Into the Valley of Death (19 page)

“With my man going to be killed on Friday morning?”

Miss Unwin stayed silent. There was no answer that could be made to those bitter words.

After a little, she thought of something which might at least rouse the landlady.

“While I was out,” she said, “was there by any chance a further message about Mr. Heavitree? I am anxious, more than anxious, about him. It was on my behalf that he met with his injury.”

“There may have been something downstairs,” Mrs. Steadman answered. “I told them I wasn’t to be worried. What does it matter to me now if there’s a rough-house in the taproom, if the beer turns sour, if there’s a fire. My life is over. Over. Or over it will be come Friday morning.”

Once more Miss Unwin felt there was nothing to be said. She dared not give the poor creature any hope, even though in her mind she had now a strong glimmering of what might have happened in Hanger Wood. But unless she could take to the authorities clear proof, what she knew or guessed was so much dross. Jack Steadman would hang on Friday unless by then the real murderer had been shown beyond doubt to be who he was. To raise hopes that were so unlikely to be justified would be worse cruelty than remaining silent.

“I will go downstairs and ask,” she said. “Perhaps someone has ridden over with news.”

Serving in the private bar she found Betsey, seemingly not greatly affected by the death of the man she had hoped to marry for the small respectability it would have given her, and even looking the picture of rude health again with the burden on her conscience removed.

“Betsey,” she said, “has there been a message at all about poor Mr. Heavitree?”

“Why, gracious, yes. I forgot all about ’un. There was a higgler coming our way with his cart—I bought a ribbon off him—and the landlord at the Fox and Hounds took pains especial to let us have word.”

“And what did he say? Has Mr. Heavitree recovered consciousness?
Or is he worse? Don’t tell me the blow proved fatal.”

“No. No, the poor fellow’s no worse nor no better, it seems. But the surgeon has been with him again, and he holds out good hopes.”

With that, Miss Unwin had to be content. But she dearly wished that she could have heard that the old detective had recovered consciousness. If he had, she thought, she might, late though the day was growing, set out to see him. She needed his advice more than ever. The affair was surely reaching crisis point.

But advice she was not going to get.

She sighed.

If anything was to be done, she would have to do it herself. And with no one to caution her if what she attempted proved more rash than it ought to be.

Lying in bed later, lying there but far from sleeping, she thought that in all probability next day she would have to take action, with Vilkins back or not, with particulars from the War Office she could use or without them.

Time was too short for anything else. Better to take a risk, even the boldest and most desperate risk, than to stay and watch the hands of the clock go round till they reached eight o’clock on Friday morning. Until the trap dropped beneath Jack Steadman, the hangman’s rope round his neck.

Innocent and helpless Jack Steadman.

The early train from London reached Chipping Compton at eighteen minutes past ten in the morning, so Miss Unwin had learnt. But she found herself standing on the platform of the railway station a whole quarter of an hour before it was due, so sharp was her anxiety.

It was not even, she told herself, very likely that Vilkins would be on it. If she had succeeded the day before with the help of a clerk from the War Office in checking the careers of all the Army officers in the neighbourhood, General Pastell’s ball-night guests, then she ought to have been in time to catch the last train of the day then and she would have reached Chipping Compton late at night. On the other hand, if she had not yet managed to find a clerk she could persuade to help, or if she still had to find out from one she had where some of the officers on the list had served, she would hardly have caught a train that left early in the morning.

But now that list, by giving her an inkling of how Jack Steadman could have learnt unbeknowingly the secret of a victim of blackmail, was perhaps the only thing that was going to save him from the hangman.

So Miss Unwin stood on the wooden platform, peering into the distance, from where, round a gentle bend in the line, the London train would come. It was quiet and still on yet another flawless summer’s day. A few birds were singing in the elms beside the station and insects chirped and droned in the warm air. But beyond this there was scarcely a sound.

Miss Unwin leant on the handle of her parasol, its point between her feet, and craned to hear.

Then at last, like the distant rattle of musketry, there came a tiny mechanical sound. The London train.

Oh, let Vilkins be on it. Let Vilkins be on it, Miss Unwin prayed.

The noise of the approaching train grew louder, not musketry now but the thunder of cannon.

Into the Valley of Death, Miss Unwin thought.

Would the train’s forward march bring as much success, despite all odds, as that cavalry charge of twenty and more years ago?

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre-stroke,
Shattered and sundered.

She found she had all Mr. Tennyson’s words there in her head.

With a furious screeching of brakes and wild hissing of steam, the locomotive drew up at the platform.

Miss Unwin looked left and right—
Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them
—along the length of the train. One door opened. Another.

From the first a stout gentleman stepped out, tall silk hat gleaming. The station’s sole porter hurried up to him, touched his cap, and relieved him of a small attaché case. From the other opened door, that of a third-class carriage, there slowly emerged, back first, a boldly patterned green-and-yellow skirt. A hand holding a large basket covered with a red-checked cloth followed, and finally there came a fat farmer’s wife.

Miss Unwin scanned the whole length of the train once more. Not a sign of another door being thrust open.

Well, she thought, it was really quite unlikely that Vilkins …

She heard the guard’s long whistle-blast and turned to see him waving with heavy self-importance his large green flag. The locomotive emitted a whistle-blast of its own, deep and sustained.

And another third-class door was hurled wide. Stumbling from the already moving train, straw bonnet trailing by its ribbons, came Vilkins.

Miss Unwin ran forward to save her from falling headlong onto the platform.

She just managed it and brought her friend to an upright position, puffing and panting, her round face with its dab of a nose red as a post-box.

“Whatever happened?” she asked. “Why were you so late off the train?”

“Oh, oh. For ’eaven’s sake, let me catch me breath.”

Vilkins stood in the sun and panted. Miss Unwin went and retrieved her parasol, which she had had to fling aside when she had rushed to save her friend.

“Well, it’s plain as a pikestaff, really,” Vilkins said, still breathing heavily, as she returned.

“Is it, my dear?”

“Yeh. You see, there I was, up all night, all blooming night. An’ try as I might in that train, jogging along like I was a babe in its cradle, I couldn’t no more keep awake than what I could walk on a tightrope.”

“And you were asleep when the train pulled in here? I see. But what is this about being up all night? You had money enough for a bed when you left here.”

“Had to spend it, didn’t I? Had to try some o’ your old bribery an’ corruption.”

“But, Vilkins, who? Whom did you have to bribe? And—
and are you sure you will not be detected? And, Vilkins, were you successful?”

“Questions, questions. Jus’ stand still, an’ let me get meself sorted out.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. You’re only just awake and you had all the flurry of getting off the train before it swept you away. Let’s go to the Rising Sun, and then you can tell me all about it.”

“Yes. All right. But ’ow about you, Unwin? ’Ave you solved the murder while I been away?”

“Oh, my dear, no. No, for that I think I need what you have been able to get from the War Office. If you have got anything. And have you, my dear?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I got the lot. Though it took me till late last night to do it. But ain’t you got even one bit further on all the time I been in London?”

Miss Unwin paused at the wide open door of the Rising Sun. “Yes, my dear,” she said. “I think—I suspect that I have got further, a good deal further. Only …”

“Only what, for ’eaven’s sake?”

“Only what I think happened, what I suspect without having any real proof must have happened, is so … so extraordinary that I hardly dare tell even myself that it is so.”

“ ’Strawdinary? Well, it’s ’strawdinary enough that poor Jack Steadman didn’t do what everybody said ’e did do, with all what they call that evidence there in Hanger Wood agin him.”

“Yes, you’re right, my dear. In a way the very peculiarity of all that makes the extraordinary thing I believe must have happened more likely. Yes, much more likely.”

“Well, then,” Vilkins said, “ ’oo done it? Out with it, Unwin.”

“No,” said Miss Unwin. “No, I cannot. It really is altogether too bizarre.”

“Well, I don’t know what bizarre is, ’less it’s one o’ them native markets in India or wherever it is. But I still can’t see why you can’t name a name. Straight I can’t.”

Miss Unwin gave her friend then a brief account of everything that had happened while she had been away in London, how with Mr. Heavitree she had tried to frighten Arthur Burch, how she had proved next morning that the farmer had been murdered, and how Mr. Heavitree had been attacked by Captain Brackham as the arrogantly reckless cavalryman was leaving the county with such unaccountable haste.

“But,” she concluded, “perhaps when I have seen that list of yours and heard what the clerk from the War Office had to say about the officers on it, then I shall feel I have some confirmation, and then … then, Vilkins dear, I shall tell you that name.”

“Well, come on up to Mrs. Steadman’s parlour then, an’ ’urry up about it.”

In a minute more the two of them were in the landlady’s sitting-room. Vilkins began pulling the list—it looked very tattered—from inside her blouse, where she must have put it for safety.

“You see,” she explained, “I ’ad to tell the feller I got ’old of at the last that it was all being done for a bet. I mean, what else could I say? Seemed barmy asking ’im to find out about all them officers for no reason at all. An’ then … Well, it all took time, see. An’ ’e was beginning not to believe me. Don’t know what ’e thought. Maybe that I was a blooming French spy, I don’t know. So I ’ad to pretend that the feller making the bet—I said ’e was one o’ the gentlemen in the ’ouse where I worked—I ’ad to pretend the bet was getting bigger an’ bigger an’ that the gent ’ad given me a yellowboy to pass on to ’im. Well, that did the trick all right.”

“A sovereign,” Miss Unwin said. “I should hope it did do the trick. And I suppose that was the pound you had for all your board and lodging in London?”

“In course it were. I didn’ ’ave no other sovereigns, did I?”

“And that was why you had to spend the night without a bed?”

Vilkins burst out laughing. “You should of seen me,” she said. “Trying to get a mite o’ sleep perched up on a bit of a low wall. An’ so uncomfortable I didn’t stand a chance. Not that I could of, not with all them blokes what kept coming up to me an’ asking.”

“Oh, Vilkins.”

“Yes, well, told ’em what they could do, didn’t I? But then after a bit I ’ad to walk up an’ down so’s I could spot ’em coming an’ go the other way.”

“Oh, my dear. What I made you go through. But am I right in thinking it was worth it? You got all the postings of all the officers on that list?”

“Every last one.”

“Then let me see. Let me see.”

Miss Unwin almost snatched the crumpled piece of paper that the housekeeper at General Pastell’s had given her— long ago, it seemed—and spread it out on Mrs. Steadman’s round table. Then she drew towards her the old account-book in which the landlady had so carefully pasted every account of the inquest and her husband’s trial.

She flipped through its bulky pages.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, here it is. What Mr. Serjeant Busfield said in mitigation, the account of Mr. Steadman’s military career. Thank goodness the county paper printed every word of the trial.”

“Well, they would of done, in course. Don’t suppose anything so exciting’s ’appened round ’ere since the beginning o’ the blooming world.”

“Well, it’s a blessing for us at least. Now I can see whether any of these officers happened to be in the same place as Mr. Steadman at some time when something must have happened that gave Alfred Goode a chance of using the blackmail. Something, too, which would have given the chance to Mr. Steadman, were he that sort of a villain and had he but known he knew what he must have done.”

“If you thinks I can foller all that, Unwin, you must ’ave a slate loose in the top storey, so you must.”

“Well, never mind,” Miss Unwin murmured absently, her head deep in the list of names with the War Office clerk’s neat annotations against each one. His copperplate writing, monotonously regular, as might be expected of someone charged with copying document after document day after day, was not, in fact, easy to read. But Miss Unwin fought her way through it.

She tried to begin at the beginning. But hardly had she finished conscientiously checking each of the places beside the first entry than she could not stop herself flicking down to look at the one name on the list that had been in her head for all the past day.

And in a moment she saw that it fitted one particular period of Corporal Steadman’s service—it was in the Crimea —down to the last detail.