Death of a Stranger (10 page)

He had studied the survey map. The shortest route lay through the hill he had just crossed. “Couldn’t you have cut through that?” he asked. “Then you would have avoided having to build a viaduct.”

“ ’Course, we could,” Contrairy said dismissively. “Cost, though! Too ’igh fer a straight cuttin’, an’ tunnels are about the most expensive things there is. Look at yer map. See the ’eight on it! An’ granite! Takes time, an’ all.”

Monk swung around and looked up at the hill. He pulled out the map from his pocket and read the height on it, then looked at the crest of the rise again. Something flashed in his memory and was gone before he caught it, but it was a moment of unease, nothing more, nothing he could explain. He should check the alternative routes, see who owned which land, where the vested interests lay, estimate the costs of cutting and tunneling the hill for a direct route compared with the small cutting there was here, and the viaduct, and the extra land, and length of rail. It would be a long, tedious task, but the answer, if there was one, lay in the figures. He had had the skill once. It had been where his business lay… his and Dundas’s. That was a chill thought he would rather not have owned, but it would not go away.

He thanked the navvy, mounted his horse again and rode slowly back up the slope, thinking. He had studied the surveyor’s maps and reports, and Baltimore and Sons’ estimate of costs for rerouting. On paper it seemed reasonable. The investors had accepted it. Some of the new land necessary was expensive, but the land for the old route had been expensive also. It was the hidden costs that would make the difference: the bribes to do one thing or another, what to purchase, what to avoid. That could be where the fraud lay.

It was warm here, even with the very slight breeze ruffling the grass. A rabbit popped up, gazed around, then bolted twenty yards, its white tail flashing until it disappeared down a hole.

It was a moment before it meant anything to him. He searched his memory. It was the rabbit. It signified something. He was on another hillside in the sun, but colder, a wind out of the east, clouds scudding across the sky and a sense of darkness in spite of the bright light.

He remembered he had watched a rabbit sit in the sun, nose twitching, then take fright and run, going into a hole. He had seen it with a slow-dawning horror!

Why? What could be more ordinary than a rabbit in the grass, running away and diving down one of its own holes into a vast warren riddling a hillside? Doubtless it would emerge somewhere else, a hundred yards away.

Except that if a rabbit could dig through the hillside and build tunnels using nothing but its feet, then an army of navvies with explosives would have little trouble digging a tunnel for a train. The hill could not possibly be granite! The survey had lied!

He could remember it now, the shock of realization, the gaslight wavering on the paper as he opened it out on the table in his hotel bedroom and read the legend on the map. But he could not recall what else there had been, try as he might, sitting there now with the sun and wind on his face, and his eyes closed, attempting to re-create the past.

Of course there was profit in some land and not in other. But surely the investors had also checked? They must have representatives who were aware of that. It would have to have been cleverer, far subtler than simply a lie, whether the land were granite instead of clay, or chalk or conglomerate, or whatever the hill was actually composed of.

And always in the back of his mind there was the jumbled horror of something dark, unclear and violent, the rending of steel, the scream of tearing metal, sparks in the night, then flame, and through it all fear so dreadful it cramped the stomach and locked the muscles in pain.

But there seemed nothing to connect the two. Arrol Dundas had been convicted of fraud, guilty or not. There had been a crash which Monk seemed to remember, and shortly after Dundas’s death he had left merchant banking and gone into the police force, driven by the passion to serve justice in future, which had to mean he had believed with a passion that there had been injustice then.

But he could do nothing more here to help Katrina Harcus or learn any greater truth about Michael Dalgarno. If there were fraud at Baltimore and Sons, then Dalgarno was almost certainly involved in it, but it was merely profiting unjustly from land purchase. There was nothing to cause injury to anyone, except the loss of possible profit to the investors. That was yet to be proved, and speculation was always as likely to end in loss as in gain. He could call for an official audit if any evidence warranted it.

It was time he stopped evading the old truth that lay at the core of his fear. Remembered pieces were little help. He must use the detective skills he had refined so well. If he wanted to know it for a client, where would he begin were it himself and not Dalgarno that he were investigating for Katrina Harcus?

Begin with the known, facts that could be checked and proven without the possibility of misinterpretation. He knew the date on the work order with his own name on it that Katrina had handed to him with the others. That was proof that he had once worked for Baltimore and Sons, but not where, and not that he had had anything to do with the fraud for which Dundas had been convicted.

Could there be more than one fraud? No, too much of a coincidence.

Nonsense-lies to comfort! Of course there could. A man who will defraud once will adopt it as a pattern if he gets away with it. The question then became: was Dundas caught on his first attempt, or on the second or third, or the twentieth?

With a jolt so sharp he startled his horse by the sudden change in his hands on the reins, Monk realized he had actually admitted the possibility that Dundas had been guilty. In fact, he had assumed it. What a betrayal of the belief he had held without shadow all his life, until now!

He turned his horse to head up the track and around the long slope of the hill back toward the ostlers’ where he had hired it, and the railway station back to London.

Where would he find the history of Dundas’s bank and its dealings? He did not even know in which city they had been headquartered. It could be any of a dozen or more. Presumably, Dundas would have been imprisoned at the closest place to the court in which he was tried, and that in turn would be the nearest large city to the scene of the fraud itself.

Or could it be where the principal investors banked?

He was still considering where to begin when he rode into the ostlers’ yard and dismounted reluctantly. It was a good animal and he had enjoyed riding, even though it brought the best memories, cutting sharp with loss.

He paid the ostler and walked out of the yard with its smells of leather, straw, and horses, and the sounds of hooves on stone and men’s voices soft as they talked to animals. He did not look back, he did not want to see it, although it was clear in his mind.

The stationmaster was on the platform, standing almost at attention with his tall top hat shining in the sun and his Crimean medals on his chest. Monk did not know what each one meant, but Hester would have.

He spoke to the man briefly, then paced the platform waiting for the next train. His original intention had been to return to London with whatever further information he had for Katrina Harcus. The promise he had made her was still strong in his mind. At least he was one step further forward in that. Like the other, this present railway was also rerouted around a hill that had been falsely surveyed. It would have been perfectly possible, and cheaper, to have blasted through it, first by cuttings, then if necessary tunneling.

If necessary?

Something else tugged at his memory, something about grid references for areas on the map, but he could not unravel it. Everything he caught hold of slipped meaninglessly out of his mind, taking him nowhere.

He heard the train before it came into sight around the curve in the track, shining, roaring, billowing steam, and drew to a halt with a hiss and clank of metal. The driver was grinning. The stoker, smut-stained, wiped a heavy hand across his brow, smearing coal dust on his skin.

There was a bang of opening and closing doors. Someone struggled with a wooden box. A porter ran forward.

Monk climbed into a second-class carriage again, and sat down on one of the hard wooden seats. A few minutes later the whistle blew and the train jolted forward and began to pick up speed.

The journey to London seemed endless, full of stops where he could get off, stretch his legs and get on again. They rattled over the rails, rhythmically jolted from side to side. He drifted into sleep filled with dreams, and woke stiff and aware of waiting for something terrible. He forced himself to stay awake, eyes wide open, watching the countryside slide past him.

Was Katrina right, and Nolan Baltimore had discovered the land fraud, and Dalgarno had murdered him to keep him silent? But the old receipt with Monk’s name on it was from seventeen years ago, and the fraud that had ruined Arrol Dundas had happened shortly after that, long before Dalgarno could possibly have had any position with the company at all. He would barely have been out of school.

Had that first fraud been practiced on Baltimore and Sons at all? Or was Monk’s connection with them coincidence? If Dundas’s bank had made a business of financing railways, he might have been connected with many.

But the fraud was the same! Or it seemed the same. He could remember the rabbits, the rerouting on the longer track, the protestors, the anger, the questions as to which land was to be used, and the accusations of profiteering.

Was he transplanting all that from the past, and his own broken memory, into the present where it did not belong?

No. Katrina Harcus had come to him because she had overheard Dalgarno and Jarvis Baltimore talking of large and dangerous profits that must be kept secret, and she feared fraud. That was fact, nothing to do with memory, true or false, and very much in the present. As was Nolan Baltimore’s murder, whether it had anything to do with the railway or not.

The train pulled into Euston at last, and Monk got out and hurried along the platform, jostled by tired and impatient travelers.

The huge space beyond the platform, arched over by a magnificent roof, was filled with peddlers, people hurrying to catch outgoing trains, porters with boxes and cases, friends and relatives come to meet those arriving or to wish good-bye to those leaving. Coachmen looked for their masters or mistresses.

A paperboy was calling out the latest news. Hurrying past him, Monk heard something about the Union troops in America having captured Roanoke Island on the Kentucky border. The violence and tragedy of that war seemed very far away; the searing heat and dust and blood of the battle he and Hester had been caught up in were in another world now.

When at last he got home he found Hester asleep, curled over in the bed as if she had reached to touch him and found him not there. One arm was still outstretched.

He stood still for several moments, hesitating whether to waken her or not. The fact that she did not stir, unaware of him, told him how tired she must be. There were times when his own impulse would have woken her anyway. She would not have minded. She would have smiled and turned to him.

Now he resisted. What would he say to her? That he had found nothing in Derby except ghosts of familiarity that he could not place? That there was a crash in the past which was so terrible he could neither remember it nor forget it, and he dared not look at the reasons because he was afraid that they involved some kind of guilt, but he had no idea for what? And he had nothing yet that would help his client.

He turned away and went to wash, shave, and change into clean clothes. Hester was still asleep when he left to go to the Royal Botanic Gardens to meet with Katrina Harcus.

It was a bright, windy, March afternoon and a score of people had chosen to spend it admiring the early flowers, the vivid green of the grass, and the giant trees, still bare, wind gusting noisily through the branches. In spite of the brilliant light, the ladies had abandoned parasols. As it was, now and again both hands were needed to keep hats in place and skirts from being whipped and lifted above petticoats.

He saw Katrina after a moment. There was a distinction about her bearing which marked her out. Apparently she recognized him just as quickly and came over without any pretense that it was a casual meeting.

Her face was flushed, but that might have been the wind and sun rather than any expectation so soon.

“Mr. Monk!” She stopped in front of him breathlessly. “What have you learned?”

An elderly gentleman out walking alone turned and smiled at them indulgently, no doubt mistaking it for a lovers’ meeting. Another couple walking arm in arm nodded and moved even closer to each other.

“Very little, Miss Harcus,” he replied quietly. This was not a conversation he wished overheard.

Her eyes dropped and disappointment filled her face, too acute to be concealed.

“I have made enquiries about workmanship and materials,” he went on. “From what I have heard, the railway navvies are too skilled to use inadequate materials of any kind. Not only their reputations and future livelihood would depend on it, but their lives at the time. They have built railways all over the world, and there is no known example of a bad one anywhere.”

She lifted her eyes quickly to gaze into his face. “Then where is the secret profit coming from?” she demanded. “This is not enough, Mr. Monk! If the materials are good, then perhaps there was dishonesty in acquiring them?” She was watching him intently, her face burning with emotion. He realized again how deeply she was in love with Dalgarno, and how terribly afraid that he would be driven into crime and then ruined by it, not only morally but in every other way, perhaps even to end in prison like Arrol Dundas. Monk knew the bitterness of that only too well. It was one thing of which even his shattered memory had not completely let go.

He offered her his arm, and after only a moment’s hesitation she took it and they walked side by side between the flower beds.