Chapter 1. The Demonic Locomotive   1: The story of the death of Sir Martin Malprelate acquired, from its earliest telling, a phantasmagorical quality, shrouding the violence of the assault in an embellishment of diabolic spectres and uncanny mystery. Strip it down to the bare facts and what did we have? One old man, beaten to death, on a night of freezing fogs, in November. A tale deplorable in itself, and deplorably common in this age of ours  – concerning which, pressed between iron and stone, I do not need to elaborate. The story of this killing became tangled up with the story of the railway the man himself was building: or say rather, the railway he was forcing through the material tissue of London, into its very heart. Nor was Sir Martin possessed of friends to decry his posthumous fabulation. An unbenevolent man, grasping, assertive, an individual who put his enormous wealth into the service of only that wealth’s further augmentation. A miser, a skinflint, wealthy but sour, selfish and solitary. No-one could gainsay his energy, of course, even in his eighth decade alive. He was often to be seen, stalking along the London streets (for he rarely travelled…