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ist, for whatever reason, perhaps compassion—that of Dundas’s wife. She had sat with a terrible calm throughout the trial. Her loyalty had been the one thing even the prosecution had felt obliged to praise. He had spoken of her with respect, certain that her faith in her husband was both honest and complete.
Monk recalled her afterwards, the totality of her silent grief when she had told him of Dundas’s death. He could picture the room, the sunlight, her face pale, the tears on her cheeks, as if it were then too late for anything but the hidden, inmost pain which never leaves. It was she he thought of more than Dundas, she whose grief outweighed his own, and which tore still at the deep well of emotion within him, unhealed even now.
And there was something more, but he could not bring it back. He sat staring at the old papers, yellowed at the edges, and struggled to recapture what it was. Time and time again it was almost there, and then it splintered into fragments and meant nothing.
He gave up and went back to the next stage of the trial. More witnesses, this time for the defense. Clerks were called, people who had written entries in ledgers, kept books, filed orders for money, purchases of land, title deeds, surveys. But it was all too complicated, and half of them had become uncertain under cross-examination. The main thrust of the defense had been not that there was no fraud but that Nolan Baltimore could equally be suspected of it.
But Nolan Baltimore was in the witness-box. Arrol Dundas was in the dock—and that perception made all the difference. It depended upon whom you believed, and then in that light all the evidence fell one way or the other. Monk could see how it had been, and he could find no loose thread to unravel a greater truth.
There seemed no question that Dundas had purchased land in his own name, farmland of poor quality, which he had paid market value for, little enough when you need it for running sheep. But when the railway was diverted from its original track, around a hill and through that farmland, which it was obliged to buy at a considerably larger amount, then Dundas’s very rapidly turned profit was huge.
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.
