William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

is wrongly surveyed, that subsides under the weight of a coal train? Or if the bridges or viaducts are constructed with cheap or substandard materials or labor? Then you risk having a crash. Have you thought how many people are killed or injured in a rail crash? How many people does a passenger train carry?”
    Her impatience vanished. She let out her breath in a slow sigh. “There might be land fraud; I don’t know anything about that. But navvies know materials. They wouldn’t build with anything that wasn’t good enough, and they wouldn’t build in a substandard way.” She spoke with complete certainty, not as if it were an opinion but a fact.
    “How on earth would you know that?” he asked, not patronizingly but as if she might have an answer, not because he thought she could, but because she was tired and had seen too much pain, and he did not want to hurt her anymore.
    “I know navvies,” she replied, stifling a yawn.
    “What?” He must have misheard. “How do you know navvies?”
    “In the Crimea,” she said, pushing her hair back off her brow. “When we were stuck in the siege of Sebastopol in the winter of ’54 to ’55, nine miles from the port of Balaclava and with the only road washed out so not even a cart could get through. The army was freezing to death, or dying of cholera.” She shook her head a little, as if the memory still hurt. “We had no food, no clothes, no medicine. They sent hundreds of navvies out from England to build us a railway . . . and they did. Without any help, and all through the Russian winter, they worked, and swore, and fought each other, and it was all finished by March. A double track, with tributary lines as well. And it was perfect.” She looked at him with a spark of pride and defiance, as if they were her own men, and perhaps she had nursed a few of them if there had been accidents or fever.
    He tried to picture it, the gangs of men laboring to cut a track through the mountains in the middle of the bitter snow, thousands of miles from home, to relieve the armies who had no other way out. He dared not think of the soldiers, or of the incompetence which had brought about such a thing.
    “You didn’t mention that before,” he said to her.
    “Nothing brought it to mind,” she replied, stifling another yawn. “They were all volunteers, but I don’t think you’ll find it any different here. But look into it. See if there has ever been an accident caused by bad excavation or bad building of track. See if you can find a tunnel that caved in or a viaduct that collapsed or rails that were built on bad ground, or at the wrong incline, or anything else that was the navvies’ doing.”
    “I will,” he agreed. “Now go to bed. You’ve done all you can.” He reached out and put his hand over hers. “Don’t think about the usurer and the women. There’s always going to be violence. You can’t stop it; all you can do is try to help the victims.”
    “That seems pretty pathetic!” she said angrily.
    “It’s like the police,” he said with a half-smile. “We never prevented crime from happening, we only caught people afterwards.”
    “You took them to the courts!” she argued.
    “Sometimes, not always. Do the best you can; don’t cripple yourself by agonizing over what you can’t reach.”
    She conceded, giving him a quick, gentle kiss, and then all but stumbled her way to the bedroom.

    Monk left the house and went into the city to begin searching for the information which would help him answer Katrina Harcus’s questions. He tried to concentrate, but nagging like a constant, dull toothache was the sight of his own name on the receipt of Baltimore and Sons from seventeen years before. He did not even think of denying it was his. He had recognized it beyond doubt, the familiar, bold writing, more assertive than now, written by the man he used to be, before he looked more closely at himself and knew how others perceived him.
    He went to see a merchant banker for whom he had solved a small domestic mystery to his great satisfaction.
    “Baltimore and Sons?” John Wedgewood said, hiding his curiosity with difficulty. They were sitting in his oak-paneled office. A crystal tantalus was on the side table, but Monk had declined whiskey. “Well-respected company. Financially sound enough,” Wedgewood went on. “A great tragedy, especially for the family. I take it that it is the family who has asked you to investigate? Don’t trust the