To conceal fraud was, certainly, but where was the fraud? None that Monk could prove. It was all only suggestion and suspicion. Monk remembered the letter with his own name in it that he had removed from Katrina’s. His hand stung as if it had burnt him. Had he left it there, it would be he that Runcorn was after now, and were it anyone other than Runcorn, with as much certainty of his guilt!

“Of course he’s guilty!” Runcorn said indignantly when Monk went straight from the station to see him and report his failure. As always, his office was crowded with papers, but they were all neatly stacked, as though studied and dealt with. He was too busy to offer Monk tea. Anyway, he seemed to regard him now as a colleague rather than a guest. He looked at him skeptically and with some disappointment. “The fact that you still didn’t bring back any proof of the fraud doesn’t mean he’s innocent,” he said grimly. “It just means he hid it too well for you to uncover. Presumably he learned from Dundas’s mistakes. Two farms, or estates or whatever, you said?”

“Yes,” Monk replied stiffly. “And if I’d been planning that line you wouldn’t have had to bribe me to divert around a hill rather than go through it, if it meant not vandalizing a stretch of land like that.”

“And you think Dalgarno is the same as you, do you?” Runcorn lifted his eyebrows in a mixture of surprise and disbelief.

Monk hesitated. The question had been meant sarcastically, but he realized how much truth there could be in it. There was a physical resemblance, increased by their similar self-assurance—one might say arrogance, the love of good clothes, a certain grace of movement. If the witnesses to Katrina’s death had really seen someone on the roof, if their descriptions fitted Dalgarno, they would just as easily fit Monk. Plenty of people had seen him with Katrina—ask anyone in the Botanic Gardens. And to an onlooker they could have appeared to be quarreling. With a chill in the pit of his stomach, Monk remembered how she had put her hands up and grasped his coat, pulling off the button. He knew when it had been torn—but she had died with it in her hand. Why? What was she doing still holding it so long after?

Without the motive, Dalgarno was no more proved guilty than was Monk himself. Perhaps the evidence against Dalgarno was just as rooted in chance—or mischance?

“Monk!” Runcorn said loudly. “Are you saying Dalgarno was like you?”

Monk returned to the moment with a jolt. “Somewhat,” he answered.

“Somewhat like you?” Runcorn said, amazement showing in his face that Monk was considering it seriously.