So if he had been suspected then, why was he later considered to be of insufficient interest to have his picture included? He must have been vindicated. By the time the newspaper went to press, he was effectively no longer involved. Why? Did it matter now? Probably not.

According to what was reported in the paper, Monk had conducted some of the negotiations for purchase. It seemed to have been pulled out of him with extraordinary reluctance that he had not hired the surveyor, which was the fact that exonerated him. He had been in the witness-box altogether less than half an hour. If he had said anything at all to help clear Dundas, it was not reported. He had been regarded as a hostile witness by the prosecution, but most of what he was asked concerned documents, and could hardly be denied.

He could not remember what he had said, only the feeling of being trapped, stared at by the crowd, frowned on by the judge, weighed and assessed by the jurors, fought over by the opposing counsel, and looked to for help he could not give by Dundas himself. That was what remained with him even now, the guilt because he had not been clever enough to make any difference.

Then another face was sharp in his mind, one not drawn by the artist, for whatever reason, perhaps compassion—that of Dundas’s wife. She had sat with a terrible calm throughout the trial. Her loyalty had been the one thing even the prosecution had felt obliged to praise. He had spoken of her with respect, certain that her faith in her husband was both honest and complete.

Monk recalled her afterwards, the totality of her silent grief when she had told him of Dundas’s death. He could picture the room, the sunlight, her face pale, the tears on her cheeks, as if it were then too late for anything but the hidden, inmost pain which never leaves. It was she he thought of more than Dundas, she whose grief outweighed his own, and which tore still at the deep well of emotion within him, unhealed even now.

And there was something more, but he could not bring it back. He sat staring at the old papers, yellowed at the edges, and struggled to recapture what it was. Time and time again it was almost there, and then it splintered into fragments and meant nothing.

He gave up and went back to the next stage of the trial. More witnesses, this time for the defense. Clerks were called, people who had written entries in ledgers, kept books, filed orders for money, purchases of land, title deeds, surveys. But it was all too complicated, and half of them had become uncertain under cross-examination. The main thrust of the defense had been not that there was no fraud but that Nolan Baltimore could equally be suspected of it.