AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was a bright, windy, March afternoon and a score of people had chosen to spend it admiring the early flowers, the vivid green of the grass, and the giant trees, still bare, wind gusting noisily through the branches. In spite of the brilliant light, the ladies had abandoned parasols. As it was, now and again both hands were needed to keep hats in place and skirts from being whipped and lifted above petticoats.
He saw Katrina after a moment. There was a distinction about her bearing which marked her out. Apparently she recognized him just as quickly and came over without any pretense that it was a casual meeting.
Her face was flushed, but that might have been the wind and sun rather than any expectation so soon.
“Mr. Monk!” She stopped in front of him breathlessly. “What have you learned?”
An elderly gentleman out walking alone turned and smiled at them indulgently, no doubt mistaking it for a lovers’ meeting. Another couple walking arm in arm nodded and moved even closer to each other.
“Very little, Miss Harcus,” he replied quietly. This was not a conversation he wished overheard.
Her eyes dropped and disappointment filled her face, too acute to be concealed.
“I have made enquiries about workmanship and materials,” he went on. “From what I have heard, the railway navvies are too skilled to use inadequate materials of any kind. Not only their reputations and future livelihood would depend on it, but their lives at the time. They have built railways all over the world, and there is no known example of a bad one anywhere.”
She lifted her eyes quickly to gaze into his face. “Then where is the secret profit coming from?” she demanded. “This is not enough, Mr. Monk! If the materials are good, then perhaps there was dishonesty in acquiring them?” She was watching him intently, her face burning with emotion. He realized again how deeply she was in love with Dalgarno, and how terribly afraid that he would be driven into crime and then ruined by it, not only morally but in every other way, perhaps even to end in prison like Arrol Dundas. Monk knew the bitterness of that only too well. It was one thing of which even his shattered memory had not completely let go.
He offered her
his arm, and after only a moment’s hesitation she took it and they walked side by side between the flower beds.
“I haven’t looked closely at the possibility of land fraud yet,” he said, speaking quietly so passersby, strolling in the bright day, would not overhear him. He was aware of their curiosity, politely masked as courteous nods and smiles as they passed. He and Katrina must make a striking picture, both handsome people, elegantly dressed and obviously involved in a conversation of deep emotional content.
She kept her hand lightly on his arm, a delicate gesture, one of trust rather than familiarity. “Please look into it, Mr. Monk, I beg you,” she said urgently. “I am desperately afraid of what may happen if no one learns the truth before it is too late. We may be able to prevent not only the tragedy of an innocent man’s being implicated in a crime, but the loss of an untold number of people’s lives in the kind of disaster that only something like a rail crash could bring.”
“Why do you fear a crash, Miss Harcus?” he asked, frowning a little at her. “There is no reason whatever to think there is either faulty material or workmanship. If there is land fraud, then that is dishonest, certainly, but it does not cause accidents.”
She lowered her eyes and turned away until he could no longer see her face except in profile, and her hand slipped off his arm. When she spoke it was barely audible.
“I have not told you everything, Mr. Monk. I had hoped not to have to speak of this. I feel ashamed of having stopped on the landing and overheard a conversation below me in the hall. I tread very lightly, and I am not always heard. It is not intentional, simply a habit from childhood which my mother instilled in me: ’Ladies should move silently and with grace.’ “ She took a deep breath, and he saw that she blinked rapidly, as if to control tears.
“What did you overhear, Miss Harcus?” he asked gently, wishing he could offer her more comfort, even reach the unnamed grief inside her which was easy to guess. “I am sorry to insist, but I need to know if I am to look in the right places for the dishonesty you fear.”
She kept her eyes averted. “I overheard Jarvis Baltimore say to Michael that as long as no one discovered what they had done,” she said quietly, “then they would both be rich men, and there would be no accident this time to mar the profits, or if there were, no one would make the connection.” She swung back to face him, her skin white, her eyes brilliant, demanding. “Can it matter where an accident is? It is still human life, still people crushed beyond any kind of help. Please, Mr. Monk, if you have any skill or wit at all which can prevent this happening, do so, not just for my sake, or for Michael Dalgarno’s, whom God knows I would save from harm, but for the sake of those people who might be riding the train when it happens!”
He was cold inside, imagination of mangled bodies too vivid in his mind.
“I don’t see how land fraud could cause an accident, but I promise I will do everything I can to find out if there has been any theft or dishonesty of any kind in Baltimore and Sons,” he promised. He would have to for his own sake as much as hers. The knowledge of the Liverpool crash and the memory of Arrol Dundas were too violent to ignore. No one knew the cause of that carnage. Perhaps if he learned more about surveying, land purchase, the movement of money, he would see the connection. “I will tell you all I know,” he went on. “But do not expect an answer sooner than three or four days.”
She smiled at him, relief flooding her expression like sunlight. “Thank you,” she said with sudden gentleness, a warmth that seemed to reach out to him. “You are all I trusted you would be. I shall be here every afternoon from three days hence, awaiting your news.” And with a slight touch of his arm again, she turned away and walked back along the path past two elderly ladies talking to each other, nodding graciously to them, and on out of the gate without looking back.
Monk turned on his heel and retraced his steps to the road, but he could not rid himself of the sense of oppression that haunted his mind. There were no specific images, just a heaviness, as if he had been forcing something out of his recollection for so long it had dimmed the sharp outlines to a blur, but its presence had never left him. What was it that he had refused to face in the past? Guilt. He already knew the sense of failure because he could not help Dundas, made the sharper by Dundas’s subsequent death. But what about his part in the fraud in the first place? They had worked together, Dundas as mentor and Monk as pupil. Monk had believed Dundas innocent. That was one thing he was sure of. The emotion of admiration and respect was still perfectly clear.
But had that been knowledge or his own naÏveté? Or far darker and uglier than that, had he known the truth but been unwilling to speak it or prove it at Dundas’s trial because it implicated himself?
Could a rail crash between a coal train and a holiday excursion trip have anything to do with fraud? The clerk who had told him of the crash had said no one ever found the cause of it. Surely they must have looked. Experts on the whole subject would have examined every detail. If it were even possibly the fraud, they would have torn apart everything to do with it until all the facts were known.
He should put it from his mind. His guilt was only that he had believed Dundas innocent and he had failed to get him acquitted, nothing to do with the crash. Dundas had gone to prison and died there, a good man who had been unquestioningly generous to Monk, sacrificed by a judicial system which made mistakes. People are fallible. Some are wicked, or at least they perform wicked acts.
What about Michael Dalgarno, with whom Katrina Harcus was so deeply in love? It was time Monk met him face-to-face and formed his own judgment.
He crossed the outer circle and walked briskly down York Gate to the Marylebone Road, where he took the next empty hansom south toward Dudley Street and the offices of Baltimore and Sons.
He went up the steps and in through the door of the building. He climbed the oak-paneled stairs, his imagination racing. By the time he was inside in front of the clerk who answered the bell on the reception desk, he had decided at least roughly what he was going to say. He already had the printed card in his waistcoat pocket.
“Good afternoon, sir. How can I help you?” the clerk enquired.
“Good afternoon,” Monk replied confidently. “My name is Monk. I represent Findlay and Braithwaite, of Dundee, who have been asked to acquire certain rolling stock for railways in France, and if their venture there should be successful, in Switzerland also.”
