Into the Valley of Death (4 page)

“That is, Mr. Steadman? John Steadman of this parish?”

“Exactly. Now, would you be able to tell me something about him? As the parish beadle, you would know more of him than perhaps anyone here.”

The gross flattery seemed to work. Onto Mr. Sprunge’s solemn cone of a face there came a look of profound thought.

“Yes, madam,” he said at last. “Yes, I consider that I am that man.”

“And?”

“And, madam?”

“And what can you tell me of John Steadman?”

“Ah. Ah, yes.”

More deep consideration. Then a long-drawn breath. “What I shall tell you, madam, will, I truly believe, astonish you.”

Miss Unwin drew herself up. “I am ready to be astonished,” she said.

“Then, madam, I will say this. This and no more. John Steadman, convicted murderer though he be, is a truly good man. A truly good boy he was when I marched him to sing in the choir at church, and a truly good man he has proved ever since he came back to this town of ours from serving Her Majesty the Queen in a military capacity. There, madam.”

Miss Unwin duly put on a display of fine astonishment. Mr. Sprunge appeared gratified. She thanked him then for his assistance and, seeing the spire of the parish church not far distant, set off in the direction of the rectory and the Reverend Dr. Clarke.

Her interviews with him and with old Mrs. Orridge, the midwife, who proved to be a terrible gossip, were longer by a good deal than her encounter with the beadle. But neither did anything to take away from the impression she had formed from pompous Mr. Sprunge.

“Yes,” Dr. Clarke, pink-faced and white-haired, had declared at the end. “Steadman, though he keeps an inn, is as fine a fellow as you will come across in all Oxfordshire. I cannot understand how he can have done such a fearful thing, and only the evidence in court persuades me that he did.”

While Mrs. Orridge, in her way, was as positive. “Oh, little Jack Steadman would knock down a boy in fight like a true ’un, so he would. But in fair fight always, mind you. In fair fight and no hard words after. That was Jack Steadman.”

Miss Unwin hurried back to the Rising Sun after this. Much of this hot July Sunday had gone, and next Friday at eight o’clock in the morning Jack Steadman, the fair fighter, would be led out to the hangman’s noose.

Yet she could find in her mind little notion how she might set about the task she had undertaken. It was all very well for Vilkins to believe she was some sort of magician who had only to look at the facts of a case to be able to put a completely different interpretation on them from everybody else, and the true interpretation at that. It was all very well for indomitable Mrs. Steadman to tell her that her Jack could not have killed a man from behind, and that he himself had declared that he had not done so. And it was all very well for Miss Unwin herself to feel convinced that Jack Steadman had not committed the crime of which an assize court had found him guilty, and for her three witnesses of character to back that belief. Yet the facts remained. And on the facts, she was soon to confirm, there seemed to be no arguing with that jury’s verdict or the response of the Home Secretary to the appeal sent to him.

When she got back to the inn, she ensconced herself in Mrs. Steadman’s neat-as-a-pin sitting-room and there read column after column, first of the local newspaper’s account of the inquest, and then other accounts of the trial itself, which Mrs. Steadman had carefully pasted into the pages of an old account-book.

Evidence had been brought to show that there was no love lost between the landlord of the Rising Sun and Alfred Goode, who had come to Chipping Compton only some two years before his death. There he had set up as a farrier, a trade he had learnt as a cavalry trooper, and had rapidly acquired a reputation for knowing much about the ills and ailments of horses. But he had earned another reputation, too, for charging high and working little. He had as well, the prosecution had not troubled to deny, been widely disliked for being foul-mouthed, ill-tempered, and frequently drunk. More than once Jack Steadman had ordered him out of the Rising Sun. But, out of malice, no doubt, he had persisted in taking his evening beer in its taproom instead of at some other hostelry. And he had spent much of his time there making evil remarks about the landlord and the landlord’s wife.

Then there had been evidence that on the night of his murder he had been good and drunk in the Sun. When Jack Steadman had at last ordered him out, he had shouted from the door, “I’m going now, but don’t forget the night’s not over yet.” And, finally, apart from the evidence of the gamekeeper, who on his regular round had discovered those two bodies in Hanger Wood, one dead, the other unconscious, there had been the evidence of the note found in Jack Steadman’s pocket, a note in Goode’s vouched-for hand saying:
This must be settled once for all If you think you can bamboozle me, think again. Meet me at midnight in the glade in Hanger Wood
.

And all Jack Steadman had had to say in his defence was that he had not shot Alfred Goode, that he had not arranged to meet him in Hanger Wood, that he had no idea how the note had got into his pocket, and that he had no idea what it meant.

He had protested and protested his innocence in this way, with, it seemed to Miss Unwin, reading a little between the lines of the long newspaper reports, a sort of fearful innocence
himself. He had not committed a murder. He would never have committed a murder. He would never have killed a man in the cowardly fashion in which Alfie Goode had been killed. And he had only to say that, loud and clear, to be believed of everyone.

But he had not been believed, and by this time a week hence he would have been two days hanged.

Miss Unwin had only just finished her reading of the newspaper reports pasted into Mrs. Steadman’s old account-book when she heard thumping steps and the clink of dishes and cutlery outside the sitting-room. A moment later Vilkins cheerfully barged her way in with supper on a tray.

“Lawks, Unwin,” she said, seeing the fat book with its pages flapping open, “you ain’t read all that already?”

“Well, yes. I have.”

Vilkins sighed. “It’s a wonder to me ’ow you does it,” she said. “An’ me, what was a blessed babe along o’ you, ’ardly able to make out more than the name of a pub above its door, if the letters is big enough.”

“I was lucky, my dear, to have been placed in a household where the mistress was willing for me to share sometimes in what her own little girl was learning. You know, it all started there.”

“An’ look where it’s finishing, with you a-solving mysteries what were baffling the ’ole o’ the blinking police force.”

“Now, Vilkins, I did not do that.”

“Oh, yes, you did. That time when they suspected you of murder an’ ’igh an’ mighty Mr. Superintendent Heavitree was all set to send you to the Bailey, you soon showed ’im the rights an’ wrongs.”

“Vilkins, it was a lucky stroke only. Or little more than that. I had the advantage of seeing it all from a different point of view.”

“Then what about that other time, when that Mr. Richard was so spoony on—”

“Vilkins. Not another word.”

“All right, all right. I was only tellin’ you what you knows very well for yourself.”

“But I don’t, my dear. Let me tell you something, something that you will hardly want to hear.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Simply, my dear, that I have read every one of these newspaper accounts and I cannot see any gap in all the evidence they say was brought against Mr. Steadman. Not the least gap.”

Vilkins’s face did fall as she heard this. “But, Unwin,” she said, “you’re the only one as could.”

“And there’s little more, I fear, that I can do now. One thing only I am sure about.”

“That Jack Steadman didn’t never do it?”

“Well, that, yes. But one small step beyond, too.”

“Well, step it out for a girl, for ’eaven’s sake.”

“It’s just this: If you look at the whole matter as it were upside-down, you see at once one certain thing.”

“Upside-down? ’Ave I got to stand on me blinkin’ ’ead then?”

“No. No, my dear. You have got to—or rather
I
have got to —turn the whole affair top to bottom in my mind. One must start by saying, not what everyone else has declared, that Jack Steadman must be guilty, but by saying no, if one thing is certain it is that Jack Steadman did not kill Alfred Goode. Then one thing is clear.”

“It ain’t to me,” said Vilkins.

“No? Well, I shall tell you. It is that not only must someone else have killed Alfred Goode, but that that person went to great lengths to make sure that Jack Steadman would die, too.”

“But ’e ain’t dead.”

“Not today he isn’t. But by next Friday morning he will be. Unless I can find—unless you and I, Vilkins dear—can find who is that person who wished both Alfred Goode and Jack
Steadman out of the way. Unless we can find who that is, and prove it.”

“Yeh,” said Vilkins. She stood in thought for a moment, sturdy feet planted wide apart. “Yeh. Well, Unwin, you’ll ’ave to do the thinking. That’s for certain. I ain’t up to it. Not by a mile. So you eat your supper, an’ I’ll get on with ’elping Mrs. Steadman, which is something what I can do and what she needs, poor soul.”

So Vilkins clumped out, and Miss Unwin turned her attention to the chop and the potatoes and the fresh bluey-green sea-kale that awaited her. But she found she had little appetite.

Then, wanting something to drink, she took up the jug of ale Vilkins had brought on the tray, only to find she had forgotten to add a glass.

There was a bell on the table, a little brass shepherdess under whose ample skirt a clapper lurked. But Miss Unwin did not want to demand service at a time when the Rising Sun was in such difficulties. So she set out to see if she could find a tumbler without troubling anybody.

And just as she got down to the foot of the stairs, she saw stepping in at the wide door, fully illuminated by the still strong daylight of July, an unmistakable figure.

It was that of a man she had not known for a very long period. But when she had had dealings with him, they had been so vital to her well-being, to her life even, that his face, his bearing, and everything about Kim had been impressed on her mind for ever.

Had she encountered him in a London street, as she might have expected possibly to happen, she would have had no hesitation in taking the first turning she could so as to avoid coming face-to-face with him. But his appearance here, miles and miles from the metropolis, was so astonishing to her that before she could stop herself, she came out with his name.

“Mr. Superintendent Heavitree.”

He looked up at the sound of her voice, and it was at once apparent that he, too, had recognised her.

“Miss Unwin. Good gracious me. What on earth brings you to these parts?”

Miss Unwin stepped off the last tread of the stairs and advanced a little along the passageway. Now that she had met the man who once had tried to persuade her to confess to a murder she had not committed, she was not going to show any fear of him, nor any dislike.

“Why, Mr. Superintendent,” she answered, “I might ask the same question of you. What on earth brings you to the town of Chipping Compton?”

Her adversary of old looked little different from the comfortable tweed-clad yet disconcertingly shrewd figure she had known, beyond having replaced the waistcoat with the heavy watch-chain across it, which she had once had to contemplate across a police-cell table, with one in shepherd’s plaid without a watch-chain. He gave her now a friendly smile.

“Your question is easily enough answered,” he said. “I am here because I am no longer Mr. Superintendent, but only plain Mr. Heavitree, retired from the Metropolitan Police and all its cares, and living with my sister in a little cottage not two miles from here.”

“So you are not visiting the town in connection with the murder the landlord here is supposed to have committed? I had not really supposed you were, indeed. The matter is considered closed by one and all.”

Mr. Heavitree, lately Superintendent, gave her one of the swift, calculating glances she remembered well as emerging from his bluffly genial exterior.

“You do not seem quite to share that universal opinion, Miss Unwin,” he said. “Any more than once upon a time you shared the opinion of us all that you were a murderess.”

“You are right, sir. I do not share that opinion. But do I
gather that you are acquainted with the facts of the matter and believe like all the rest that Mr. Steadman is guilty?”

“Well, Miss Unwin, I will not disguise from you that, the affair having taken place almost on my doorstep as you might say, I did interest myself in it a little. I attended the inquest and I read some accounts of the trial.”

“And you agree with the verdict there?”

“Yes. Yes, I have to say it. I think I hardly ever saw evidence so strong.”

“But you have been to this house before? You know Mr. Steadman?”

“Why, no. No, I did not know him, and, as it so happens, I have never set foot here till this moment. But this evening I had some business in the town for my sister, and feeling thirsty I thought I would step in here, forgetting indeed that this was the inn where that murderer was landlord. It is, if I say it, a most extraordinary kind of coincidence that we two should have met again in this way.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, it is,” Miss Unwin said.

And a thought that owed nothing to that logical side of her mind abruptly entered her head then. A wild thought owing much more to mysterious intuition.

“Mr. Heavitree,” she said, “might I ask a particular favour of you?”

“I owe you a great deal, Miss Unwin, as you know.”

“Then may I ask you to spare some few minutes to meet Jack Steadman’s wife? To meet her, to ask her about that business, and to tell me afterwards whether you still believe Mr. Steadman is a murderer.”

Ex-Superintendent Heavitree looked plainly astonished. For several seconds he stood where he was, blank-faced.

“I have said, Miss Unwin,” he pronounced at last, “that I owed you much. But I must confess I did not expect to be asked to do what you have asked me by way of a favour. Yet ask you have, and I will do as you wish.”