“We’ve got to prove his motive,” Monk said, concentrating his mind on the issue. Fury, outrage, and pity were all understandable emotions, but they accomplished nothing now.

  “Greed,” Runcorn said simply, as if the one word were damnation in itself. He picked up his tea and sipped it gingerly, afraid of burning himself.

  “That doesn’t prove he killed her,” Monk pointed out with controlled patience. “Lots of people are greedy. He wouldn’t be the first man to have broken his promise to a woman of little means in favor of an heiress, once he realized he had the chance. It’s despicable, but it’s not a crime.”

  “He has no proof where he was.” Runcorn put down his cup and touched the points off on his fingers. “He had the opportunity to have been in Cuthbert Street. He resembles the figure seen on the roof by the witnesses. Only an impression, but elegant, dark, taller than she was, but not by a great deal. But she was quite a tall woman.” Runcorn held up his second finger. “He needed nothing to kill her with except his own weight and strength. And of course there was the man’s coat button we found in her hand. We’ll look at all his clothes.”

  Monk felt the chill run through him and then the sweat break out on his body. He prayed Runcorn did not notice it. The jacket with the missing button was in his wardrobe in the bedroom. Thank God he had not stuffed it into the stove with the paper. He had thought about it!

  “Hope he hasn’t destroyed it,” Runcorn went on. “But even if he has, people will know he had another coat, and how will he explain its disappearance?”

  Monk said nothing. His mouth was dry. Where could he find another button and replace it? If he went to a tailor Runcorn might find out.

  Runcorn held up a third finger. “And she had accused him of being involved in fraud; we know that she hired you to prove it!”

  Monk licked his lips.

  “Disprove it, actually,” he countered.

  “And he wanted to cast her aside and marry the Baltimore heiress,” Runcorn went on relentlessly. “That’s more than motive enough.”

  Hester was looking silently from one to the other of them.

  “Only if we prove the land fraud,” Monk argued. “And Livia Baltimore is probably quite comfortably off, but she’s not an heiress.”

  “She will be when Baltimore and Sons sells its railway components to India,” Runcorn answered vehemently. “It will make them all rich, and it will only be the beginning. The money will go on and on.”

  Something flickered in Monk’s brain, then vanished.

  “What is it?” Runcorn demanded, looking at him more closely.

  Monk sat motionless, trying to bring it back, to catch something of it from the edge of his mind, but it was gone. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  Anger flared for an instant in Runcorn’s eyes, then was replaced by understanding. “Well, if you remember, tell me. In the meantime, I’ve got to tie Dalgarno into the fraud better.” His tone of voice had a lift at the end, as if waiting for Monk to complete the thought for him.

  “I’ll help,” Monk said immediately. It was a statement. He intended to whether Runcorn agreed or not; it would simply be easier if he did.

  Runcorn must have searched the rest of Katrina’s house. Had he found any letters from Emma? There would be a return address on them. Dare he ask? What excuse could he give?

  The moment slipped away.

  Runcorn gave a wry smile. “Thought you would.” He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his pocket, maybe half a dozen or so, and for an instant Monk felt as if he must have spoken aloud. “Got these from Miss Harcus’s rooms.” Runcorn looked at him, all shadow of even the most bitter humor gone from his eyes. “They’re order forms and receipts from Baltimore and Sons. She really suspected him. She must have gone to a lot of trouble, and risk, to take these. She was a brave woman with a passionate love of honesty.” He held the papers high in his hand. “No matter how much she loved him, she wasn’t going to protect him from fraud. Even though when she started out suspecting, she was still betrothed to him, so in time she would have shared with him whatever he got out of it.” He shook his head very slowly. “Why are people such fools, Monk? Why did he want dishonest money more than a really fine woman? Not as if she wasn’t handsome as well, and young.”

  “Precisely because she was honest, I expect,” Hester replied for him. “She loved him in spite of what he was, not because of it. Maybe his pride couldn’t live with that. He wants admiration.”

  “Then he’d have to have been a saint,” Runcorn said in disgust. “As it is, he’ll swing for her. Sorry, Mrs. Monk, but he will.” He held the papers out to Monk. “Here, take these and see if you can find anything. I’m going to follow the Baltimore money and see just how much of it ends up with Dalgarno, either now or if he marries Miss Baltimore.” He turned to Hester. “Thank you for the tea. I apologize for disturbing you.”

  She smiled and rose to see him to the door.

  Monk stood in the center of the room with his hands clenched and shaking, the papers crumpled by the power of his grip.

  Monk read very carefully through everything Runcorn had left with him. There were no letters to implicate Dalgarno in anything but the desire to make as large a profit as possible, and that was common to all businessmen. There was nothing illegal, nothing even underhanded. All they showed was that Dalgarno was involved in every aspect of the survey, bargaining for and purchasing the land. But that was part of his duty. Jarvis Baltimore had apparently dealt with the purchase of timber, steel and other necessary materials for the track itself, and Nolan Baltimore had overseen the whole enterprise and concerned himself with the government and the competition. The fiercest rivalry between railway companies lay in the great days of expansion, a generation or so before, but it still required knowledge now, ability and the right connections, to achieve any success.

  The one thing that impressed itself upon Monk as he looked over the papers a third time, reading the principal pieces aloud to Hester, was that the amounts of profit were not undue.

  “The Baltimores must be comfortably off,” she observed. “But it is not really a fortune.”

  “No,” he agreed wryly. “Not by railway standards, I suppose.”

  Memory teased him that Dundas had been accused of defrauding for much larger profits than anything written here. It was only glimpses so brief they were gone again before he could understand them. They might have no connection with the present issue, but something in them could be the key, the one element still missing. And there was something that would tie them all together and make sense of them, but it floated always just beyond his reach, melting into shapelessness one moment, on the verge of identity the next. He grasped for it, and it melted into fear without meaning.

  But there was another fear with very precise shape—Emma, to whom Katrina had written so frankly and in whom she had confided that she did not trust Monk. Who was she, and why had she not come forward? Someone would tell her Katrina had been murdered, friends, gossips, even possibly some lawyer with whom Katrina had entrusted her affairs. From his brief sight of her rooms, and the clothes she had worn to meet him, she was not without means.

  If they corresponded with such candor then they were close, wrote frequently. There would surely be some note among Katrina’s papers—of her address, or at least something from which he could deduce where she lived.

  She might even know more about Dalgarno than Katrina had told him, something to help Runcorn.

  He must go back to her rooms. The question was: would it be wiser to go brazenly in daylight, lie that he had authority, or break in at night and trust to his skill not to be caught? Either way he had no honest explanation. Worst of all could be if he were caught having found Emma’s address, or some further damning letter from her.

  But the risk of leaving it was too great, not only if Runcorn found it, but for the first time in his life that he could remember, his nerves were raw enough to betray him, to Hester at least, and it was she who mattered, even above the law.

  He did not know if it was the braver of the two ways or not, but he chose to go by daylight. He would have a better chance of bluffing his way if he was questioned, and it was quicker. He wanted it over with. The waiting was almost as hard as the preparation and the doing.

  He found no one on duty at the door of Katrina’s building, but there was a beat constable twenty yards away. He hesitated. Should he wait until the man moved on, then try to sneak in, and if he was caught think of some excuse for not being honest? Or would it be better to go up to him boldly, lie about having thought of something useful and having Runcorn’s permission to search? Implicitly he did have. Runcorn wanted him to prove Dalgarno’s guilt.

  There were only two choices; the latter had dangers, but it was the better of the two. He forced the consequences out of his mind. Fear would show in his face, and if the constable was very good he would see it. He walked firmly up to the constable and stopped in front of him.

  “Good morning, Constable,” he said with a very faint smile, no more than a gesture of civility. “My name is Monk. You may remember me from the night Miss Harcus was killed.” He saw recognition in the man’s face with a wave of relief. “Mr. Runcorn has asked for my assistance, since I knew Miss Harcus and was working on a case for her. I need to go into the house again and make a further search. I do not require your assistance. I am simply informing you so that you are not concerned if you see me there.”

  “Right, sir. Thank you,” the constable said with a nod. “If you need me, sir, I’ll be ’ere.”

  “Good. I’ll send for you if there’s anything. Good day.” And before the man could sense his tension, he turned and left, going as rapidly as he dared toward the house. He had no keys. He was going to have to fiddle with the lock and pick his way in, but that was an art he had learned from a master in the days before the accident, and the skill had not left him.

  He was inside the house within seconds, and retraced his steps up to Katrina’s rooms. It took him even less time to pick the lock on her door, and then he was in the room. The sense of tragedy closed around him, the silence, the very faint film of dust showing on the wooden surfaces in the sunlight through the bay windows. Perhaps to someone else it would simply have looked like the room of someone on holiday; to him the presence of death was as tangible as another person watching him, waiting.

  He jerked his attention back to the moment. There was no time to think about what had happened here, to try to picture Dalgarno, if it had been him, standing probably where Monk was now, charming her, quarreling, whatever it had been, then going out onto the balcony with her, the last furious words, the struggle, and her falling . . .

  He was looking for papers, letters, address books. Where would they be? In the desk where Runcorn had already looked, or in some other similar kind of place. He moved quickly to the desk, opened it and started with the pigeonholes, then the drawers. There was surprisingly little for a woman who conducted her own affairs, and nothing dating farther back than a few months. Presumably that was when she had come to London.

  There was nothing else to Emma, which was not surprising. They would naturally all have been posted. He was chilled inside at the thought of what Emma might have. And it seemed Katrina had not kept Emma’s other letters, at least not in the desk. Nor was there any note of her address. Was it one that she knew so well there was no need to note it down?

  He stood in the middle of the floor, staring around him. Where else might she keep anything on paper? Where did she cook? Did she have recipe books, kitchen accounts that were separate? A diary? Where did women keep diaries? Bedside table or cabinet? Under the mattress, if it were private enough.

  He searched more and more frantically, trying to steady his hands and be methodical, miss nothing, replace everything as he had found it. There were no other letters, no address book, only the cooking notes any woman might have, a book of recipes handed on from Eveline Mary M. Austin, and brief memos on how to launder certain difficult fabrics.

  He found the diary just as he was about to give up. He had actually sat down on the bed, sweat on his face, frustration making his hands stiff and clumsy, when he felt a hardness in the lace-covered decorative pillow at the head, over the coverlet. He fished inside the fold at the back and drew out the hardcovered little book. He knew instantly what it was, and opened it, gulping his breath at fear of what he would find. It could be anything, more doubts of himself, words that would prove Dalgarno’s guilt, or even someone else’s, or nothing of use at all. And he hated the intrusion. Diaries were often intimate and shatteringly private. He did not want to read it, and he had to.

  Inside the flyleaf was an inscription: “To my dearest Katrina, from your Aunt Eveline.” He only glanced at the pages. The first date was over ten years ago, and the entries were sporadic, sometimes merely the notation of a date, at others a page or more, even two for events of great importance to her. He had not time to read them all, and he concentrated on the more recent ones, particularly since meeting Dalgarno.

  He felt guilty reading what were in some cases the inner thoughts of a young woman on the people in her life and the emotions they caused in her, but often her words were so cryptic he could only guess, and he preferred not to. He imagined what he would have felt, had he ever committed his own thoughts to paper like this, and some mere stranger had read them.

  He found the letter from Emma almost at the end. It was in the same cramped backhand as the one he had destroyed. It was far less specific, only words of any general sympathy, as if in answer to a letter from Katrina which did not need repeating for her responding emotions to be understood.

  He read it twice, then folded it up again, put it in the diary and then put the diary carefully in his pocket. Apparently, Runcorn had not found it so he would not now miss it. He could read it later, and see if anything in it would lead to Emma.

  Within half an hour of going in, he was out in the street again, telling the constable that unfortunately he had found nothing, and then wishing him good day and walking rapidly back towards the main thoroughfare.

  The news broke in the late edition that evening: MICHAEL DALGARNO ARRESTED FOR BRUTAL MURDER OF KATRINA HARCUS IN SECOND TRAGEDY FOR BALTIMORE AND SONS.

  Runcorn must think he had enough to go to trial. Please heaven he was right!

  But Runcorn was not certain. Monk knew that the moment he spoke to him the next morning, even though he denied it. They were in Runcorn’s office, papers scattered on the desk and the sunlight coming through the window making bright patterns on the rest of the floor.

  “Of course it’s enough!” Runcorn repeated. “He was pulling a land fraud against the investors in Baltimore and Sons, and Katrina Harcus knew it. She told him so, begged him to stop. He had two reasons for wanting her dead.” He held up his fingers. “To keep her quiet about the fraud, for which she may well have had proof—and he destroyed it, she as good as told you that. And because he now had a chance of marrying Livia Baltimore, who was shortly going to be a rich woman.” He looked across at Monk challengingly. “And whether he had anything to do with Nolan Baltimore’s death or not, we’ll probably never know, but it’s possible.” He drew in his breath. He held up a third finger. “Added to that, he can’t prove where he was at the time of her death. He says he was at home, but there’s no one who can swear to it.”

  “What about the cloak?” Monk asked, then instantly wished he had not. It had to remind Runcorn of the button as well, and he had not yet destroyed the jacket, or had a chance to find a replacement button, if he dared do that.

  Runcorn sighed irritably. “No trace of it,” he said. “Can’t find anyone who saw him with a cloak anything like that. He had a cape for the opera.” His tone of voice suggested what he thought of that. “But he’s still got it.”

  Monk was disappointed.

  “Nothing with the button either,” Runcorn went on. “All his coats and jackets are complete, and his manservant says there’s nothing missing.”

  “Then it all hangs on there being a fraud,” Monk pointed out. He hated having to say it, but it was the truth. “And we can’t prove that.”

  “The land!” Runcorn said truculently, his chin forward. “You said there are rabbits in it. You told me you saw them yourself. Is there some kind of a rabbit that can build tunnels through a hillside that a team of navvies couldn’t blast through with dynamite, for God’s sake?”

  “Of course there isn’t. At least I hope not,” Monk said wryly. “But even if there was a bit of sharp profit made on that, it wasn’t because Dalgarno owned the land they had to divert to.”

  “If there was no profit, why do it?” Runcorn demanded.

  Monk was patient. “I didn’t say there was no profit, only that it wasn’t because Dalgarno owned the land. He didn’t; neither did either of the Baltimores. It may have been a matter of bribery. Someone paid very nicely to have the line diverted from his land, but we haven’t any proof of it, and I don’t think Katrina did either. At least she didn’t tell me about it—” He stopped.

  “What?” Runcorn said quickly. “What is it, Monk? You’ve remembered something!”

  “I think she knew something more that she had not yet told me,” he admitted.

  “Then that was it!” Runcorn’s face was alight. “That was the proof she was going to give you, but Dalgarno killed her before she could! She wanted to try one more time to persuade him to give it up—”

  “We have no evidence of that!” Monk cut across him.

  “Look!” Runcorn clenched his fist and stopped just short of banging it on the table. “This fraud is a copy of the first one, for which Arrol Dundas was jailed sixteen years ago—yes?”