‘I won’t beat around the bush,’ said Collis. ‘I happen to know, by a fortuitous stroke of luck, the identity of the perpetrators of this crime. They were unscrupulous, vicious, unprincipled, and mean; Sarah was fortunate to escape unharmed. But I must warn you that they won’t stop at anything if they’re not humoured.’

‘You sound as if you’re acting as their collecting agent,’ said Laurence Melford.

‘Not at all. I’ve come here to see you today because I’m in the happy position of being able to make a deal. It so happens that these rogues owe me a sizeable favour — a favour which only just kept them out of jail. Now, if I were to go to them on your behalf, and insist that this favour should be returned at once, in the shape of all their calotype negatives of Sarah, they would hardly be in any kind of position to resist my demands.’

Laurence Melford’s eyes were as narrow as musket slits in a stockade. ‘You’d do that? And what would you expect for your trouble?’

Collis smiled. ‘I’m an opportunist, Mr Melford. I can’t deny that. As soon as I heard about this lamentable business, I thought to myself, aha, here’s another opportunity to help the cause of the Sierra Pacific Railroad.’

‘Yes?’ growled Laurence Melford. ‘How, exactly?’

‘I’ll get those negatives for you if you stop blocking my plans for the railroad,’ said Collis. ‘That includes saying or doing anything to discourage any of your fellow businessmen from investing in it, and any attempts to manipulate the state administration into voting against public funds for it. I shall also expect you to write a letter to the principal San Francisco newspapers, saying that, on reflection, you now regard the arrival of a transcontinental railroad link to be historically inevitable.’

Laurence Melford sat quiet and hunched for a long time. The only sign of the fury that was grumbling and boiling within him was the way in which he was slowly digging his fork into the table, again and again and again.

Finally, he spoke. ‘You arranged this, didn’t you, Edmonds? Not some anonymous gang. You had my daughter abducted, you had her female sanctity despoiled, and you had all those calotypes taken. You wrote the threats for money, and didn’t you know, right from the goddam start, that it wasn’t money you were after at all. You bastard.’

Collis blandly finished his drink and wiped his mouth on the edge of the tablecloth. ‘You can think what you like. But as you said yourself not five minutes ago, how are you going to prove it? I’ve offered you an easy way out of it; a way that doesn’t harm Sarah or impugn your dignity; and it seems to me that you don’t have much alternative but to take it.’