“ ’We in’t gettin’ no papers terday, Lizzie,’ ’e answered ’er.

“ ’Nor you neither, Robert,’ ’e adds ter me.

“ ’There’s bin a terrible crash up Liverpool way. Near an ’undred people killed, an’ only God in ’Is ’eaven knows ’ow many injured. I’m a’tellin’ yer because yer’ll ’ear it any road, but don’ go lookin’ at no paper. There’s things in there yer don’ wanna know. Pictures they drawed yer don’ wanna see.’ That was ter protect me mam, o’ course.”

“But you looked?” Monk said, knowing the answer.

“O’ course!” The clerk’s face was pale at the memory. “An’ I wished I’adn’t. Wot me dad never said, fer me mam’s sake, was that a coal train’ad ’it a load o’ children on an ’oliday outing, one o’ them excursion trains. They was all comin’ ’ome from a day at the seaside, poor little beggars.” His mouth was tight with grief and he blinked away the vision even now, as if he could see the artist’s impressions back in front of him with all their horror and pain, the mangled bodies in the wreckage, rescuers trying desperately to reach them while there was still time, driven to try, and terrified of what they would find.

Was that what waited buried at the back of Monk’s mind, like a plague pit, waiting to be opened? What kind of a man was he that he could have had any part—even any knowledge—of a thing like that and forgotten it? Why, if he’d had no part in it, did it not stay an innocent grief such as this man felt?

What had he done then? Who had he been before that night nearly seven years ago when in an instant he had been obliterated and re-created again, washed clean in his mind but in his body still the same person, still responsible?

Was there anything on earth as important as learning that? Or as terrible?

“What caused the crash?” He heard his own voice as if from far away, a stranger speaking in the silence.

“Dunno,” the clerk said softly. “They never found out. Blamed the driver and the brakemen, like I said. That’s the easiest, seein’ as they were dead an’ couldn’t say nothin’ diff’rent. Coulda’ bin them. ’Oo knows?”

“Who laid the tracks?”

“Dunno, sir, but they was perfick. Bin used ever since, an’ nothin’ else’s ever ’appened.”

“Where was it exactly?”

“Can’t remember, sir. It wasn’t the only rail crash, o’ course. I just remember ’cos it were the worst . . . it bein’ children, like.”