The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

Bell flipped pages in his notebook.

“No,” said the surgeon. “Not at all like yours. L’s and V’s. Yours look like horns.”

The British Lock Museum occupied a three-story brick row house several doors down from the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The hall porter invited Isaac Bell to browse the collection while he went in search of “Keeper Roberts.”

Bell roamed the centuries-spanning displays of safes, handcuffs, door locks, and keys with an expert’s appreciation. He admired a working model of an Egyptian pharaoh’s pin tumbler lock and examined skeptically a German chastity belt. Draftsman’s drawings detailed the workings of the 1861 Yale cylinder pin tumbler that had elevated lockpicking to a fine art.

A thief-catcher lock—which Bell had heard of but never seen—was accompanied by an eighteenth-century lesson book for accountants. The book warned auditors tallying the estates of the deceased to beware of safes armed with spring-loaded manacles to trap a thief who tried to pick the lock. This one protected a strongbox, left open to show springs that had the power to shatter wrist bones.

A lock dubbed un-pickable caught his eye. The museum challenged the visitor to try, and even supplied a set of picks. Isaac Bell was using his own when Nigel Roberts walked in.

“You’re wasting your time, Mr. Bell. No one has ever succeeded in picking that lock.”

“It’s got a lot of pins,” said Bell, who maintained a light pressure on his turning tool, which he had inserted vertically to leave room for his pick. “Or it could be because they tried it using your tools.”

He lifted the final pin and increased pressure on his turning tool. The un-pickable lock rotated open, and he looked Roberts full in the face.

“Davy Collins thinks that Jack the Ripper was as agile as a young man. Which you could have told me yourself, if you cared to. You also could have told me that Davy himself admitted he was ‘speculating.’ Whoever he saw running wasn’t necessarily the Ripper.”

“Who are you, Mr. Bell?”

“‘Power pollutes,’ you told me. ‘Obedience enslaves.’ Who do you obey?”

“No one.”

“What game are you playing?” asked Bell. “Why did you send me on a wild-goose chase?”

The tall detective and the white-haired old man locked angry eyes.

“Those girls he slaughtered aren’t my ‘hobby,’” said Roberts. He started blinking behind his spectacles. “They are not pieces in a game.”

Isaac Bell recalled that the retired constable at the Red Lion had told him, “Nigel Roberts could never put old Jack out of his mind.”

Despite the games, Bell had to concede that something about Roberts rang true. Did he find the murderer as repulsive as Bell did? Did he truly care about the women the Ripper had killed so long ago?

“Calling him a monster,” said Bell, “or naming him the Whitechapel Fiend, somehow denies that he was a human criminal.”

“It also somehow denies that the girls were human beings,” said Roberts. “And that makes me almost as angry as their tarting up their failure to catch him with a word like ‘mystery.’ It makes the Ripper seem like an unstoppable force of nature instead of the product of incompetent investigators.”

“Jack the Ripper is not my hobby, either,” Bell said bluntly. “I am not an insurance investigator on a busman’s holiday.”

“Then what’s your interest— Don’t worry. I won’t tell. Besides, they wouldn’t listen.”

“O.K.,” said Bell. “But tell me something first. A professional operative has been shadowing me since I got to London. Is there anything in the Jack the Ripper case that my asking questions would get me shadowed?”

“We’ve already established that Scotland Yard did not solve at least five murders by the same killer, plus ten or more after he supposedly drowned. Were they incompetent or did they prefer not to? If they were incompetent, they don’t want to be reminded. If corrupt, then they don’t want you to expose them.”

“But I don’t think the shadow is a cop,” said Bell.

“Why?”

“I know cops. This guy is different. Besides, the inspector helped me talk to retired coppers. He must have known if I came to the Red Lion, I would meet you.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Roberts.

Convinced that Roberts knew nothing about the shadow, Bell palmed his Van Dorn badge and showed it to the old man.

“I am Chief Investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency. I am hunting a murderer who operates similarly to your Jack the Ripper.”