The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10) - Page 70
“There I have what?”
“The question you must answer: What do the crescents mean?”
25
What the Cutthroat meant by the crescents was a question that Isaac Bell was acutely aware he had to answer.
“There’s another question much more vital,” he told Abbington-Westlake.
“Oh?”
Bell watched the naval commander for signs of a lie, no easy task with a man so good at it. For the answer to this question was core to the reason he had come to London. “Why is Scotland Yard so bent and determined that Jack the Ripper stopped killing in 1888?”
Abbington-Westlake sighed. “How should I know? I’m a simple practitioner of naval espionage.”
“Commander, you are cynical. And you are treacherous. But what makes you most dangerous is that your ambition is served by first rate ingenuity. If you saw any hint of Scotland Yard being vulnerable on this issue, you would mine it for every ounce of advantage you could wring out of it to hold over their heads. What caught your attention? What made you smell blood in the water?”
Abbington-Westlake lit a cigar without offering one to Bell, got it going, and puffed smoke. “Do you recall, old boy, what I taught you years ago about the rules?”
“Something about don’t tell the servants and don’t frighten the horses?”
“Top marks for retention.”
“Or was it ‘don’t tell’ the horses?”
“Now, Bell . . .”
“Now, Comman
der.” Bell fished the broken cane out of the elephant foot and shook it under Abbington-Westlake’s nose. “You seem to have forgotten that this could have been your arm. Come clean.”
“Truth is, I looked into it, on a purely informal basis, for the Home Office.”
“Why?”
“Favor for a chap I was at school with.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“The Home Office oversees Scotland Yard.”
“I know that, but I don’t believe you. You did it on your own, figuring to gain leverage for the next time Naval Intelligence wants a favor from the Yard. You don’t ask favors, you collect debts.”
“All right, Bell. There were hints of irregularities in the investigations. And, frankly, the reasons for the irregularities came down to clumsy attempts to cover up sheer incompetence.”
“My field office chief suggested that the day I arrived in London.”
“Joel Wallace is a bright fellow. Yet another reason I suspected you were spying.”
Bell asked the key question that had brought him to England: “Can you tell me whether Jack the Ripper killed more women in London after 1888?”
“London and the suburbs,” Abbington-Westlake answered blandly.
Isaac Bell drew a deep breath. “After ’eighty-eight?”
“’Eighty-nine, ’ninety, and the first half of ’ninety-one.”
“Why did the Yard deny it?”
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