William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

brakes?” Monk said quickly.
    Carborough opened his eyes wide.
    “Oh . . . they invented their own system of braking for carriages and goods wagons. Quite a bit cheaper than the standard ones used now. Would have cleaned up a fortune. Don’t know what happened there. They never followed through with it.”
    “Why not?” he asked. The same flicker of memory woke in Monk and died in the same instant.
    “Don’t know that, Mr. Monk,” Carborough replied. “After Dundas’s trial everything seemed to stop for a while. Then he died, you know?” He put the pencil down next to his pad, making it perfectly level. “In prison, poor devil. Maybe the shock of it all was too much. Anyway, after that they concentrated on new lines. Seemed to forget all about brakes. Built their own wagons and so on. Did pretty well out of it. As I said, moved down to London.”
    Monk asked him more questions, but Carborough knew nothing about Dundas personally and had not heard Monk’s name before that he recalled.
    Neither was there any sign of the money that Dundas must have received for his house. It had vanished as completely as if the treasury notes it was paid in had been burned.

    The next step was to pursue the Reverend William Colman, who had given such telling evidence against Dundas. It might be an unpleasant encounter, since Colman would certainly remember Monk from the trial. He would be the first person Monk had spoken to who had known him from that time. Dundas and his wife were both dead, and so was Nolan Baltimore. Monk would be coming face-to-face with the reality of who he had been, and finally there would be no escape from whatever Colman remembered of him.
    Had he hated the man then, for his evidence? Had he been offensive to him, tried to discredit him? Had Colman even believed him equally guilty with Dundas, but simply been unable to prove it?
    Colman was still in the ministry, and it was not a difficult matter to find him in Crockford’s, the registry of Anglican priests. By late afternoon Monk was walking up the short path to the vicarage door in a village on the outskirts of Liverpool. He was aware of a fluttering in his stomach and that his hands were clammy and aching from the frequency with which he was clenching them. Deliberately, he forced himself to relax, and pulled the bell knob.
    The door opened surprisingly quickly and a tall man in slightly crumpled clothes and a clerical collar stood staring at him expectantly. He was lean with gray hair and a vigorous, intelligent face. Monk knew with a thrill of memory so sharp it caught his breath that this was Colman—the face he had seen sketched with the protesters against the railway. Immeasurably more vivid than that, it was the face he had seen in his dreams, and desperate, fighting through the wreckage of the burning train.
    In that same instant Colman recognized him, his jaw momentarily slack with amazement.
    “Monk?” He stared more closely. “It is Monk, isn’t it?”
    Monk kept his voice steady with difficulty. “Yes, Mr. Colman. I would appreciate it if you could spare me a little of your time.”
    Colman hesitated only a moment, then he swung the door wide. “Come in. What can I do for you?”
    Monk had already decided that the only way to achieve what he needed was for the complete truth to come out, if indeed it was possible at all. The truth necessarily involved being honest about his loss of memory, and that bits and pieces were now coming back.
    Colman led the way to the room in which he received parishioners and invited him to be seated. He regarded Monk with curiosity, which was most natural. He had not seen him in sixteen years. He must be looking at the changes in him, the character more deeply etched in his face, the tiny differences in texture of skin, the way the lean flesh clothed the bones.
    Monk was acutely aware of Colman’s personality and the force of emotion he had felt in him before—nothing had diminished it. The grief was all still there, the memory of burying the dead, of trying to scrape together some kind of comfort for stricken families.
    Colman was waiting.
    Monk began. It was difficult, and his voice stumbled as he summarized the years between then and now, ending with the story of Baltimore and Sons and the new railway.
    As Colman listened the guardedness was there in his face, the echoes of old anger and shattering grief. They had been on opposite sides of the issue then, and it was clear in his expression,