William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

conglomerate, or whatever the hill was actually composed of.
    And always in the back of his mind there was the jumbled horror of something dark, unclear and violent, the rending of steel, the scream of tearing metal, sparks in the night, then flame, and through it all fear so dreadful it cramped the stomach and locked the muscles in pain.
    But there seemed nothing to connect the two. Arrol Dundas had been convicted of fraud, guilty or not. There had been a crash which Monk seemed to remember, and shortly after Dundas’s death he had left merchant banking and gone into the police force, driven by the passion to serve justice in future, which had to mean he had believed with a passion that there had been injustice then.
    But he could do nothing more here to help Katrina Harcus or learn any greater truth about Michael Dalgarno. If there were fraud at Baltimore and Sons, then Dalgarno was almost certainly involved in it, but it was merely profiting unjustly from land purchase. There was nothing to cause injury to anyone, except the loss of possible profit to the investors. That was yet to be proved, and speculation was always as likely to end in loss as in gain. He could call for an official audit if any evidence warranted it.
    It was time he stopped evading the old truth that lay at the core of his fear. Remembered pieces were little help. He must use the detective skills he had refined so well. If he wanted to know it for a client, where would he begin were it himself and not Dalgarno that he were investigating for Katrina Harcus?
    Begin with the known, facts that could be checked and proven without the possibility of misinterpretation. He knew the date on the work order with his own name on it that Katrina had handed to him with the others. That was proof that he had once worked for Baltimore and Sons, but not where, and not that he had had anything to do with the fraud for which Dundas had been convicted.
    Could there be more than one fraud? No, too much of a coincidence.
    Nonsense—lies to comfort! Of course there could. A man who will defraud once will adopt it as a pattern if he gets away with it. The question then became: was Dundas caught on his first attempt, or on the second or third, or the twentieth?
    With a jolt so sharp he startled his horse by the sudden change in his hands on the reins, Monk realized he had actually admitted the possibility that Dundas had been guilty. In fact, he had assumed it. What a betrayal of the belief he had held without shadow all his life, until now!
    He turned his horse to head up the track and around the long slope of the hill back toward the ostlers’ where he had hired it, and the railway station back to London.
    Where would he find the history of Dundas’s bank and its dealings? He did not even know in which city they had been headquartered. It could be any of a dozen or more. Presumably, Dundas would have been imprisoned at the closest place to the court in which he was tried, and that in turn would be the nearest large city to the scene of the fraud itself.
    Or could it be where the principal investors banked?
    He was still considering where to begin when he rode into the ostlers’ yard and dismounted reluctantly. It was a good animal and he had enjoyed riding, even though it brought the best memories, cutting sharp with loss.
    He paid the ostler and walked out of the yard with its smells of leather, straw, and horses, and the sounds of hooves on stone and men’s voices soft as they talked to animals. He did not look back, he did not want to see it, although it was clear in his mind.
    The stationmaster was on the platform, standing almost at attention with his tall top hat shining in the sun and his Crimean medals on his chest. Monk did not know what each one meant, but Hester would have.
    He spoke to the man briefly, then paced the platform waiting for the next train. His original intention had been to return to London with whatever further information he had for Katrina Harcus. The promise he had made her was still strong in his mind. At least he was one step further forward in that. Like the other, this present railway was also rerouted around a hill that had been falsely surveyed. It would have been perfectly possible, and cheaper, to have blasted through it, first by cuttings, then if necessary tunneling.
    If necessary?
    Something else tugged at his memory, something about grid references for areas on the map, but he could not unravel it. Everything he caught