William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

“No, Con, we’d better start all over an’ dig through that damn great ’ill over there!” he replied.
    “Three weeks, mebbe,” Con said to Monk. “If that’s wot yer want ter know. I in’t see’d yer ’ere before. Yer come up from Lunnon?”
    Apparently they assumed he was from Baltimore and Sons’ main office.
    “Where’s your foreman?” Monk enquired.
    “I’m the foreman, Contrairy York,” the first man replied. “Like I said, three weeks. Can’t do it no faster.”
    “I can see that.” Monk squinted along the line of the rail. The last bit of the viaduct would take another two weeks at least, and then there were sleepers to lay, the rails themselves to lay and tie. It was double track most of the way, single through the cutting and as far as the other end of the viaduct. There must be a plan for timetables and trains passing. A length like this was far too expensive to use only one engine at a time on.
    He had studied the survey map. The shortest route lay through the hill he had just crossed. “Couldn’t you have cut through that?” he asked. “Then you would have avoided having to build a viaduct.”
    “ ’Course, we could,” Contrairy said dismissively. “Cost, though! Too ’igh fer a straight cuttin’, an’ tunnels are about the most expensive things there is. Look at yer map. See the ’eight on it! An’ granite! Takes time, an’ all.”
    Monk swung around and looked up at the hill. He pulled out the map from his pocket and read the height on it, then looked at the crest of the rise again. Something flashed in his memory and was gone before he caught it, but it was a moment of unease, nothing more, nothing he could explain. He should check the alternative routes, see who owned which land, where the vested interests lay, estimate the costs of cutting and tunneling the hill for a direct route compared with the small cutting there was here, and the viaduct, and the extra land, and length of rail. It would be a long, tedious task, but the answer, if there was one, lay in the figures. He had had the skill once. It had been where his business lay . . . his and Dundas’s. That was a chill thought he would rather not have owned, but it would not go away.
    He thanked the navvy, mounted his horse again and rode slowly back up the slope, thinking. He had studied the surveyor’s maps and reports, and Baltimore and Sons’ estimate of costs for rerouting. On paper it seemed reasonable. The investors had accepted it. Some of the new land necessary was expensive, but the land for the old route had been expensive also. It was the hidden costs that would make the difference: the bribes to do one thing or another, what to purchase, what to avoid. That could be where the fraud lay.
    It was warm here, even with the very slight breeze ruffling the grass. A rabbit popped up, gazed around, then bolted twenty yards, its white tail flashing until it disappeared down a hole.
    It was a moment before it meant anything to him. He searched his memory. It was the rabbit. It signified something. He was on another hillside in the sun, but colder, a wind out of the east, clouds scudding across the sky and a sense of darkness in spite of the bright light.
    He remembered he had watched a rabbit sit in the sun, nose twitching, then take fright and run, going into a hole. He had seen it with a slow-dawning horror!
    Why? What could be more ordinary than a rabbit in the grass, running away and diving down one of its own holes into a vast warren riddling a hillside? Doubtless it would emerge somewhere else, a hundred yards away.
    Except that if a rabbit could dig through the hillside and build tunnels using nothing but its feet, then an army of navvies with explosives would have little trouble digging a tunnel for a train. The hill could not possibly be granite! The survey had lied!
    He could remember it now, the shock of realization, the gaslight wavering on the paper as he opened it out on the table in his hotel bedroom and read the legend on the map. But he could not recall what else there had been, try as he might, sitting there now with the sun and wind on his face, and his eyes closed, attempting to re-create the past.
    Of course there was profit in some land and not in other. But surely the investors had also checked? They must have representatives who were aware of that. It would have to have been cleverer, far subtler than simply a lie, whether the land were granite instead of clay, or chalk or