Death of a Stranger (31 page)

“Nolan Baltimore has been murdered,” Monk stated. He saw Colman’s start of surprise, then a gleam of satisfaction, and immediately afterwards guilt for it, even a flush in his cheeks. But he was in no haste to express the usual regrets. There was an honesty in him which prevented it.

“By a prostitute,” Monk added. “While in the pursuit of somewhat irregular pleasures.”

Disgust was plain in Colman’s eyes.

“And that brings you here?” he said in disbelief.

“Not directly,” Monk replied. “But it does mean we cannot question him about anything to do with what very much appears to be another fraud in Baltimore and Sons, almost exactly like the first.”

Colman sat upright with a jolt. “Another? But Dundas is dead, poor soul. You, of all people, must know that. Surely your memory cannot be so affected… I mean…” He stopped.

Monk rescued him in his embarrassment. “I remember that. But what I don’t recall is how the fraud was discovered… not in detail. You see, it seems this time as if a man named Dalgarno is responsible, only the person who was his main accuser is also dead… murdered.” He saw the pity in Colman’s face, this time unmixed with anything else. “A woman,” Monk continued. “She was betrothed to him, and because of her privileged position as his fiancée, discovered certain things about the business, overheard conversations, saw papers, which made her realize there was something seriously wrong. She brought it to me. I investigated it as far as I was able, but I could find no fraud. A little questionable profiteering, but that’s all.”

“But she was murdered?” Colman interrupted, leaning forward with urgency.

“Yes. And Dalgarno is charged with it. But in order to prove his guilt we need to show the fraud beyond question.”

“I see.” It was clear from his expression that he understood perfectly. “What is it that you want of me?”

“You were the one who first suspected fraud. Why?”

Colman frowned. He was clearly fascinated by the concept of such total loss from the mind of something in which Monk had been passionately involved. “You really remember nothing of it?” His voice thickened with emotion; his body became rigid. “You don’t remember my church? In the valley, with the old trees around it? The graveyard?”

Monk struggled, but nothing came. He was picturing it in his mind, but it was imagination, not memory. He shook his head.

“It was beautiful,” Colman said, his face tender with sorrow. “An old church. The original was Norman, with a crypt underneath where men were buried nearly a thousand years ago. The graveyard was full of old families, over fifteen or twenty generations. It was the history of the land. History is only people, you know.” He stared at Monk intensely, reaching for the man behind the facade, the passions which could be stirred-and wounded-deeper than the analytical brain. “They sent the railway right through the middle of it.”

Now something clicked in Monk’s mind, a bishop mild and reasonable, full of regret, but acknowledging progress and the need for work for men, transport, the moving forward of society. There had been a curate, shy and enthusiastic, wanting to keep the old and bring in the new as well, and refusing to see that to have both was impossible.

And caught between the two of them the Reverend Colman, an enthusiast, a lover of the unbroken chain of history who saw the railways as forces of destruction, shattering the cement of family bonds with the dead, vandalizing the physical monuments that kept the spiritual ties whole. Monk could hear voices raised-shouting, angry and afraid, faces twisted with rage.

But Colman had done more than protest, he had proved crime. Was this it, the elusive memory at last-the proof? Who would it blame-Baltimore, or Monk himself? He cleared his throat. It felt tight, as if he could not breathe.

“They destroyed the church?” he asked aloud.

“Yes. The new line goes right over where it used to be.” Colman did not add anything; the emotion in his voice was sufficient.

“How did you discover the fraud?” Monk forced himself to sound almost normal. He almost had the truth.

“Simple,” Colman replied. “Someone told me he watched rabbits on the hill they said they had to go around because it would be too expensive to tunnel through. He was a parishioner of mine, in trouble for poaching. When I asked where he’d been caught, he told me. Rabbits don’t tunnel in granite, Mr. Monk. Navvies can blast through pretty well anything; solid mountains just take longer, and therefore cost more.

“I found the original survey. When one looked more carefully at the one Baltimore was using, it was falsified. Whoever did it had been too clever to alter the heights or composition-he found a hill that was exactly right somewhere else and altered the grid reference. It was an extremely skilled job.”

Monk asked the question he had to, but he had to clear his throat again to make his voice come. “Arrol Dundas?”

“It looked like it,” Colman said with regret, as if he would rather it had been someone else.

“Did he ever admit to it?”

“No. Nor did he blame anyone else, but I think that was more a matter of dignity, even morality, than because he had no idea who it might have been.”

It was a moment before Monk realized the full meaning of what Colman had said. He had begun his own next question, and stopped in the middle of the sentence.

“You mean you doubted Dundas was guilty?” he said incredulously.

Colman blinked. “You always maintained he wasn’t. Even after the verdict, you swore he was not the one who had changed the survey, and that his profit was through good speculation but not dishonesty. He simply bought low and sold high.”

Monk was confused. “Then who forged the survey references? Baltimore? Why would he? He didn’t have any land!”

“Nor money in the bank from it afterwards,” Colman agreed. “I don’t know the answer. If it wasn’t Dundas, then the real money probably came in bribery somewhere, but no one will ever prove it.”

“Why would anyone else falsify the surveys?” Monk pressed.

Colman frowned, weighing his answer before he gave it, and then his words were picked with great care. “The railway cut through the middle of my church, and that was all I could think of at the time.” His eyes filled with sudden tears. “And then the crash… the children…” He stopped. There was no way to express it, and perhaps he saw some recognition of horror in Monk, and words became unnecessary.

Monk’s recollection of him was growing sharper. He had wanted to like him before; it was his testimony against Dundas that had made it impossible. Now all that had receded into history for both of them and there was no issue to be fought anymore.

Colman blinked and smiled in apology. “I am afraid I am not much help in gaining the evidence you need to prove Dalgarno’s guilt for murdering the young woman, or whether Baltimore was the one practicing the fraud. But if I understood you correctly, he was already dead himself by the time she was killed.”

“Yes, by two or three weeks,” Monk agreed.

“Then possibly Dalgarno was in the fraud with Baltimore, and once Baltimore was dead he would take all the profits to himself?” Colman suggested.

“Or share them with the son, Jarvis Baltimore,” Monk amended. “It seems likely, especially since Dalgarno is now courting the daughter, Livia, according to my wife’s observation.”

Colman’s eyes widened. “Your wife is acquainted with the Baltimores?”

Monk did not bother to hide his smile, or the bubble of pride springing up inside him, high and bright, and with a pain like a dagger for what he could lose. “No. She is running a house of refuge and medical treatment for prostitutes in Coldbath Square, and Livia Baltimore went to her for help, and in considerable anger and distress, after her father’s murder. Hester learned some information and went to call on her. She nursed in the Crimea. There is not much that deters her once she is convinced she is right.”

Colman shook his head, but his eyes were shining. “I hope she does not have to enlighten Miss Baltimore as to the true nature of her father,” he said. “I think he may well have tried the same fraud a second time. But I don’t know how you will prove it to a jury without evidence of profit. He escaped the first time because it was plain he had no financial gain from it, and Dundas did.”

“Dundas died with very little,” Monk pointed out, old sadness and anger washing over him in a tidal wave.

Colman became suddenly very solemn also. “I heard that, although it was extraordinary. He was an excellent banker, quite brilliant. But you can’t have forgotten that, surely?”

“I had. But not now. Where did the money go?”

Colman stared at Monk somberly.

“I have no idea. No one had. And shortly after that the crash put all such things out of everyone’s thoughts.” Suddenly his face was pinched and the color went from his cheeks again. “It was the closest thing to hell I think this life could offer. I shall remember the screams as long as I live. The smell of burnt hair still brings me out in a sweat and I feel sick. But you know that. You were there.”

He looked ill. Monk lowered his eyes. He knew what Colman meant. He had tasted something of it in his own nightmare. It was strange, an almost irrelevant reality, to hear Colman say that Monk had been there; he knew it far more urgently and terribly from the nightmare of his hidden mind.

“What caused it?” he said aloud.

Colman looked up slowly. “They never found out. But it wasn’t the new track. That was perfectly good. At least… as far as anyone could tell.” The last vestige of blood drained out of his face and his body stiffened. “Oh, no! You don’t think it’s going to happen again? Please God-no! Is that what you’re afraid of?”

“It is what Katrina Harcus was afraid of,” Monk replied. “But I’ve searched everything I can; I’ve walked the track myself and I can’t see anything wrong with it at all. Tell me, Mr. Colman-how can I prove this fraud? It’s happened again-and I still can’t see it!”

Colman looked at him with intense pity. “I don’t know. Do you think if I did I would have stayed silent all these years? Whoever it hurt, I would have spoken. I simply don’t know!”

Monk stared at him helplessly, his mind caught like a runner through the breaking surf, feeling the tide drag at his feet, taking away his balance, and still no sense came out of it.

“Look for the bribe,” Colman urged. “That’s all it can be.”

Monk did not argue as to whether there had been a bribe or not. Colman had long ago made up his mind. He stayed a little longer, then thanked Colman and left, walking more easily, with lighter feet. One old enmity had been exorcised. Now he would not dread seeing Colman’s face in his dreams.

But he had not found that one fact which he was convinced would let him unravel all the others from the fast-tied knot of his memory. There was something which he dared not bring back because of the pain, and yet until he knew what it was, and faced it, all the rest was just beyond his reach.

He had the courage to look at it, and the will in his conscious mind, but that tiny part of him which looked too deep to touch, which knew what it was, still held it just beyond his reach.

Was it defying him… or protecting him?

He went back to London through Derby, checking once more on the original route, before the alteration, and seeing exactly whose land it had crossed. There was a large and wealthy farm it would have cut in half, making it impossible to have taken cattle from one side to the other, effectively ruining the unity of it.

It would also have sliced through a spinney of trees, one of the best in the area for drawing a fox, a favorite place of the local hunt. Would it have needed bribery to divert the track a mile or two through unused land? On the whole, he thought not. It seemed the obvious thing to do. Not to would have been an act of vandalism, and earned a dangerous enmity among the people of the nearest town.

Was any of this really a crime? Was it even a sin worth caring about more than with a passing regret?

Michael Dalgarno was a worthless man in his relationship with Katrina. He had taken her love while it suited him, and then cast her aside when a financially better prospect had presented itself in Livia Baltimore. But that was not a crime either… a sin certainly, but one many men were guilty of. As men had married for beauty, so many an empty woman had married for wealth.

None of that was motive for Dalgarno to have murdered Katrina.

To conceal fraud was, certainly, but where was the fraud? None that Monk could prove. It was all only suggestion and suspicion. Monk remembered the letter with his own name in it that he had removed from Katrina’s. His hand stung as if it had burnt him. Had he left it there, it would be he that Runcorn was after now, and were it anyone other than Runcorn, with as much certainty of his guilt!

“Of course he’s guilty!” Runcorn said indignantly when Monk went straight from the station to see him and report his failure. As always, his office was crowded with papers, but they were all neatly stacked, as though studied and dealt with. He was too busy to offer Monk tea. Anyway, he seemed to regard him now as a colleague rather than a guest. He looked at him skeptically and with some disappointment. “The fact that you still didn’t bring back any proof of the fraud doesn’t mean he’s innocent,” he said grimly. “It just means he hid it too well for you to uncover. Presumably he learned from Dundas’s mistakes. Two farms, or estates or whatever, you said?”

“Yes,” Monk replied stiffly. “And if I’d been planning that line you wouldn’t have had to bribe me to divert around a hill rather than go through it, if it meant not vandalizing a stretch of land like that.”

“And you think Dalgarno is the same as you, do you?” Runcorn lifted his eyebrows in a mixture of surprise and disbelief.

Monk hesitated. The question had been meant sarcastically, but he realized how much truth there could be in it. There was a physical resemblance, increased by their similar self-assurance-one might say arrogance, the love of good clothes, a certain grace of movement. If the witnesses to Katrina’s death had really seen someone on the roof, if their descriptions fitted Dalgarno, they would just as easily fit Monk. Plenty of people had seen him with Katrina-ask anyone in the Botanic Gardens. And to an onlooker they could have appeared to be quarreling. With a chill in the pit of his stomach, Monk remembered how she had put her hands up and grasped his coat, pulling off the button. He knew when it had been torn-but she had died with it in her hand. Why? What was she doing still holding it so long after?