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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.

Had he hated the man then, for his evidence? Had he been offensive to him, tried to discredit him? Had Colman even believed him equally guilty with Dundas, but simply been unable to prove it?

Colman was still in the ministry, and it was not a difficult matter to find him in Crockford’s, the registry of Anglican priests. By late afternoon Monk was walking up the short path to the vicarage door in a village on the outskirts of Liverpool. He was aware of a fluttering in his stomach and that his hands were clammy and aching from the frequency with which he was clenching them. Deliberately, he forced himself to relax, and pulled the bell knob.

The door opened surprisingly quickly and a tall man in slightly crumpled clothes and a clerical collar