“Do you remember this?” Tellman asked him.
“No, sir. Can’t ’ave been me on duty then,” he said blandly.
“Looks like your signature here,” Tellman pointed out. “Looks like your writing and your name.”
The sergeant’s face was a careful study in blank insolence. If he was trying to disguise the feeling in any way, he failed.
“You asked if I remember, an’ I don’t! Yer ought to leave that alone, Mr. Tellman. You’re one of us, or yer was! Yer didn’t ought ter do this.”
Tellman felt cold, and profoundly vulnerable. He found his voice husky when he spoke. “What is it you’re asking me to forget, Sergeant? That a gun and bullets went missing from property, and turned up later in a murder committed by Dylan Lezant? And no one here knows how it got from here into his possession?”
“Mistakes ’appen.” He stared at Tellman with a flat, angry expression. “An’ five men are dead, or as close to as matters,” he went on. “?’Ow’d yer like to ’ave yer face so burned yer own mother wouldn’t know yer? Or lose one o’ yer arms?” He looked Tellman up and down. “Still find that uniform fits yer, do yer? Still think yer got the right ter wear it?”
Tellman’s hands were shaking.
“Yes, Sergeant, I do. Ednam’s gone, and no one else is going to risk his neck covering for you.” He pushed the ledgers back across the counter, then turned and walked out.
Outside in the street there was a very light snow falling and it was bitterly cold, more than Tellman remembered from when he’d arrived.
The next thing to follow up was the timing of the tip regarding the drug purchase. How had Ednam known where it would be, when, and who would be involved? To take other men with him, he had to have a story to account for how he had learned the information.
The inquiry led him eventually to a Sergeant Busby, who, under considerable pressure, admitted that he had owed Bossiney a favor for some time: a mistake overlooked. He had mentioned information to Bossiney about an upcoming drug sale, but might have forgotten to tell all the appropriate superiors as well. Perhaps the information had lost its way somehow? He was no longer certain exactly where it had originated.
Tellman did not press him any further. There were lies within lies. What had happened to the written reports? No one knew. Perhaps in the haste and shock of Lezant shooting at them, things here and there had been lost. Busby defied Tellman to prove any different.
Late in the evening when the snow had stopped and an icy wind sliced in from the east, Tellman did what he had dreaded he must. He went to see Bossiney at his home.
The hospital had released him, but they had warned Tellman that he was still in a very bad state.
It would be a long time before he returned to work, if ever. Even then, it could only be some kind of desk duty, where the public would not see his face.
Tellman found him sitting beside his own fire, dressed in a nightshirt and a thick jacket to keep him warm. Even so he was rigid, as if knotted against some cold no one else in the stuffy room could feel. Bossiney’s wife, small and frail-looking, left them alone as soon as she had received a nod from her husband that she should do so.
Tellman took the other chair and forced himself to look at Bossiney’s face. It was scarred hideously, and still inflamed so that his right eye was almost invisible. How could Tellman inflict further pain on him by asking questions about past wrongs? There was too much suffering altogether. Newman and Hobbs were dead, and now Ednam too. And, of course, Tyndale and Lezant. Nothing anybody said was going to alter that.
For that matter, Alexander Duncannon was destined to die no matter what happened. If he wasn’t hanged, the opium would kill him, only more slowly. Did the truth matter so much? It would hurt deeply and endlessly, regardless of his acts.
“What do you want?” Bossiney asked him.
Tellman took a deep breath and let it out slowly. His heart was hammering in his chest as if he had been running.
“The drug sale that went wrong.” He cleared his throat. “When Tyndale was shot…”
Bossiney stared at him from his one good eye. His face was so badly disfigured it was impossible to read any expression in it.
Tellman began again. “The drug dealer that didn’t turn up. Did you ever get him?”
“No,” Bossiney answered. “Why do you care now?” Part of his mouth was scarred, but it did not slur his speech.
Tellman chose his words carefully. “I don’t, except that I’m wondering who gave you the information that set up the operation in the first place.”
“Don’t know,” Bossiney replied. “I’d say ask Ednam, but he’s dead, isn’t he!”
There was something in his answer, not the words but a change in the tensions in his body, even in his twisted face, that made Tellman believe he was lying, if not in total then at least in part.
“Yes, you do,” he said. “Nobody sets up a five-man operation like that unless there’s pretty good information about it. It wasn’t just a petty sale. Five of you! And armed!” He was taking a chance and he knew it. He hated doing it. These were his own men, not the enemy! Friends, more than that, allies. “You were expecting something hard and dangerous.”
Bossiney sat motionless, except that his left hand curled over, gripping the thick fabric of his jacket.
“We weren’t armed. Lezant had the gun. He shot Tyndale.” He said the words as if by rote, with no hesitation, not even any emotion. He seemed tired of repeating them. Did that mean they were lies? Or simply that he did not care anymore? Perhaps the tide of violence and tragedy had drowned such things in him.
Then would he be ready to tell the truth at last?
Tellman felt brutal. He was attacking a beaten man. Did the truth matter enough for that?
Yes, it did.
“As you said, Ednam is dead,” Tellman said flatly. “You can’t protect him anymore. There’s only you and Yarcombe left.”
“Then it doesn’t matter, does it?” Bossiney said bitterly. “Leave it alone. Let him rest in peace.”
“Who? Ednam? He was the one who shot Tyndale?”
There was silence, absolute except for the ashes settling in the hearth. Who would pay for coal, for food, for anything, if Bossiney was dishonorably discharged from the police?
“I don’t care if it was you,” Tellman said rashly. “I have to know the truth to get Alexander Duncannon. He keeps swearing Lezant was innocent. That’s why he blew up the house! Is he wrong? Maybe he didn’t put that bomb there, then?”
Bossiney blinked his good eye.
Tellman waited.
“I don’t know where the tip-off came from,” Bossiney said at last. “I got it from Busby, but…but he told me later that it was false. I never told Ednam. I forgot, until it was too late, then I never said. We had a lot of bad things going on then.”
“So Ednam took the gun…” Tellman said quietly, as if he knew.
“Yes…”
“And he shot Tyndale?”
“We thought it was the drug seller come…” Bossiney must have realized how futile that sounded now.
“And then made it look as if Lezant shot him,” Tellman finished.
“They were drug addicts anyway! Both of them!” Bossiney protested.
“Were they?” Tellman’s heart was beating so hard it almost choked him. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure! They were pale-faced, sweating, shivering, like something out of a nightmare. Both of ’em.”
“Duncannon and Lezant?” Tellman held his breath.
“Yes…” Then Bossiney realized what he had said. They had been close enough to see their faces, to recognize Alexander, who they said had not been there! He seemed to crumple up inside, as if suddenly he had become a smaller, older man, robbed of part of himself.
“Duncannon escaped and you put the gun into Lezant’s hands. What did you do? Knock him out, then put it beside him and swear it was his?”