up. She opened it and took out fifteen or twenty sheets of paper and leaned across, offering them to him.
He accepted them almost automatically. The first one was folded over, and he opened it. It was a survey map of a large area of countryside, most of it with many hills and valleys, and a line of railway track marked clearly through it. It took him a moment or two to recognize the names. It was in Derbyshire, on a line running roughly between London and Liverpool.
“This is the new line Mr. Dalgarno’s company is building?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes. It goes through some very beautiful land between mining districts and the big cities. It will be used a great deal for both goods and passengers.”
He did not repeat his comment about quite normal profit. He had said it once. He looked at the next paper, which was a map of a much smaller section of the same area, and therefore in greater detail. This time the grid references were on the corners, the scale below, and every rise and fall of the land was written in, and in most places the actual composition of the soil and rock beneath the surface. As he stared at it he had an odd sense of familiarity, as if he had seen it before. And yet as far as he knew he had never been to any part of Derbyshire. The names of the towns and villages were unknown to him. One or two of the higher peaks were identified, and they were equally unknown.
Katrina Harcus waited without comment.
He looked at the next sheet, and the next. They were deeds to purchase stretches of land. He had seen such things often before. There would be many of them necessary in the construction of a railway. Land always belonged to someone. Railways had to stop at towns if they were to be any use, and the way in and out lay through areas that were bound to be built upon. It was sometimes a long and difficult matter to acquire a passage through.
Some enthusiasts believed the rights of progress overruled everything else. All structures across the path of the railway should be demolished, even ancient churches and abbeys, monuments to history, great works of architecture, private homes. Others took the opposite view and hated the noise and destruction with a violence that did not stop short of action.
He flicked back to the first map again. Then he realized what it was that had jolted his memory, not the land at all, but the fact that it was a surveyor’s map. He had seen such maps before, with a proposed railway line penciled through them. It had to do with Arrol Dundas, the man who had been his friend and mentor when he had left Northumberland as a young man and come south, the man to whom he had owed just that kind of loyalty of which Katrina Harcus had spoken, the debt of honor. Monk had been a banker then, determined to make his fortune in finance. Dundas had taught him how to look and behave like a gentleman, how to use charm and skill and his facility with figures to advise in investment and always earn himself a profit at the same time.
He had deduced much of this from fragmentary facts that came to him in other cases-a snatch of recollection, a momentary picture in the mind-rather than remembered it in any sequence. And with it always came the memory of helplessness and pain. He had failed terribly, overwhelmingly. As he looked at the map now, the grief engulfed him again. Arrol Dundas was dead. Monk knew that. Dundas had died in prison, disgraced for something he did not do. Monk had been there, and unable to save him, knowing the truth, trying repeatedly to make anyone else believe him, and always failing.
But he did not know where, nor exactly when. Somewhere in England, before Monk had joined the police. It was his inability then to effect any kind of justice which had driven him to become part of the law. He had not learned more than that. Perhaps he had not wanted to. It was part of the man he used to be, and so much of that was not what he admired or wanted anymore. His youth belonged to that same hard, ambitious man who hungered for success, who despised the weak, and who all too often disregarded the vulnerable. And nothing he could do now would help Dundas or retrieve his innocence. He had failed then, when he knew everything. What was to be gained now?
Nothing! It was just that the survey map, with its proposed railway, and the purchase order for land had brought back a past of which he had no knowledge, almost as if he had broken from a dream to step into it, and it was the reality, and everything since only imagination.
Then it was gone again, and he was sitting in the present, in his own home in Fitzroy Street, holding a sheaf of papers and looking at a troubled young woman who wanted him to prove to the world, and perhaps most of all to her, that the man she was going to marry was not guilty of fraud.
“May I make notes of some of this, Miss Harcus?” he asked.
“Of course,” she agreed quickly. “I wish I could allow you to keep them, but they would be missed.”
“Naturally.” He admired her courage and the fact that she had taken them at all. He rose to his feet and fetched pen and paper from his desk, bringing the inkwell back with him and sitting at a small table by his chair. He copied rapidly from the first map, then the second, taking the grid references, the names of the principal towns and the main features of the route.
From the other papers he took the areas, prices, and names of the previous owners of the land purchased. Then he looked at the rest that she had handed him. There were purchase orders and receipts for an enormous amount of materials, including wood, steel, and dynamite; for tools, wagons, horses, food for men and animals; and endless wages for the navvies who cut the land, built bridges and viaducts, laid the track itself-but also for ostlers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, surveyors and a dozen other minor tradesmen and artisans.
It was a vast undertaking. The sums involved amounted to a fortune. But building railways had always been about speculation and venture capital, about winning or losing everything. That is why men like Arrol Dundas were drawn to it, and it needed their skill and willingness to take risks.
Arrol Dundas in the past, Dalgarno now, and Monk as he had been however many years ago.
He must read the papers closely, he told himself. Notes were not enough. If there were anything fraudulent it would not be in the open for a casual observer to see. Had it been, then Katrina Harcus herself would have read it, and in all probability understood. Unless, of course, she had understood but could not bring herself to face Dalgarno with it, and she wanted Monk to stop him before he was committed beyond retreat?
He read the bills and receipts carefully. The expenses seemed reasonable. Two of them were signed by Michael Dalgarno, the others by a Jarvis Baltimore. The figures were added correctly and there was nothing unaccounted for. Certainly some of the land purchased was expensive, but it was the stretches previously occupied by houses, workers’ cottages, tenant farmers. The payment did not seem to be more than the land was worth.
He looked at the last two orders for navvies’ wages. They were what a hardworking and skilled man might expect. He flicked down the list. Masons received twenty-four shillings a week. Bricklayers were paid the same, also carpenters and blacksmiths. The navvies who used picks were paid nineteen shillings, the shovelers seventeen. The last two seemed a trifle high. He looked at the signature at the bottom-Michael Dalgarno. Was that really fraud-a shilling or two on the price of pickmen?
He looked at the last one. The pickmen were twenty-four shillings, the shovelers twenty-two shillings and sixpence. The signature was… he felt the blood pounding in his head. He blinked, but his vision did not clear. It was there in front of him-William Monk!
He heard Katrina Harcus say something, but it was no more than a jumble of sound in his ears.
This made no sense. His name on the order! And his hand! There was no arguing it. He had lost the past up to 1856, but since then he remembered everything as well as anyone else. Date? When was it? He could prove he had nothing to do with it.
Date! There it was at the top, just under the company name. Baltimore and Sons, August 27, 1846. Seventeen years ago. Why was this receipt in with the present-day ones? He looked up at Katrina Harcus. She was watching him, her eyes bright, eager.
“Have you found something?” she said breathlessly.
Should he tell her? Everything in him shrank from the thought. It was his fear, to be kept secret until he understood it. All she cared about was Dalgarno. Someone had accidentally picked up an extra piece of paper and an old receipt had been mixed in with the current ones. It was coincidence that it was the same company. But then why not the same? There were only so many large manufacturers and builders in the business. It was the same area, London to the northwest. Not really such a coincidence.
“Not yet.” His mouth was dry; his voice came with an effort. “The figures seem correct, but I shall make notes of all the facts and investigate them. From what you have here, though, there does not seem to be any irregularity.”
“I heard them speak of an enormous profit, far above and beyond what is usual,” she said anxiously, her brow furrowed. “If it were there openly”-she gestured to the papers-“I could have found it myself. But I am deeply afraid,
