Into the Valley of Death (6 page)

Nevertheless, as soon as she had drunk a cup of tea and tried to eat a little bread and butter, she set off. As she strode out through the glittering morning air, over the three miles or so of softly dusty lanes, down the steep hill into the Valley of Death and half-way up the equally steep slope on the other side, she did her best to concoct a story about being a lady’s-maid
temporarily without a position who had heard of the housekeeper’s difficulty.

But she found when, after some trouble, she came to confront Mrs. Perker, a thick-bodied lady in a stiffly pleated black satin gown, that the story she had patched together was scarcely good enough.

“Well, my good woman,” Mrs. Perker said, “I hardly think I can take you into General Pastell’s service even for the length of a day knowing nothing at all of you. The General, you understand, is a widower, and a great deal devolves upon myself.”

“But I assure you, madam, I well understand the work.”

Miss Unwin felt with bitterness as those words came to her lips how easily she had slipped back again into the subservient mode. But if she was to have the chance of observing the various gentlemen who might have been victims of the unsavoury Alfie Goode, then work as a maidservant in General Pastell’s house that night she must. And take up again the respectful, even obsequious, tone of the good servant she must.

“I dare say you do understand your work, for aught I know,” Mrs. Perker answered her. “But that is neither here nor there. You have told me scarcely anything of yourself, except that you cannot show me a letter of character. Why, you might be nothing but a wicked thief, or in league with a whole band of robbers, even. And I have a young child in the house, too, the General’s granddaughter. No, I cannot take the responsibility.”

For a moment Miss Unwin felt herself at a total check. But then the thought of Jack Steadman in the condemned cell came yet more vividly into her head, and of his wife, still bright-eyed and defiant but terribly in need of help. No, somehow she must get to see the gentry of the county. One of them, surely, had for some reason or another put himself at the mercy of the unscrupulous Alfie Goode and had at last taken a murderer’s way out of his trouble. She must find him.
Otherwise Jack Steadman would have been hanged in his place by Friday.

But how could she persuade this obdurate woman to accept her services?

And then a notion came into her mind. A daring, even foolish notion, but one that had to be acted on at once if there was any chance of its succeeding.

She swallowed. “Mrs. Perker,” she said, “there is something I have to tell you in confidence. In the strictest confidence.”

“Now, it is no use you spinning me a tale, young woman. I want to hear nothing of a child without a father or any unpleasantness of that sort.”

“No, no. The confidence I have to tell you of is not mine. It —it is, in fact, your master’s.”

“The General? What confidence can he have entrusted to you, a stranger, that he would not have entrusted to me, his housekeeper of twenty years?”

“Madam, it is simply this. You know that over in Chipping Compton the landlord of the Rising Sun inn, an old soldier in whom General Pastell has taken the keenest interest, has been accused of murder and found guilty?”

“Of course I know of the General’s interest in the man. But that could have been a piece of mere gossip you picked up at the inn in half an hour. I expect you heard it from that chatterbox Vilkins who told you there was employment here.”

“No, madam, I heard of it from the General himself. Or, to be more correct, my employer heard it from General Pastell and he passed it on to me. Madam, I am a female private inquiry agent.”

Miss Unwin held her breath.

Mrs. Perker had only to go to the General and ask whether he had employed the services of such an agency as she had invented for her to be in much worse trouble than before. She might, of course, try then to persuade General Pastell all
the same to use her services. But, much though he had tried to do on behalf of the former Corporal Steadman, it was in the highest degree unlikely that he would think there was anything to be gained now from the assistance, not even of an inquiry agent, but of a mere governess. She trusted, however, that the housekeeper would take her at her word.

“Let me explain a little,” she added hastily. “General Pastell, as you must know, has from the start been most anxious to do all that he could to see Mr. Steadman acquitted, believing it was hardly possible for him to have committed so foul a deed. I do not know what assistance he gave to his defence in court, but some person must have paid for Mr. Serjeant Busfield’s services, and then the General, as you will know, got up a petition when the verdict went against Mr. Steadman. But that, too, did no good. So as a last measure he has gone to the agency of which I am an employee.”

“Yes, I understand that now. And, of course, it is not for me to question anything the General does.”

At this, Miss Unwin took a little heart.

“But what I cannot altogether understand,” the housekeeper went on, “is why, in the interests of Mr. Steadman, you should want to come here as a lady’s-maid on the night of the ball.”

“That is where I must beg you particularly to keep a confidence,” Miss Unwin said.

She thought, in fact, that if she did succeed in convincing Mrs. Perker, it was not very likely that this particular confidence would be kept. To have in secret a private inquiry agent in the house—it was too good a piece of gossip to keep entirely to oneself. No, the news would spread. Like wildfire. But this was by no means a bad thing. If in the end it got to the ears of the man who had killed Alfie Goode and arranged for Jack Steadman to hang for it, then it might well stir him into some rash countermeasure that could cause him at last to betray himself.

It would be a countermeasure not without danger to herself.
But for little, bright-cheeked Mrs. Steadman she would be happy to risk anything that had to be risked.

“I am sure I can keep a confidence as well as anybody,” Mrs. Perker said.

Yes, thought Miss Unwin, and how many people can?

“Then I will tell you everything,” she answered. “My employer has come to the conclusion that if Mr. Steadman did not commit the crime of which he was accused, then it is most likely that Alfred Goode was killed because he had learnt some secret and was asking too great a sum to keep it hidden. And, I regret to say, that the only persons susceptible of such a need for concealment are gentlemen who have reputations to lose. My employer considers that it is by no means unlikely therefore that the gentleman in question will be at the ball here tonight.”

Mrs. Perker gasped.

And Miss Unwin knew then that she had finally earned her place as a lady’s-maid when the ball should begin.

But would she, as she assisted the lady guests with their cloaks and mended perhaps a dress hem torn in the dance, be able to see something that gave her an inkling as to who had laid that terrible trap for Jack Steadman? And even if she did, would there then be time enough to produce proof that he and not the innkeeper had shot Alfie Goode?

When Miss Unwin returned to the Rising Sun from her interview with the housekeeper at Monkton Hall, she saw her new colleague, the former Scotland Yard detective officer, sitting at his ease in the private bar, a pint of ale in a pewter tankard on the oaken table in front of him. The very picture of a countryman of modest means dreamily whiling away the time.

But she had only to pass in front of the wide entrance door to the bar to see the tankard drained and the countryman get to his feet. She preceded him up the stairs to Mrs. Steadman’s sitting-room, kept at her disposal.

Hardly had she taken off her bonnet when there came a quiet tap on the door she had left half open.

“Mr. Heavitree,” she said, beckoning him in. “What news?”

The burly former superintendent stepped forward and closed the door carefully behind him.

“A little news, I think,” he said.

“Do sit down and tell me quickly.”

Mr. Heavitree settled onto a chair at the table.

“Don’t expect me to tell you that I have caught out Mr. Arthur Burch in a flagrant falsehood,” he said. “But on the other hand I am pretty well convinced that there was indeed a falsehood in that evidence of his.”

“Then we are making progress,” Miss Unwin said. “I did not dare to hope for any when I rashly undertook to see what could be done yesterday. But progress we have made, surely. If Arthur Burch was telling lies at the assizes, then he must
have been doing so for a reason. He must have been paid or suborned to do what lay in his power to see that a rope went round Jack Steadman’s neck.”

“And,” added Mr. Heavitree, “that payment, or that pressure brought to bear, must have come from the man who wishes to see Jack Steadman dead. That’s true enough, Miss Unwin, and it is to you that I owe my certainty of it.”

“But you were not able to obtain any hint as to who this man might be?”

“Oh, dear me, no. Dear me, no. I was far from that, I’m afraid. I presented myself to Mr. Burch at the cottage on his bit of a farm—and a pretty tumbledown place that is—I presented myself to him as a former police officer taking only the mildest interest in the matter, but somewhat curious nevertheless and happening to be passing near. And straightaway I could see that he did not like it.”

“The former police officer? The hint of a threat?”

“Yes, that was the size of it. But I went about my way as hard as I could to reassure him, and I believe that by the time he consented to talk about the matter, he truly thought I was no more than an old buffer trying to warm the embers of a dying fire.”

“Good. Well done. And what more did you learn other than those few words of evidence we read in Mrs. Steadman’s newspaper extracts?”

“Little enough, little enough. In fact, I hardly think I heard anything more than the fact, or the so-called fact, we already knew, that he states he heard Alfred Goode call out to Jack Steadman, as the former left this place in a state of drunkenness, the words:
I’m going now. But don’t you forget the night’s not over yet.”

Miss Unwin could not hide an expression of disappointment.

“Oh, but don’t be too dismayed, my dear. I may not have induced Arthur Burch to budge from those words. But I heard him say them and repeat them three, four, or five
times. And do you know? He repeated them like a parrot. Like a parrot every time.”

“Yes,” said Miss Unwin slowly. “Yes, no doubt you are right. If he was truly recollecting something he had heard three months ago, he would almost certainly have varied that speech, if only by a small hesitation here or there.”

“And he did not,” said Mr. Heavitree. “No, take my word for it as an officer who has questioned criminals by the score, by the hundred, in his time. That man had been drilled in what he was to say. Drilled and drilled till he had got it word-perfect. And I’ll tell you something else.”

“Yes?”

Mr. Heavitree pushed himself to his feet. “Come downstairs with me,” he said, “and you can see with your own eyes what I mean.”

“Very well,” Miss Unwin answered, agog with curiosity.

She followed the ex-superintendent in his heavy progress down the inn’s stairway. In the passage between the taproom and the private bar he stopped.

“Now, I don’t know as you’ll recollect,” he said, “but it was given in evidence at the assizes that Arthur Burch was sitting that night as he always does in the private bar on my left here.”

“Yes, I remember reading that.”

“Good. And Alfie Goode, of course, had been getting drunk, as was his custom, in the taproom on my right here.”

“Yes, I recall that too.”

“Now, it was from behind the taproom bar that Jack Steadman at last ordered him out. That wasn’t given in evidence, but it stands to reason that it must have been so. And I have taken the liberty already of confirming the fact from Mrs. Steadman.”

“I will take your word for it. But—”

Mr. Heavitree held up a majestic hand. “No, hear me out. Now, we have Arthur Burch in the private bar and Alfie Goode leaving the taproom, there in its doorway just where
you are yourself this minute, with Jack Steadman behind its bar barely five yards distant from him. Now, Jack Steadman denied in court that Alfie Goode had said anything about meeting him, did he not?”

“Yes. Yes, he was all but bound to do so, unless he wished almost directly to admit to the murder.”

“Very well. Though he was not able to tell the court just what Alfie Goode did say, claiming in that innocent way of his that he couldn’t remember a few trivial words, he was still nearer by a good few paces to Goode than was Burch sitting at the far end of the private bar there. Yet Burch swore and swore again to the exact words.”

“Yes,” said Miss Unwin. “Yes, yes, and yes again. He would have had more than a little difficulty in making out what Alfie Goode, doubtless in a slurred, drunken way, was saying. But he swore to the very words. Oh, why were you not advising the defence at the trial, Mr. Heavitree? It might have made all the difference.”

Mr. Heavitree sighed. “It might have made some difference, I agree,” he said. “But I think you’re being too optimistic to say all the difference. And I beg you, Miss Unwin, not to start thinking we have only to telegraph this to the Home Secretary for a reprieve to be granted instanter.”

“Yes,” said Miss Unwin sadly. “Yes, I see that you are right.”

“But take heart, do, my dear. We know something, remember. Something hard now. We know Arthur Burch is a liar.”

“But does that advance matters after all?”

“No, not at present. But it does give us a way forward. A narrow and a difficult way, but a way nonetheless.”

“Then let us take it, Mr. Heavitree. Whatever the difficulties.”

Mr. Heavitree shook his head. “Not us, my dear, not us,” he said. “You. You, Miss Unwin.”

“Me? But I thought we had agreed Mr. Burch was your pigeon.”

“Oh, yes. To begin with, he could not have been anything
else. When we needed quietly to find out what we could about the fellow, he would have told more to me than ever to a lady. But now we need to do something altogether different.”