Into the Valley of Death (16 page)

“His name was Sutter? A man called Sutter killed your son?”

“Mr. Sutter. Mr. Sutter.”

“And you know this? You know that it was him?”

There had been no name of Sutter on the list of guests at General Pastell’s ball, Miss Unwin was sure of that. Yet she supposed that it was possible there had been some gentleman in the district who had not been invited, despite what Mrs. Perker had said. There might be some recluse living nearby. Or someone who was not quite a gentleman.

She felt the blood course through her veins. She was within moments of finding her quarry now. Within moments. And within hours perhaps Jack Steadman would be safe.

But the old woman was murmuring again.

“He came. Last night. Very late. He came. I heard a noise….”

“Yes? You heard a noise? You went downstairs? You saw Mr. Sutter shoot your son?”

“No, no, no.”

Miss Unwin’s heart plummeted. “But I thought you said …”

“Arthur told me … keep out o’the way. When he came. Whenever he came.”

“Mr. Sutter? He came here regularly?”

“That woman. Arthur said … mind own business. But last night it was so late, and voices … Angry …”

“You heard voices raised in anger last night and you went downstairs?”

“Then a shot, and … and …”

“And you crept back up here? Of course you did. It was the best thing to do. But did you see Mr. Sutter last night?”

“Voice,” the old woman murmured.

“Ah, you heard his voice? You recognised it? Are you sure?”

“I know it. Well. Well.”

“Yes. Good. And now tell me, who is Mr. Sutter? Where does he live?”

“Don’t know.”

“But—but you must.”

Miss Unwin strove to suppress the anger she felt. How could this old woman, this vital witness, not know anything more than the bare name of the man she was certain had murdered her son?

She took a deep breath. “Mrs. Burch,” she said, “tell me what Mr. Sutter looks like, if you really don’t know where he comes from.”

“Never proper sight of him. But I know that voice. Know that any time.”

Miss Unwin thought. “It was a gentleman’s voice?” she asked.

“Oh, yes. Yes. He’s a gentleman. And she, the one he went with downstairs, she … Lady, too.”

Miss Unwin saw then in her mind’s eye that strangely well-furnished bedroom she had glimpsed once down below. And she thought she knew now why it was so well furnished in this shabby house. It was a place of assignation. The mysterious Mr. Sutter must have used it to meet a lady. And … In all probability, this was the secret about him that Alfie Goode had learnt. Only who was Mr. Sutter?

“Mrs. Burch,” she asked again, “do you not know anything about this man who came here in the night? Nothing more than the sound of his voice?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

And, though she stayed with the old woman for almost another hour, she could get no more out of her.

At the end of that time she heard below the
click-click
on the stone floor of a countrywoman’s wooden pattens, and, going down, she found that a neighbour’s wife, hearing the news, had walked the mile or so from her cottage to look after the bereaved old woman. Gratefully, she handed over the care of her and left in company with Mr. Heavitree.

They discussed, as he drove her back to the Rising Sun, both her new discovery and the impasse it seemed to have led to. Mr. Heavitree was unable to recall anyone of the name of Sutter in the district, but they agreed that Miss Unwin should ask Mrs. Steadman whether she knew of anyone, perhaps a recluse hardly showing himself to the world.

“You know, my dear,” Mr. Heavitree said as he halted in front of the inn to let Miss Unwin down, “if what old Mrs. Burch has told you is in any way true, then who is more likely to be the lady this mysterious Sutter met at the cottage than … Mrs. De Lyall?”

“Yes. Mrs. De Lyall. You may very well be right.”

“It’s worth some looking into,” Mr. Heavitree said. “And I mean to drive straight over to her place to see what I can turn up.”

“But you’ll come back here as soon as you can and let me know what you’ve learnt?”

“I will, of course. But delicate inquiries of this sort take time, you know.”

“Yes, I realise that. But when you return, I may have news of my own, too. Not about Mr. Sutter, whom I begin to suspect perhaps of going under an alias, but from Vilkins. Vilkins may have completed her inquiries at the War Office.”

Mr. Heavitree smiled slowly. “You know,” he said, “I’d give a sovereign to be hiding somewhere by when that young woman talks to the clerks she finds there.”

Miss Unwin managed to laugh, and bade the old detective goodbye and good hunting.

She entered the inn and went up to her bedroom to refresh herself after the trials of the morning. But she had hardly taken off her bonnet when, from Mrs. Steadman’s sitting-room immediately below, there came the sounds, one after another, of piercing, shrill, terrified screams.

Miss Unwin did not hesitate. She dropped her bonnet on the floor, ran to the door, flung it open, raced down the narrow stairs from the attics, tore over to Mrs. Steadman’s sitting-room, and jerked its door wide.

An astonishing sight met her eyes.

Betsey, big and bouncing, was standing hard up against the wall of the room beside the fireplace with its paper ornament in the grate. Her normally cherry-red cheeks were a shade of dull grey, and she looked as if she wished she could fall backwards through the very wall behind her.

And, standing facing her, taut as an anchor-cable, was little Mrs. Steadman. Had not the attitudes of the two of them been so tense, they vvould have seemed comic. Betsey, tall and splendidly built, frozen in fear, and Mrs. Steadman, her head a good fifteen inches below the maid’s, her diminutive figure quite dwarfed, nevertheless menacing her completely.

As well she might do, Miss Unwin realised, suddenly seeing in her hand the gleaming, pointed blade of a black-handled kitchen knife.

She stepped forward, came up beside the transfixed pair, and put her own hand on Mrs. Steadman’s sinewy bare forearm.

“What—what is this?” she asked.

The few words were enough. All the taut force went out of Mrs. Steadman’s tiny frame. The black-handled knife dropped to the floor.

“She—she knows. She knows something,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.

Miss Unwin gave Betsey a quick look. The colour was flooding back into the girl’s face. And with it there was, plain to see, a look of shame.

“Yes, Betsey,” Miss Unwin said, “you do know something. Something about Mr. Steadman, isn’t it?”

“Oh, miss.”

“Yes, it’s been at the back of my mind ever since I first set eyes on you that you were not quite easy in my presence, and I see now it was the thought that I was here to prove Mr. Steadman innocent that made you so. Well, hadn’t you better tell us everything straight out now? I cannot believe that what you have to tell will be all that grave. You’re a good girl, and if you had known anything that would have absolutely saved your master, you’d have spoken up before this. But now is the time to tell us whatever it is you do know, grave or petty.”

“Yes, miss, yes. I wanted to, truly. Only it didn’t seem … And then it was, well, private, like.”

“I dare say. But tell us everything now. Private or not. It has to come out.”

“Oh, yes, miss, I will, I will. It was just this. Well, Farmer Burch . . Well, he fancied I, like. He’s a gruff, shy sort of a man, miss, and didn’t like to be seen a-courting a girl. But he liked me, and he found his chance to tell me.”

“Nothing wrong in that, my dear,” Miss Unwin said, thinking to herself that before much longer poor Betsey would have to learn that the man who had come courting her was now dead.

“No, nothing wrong,” Betsey answered. “And I weren’t going to have nothing wrong neither, though I dare say he’d have been ready if I was willing.”

“But you were not. So go on.”

“Well, he did promise to marry I. But— Well, he said as he
couldn’t afford to keep a wife, not when he had his rent unpaid and other debts beside.”

“Go on,” Miss Unwin said again.

Thoughts were piling up in her head, but she thrust them aside until she had heard Betsey’s story to the full.

“Well, I told him as I’d wait,” Betsey went on. “He were worth waiting for, so I thought. A farmer, even if he were only a tenant and behind with his rent. But if he could get clear, why, then I’d be a farmer’s wife, gruff though he might be.”

“But you have not told me what you were keeping secret, have you?” Miss Unwin said.

Betsey hung her head. “No. No, but I will. I meant to make a clean breast on it, only when I began to say summat to the mistress just now, her went for me with that knife.”

“Well, never mind about that. Tell us what it is now.”

“Why, that one day not above a month ago Mr. Burch come to me and says he were ready to marry me right off. So I asked him as if he’d got the money for his back rent and all, and he said as he had. First off, I was rejoicing, like. But then I got to think.”

“About how he had got that money, and how, just before, he had given evidence against Mr. Steadman, evidence that Mr. Steadman had said wasn’t so?” Miss Unwin asked.

“Why, yes, miss. Yes, you gone and guessed it. And—and when Mary Vilkins told I you was come to find out the truth of it all, why, then I wanted to tell what I feared all the more. But I daresent, not if I still wanted to marry him, and I didn’t know whether I did that or not. But just now when I saw the mistress a-weeping, the first time as ever I did, I began to tell all. Only she—”

“Yes, yes,” Miss Unwin broke in then. “Well, what you had to say in the end was not so important. Yet it does put another brick in the building I am beginning to build, and you’d have done well to say it all earlier, my girl.”

“Oh, miss. Oh, I’m sorry, I am. Right sorry.”

And Betsey broke into floods of streaming tears, while at the same time Mrs. Steadman, who had collapsed onto the sofa, began babbling apologies.

Miss Unwin went over and did her best to reassure her.

“My dear, I know how desperate with worry you must be, and what you did was quite natural. But, remember, what I was just saying is quite true. Brick by brick the case against that unknown man is building up. Indeed, it is possible that I already know his name.”

Mrs. Steadman jumped from the sofa, once more ramrod-stiff as any soldier from the Crimea campaign.

“Who is he? Where can I find him?”

Miss Unwin put a soothing hand on her arm. “Don’t hope too much,” she said. “Don’t hope too much.”

“But you say you have his name?”

“Well, does the name Sutter mean anything to you?”

“Sutter? Sutter? But I don’t know any Sutter.”

The little spark of hope in Miss Unwin’s head, which she had done her best to keep down, died then.

“No,” she said, “I feared as much. Sutter must be an alias. The man who uses it had good reason to keep himself as much in the dark as he could.”

Then, after the blubbering Betsey had been sent sharply about her work, Miss Unwin told Mrs. Steadman all that had happened out at Arthur Burch’s farm. But the landlady, rack her brains as she might, was unable to recall anyone, near or far, with a name even at all like Sutter.

“No, my dear,” she concluded after they had been going over it all for more than an hour, “it’s no use. We’re as far from it as ever. Jack, my poor Jack, will hang come Friday. I know he will.”

Miss Unwin sighed. “Perhaps you do well not to hope. But I must hope myself. I must believe that, somehow, before that time on Friday morning, I can, with Mr. Heavitree’s help, and with Vilkins’s, find not only the man who played this foul trick on your husband but proof, too, that he did it.”

“But won’t the name be enough?”

“No, I’m afraid it hardly will. Not when the Home Secretary himself has already been appealed to and has decided against.”

Mrs. Steadman bit her lip. “Oh, and to think,” she said, “when General Pastell told me he was getting up a petition, I blessed him. I blessed him, and now you tell me that, because the Home Secretary has made up his mind, not even naming the true villain will save my Jack.”

“I would be bringing you false comfort if I said anything else,” Miss Unwin replied. “No, what I must be able to do is to go to the Chief Constable with such strong proof that he will have no choice but to telegraph the Home Secretary himself. No message coming from any other but a Chief Constable will serve, I fear.”

She sat then in the neat little sitting-room with Mrs. Steadman while the hours of the day passed slowly on. There was nothing, she felt, that she could do now. Her only hopes lay in, first, what Mr. Heavitree might ferret out about Mrs. De Lyall and the lover they suspected she had met at Arthur Burch’s miserable farm, and, second, in Vilkins. In Vilkins, who quite possibly had not been able to find a single clerk coming out of the War Office to the nearby public houses who would agree to help her with the list of names she had taken up to London.

When it had got well into the afternoon, Miss Unwin began to look out for Mr. Heavitree. Each time she heard from the sleepy road the clop of horses’ hooves she went to the window. Mrs. De Lyall’s mansion lay some ten miles from the town, she understood, and it ought not to take the good horse in Mr. Heavitree’s hired trap very long to cover the distance.

But what might he not have had to do in the immediate vicinity of the house? He could not go and question Mrs. De Lyall directly. Indeed, she doubted if it would be possible for him to obtain an interview with her on any pretext. No, he would have to go round and round, getting into conversation
with anyone who seemed likely to be able to tell him anything about the lady.

And then, too, he would have had to take care that Captain Brackham, living at the wretched inn nearby, did not get to hear of his activities. It might be very late in the day before the old detective had anything in the way of news to bring her.

There was, too, Mrs. De Lyall’s threat to herself to be thought about. Last night it had not been her burly footmen who had come up the path beside the house to give her the beating that had been promised, and nothing had been seen of them today, but this did not mean that Mrs. De Lyall’s threat had been wholly idle. At any time now it could be carried out. She had been warned.