Death of a Stranger (7 page)

“May I make notes of some of this, Miss Harcus?” he asked.

“Of course,” she agreed quickly. “I wish I could allow you to keep them, but they would be missed.”

“Naturally.” He admired her courage and the fact that she had taken them at all. He rose to his feet and fetched pen and paper from his desk, bringing the inkwell back with him and sitting at a small table by his chair. He copied rapidly from the first map, then the second, taking the grid references, the names of the principal towns and the main features of the route.

From the other papers he took the areas, prices, and names of the previous owners of the land purchased. Then he looked at the rest that she had handed him. There were purchase orders and receipts for an enormous amount of materials, including wood, steel, and dynamite; for tools, wagons, horses, food for men and animals; and endless wages for the navvies who cut the land, built bridges and viaducts, laid the track itself-but also for ostlers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, surveyors and a dozen other minor tradesmen and artisans.

It was a vast undertaking. The sums involved amounted to a fortune. But building railways had always been about speculation and venture capital, about winning or losing everything. That is why men like Arrol Dundas were drawn to it, and it needed their skill and willingness to take risks.

Arrol Dundas in the past, Dalgarno now, and Monk as he had been however many years ago.

He must read the papers closely, he told himself. Notes were not enough. If there were anything fraudulent it would not be in the open for a casual observer to see. Had it been, then Katrina Harcus herself would have read it, and in all probability understood. Unless, of course, she had understood but could not bring herself to face Dalgarno with it, and she wanted Monk to stop him before he was committed beyond retreat?

He read the bills and receipts carefully. The expenses seemed reasonable. Two of them were signed by Michael Dalgarno, the others by a Jarvis Baltimore. The figures were added correctly and there was nothing unaccounted for. Certainly some of the land purchased was expensive, but it was the stretches previously occupied by houses, workers’ cottages, tenant farmers. The payment did not seem to be more than the land was worth.

He looked at the last two orders for navvies’ wages. They were what a hardworking and skilled man might expect. He flicked down the list. Masons received twenty-four shillings a week. Bricklayers were paid the same, also carpenters and blacksmiths. The navvies who used picks were paid nineteen shillings, the shovelers seventeen. The last two seemed a trifle high. He looked at the signature at the bottom-Michael Dalgarno. Was that really fraud-a shilling or two on the price of pickmen?

He looked at the last one. The pickmen were twenty-four shillings, the shovelers twenty-two shillings and sixpence. The signature was… he felt the blood pounding in his head. He blinked, but his vision did not clear. It was there in front of him-William Monk!

He heard Katrina Harcus say something, but it was no more than a jumble of sound in his ears.

This made no sense. His name on the order! And his hand! There was no arguing it. He had lost the past up to 1856, but since then he remembered everything as well as anyone else. Date? When was it? He could prove he had nothing to do with it.

Date! There it was at the top, just under the company name. Baltimore and Sons, August 27, 1846. Seventeen years ago. Why was this receipt in with the present-day ones? He looked up at Katrina Harcus. She was watching him, her eyes bright, eager.

“Have you found something?” she said breathlessly.

Should he tell her? Everything in him shrank from the thought. It was his fear, to be kept secret until he understood it. All she cared about was Dalgarno. Someone had accidentally picked up an extra piece of paper and an old receipt had been mixed in with the current ones. It was coincidence that it was the same company. But then why not the same? There were only so many large manufacturers and builders in the business. It was the same area, London to the northwest. Not really such a coincidence.

“Not yet.” His mouth was dry; his voice came with an effort. “The figures seem correct, but I shall make notes of all the facts and investigate them. From what you have here, though, there does not seem to be any irregularity.”

“I heard them speak of an enormous profit, far above and beyond what is usual,” she said anxiously, her brow furrowed. “If it were there openly”-she gestured to the papers-“I could have found it myself. But I am deeply afraid, Mr. Monk, firstly for Michael, his reputation and his honor, even his freedom. Men can go to prison for fraud…”

Monk was cold inside. He, of all people, knew that! As if it were only days ago, hours even, he could see Dundas’s white face in the dock as he was sentenced. He could remember their last parting. And he knew exactly where he had been when Mrs. Dundas had told him of her husband’s death. He had gone to visit her. She was sitting in the dining room. He could recall exactly the sunlight through the windows shining bright and hard on the glass cabinets, almost obscuring the Staffordshire china dogs inside. The tea had been cold. She had been sitting there by herself, time sliding by, as if the world had stopped.

“Yes, I know,” he said abruptly. “I will look into the land purchases very carefully, and the quality of the materials and that the building is actually what is specified here. If there is anything that can cause or contribute to a rail crash I shall find it, I promise you, Miss Harcus.” It was a rash thing to say, and he knew it the moment the words were out of his mouth, but the compulsion within him was greater than any whispered caution in his mind.

She relaxed, and for the first time since she had entered the room, she smiled. Her smile was dazzling, intensely alive, making her face almost beautiful. She rose to her feet.

“Thank you, Mr. Monk. There is nothing you could say that would make me happier. I feel confident that you will do everything I hope. Indeed, you are all I had believed of you.”

She was waiting for the papers. Could he keep the one with his own name on it? No. She was watching him. There was no possibility.

She took them from his hand and replaced them in her bag, then from her purse she carefully took out five sovereigns and offered them to him. “Will this suffice as a retainer for your services?”

His lips were dry. “Certainly. Where may I reach you to report anything I find, Miss Harcus?”

The gravity returned to her face. “I have to practice the utmost discretion. It is important that Mr. Dalgarno, and indeed the Baltimore family, have no idea whatsoever of my concern, as I am sure you will appreciate.”

“Of course.”

“I do not know whom I may trust, or who among my friends would feel a divided loyalty if they were aware of my fears. Therefore I think it would be prudent of me to place no one at all under that burden. I will be in the Royal Botanic Society Gardens in the afternoon at two o’clock, from the day after tomorrow until I see you.” She smiled very slightly. “It is no inconvenience to me. I have always had a fondness for plants and my presence will not cause any surprise. Thank you, Mr. Monk. Good day.”

“Good day, Miss Harcus. I will be there as soon as I have anything to tell you.”

He sat for a little while after she had gone, reading and rereading his notes. Apart from the order signed by himself, the others made excellent sense. It was all exactly what he would have expected. Obviously they were only samples of a very much larger quantity which would stretch over years of activity. But would anyone be blatant enough to alter or corrupt receipts so that someone looking at them could see a discrepancy? Surely the differences would lie between the paper and the reality. For that he would have to go to Derbyshire and look at the track itself.

If, on the other hand, as seemed far more likely, the fraud lay in the purchase of land, if he went to the appropriate offices in Derbyshire, he would be able to find the original copies of the survey and begin to trace the ownership, the transfer of money, and anything else that was relevant.

When Hester came home at nearly eleven, exhausted and frightened by the events of the night, he was relieved to see her. She was later than usual and he had become anxious. He made an effort to put everything to do with railways out of his mind, even the fact that his own name had been on one of the orders. She had been up all night, and obviously wished to speak to him about something so urgently she barely waited until she had sat down.

“No, thank you,” she replied to his offer of tea. “William, there is most despicable business going on in Coldbath.” And she proceeded to tell him about the young women who had been lent money and required to pay it back at extortionate rates of interest by prostituting themselves for the particular tastes of men who liked women of good family. “It is their pleasure to humiliate them in a way that using an ordinary woman of the streets could never do,” she said furiously. “How can we fight it?” She stared at him with anger burning in her eyes and her cheeks flushing.

“I don’t know,” he replied honestly, feeling guilty as he said it. “Hester, women have been exploited like that for as long as anyone knows. I don’t know how to help it, except now and then in individual cases.”

She would not accept defeat. She sat on the edge of her seat, her back rigid, her body stiff. “There has to be something!”

“No… there doesn’t have to be,” he corrected her. “Not this side of God’s justice. But if there is, and you can find it, I’ll help you all I can. In the meantime I have a new case, possibly to do with fraud in the building of railways…” He saw the look of impatience in her face. “No, it’s not just money!” he said quickly. “If a railway track is built on land that is fraudulently obtained, or there is an unjust profit, that is illegal and immoral, but what if it is built on land that is wrongly surveyed, that subsides under the weight of a coal train? Or if the bridges or viaducts are constructed with cheap or substandard materials or labor? Then you risk having a crash. Have you thought how many people are killed or injured in a rail crash? How many people does a passenger train carry?”

Her impatience vanished. She let out her breath in a slow sigh. “There might be land fraud; I don’t know anything about that. But navvies know materials. They wouldn’t build with anything that wasn’t good enough, and they wouldn’t build in a substandard way.” She spoke with complete certainty, not as if it were an opinion but a fact.

“How on earth would you know that?” he asked, not patronizingly but as if she might have an answer, not because he thought she could, but because she was tired and had seen too much pain, and he did not want to hurt her anymore.

“I know navvies,” she replied, stifling a yawn.

“What?” He must have misheard. “How do you know navvies?”

“In the Crimea,” she said, pushing her hair back off her brow. “When we were stuck in the siege of Sebastopol in the winter of ’54 to ’55, nine miles from the port of Balaclava and with the only road washed out so not even a cart could get through. The army was freezing to death, or dying of cholera.” She shook her head a little, as if the memory still hurt. “We had no food, no clothes, no medicine. They sent hundreds of navvies out from England to build us a railway… and they did. Without any help, and all through the Russian winter, they worked, and swore, and fought each other, and it was all finished by March. A double track, with tributary lines as well. And it was perfect.” She looked at him with a spark of pride and defiance, as if they were her own men, and perhaps she had nursed a few of them if there had been accidents or fever.

He tried to picture it, the gangs of men laboring to cut a track through the mountains in the middle of the bitter snow, thousands of miles from home, to relieve the armies who had no other way out. He dared not think of the soldiers, or of the incompetence which had brought about such a thing.

“You didn’t mention that before,” he said to her.

“Nothing brought it to mind,” she replied, stifling another yawn. “They were all volunteers, but I don’t think you’ll find it any different here. But look into it. See if there has ever been an accident caused by bad excavation or bad building of track. See if you can find a tunnel that caved in or a viaduct that collapsed or rails that were built on bad ground, or at the wrong incline, or anything else that was the navvies’ doing.”

“I will,” he agreed. “Now go to bed. You’ve done all you can.” He reached out and put his hand over hers. “Don’t think about the usurer and the women. There’s always going to be violence. You can’t stop it; all you can do is try to help the victims.”

“That seems pretty pathetic!” she said angrily.

“It’s like the police,” he said with a half-smile. “We never prevented crime from happening, we only caught people afterwards.”

“You took them to the courts!” she argued.

“Sometimes, not always. Do the best you can; don’t cripple yourself by agonizing over what you can’t reach.”

She conceded, giving him a quick, gentle kiss, and then all but stumbled her way to the bedroom.

Monk left the house and went into the city to begin searching for the information which would help him answer Katrina Harcus’s questions. He tried to concentrate, but nagging like a constant, dull toothache was the sight of his own name on the receipt of Baltimore and Sons from seventeen years before. He did not even think of denying it was his. He had recognized it beyond doubt, the familiar, bold writing, more assertive than now, written by the man he used to be, before he looked more closely at himself and knew how others perceived him.

He went to see a merchant banker for whom he had solved a small domestic mystery to his great satisfaction.

“Baltimore and Sons?” John Wedgewood said, hiding his curiosity with difficulty. They were sitting in his oak-paneled office. A crystal tantalus was on the side table, but Monk had declined whiskey. “Well-respected company. Financially sound enough,” Wedgewood went on. “A great tragedy, especially for the family. I take it that it is the family who has asked you to investigate? Don’t trust the police.” He pursed his lips. “Very wise. But you’ll need to move very swiftly if you are to forestall scandal.”