An excursion train carrying nearly two hundred children on a trip into the country was crashed and thrown off the rails last night as it returned to the city along the new line recently opened by Baltimore and Sons. The accident happened on the curve beyond the old St. Thomas’s Church where the line goes into single track for a distance of just under a mile through two cuttings. A goods train heavily loaded with coal failed to stop as it was coming down the incline before the tracks joined. It crashed into the passenger cars, hurling them down the slope to the shallow valley below. Many carriages caught fire from the gas used to provide lights, and screaming children were trapped inside to be burned to death. Other children were thrown clear as the fabric of the carriages was torn and burst open, some to escape with shock and bruises, many to be crippled, maimed, trapped and crushed under the wreckage.

Both drivers were killed by the impact, as were the firemen, stokers and brakemen on both trains.

Monk skipped over the next paragraphs, which were accounts of the attempts at rescue and the transport of the injured and dead to the nearest places of help. After that there followed the grief and horror of relatives, and promises of the fullest possible investigation.

But even searching with stiff fingers and dazed mind through all the succeeding weeks, into months, he found no satisfactory explanation as to what had caused the crash. In the end it was attributed to human error on the part of the goods train driver. He was not alive to defend himself, and no one had discovered any other cause. Certainly the torn and twisted track appeared to have been damaged by the crash itself, and there was no suggestion by anyone that it had been at fault previously to that. The earlier goods train along it carrying timber had had no difficulty at all and arrived at its destination safely and on time.

As he had already heard from the clerk days ago, there was nothing wrong with the track—there was no connection whatever with the fraud, or with Arrol Dundas, or therefore with Monk.

With overwhelming relief he kept telling himself that over and over again. He would go back to London and assure Katrina Harcus that there was no reason whatever to fear a crash on the new line. Baltimore and Sons had never been implicated in the Liverpool crash, and Baltimore himself had been exonerated of fraud in the trial of Dundas.

Which did not mean he had been innocent.

But if land fraud was what was happening now, on the same scale as before, then it was not unreasonable to believe it was Nolan Baltimore who was involved this time as well, rather than Michael Dalgarno. Monk could at least tell that to Katrina.

Although even as he said that to himself, he knew she would want more than hope, she would need proof—just as he did.