Death of a Stranger (18 page)

The attendant was at his elbow to tell him they were closing when he saw the name Dundas, and then the rest of it: He had died of pneumonia in prison in Liverpool, April 1846.

He closed the book and turned to the man. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “That’s all I need. I’m obliged to you.” Irrational how seeing it in cold writing like that made it so much more real. It took it out of imagination and memory and into the world of indelible fact that the world knew as well as he.

He strode out of the door, down the steps and along the street back to the station, where he bought a ham sandwich and a cup of tea while he waited for the last train north.

When the night train pulled into Liverpool Lime Street just before dawn, Monk got off shivering cold, his body stiff, and went to buy himself a hot drink and something to eat, then to look for some sort of lodgings where he could wash and shave and put on a clean shirt before he began to look for the facts of the past.

It was still far too early to find any records office open, but he knew without asking where the prison was. By seven o’clock it was gray daylight with a stiff wind coming up off the Mersey. All around him people were hurrying to work, steps swift, heads down. He heard the flat, nasal Liverpool voices with the lift at the end of each sentence, the dry humor, the cheerful complaints about the weather, the government, the prices of everything, and found it all oddly familiar. Even the slang he understood. He took a hansom and simply directed the driver, street by street, until the dark walls towered over them and memories came surging back like the flood tide of the sea, the smell of the wet stones, the sound of rain in the gutter, the unevenness of the cobbles and the chill wind around the corners.

He told the driver to wait, climbed out, and stood staring at the locked gates. He had been here before so many times in Dundas’s last days, even the pattern of light and shadow on the walls was familiar.

More powerful than the blackness of the stone around him, and the smell of ingrained dirt and misery, was the old feeling of helplessness come back with shattering force, as if the air were thin in his lungs, starving him of breath.

He stood motionless, fighting to grasp something tangible-words, facts, details of anything-but the harder he tried the more completely it all eluded him. There was only the suffocating emotion.

Behind him, the cab horse shifted its weight, iron shoes loud on the cobbles, harness creaking.

There was nothing to be gained here. Remembered pain did not help. He had not doubted the truth of it. He needed something he could follow.

He walked slowly back to the hansom and climbed in.

“I want to look at old newspapers,” he told the driver. “Sixteen years ago. Take me wherever they are.”

“Library,” the driver replied. “Less yer want the law courts?”

“No, thank you. The library will do.” If he had to ask for a transcript of the trial he would, but he was not ready for that yet. To see such a thing he would have to give his name and his reasons. The newspapers were an anonymous way of learning, and he despised himself even as the thought was in his mind. Still, he knew it was self-preservation to guard against all the hurt he could. Pain was disabling, and he had to keep his promise to Katrina Harcus.

There was no one else interested in old records so early in the day, and he had the newspaper files to himself. It took no more than fifteen minutes to locate the trial of Arrol Dundas. He already knew the date of Dundas’s death, so he worked backwards. There was the headline:FINANCIER ARROL DUNDAS ON TRIAL FOR FRAUD.

He turned to the beginning and read.

It was exactly as he had feared. The print swam before his eyes, but he could have recited the words as if they were in inch-high capitals. There was even a pen-and-ink sketch of Dundas in the dock. It was brilliant. Monk did not have to hesitate for an instant to wonder if it portrayed the man as he had been. It was so vivid; the charm, the dignity, the inner grace were all there, caught in a few lines, and the fear and weariness in the face, fine features become gaunt, nose too prominent, hair a fraction too long, folds in the skin too deep, making him look ten years older than the sixty-two the words proclaimed.

Monk stared at it and was back in the courtroom again, feeling the press of bodies around him, the noise, the smell of anger in the air, the harsh Liverpool voices with their unique rhythm and accent, the innate humor turned vicious against what they saw as betrayal.

All the time he felt the frustration again, the striving to do something he was prevented from at every turn. Hope seeped away like water poured into dry sand.

There was a picture of the prosecutor, a large man with a bland, placid face belying his appetite for success. He had educated himself out of his local dialect, but the nasal sounds of it were still there when he was excited, scenting the kill. Now and then he forgot and used a piece of idiom, and the crowd loved him for it. Monk had not realized then how much he was playing to the gallery, but now, with hindsight and memories of the scores of other trials he had attended, he could see that the prosecutor had been like a bad actor.

Did it all rest on the skill of lawyers? What if Dundas had had someone like Oliver Rathbone? Would it have made any real difference, in the end?

He read on through the account of witnesses: first of all other bankers, disclaiming all knowledge of improper dealings, busy washing their hands of it, talking loudly of their innocence. He could remember their well-cut jackets and tight-collared shirts, faces scrubbed and pink, voices correct. They had looked frightened, as if guilt were contagious. Monk could feel his own anger clenching inside him, still urgent and real, not something finished sixteen years ago.

Next had come the investors who had lost money, or at least were beginning to realize they were not going to profit as they had expected. They had swung from professed ignorance to open anger when they saw that their financial competence was undermined. They had been foremost in damning Dundas with their sly, pejorative words, their judgment of his character, wise after the event. Monk could remember his fury as he had been forced to listen to them, helpless to argue, to defend, to speak of their own greed or repeat the eagerness with which they had been persuaded from one route to another, one purchase more or less, any cheaper way.

He had wanted to testify. He could feel his anger as if it had been yesterday, and all the pressure he had put to bear on the defense lawyer to let him speak. And every time it had been refused.

“Prejudice the jury,” he had been told. “Pillar of the community; can’t attack Baltimore or you’ll only make it worse. His family has money in every big undertaking in Lancashire. Make an enemy of him and you’ll turn half the county against you.” And so it had gone on, until his own evidence had been so anodyne as to be virtually useless. He entered the ring like a boxer with one arm behind him, bruised by blows he could not return.

The landowner had surprised him. He had expected outrage and self-interest from him, and instead he had heard bewilderment, careful recounting of haggling and sales, attempts at diversion so as to keep one estate or another whole. But there was no spite, no desperation to preserve a reputation.

Large sums of money had changed hands, but in spite of all the prosecutor’s attempts to make them seem dishonest or exorbitant, by and large they were exactly what everyone expected.

However, when all the amounts were entered into evidence, Monk heard the death knell of the defense in those meticulous records. He knew now as if it were all clear in his fragmented mind just what the final verdict would be, not because it was true but because there were too many of the negotiations conducted by Dundas, agreements with his signature on them, money in his accounts. He could deny, but he could not disprove. He had acted for others. That was his business.

But there were no other names written. He had trusted. They claimed they had trusted also. Who had betrayed whom?

Of course Monk knew the verdict-guilty.

But he had to know more of the detail, exactly how the fraud had been managed so that it had remained hidden until the last moment. How had Dundas expected to get away with it?

There was a sketch of Nolan Baltimore giving evidence. Monk stared at the few lines with fascination. It was an ugly face, but there was immense vitality in it, a power in the heavy bones and appetite in the curve of the mouth. It was intelligent, but portraying no sensitivity and little subtlety or humor. Monk was repulsed, yet it was only a sketch, one man’s view. He could not recall ever having seen the man alive. He was simply the owner of Dalgarno’s company, and the man whose murder had so inconvenienced Hester and the women she cared for. He had died in Leather Lane, in all probability pushed down the stairs by a prostitute, whom presumably he had refused to pay.

Or else railway fraud had at last caught up with him after all, and he had been killed as Katrina feared, either to prevent it from happening again or to keep it secret and allow it to go ahead. Had he been going to expose this one too, this all-but-duplicate of the old fraud which would have worked if… if what?

Monk laid the paper down on the flat tabletop and stared at the rows of folders and ledgers on the shelves in front of him. What had happened to expose Arrol Dundas? Why had the scheme not continued undetected? Had someone betrayed him, or had it been carelessness, a transfer not concealed well enough, an entry not followed through, something incomplete, a name mentioned that should not have been?

If anyone had ever told Monk he had known from a confidence or deduction, he could not bring it back now, however hard he tried.

His eyes ached from the endless writing and the lines jumped in front of him, but he went back to reading the account of evidence day by day. Fraud trials were always long; there was so much detail following the intricacies of land sale and purchase, surveying, negotiation of routes, consideration of methods, materials, alternatives.

He rubbed his eyes, blinking as if there were grit in them.

He had given evidence himself, but there was no sketch of him. He was not interesting enough to engage the reader, so whether the artist had drawn him or not, no likeness had been used. Was he disappointed? Had he really been so incidental then, so unimportant? It seemed so.

He read what was given of his own interrogation by the prosecutor. At first he was startled to see that from the tone of the questions he was obviously a suspect too. But then, as he looked at it more rationally, and without the instinctive self-defense, the man would have been derelict in his duty not to have taken very serious consideration of the possibility.

So if he had been suspected then, why was he later considered to be of insufficient interest to have his picture included? He must have been vindicated. By the time the newspaper went to press, he was effectively no longer involved. Why? Did it matter now? Probably not.

According to what was reported in the paper, Monk had conducted some of the negotiations for purchase. It seemed to have been pulled out of him with extraordinary reluctance that he had not hired the surveyor, which was the fact that exonerated him. He had been in the witness-box altogether less than half an hour. If he had said anything at all to help clear Dundas, it was not reported. He had been regarded as a hostile witness by the prosecution, but most of what he was asked concerned documents, and could hardly be denied.

He could not remember what he had said, only the feeling of being trapped, stared at by the crowd, frowned on by the judge, weighed and assessed by the jurors, fought over by the opposing counsel, and looked to for help he could not give by Dundas himself. That was what remained with him even now, the guilt because he had not been clever enough to make any difference.

Then another face was sharp in his mind, one not drawn by the artist, for whatever reason, perhaps compassion-that of Dundas’s wife. She had sat with a terrible calm throughout the trial. Her loyalty had been the one thing even the prosecution had felt obliged to praise. He had spoken of her with respect, certain that her faith in her husband was both honest and complete.

Monk recalled her afterwards, the totality of her silent grief when she had told him of Dundas’s death. He could picture the room, the sunlight, her face pale, the tears on her cheeks, as if it were then too late for anything but the hidden, inmost pain which never leaves. It was she he thought of more than Dundas, she whose grief outweighed his own, and which tore still at the deep well of emotion within him, unhealed even now.

And there was something more, but he could not bring it back. He sat staring at the old papers, yellowed at the edges, and struggled to recapture what it was. Time and time again it was almost there, and then it splintered into fragments and meant nothing.

He gave up and went back to the next stage of the trial. More witnesses, this time for the defense. Clerks were called, people who had written entries in ledgers, kept books, filed orders for money, purchases of land, title deeds, surveys. But it was all too complicated, and half of them had become uncertain under cross-examination. The main thrust of the defense had been not that there was no fraud but that Nolan Baltimore could equally be suspected of it.

But Nolan Baltimore was in the witness-box. Arrol Dundas was in the dock-and that perception made all the difference. It depended upon whom you believed, and then in that light all the evidence fell one way or the other. Monk could see how it had been, and he could find no loose thread to unravel a greater truth.

There seemed no question that Dundas had purchased land in his own name, farmland of poor quality, which he had paid market value for, little enough when you need it for running sheep. But when the railway was diverted from its original track, around a hill and through that farmland, which it was obliged to buy at a considerably larger amount, then Dundas’s very rapidly turned profit was huge.

That in itself would be regarded as no more than exceptionally fortunate speculation, to be envied but not blamed. One might well resent not having done the same oneself, but only a small-minded man hates another for such advantage.