William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

accident is? It is still human life, still people crushed beyond any kind of help. Please, Mr. Monk, if you have any skill or wit at all which can prevent this happening, do so, not just for my sake, or for Michael Dalgarno’s, whom God knows I would save from harm, but for the sake of those people who might be riding the train when it happens!”
    He was cold inside, imagination of mangled bodies too vivid in his mind.
    “I don’t see how land fraud could cause an accident, but I promise I will do everything I can to find out if there has been any theft or dishonesty of any kind in Baltimore and Sons,” he promised. He would have to for his own sake as much as hers. The knowledge of the Liverpool crash and the memory of Arrol Dundas were too violent to ignore. No one knew the cause of that carnage. Perhaps if he learned more about surveying, land purchase, the movement of money, he would see the connection. “I will tell you all I know,” he went on. “But do not expect an answer sooner than three or four days.”
    She smiled at him, relief flooding her expression like sunlight. “Thank you,” she said with sudden gentleness, a warmth that seemed to reach out to him. “You are all I trusted you would be. I shall be here every afternoon from three days hence, awaiting your news.” And with a slight touch of his arm again, she turned away and walked back along the path past two elderly ladies talking to each other, nodding graciously to them, and on out of the gate without looking back.
    Monk turned on his heel and retraced his steps to the road, but he could not rid himself of the sense of oppression that haunted his mind. There were no specific images, just a heaviness, as if he had been forcing something out of his recollection for so long it had dimmed the sharp outlines to a blur, but its presence had never left him. What was it that he had refused to face in the past? Guilt. He already knew the sense of failure because he could not help Dundas, made the sharper by Dundas’s subsequent death. But what about his part in the fraud in the first place? They had worked together, Dundas as mentor and Monk as pupil. Monk had believed Dundas innocent. That was one thing he was sure of. The emotion of admiration and respect was still perfectly clear.
    But had that been knowledge or his own naÏveté? Or far darker and uglier than that, had he known the truth but been unwilling to speak it or prove it at Dundas’s trial because it implicated himself?
    Could a rail crash between a coal train and a holiday excursion trip have anything to do with fraud? The clerk who had told him of the crash had said no one ever found the cause of it. Surely they must have looked. Experts on the whole subject would have examined every detail. If it were even possibly the fraud, they would have torn apart everything to do with it until all the facts were known.
    He should put it from his mind. His guilt was only that he had believed Dundas innocent and he had failed to get him acquitted, nothing to do with the crash. Dundas had gone to prison and died there, a good man who had been unquestioningly generous to Monk, sacrificed by a judicial system which made mistakes. People are fallible. Some are wicked, or at least they perform wicked acts.
    What about Michael Dalgarno, with whom Katrina Harcus was so deeply in love? It was time Monk met him face-to-face and formed his own judgment.
    He crossed the outer circle and walked briskly down York Gate to the Marylebone Road, where he took the next empty hansom south toward Dudley Street and the offices of Baltimore and Sons.
    He went up the steps and in through the door of the building. He climbed the oak-paneled stairs, his imagination racing. By the time he was inside in front of the clerk who answered the bell on the reception desk, he had decided at least roughly what he was going to say. He already had the printed card in his waistcoat pocket.
    “Good afternoon, sir. How can I help you?” the clerk enquired.
    “Good afternoon,” Monk replied confidently. “My name is Monk. I represent Findlay and Braithwaite, of Dundee, who have been asked to acquire certain rolling stock for railways in France, and if their venture there should be successful, in Switzerland also.”
    The clerk nodded.
    “The reputation of Baltimore and Sons is very high,” Monk continued. “I should be much obliged for the advice of whoever is available to give it to me regarding possible business of