William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

Railways had to stop at towns if they were to be any use, and the way in and out lay through areas that were bound to be built upon. It was sometimes a long and difficult matter to acquire a passage through.
    Some enthusiasts believed the rights of progress overruled everything else. All structures across the path of the railway should be demolished, even ancient churches and abbeys, monuments to history, great works of architecture, private homes. Others took the opposite view and hated the noise and destruction with a violence that did not stop short of action.
    He flicked back to the first map again. Then he realized what it was that had jolted his memory, not the land at all, but the fact that it was a surveyor’s map. He had seen such maps before, with a proposed railway line penciled through them. It had to do with Arrol Dundas, the man who had been his friend and mentor when he had left Northumberland as a young man and come south, the man to whom he had owed just that kind of loyalty of which Katrina Harcus had spoken, the debt of honor. Monk had been a banker then, determined to make his fortune in finance. Dundas had taught him how to look and behave like a gentleman, how to use charm and skill and his facility with figures to advise in investment and always earn himself a profit at the same time.
    He had deduced much of this from fragmentary facts that came to him in other cases—a snatch of recollection, a momentary picture in the mind—rather than remembered it in any sequence. And with it always came the memory of helplessness and pain. He had failed terribly, overwhelmingly. As he looked at the map now, the grief engulfed him again. Arrol Dundas was dead. Monk knew that. Dundas had died in prison, disgraced for something he did not do. Monk had been there, and unable to save him, knowing the truth, trying repeatedly to make anyone else believe him, and always failing.
    But he did not know where, nor exactly when. Somewhere in England, before Monk had joined the police. It was his inability then to effect any kind of justice which had driven him to become part of the law. He had not learned more than that. Perhaps he had not wanted to. It was part of the man he used to be, and so much of that was not what he admired or wanted anymore. His youth belonged to that same hard, ambitious man who hungered for success, who despised the weak, and who all too often disregarded the vulnerable. And nothing he could do now would help Dundas or retrieve his innocence. He had failed then, when he knew everything. What was to be gained now?
    Nothing! It was just that the survey map, with its proposed railway, and the purchase order for land had brought back a past of which he had no knowledge, almost as if he had broken from a dream to step into it, and it was the reality, and everything since only imagination.
    Then it was gone again, and he was sitting in the present, in his own home in Fitzroy Street, holding a sheaf of papers and looking at a troubled young woman who wanted him to prove to the world, and perhaps most of all to her, that the man she was going to marry was not guilty of fraud.
    “May I make notes of some of this, Miss Harcus?” he asked.
    “Of course,” she agreed quickly. “I wish I could allow you to keep them, but they would be missed.”
    “Naturally.” He admired her courage and the fact that she had taken them at all. He rose to his feet and fetched pen and paper from his desk, bringing the inkwell back with him and sitting at a small table by his chair. He copied rapidly from the first map, then the second, taking the grid references, the names of the principal towns and the main features of the route.
    From the other papers he took the areas, prices, and names of the previous owners of the land purchased. Then he looked at the rest that she had handed him. There were purchase orders and receipts for an enormous amount of materials, including wood, steel, and dynamite; for tools, wagons, horses, food for men and animals; and endless wages for the navvies who cut the land, built bridges and viaducts, laid the track itself—but also for ostlers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, surveyors and a dozen other minor tradesmen and artisans.
    It was a vast undertaking. The sums involved amounted to a fortune. But building railways had always been about speculation and venture capital, about winning or losing everything. That is why men like Arrol Dundas were drawn to it, and it needed