Free Treachery at Lancaster Gate by Anne Perry Page A

were all just as good as your own men. I’ll show you, and I’ll show the bloody newspapers that are looking for blame. And I’ll show bloody Special Branch! They should have seen this coming, and stopped it!”
    Tellman found himself answering before he considered whether it was wise or not.
    “No matter how hard we work, sir, or how clever we are, we can’t stop all crime, and Special Branch can’t either. What we can do is catch the bastards afterward. Now if you’ll let me see those records, I’ll be much obliged.”
    The records were brought to him, and he spent a long, miserable day searching them. It took him a little while before he found the Lezant case. He could see immediately that the five men caught in the bombing had been involved.
    A constable brought Tellman a cup of hot, over-strong tea, and he was so absorbed he forgot to drink it until it was cold.
    The case centered on another suspected sale of opium, on the information of an informer considered reliable but named only as Joe, which could have been anyone.
    The arrest had gone badly wrong. The two young men, both addicts, who were presumed to be the buyers, had turned up, but the seller had not.
    The disaster was that one of the young men had been carrying a gun, and was extremely tense and jittery. In Ednam’s opinion, he needed his drugs and was almost out of his mind from withdrawal symptoms. A passerby had chosen this alley as a shortcut home. The young man was so highly strung he had completely lost his nerve and shot the passerby, killing him immediately. He had realized what he had done, and turned to run away.
    The police could then show themselves and chase both young men. They caught the one who had fired the shot, but the other had escaped. Tellman looked for a description of him, but it was so vague as to be useless. He was average height, possibly thin. He looked in the faint lamplight to be dark-haired.
    Dylan Lezant was charged with murder.
    Tellman read the report again, slowly and even more carefully. All five men said exactly the same thing, agreeing on the details. But then they were so few, and so general, there was nothing much to disagree about. It was not a complicated story where disagreement on details was to be expected.
    It was a simple tragedy, correctly handled.
    He read on, looking to see if there were any questions that had arisen later, but there were none. The seller of opium was never found. But then when he read about the shooting in the newspapers the next day, he would very naturally have moved his place of business.
    Tellman stopped for a few minutes, rubbed his eyes, tired of reading handwriting, relatively neat as it was. He was glad of a fresh cup of tea and a couple of biscuits.
    Then he began on other reports, including financial ledgers. He had always been good at arithmetic. It had a kind of logic to it that he liked. There was a right and a wrong. It balanced itself. He was working on accounts of money from robberies, arrests, stolen-goods receipts. He checked the addition and found an error. He tried it again, and realized someone had read a five for an eight. Easy to do, especially when you were tired and had probably been working all day. A man could easily be too eager to go home to his family, a warm hearth, and a decent meal to check his sums. Not everyone found numbers easy.
    Working on a little further, he found more, a seven mistaken for a one; threes, fives, and eights written carelessly and misread.
    He went back to check all of them, and realized that in every case, the error resulted in a smaller sum. It only added up to a few pounds, but a pound was a lot of money. A few years ago, it had been a constable’s weekly pay.
    He closed the ledger and sat back. Another thing he had noticed, much as he did not wish to: all the errors had happened when Sergeant Tierney was on duty.
    What had happened to the money? Had it lined his pocket? Someone else’s that he owed? Bribes? Tellman hated the