Sally Spencer - Blackstone and the New World

Blackstone nodded. ‘Wheels within wheels,’ he said.

‘Wheels within wheels,’ Meade agreed. ‘Say there are cops in Mulberry Street who can feel Inspector O’Brien breathing down their necks and are worried that any day now he’s going to arrest them. What do they do about it?’

‘They go to Tammany Hall and ask for help?’ Blackstone guessed.

‘Exactly! They go to Tammany Hall and ask for help,’ Meade agreed. ‘And somebody in Tammany will help them. Why?’

‘Because he knows that if the cops go down, the chances are they’ll be taking him with them?’

‘Spot on! So this guy from Tammany contacts Paul Kelly and his Five Points Gang, and says he wants a job doing. And it’s done — just like that! And the real beauty of it — at least from their point of view — is that the killer is three removes from the dirty cops who Patrick O’Brien was actually investigating.’

‘If that is what happened, it makes our job almost impossible,’ Blackstone said darkly. ‘Because even if we do manage to track the killer down, it’s going to be very difficult to connect him to the people who ordered the murder, since it was all done by proxy.’

Blackstone’s words should have had a depressing effect on Meade, but instead, he looked almost relieved.

‘You’re finally starting to believe me, aren’t you, Sam?’ the sergeant asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You thought that I’d got a real bee in my bonnet about Tammany Hall and police corruption. You thought there was some other explanation for the murder. But now you’re beginning to see — even if you don’t want to — that I just might have been right all along.’

Yes, he was, Blackstone admitted to himself. Coming from London, he’d found it hard to accept that any one organization could have a stranglehold on a city the size of New York. Yet every step he took, he found himself tripping over another strand of Tammany Hall’s nefarious web. And the more that happened, the harder it became to dismiss Meade as just an inexperienced hothead.

‘You do realize that we’ll probably never solve this case, don’t you?’ he asked Meade.

‘We’ll solve it,’ Meade said. ‘I’m a smart guy. .’

‘I wouldn’t dispute that.’

‘And you’re from New Scotland Yard, which makes you even smarter than I am. If we work together on this investigation, Sam, there’s simply no way that we can fail.’

Ah, the optimism of youth, Blackstone thought — and wished he still had a little of it left himself.

‘The whole of the police department is rotten through and through, but the Detective Bureau is rotten in its own special way,’ Alex Meade said, as he and Blackstone walked along Mulberry Street towards police headquarters.

‘And what special way is that?’ Blackstone asked.

‘It pretends it isn’t corrupt at all. It pretends it’s not only as pure as the driven snow, but that it’s the best damn detective bureau in the whole world. And it’s got a lot of other people — people who should know better — completely buying into that particular story.’

‘By “people who should know better” I take it you mean people with some influence — people who could have the power to change things if they didn’t keep their heads buried in the sand,’ Blackstone suggested.

‘That’s exactly who I mean,’ Meade agreed. ‘US Congressman McClellan’s a good example of that. He’s an excellent legislator, and they say he’ll be mayor of this city one day. And do you know what this fine man called Thomas Byrnes, who was the first Chief of Detectives? He called him “master psychologist”!’

‘And I take it he wasn’t.’

‘One of the first things that Byrnes did after he was appointed was to have an especially thick carpet laid down on his office floor,’ Meade said. ‘And can you guess why he did that, Sam?’

‘To muffle the noise when he was beating up a suspect?’

‘Exactly. He’d have the suspect stand in front of him, manacled between two detectives, and if he didn’t like the answers he was getting, he’d proceed to pound the crap out of the man. Now that’s what I call psychology. But it was after he’d beaten the confession out of the suspect that he’d be really clever.’

‘How so?’

‘Say he’d got a guy in the cells who’d confessed to a bank robbery — and who might even have been guilty of it. He’d call a press conference and tell the reporters that the robber was still at large, but that the brilliant investigative team from the Bureau of Detectives was following up a number of clues. He could then confidently promise that an arrest would be made within a few hours. And guess what? Since he already had his man, he was always able to keep his promise — which made the reporters think he was a very smart cop indeed.’

‘That really is clever,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘Totally despicable, it’s true, but very clever.’

‘Were you involved in the Whitechapel hunt for Jack the Ripper, Sam?’ Meade asked.

Blackstone shook his head. ‘Not really. I’d only just joined the force at that time, so I was on the edges of the investigation, at best.’

‘Byrnes gave a press conference in which he told the world how, if he’d been in charge, they’d have caught the man right away. He said he’d have gone to work in a common sense way, instead of following mere theories, which was what Scotland Yard seemed to be doing.’

‘And just what was this “common sense way” of his?’ Blackstone asked.

‘He said that rather than just wait for the Ripper to seek out new victims, he would have manufactured them for him. Yes, he really did use that word,’ Meade continued, with disgust. ‘ Manufactured! ’

‘But what does it mean?’ Blackstone asked.

‘It means that he would have taken fifty female habitués. .’

‘By which he meant prostitutes?’

‘That is what he meant. But remember, he was talking to reporters from family newspapers, and you can’t go using words like “prostitute” in that kind of journal.’

‘Although you can go into graphic detail when you’re describing the terrible things that happened to the poor women,’ Blackstone said.

‘Well, exactly. At any rate, Byrnes said he would have taken fifty female habitués of Whitechapel and “covered the ground” with them.’

‘Taken them to deserted streets and dumped them?’ Blackstone suggested.

‘Couldn’t have phrased it better myself,’ Meade replied. ‘Once the women had been abandoned, Byrnes went on, he would have infiltrated the area with his men, and waited for the Ripper to strike. “Even if one of the women fell victim, I should get the murderer,” he told the reporters — which is a nice family newspaper way of saying that if she got her throat cut and her stomach sliced open, he would have been able to make an arrest.’

‘He sounds like a nice man,’ Blackstone said.

‘A real prince,’ Meade replied. ‘I could tell you much more about him, but you’re probably better hearing it from Sergeant Saddler.’

‘Who’s Sergeant Saddler?’

‘He’s Inspector Patrick O’Brien’s partner, and he’s the next man on our list of people to talk to.’

The desk sergeant looked up at Blackstone with a certain degree of wariness in his eyes, and at Meade with little less than contempt.

It was a neat trick to be able to do both things at the same time, Blackstone thought.

‘Have you seen Detective Sergeant Saddler today?’ Meade asked.

The desk sergeant shook his head.