Into the Valley of Death (12 page)

“But I wonder if you can guess what I want you to do about this idea of mine?”

Vilkins lifted a soapy hand and scratched vigorously at her frilled cap. “Can’t,” she said.

“Well, I want you to go up to London and make inquiries at the War Office.”

“Eh? You gone out o’ your mind?”

“No, dear, I don’t think I have. You see, we’re in a hurry, a deadly hurry. If we weren’t, I might try taking this idea of mine to the Chief Constable and trying to persuade him that it was his duty at least to explore the possibility. But I should never succeed in doing that in the few days we have left.”

“I should say you wouldn’t. I’ve ’eard about that Major Charteris. Regular fire-eater ’e is.”

“Yes, I have heard as much, too. But if there is no chance of going to the top at the War Office—and that institution wears
altogether too much of a thick brass helmet on its head to pay any attention to a mere governess—there is still what you might call the soft underside.”

“Clerks,” said Vilkins.

“Clerks indeed, my dear. Clerks who go for a drink after they have finished their copying duties for the day, or who go out at their lunch hour. Clerks who’ll talk to a girl who knows how to be friendly.”

“Which,” said Vilkins, “is yours truly.”

She put her hands behind her back and untied the strings of her big sacking apron.

It did not take Vilkins long to put a few clothes into a basket while Miss Unwin went to Mrs. Steadman and explained why she was going to deprive her of the help General Pastell had so kindly sent to her. The two of them reached the station in good time for the midday train to London.

On the platform, Miss Unwin gave her deputy investigator final instructions.

“Vilkins, dear, are you sure you can remember every name on that list?”

She had handed Vilkins the list of names that the housekeeper at the Hall had given her and had carefully read it to her three times over.

“Oh, yes, Unwin. I’ll remember, don’t you fret. Not knowing ’ow to read’s a great ’elp, you know. An’ besides, I
can
read, a bit.”

“Well, if you are sure …”

Miss Unwin thought that, despite her friend’s somewhat muddled logic, there was a good deal of truth in what she had said. People who could not read often had remarkable memories. Vilkins was quite likely to have been able to commit to mind all the names and ranks of the officers who had attended General Pastell’s ball. Among them, since “the whole county” had been invited, there ought to be the man who had killed Alfie Goode and would have killed Jack Steadman on Friday morning.

“And you’ll do it all as quickly as ever you can?”

“I told you already, didn’t I? I don’t want to see poor Mrs.
Steadman the morning ’er Jack’s topped, no more than what you do.”

“Yes, yes. You’re quite right, dear. It’s only that time is so short, and I hate having to put such a difficult task into your hands. But I cannot leave Chipping Compton. Mr. Heavitree and I have to play out our comedy with Arthur Burch tonight.”

“No, I knows that, Unwin, and you can trust— Oh, gorblimey! ’Ere’s the blessed train.”

Round a curve in the gleaming rails there came, snorting and grinding, the express that in the space of less than two hours would take Vilkins to the metropolis and her meetings with copying clerks from the War Office.

“Goodbye, dear. Goodbye and the best of luck,” Miss Unwin said as the steam monster came to a halt.

She bundled Vilkins into a third-class carriage—she had offered her a second-class ticket, but Vilkins would have none of it—and saw her safely place her basket on the rack above her seat. The station porter came along the platform cheerfully banging closed any open doors. The train guard blew his whistle and waved his green flag. The wheels of the long express began slowly to turn, and the great monster was off on its journey.

When it comes back, Miss Unwin thought, will it bring Vilkins triumphant with some link between Corporal Jack Steadman and one of the military gentlemen at General Pastell’s ball? Will she find one? Or will she have to return defeated?

She herself left the station and set off at once down into the valley in the direction of the Hall. Perhaps there was nothing to be gained from finding out about General Pastell’s great rival, General Bickerstaffe. But she must not leave anything undone that might lead to the hard evidence that would free Jack Steadman. Phemy Pastell’s gossip was the best opening still left to her.

She pondered, as she made her way along between the
dense banks of white-headed cow parsley on either side of the lane, how she was going to get to see Phemy. After the ball had ended, she had been given the wages due to her and had been in two minds about accepting money for work she had hated having to go back to doing.

So she had no excuse for presenting herself at the Hall a second time. There was even some risk of having Mrs. Perker discover that General Pastell was not, after all, the person who had employed the services of a phantom inquiry agency.

But when she got to the gates she saw that her worry had been needless. Some twenty yards inside the grounds with their expanse of trim lawns there was a cedar of Lebanon, a huge spreading tree, dark green and still in the hot midday air. And, perched on one of its thick branches some fifteen feet above the ground, happily chewing at an apple and swinging her legs with scant regard for ladylike deportment, was Miss Euphemia Pastell.

Miss Unwin waved her parasol.

“Half a min’,” Phemy yelled.

The apple core described a graceful parabola in the air. Phemy rose to her feet, launched herself, caught hold of a branch some five feet farther down, swung again, caught hold of another, swung once more, and landed with a thump that seemed to shake the sun-baked earth at the tree’s foot. She shook herself once and came bounding over the grass.

She let herself through the wicket in the tall ironwork of the gates and came up to Miss Unwin.

“We’d better go for a walk if we want to talk secrets,” she said. “If I stay in the grounds as I’m meant to, somebody’s bound to come nosey-parkering.”

“But won’t you be missed? I don’t like to—”

“Oh, pooh. If you never take risks, you never take fences. That’s what Grandpapa says when he’s off hunting, and so I don’t jolly well see why I shouldn’t take a risk or two myself.”

Miss Unwin, the governess away in London, might have
had an answer to that. Miss Unwin, trying to save innocent Jack Steadman’s life, kept her mouth shut.

When they were well out of sight of the lodge-keeper sitting out in the sun in her garden shelling peas, she wasted no time in asking Phemy what she wanted to know.

“Tell me about General Bickerstaffe,” she said. “Tell me everything you’ve heard, no matter from whom.”

“Oh, well,” Phemy answered, “I know I oughtn’t to discuss my elders and betters with the grooms and the gardeners and any others of the servants who aren’t beastly starchy. But I can’t help it when what they say’s so interesting, can I? And now meeting you shows I was quite right all the time.”

“If something you have learnt helps save Mr. Steadman,” Miss Unwin answered, “you can feel that you’ve done right as long as you live.”

“Well, then, old Billy Bickerstaffe. Let me see. First off, of course, he’s had a quarrel with Grandpapa that began years and years ago, right after the war in the Crimea.”

“Is that really true now? It doesn’t seem to have prevented your grandfather inviting General Bickerstaffe to his ball.”

“No, I’m not telling a bouncer, really. Grandpapa would never refuse old Billy an invitation. He couldn’t. Not as a gentleman.”

“Very well, I think I understand that. But what was this quarrel about?”

“Oh, only over what’s the proper way of being a soldier. Grandpapa believes you shouldn’t fight until you’re made to, and old Billy always wanted to make the enemy do something that let him charge with his Heavy Brigade.”

“I see.”

Miss Unwin felt disappointed. Military theory was hardly going to provide anything that made General Bickerstaffe a victim for Alfie Goode’s extortion.

“And then, oh, lots of other things,” Phemy went blithely on. “I mean, old Billy was always having the troopers flogged and things like that, and Grandpapa always says they have a
hard enough life anyway without being punished for the least thing.”

Was there something there? Miss Unwin wondered. Had General Bickerstaffe once ordered Corporal Steadman to be flogged?

“Tell me,” she said abruptly. “Your grandfather befriended Mr. Steadman. Do you remember what regiment he was in when he was a soldier?”

“Oh, yes. Grandpapa said such a lot about Mr. Steadman when they found him there in Hanger Wood like that. He wasn’t a cavalry trooper at all, so Grandpapa was never his officer. He just got to know about him and that he had a splendid record. He was Ox and Bucks.”

“Ox and Bucks?” asked Miss Unwin, who, however much she knew of history and geography, was no military expert.

“The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. It’s a jolly good regiment, Grandpapa says, even if it isn’t cavalry.”

“I see. And Bill—General Bickerstaffe, of course, was a cavalry officer, in the Heavy Brigade.”

“Yes. And I think what really started the trouble between him and Grandpapa was that old Billy was furious all those years ago because the Light Brigade got all that glory in the Crimea. You know, having a poem written about them and everything.
When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made!”

“Yes,” said Miss Unwin,” I know. Into the Valley of Death.”

“Oh, stars, yes. I never thought of that. You know what everybody round here, except the gentry, of course, calls where we’re walking now?”

“Yes, indeed. The Valley of Death.”

Phemy stopped their stroll. She looked suddenly pale.

“You don’t think …” she said.

“No. Nonsense. Utter nonsense,” Miss Unwin replied.

But she could not prevent herself remembering Mrs. De Lyall’s two burly, stony-faced footmen up on the back of her
carriage. Mrs. De Lyall had spoken only of rough treatment. But already one man had been killed to preserve the secret of the Valley of Death and another man was only hours away from dying, too. Was a similar fate awaiting her if she failed to leave the place by nightfall?

Then she saw that Phemy’s face, which was not as clean as it might have been, was turning from pale to fiery red.

“No,” she said to her firmly. “Any idea like that’s just bosh, you know. Plain bosh. And now, what’s my assistant detective got to tell me about General Bickerstaffe and Mrs. De Lyall?”

The appeal worked. Phemy’s face resumed its normal healthy colour, and she set out along the lane once more.

“Well, he’s spoony on her, of course,” she said. “I think everybody round here knows that. Even Grandpapa. Even Mrs. Perker.”

Miss Unwin hesitated before she put her next question. “And is …?” And does …?”

“If you mean, does he commit adultery with—”

“Oh, Phemy.”

“Well, it’s in the Bible, isn’t it? So I suppose I’d be wicked, really, if I
didn’t
know about it.”

“Well, all right.”

“A little bird tells me the answer actually is: Probably not.”

“Little birds,” Miss Unwin broke in sharply, the governess once more, “are generally more inventive than veracious.”

Phemy looked at her curiously. But she was too keen to be the reliable detective’s assistant to question this change.

“Well,” she said, “really the bird was Fred, the stableboy. He told me when we were discussing it one day that you can never be certain sure with a thing like that, not unless you—”

“Phemy, that will do.”

“Well, I thought a female detective wouldn’t blush over just something like that.”

“A female detective can be a lady, too.”

“Oh, now you’re the one talking bosh.”

After which they walked along in silence. Miss Unwin was
thoughtful. A female detective could not, of course, be a lady. But on the other hand, if it was necessary in order to save the life of an innocent man to behave like a female detective, then that was what she was going to do. Lady or no lady.

“All right,” she said at last, “tell me what your Fred thinks is the truth of the matter.”

“Well,” Phemy replied with a carelessness that Miss Unwin suspected was more than a little put on, “Fred thinks that, spoony though old Billy is, he hasn’t actually committed you-know-what.”

“I see. And you agree?”

“Yes. I mean, Billy’s a bit like an old stallion, really. You just have to let them graze in the end, you know.”

“I see,” Miss Unwin said again.

For a little more they walked along in silence.

“Well,” Miss Unwin resumed eventually, “I don’t think there is anything more I need to know from you for the present. But I promise you, if there is, I shall come up to see you again as fast as I can.”

“So have I really been a female detective’s assistant?”

“Yes,” said Miss Unwin, “I think you really have.”

But walking back to the town, she found she had no more she could do to move things forward until the hour that evening when Arthur Burch would come driving down in his cart to sup his ale at the Rising Sun.

All she could do was to spend the afternoon in Mrs. Steadman’s sitting-room, reading over and over again the details of the trial pasted in the old account-book. She had hoped that somehow she would, after all, manage to hit on something that Mr. Serjeant Busfield had not noticed when he had been conducting Jack Steadman’s defence. But it was an ill-founded hope, as she had really feared all along that it would be.

So it was a decided relief when at about five o’clock the maidservant, Betsey, knocked on the door bearing a tea-tray. Though she did not think she had any appetite even for a
piece of Mrs. Steadman’s fruit-cake, a cup of tea would be more than welcome.

“Betsey,” she said as the girl carefully lowered the tray, “have you seen your mistress this afternoon? How is she? Can you tell me?”

The tea-tray dropped the last inch onto the table with a sharp crash. A deep red flush sprang up on the white column of the girl’s neck.