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.

  It only looked fraudulent when it emerged that the rerouting of the track from its original passage was not only unnecessary but brought about at all only by forged papers and lies told by Dundas. The original route would have been used, in spite of the fact that a certain owner of a huge estate was actually campaigning against it because it spoiled the path of his local hunt and the magnificent landscaped view from his house. The hill that had been the pretext for the rerouting was real, and certainly lay across the proposed path of the track, but it was less high in reality than on the survey they had used, which was actually of another hill of remarkably similar outlines, but higher, and of granite. The grid references had been changed in an imaginative forgery. The actual hill across the track could probably have been blasted into a simple cutting with a manageable gradient. If not, even tunneling for a short distance would have been possible. The cost of that had been wildly overestimated in Dundas’s calculations, too much to have been incompetence.

  All Dundas’s past plans were reviewed, and no errors were found of more than a foot here or there. This miscalculation was over a hundred feet. When it was put together with his profit on the sale of the land, the assumption of intentional fraud was inescapable.

  A defense of incompetence, misjudgment and coincidental profit might have succeeded, but it was Dundas’s name on the purchase and on the survey, and the money was in Dundas’s bank, not Baltimore’s.

  In the face of the evidence, the jury returned the only verdict it could. Arrol Dundas was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He died within months.

  Monk was cold where he sat, drenched with memory. He could feel again the overwhelming defeat. It hurt with a pain so intense it was physical. It was for Dundas, white-faced, crumpled as if age had caught up with him and shrunken him inside and in a day he had been struck by twenty years. It was for his wife as well. She had hoped until the very end, she had kept a strength that had sustained them all, but there was nothing left to hope for now. It was over.

  And it was for himself also. It was the first bitter and terrible loneliness he could recall. It was a knowledge of loss, a real and personal sweetness gone from his life.

  How much of the truth had he known at the time? He had been far younger then, a good banker, but naÏve in the ways of crime. It was before he had become a policeman. He was accustomed to making judgments of men’s character, but not with the view to dishonesty he had developed later, not with the knowledge of every kind of fraud, embezzlement, and theft—and the suspicion carved deep into every avenue of his mind.

  He had wanted to believe Dundas. All his emotions and loyalty were vested in his honesty and his friendship. It was like being asked to accept that your own father had deliberately deceived you over the years, and everything you had learned from him was tainted with lies, not just to the world, but specifically to you.

  Was that why he had believed Dundas? And the rest of the world had not? All the proof had been pieces of paper. Anyone can produce paper, whoever else had been in the company, even Baltimore himself. But Dundas had fought so little! He had seemed to at first, and then to crumple, as if he knew defeat even before he really attempted to struggle.

  But Monk had felt so certain of Dundas’s innocence!

  Had he known something which he had not said in court, something which would have shown that there was no deceit, or if there had been, that it was Baltimore’s? After all, there was no proof here that it had been Dundas’s idea to divert the track. Neither had there been anything to prove that he had met the landowner or accepted any favor from him, financial or otherwise. The police had not examined the landowner’s records to trace any exchange of monies. Nothing was found in Dundas’s bank beyond the profit from the sale of his own land. The worst that could be said of that was that it had been sharp practice, but that happened all the time. It was what speculation was. Half the families in Europe had made their fortune in ways they would not care to acknowledge now.

  What could he have known? Where more money was? Why had he kept silent? To conceal Dundas’s act? To keep the money from being taken back? For whom—Mrs. Dundas or himself?

  He moved in the seat and felt his locked muscles stab, he was so stiff. He winced, and rubbed his hands over his eyes.

  He had to know his own part in it—it was the core of who he had been then.

  Then? He even used the word as if it could separate him from who he was now and rid himself of responsibility for it.

  At last he faced the thing that was woven into the story and that in pursuing the evidence of money he had ignored—the crash. It was not mentioned in reports about the trial, even obliquely. Obviously it was either irrelevant or it had not happened yet. There was only one way to find out.

  He turned the pages, looking at headlines only. It would be in the heaviest, blackest print when it came.

  And it was—nearly a month later, at the top of the front page: RAIL CRASH KILLS OVER FORTY CHILDREN AS COAL TRAIN PLOWS INTO EXCURSION TRIP FROM LIVERPOOL.

  The words seemed unfamiliar, although he must have read this before. But he had to have known about it anyway. Seeing this would have meant nothing. It would have been only someone else’s report of a horror beyond words to re-create. Now as he stared at it, it was everything, the reality he had been torn between finding and leaving buried, the compulsion to know and the dread of confirming it at last, making it no longer nightmare but reality, never again to be evaded or denied.

  An excursion train carrying nearly two hundred children on a trip into the country was crashed and thrown off the rails last night as it returned to the city along the new line recently opened by Baltimore and Sons. The accident happened on the curve beyond the old St. Thomas’s Church where the line goes into single track for a distance of just under a mile through two cuttings. A goods train heavily loaded with coal failed to stop as it was coming down the incline before the tracks joined. It crashed into the passenger cars, hurling them down the slope to the shallow valley below. Many carriages caught fire from the gas used to provide lights, and screaming children were trapped inside to be burned to death. Other children were thrown clear as the fabric of the carriages was torn and burst open, some to escape with shock and bruises, many to be crippled, maimed, trapped and crushed under the wreckage.

  Both drivers were killed by the impact, as were the firemen, stokers and brakemen on both trains.

  Monk skipped over the next paragraphs, which were accounts of the attempts at rescue and the transport of the injured and dead to the nearest places of help. After that there followed the grief and horror of relatives, and promises of the fullest possible investigation.

  But even searching with stiff fingers and dazed mind through all the succeeding weeks, into months, he found no satisfactory explanation as to what had caused the crash. In the end it was attributed to human error on the part of the goods train driver. He was not alive to defend himself, and no one had discovered any other cause. Certainly the torn and twisted track appeared to have been damaged by the crash itself, and there was no suggestion by anyone that it had been at fault previously to that. The earlier goods train along it carrying timber had had no difficulty at all and arrived at its destination safely and on time.

  As he had already heard from the clerk days ago, there was nothing wrong with the track—there was no connection whatever with the fraud, or with Arrol Dundas, or therefore with Monk.

  With overwhelming relief he kept telling himself that over and over again. He would go back to London and assure Katrina Harcus that there was no reason whatever to fear a crash on the new line. Baltimore and Sons had never been implicated in the Liverpool crash, and Baltimore himself had been exonerated of fraud in the trial of Dundas.

  Which did not mean he had been innocent.

  But if land fraud was what was happening now, on the same scale as before, then it was not unreasonable to believe it was Nolan Baltimore who was involved this time as well, rather than Michael Dalgarno. Monk could at least tell that to Katrina.

  Although even as he said that to himself, he knew she would want more than hope, she would need proof—just as he did.

  He went back to the station and caught the evening train to London. Perhaps because he had been reading most of the day, and had slept little and poorly on the previous night, in spite of the wooden seats and the awkward, upright position, the rhythmic movement of the train and the sound of the wheels over the track lulled him to sleep. He drifted into a darkness in which he was even more conscious of the noise; it seemed to fill the air and to be all around him, growing louder. His body was tense, his face tingling as if cold air were streaming past him, and yet he could see sparks red in the night, like chips of fire.

  There was something he needed to do: it mattered more than anything else, even the risk of his own life. It dominated everything, mind and body, obliterating all thought of his safety, of physical pain, exhaustion, and carrying him beyond even fear—and there was everything to be afraid of! It roared and surged around him in the darkness, buffeting him until he was bruised and aching, clinging on desperately, fighting to . . . what? He did not know! There was something he must do. The fate of everybody who mattered depended on it . . . but what was it?

  He racked his brain . . . and found only the driving compulsion to succeed. The wind was streaming past him like liquid ice. He strained against a force, hurling his weight against it, but it was immovable.

  There was indescribable noise, impact, and then he was running, scrambling, blind with terror. All around him the sound of screaming ripped through him like physical pain, and he could do nothing! He was closed in by confusion, thrashing around pointlessly, bumping into objects in the darkness one moment, blinded by flames the next, the heat in his face and the cold behind him. His feet were leaden, holding him back, while the rest of his body ran with sweat.

  He saw the face again above the clerical collar, the same as before, this time gray with horror, scrambling in the wreckage, all the time calling out.

  He woke with a violent start, his head throbbing, his lungs aching, starved of air, his mouth dry. As soon as he moved he realized the sweat was real, sticking his clothes to him, but the carriage was bitterly cold and his feet were numb.

  He was alone in his compartment. The smell of smoke was in his imagination, but the fear was real, the guilt was real. Knowledge of failure weighed on him as if it were woven into every part of his life, staining everything, seeping into every corner and marring all other joy.

  But what failure? He had not saved Dundas, but he had known that for years. And now he was no longer rationally sure that Dundas had been innocent. He felt it, but what were his feelings worth? They could have been simply born of the loyalty and ignorance of a young man who owed a great deal to someone who had been as a father to him. He had seen Dundas as he wished him to be, like millions before him, and millions to come.

  The dream was a crash—that was obvious. But was it from reality, or imagination read into the accounts of those who were there, or even a visit to the scene afterwards, as part of the enquiry into what had happened?

  It was not the rail line which had caused it. It was not the land fraud, which could make no difference to anything but money.

  So why did he feel this terrible responsibility, this guilt? What was there in himself so fearful he still could not bear to look at it? Was it Dundas—or himself?

  Could he find out? Was he just like Katrina Harcus, driven to discover a truth which might destroy everything that mattered to him?

  He sat hunched in the seat, rattling through the darkness towards London, shivering and icy cold, thoughts racing off the rails into tunnels—and another, different kind of crash.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The house on Coldbath Square was almost empty of women injured in the usual way of trade, because there was hardly any trade. Many of the local populace had found ways around the constant police presence and now conducted what business they could elsewhere, but the Farringdon Road was outwardly much the same as always. It required a more practiced eye to see the stiffness of street corner peddlers, the way everyone was watching over their shoulders, not for pickpockets or other small-time thieves, but for the ubiquitous constables placed, in frustrated boredom, as prevention rather than solution.

  “On our backs like a jockey floggin’ a horse what won’t run,” Constable Hart said miserably, nursing a mug of hot tea in his hands as he sat opposite Hester at the smaller of the two tables. “We won’t run ’cos we can’t!” he went on. It was mid-afternoon and raining on and off. His wet cape hung on one of the hooks by the door. “We’re just standin’ ’round lookin’ stupid, an’ gettin’ everyone angry at us,” he complained. “It’s all to make the Baltimore family an’ their friends feel like we’re cleanin’ up London.” His expression of disgust conveyed his feelings perfectly.

  “I know,” she agreed with some sympathy.

  “Nobody ever done that, nor ever will,” he added. “London don’t wanter be cleaned up. Women on the street in’t the problem. Problem is men what comes after ’em!”

  “Of course,” Hester conceded. “Would you like some toast?”

  His face lit up. It was a completely unnecessary question, as she had known it would be.

  He cleared his throat. “Got any black currant jam?” he asked hopefully.

  “Of course.” She smiled, and he colored very faintly. She stood up and spent the next few minutes cutting bread, toasting it on the fork in front of the stove, and then bringing it over, with butter and jam.

  “Thanks,” he said with his mouth already full.

  She and Margaret had spent their days trying to drum up more funding, having further conversations with Jessop which varied from placatory to confrontational and back again depending upon tempers, and pledges of help. Hester had never disliked anyone more. “Are you any closer to finding whoever killed Baltimore?” she asked Hart.

  He shrugged, an air of hopelessness filling him as he stared gloomily at the crumbs on his plate. “Not as I can see,” he admitted. “Abel Smith’s girls all swear blind they din’t do it, an’ speakin’ purely for meself, I believe ’em. Not that the higher-ups are goin’ to listen to what I say.” He looked up at her with sudden anger, his face set hard.

  “But I’m damned if I’m goin’ to see some poor little cow topped for killin’’im just to satisfy ’is family an’ their like, an’ get business back to normal. No matter whoever says, ever so soft, that they’d like it that way!”

  Hester felt a chill. “Do you think anyone would try to do that?”

  He caught the doubt in her voice. “You’re a nice lady, brought up proper. You don’t belong ’ere,” he said gently. He glanced around the long room with its iron beds, the stone sinks at the far end and the jugs and pails of water. “ ’Course they would, if it comes to it. Can’t go on like this much longer. Right and wrong gets to look different when you’ve bin ’ungry for a while, or slept in a doorway. I’ve seen ’em. It changes folk, an’ ’oo’s to say it’s their fault?”

  She wondered whether to tell him anything about Squeaky Robinson and his very different establishment, apparently somewhere near Reid’s Brewery on Portpool Lane, or close beside. She was only half listening to him as she weighed it up.

  “Of course,” she agreed absently. If she told Hart he would feel obliged in turn to tell his superiors, and they would go blundering in, and very possibly warn Robinson without learning anything about Baltimore. After all, Robinson would deny it, just as everyone else was doing. Almost certainly he already had done.

  “Not as I’m sure we want to find the truth,” Hart went on dismally. “Considering what it’ll be, like as not.”

  Now she did pay attention. “Not find it?” she challenged. “You mean just go on with the appearance until they get tired of it and say they’re giving up? They can’t keep half the London police force in Coldbath forever.”

  “Another few weeks at the most,” he agreed. “It would be easier, in the end.”

  “Easier for whom?” Without asking, she poured him more tea, and he thanked her with a nod.

  “ ’Em as uses the ’ouses ’round ’ere for their pleasures,” he answered her question. “But mostly for ’em in charge o’ the police.” He grimaced, shaking his head a little. “Would you like to be the one what goes and tells the Baltimore family that Mr. Baltimore came ’ere to gratify ’isself, an’ maybe refused to pay what ’e owed, an’ got into a fight with some pimp in a back alley somewhere? But the pimp got the better of’im, an’ killed’im. Maybe ’e didn’t even mean to, but when it was done it were too late, an’ so ’e settled some old score or other by dumpin’ the body at Abel Smith’s?”

  She tightened her lips and frowned.

  “We all know it’s likely the truth,” he went on. “But knowin’ an’ sayin’ is two different things. Most of all, ’aving other people know is a third different thing, an’ all! Some of which is best not said.”

  It made her decision for her. If the truth was what she feared it was—that in some way Baltimore’s death was personal, incurred by his behavior, either as a user of prostitutes or something to do with the railway fraud, because he was the instigator of it, or some other member of his family was—then the police were not going to wish to find either of those answers.

  “You are right,” she agreed. “Would you like another piece of toast and jam?”

  “That’s very civil of you, miss,” he accepted, leaning back in the chair. “I don’t mind if I do.”