What could he have known? Where more money was? Why had he kept silent? To conceal Dundas’s act? To keep the money from being taken back? For whom—Mrs. Dundas or himself?

He moved in the seat and felt his locked muscles stab, he was so stiff. He winced, and rubbed his hands over his eyes.

He had to know his own part in it—it was the core of who he had been then.

Then? He even used the word as if it could separate him from who he was now and rid himself of responsibility for it.

At last he faced the thing that was woven into the story and that in pursuing the evidence of money he had ignored—the crash. It was not mentioned in reports about the trial, even obliquely. Obviously it was either irrelevant or it had not happened yet. There was only one way to find out.

He turned the pages, looking at headlines only. It would be in the heaviest, blackest print when it came.

And it was—nearly a month later, at the top of the front page: RAIL CRASH KILLS OVER FORTY CHILDREN AS COAL TRAIN PLOWS INTO EXCURSION TRIP FROM LIVERPOOL.

The words seemed unfamiliar, although he must have read this before. But he had to have known about it anyway. Seeing this would have meant nothing. It would have been only someone else’s report of a horror beyond words to re-create. Now as he stared at it, it was everything, the reality he had been torn between finding and leaving buried, the compulsion to know and the dread of confirming it at last, making it no longer nightmare but reality, never again to be evaded or denied.

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.