Into the Valley of Death (17 page)

Yet perhaps Mr. Heavitree would have news about this, too.

So it was with a bound of delight that, only at the fourth time she had jumped to her feet and hurried to the window, she saw the familiar trap coming down the road.

It was not, however, till she had been looking at it for perhaps half a minute that she realised there was something different about it. The figure in the driving seat was not Mr. Heavitree’s. In place of the old detective’s tweed suit and brown billycock hat, the driver wore, she saw now, the smock of a countryman and had on his head an old straw.

She pushed herself farther out the window and looked hard at the approaching vehicle. But there could be no doubt. It was the one in which she had travelled that morning to Farmer Burch’s cottage. Painted a dark green, like many another trap of its sort, its owner had for some reason or another added a band of bright orange all round its top. She had thought, that morning, that the colour was unpleasantly garish.

So why was this other man driving it? And where was Mr. Heavitree?

With hardly a rapid excuse to Mrs. Steadman, she left her
place at the window, ran downstairs and, bonnetless, out into the road.

The trap was just drawing abreast of the inn. When its driver saw her, he brought the horse—Yes, Miss Unwin thought, it is just the chestnut we had—to a halt.

“Would you be a Miss Unwin?” he asked in a twanging Oxfordshire accent, taking out of his mouth the clay pipe he had been sucking at.

“Yes, I am Miss Unwin. But Mr. Heavitree, where is he? Has anything happened to him?”

“Why, yes, you’ve the right on that,” the man answered, the slowness of his speech filling her with irritation.

“What? What, for heaven’s sake, has happened?”

“Why, he be hurt.”

“Hurt? Hurt? How? Is he seriously injured? He’s not dead, is he?”

“Oh, ah, no. Not dead. No, not dead at all. The surgeon do be saying as he’ll be on his feet again come a fortnight.”

“On his feet? In a fortnight? Whatever has happened? For heaven’s sake, tell me everything.”

“He be in a fight,” the man said, slow as ever. “Leastways, he be as well knocked about as if he been.”

“A fight? Who knocked him about?”

“Ah, that’s easy to tell. It were that Captain Brackham, none other.”

Miss Unwin felt she was beginning to understand. She went up to the trap and stood holding its orange-painted side.

“Now,” she said, “tell me everything. Take your time, but tell me every single thing you know about it all.”

“Ah.” The man in the smock leant away to have a healthy spit over the far side of the trap. “It were like this,” he said. “Mr. Heavitree, for such I understand be the gentleman’s name, came to the inn where I sometimes gives a hand in the stable, the Fox and Hounds. He were asking all sorts of questions, mostly about that Mrs. De Lyall up at the Grange. And
then someone goes and tells him if he wants to know anything about her, he might as well ask Captain Brackham who’s been staying at the Fox for many a week and knows that Mrs. De Lyall well. Only, they say, he’d better stir hisself, since the Captain be just leaving, and him in a blessed hurry, too.”

“Leaving?” Miss Unwin was unable to stop herself exclaiming.

“Now, weren’t I telling you just that? Leaving, I said, leaving, and in a fine hurry. And so this Mr. Heavitree o’ yourn goes traipsing round to the yard where the Captain be just getting into his carriage, one o’ they fast ’uns with a pair o’ fine horses in the shafts. A curridgle, I think they calls ’em.”

“A curricle, a curricle.”

“Well, if that’s how you likes to say it. But as I was a-telling you, only you broke in, into this curridgle the Captain was getting, and Mr. Heavitree comes up to him like and says as he wants a word. But Captain he bain’t ready to give him a word, it seems, and what you might call a argumenty broke out. Then, afore you knows it, the Captain was a-striking out at your friend and left him on the ground with a mort o’ broken ribs, so they say, and summat worse as well.”

“But the surgeon thinks he will be up in a fortnight?”

“Oh, aye. He bain’t hurt so very bad, though he do be fallen into insenserberrity now. But afore he went, he rose up and begged that they let a Miss Unwin o’ the Rising Sun in Compton know. And so here be I, sent all this way for ’ee, and few thanks I get.”

“No, no,” Miss Unwin assured him. “I do thank you. I thank you indeed. I have not my purse by me, but if you will wait …”

Her effusiveness changed the old countryman’s attitude.

“No, no. I want no money for a Chrissen act,” he said. “And besides, I’m to be paid proper for a-taking the trap back to where it was hired. So I’ll bid ’ee good day.”

And with a cheerful crack of his whip the fellow turned the trap and made off up the road.

Miss Unwin went back towards the inn. But, walking slowly and thoughtfully in the warm afternoon sun, she had not reached its doorway when her attention was caught by the sounds of horses’ hooves beating a rapid tattoo on the dusty surface of the road behind her.

Had the old countryman forgotten some important message from Mr. Heavitree?

She turned, realising as she did so that the sound of the hooves had been much louder and faster than those of the horse in the hired trap.

And, coming in a cloud of rising dust towards her, she saw, once again, Mrs. De Lyall’s canary-yellow phaeton with its two tall, stone-faced footmen up on the back. They had not come at nightfall yesterday. Were they here to do their vicious work now?

Mrs. De Lyall’s two fine roans were pulled up in a rearing halt, sending the dust of the road rising in a swirling cloud. Mrs. De Lyall’s coachman sat in his high seat, solid as a pillar of stone, as if the wild canter and the sudden dramatic halt had been none of his doing. Mrs. De Lyall’s two tall, black-browed footmen stood behind her as she sat in the open phaeton, still as a pair of carefully matched statues apparently altogether oblivious of Miss Unwin outside the Rising Sun with the dust slowly settling on her bonnetless head.

Mrs. De Lyall raised her veil. “So, my madam,” she said without preliminary, “I find you still in the town.”

“I have business here,” Miss Unwin answered, with equal curtness.

Mrs. De Lyall’s eyes flashed. “Yes,” she said, “and it is business that I do not care to have disturbing myself and my neighbours.”

“I am sorry for that. But when it is a question of a man’s life, then if there is disturbance, it must be endured. No matter by whom.”

An angry flush darkened the rouge on Mrs. De Lyall’s cheeks.

“Yesterday,” she said, “I took the trouble to warn you, my fine miss, just what would happen to you if you persisted in staying here.”

“You did. And night fell. And I am here still.” Miss Unwin drew herself up and looked straight at her antagonist in the carriage.

“You know, do you not, that I have only to nod my head
and those two fellows at my back will be down on the ground and dealing with you in an instant.”

“I think not.”

“You do? Why, I have half a mind to show you otherwise.”

“In a public road? Ordering your servants to disturb the Queen’s peace?”

“Yes, madam. That. Do you think that in the county here any policeman would dare interfere, when I am acting in the interests of all my neighbours, magistrates and gentlemen?”

Mrs. Unwin thought then that Mrs. De Lyall’s threats, extravagant though they seemed, might not be altogether airy nothings. The lady might be looked down on by her gentlemanly neighbours, but there could scarcely be one of them not susceptible to her flaunted beauty. She herself had seen as much at General Pastell’s ball. She had seen a man as kindly and correct as the General himself succumbing to those lures.

But she could not back down now.

“If need be, madam,” she said, as loudly and clearly as she could make herself speak, “I shall have to put your threats— for that is what they are—to the test.”

“You refuse to pack your bags and go?”

“I have said I have business in the town, and in the neighbourhood. Business on which a man’s life depends. I am not going to leave at your behest.”

Mrs. De Lyall was positively dark with anger now under the careful layer of rouge.

“Not at my behest, you insolent creature?” she said. “Then let us see whether you will go at the behest of the authorities. Heaven knows, there is little love lost indeed between myself and Major Charteris, the Chief Constable of the county. But I think, were I to go to him, he would have no difficulty in choosing between a landowner and a slut from London.”

That “slut” hurt Miss Unwin. When, later, she thought about the encounter, she realised that it was the tiny sliver of truth in the jibe that had made her momentarily so furious
that she had been unable to speak. Certainly she was no slut, nor had she any inclination to behave as a slut. But she knew that many girls brought up as she had been, in the very lowest reaches of society, were left with no choice but to take to the life of a slut so as to have bread to eat. The gifts she herself had inherited from either one or other of her unknown parents or perhaps from both—her sense of logic, her intelligence, and her determined ambition—had saved her from that life. But she felt that there but for the grace of God she went. And the word hit her like a whip stroke.

Yet she forced herself to recover from it.

“Very well, madam,” she said. “If going to the Chief Constable is what you have a mind to do, then do it. And I will trust that I in my turn shall be able to persuade the gentleman to act as justice dictates.”

“Coachman, drive on.”

Miss Unwin heard the words with an inner gratitude for the deliverance they brought. She found it hard not to let it appear at once on her face. But not a trace of it did she allow to surface until the canary-yellow phaeton was well up at the other end of the road. Then she let the tears she had forced back break out, careless of who might see her.

At last, limp with exhaustion, she managed to get back inside the inn.

In the cool darkness she stood, finally recovering herself. Taking a long deep breath, she forced her good logical mind to go over every word and gesture of that upsetting incident. And, as at last she set foot on the stairs to go up to Mrs. Steadman, she came to a decision.

She would have to go very soon to Major Charteris. It was necessary now to confront him face-to-face.

She wished with all her heart that she had old Mr. Heavitree there to consult. Now, if ever, she needed his experience. But there was no time to waste in hiring a conveyance and making the long journey to the wretched public house
near Mrs. De Lyall’s mansion in the hope that the old detective might have regained consciousness.

And, besides, firm though she was in her decision not to be frightened away by Mrs. De Lyall’s threats, it would be the height of foolishness, she felt, deliberately to go to within a short distance of where she lived. Those two tall footmen had remained statue-still during the angry confrontation down in the road outside. But they could easily have been unleashed, and if they had been, she had little doubt they would have inflicted sharp physical harm.

So, instead of continuing to sit with Mrs. Steadman and wait for the slender chance of Vilkins’s return with some useful indications from the War Office clerks, she told the landlady that she was sorry but would have to leave her for a while.

Then she took her bonnet and her parasol and, following Mrs. Steadman’s directions, hired at the railway station a fly to take her to Major Charteris’s house.

Sitting in the decrepit vehicle, which was all that was to be had, with an equally decrepit horse and an even more decrepit fly-man, she had plenty of time to ponder what she would say to the Major when she met him again.

She hoped that her swift deduction of the morning about the manner of Arthur Burch’s death would stand her in good stead. The Chief Constable, surely, must acknowledge that she was not the simple, silly woman he had put her down as when he had first stepped into the death chamber at the farm. But time had passed since then, and he would perhaps have begun to discount the startling proof she had been able to give that Arthur Burch’s death was murder.

So, now would the Major treat her, not altogether as a helpless female, but as someone not worthy of much consideration?

The wretched horse jogged on along the road, straggling across the slope of the Valley of Death, came to a stop, seized with feeble teeth a tussock of grass from the roadside, was
half-heartedly cursed by the fly-man, and at last slowly dragged the fly on its way once more.

No, Miss Unwin decided, she would not say a word to the Chief Constable about Mrs. De Lyall and her threat. To do so would seem to show herself as weak as Major Charteris, that Tartar hero, would expect her to be. Instead she would confine her conversation with him strictly to Arthur Burch’s murder. Tell him she must now that she was here to find who had killed Alfie Goode. But beyond that she would not go.

The fly suddenly dipped and swerved. Its ancient horse had attempted to shy, startled by a cock pheasant whirring up from under the wayside hedge.

Miss Unwin, recovering, looked at the watch pinned to her dress and wondered how much longer the journey would take. Major Charteris lived, so Mrs. Steadman had said, in a new house he had built for himself when he had gained his present office after retiring from the Army. The small estate that went with it incorporated at its edge Arthur Burch’s ill-kept farm and cottage. Thus, it should not be all that far from Chipping Compton, not if she herself had been able to walk to the cottage.

So why was this journey, even with the wreck of a horse, taking so long?

As if in answer to her unspoken question, the fly-man turned in his seat, pointed with his whip—Miss Unwin saw, with amusement, that even this was a hopelessly frayed affair —and broke into surly speech.

“That be the house, through them trees. Right at the top of the hill. Must you go all the way?”

Miss Unwin was tempted to answer that she had already agreed to the fare and should be taken to her destination to the last yard. But the thought of getting out of the dilapidated vehicle and being free to go at her own determined pace kept her silent.