“It was beautiful,” Colman said, his face tender with sorrow. “An old church. The original was Norman, with a crypt underneath where men were buried nearly a thousand years ago. The graveyard was full of old families, over fifteen or twenty generations. It was the history of the land. History is only people, you know.” He stared at Monk intensely, reaching for the man behind the facade, the passions which could be stirred—and wounded—deeper than the analytical brain. “They sent the railway right through the middle of it.”

Now something clicked in Monk’s mind, a bishop mild and reasonable, full of regret, but acknowledging progress and the need for work for men, transport, the moving forward of society. There had been a curate, shy and enthusiastic, wanting to keep the old and bring in the new as well, and refusing to see that to have both was impossible.

And caught between the two of them the Reverend Colman, an enthusiast, a lover of the unbroken chain of history who saw the railways as forces of destruction, shattering the cement of family bonds with the dead, vandalizing the physical monuments that kept the spiritual ties whole. Monk could hear voices raised—shouting, angry and afraid, faces twisted with rage.

But Colman had done more than protest, he had proved crime. Was this it, the elusive memory at last—the proof? Who would it blame—Baltimore, or Monk himself? He cleared his throat. It felt tight, as if he could not breathe.

“They destroyed the church?” he asked aloud.

“Yes. The new line goes right over where it used to be.” Colman did not add anything; the emotion in his voice was sufficient.

“How did you discover the fraud?” Monk forced himself to sound almost normal. He almost had the truth.

“Simple,” Colman replied. “Someone told me he watched rabbits on the hill they said they had to go around because it would be too expensive to tunnel through. He was a parishioner of mine, in trouble for poaching. When I asked where he’d been caught, he told me. Rabbits don’t tunnel in granite, Mr. Monk. Navvies can blast through pretty well anything; solid mountains just take longer, and therefore cost more.

“I found the original survey. When one looked more carefully at the one Baltimore was using, it was falsified. Whoever did it had been too clever to alter the heights or composition—he found a hill that was exactly right somewhere else and altered the grid reference. It was an extremely skilled job.”

Monk asked the question he had to, but he had to clear his throat again to make his voice come. “Arrol Dundas?”

“It looked like it,” Colman said with regret, as if he would rather it had been someone else.

“Did he ever admit to it?”