He tried to snatch back more detail of memory, not the emotional but the practical. What had they spoken of? What did he know of the land purchases in detail? What was the fraud involved? Wedgewood had said there was no such thing as land across which it was not possible to make a track. It was only a question of cost. And navvies knew how to set up rails on pontoons, if necessary, which could cross marshland, shifting streams, subsidence, anything you cared to think of. They tunneled through shale or clay, chalk, sandstone, anything at all. Again, it was only cost which made the difference. Back to money.

All land had to be purchased. Was it as simple as money passed back to the officer of the company who decided which route to take? A track diverted from one path to another, the officer bribed by the landowner in order to keep his property intact? Or otherwise worthless land sold at an inflated price, and the profits shared back with the officer, straight into his own pocket, defrauding the company and the investors?

That was obvious, but was it so much that it had been overlooked, at least for a while? What arrogance, to imagine they could escape forever.

Had Dundas been arrogant? Monk tried again to recapture a sense of the man he had once known so well, and the harder he looked the more any clear remembrance evaded him. It was as if he could see it only in the corner of his vision; focus on it and it vanished.

The wind was growing warmer across the grass, and far above him, piercingly sweet, he heard skylarks singing. It was timeless. It must have been like this when trains were only a thing of the imagination, when Wellington’s armies gathered to cross the Channel, or Marlborough’s, or Henry VIII’s for that matter, bound for the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Why could he not turn in the saddle now and catch some clearer glimpse of Dundas?

The brightness of the sun on his face brought back a feeling of affection and well-being, but it was no more than that, a remembrance of being utterly comfortable with someone, laughing at the same jokes, a kind of happiness in the past that was gone, because Dundas was dead. He had died alone in a prison, disgraced, his life ruined, his wife isolated, no longer able to live in the city that had been her home.