Into the Valley of Death Read Online Free PDF

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 innocencehimself. 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.

4
    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