Anne Perry - Death Of A Stranger

“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 on earth would you know that?” he asked, not patronizingly but as if she might have an answer, not because he thought she could, but because she was tired and had seen too much pain, and he did not want to hurt her anymore.

“I know navvies,” she replied, stifling a yawn.

“What?” He must have misheard. “How do you know navvies?”

“In the Crimea,” she said, pushing her hair back off her brow. “When we were stuck in the siege of Sebastopol in the winter of ’54 to ’55, nine miles from the port of Balaclava and with the only road washed out so not even a cart could get through. The army was freezing to death, or dying of cholera.” She shook her head a little, as if the memory still hurt. “We had no food, no clothes, no medicine. They sent hundreds of navvies out from England to build us a railway… and they did. Without any help, and all through the Russian winter, they worked, and swore, and fought each other, and it was all finished by March. A double track, with tributary lines as well. And it was perfect.” She looked at him with a spark of pride and defiance, as if they were her own men, and perhaps she had nursed a few of them if there had been accidents or fever.

He tried to picture it, the gangs of men laboring to cut a track through the mountains in the middle of the bitter snow, thousands of miles from home, to relieve the armies who had no other way out. He dared not think of the soldiers, or of the incompetence which had brought about such a thing.

“You didn’t mention that before,” he said to her.

“Nothing brought it to mind,” she replied, stifling another yawn. “They were all volunteers, but I don’t think you’ll find it any different here. But look into it. See if there has ever been an accident caused by bad excavation or bad building of track. See if you can find a tunnel that caved in or a viaduct that collapsed or rails that were built on bad ground, or at the wrong incline, or anything else that was the navvies’ doing.”

“I will,” he agreed. “Now go to bed. You’ve done all you can.” He reached out and put his hand over hers. “Don’t think about the usurer and the women. There’s always going to be violence. You can’t stop it; all you can do is try to help the victims.”

“That seems pretty pathetic!” she said angrily.

“It’s like the police,” he said with a half-smile. “We never prevented crime from happening, we only caught people afterwards.”

“You took them to the courts!” she argued.

“Sometimes, not always. Do the best you can; don’t cripple yourself by agonizing over what you can’t reach.”

She conceded, giving him a quick, gentle kiss, and then all but stumbled her way to the bedroom.

Monk left the house and went into the city to begin searching for the information which would help him answer Katrina Harcus’s questions. He tried to concentrate, but nagging like a constant, dull toothache was the sight of his own name on the receipt of Baltimore and Sons from seventeen years before. He did not even think of denying it was his. He had recognized it beyond doubt, the familiar, bold writing, more assertive than now, written by the man he used to be, before he looked more closely at himself and knew how others perceived him.

He went to see a merchant banker for whom he had solved a small domestic mystery to his great satisfaction.

“Baltimore and Sons?” John Wedgewood said, hiding his curiosity with difficulty. They were sitting in his oak-paneled office. A crystal tantalus was on the side table, but Monk had declined whiskey. “Well-respected company. Financially sound enough,” Wedgewood went on. “A great tragedy, especially for the family. I take it that it is the family who has asked you to investigate? Don’t trust the police.” He pursed his lips. “Very wise. But you’ll need to move very swiftly if you are to forestall scandal.”

Monk had no idea what the man was talking about. It must have been clear from his face, because Wedgewood understood before Monk had time to frame a reply.

“Nolan Baltimore was found dead in a brothel in London,” Wedgewood said, puckering his brow with distaste, and something which might or might not have been sympathy. “I apologize. I rather leaped to the conclusion that you had been asked to find the truth of the matter before the police, and if possible to persuade them into some sort of discretion.”

“No,” Monk answered, wondering for an instant why he had not read about the case in newspaper headlines, then realizing the answer before the question was on his tongue. It must be the murder Hester had referred to, and which had set the police buzzing around the Farringdon Street area in what was very probably a hopeless quest. No doubt the press would learn the reason for all the activity soon enough. They had only to ask one of the local inhabitants sufficiently inconvenienced, and sooner or later the story would emerge, suitably dramatized.

“No,” he repeated. “I am interested in the reputation of the company, not Mr. Baltimore personally. How good is their work? What skill and honesty have their men?”

Wedgewood frowned. “In what regard?”

“All regards.”

“Are you asking on behalf of someone interested in investment?”

“In a manner of speaking.” It was true enough. Katrina Harcus was investing her life, her future, in Michael Dalgarno.

“Financially sound,” Wedgewood said without hesitation. “Weren’t always. Had a shaky spell fifteen or sixteen years ago, but weathered it. Don’t know what theirs was about specifically, but a lot of people did then. Great age of expansion. People took risks.”

“Their workmanship?” Monk asked.

Wedgewood looked a little surprised. “They use the traveling navvies, the same as everyone else. Platelayers, miners, masons, bricklayers, carpenters, and blacksmiths-all that sort of thing. And there are engine men and fitters, foremen, timekeepers, clerks, draftsmen and engineers.” He shrugged slightly, looking at Monk with puzzlement.

“But they’re all competent or they wouldn’t last. The men themselves see to that. Their lives depend on every man doing what he should, and doing it right. Best workmen in the world, and the world knows it! British navvies have built railways all over Europe and America, Africa, Russia, and no doubt will go to India and China as well, and South America too. Why not? They all need railways. Everybody does.”