MURDER AT BERTRAM'S BOWER Read online

  “Because it is the nature of the beast. Consider: The bodies of these two women were found not far apart in the same district of the city—a poor district, yes? Although not the slum that Whitechapel is, I daresay. They were both reformed prostitutes. I would wager that some Boston man with a grudge against them, or women like them, has decided to start killing them. In some twisted fantasy of revenge perhaps—or in a hideously misguided attempt to rid the city of their kind. Unless—”

  He smiled, not pleasantly. “Unless our man has come over here to America.”

  There was an appalled silence.

  “You mean—the Ripper?” Delahanty said at last. “Here in Boston? But how could that be?”

  “Easy enough. Quite a few people in London held to that view—that the Ripper had escaped. Never proven, of course. And so if you assume, as some people have, that the Ripper did not die, did not kill himself or meet with some disaster, and so eluded Scotland Yard’s net, you can at least entertain the possibility that he may have bought passage away from London. Where? Anywhere. South Africa, India, the Orient. Or any city in America, Boston included.”

  “That is absurd,” said Edward Boylston, frowning.

  “Absurd?” Chadwick removed his spectacles, flicked a speck of dust off one lens, and replaced them. “How is it absurd, sir?”

  “Because the Ripper must have been mad, and how could a madman plan so rationally to make his escape?”

  “Madmen’s twisted minds can come up with diabolical, insanely logical plans,” Chadwick said. “Madmen can decide upon a course of action quite as readily as you or I can. That course might be mad—probably will be, in fact—but it is a plan that can be acted upon, and will be acted upon, just as you or I would act upon our own.” He waved a hand dismissively. “But we gain nothing by idle speculation. What is needed in these tragic cases is evidence. And that, unfortunately, is the hardest thing to come by. Facts. Information. Physical evidence—those are the difficult things in cases like these. In any event—yes, I understand that it is time to return to the ladies—in any event, gentlemen, I will say to you once more: Your killer, whoever he is, Ripper or not, is not done with his work. He will kill again.”

  On this dispiriting thought they joined the ladies in the parlor, and shortly afterward the evening came to an end. As the guests took their leave, MacKenzie stood with the Ameses in the front hall, saying good night. Then, his head stuffy with cigar smoke and too much port, he stepped outside and stood at the top of the little flight of granite steps, watching the last of the carriages make their way down the square, their red taillights blurred in the fog that had come with the dark. A damp night, with a raw, penetrating chill. Suddenly, he shivered, but not from the temperature. This is a night for murder, he thought. He remembered Chadwick’s warning, and in his mind’s eye he saw the shadowy, faceless man who had killed two of the Bower’s girls, slipping from door to door along the dark, deserted streets of the South End, searching for another victim.

  He turned and went back into the house, grateful that he had such a warm and welcoming refuge as No. 16½ Louisburg Square.

  It was the middle of the night, and Caroline lay wide awake, listening to the bells in the Church of the Advent tolling the hours.

  Addington had told her about Nigel Chadwick’s prediction. She couldn’t believe it. Another murder of another Bower girl was not possible—it would be too cruel for poor Agatha, who, on leaving earlier, had looked so exhausted and despairing that Caroline almost regretted having invited her. Perhaps the evening had been too much for her after all. Perhaps she would have been better off back at the Bower.

  No. The Bower, now, must be a place of torment for Agatha. Every room in it must remind her of Mary. Poor Mary—a pretty girl who had wanted to better herself.

  Who had killed her—and Bridget too?

  Why?

  Caroline turned over on her side, and then, her mind racing, turned back again.

  Who had killed Mary?

  Was it the unknown someone who had sent that odd, coded note? Who would send a note like that? And why? And what was the key to the code?

  Suddenly a thought blazed across her mind. After a moment, stunned, she sat bolt upright.

  Could it be?

  She slipped from her bed and turned up the gas, wincing in the light. On the bookshelf by the fireplace. Her own collection of novels by Diana Strangeways, England’s premier lady novelist of sensation stories. Diana Strangeways was Caroline’s secret vice. Caroline belonged to a Saturday Morning Reading Club, whose members read uplifting works to improve their minds: the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. But no matter how much improving literature she read, she maintained her devotion to the thrilling stories annually produced by Miss Strangeways—tales of love and adventure and fabulous derring-do, whose heroines were always beautiful and strong-willed, the dashing heroes always handsome and gallant.

  And always, there was a little trick to the plot—a secret, discovered usually by the heroine in the nick of time.

  Caroline was thinking of such a secret now as she took one worn volume from the shelf and then another. Oh, where was it? In The Curse of the Wigmores? In The Second Lady Mandeville? In The Velvet Glove?

  Ah. She’d found the right volume at last. Heedless of the chill of the room, she sank down into the little rose velvet slipper chair by the cold fire and eagerly flipped through the pages until she came to it. Yes. There it was. Her heart pounding, she read it once, then again.

  Perfect.

  She’d not wake Addington now to tell him, but in the morning—

  She thought she’d be too excited to sleep when she went back to bed, but she was wrong. She fell asleep at once and slept until her usual time to rise, which was seven-thirty. And when Ames came down to breakfast, she was awaiting him with her news.

  “Miss Strangeways?” said Ames. He took his porridge from the tureen on the sideboard and came to sit at the table. “Good morning, Doctor,” he said to MacKenzie, who was just coming in, and then, turning back to Caroline: “I hardly think she will be of help to us.”

  Caroline heard the disapproval in his voice. He had never actually forbidden her to read Diana Strangeways’ novels, but she knew he thought of them as no better than trash.

  Which, perhaps, they were—but such fascinating, such diverting and elegant trash that even if he had forbidden them, she would have found some way of surreptitiously continuing to read them, year after year, as they appeared regularly from across the Atlantic to a horde of eager, devoted readers in America.

  “But just listen, Addington,” she said. She’d already tried to explain the discovery that she’d made in the middle of the night—the revelation that lay in the pages of one of Miss Strangeways’ torrid, lurid narratives—and she’d botched it. He hadn’t understood her at all.

  He doesn’t want to understand, she thought, because it is coming from Diana Strangeways, of whom he does not approve. Ridiculous. Pry open your mind, dear brother, and listen.

  She tried again. “Two lovers, Addington. From feuding families—like Romeo and Juliet. Forbidden to communicate with each other, they must contrive to do so secretly.”

  He was scanning the morning Globe, hardly paying attention to what she said.

  “So romantic!” Caroline went on, smiling at MacKenzie. Her eyes sparkled as she recalled the story. “Miss Strangeways certainly knows how to make you want to turn the page. At any rate, the solution they—she—came up with was to provide each of them with a copy of the same book of poetry. Love poetry, of course. And they wrote their notes in code, using numbers. Page and line and so forth. Don’t you see, Addington?”

  He put down the newspaper, and now he was staring at her, his teacup halfway to his lips. He fixed her in his dark, brilliant eyes as if he would see through to her soul—as if he were trying to read in her mind something that even she might not know was hidden there.

  “How do you mean?” he a
sked.

  “Two people, working from the same—oh, I don’t know what to call it! The same key. Isn’t that what a code is? Or a cipher? Or what if—what if, instead of a key, what if there were some kind of cipher machine? Like a telegraphy machine that sends the Morse code—?”

  “You must have been reading Jules Verne, Caroline, not Miss Strangeways. A machine? But Mary did not have a machine.”

  “No, but she had the key to one, Addington. She had the typewriter manual. And would not such a manual have a diagram of the keys?”

  Carefully, he put his cup back onto its saucer. He held her gaze still, his mind working furiously.

  “Yes,” he said as if to himself. “The manual for a typewriting machine.” And then, more forcefully: “By God, Caroline, I think you’ve hit on something!”

  She flushed with pleasure. “It was not I, Addington, it was Miss Strangeways.”

  “Then I am not only in your debt, but in hers as well. She will never know how she helped us. A typewriting machine! Of course!”

  And before she could reply, he had leapt up and dashed out of the room; in another moment they heard the front door slam.

  “Now where has he gone?” Caroline said to MacKenzie. Her porridge lay cold and congealing before her. She pushed it away. She’d eaten far too much last night to be hungry now.

  MacKenzie didn’t answer. He’d risen, too, and had gone through the hall into the front parlor, where he stood at the lavender-glass windows, looking out onto the square. A dull day, no rain yet but no sunshine either; he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen the sun.

  He caught a glimpse of Ames’s tall, dark-clad figure across the square, pounding on Dr. Warren’s door. After a moment, a maid let him in.

  “Dr. Warren?” said Caroline when he returned to the table. “Why Dr. Warren?”

  “You have put into his mind the idea of a typewriting machine. No doubt he hopes that Dr. Warren will have one.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  But Ames’s hope was misplaced, as he reported when he came back not five minutes later. “He didn’t have one,” he said without explanation, as if he assumed they would understand. “But downtown—yes. Are you finished with your breakfast, Doctor? Come along, then. Typewriting! And who of all the people involved in this case would have been familiar with a typewriting machine?”

  “The salesman,” said MacKenzie.

  “Right. Who had a nasty argument with Mary Flaherty the day before she was killed. And who—if my knowledge of traveling salesmen is correct—may have had a way with him, may have been accustomed to seducing the young women he met in his travels. Yes, Doctor? What do you think?”

  “I think we’d better see if we can decipher the note before we jump to any conclusions.”

  “Right again.”

  They walked rapidly along the square and over the hill to the Common, where they cut across on one of the long paths. In no more than ten minutes they had arrived at Proctor & Moody’s Stationery and Office Supply Store at 37 West Street. Proctor greeted them personally, all smiles, hoping no doubt for a good sale. His shop was a wilderness of paper, pens, pencils, bottles of India ink, bottles of glue, letterhead in all sizes (engraving extra), account ledgers, receipt books, blotting paper, green eyeshades, and all the other dozens of items necessary to the modern office.

  “A typewriting manual?” he said, his face falling a bit. “Why—yes. Right here. Perhaps you wish to buy a machine?” he added, brightening. “They are very useful, very useful indeed.”

  “No,” Ames replied shortly. “Just the manual, if you please.”

  He flipped through the pages until he found what he sought: a diagram of the keyboard.

  “What a devil of an arrangement,” he muttered. “Why did they design it like this? Q W E R T Y— It makes no sense.”

  “I believe it was done deliberately in that way so that the typewriter—the person who uses it—would not jam the keys,” Proctor offered. “But it is not difficult to learn.”

  “Yes, well, I have no intention of learning it,” Ames replied, fishing for his coin purse. “But I will purchase this booklet. Ten cents? No—I don’t need a receipt. Come along, Doctor.”

  Shoving the manual into his pocket, he exited the store, MacKenzie following behind, and went along three doors to a small coffee and tea shop, still busy at this early hour. Settled at a table toward the rear, Ames took out his notebook, opened the manual to the diagram of the typewriter keyboard, and began to puzzle over the code. MacKenzie ordered coffee for both of them and waited.

  “No,” Ames muttered, scribbling. “It doesn’t work. Damn! But perhaps—yes—perhaps this way—”

  Their coffee came. Ames pushed his away and went on working. The shop was overwarm. MacKenzie wanted to remove his coat, but he didn’t want to make any movement that might distract his companion.

  For some few minutes longer, Ames remained hunched over the materials in front of him, studying them intently, uttering little grunts of satisfaction—or frustration—as he looked from one to the other, made a note, looked again, made another note. Then he scribbled furiously.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “Yes, I think so.”

  At last he gave a little cry, causing several of the other patrons to stare at him. “Look here, Doctor,” he said. He slid his notebook across the table, narrowly missing MacKenzie’s cup, and pointed to the open page. “Look at this—and this! You see? Just as I thought.”

  Just as your sister thought, MacKenzie amended, but he kept the notion to himself as he scanned Ames’s printing:

  COME TONIGHT EIGHT SHARP TELL NO ONE

  “You see?” said Ames, his face alight with triumph. “Mary Flaherty’s death was no random murder—nor Bridget’s either, I’ll wager. Someone lured Mary to her fate. Someone who very cleverly composed a code that not many people would know how to break. Look here—you see how it goes? It is the letter to the immediate right of the letter desired, so that C becomes V and O becomes P and so forth. He excluded punctuation marks—used only letters, which made it more confusing at first.”

  “Very clever,” said MacKenzie. And indeed it was, he thought, depending as it did on such a relatively new and unfamiliar thing as the keyboard of a typewriting machine. Few people had ever seen a typewriter keyboard; almost certainly none of the girls at the Bower had seen one, except for Mary Flaherty. And it was not something that came readily to mind when one faced the task of solving a cipher. No wonder Professor Harbinger had been stumped. Undoubtedly, it would be years before the scholars at Harvard began to use the machines.

  “Come on,” said Ames, scooping up his papers. “I must show this to Crippen immediately!”

  He proceeded up Tremont Street at a good clip, MacKenzie struggling behind. When the doctor reached the Parker House, he saw Ames just disappearing into City Hall; when MacKenzie finally arrived at Crippen’s office, he found the two men deep in conversation.

  “I don’t see how this helps, Mr. Ames,” Crippen was saying. He glanced at MacKenzie coming in but did not greet him, and returned his attention to Ames’s pocket notebook, which he held open before him.

  “But of course it helps, man!” exclaimed Ames. He paced nervously back and forth across the narrow space between Crippen’s desk and the door. “Don’t you see? This note was sent to Mary Flaherty by someone who wanted to lure her away from the Bower, secretly, to meet him. At a time when she was supposed to be working in the office—”

  “A romantic assignation,” said Crippen. “What of it?”

  “What of it?” cried Ames. He was nearly exploding with frustration. “Only this—that Mary Flaherty was pregnant! And the man who sent that note—”

  “And how do you know it was a man, Mr. Ames?”

  “Because one thing we can be sure of is that no woman impregnated her. The note summons her to a romantic assignation, and who else would summon her in such a way except the man who was—is—responsible for her condition? And also beca
use it is so clever a cipher. Far too clever for a woman to have devised.”

  MacKenzie thought of Caroline Ames, and then he thought of Diana Strangeways, but he kept silent. This was not the moment to distract Ames in a discussion of the mental powers of the so-called weaker sex.

  Crippen, exasperated, tossed Ames’s notebook onto his littered desk. “I am not arguing with your translation,” he said, “just your interpretation.”

  “Inspector, listen to me. There is a man named Fred Brice who sells typewriters. He is known to have struck up an acquaintance with Mary Flaherty. The Reverend Montgomery told us that Brice was probably in love with her. He is known to have visited her at the Bower on the day before she was killed. They had an argument. Are you telling me that you see no connection between those facts and the fact of this note?”

  “I am.”

  “But you said yourself, Inspector, when you showed it to me and asked me to look into it—”

  “Yes, well, that was then. This is now, and the investigation has taken a different turn.”

  “How so?”

  Crippen shrugged. His ugly little face was closed—secretive. And stubborn, thought MacKenzie; he is a stubborn man, jealous of his prerogatives.

  “I know where this case is going, Mr. Ames, and it has nothing to do with this note. What is more, I know how important it is that we move quickly. I have had word, this morning, from my superiors. They have warned me about a piece that is to appear in this afternoon’s edition of the Boston Star.”

  “A cheap penny sheet—”

  “Cheap it may be, but it has the biggest circulation in the city. Its proprietors practice New York journalism here in Boston, and very successfully, I am sorry to say. And in this afternoon’s edition, they are going to run an article saying, in effect, that we have Jack the Ripper right here in our midst. I know it sounds unbelievable, but it’s going to stir up trouble all the same.”

  Ames glanced at MacKenzie; each saw the thought in the other’s eyes. “Who wrote it?” Ames asked Crippen.