Death of a Stranger - Anne Perry [25]
“I am sorry,” she said softly, but she did not lower her gaze. “I should not have questioned your understanding. That is exactly what I would like. Please . . . before you say anything else, look at the papers I have with me. I dare not leave them in case they are missed, but I believe they matter.” She reached for the bag at her feet and picked it 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.