She looked up at him earnestly. He could see the hurt and confusion in her face, the desperation mounting inside her. Why? What did she know about Dalgarno that she was still not telling him?

  “What amounts of money could be involved?” she interrupted his thoughts. “A great deal, surely? Enough to keep an ordinary man in comfort for the rest of his life?”

  Monk had a sudden start of memory of Arrol Dundas, so vivid he could see the lines in Dundas’s skin, the curve of his nose, and a gentleness in his eyes as he looked across at Monk. He was back at the trial again, seeing people’s faces drop in amazement as amounts of money were mentioned, sums that seemed unimaginable wealth to them but in railway terms were everyday. He could see the open mouths, hear the gasps of indrawn breath and the rustle of movement around the room, the scrape of fabric, the creak of whalebone stays.

  What had happened to that money? Did Dundas’s widow have it? No, that was impossible. People did not keep the profit of crime. Had it disappeared? There must have been proof that he had had it at some time in order to convict him.

  Monk refused even to consider the other possibility, that somehow he himself had had it. He knew enough of his own life in the police force to know such wealth would have been exposed.

  Katrina was waiting for him to respond.

  He jerked himself back to the present. “Yes, it would be a great deal of money,” he conceded.

  Her mouth was a thin line, lips tight. “Enough to tempt men to great crime,” she said hoarsely. “For people to believe the worst of anyone . . . quite easily. Mr. Monk, this answer is not sufficient.” She looked down, away from his eyes and what they might read in hers. When she spoke again her voice was little more than a whisper. “I am so afraid for Michael I hardly know how to keep my head at all. Because I am afraid, I have taken risks I would never take in other circumstances. I have listened at doors, I have overheard conversations, I have even read papers on other people’s desks. I am ashamed to confess it.” She looked up suddenly. “But I am seeking with all my strength to prevent disaster to those I love, and to ordinary innocent men and women who only wish to travel from one town to another and who trust the railway to carry them safely.”

  “What is it that you have not told me?” he demanded, now a little roughly.

  Again passersby were staring at them, perhaps because they were standing rather than walking, more likely because they saw the passion and the urgency in Katrina’s face, and that she was still gripping Monk’s arm.

  “I know that Jarvis Baltimore is planning to spend over two thousand pounds on an estate for himself,” she said breathlessly. “I saw the plans of it. He spoke of having the money in almost two months’ time, from the profits they expect out of the scheme he and Michael spoke of.” She was watching him intently, struggling to guess his judgment. “But both he and Michael have said it must be kept a most deadly secret or it will ruin them instead.”

  “Are you quite certain you have not misunderstood?” he questioned. “Was this since Nolan Baltimore’s death?”

  “No . . .” The word was hardly more than a breathing out.

  So it was not an inheritance.

  “The sale of railway stock to foreign railway companies?”

  “Why should that be secret?” she asked. “Would someone not speak of it quite openly? Do not companies do it all the time?”

  “Yes.” He said that with certainty.

  “There is some secret you have not yet discovered, Mr. Monk,” she said huskily. “Something which is terrible and dangerous, and will drag Michael down to prison, if not death, if we do not find it before it is too late!”

  Fear ran through him like a burning wave, but it was nameless and without sense. He reached for the only thing he knew which matched the violence and the enormity of what she was suggesting.

  “Miss Harcus! Nolan Baltimore was murdered a short while ago. Most people assumed it was because he was frequenting a brothel in Leather Lane. But perhaps that is what they were intended to think.”

  She jerked up her head, staring at him with terrified eyes, her face white. She was totally oblivious of the people around her, of their curiosity or alarm. “You think it was to do with the railway?” She breathed out the words in horror, putting her hand up to cover her mouth, as if that could stifle the truth.

  He knew the worst fear that had to be in her mind, and he hurt for her pain, but it was senseless to evade it now. It would not drive it away.

  “Yes,” he answered gently. “If you are correct, and there really is such a great deal of money involved, then if he knew of this scheme, he may have been murdered to assure his silence.”

  Now she was so white he was afraid she was going to faint. Instinctively, he reached for her arms to stop her from falling.

  She allowed him to hold her for no more than seconds, then she pulled away with a jerk so sharp he all but tore the fine muslin of her sleeves.

  “No!” There was horror in her face, and she spoke with such pent-up, choking emotion that several people nearby actually turned and looked at them both, then in embarrassment at being caught staring, turned away again.

  “Miss Harcus!” he urged. “Please!”

  “No,” she repeated, but less fiercely. “I . . . I can’t think that . . .” She did not finish.

  They both knew what it was that tormented her. The possibility was too clear. If the fraud were as great as she feared, the profit as high, then Nolan Baltimore could easily have been murdered to silence him. It could have been because he knew and he and his murderer quarreled. He wanted too large a share, or he threatened the plans in any other way, or because he had not known but had discovered, and had to be silenced before he betrayed them. Michael Dalgarno was the obvious man to suspect. As far as Katrina knew, only Dalgarno and Jarvis Baltimore were involved.

  Monk ached for her. He knew with hideous familiarity what it was like to live with the dread of learning the truth, and yet be compelled to seek it. All the denial in the world changed nothing, and yet the knowledge, final and irrefutable, would destroy all that mattered most.

  For her it would mean that the man she loved in a sense had never really existed. Even before he had gone to Leather Lane that night, before anything was irrevocable, he had had the seed of it within him, the cruelty and the greed, the arrogance that placed his own gain before another man’s life. He had betrayed himself long before he had betrayed Katrina, or his mentor and employer.

  And if Monk had betrayed Arrol Dundas, and had even the slightest knowing or willing hand in the rail crash in the past, then he had never been the man Hester believed him to be, and everything he had so carefully built, with such difficult letting go of his pride, would come shattering down like a house of cards.

  Suddenly this woman he barely knew was closer to him than anyone else, because they shared a fear which dominated their lives to the exclusion of everything else.

  She was still staring at him in terrified silence.

  “Miss Harcus,” he said with a tenderness that startled him, and this time he did not hesitate to touch her. It was only a small gesture, but of extraordinary understanding. “I will find out the truth,” he promised. “If there is a fraud, I’ll uncover it and prevent any further accidents. And I will do what I can to discover who murdered Nolan Baltimore.” He watched her gravely. “But unless there is fraud, and Michael Dalgarno is implicated, he would have no motive to have done such a thing. Baltimore was probably killed in some fight over money to do with prostitution, not a fortune but a few pounds some drunken pimp thought he owed. They may well have had no idea who he was. Had he a hot temper?”

  The faintest shadow of a smile touched her lips, and her whole body eased its stiffness. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, he was quick-tempered. Thank you more than I can say, Mr. Monk. You have at least given me hope. I shall cling onto that until you bring me news.” Her eyes flickered down, then up again. “I must owe you further, and you have expenses from all the traveling you have done on my behalf. Would another fifteen pounds be sufficient for the moment? It . . . it is all I can manage.” There was a faint flush of embarrassment on her cheeks now.

  “It would be quite sufficient,” he answered, taking it from her hand and putting it into his inside pocket as discreetly as possible, pulling out a handkerchief as if that were what he had reached for. He saw her flash of understanding and acknowledgment and was sufficiently thanked in that.

  It was time that Monk considered more seriously the possibility that Baltimore’s death was not the prostitution scandal that the police, and everyone else, assumed, but a very personal murder simply carried out in or near the brothel in Leather Lane. If Dalgarno, or even Jarvis Baltimore, had wished to kill the older man, to do it behind the mask of his private vices was the perfect crime.

  There was nothing to be gained by asking the superintendent in charge of the investigation, who would resent Monk’s interference. The poor man was being pressured more than enough by the authorities and the outraged citizens who felt morally obliged to protest. No matter what he did he would not please them. The only solution they wanted was for the whole matter to disappear without trace, and that was not a possibility. If they did not complain, they appeared to condone prostitution and the murder of a prominent citizen; if they did, then they drew even more attention to practices they all wished to be free to indulge in and deny at the same time.

  Nor was there much purpose in his speaking to the constables on the beat, who were being dragooned into protecting the Farringdon Road area against everybody’s interests. If they knew who had killed Nolan Baltimore, whoever it was would have been charged already and the matter put to rest.

  What Monk wanted to know was the movements of Nolan Baltimore on the night of his death, and exactly what Michael Dalgarno had known of them, and where he had been. How had they parted? What was Jarvis Baltimore’s role?

  Who could know these things? The Baltimore household, family and servants; possibly the constables on the beat near the house or the offices, if either man had not gone home that evening; or street peddlers, cabdrivers, people whose daily passage took them through that area.

  He began with the easiest, and possibly the most likely to tell him something of worth. She sat on a rickety box propped up near the corner of the street, a shawl around her head and a clay pipe stuck firmly between her remaining teeth. An array of cough drops and brandy balls sat in bowls and tin dishes around her, and a heap of small squares of paper was held down by a stone.

  “Arternoon, sir,” she said in a soft Irish accent. “Now what can I be gettin’ yer?”

  He cleared his throat. “Cough drops, if you please,” he said with a smile. “Threepence worth, I think.” He fished a threepenny piece out of his pocket and offered it to her.

  She took it and ladled out a portion of sticky sweets with a tin spoon. She dropped them onto one of the pieces of paper and twisted it into a screw, then handed it up to him. She drew deeply on the pipe, but it appeared to have gone out. She fished in her pocket, but he was there before her, a packet of matches in his hand. He held it out for her.

  “It’s a gentleman ye are,” she said, taking it from him, picking out a match and striking it, holding the flame to the bowl of her pipe and drawing deeply. It caught and she inhaled with profound satisfaction. She offered the matches back to him.

  “Keep them,” he replied generously.

  She did not argue, but her bright eyes, half hidden by wrinkles of weathered skin, were sharp with amusement. “So what are ye wantin’ then?” she said bluntly.

  He smiled widely at her. He had charm when he wanted it. “You’ll be knowing that Mr. Baltimore was murdered in Leather Lane a few days ago,” he said candidly. He knew the folly of insulting her wits. Anyone who served in the street to her age was nobody’s fool.

  “Sure an’ doesn’t all London know it?” she replied. Her expression betrayed her contempt of him, probably not for his morals but for his hypocrisy.

  “You’ll have seen him coming and going,” he went on, nodding his head toward the Baltimore house, thirty yards away.

  “Of course I have, bad cess to him,” she responded. “Not a halfpenny on a cold day, that one!” Perhaps it was a warning to him that she had no interest in helping to find his killer. An honest expression or a ploy to be paid now for help, it did not matter; either way if she told him anything he was happy to reward her for it.

  “I am interested in the possibility that he was killed by someone who knew him,” he admitted. “Did you see him that evening? Any idea what time he left home, and if he was alone or with anyone?”

  She looked at him steadily, weighing him up.

  He looked back, wondering whether she wanted money, or if poorly handled it would offend her pride.

  “It would be very agreeable to find it was nothing to do with the women in Leather Lane,” he remarked.

  Real interest flashed in her eyes. “It would an’ all,” she agreed. “But even if I saw him leave, an’ others follow after him, that doesn’t mean to say they went further than the end o’ the street, now does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said, trying to keep the emotion out of his voice. He did not even know if he was excited or afraid. He did not want Dalgarno guilty! It was only the keenness of a scent which caught his eagerness, a thread of truth at last among all the knots and ends. “But if I knew which way they went then I might be able to find the cabbie who picked them up.”

  “Josiah Wardrup,” she said without a flicker. “Saw him myself, I did. Almost like he was expectin’ the old bastard.”

  “How very interesting,” Monk said sincerely. “Perhaps he was? In fact, perhaps Mr. Baltimore went that way, at that time, quite regularly?”

  She made a low sound of appreciation in the back of her throat. “It’s clever you are, now isn’t it?”

  “Oh, now and then,” he agreed. He fished in his pocket and brought out two shillings. “I think I’ll reward myself with a few pence worth of brandy balls.”

  “Sure an’ how many pence worth would that be, now?” she asked, taking the two shillings from him.

  “Four,” he said unhesitatingly.

  She grinned and poured him a generous four pence worth.

  “Thank you. Keep the change. I’m most obliged.”

  She put the clay pipe back in her mouth and drew on it with profound satisfaction. She had had a pleasant conversation, gained one and eight pence for nothing, and perhaps helped the cause of justice to get the rozzers off the backs of the poor cows who worked down the Farringdon Road way. Not bad for less than half an hour’s work.

  Monk took until the next day to find Josiah Wardrup, but with only a moderate amount of pressure the cabbie admitted that he had picked up Nolan Baltimore on that corner at least once a week for the last two or three years and taken him to the corner of Theobald’s Road and Gray’s Inn Road, which was a mere stone’s throw from Leather Lane.

  Monk was not sure if it was what he wanted to hear. It looked extraordinarily like a regular indulgence, but then insofar as it was regular, it would have been simple enough for anyone wishing him harm to have learned his pattern and followed him.

  But if Wardrup had seen anyone else he was not saying so. He looked at Monk with blank innocence and demanded his suitable appreciation. And no, he had no idea where Mr. Baltimore went from the corner. He always stood there and waited until Wardrup had left, which caused him some wry amusement. What did anyone imagine a gentleman did in such an area?

  The only fact Monk would glean of any interest was that on every occasion it had been the same corner. The times varied, the nights of the week, but never the place.

  And yet the brothel in Leather Lane where his body was found denied all knowledge of him. They said that not only had he not been there for business that night, he had never been.

  Monk was alternately cajoling and threatening, but not one woman changed her words, and in spite of general opinion of their honesty, and the fact that Baltimore had undoubtedly been found there, he found to his surprise that he believed them. Of course he was also aware that he was far from the first person to have asked, and they had had more than enough time to compare stories with each other and determine a united front.

  Still, Abel Smith’s dubious and far from attractive establishment was not the sort of place one expected a man of Baltimore’s wealth to frequent. But tastes were individual; some men liked dirt, others danger. Yet he knew of none who liked disease—except of course those already infected.

  At the end of two days he was little wiser.

  He turned his attention to Dalgarno, surprised how much he dreaded what he would find. And the search itself was not easy. Dalgarno was a man who seemed to do a great many things alone. It was not difficult to establish what time he had left the offices of Baltimore and Sons. A few enquiries of the desk elicited that information, but it was of little use. Dalgarno had left at six o’clock, five hours before Baltimore had been picked up by a hansom and taken to the corner of the Gray’s Inn Road.

  A newsboy had seen someone who was almost certainly Dalgarno go into the Baltimore house, and half an hour later Jarvis Baltimore go in also, but he had left the street before eight, and no one that Monk could question knew anything further. The Baltimore servants would know, but he had no authority to speak to them and could think of no excuse. Even if he could have, Baltimore could have been killed at any time after midnight and before dawn. No enquiry showed one way or the other whether Dalgarno had been in his rooms all night. Exit and entry were easy, and there was no postman or other servant to see.

  He spoke to the gingerbread seller on the corner fifty yards away, a small, spare man who looked as if he could profit from a thick slice of his own wares and a hot cup of tea. He had seen Dalgarno returning home at about half past nine in the evening of Baltimore’s death. Dalgarno had been walking rapidly, his face set in a mask of fury, his hat jammed hard on his head, and he had passed without a word. However, the gingerbread seller had packed up shortly after that and gone home, so he had no idea whether Dalgarno had gone out again or not.