Read Chapter 17: The Lost Surveyor

The frost had not yet left the ground when Jack found Andrew.

He had come out before dawn to walk the culvert line, checking the winter's damage to his brickwork, his breath fogging in the grey light. The eastern approach lay quiet, the waterlogged parcel still half-frozen, and he had allowed himself a moment of satisfaction—the drainage ditch was holding. The spring thaw would test it, but for now, his shoddy bricks were holding muck and water at bay.

Then he saw the boot.

It stuck up from the roadside ditch, black leather scuffed with mud, the sole worn through at the heel. Jack knew that boot. He had watched Andrew pace a hundred survey lines in those boots, muttering headings to himself, tapping the brass compass he kept on a chain at his belt.

Jack ran.

Andrew lay on his back in six inches of icy water, his face turned toward the pale sky. His eyes were open. His coat had ridden up around his ribs, and there was a dark bruise spreading across his temple, almost black in the half-light. One arm was bent beneath him at an angle that made Jack's stomach turn.

"Andrew," Jack said, though he knew it was pointless. He knelt in the mud at the ditch's edge. "Andrew, wake up."

The water around the body had frozen into a thin skin of ice, broken only where Andrew's shoulders had settled. He must have lain here for hours. Overnight, at least.

Jack forced himself to look. To see what a surveyor would see. Andrew's theodolite case lay on the bank a few feet away, its strap snapped clean. His notebook was gone. His coat pockets had been pulled inside out. But his compass—the brass one he'd carried for years—lay five feet up the slope, half-buried in frost-killed grass.

Jack climbed out of the ditch and picked it up. The glass face was cracked. The needle had stopped, jammed hard against the rim where the case had been struck. The brass was dented, not from a fall but from a blow, a heavy impact that had bent the frame.

He turned it over. On the back, scratched into the metal, were three figures: 214.

Jack stared at them. Andrew had kept his survey notes in a code—angles, sightings, valuations. That number was a heading, or perhaps a reference. It meant nothing to Jack. But he knew Andrew had been working the valley's land assessments in the weeks before the railway route was finalized. He had been mapping every parcel on the eastern approach, the same ground Jack had just bought, the same ground Ashworth had claimed.

He slipped the compass into his coat pocket.

"Mr. Mullins."

Jack straightened, turning. A farmhand stood at the lane's edge, a scythe over his shoulder, his face gone pale beneath its stubble. "That's Andrew Peel, ain't it? The surveyor fella."

Jack looked down at the body, then back at the man. "Fetch the constable," he said. "Tell him there's been an accident."

The farmhand hesitated. "Should I—should we get him out of the water?"

"No," Jack said, too quickly. He forced himself to soften. "Leave everything as it is. The constable will want to see it."

The man nodded and hurried off, boots crunching through the frost.

Jack stood alone with Andrew for a long moment. He had known him for three years, since the Grand Union survey first came through. Andrew had been the only one of the company's men who would take a drink with a mechanic, the only one who never flinched at the grease under Jack's nails. He had drunk too much, gambled too much, and laughed at everything, including his own ruin. And he had known the valley's ground better than any man alive.

Who would want him dead?

Jack's mind ran through the possibilities like a ledger. The Northern & Western had been claiming this valley for its route—they had surveyors of their own, mapping alternative lines to challenge Grand Union's tender. Sabotage between the companies was not unknown. Men had been beaten for carrying the wrong maps. And Andrew had been carrying something, that night. His notebook was gone.

But the compass had been left. And a man who steals a notebook but leaves a brass compass is not a thief.

He is a man who knows exactly what he's looking for.

Jack crouched again, studying the ground around the body. The frost had preserved the mud at the ditch's edge, and there, pressed into the frozen earth near the bank, he saw boot prints that did not match Andrew's worn soles. These were newer, deeper, the marks of a heavy man moving fast. Two sets, converging on the spot where Andrew had fallen. One set belonged to someone who had stood over the body, feet planted, and then walked up the slope toward the lane.

Toward the road that led to Ashworth's ridge land.

Jack's jaw tightened. He pulled his coat close and walked the path himself, following the prints to where they cut through the hedgerow and joined the lane. The mud there showed a wheel's mark, narrow, a gig or light trap. A gentleman's carriage.

He stood at the lane's edge, the cold wind cutting through his coat, and felt the brass compass heavy in his pocket.

The constable arrived within the hour, a slow, methodical man named Prosser who examined Andrew's body with the expression of a man cataloguing livestock. He declared it an accident within five minutes.

"Fell," Prosser said, straightening up and dusting his hands. "Slipped on the frost, caught his head on a stone. Drunk, most likely, heading home from the tavern."

"He was a surveyor," Jack said. "He knew this ground. He'd walked it in worse conditions."

Prosser shrugged. "Men fall. Especially men who drink." He gestured at Andrew's upturned coat. "Robbed, too. Look at the pockets. Some vagrant found him after the fall and took his purse."

"His notebook was taken as well," Jack said.

"Notebooks are worth paper. Paper can be sold." Prosser pulled a pipe from his coat and began to pack it. "Sad business. But it's winter, and men die in winter. I'll have the cart round to take him to the churchyard."

Jack said nothing. He watched Prosser walk away, already thinking of his supper, and felt the cold anger settle deeper in his chest.

He knelt one last time beside Andrew. The man's face had frozen into an expression of blank surprise. Jack reached out and closed his eyes with two fingers, the way his mother had taught him to do for the dead.

"I'll find him," Jack said quietly. "Whoever did this. I'll find him and I'll make him pay."

He stood, and as he did, he saw it—a glint in the frost at the ditch's edge, where Andrew's body had lain. He bent and picked it up. A button, brass, stamped with a raised pattern.

A hawk, its wings spread over crossed arrows.

Jack's hand closed around it. He knew that mark. He had carried its nameplate in his coat for years, hidden from every eye, keeping it close as proof of his father's destruction. The same seal had marked the documents Ashworth had carried at the land office. The same symbol was burned into his memory.

He turned the button over. On the back was scratched three letters: W.M.

Wickham Marsh. The land agent at Ashworth's estate.

Jack slipped the button into his pocket, next to the broken compass. The wind picked up, carrying the sound of the cart approaching from the village, and he stood over Andrew's body one last time.

The constable called it an accident. The locals would call it a tragedy. But Jack knew better. Andrew had been surveying the eastern approach for the railway's valuation, the same ground men were killing over. He had found something, or been hired to hide something, and someone had put him in that ditch to make sure he never spoke of it.

And the trail led, as it always did, to the hawk.

Jack turned and walked back toward his work site, the button and the compass burning against his ribs. He had six pounds to his name, a culvert that might not survive the thaw, a blackmailer embedded in his crew, and a secret pact with the man who most likely had ordered his friend killed.

And now he had the proof of it.

The proof he could show no one. Not yet. Not until he knew what Andrew had been carrying, and who had wanted it badly enough to kill.

He would finish the culvert. He would pay his debts. And then he would find Andrew's notebook, find whatever truth had been worth a man's life, and he would use it to bring the whole rotten edifice down.

Whatever it cost him.