service Bureau—unless they give us cause.”

“Understood, Mr. Bell.”

“And cable Archie in New York. Strone keeps an estate in Connecticut.”

“I’ll get right on it . . . Look, Mr. Bell, I’m sorry I let the guy ditch me.”

“Did you do any better with the postmortems?”

Joel Wallace had done much better with a postmortem witness, producing a Harley Street surgeon who had been a coroner’s assistant back when he was a medical student. It had been his job to take notes. The doctor had a sharp memory and a cold eye, and he presented Bell with grisly details in abundance.

Bell asked him to comment on the speculation at the time that Jack the Ripper was a medical student.

“They gave him far too much credit for surgical skills. His dismemberments struck me as the work of a deer stalker who had experience butchering game. Or even an actual butcher. It was clear he used a large knife, whereas an anatomy student would have been trained to use a small dissecting blade. No, this chap knew where to separate an arm from the shoulder at the joints, or a leg from the hip, but that doesn’t take a surgeon. Clearly, he was strong—he would have to be to wrench limbs apart the way he did.”

“What about his ability to remove organs?”

“Again, he’s earned far too much credit. His method of removing organs was to slash open the general area and tear loose what he was after.”

“Did you see any symbols cut in the skin?”

“Symbols? What sort of symbols?”

“Did he carve shallow marks on the victims?” Bell described the crescent shapes he had seen carved on Anna Waterbury’s and Mary Beth Winthrop’s corpses.

“No crescent shapes,” said the surgeon.

“None? I don’t mean wounds. Marks.”

“But they weren’t crescent-shaped,” said the surgeon.

“You did see them?”

“I saw L-shaped marks. Like this— May I?” He reached for Bell’s notebook and fountain pen, turned to a blank page and drew:

Bell shook his head . . . Unless . . . “Could a slip of the blade make an L look like a crescent?”

“No, the L’s were sharply defined by straight lines. L-shaped cuts, made with two strokes of the blade, on perpendicular courses. If that’s what you mean by a symbol.”

“That’s what I meant. But not that shape.”

“You could say the same about the V-shaped cuts, too.”

“V-shaped cuts?”

The surgeon drew: