The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“Photographs of what?”

“Mortuary photographs of his victims’ bodies.”

“Where did you get them?”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“How did you get pictures?”

“I’ll show you— Driver! Whitehall. Number 26.”

Abbington-Westlake tossed his broken cane in an elephant-foot umbrella stand and turned up the lights in a windowless office in the back of the Old Admiralty Building. He unlocked a closet, twirled a combination, and opened a Chubb fireproof safe. From it he pulled a thick manila file.

“Of course I didn’t believe your story about looking for the Ripper. But I sent around for these anyway, reasoning that I should bone up. Do you recall that you asked a certain Harley Street surgeon whether the Ripper carved symbols on his victims? Yes, yes, yes, of course I know you talked to him. I just didn’t believe why, at the time. Look at these L-shaped marks. Not crescent-shaped. They’re L-shaped.”

He flipped through photographs of mutilated bodies and tossed each to Bell.

Bell said, “The surgeon insisted a slip of the blade could not make an L look like a crescent.” Indeed, the L’s were sharply defined by straight lines.

“The V-shaped cuts, too.”

“Look at these.”

“Squares, don’t you see?”

“They’re not square.”

“Not that kind of square. The stone mason’s square. His ancient instrument of measurement.”

“Masons?” Bell asked, not entirely sure he had heard right.

“These are signs of the Freemason. The Masonic Brotherhood.”

“What do the Masons have to do with murdering girls in Whitechapel?” asked Bell. Was there anyone in all of England who didn’t have a lunatic theory about Jack the Ripper?

“Clearly, the fiend was sending a message.”

“What message?” asked Bell.

“Invert the V. What do you get? You get a compass. The compass is a mason’s drafting tool.”

“These V slashes, like the L’s, mock the police. He is saying, I am a Freemason.”

“Why?”

“To throw the police off the scent and besmirch the Brotherhood. Whom, obviously, he hated.”

“Why would he hate the Masons?”

“Who knows how he thinks?”

“Are you a Mason?” asked Bell. He reckoned that Abbington-Westlake probably was, if England was at all like the United States, where half the men in the country had banded into one fraternal order or another. Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks, Owls, Knights of Columbus—the list was endless, and many Americans claimed brotherhood in more than one of them.

Abbington-Westlake did not admit to being a Mason, saying only, “That’s neither here nor there. Point is, old boy, he didn’t send that message on your bodies. Our man carved L’s and V’s, not crescents. So our Jack the Ripper is not your murderer.”

“Unless he changed the message.”

Abbington-Westlake crossed his arms triumphantly over his chest like a man who had won an essential argument. “There you have it, Bell.”