Death of a Stranger - Anne Perry [28]
“Of course.”
“I do not know whom I may trust, or who among my friends would feel a divided loyalty if they were aware of my fears. Therefore I think it would be prudent of me to place no one at all under that burden. I will be in the Royal Botanic Society Gardens in the afternoon at two o’clock, from the day after tomorrow until I see you.” She smiled very slightly. “It is no inconvenience to me. I have always had a fondness for plants and my presence will not cause any surprise. Thank you, Mr. Monk. Good day.”
“Good day, Miss Harcus. I will be there as soon as I have anything to tell you.”
He sat for a little while after she had gone, reading and rereading his notes. Apart from the order signed by himself, the others made excellent sense. It was all exactly what he would have expected. Obviously they were only samples of a very much larger quantity which would stretch over years of activity. But would anyone be blatant enough to alter or corrupt receipts so that someone looking at them could see a discrepancy? Surely the differences would lie between the paper and the reality. For that he would have to go to Derbyshire and look at the track itself.
If, on the other hand, as seemed far more likely, the fraud lay in the purchase of land, if he went to the appropriate offices in Derbyshire, he would be able to find the original copies of the survey and begin to trace the ownership, the transfer of money, and anything else that was relevant.
When Hester came home at nearly eleven, exhausted and frightened by the events of the night, he was relieved to see her. She was later than usual and he had become anxious. He made an effort to put everything to do with railways out of his mind, even the fact that his own name had been on one of the orders. She had been up all night, and obviously wished to speak to him about something so urgently she barely waited until she had sat down.
“No, thank you,” she replied to his offer of tea. “William, there is most despicable business going on in Coldbath.” And she proceeded to tell him about the young women who had been lent money and required to pay it back at extortionate rates of interest by prostituting themselves for the particular tastes of men who liked women of good family. “It is their pleasure to humiliate them in a way that using an ordinary woman of the streets could never do,” she said furiously. “How can we fight it?” She stared at him with anger burning in her eyes and her cheeks flushing.
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly, feeling guilty as he said it. “Hester, women have been exploited like that for as long as anyone knows. I don’t know how to help it, except now and then in individual cases.”
She would not accept defeat. She sat on the edge of her seat, her back rigid, her body stiff. “There has to be something!”
“No . . . there doesn’t have to be,” he corrected her. “Not this side of God’s justice. But if there is, and you can find it, I’ll help you all I can. In the meantime I have a new case, possibly to do with fraud in the building of railways . . .” He saw the look of impatience in her face. “No, it’s not just money!” he said quickly. “If a railway track is built on land that is fraudulently obtained, or there is an unjust profit, that is illegal and immoral, but what if it is built on land that is wrongly surveyed, that subsides under the weight of a coal train? Or if the bridges or viaducts are constructed with cheap or substandard materials or labor? Then you risk having a crash. Have you thought how many people are killed or injured in a rail crash? How many people does a passenger train carry?”
Her impatience vanished. She let out her breath in a slow sigh. “There might be land fraud; I don’t know anything about that. But navvies know materials. They wouldn’t build with anything that wasn’t good enough, and they wouldn’t build in a substandard way.” She spoke with complete certainty, not as if it were an opinion but a fact.
“How