When Tellman put those reports in the right order, the story looked very different. The dates had been changed, very carefully. Which made him realize the case had begun with Yarcombe, gone on to Bossiney, and ended with Ednam taking charge of it. The events had happened in a different order. The brawl had come last, when two of the named participants had already been in jail. The only conclusion was that it had been a beating by someone quite different, which made no sense.

  It was the witness who had been beaten, and who had refused to testify against the man charged.

  Was this the error of a tired and confused man, trying to get it right and failing? A misunderstanding? Or even carelessness? Perhaps the injured man was not well enough to testify, or worried about his family?

  Tellman put the files aside and read the cases that followed. He found more mix-ups, stories that did not make sense when looked at closely. Many notes appeared merely hasty, as if written up by busy men made to work out details too long after the events and making mistakes in good faith. That was what he wanted to think. He had made such errors himself. It was easy to do. You started seeing something another way, and then got the whole pattern wrong.

  He forced himself to study the files long into the evening. The errors added up to a few people not being convicted because evidence was lost. A few people had had accidents rather conveniently and were unable to testify. Whoever was looking after evidence was selectively careless. Some people were arrested quite often but never seemed to get convicted.

  The next day he asked for other files, of cases not involving Ednam. He searched for the same carelessness, and did not find it. He also compared the rates of conviction for certain crimes, and found them lower than for Ednam, especially where theft was concerned.

  There was little he could prove because some sorts of evidence were consistently missing, but by the end of the second day he was certain that there was a lot of well-concealed graft going on, favors for certain people, evidence deliberately misplaced.

  Was Ednam overzealous? Now and then was he taking the law into his own hands when he felt certain a man was guilty but could not prove it legally, so he resorted to doing so illegally? Was he exercising his own form of justice? Or was he driven by his own ambition? Please heaven all of this was not for his own profit?

  No! Tellman refused to think that.

  Had somebody felt a rage hot enough to plant that bomb in Lancaster Gate as revenge for being framed for a crime?

  Tellman wondered how much the other four men had collaborated with Ednam and how far outside the law they had gone. Had they knowingly convicted an innocent man, possibly not even caring, or were they just being obedient? They might even have been afraid of Ednam, who was, after all, their senior.

  Newman he had known himself, and liked. He was cheerful, outgoing, prone to thinking the best of people—more than Tellman himself did. That was what Tellman had liked about him.

  Suddenly it hurt all over again, recalling seeing him blown to bits on the floor of the house in Lancaster Gate. Had he trusted Ednam when he shouldn’t or was he afraid to fall out with his comrades? There was no hint of guilt in Newman’s case notes.

  Yarcombe’s notes were terse, saying no more than they had to, like the man.

  Bossiney wrote a lot. Was he drowning the truth in too many words?

  Hobbs’s notes were careful, written in a schoolboy’s hand. It was a job he disliked.

  It was Ednam whose words wrapped it all up, taking care of the omissions.

  But even so, that did not justify the appalling bombing at Lancaster Gate, though it might well have been the cause of it.

  Had Drake, this young constable detailed to help him, reordered the files intentionally? He thought so. But when he left late on the second evening, there was nothing in the innocent face to make him certain.

  There was still a great deal more to find out. And he had tied it to nothing that related to the informer, Anno Domini. He had found the letter with the information, and the report of the opium sales and the amounts. There was nothing about the letter from which he could deduce anything further.

  Tellman chose to walk a good distance before even looking for a bus to take him the rest of the way home. The bitter cold edge of the wind kept his thoughts sharp, a knife-edge outside to match the one cutting him inside.

  He must have been terribly naïve to have kept his ignorance of dubious police behavior for so long. He dealt with the worst aspects of humanity most of the time so none of this should come as a surprise. Yet it did! And it hurt!

  He knew the police were fallible, because everyone was, but he had believed they were honest, loyal to the best in themselves. They would face what they saw, the violence and the pain, because they also knew the good.

  Ednam had soiled that! He had twisted and distorted it. His betrayal was unforgivable.

  Tellman pushed his hands hard into his coat pockets and turned the corner off the main street to take a shortcut. Suddenly he felt shattered. He stopped leaning into the wind and stood straighter, then began walking again.

  He came out at the far end of the alley and faced the wind again. It seemed even harsher. Ednam had betrayed his men. And he had betrayed Tellman as well, because in a way he stood for all leaders that men had believed in.

  He quickened his pace toward the omnibus stop. It was too cold to walk the streets any longer. He very much needed to go home.

  —

  HE TOLD PITT WHAT he had done when they met at Lisson Grove mid-morning the day after. Tellman was tired and his head pounded from all the reading by lamplight. But at least his cold was beginning to go away. He forgot about it for hours at a time. Perhaps he was simply too angry about the dishonesty and the violence he had found to care about a hacking cough or aching chest.

  Briefly he told Pitt what he had found. He did not apologize for their last meeting. He thought his actions since then were apology enough. He did not want to remind Pitt of it, if he was willing to forget.

  He watched Pitt’s face and saw the sadness in it. It was only then that he realized the disillusion was as sour to Pitt as it was to him, just maybe not as much of a surprise.

  Maybe Pitt’s awakening had come some time ago. Perhaps it had dawned when his superiors, far above Cornwallis, had bowed to pressure over the business in Whitechapel and dismissed him from the police. Special Branch had been the only place still open to him to make his living in the profession he knew. That seemed like a long time ago now, but old wounds don’t stop aching. They are always under the surface, ready to remind one of the original injuries.

  “The man I mentioned in connection to the Lezant case,” Pitt said slowly. “His name is Alexander Duncannon. His father is Godfrey Duncannon.”

  Tellman stared at him, slowly grasping the enormity of what he had said. “And do you believe his story now?” he asked a little huskily. He wanted him to deny it.

  “I still don’t know. As I said, I believe Alexander thinks he is right.” Pitt chose his words with care. “Whether he wants to because he can’t think his friend was guilty, or whether he has to blame someone other than himself for getting away when his friend didn’t—”

  “Getting away?” Tellman interrupted. “He was there?” He remembered the account of Lezant’s arrest had said there were two men, but the other one had escaped.

  “So he says, but I’m not sure he even remembers. He says Lezant didn’t have a gun, but all that means is that he doesn’t remember him having one, or he didn’t know he had.”

  “Or he’s chosen to forget!”

  “Or that. But it doesn’t matter now—”

  “Doesn’t matter!” Tellman’s voice was high and sharp. “It doesn’t matter if the police lied about evidence to convict an innocent man and see him hanged for a crime they knew damn well he didn’t commit? Then, for God’s sake, what does matter?” He could feel the desperate helplessness rise up inside him again until he could hardly breathe.

  Pitt was silent for a moment. “From what you tell me about Ednam and those he leads…led…they were not above bending evidence, misusing money, telling the occasional lie to get what they thought was a bigger truth. They might have been right in some cases, and wrong in others. Perhaps they reached the point where the truth was so blurred they lost sight of it altogether. They believed what they wanted to.” His smile was bitter. “Like Alexander…maybe.”

  “And Duncannon placed the bomb in Lancaster Gate to make us pay attention? Now? The Lezant case was over two years ago,” Tellman pointed out. “And there was no record of him having fought for Lezant at the time in the files.” He knew as he said it that that meant little. It was still all possible…or not. He also knew before Pitt spoke again that they were going to have to look into it a lot further, before the Lancaster Gate case suddenly solved itself and brought chaos, disbelief, and violence on all of them.

  —

  WHEN TELLMAN RETURNED TO his own station he found a message waiting for him to report that afternoon to Commissioner Bradshaw. He was not aware of having done anything wrong, and yet he found his hands sweating. What had he missed? Did Bradshaw expect a result already?

  It was a beautiful office, elegant, the furniture antique and worn smooth and comfortable by generations of men who’d held command and on whom it sat easily. Bradshaw, with his gracious office, his smooth hair, and his well-cut clothes, fitting him as only a personally tailored suit can, seemed to be placed by birth and education above the anxieties of the ordinary man. But was he?

  “Yes, sir?” Tellman said politely.

  “Sit down, Tellman,” Bradshaw waved his hand toward a chair with slender legs and a delicately carved mahogany back. His own chair was roomier, the seat leather-padded.

  Tellman obeyed. Even if he preferred standing, one did not argue with the police commissioner.

  “Sad thing about Ednam’s death,” Bradshaw said gravely. “Poor man can’t even defend himself now. We’ve got to do something about the rumors that the press is beginning to stir up. I suppose it was inevitable someone would stir up trouble! Whicker tells me you were onto that yesterday and the day before…” He had not phrased it as a question, but he left it hanging in the air. His face was furrowed.

  “Yes, sir,” Tellman replied. “I need to be in a position where I can say I’ve looked into it. If I don’t, they’ll leap on it, sooner or later.” Silently he thanked Pitt for forcing him to. “I hate doing it, sir. It’s as if I think there’s something to it, but the rumormongers will twist it if I don’t.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Bradshaw nodded. “Rotten business altogether. Pitt tells me he has no leads from Special Branch, no anarchist groups they can pinpoint, except to know who sold the dynamite, but not what happened to it after that. Damned stuff seems to be for sale to God knows who, once a thief gets hold of it.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been working with Commander Pitt. Seems most of the anarchists he knows about are more or less accounted for.”

  Bradshaw looked up at him. “Are you suggesting there are others he doesn’t know about?” His voice was impossible to read. Was he hoping there were, so it would take the attention away from the police? Or afraid there were, and they were all on the edge of more violence, and perhaps worse?

  Tellman thought about it for a moment. Loyalty said he should deny it. Loyalty to whom? To Pitt, with whom he had worked for years? Or to his own force, the police? Pitt had been willing to blame the police, and so far as Tellman knew, had not even looked into the competence or honor of his own men.

  No, that was unfair. Tellman would not know whether he had or not. He might have torn them apart! It was the evidence. Alexander Duncannon was blaming police for Lezant’s death, not Special Branch.

  “It’s a possibility, sir,” he replied, still sitting upright in the carved-backed chair. It offered more beauty than comfort. But nothing would have made him comfortable in this interview. “But unlikely, I think,” he added.

  Bradshaw nodded slowly, turning it over in his mind. He looked miserable, as if something were worrying him so deeply he was having trouble concentrating on Tellman.

  Tellman began to be concerned that there was important information that Bradshaw knew and he did not. Could it be about Pitt? Or about the police?

  Tellman noticed in a small alcove in the bookcase a framed photograph of a woman, more than a decade younger than Bradshaw, maybe even two decades. A daughter? A wife? It was possibly an old picture. Its color was soft, as if a little faded over time from sitting in the light. The woman was beautiful, soft-featured, her hair falling a trifle out of its pins. It was an informal picture, and she was smiling. There was an innocence about her that was instantly appealing, something in her that awoke a gentleness in him. She looked young, unaware of what would hurt her.

  He moved his gaze. He should not be looking at her. It was a very personal photograph. One day he would like to have enough money to be able to pay someone really good to take a photograph of Gracie, looking happy like that, quite unstudied. He would have it on his desk, or somewhere that he could see it all the time.

  Bradshaw had said something, and he had missed it. He must pay attention.

  “…anything that makes sense,” Bradshaw added. “We must give the newspapers something, or they’ll make things up. What did you find when you looked into Ednam’s records? Who is this Anno Domini Pitt told me of, the informer that led the men to the house in Lancaster Gate? What grounds did they have for believing him? Can we at least say that much? Is he a suspect, this informer? He has to be. Why haven’t we found him yet?”

  “We’re looking, sir, but no one in the general neighborhood seems to have any idea who he is.”

  “So this man could be anyone, possibly a serious political threat?” Bradshaw looked suddenly afraid, as if the whole issue had ballooned into a new and far more serious crime.

  “No, sir. But not an ordinary petty thief or scam artist. And we can’t ask Ednam now, poor…man. But every other tip this informer has given them has proved genuine.”

  “To set Ednam up?” Bradshaw asked grimly.

  “Perhaps. But then again, maybe someone was setting the informer up. Sir…”

  He already had Bradshaw’s attention. He must continue now, get it over with…or lie.

  “Sir, I found a degree of sloppiness, inaccuracy, and lying to cover petty theft, in Ednam’s station.” He chose his words carefully. “Quite a bit of unnecessary violence in making arrests. One or two people pushed into changing their evidence when it got to court, or even taking it out altogether. It won’t look good if a journalist gets wind of it, sir.” He drew in his breath to go on, then changed his mind. He was already talking too much. He felt awkward in this quiet room where there was a decanter with a silver label around the neck on the side cabinet, and an ashtray for cigars.

  Bradshaw nodded, looking at Tellman all the time.

  “I see. Thank you for the warning. For the time being, Inspector Tellman, keep it to yourself. The more I look into this thing, the worse it gets. Keep the report off paper, for the moment. Tell me anything else you discover. And you’d better be quick about it. I won’t mince words. Your job hangs on how well you manage to keep control of the rumors. I’ll have no choice but to replace you, if you can’t do it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tellman stood up, but felt the room sway around him. His job! How could he keep this from Gracie? She would be worried sick, even if she did everything she could to hide it from him. And she would!

  He must do better than this. He stiffened his shoulders and looked down at Bradshaw in his padded chair.

  “We have a suspect, sir, but we need to make certain he is the right man before we tell anyone at all, as it will cause a certain amount of concern among some people. I will report directly to you, sir.”

  “Who is it?” Bradshaw asked, in spite of Tellman’s saying that he would not divulge the name.

  “Need to be certain, sir,” Tellman replied. He met Bradshaw’s gaze without the slightest flicker.

  Eventually Bradshaw blinked, and then gave a grim smile.

  “Very well, I expect to hear from you soon. You may go.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  EMILY WAS DRESSED IN cream and gold, colors she did not often wear, but this gown was the height of sophistication, slender, rich, and up to the minute in its styling, especially about the shoulders. She knew it flattered her even before she left her dressing room, but admiration from a number of men, and a burning curiosity from women, reaffirmed this to her now as she and Jack were attending yet another party where the edges of politics and vast business empires interacted.

  Again, of course, Sir Donald Parsons, Josiah Abercorn, Godfrey Duncannon, and many others were gathered. Another major clause in the contract had been successfully negotiated and they were here both to celebrate and to prepare for the next step. It was beginning to look possible that soon they might complete enough of it to take a few days’ break from negotiations, maybe even go to the country in time for New Year’s.

  Emily was at the edge of a conversation, half listening. Her eyes were on Godfrey Duncannon, elegant, courteous, always appearing to be interested. She wondered how he achieved it. He must have been bored almost to sleep, and yet he was smiling at everyone, nodding now and then as if he approved.

  Where was Cecily? No doubt listening dutifully to someone. Emily’s eyes swept around the room, trying to recall what color Cecily was wearing. She saw a figure in a bronze and black gown, striking, almost wintry, but beautiful. Her dark head was bent, the light of the chandelier striking fire from the jewels in her hair.

  She straightened up, and Emily realized it was Cecily. As Cecily turned away from the people she was with, Emily saw the tension in her face. Was it Emily’s imagination, or was Cecily even more troubled than before? Why? Something to do with her son, or her husband? Or possibly it was something completely different.

  Emily was drawn back into the conversation around her.

  “How interesting,” she lied smoothly. She had no idea what they were discussing, but that seemed an innocuous enough thing to say. Everybody wanted to be thought interesting.