The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“None out west?”

“None we hadn’t heard about earlier.”

Bell pondered the report. Missing girls, no bodies. Young women disappeared for all sorts of reasons. But this murderer so often succeeded in hiding his victims.

“Have you ever been to Wilton’s Music Hall?”

“In Whitechapel? No, the Methodists took it over for a mission twenty years ago. Why?”

“Just a thought. Ever hear of a guy in the theater named Jack Spelvin?”

“On the stage?”

“Could be anything—an all-rounder, or even a scenic designer, director, actor, manager.”

“Not here in London. I think I heard of a George Spelvin back home. Not Jack. Why?”

“Emily’s crush,” Bell answered distractedly. His eyes roamed the train travelers crisscrossing the Great Hall.

“What’s the word on Lord Strone?”

“Out of business,” said Wallace. “The Secret Service Bureau gave him his walking papers.”

“Are you certain?”

“As certain as I can be about spies. Cabled a fellow I bank on to confirm. He cabled back that Strone’s gone fishing in Florida.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Bell. “I’ve got another job for you.”

“When?”

“Right this minute. On the jump!”

Isaac Bell took an escalator deep underground to the tube train and rode east for several stops. He returned to the surface at Moorgate. A misty drizzle mingled with the coal smoke. It was hard to see fifty feet ahead. He walked into the East End and onto Bishopsgate, a busy commercial street jam-packed with wagons and double-decker horse trams that cut through the Whitechapel district that Jack the Ripper had terrorized.

The Range Riders, a Tom Mix Western, was showing at the Electric.

Bell bought a ticket. The movie theater sat more than a hundred and was so recently built that he could smell the paint. He found a seat in the back row. Before the Western started, they showed a Picture World News Reel of “Old King Teddy’s”—King Edward VII’s—funeral processing through London. Bell grinned with delight. Wait ’til he told Marion that the newsreel she had shot a full year ago—five hundred and twenty feet of what the movie people call topical film—was still playing in the theaters.

A man in a bowler and a long black coat entered from the curtained lobby and took a seat one over in the row in front of Bell. In the light flickering from Marion’s film, Bell saw he was in his thirties and impeccably dressed. He had walked ramrod straight, and he sat similarly stiff and upright. Neither his bowler and walking stick, nor his civilian topcoat, could disguise the proud badge of lifelong military service.

Isaac Bell leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “My wife made this film.”

The icily supercilious retort matched his posture: “Are you addressing me, sir?”

“Why did you follow me from Euston Station?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You and I caught the Tube to Moorgate. Then we walked—London Wall on to Broad Street, Liverpool, and up Bishopsgate. We could have taken London Wall direct to Wormwood and Bishopsgate, but I wanted to be absolutely certain it was you again before I punched you in the nose.”

21

The shadow jumped up and sprinted from the theater.

Bell pounded after him.

Coattails flapping like a startled crow, the shadow fled through the lobby and out the door. He shoved through the rippling wall of pedestrians blocking the sidewalk and plunged over the curb into the truck and wagon traffic inching along Bishopsgate High Street. Isaac Bell was catching up when a burly man in a tweed coat and workman’s cap shot a scuffed, lace-up boot in his path. Bell tripped and went flying headlong into the street, rolling on his shoulder when he hit the cobblestones and tumbling under the ironshod wheels of a giant hay wagon trundling fodder to the horse-tram stables.