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friends in high places. And those friends are more than willing to give it the protection it needs.’
    ‘Protection?’ Blackstone repeated. ‘Who could an armed gang, which you say has over six hundred members, possibly need protection from ?’
    ‘From the police!’ Meade said, as if the answer were obvious. ‘See, in between elections, the gang’s involved in prostitution, gambling, robbery, extortion – all kinds of criminal activities. We know exactly what they’re doing. But we also know that if we try to interfere, we’ll soon be out of a job. Do you see what I’m getting at, Sam?’
    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.

SEVEN
    ‘ T he 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