But Nolan Baltimore was in the witness-box. Arrol Dundas was in the dock—and that perception made all the difference. It depended upon whom you believed, and then in that light all the evidence fell one way or the other. Monk could see how it had been, and he could find no loose thread to unravel a greater truth.

There seemed no question that Dundas had purchased land in his own name, farmland of poor quality, which he had paid market value for, little enough when you need it for running sheep. But when the railway was diverted from its original track, around a hill and through that farmland, which it was obliged to buy at a considerably larger amount, then Dundas’s very rapidly turned profit was huge.

That in itself would be regarded as no more than exceptionally fortunate speculation, to be envied but not blamed. One might well resent not having done the same oneself, but only a small-minded man hates another for such advantage.

It only looked fraudulent when it emerged that the rerouting of the track from its original passage was not only unnecessary but brought about at all only by forged papers and lies told by Dundas. The original route would have been used, in spite of the fact that a certain owner of a huge estate was actually campaigning against it because it spoiled the path of his local hunt and the magnificent landscaped view from his house. The hill that had been the pretext for the rerouting was real, and certainly lay across the proposed path of the track, but it was less high in reality than on the survey they had used, which was actually of another hill of remarkably similar outlines, but higher, and of granite. The grid references had been changed in an imaginative forgery. The actual hill across the track could probably have been blasted into a simple cutting with a manageable gradient. If not, even tunneling for a short distance would have been possible. The cost of that had been wildly overestimated in Dundas’s calculations, too much to have been incompetence.

All Dundas’s past plans were reviewed, and no errors were found of more than a foot here or there. This miscalculation was over a hundred feet. When it was put together with his profit on the sale of the land, the assumption of intentional fraud was inescapable.

A defense of incompetence, misjudgment and coincidental profit might have succeeded, but it was Dundas’s name on the purchase and on the survey, and the money was in Dundas’s bank, not Baltimore’s.

In the face of the evidence, the jury returned the only verdict it could. Arrol Dundas was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He died within months.