William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

Anyone can produce paper, whoever else had been in the company, even Baltimore himself. But Dundas had fought so little! He had seemed to at first, and then to crumple, as if he knew defeat even before he really attempted to struggle.
    But Monk had felt so certain of Dundas’s innocence!
    Had he known something which he had not said in court, something which would have shown that there was no deceit, or if there had been, that it was Baltimore’s? After all, there was no proof here that it had been Dundas’s idea to divert the track. Neither had there been anything to prove that he had met the landowner or accepted any favor from him, financial or otherwise. The police had not examined the landowner’s records to trace any exchange of monies. Nothing was found in Dundas’s bank beyond the profit from the sale of his own land. The worst that could be said of that was that it had been sharp practice, but that happened all the time. It was what speculation was. Half the families in Europe had made their fortune in ways they would not care to acknowledge now.
    What could he have known? Where more money was? Why had he kept silent? To conceal Dundas’s act? To keep the money from being taken back? For whom—Mrs. Dundas or himself?
    He moved in the seat and felt his locked muscles stab, he was so stiff. He winced, and rubbed his hands over his eyes.
    He had to know his own part in it—it was the core of who he had been then.
    Then? He even used the word as if it could separate him from who he was now and rid himself of responsibility for it.
    At last he faced the thing that was woven into the story and that in pursuing the evidence of money he had ignored—the crash. It was not mentioned in reports about the trial, even obliquely. Obviously it was either irrelevant or it had not happened yet. There was only one way to find out.
    He turned the pages, looking at headlines only. It would be in the heaviest, blackest print when it came.
    And it was—nearly a month later, at the top of the front page: RAIL CRASH KILLS OVER FORTY CHILDREN AS COAL TRAIN PLOWS INTO EXCURSION TRIP FROM LIVERPOOL.
    The words seemed unfamiliar, although he must have read this before. But he had to have known about it anyway. Seeing this would have meant nothing. It would have been only someone else’s report of a horror beyond words to re-create. Now as he stared at it, it was everything, the reality he had been torn between finding and leaving buried, the compulsion to know and the dread of confirming it at last, making it no longer nightmare but reality, never again to be evaded or denied.
    An excursion train carrying nearly two hundred children on a trip into the country was crashed and thrown off the rails last night as it returned to the city along the new line recently opened by Baltimore and Sons. The accident happened on the curve beyond the old St. Thomas’s Church where the line goes into single track for a distance of just under a mile through two cuttings. A goods train heavily loaded with coal failed to stop as it was coming down the incline before the tracks joined. It crashed into the passenger cars, hurling them down the slope to the shallow valley below. Many carriages caught fire from the gas used to provide lights, and screaming children were trapped inside to be burned to death. Other children were thrown clear as the fabric of the carriages was torn and burst open, some to escape with shock and bruises, many to be crippled, maimed, trapped and crushed under the wreckage.
    Both drivers were killed by the impact, as were the firemen, stokers and brakemen on both trains.
    Monk skipped over the next paragraphs, which were accounts of the attempts at rescue and the transport of the injured and dead to the nearest places of help. After that there followed the grief and horror of relatives, and promises of the fullest possible investigation.
    But even searching with stiff fingers and dazed mind through all the succeeding weeks, into months, he found no satisfactory explanation as to what had caused the crash. In the end it was attributed to human error on the part of the goods train driver. He was not alive to defend himself, and no one had discovered any other cause. Certainly the torn and twisted track appeared to have been damaged by the crash itself, and there was no suggestion by anyone that it had been at fault previously to that. The earlier goods train along it carrying timber had had no difficulty at all and arrived