William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

come to bedrock. Are you sure you aren’t after his personal life?”
    Monk smiled. “Yes, I am sure. The Baltimore family is not my client, nor is anyone related to them. I have no concern in his death unless it has to do with his railway’s honesty or safety.”
    “I doubt it has,” Wedgewood said ruefully. “Just a very regrettable lapse of personal judgment.”
    Monk thanked him and left to pursue the other idea nagging more and more insistently in his mind. Perhaps no one would risk a fraud in which one sharp-eyed navvy might betray him. And the amounts of profit he made might be small. Far easier and less dangerous, and certainly with more money to be made from it, would be something to do with the purchase of the land for the track.
    He did not mention this to Hester. It was far more real, closer to him and not to be laid so easily at some anonymous door, although he had no memory he could pin down. There was nothing but a nameless anxiety, something dark at the back of his mind.

    The following day he started specific enquiries. Who decided where a railway line should run? What provisions were there for obtaining the land? Where did the money come from? Who surveyed it? Who bought it?
    It was not until he had answered these questions, all ending back with the railway company, that it crossed his mind to wonder what happened to the dispossessed who had once lived in the houses knocked down to make room for progress, or to those who had worked the land now divided or gouged out for cuttings?
    None of the answers surprised him, as if he had once known them as easily as did the small, neat clerk who sat across the office table from him. The clerk looked slightly baffled at the question.
    “They move to live somewhere else, sir. They can hardly stay there!”
    “Do they all agree to that?”
    “No sir, not quietly,” the clerk acceded. “An’ sometimes if it’s a big estate—aristocracy, or the like—then the railway just ’as ter go ’round it. No choice. ’Em as ’as got the power, in Parliament or that, can see their land don’t get cut up. An’ o’ course there’s gentry what object like mad to their ’unting being sliced in ’alf.”
    “Grouse and pheasants?” Monk asked with slight surprise. He had imagined farmland.
    “Foxes, actually,” the clerk corrected him. “Likes ter ride after ’em, an’ can’t get ’orses ter jump tracks like they do ’edges, an’ all.” The light in his eyes betrayed a certain satisfaction in this, but he did not elaborate. He had long ago learned not to have personal opinions, as far as anyone else would know.
    “I see,” Monk acknowledged.
    “Yer bin abroad, sir?”
    “Why?”
    “I was jus’ wonderin’ ’ow yer missed knowin’ all this kind o’ thing. Lot o’ fuss about it in the papers, goin’ back a bit, like. Protests, an’ all. Work o’ the devil . . . railways. If the good Lord’ad meant us ter travel that way, an’ at that speed, ’E’d ’ave made us with steel skins an’ wheels on our feet.”
    “And if He hadn’t meant us to think, He wouldn’t have given us brains,” Monk countered immediately, and even as the words were on his tongue, he heard an echo of them as if he had said them before.
    “Yer try tellin’ that to some o’ them ministers ’oo’s churches get knocked down an’ moved!” The clerk’s face was eloquent of his awe, and an amusement he was trying hard to suppress.
    “Knocked down and moved?” Monk repeated the words as if they were incredible, but he believed them—in fact, he knew they were true. Again memory had jabbed at him and then disappeared. For an instant he saw a lean face, dark with outrage, above a clerical collar. Then it was gone. “Yes, of course,” he said quickly. He did not want the man to tell him more about it. The memory was unpleasant, touched with guilt.
    “O’ course they protest.” The clerk shrugged his shoulders. “All kinds of ’em out by the score. Talk about Mammon an’ the devil, an’ ruin of the land, an’ so on.” He scratched his head. “ ’Ave ter say I wouldn’t take kindly if it were me mam an’ dad ’oo’s gravestones were took up, an’ they was left ter lie under the tracks o’ the five forty-five from Paddington, or whatever. I reckon I’d be out there wi’ placards in me ’and an’ threatenin’ ’ellfire on the profiteers as did it.”
    “Has anybody ever done more than threaten?” Monk had to ask. If he did not, the