Into the Valley of Death (21 page)

Vilkins’s round face looked comically woebegone. “Well, all right,” she said, “if you must you must. But I’m coming with you. That feller’ll be dangerous. Mad killing dangerous.”

“And I shall be prepared, my dear.”

“Oh, Unwin, it ain’t enough to be prepared. If you was going into a cage at the Zoo Gardens with a wild tiger, what good would it do you to be prepared?”

“Much more good than not to be prepared,” Miss Unwin answered with her accustomed logic.

“Oh, don’t give me that. I’m a-coming with you, I tell you.”

“No, my dear, that would never do. Just think how it would seem to the Chief Constable if he found the female detective he has been persuaded, with great difficulty, to trust had come to their rendezvous with a housemaid beside her for protection.”

“Don’t care what he’d say,” Vilkins answered. “I’d give ’im as good as ’e gave me. I dare swear I’d be better protection for you, Unwin, than one o’ that man’s policemen, yokels that they are. Why, you can’t understan’ more’n one word in a dozen what they says.”

Miss Unwin smiled, little though she felt light-hearted. “No, my dear,” she said, “I must go to that cottage tonight on my own. But there is one precaution I should like to take, one thing you can do for me.”

“What’s that, then?” Vilkins asked suspiciously.

It took Miss Unwin more than a little time to persuade her childhood friend and companion in adversity that what she proposed was, in fact, the only course open to her. But at last she succeeded.

When the long summer’s day at last began to draw to its end, it was without anyone to accompany her that Miss Unwin set out from the Rising Sun for the rendezvous that would, she hoped with all her strength, lead to the saving of poor little Mrs. Steadman’s husband. A deep-orange moon was beginning to rise as she tramped along, her light-grey alpaca dress covered with a large black shawl borrowed from the landlady.

She had wondered whether she should make an attempt to arm herself, if only with that kitchen knife with which Mrs. Steadman had threatened blustering, bouncing Betsey. But in the end she had come to the conclusion that no weapon would protect her if she was not quick enough when the time came.

Filled though she was with determination, she could not help slowing her steps as she approached the wide-spreading oak-tree where, the boy with the tax-cart had told her, the gallows had once stood. And at the edge of the patch of deep shadow beneath the tree, she found she had actually faltered to a complete halt.

Come, she told herself, I must not be ridiculous. There will be worse things to face by far before the night is out than a patch of darkness in the empty countryside.

She took a breath and marched forward.

From out of the deepest shadow a figure emerged, tall, menacing.

Miss Unwin gasped with fright.

“Miss Unwin, forgive me.”

It was the familiar voice of Major Charteris, if unfamiliarly apologetic.

“I am sorry, miss, if I startled you. I thought it best to catch you at the lane-end rather than attempt to get into the cottage myself and wait for you there.”

“Yes, you were quite right, sir,” Miss Unwin answered, endeavouring to conceal her panting breath. “I ought to have suggested this afternoon that we met somewhere about here.”

“Well, well, no harm done, eh?”

“None at all, sir. And let me congratulate you, while there is an opportunity, since I believe we should remain strictly silent so long as we are inside the house, on the skill your Inspector Whatmough has shown in concealing his ambush party. I saw not the least sign of them as I approached. I suppose they are indeed in place?”

The Major gave a grunt of a laugh. “Oh, yes,” he said. “You can rely on an Army man to see that the military dispositions are correct. You need have no fear there. And may I congratulate you in having looked about you so carefully. If I had you under my command, I’d make a policeman of you yet.”

Miss Unwin ignored the compliment. In a whisper she offered a last few suggestions for their vigil, and then they set off up the lane together. In silence.

They entered the cottage’s neglected garden and, picking their way through the tall weeds and spiky ragged gooseberry bushes there, crept over to the door. The pungent smell of the unpicked fruit came sharply to Miss Unwin’s nostrils.

“Shall we go in, then?” the Major murmured, pushing open the unlocked door.

Miss Unwin peered into the blackness inside, thick and forbidding. However, the kitchen door was half open, and through the low window on the far side of the dark room—it was where they had agreed to wait in hiding—the rising moon was casting some faint light.

Miss Unwin reasoned that, once they had grown accustomed to the gloom, they should be able to see well enough, even with the kitchen door closed.

She stepped forward and entered the room. The Major, coming in closely behind her, turned and carefully shut the rickety door.

In the darkness Miss Unwin became aware of the odour of stale food. She thought, too, that she could distinguish the sharper smell of busy mice.

She advanced quickly but cautiously farther in, making for the big table where that breakfast had been laid which had enabled her to show that Arthur Burch’s death was no suicide.

Then from behind her, appallingly loud in the thick silence, came Major Charteris’s barking voice.

“Right, then, you interfering bitch.”

She whirled round to face him, aware at once that standing between him and the low moonlit window she must be outlined against the garden beyond.

In his hand she saw the glint of metal. A pistol.

But she had been ready for this or something like it, ever since she had invented for the Major’s benefit a mysterious “object” he might have dropped in the cottage when he had come to kill ready-to-blab Arthur Burch.

She flung herself forward facedown towards the shelter of the clumsy old table.

And as she did so two things happened over beside the door. With a roar of sound in the low-ceilinged room Major Charteris fired his pistol. Its noise was so deafening that for a moment Miss Unwin was unable to tell whether she had been hit or not.

At the same time she had caught just a glimpse as she hurled herself down of the flash of a larger, more shining piece of metal than the Major’s pistol. And, following closely on the confined thunder of the shot, there came a yelp of pain.

Then a new voice broke in.

“Stand where you are. One move and my sword runs you through.”

It was the voice, Miss Unwin recognised with flooding relief, of old General Pastell. Old, but active and steely-determined still.

“Are you safe, Miss Unwin?” he asked as soon as it became clear that the man who had attempted to murder her was not going to do anything other than stay where he was, silent and baffled.

Miss Unwin considered.

She was bruised and sore, she knew. She could not have flung herself down on the stone-flagged floor so violently without suffering bruises. But, no, she was aware of no wound from the bullet that must have whistled past her.

“Yes, sir,” she answered the General. “No harm done, I believe.”

“You’ll find matches and a candle on the table, then.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Miss Unwin eased herself painfully out of her hiding-place and pushed herself to her feet. She did indeed feel sore from knee to forehead, but no worse. She swept a hand over the surface of the table until it came in contact with a metal candle-holder. In it she found a box of lucifers. She fumbled with them for a little and at last produced a flare of light. She put it hastily to the wick of the candle.

By the swiftly growing flame, she saw the two men standing beside the door. General Pastell, though dressed in a suit of country tweeds and with a deerstalker hat on his head, still looked every inch the soldier. It was a picture that the heavy sabre in his right hand, its point held steadily at his captive’s neck, did nothing to detract from. But Major Charteris, despite his fierce military moustaches, no longer resembled the soldier he had always portrayed himself as. Even his right arm hanging loosely by his side and softly dripping blood from the slash the General had given him onto the pistol
lying at his feet did nothing to make him look like the once-wounded hero of the Battle of the Alma.

As the candlelight fully established itself, General Pastell turned for a moment towards Miss Unwin.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “you look little the worse for all that.”

“No, sir, I believe I am none the worse.”

But then abruptly she felt the need to reach forward and steady herself by holding firmly onto the table in front of her.

The General saw the sudden movement.

“Touch of faintness, eh?” he said reassuringly. “Don’t you mind it, my dear. I felt exactly the same when I dismounted after that charge they’re always talking about.”

Miss Unwin’s spirits perked up. “The Light Brigade?” she asked. “You were in the Charge?”

“Well, yes, I was. Make too much of it all nowadays. That nonsense of a poem by that fellow. I tell you, I was damned— I beg your pardon, ma’am. I was extremely glad to find I had ridden out of it all more or less unscathed.”

“And did you—forgive me, I ought to know this—did Her Majesty confer any award on you?”

“Hm. You mean the Victoria Cross, like our friend here? No, I did nothing to deserve anything like that. Can’t understand why a fellow who had should take to behaving as he’s done.”

“I think I can give you an answer to that, sir,” Miss Unwin said. “Indeed, if I am not mistaken, that Victoria Cross lies at the bottom of the whole of this business.”

She then saw Major Charteris for one moment look up. And the glance that he gave her was as full of hatred as any she had ever seen.

“So you know,” he spat out. “You know why I had to kill Goode, and why I had to get rid of Steadman, too.”

“Yes,” said Miss Unwin, “I think I have found out most of it.” She turned to General Pastell. “General,” she said, “you heard those words from Major Charteris. Are they enough to
justify you as a magistrate telegraphing the Home Secretary?”

“They are indeed, my dear,” the old man said. “And we’d best be off to see about it. I’ve got a groom on my best hunter waiting not far from the top of the lane, and I’ll write him a message to take to Chipping Compton in two minutes.”

“Then let’s go, for heaven’s sake,” Miss Unwin said, prey suddenly to a dozen fantastic fears of obstacles rising up in their way.

But nothing, in fact, hindered their progress. The General made Major Charteris walk in front, the bare sabre at his back. Miss Unwin brought up the rear, and their strange little procession soon reached Gallows Corner, where the General gave a stentorian shout in the darkness.

Two minutes later his groom appeared, leading the fine hunter and with a lit lantern in his other hand. By it the General wrote out his message, and in a very short time the groom was galloping away with it and with instructions to rouse Inspector Whatmough, still ignorant of the whole affair, and get him to come with a party of men to effect an arrest.

Then they settled down on the grassy bank at the roadside to wait.

“Tell me,” the General said, after some minutes of silence, “what was that you were saying, Miss Unwin, about Charteris’s V.C. being at the bottom of it all? You mentioned nothing of the sort in the letter you sent me by Vilkins asking me to witness this business.”

“No, sir, I doubted whether you would believe me. Indeed, I even doubted whether you would agree to come and witness the attempt on my life that I had to bring about if I was to get enough proof of John Steadman’s innocence.”

“Well, that you have, my dear, no doubt about it. And in another few minutes my telegraph message to Whitehall will be on its way. But the Victoria Cross. What do you mean about that?”

“Just this, sir. And I think now that what was little more than a guess on my part will prove after all to be the truth. All along, when I thought about that terrible trick that was played on John Steadman, I was unable to understand how it could be that he had been involved, unknowingly, in the blackmail which I was certain Alfie Goode had practised.”

“I follow so far.”

“Well, sir, it occurred to me eventually that all three persons in the affair might well have been soldiers together on some occasion or at some place in particular. In a manner which I prefer not to have to tell you about I was able to— shall we say?—consult files from the War Office, and—”

“That clever hussy, Mary Vilkins,” the General interrupted. “She shall be rewarded, the minx, if guineas can do it.”

“You know what I asked her to do, then, sir?”

“Got it out of her, didn’t I, when she brought me your letter.” The General chuckled.

“Well, it turned out,” Miss Unwin went on, “that I was right. When I looked at that list of your military guests at the ball with the War Office clerk’s notes on it, I saw straightaway that Major Charteris had been wounded at the Battle of the Alma. I knew, too, that Corporal Steadman had been in action there and, indeed, from Mrs. Steadman, that he, too, had been badly wounded and had been missing for a long period afterwards. And Goode was in the Crimea at the time. Now, I was looking for something that would have given that unpleasant person his opportunity. I didn’t think any ordinary peccadillo of military life abroad would provide anything grave enough, and so it occurred to me that perhaps Major Charteris’s V.C. had not been properly earned in that smoke-shrouded battle at the crossing of the River Alma.”

“Oh, yes, confusion all round there. Remember it well. The Russians had set a village on fire on our left, put straw in the houses, too, I believe. You couldn’t see more than five yards in front of you in places. So in that famous muddle Charteris
here never captured the Russian twelve-pounder he was credited with, eh? Never turned it against them? Is that what you think, Miss Unwin?”

But Miss Unwin was not allowed to answer. The wounded man broke in, his voice harsh with bitterness.

“Yes, damn it, the woman guessed it all. No, I never captured that gun. It was Steadman, Corporal Steadman, who did that. What I did was to run blubbering towards the enemy like a schoolchild, ready to give myself up as a prisoner if only I could get some peace.”