Death Of A Stranger

There had been a dozen people around the table, all perfectly dressed, jewels glittering, faces smooth and happy, Arrol Dundas at the head, presiding over the good fellowship.

There had been money, plenty of it.

Had it been the product of fraud? Had all that elegance and charm been bought at the expense of other people’s loss? It was a thought so ugly he was surprised he could entertain it without it leaving him with a raw wound. And yet it did not. Perhaps he was too anesthetized by Katrina’s death and the snatched memories and imagination of the crash to be capable of still more hurt.

He leaned and tapped hard to get the cabbie’s attention.

“Thank you. Take me back to the records office, please,” he instructed him.

“Yes, sir. Right.” The cabbie had had his fair share of eccentrics, and it made no difference to him, as long as they paid. He flicked the whip lightly and the horse moved forward, glad to stand no longer in the sharp sunlight. The overnight frost had not yet melted on the cobbles in the shade.

Had the house been Dundas’s, or merely rented? Monk had followed enough other people’s affairs to know that all kinds of men lived on credit, sometimes the last ones you would expect. He remembered Mrs. Dundas somewhere quite different when she had told him of her husband’s death. Had she left this beautiful place for financial reasons, or because she could no longer bear to live so close to her old friends after her husband was disgraced? There would be no invitations anymore, no calls, no conversations in the street. Anyone might choose to move-he would have!

Dundas must have left a will. And there would be records somewhere of the house’s being sold, with the date.

It took him till the middle of the afternoon to trace what he was looking for. It left him puzzled and acutely aware of a mystery he should already have solved, but if he had there was nothing of it left in his memory. The house had been sold before Dundas’s death. In fact, by then his estate had been worth no more than the new, very modest house in which his widow had lived, and a very small a

What startled him, and left him with shaking hands and a tightness in his chest, was that the name of the executor of the will was William Monk.

He stood in front of the shelf with the book open in front of him, and leaned over it, his legs weak.

What had happened to the money from the sale of the house? The court had not taken it. The profit from the sale of land which had been charged as fraud was still to be realized. Dundas had owned the house for twelve years. There was no shadow or taint upon his purchase of that.

So where had it gone? He looked again, and again, but search as he might, he could find no record of it. If he had handled it himself, and it seemed that Dundas had trusted him to do just that, then he had concealed all trace of it. Why? Surely the only reason a man hid his dealings with money was because they were dishonest?

It had been a fortune! If he had taken it himself, then he would have been an extremely rich man. Surely that was not something he could have forgotten? When he joined the police he had owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in-and a few others besides. Clothes-Dundas had taught him to dress well, very well, and he had never lost the taste for it.

Glimpses of memory returned of fittings at tailors, Dundas leaning back elegantly and giving instructions, a lift here, an inch in or out there, a little longer in the legs.Yes-that’s right! This cut of shirt is best, Egyptian cotton, that is how to tie a cravat. Smart but vulgar-don’t ever wear one like that! Understated, always understated. A gentleman does not need to draw attention to himself. Discreet but expensive. Quality tells in the long run.

Monk found himself smiling, against his will, a lump in his throat so high and hard it stopped him from swallowing.

The legacy was still with him; he spent too much on clothes even now.

What had happened to the money?

What had Mrs. Dundas bequeathed at the time of her death?

That too was easily discovered when he found her will: very little indeed. The a

If he had been Dundas’s executor, had he disposed of the money somehow? Where? To whom? Above all, why? That question beat in his mind at every turn like the scrape of leather on a bleeding blister.

He drank hot coffee and was too tense to eat.

What did it have to do with Baltimore? Perhaps the affairs of Baltimore and Sons would give him some of the answers or lead him to another avenue to follow in his search.

It took him until the next day to find someone both willing and able to discuss the subject with him: Mr. Carborough, who made a study of the finances of such businesses with a view to investment in them for himself.

“Good company,” he said enthusiastically, waving a pencil in the air. “Small, but good. Made a nice profit from the land deals, not excessive, and better, of course, from the railways themselves. Headquarters in London now, I believe. Building another nice line to Derby.”

They were sitting in Carborough’s office overlooking a narrow, busy street down near the docks. The smell of salt drifted up to the half-open window, and the shouts and clangs of traffic, winches and bales being loaded and unloaded.

“What about Dundas and the land fraud?” Monk asked, keeping his voice casual, as if it were of no personal interest to him.

Carborough curled his lip. “Stupid to get caught in something as trivial as that,” he said, shaking his head. “Never understood it myself. He was brilliant. One of the best merchant bankers in the city, if not the best. Then he goes and does a foolish thing like changing the grid reference on a survey so they move the course of the track onto his own land, and he makes… what?” He shrugged. “A thousand pounds at most. Hardly as if he needed it. And at the time he did it, he’d have expected to get an interest in whatever the company made on the new brakes. He found the money to develop them.”

“What new brakes?” Monk said quickly.

Carborough opened his eyes wide.

“Oh… they invented their own system of braking for carriages and goods wagons. Quite a bit cheaper than the standard ones used now. Would have cleaned up a fortune. Don’t know what happened there. They never followed through with it.”

“Why not?” he asked. The same flicker of memory woke in Monk and died in the same instant.

“Don’t know that, Mr. Monk,” Carborough replied. “After Dundas’s trial everything seemed to stop for a while. Then he died, you know?” He put the pencil down next to his pad, making it perfectly level. “In prison, poor devil. Maybe the shock of it all was too much. Anyway, after that they concentrated on new lines. Seemed to forget all about brakes. Built their own wagons and so on. Did pretty well out of it. As I said, moved down to London.”

Monk asked him more questions, but Carborough knew nothing about Dundas personally and had not heard Monk’s name before that he recalled.

Neither was there any sign of the money that Dundas must have received for his house. It had vanished as completely as if the treasury notes it was paid in had been burned.

The next step was to pursue the Reverend William Colman, who had given such telling evidence against Dundas. It might be an unpleasant encounter, since Colman would certainly remember Monk from the trial. He would be the first person Monk had spoken to who had known him from that time. Dundas and his wife were both dead, and so was Nolan Baltimore. Monk would be coming face-to-face with the reality of who he had been, and finally there would be no escape from whatever Colman remembered of him.