Long Spoon Lane - Anne Perry [31]
Pitt knew what he was thinking. The Inner Circle was a web of secret alliances, promises, and loyalties between men who on the surface had no connection with one another. Outsiders did not know who they were, just that some people succeeded when others failed. Certain business deals went one way rather than another. Some men were promoted above rivals who had more skill. But if Wetron, now the head of what was left of the Circle, were making alliances with potential rivals from the most senior police command in the country, it was cause for anxiety.
“Simbister?” Pitt said aloud.
“And others, but him the most,” Tellman answered through a mouthful of sausage. “If it’s men from Cannon Street who are taking extortion money, it’ll be more than two or three. You won’t be able to count on anyone!”
“I know.” Pitt felt a chill, even sitting in this warm room, and with the food inside him. “That’s why I need you, and someone you can trust, to arrest Jones, when I find him. I have to know if what the anarchists say is true.” He did not explain why. It was not only to find who killed Magnus Landsborough, it was far bigger than that. At issue was the whole morality of the force they had both served and believed in all their working lives.
Tellman nodded, then finished the last of his meal without pleasure. The silence stretched on after they had swallowed their final mouthful and the tea in the pot was getting cold.
The hurt was naked in Tellman’s thin face. He came from a poor but fiercely respectable family. His father had worked all the hours he was awake in order to keep them clothed and fed. His mother was energetic, angry, and scrupulously fair, and loved them with a defensiveness that bordered on violence. She scolded them for laziness, deviousness, too much laughter, for telling lies or minding other people’s business. But let anyone else find fault with her children, and they’d have their ears burned by her defense. Their achievements were considered to be no more than their duty to perform while their faults were addressed with a whirlwind of discipline. She loved them all, but she was proudest of Samuel, because he fought for what was right. She embarrassed him furiously by holding him up as an example to his younger siblings, and yet next to Gracie’s approval, hers mattered more to him than anyone else’s.
To see his own force tainted cut him to the bone, perhaps even more than it did for Pitt.
“I want to know too,” he said quietly. “I have to. If it’s in our patch as well, our men taking protection money, then it’s down to me to stop it. If I don’t, then I’m part of it too.” He stared at Pitt, defying him to argue.
“Be careful!” Pitt warned impulsively, knowing how easily Tellman could be falsely disgraced, or even killed.
Police officers were sometimes killed in the line of duty. It would be a hero’s death. Wetron himself would eulogize him. Pitt would be helpless to prove otherwise. And he realized with a tightening of his stomach, a weight inside him, that in spite of Tellman’s belligerence, his odd, stiff vulnerability, his prejudices and his doggedness, Pitt liked him more than anyone else outside his own family. It would be more than guilt for involving him that he would suffer, it would be a loneliness, a searing and permanent loss.
In the morning, Pitt went to Narraway, who was sitting in his office, a pile of papers on the table in front of him, a pen in his hand.
“Yes,” he said abruptly, looking up as Pitt closed the door.
Pitt sat down without being asked to. It was the first time he had done so. He was still very aware of Narraway being his superior, and while his position was not officially insecure anymore, the feeling of uncertainty had never left him.
“I looked around yesterday at the corruption Welling and Carmody are accusing