William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

owner of Dalgarno’s company, and the man whose murder had so inconvenienced Hester and the women she cared for. He had died in Leather Lane, in all probability pushed down the stairs by a prostitute, whom presumably he had refused to pay.
    Or else railway fraud had at last caught up with him after all, and he had been killed as Katrina feared, either to prevent it from happening again or to keep it secret and allow it to go ahead. Had he been going to expose this one too, this all-but-duplicate of the old fraud which would have worked if . . . if what?
    Monk laid the paper down on the flat tabletop and stared at the rows of folders and ledgers on the shelves in front of him. What had happened to expose Arrol Dundas? Why had the scheme not continued undetected? Had someone betrayed him, or had it been carelessness, a transfer not concealed well enough, an entry not followed through, something incomplete, a name mentioned that should not have been?
    If anyone had ever told Monk he had known from a confidence or deduction, he could not bring it back now, however hard he tried.
    His eyes ached from the endless writing and the lines jumped in front of him, but he went back to reading the account of evidence day by day. Fraud trials were always long; there was so much detail following the intricacies of land sale and purchase, surveying, negotiation of routes, consideration of methods, materials, alternatives.
    He rubbed his eyes, blinking as if there were grit in them.
    He had given evidence himself, but there was no sketch of him. He was not interesting enough to engage the reader, so whether the artist had drawn him or not, no likeness had been used. Was he disappointed? Had he really been so incidental then, so unimportant? It seemed so.
    He read what was given of his own interrogation by the prosecutor. At first he was startled to see that from the tone of the questions he was obviously a suspect too. But then, as he looked at it more rationally, and without the instinctive self-defense, the man would have been derelict in his duty not to have taken very serious consideration of the possibility.
    So if he had been suspected then, why was he later considered to be of insufficient interest to have his picture included? He must have been vindicated. By the time the newspaper went to press, he was effectively no longer involved. Why? Did it matter now? Probably not.
    According to what was reported in the paper, Monk had conducted some of the negotiations for purchase. It seemed to have been pulled out of him with extraordinary reluctance that he had not hired the surveyor, which was the fact that exonerated him. He had been in the witness-box altogether less than half an hour. If he had said anything at all to help clear Dundas, it was not reported. He had been regarded as a hostile witness by the prosecution, but most of what he was asked concerned documents, and could hardly be denied.
    He could not remember what he had said, only the feeling of being trapped, stared at by the crowd, frowned on by the judge, weighed and assessed by the jurors, fought over by the opposing counsel, and looked to for help he could not give by Dundas himself. That was what remained with him even now, the guilt because he had not been clever enough to make any difference.
    Then another face was sharp in his mind, one not drawn by the artist, for whatever reason, perhaps compassion—that of Dundas’s wife. She had sat with a terrible calm throughout the trial. Her loyalty had been the one thing even the prosecution had felt obliged to praise. He had spoken of her with respect, certain that her faith in her husband was both honest and complete.
    Monk recalled her afterwards, the totality of her silent grief when she had told him of Dundas’s death. He could picture the room, the sunlight, her face pale, the tears on her cheeks, as if it were then too late for anything but the hidden, inmost pain which never leaves. It was she he thought of more than Dundas, she whose grief outweighed his own, and which tore still at the deep well of emotion within him, unhealed even now.
    And there was something more, but he could not bring it back. He sat staring at the old papers, yellowed at the edges, and struggled to recapture what it was. Time and time again it was almost there, and then it splintered into fragments and meant nothing.
    He gave up and went back to the next stage of the trial. More witnesses, this time for the defense. Clerks were