THREE

Ending with
a Beginning

Arthur & George

Ever since Sherlock Holmes solved his first case, requests and demands have been coming in from all over the world. If persons or goods disappear in mysterious circumstances, if the police are more than usually baffled, if justice miscarries, then it appears that mankind’s instinct is to appeal to Holmes and his creator. Letters addressed to 221B Baker Street are now automatically returned by the Post Office stamped ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN; those sent to Holmes c/o Sir Arthur are similarly dealt with. Over the years, Alfred Wood has often been struck by the way his employer is simultaneously proud of having created a character in whose true existence readers effortlessly believe, and irritated when they take such belief to its logical conclusion.

Then there are appeals directed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in propria persona, written on the presumption that anyone with the intelligence and guile to devise such complicated fictional crimes must therefore be equipped to solve real ones. Sir Arthur, if impressed or touched, will sometimes respond, though unfailingly in the negative. He will explain that he is, regrettably, no more a consulting detective than he is an English bowman of the fourteenth century or a debonair cavalry officer under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte.

So Wood has laid out the Edalji dossier with few expectations. Yet on this occasion Sir Arthur is back in his secretary’s office within the hour, in mid-expostulation even as he barges through the door.

“It’s as plain as a packstaff,” he is saying. “The fellow’s no more guilty than that typewriter of yours. I ask you, Woodie! It’s a joke. The case of the locked room in reverse—not how does he get in but how does he get out? It’s as shabby as shabby can be.”

Wood has not seen his employer so indignant for months. “You wish me to reply?”

“Reply? I’m going to do more than reply. I’m going to stir things up. I’m going to knock some heads together. They’ll rue the day they let this happen to an innocent man.”

Wood is as yet unsure who “they” might be, or indeed what “this” is that has “happened.” In the supplicant’s petition he observed little, apart from a strange surname, to distinguish it from dozens of other supposed miscarriages of justice which Sir Arthur is expected single-handedly to overturn. But Wood does not at this moment care about the rights or wrongs of the Edalji case. He is only relieved that his employer seems, within the hour, to have shrugged off the lethargy and despondence that have afflicted him these past months.

In a covering letter George has explained the anomalous position in which he finds himself. The decision to free him on licence was taken by the previous Home Secretary, Mr. Akers-Douglas, and implemented by the present one, Mr. Herbert Gladstone; but neither has offered any official explanation of their reasons. George’s conviction has not been cancelled, nor has any apology been tendered for his incarceration. One newspaper, doubtless briefed over a complicit luncheon by some nod-and-wink bureaucrat, shamelessly let it be known that the Home Office had no doubt as to the prisoner’s guilt, but had released him because three years was considered the appropriate sentence for the crime in question. Sir Reginald Hardy, in deciding upon seven, had shown himself a touch over-zealous in the defence of Staffordshire’s honour; and the Home Secretary was merely correcting this fit of enthusiasm.

All of which leaves George in moral despair and practical limbo. Do they think him guilty or not guilty? Are they apologizing for his conviction or reaffirming it? Unless and until the conviction is expunged, it is impossible for him to be readmitted to the Rolls. The Home Office perhaps expects George to display his relief by silence, and his gratitude by slinking away to another profession, preferably in the colonies. Yet George has survived prison only by the thought, the hope, of returning to work—somehow, somewhere—as a solicitor; and his supporters, having come thus far, have no intention of giving up either. One of Mr. Yelverton’s friends has given George temporary employment in his office as a clerk; but this is no solution. The solution can only come from the Home Office.

Arthur is late for his appointment with George Edalji at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross; business with his bank has detained him. Now he enters the foyer at speed, and looks around. It is not difficult to spot his waiting guest: the only brown face is sitting about twelve feet away from him in profile. Arthur is about to step across and apologize when something makes him hold back. It is, perhaps, ungentlemanly to observe without permission; but not for nothing was he once the out-patient clerk of Dr. Joseph Bell.

So: preliminary inspection reveals that the man he is about to meet is small and slight, of Oriental origin, with hair parted on the left and cropped close; he wears glasses, and the well-cut, discreet clothing of a provincial solicitor. All indisputably true, but this is hardly like identifying a French polisher or a left-handed cobbler from scratch. Yet still Arthur continues to observe, and is drawn back, not to the Edinburgh of Dr. Bell, but to his own years of medical practice. Edalji, like many another man in the foyer, is barricaded between newspaper and high-winged armchair. Yet he is not sitting quite as others do: he holds the paper preternaturally close, and also a touch sideways, setting his head at an angle to the page. Dr. Doyle, formerly of Southsea and Devonshire Place, is confident in his diagnosis. Myopia, possibly of quite a high degree. And who knows, perhaps a touch of astigmatism too.

“Mr. Edalji.”

The newspaper is not flung down in excitement, but folded carefully. The young man does not leap to his feet and fall on the neck of his potential saviour. On the contrary, he stands up carefully, looks Sir Arthur in the eye, and extends his hand. There is no danger that this man is going to start babbling about Holmes. Instead, he holds himself in wait, polite and self-contained.

They withdraw to an unoccupied writing room, and Sir Arthur is able to examine his new acquaintance more closely. A broad face, fullish lips, a pronounced dimple in the middle of the chin; clean-shaven. For a man who has served three years in Lewes and Portland, and who must have been used to a softer life than most beforehand, he shows few signs of his ordeal. His black hair is shot with grey, but this rather gives him the aspect of a thinking, cultured person. He could very well still be a working solicitor, except that he is not.

“Do you know the exact value of your myopia? Six, seven dioptres? I am only guessing, of course.”

George is startled by this first question. He takes a pair of spectacles from his top pocket and hands them over. Arthur examines them, then turns his attention to the eyes whose defects they correct. These bulge somewhat, and give the solicitor a slightly vacant, staring appearance. Sir Arthur assesses his man with the judgement of a former ophthalmologist; but he is also familiar with the false moral inferences the general public is inclined to draw from ocular singularity.

“I am afraid I have no idea,” says George. “I have only recently acquired spectacles, and did not enquire about their specifications. Nor do I always remember to wear them.”

“You did not have them as a child?”

“Indeed not. My eyesight was always poor, but when an oculist was consulted in Birmingham, he said it was unwise to prescribe them for a child. And then—well—I became too busy. But since my release I am, unfortunately, less busy.”

“As you explained in your letter. Now, Mr. Edalji—”

“It’s Aydlji, actually, if you don’t mind.” George says this instinctively.

“I apologize.”

“I am used to it. But since it is my name . . . You see, all Parsee names are stressed on the first syllable.”

Sir Arthur nods. “Well, Mr. Aydlji, I should like you to be professionally examined by Mr. Kenneth Scott of Manchester Square.”

“If you say so. But—”

“At my expense, of course.”

“Sir Arthur, I could not—”

“You can, and you will.” He says it softly, and George catches the Scottish burr for the first time. “You are not employing me as a detective, Mr. Edalji. I am offering—offering—my services. And when we have won you not only a free pardon but also a large sum in compensation for your wrongful imprisonment, I may send you Mr. Scott’s bill. But then again I may not.”

“Sir Arthur, I did not imagine for a moment when I wrote to you—”

“No, and nor did I when I received your letter. But there we are. And here we are.”

“The money is not important. I want my name back again. I want to be readmitted as a solicitor. That is all I want. To be allowed to practise again. To live a quiet, useful life. A normal life.”

“Of course. But I disagree. The money is very important. Not just as compensation for three years of your life. It is also symbolic. The British respect money. If you are given a free pardon, the public will know you are innocent. But if you are given money as well, the public will know you are completely innocent. There is a world of difference. Money will also prove that it is only the corrupt inertia of the Home Office that kept you in prison in the first place.”

George nods slowly to himself as he takes in the argument. Sir Arthur is impressed by the young man. He seems to have a calm and deliberate mind. From his Scottish mother or his clergyman father? Or a benign mixing of the two?

“Sir Arthur, may I ask if you are a Christian?”

Now it is Arthur’s turn to be startled. He does not wish to offend this son of the manse, so he replies with his own question. “Why do you ask?”

“I was brought up, as you know, in the Vicarage. I love and respect my parents, and naturally, when I was young, I shared their beliefs. How could I not? I would never have made a priest myself, but I accepted the teachings of the Bible as the best guide to living a true and honourable life.” He looks at Sir Arthur to see how he is responding; soft eyes and an inclination of the head encourage him. “I still do think them the best guide. As I think the laws of England are the best guide for how society in general may live a true and honourable life together. But then my . . . my ordeal began. At first I viewed it all as an unfortunate example of maladministration of the law. The police made a mistake, but it would be corrected by the magistrates. The magistrates made a mistake, but it would be corrected by the Quarter Sessions. The Quarter Sessions made a mistake, but it would be corrected by the Home Office. It will, I hope, still be corrected by the Home Office. It is a matter of great pain and, to say the least, inconvenience, that this has happened, but the process of the law will, in the end, deliver justice. That is what I believed, and what I still believe.

“However, it has been more complicated than I at first realized. I have lived my life within the law—that is to say, taking the law as my guide, while Christianity has been the moral support behind that. For my father, however—” and here George pauses, not, Arthur suspects, because he does not know what he is about to say, but because of its emotional weight—“my father lives his life wholly within the Christian religion. As you would expect. So for him my ordeal must be comprehensible in those terms. For him there is—there must be—a religious justification for my suffering. He thinks it is God’s purpose to strengthen my own faith and to act as an example for others. It is an embarrassment for me to say the word, but he imagines me a martyr.

“My father is elderly now, and becoming frail. Nor would I wish to contradict him. At Lewes and Portland I naturally attended chapel. I still go to church every Sunday. But I cannot claim that my faith has been strengthened by my imprisonment, nor”—he gives a cautious, wry smile—“nor would my father be able to claim that congregations at St. Mark’s and neighbouring churches have increased in the last three years.”

Sir Arthur contemplates the odd formality of these opening remarks—as if they have been practised, even over-practised. No, that is too harsh. What else would a man do during three years of prison except turn his life—his messy, inchoate, half-understood life—into something resembling a witness statement?

“Your father, I imagine, would say that martyrs do not choose their lot, and may not even have an understanding of the matter.”

“Perhaps. But what I have just said is actually less than the truth. My incarceration did not strengthen my faith. Quite the contrary. It has, I think, destroyed it. My suffering has been quite purposeless, either for me or as any kind of example to others. Yet when I told my father that you had agreed to see me, his reaction was that it was all part of God’s evident purpose in the world. Which is why, Sir Arthur, I asked if you were a Christian.”

“Whether I am or not would not affect your father’s argument. God surely chooses any instrument to hand, whether Christian or heathen.”

“True. But you do not have to be soft with me.”

“No. And you will not find me a man to palter, Mr. Edalji. For myself, I cannot see how your time in Lewes and Portland, and the loss of your profession and your place in society, can possibly serve God’s purpose.”

“My father, you must understand, believes that this new century will bring in a more harmonious commingling of the races than in the past—that this is God’s purpose, and I am intended to serve as some kind of messenger. Or victim. Or both.”

“Without in any way criticizing your father,” says Arthur carefully, “I would have thought that if such had been God’s intention, it would have been better served by making sure you had a gloriously successful career as a solicitor, and thus set an example to others for the commingling of the races.”

“You think as I do,” replies George. Arthur likes this answer. Others would have said, “I agree with you.” But George has said it without vanity. It is simply that Arthur’s words have confirmed what he has already thought.

“However, I agree with your father that this new century is likely to bring extraordinary developments in man’s spiritual nature. Indeed, I believe that by the time the third millennium begins, the established churches will have withered, and all the wars and disharmonies their separate existences have brought into the world will also have disappeared.” George is about to protest that this is not what his father means at all; but Sir Arthur is forging on. “Man is on the verge of elaborating the truths of psychical law as he has for centuries been elaborating the truths of physical law. When these truths come to be accepted, our whole way of living—and dying—will have to be rethought from first principles. We shall believe in more, not less. We shall understand more deeply the processes of life. We shall realize that death is not a door closed in our face, but a door left ajar. And by the time that new millennium begins, I believe we shall have a greater capacity for happiness and fellow-feeling than ever before in mankind’s frequently miserable existence.” Sir Arthur suddenly catches himself, an orator on a damn soapbox. “I apologize. It is a hobby horse. No, it is a great deal more than that. But you did ask.”

“There is no need to apologize.”

“There is. I have allowed us to stray far from the matter in hand. To business again. May I ask if there is anyone you suspect of the crime?”

“Which one?”

“All of them. The persecutions. The forged letters. The rippings—not just of the Colliery pony, but all the others.”

“To be perfectly honest, Sir Arthur, for the last three years I and those who have supported me have been more concerned with proving my innocence than anyone else’s guilt.”

“Understandably. But a connection inevitably exists. So is there anyone you might suspect?”

“No. No one. Everything was done anonymously. And I cannot imagine who would take pleasure in mutilating animals.”

“You had enemies in Great Wyrley?”

“Evidently. But unseen ones. I had few acquaintances there, whether friend or foe. We did not go out into local society.”

“Why not?”

“I have only recently begun to understand why not. At the time, as a child, I assumed it to be normal. The truth is, my parents had very little money, and what they had, they spent on their children’s education. I did not miss going to other boys’ houses. I was a happy child, I think.”

“Yes.” This seems less than the full answer. “But, I presume, given your father’s origins—”

“Sir Arthur, I should like to make one thing quite clear. I do not believe that race prejudice has anything to do with my case.”

“I have to say that you surprise me.”

“My father believes that I would not have suffered as I did if I had been, for instance, the son of Captain Anson. That is certainly true. But in my view the matter is a red herring. Go to Wyrley and ask the villagers if you do not believe me. At all events, if any prejudice exists, it is confined to a very small section of the community. There has been an occasional slight, but what man does not suffer that, in some form or another?”

“I understand your desire not to play the martyr—”

“No, it is not that, Sir Arthur.” George stops, and looks momentarily embarrassed. “Is that what I should be calling you, by the way?”

“You may call me that. Or Doyle if you prefer.”

“I think I prefer Sir Arthur. As you may imagine, I have thought a great deal about this matter. I was brought up as an Englishman. I went to school, I studied the law, I did my articles, I became a solicitor. Did anyone try to hold me back from this progress? On the contrary. My schoolmasters encouraged me, the partners at Sangster, Vickery & Speight took notice of me, my father’s congregation uttered words of praise when I qualified. No clients refused my advice at Newhall Street on the grounds of my origin.”

“No, but—”

“Let me continue. There have been, as I said, occasional slights. There were teasings and jokes. I am not so naive as to be unaware that some people look at me differently. But I am a lawyer, Sir Arthur. What evidence do I have that anyone has acted against me because of race prejudice? Sergeant Upton used to try and frighten me, but no doubt he frightened other boys as well. Captain Anson clearly took a dislike to me, without ever having met me. What concerned me more about the police was their lack of competence. For example, they themselves, despite covering the district with special constables, never discovered a single mutilated animal. These events were always reported to them by the farmers, or by men going to work. I was not the only person to conclude that the police were afraid of the so-called Gang, even if they were quite unable to prove its existence.

“So if you are proposing that my ordeal has been caused by race prejudice, then I must ask you for your evidence. I do not recall Mr. Disturnal ever alluding to the subject. Or Sir Reginald Hardy. Did the jury find me guilty because of my skin? That is too easy an answer. And I might add that during my years in prison I was fairly treated by the staff and the other inmates.”

“If I may make a suggestion,” replied Sir Arthur. “Perhaps you should try occasionally not to think like a lawyer. The fact that no evidence of a phenomenon can be adduced does not mean that it does not exist.”

“Agreed.”

“So, when the persecutions began against your family, did you believe—do you believe—you were random victims?”

“Probably not. But others were victims too.”

“Only of the letter writing. None suffered as you did.”

“True. But it would be quite unsound to deduce from this the purpose and motive of those involved. Perhaps my father—who can be severe in person—rebuked some farm boy for stealing apples, or blaspheming.”

“You think something like that to be the start of it?”

“I have no idea. But I will not, I am afraid, stop thinking like a lawyer. It is what I am. And as a lawyer I require evidence.”

“Perhaps others can see what you cannot.”

“No doubt. But it is also a question of what is useful. It is not useful to me as a general principle of life to assume that those with whom I have dealings have a secret dislike of me. And at the present juncture, it is no use imagining that if only the Home Secretary were to become convinced that race prejudice lies at the heart of the case, then I shall have my pardon and the compensation to which you allude. Or perhaps, Sir Arthur, you believe Mr. Gladstone himself to be afflicted with that prejudice?”

“I have absolutely no . . . evidence of that. Indeed, I very much doubt it.”

“Then please let us drop the subject.”

“Very well.” Arthur is impressed by such firmness—indeed, stubbornness. “I should like to meet your parents. Also your sister. Discreetly, however. My instinct is always to go directly at things, but there are times when tactics and even bluff are necessary. As Lionel Amery likes to say, if you fight with a rhinoceros, you don’t want to tie a horn to your nose.” George is baffled by this analogy, but Arthur does not notice. “I doubt it would help our cause if I were to be seen tramping the district with you or a member of your family. I need a contact, an acquaintance in the village. Perhaps you can suggest one.”

“Harry Charlesworth,” replies George automatically, just as if facing Great-Aunt Stoneham, or Greenway and Stentson. “Well, we sat next to one another at school. I pretended he was my friend. We were the two clever boys. My father used to rebuke me for not being friendlier with the farm boys, but frankly there was little contact possible. Harry Charlesworth has taken over the running of his father’s dairy. He has an honest reputation.”

“You say you had little society with the village?”

“And they little with me. In truth, Sir Arthur, I always intended, after qualifying, to live in Birmingham. I found Wyrley—between ourselves—a dull and backward place. At first I continued living at home, fearing to break the news to my parents, ignoring the village except for necessities. Having boots repaired, for example. And then gradually I found myself, not exactly trapped, but living so much within my family that it was becoming harder and harder to even think of leaving. And I am very attached to my sister Maud. So that was my position until . . . all that you know was done to me. After I was released from prison, it was naturally impossible for me to return to Staffordshire. So now I am in London. I have lodgings in Mecklenburgh Square, with Miss Goode. My mother was with me in the first weeks after my release. But Father needs her at home. She comes down when she can be spared to see how I am faring. My life—” George pauses for a moment, “my life, as you can see, is in abeyance.”

Arthur notes again how cautious and exact George is, whether describing large matters or small, emotions or facts. His man is a first-class witness. It is not his fault if he is unable to see what others can.

“Mr. Edalji—”

“George, please.” Sir Arthur’s pronunciation has been slipping back to Ee-dal-jee, and his new patron must be spared embarrassment.

“You and I, George, you and I, we are . . . unofficial Englishmen.”

George is taken aback by this remark. He regards Sir Arthur as a very official Englishman indeed: his name, his manner, his fame, his air of being absolutely at ease in this grand London hotel, even down to the time he kept George waiting. If Sir Arthur had not appeared to be part of official England, George would probably not have written to him in the first place. But it seems impolite to question a man’s categorization of himself.

Instead, he reflects upon his own status. How is he less than a full Englishman? He is one by birth, by citizenship, by education, by religion, by profession. Does Sir Arthur mean that when they took away his freedom and struck him off the Rolls, they also struck him off the roll of Englishmen? If so, he has no other land. He cannot go back two generations. He can hardly return to India, a place he has never visited and has little desire to.

“Sir Arthur, when my . . . troubles began, my father would sometimes take me into his study and instruct me about the achievements of famous Parsees. How this one became a successful businessman, that one a Member of Parliament. Once—though I have not the slightest interest in sports—he told me about a Parsee cricket team which had come from Bombay and made a tour of England. Apparently they were the first team from India to visit these shores.”

“It was 1886, I believe. Played about thirty, won only a single match, I’m afraid. Forgive me—in my idle hours I am a student of Wisden. They returned a couple of years later, with better results, I seem to remember.”

“You see, Sir Arthur, you are more knowledgeable than I am. And I am unable to pretend to be something I am not. My father brought me up an Englishman, and he cannot, when things become difficult, attempt to console me with matters he has never previously stressed.”

“Your father came from . . . ?”

“Bombay. He was converted by missionaries. They were Scottish, in fact. As my mother is.”

“I understand your father,” says Sir Arthur. It is a phrase, George realizes, that he has never in his life heard before. “The truths of one’s race and the truths of one’s religion do not always lie in the same valley. Sometimes it is necessary to cross a high ridge in winter snow to find the greater truth.”

George ponders this remark as if it is part of a sworn affidavit. “But then your heart is divided and you are cut off from your people?”

“No—then it is your duty to tell your people about the valley over the ridge. You look back down to the village whence you have come, and you observe that they have dipped the flags in salute, because they imagine that getting to the ridge itself is the triumph. But it is not. And so you raise your ski stick to them and point. Down there, you indicate, down there is the truth, down there in the next valley. Follow me over the ridge.”

George came to the Grand Hotel anticipating a concentrated examination of the evidence in his case. The conversation has taken several unexpected turns. Now he is feeling somewhat lost. Arthur senses a certain dismay in his new young friend. He feels responsible; he has meant to be encouraging. Enough reflection, then; it is time for action. Also, for anger.

“George, those who have supported you so far—Mr. Yelverton and all the rest—have done sterling work. They have been utterly diligent and correct. If the British state were a rational institution, you would even now be back at your desk in Newhall Street. But it is not. So my plan is not to repeat the work of Mr. Yelverton, to express the same reasonable doubts and make the same reasonable requests. I am going to do something different. I am going to make a great deal of noise. The English—the official English—do not like noise. They think it vulgar; it embarrasses them. But if calm reason has not worked, I shall give them noisy reason. I shall not use the back stairs but the front steps. I shall bang a big drum. I intend to shake more than a few trees, George, and we shall see what rotten fruit falls down.”

Sir Arthur stands to say goodbye. Now he towers over the little law clerk. Yet he has not done this in their conversation. George is surprised that such a famous man can listen as well as fulminate, be gentle as well as forceful. Despite this last declaration, however, he feels the need for some basic verification.

“Sir Arthur, may I ask . . . to put it simply . . . you think me innocent?”

Arthur looks down with a clear, steady gaze. “George, I have read your newspaper articles, and now I have met you in person. So my reply is, No, I do not think you are innocent. No, I do not believe you are innocent. I know you are innocent.” Then he extends a large, athletic hand, toughened by numerous sports of which George is entirely ignorant.

Arthur

As soon as Wood had familiarized himself with the dossier, he was sent ahead in a scouting capacity. He was to survey the area, assess the temper of the locals, drink moderately in the public houses, and make contact with Harry Charlesworth. He was not, however, to play the detective, and was to stay away from the Vicarage. Arthur had not yet decided his plan of campaign, but knew that the best way to cut off sources of information would be to set up a public stall and announce that he and Woodie had come to prove the innocence of George Edalji. And, by implication, the guilt of some other local resident. He did not want to alarm the interests of untruth.

In the library at Undershaw, he bent himself to research. He established that the parish of Great Wyrley contained a number of well-built residences and farmhouses; that its soil was light loam, with a subsoil of clay and gravel; that its chief crops were wheat, barley, turnips and mangolds. The station, a quarter of a mile to the north-west, was on the Walsall, Cannock & Rugeley branch of the London & North Western Railway. The Vicarage, with a net yearly value of £265, including residence, had been held since 1876 by the Reverend Shapurji Edalji of St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury. The Working Men’s Institute, nearby at Landywood, seated 250 for lectures or concerts, and was well supplied with daily and weekly newspapers. The Public Elementary School, built in 1882, had Samuel John Mason as its master. The Post Office was held by William Henry Brookes, who was also grocer, draper and ironmonger; the Station by Albert Ernest Merriman, who had evidently inherited the stationmaster’s cap from his father, Samuel Merriman. There were three beer retailers in the village: Henry Badger, Mrs. Ann Corbett and Thomas Yates. The butcher was Bernard Greensill. The manager of the Great Wyrley Colliery Company was William Browell and its secretary John Boult. William Wynn was the plumber, decorator, gas-fitter and general dealer. So normal, all of it sounded; so ordered, so English.

He decided, with regret, not to drive: the arrival of a twelve-horse-power, chain-driven, one-ton Wolseley in the lanes of Staffordshire would not exactly render him inconspicuous. A pity, since it was to Birmingham that he had gone, only two years previously, to collect the machine. A journey with a lighter purpose, that had been. He remembered wearing his peaked yachting cap, which had recently become the badge of fashion for the motorist. A fact perhaps not widely recognized among the local citizenry, for as he was pacing the platform of New Street waiting for the Wolseley salesman, a peremptory young woman had accosted him, demanding to know how the trains were running to Walsall.

He left the motor in the stables and took the Waterloo train from Haslemere. He would break his journey in London and see Jean for only the fourth time as a widower and free man. He had written and told her to expect him that afternoon; he had closed with the tenderest of farewells; yet as the train pulled out of Haslemere he found himself wishing, more than anything, that he was in his Wolseley, yachting cap crammed down over his ears, goggles tight against his eyes, roaring up through the heart of England towards Staffordshire. He could not understand this reaction, which made him feel both guilty and irritated. He knew that he loved Jean, that he would marry her, and make her the second Lady Doyle; yet he was not looking forward to seeing her in the way he would wish. If only human beings were as simple as machinery.

Arthur found something near a groan about to break from him, which he suppressed for the sake of the other first-class passengers. And that was all part of it—the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it: in order to behave well, you had to behave badly. Why could he not bundle Jean into the Wolseley, drive her up to Staffordshire, register at a hotel as man and wife, and give his sergeant-major’s stare to anyone who raised an eyebrow? Because he couldn’t, because it wouldn’t work, because it looked simple but wasn’t, because, because . . . As the train passed the outskirts of Woking, he thought again with quiet envy of that Australian soldier out on the veldt. No. 410, New South Wales Mounted Infantry, lying inert with a red chess pawn balanced in his water bottle. A fair fight, open air, a great cause: no better death. Life should be more like that.

He goes to her flat; she is wearing blue silk; they embrace wholeheartedly. There is no requirement to pull back, and yet also, he realizes, no need; he remains unstirred by their reunion. They sit down; there is tea; he enquires after her family; she asks why he is going to Birmingham.

An hour later, when he has still reached no further than the committal proceedings at Cannock, she takes his hand and says,

“It is wonderful, dear Arthur, to see you in such spirits again.”

“You too, my darling,” he replies, and continues his narrative. As she would expect, the story he tells is full of colour and suspense; she is also both moved and relieved that the man she loves is shaking off the cares of recent months. Even so, by the time his story is finished, his purpose explained, his watch consulted, and the railway timetable re-examined, her disappointment lies close to the surface.

“I wish, Arthur, that I was coming with you.”

“How quite extraordinary,” he replies, and his eyes seem to focus on her properly for the first time. “You know, as I was sitting on the train, I imagined driving up to Staffordshire with you at my side, the two of us, like man and wife.”

He shakes his head at this coincidence, which is perhaps explicable by the capacity for thought-transference between two hearts that are so close. Then he gets to his feet, collects his hat and coat, and departs.

Jean is not hurt by Arthur’s behaviour—she is too indelibly in love with him for that—but as she rests her hands on the lukewarm teapot, she realizes that her position, and her future position, will require some practical thought. It has been difficult, so difficult, these past years; there have been so many arrangements and concessions and concealments. Why did she assume that Touie’s death would change everything, and that there would be instant embraces in full sunshine to the applause of friends, while a distant bandstand played English tunes? There can be no such sudden transition; and the small amount of additional freedom they have been granted may prove more rather than less hazardous.

She finds herself thinking differently about Touie. No longer as the untouchable other whose honour must be protected, the self-effacing hostess, the simple, gentle, loving wife and mother who took so long to die. Touie’s great quality, Arthur once told her, was that she always said Yes to anything he proposed. If they were to pack up instantly and depart for Austria, she said Yes; if they were to buy a new house, she said Yes; if he were to go off to London for a few days, or South Africa for several months, she said Yes. This was her nature; she trusted Arthur entirely, trusted him to make the correct decisions for her as well as him.

Jean trusts Arthur too; she knows he is a man of honour. She also knows—and this is another reason she loves and admires him—that he is constantly in motion, whether writing a new book, championing some cause, dashing around the world or hurling himself into his latest enthusiasm. He is never going to be the sort of man whose ambition is a suburban villa, a pair of slippers and a garden spade; who longs to hang over the front gate and wait for the paper boy to bring him news from distant lands.

And so something which it is too early to call a decision—more a kind of warning awareness—begins to form in Jean’s mind. She has been Arthur’s waiting girl since March the fifteenth, 1897; in a few months it will be the tenth anniversary of their meeting. Ten years, ten treasured snowdrops. She would rather wait for Arthur than be contentedly married to any other man on the globe. Yet, having been his waiting girl, she has no desire to be a waiting wife. She imagines them married, and Arthur announcing his impending departure—whether to Stoke Poges or Timbuctoo—in order to right a great wrong; and she imagines herself replying that she will ask Woodie to arrange their tickets. Their tickets, she will say quietly. She will be at his side. She will travel with him; she will sit in the front row when he gives a lecture; she will smooth his path and make sure of proper service in hotels and trains and liners. She will ride with him flank to flank, if not—given her superior control of a horse—a little ahead. She may even learn golf if he continues golfing. She will not be one of those harridan wives who pursue their mates even to the steps of the club; but she will be there at his side, and she will indicate, by word and constant deed, that this will remain her place until death do them part. This is the kind of wife she intends to be.

Meanwhile, Arthur sat on the Birmingham train, reminding himself of his only previous experience of playing detective. The Society for Psychical Research had asked him to assist in the investigation of a haunted house at Charmouth in Dorsetshire. He had travelled down with Dr. Scott and a certain Mr. Podmore, a professional skilled in such inquiries. They had taken all the usual steps to outwit fraud: bolting doors and windows, laying worsted threads across the stairs. Then they had sat up with their host for two successive nights. On the first, he had refilled his pipe a lot and fought narcolepsy; but in the middle of the second night, just as they were giving up hope, they were startled—and, for the instant, terrified—by the sound of furniture being violently cudgelled close at hand. The noise appeared to be coming from the kitchen, but when they rushed there the room was empty and everything in its place. They searched the house from cellar to attic, hunting for hidden spaces; they found nothing. And the doors were still locked, the windows barred, the threads unbroken.

Podmore had been surprisingly negative about this haunting; he suspected that some associate of their host’s had lain concealed behind the panelling. At the time, Arthur acceded to this view. However, some years later, the house had burned to the ground; and—more significantly still—the skeleton of a child no more than ten years old had been dug up in the garden. For Arthur, this had changed everything. In cases where a young life is violently taken, a store of unused vitality often becomes available. At such times the unknown and the marvellous press upon us from all sides; they loom in fluctuating shapes, warning us of the limitations of what we call matter. This seemed the irrefutable explanation to Arthur; but Podmore had declined to amend his report retrospectively. In fact, the fellow had behaved all along more like a damned materialist sceptic than an expert charged with authenticating psychic phenomena. Still, why concern yourself with the Podmores of this world when you have Crookes and Myers and Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace? Arthur repeated to himself the formula: it is incredible, but it is true. When he first heard the words, they had sounded like a flexible paradox; now they were hardening into an iron certainty.

Arthur made his rendezvous with Wood at the Imperial Family Hotel in Temple Street. He was less likely to be recognized here than at the Grand, where he might normally stop. They had to minimize the chance of some teasing headline on the society page of the Gazette or the Post: WHAT IS SHERLOCK HOLMES UP TO IN BIRMINGHAM?

Their first foray out to Great Wyrley was planned for late the following afternoon. Profiting from the December dusk, they would make their way to the Vicarage as anonymously as possible, and return to Birmingham as soon as their business was done. Arthur was keen to visit a theatrical costumier and equip himself with a false beard for the expedition; but Wood was discouraging. He thought this would draw more rather than less attention to them; indeed, any visit to a costumier would guarantee unwelcome paragraphs in the local press. A turned-up collar and a muffler, together with a raised newspaper in the train, would be enough to get them unscathed to Wyrley; then they would just stroll along to the Vicarage by the badly lit lane as if—

“As if we are what?” asked Arthur.

“Do we need to pretend?” Wood did not understand why his employer was so insistent upon disguise; first material, then psychological. In his view it was an Englishman’s inalienable right to tell others, especially those of a nosy inclination, to mind their own business.

“Certainly. We need it for ourselves. We must think of ourselves as . . . hmmm . . . I have it—emissaries from the Church Commissioners, come to respond to the Vicar’s report on the fabric of St. Mark’s.”

“It is a relatively new and sturdily built church,” replied Wood. Then he caught his employer’s glance. “Well, if you insist, Sir Arthur.”

At New Street, late the next afternoon, they chose a carriage which would deposit them, at Wyrley & Churchbridge, as far from the station building as possible. By this stratagem they planned to escape the intrusive gaze of other alighting passengers. But in the event, no one else got off the train, and as a consequence the ecclesiastical imposters received extra scrutiny from the stationmaster. Pulling his muffler defensively up around his moustache, Arthur felt almost larky. You do not know me, he thought, but I know you: Albert Ernest Merriman, the son of Samuel. What an adventure!

He followed Wood along a darkened lane; at one point they skirted a public house, but the sole sign of activity was a man lolling on the front step, studiously chewing his cap. After eight or nine minutes, with only an occasional gas lamp to trouble them, they came upon the dull bulk of St. Mark’s with its high, double-pitched roof. Wood led his employer along its southern wall, so close that Arthur could note the greyish stone streaked with purply-red. As they passed the porch, two buildings came into view some thirty yards beyond the west end of the church: to the right, a schoolroom of dark brick, with a faint diamond pattern picked out in lighter brick; to the left, the more substantial Vicarage. A few moments later, Arthur found himself looking down at the broad doorstep where, fifteen years previously, the key to Walsall School had been laid. As he raised the knocker and calculated how gently he should make it fall, he imagined the more thunderous arrival of Inspector Campbell with his band of specials, and the turmoil it had brought to that quiet household.

The Vicar, his wife and daughter were waiting for them. Sir Arthur could immediately recognize the source of George’s simple good manners, and also of his self-containment. The family was glad of his arrival, but not effusive; conscious of his fame, yet not overawed. He was relieved for once to find himself in the presence of three people, none of whom, he was prepared to wager, had ever read a single one of his books.

The Vicar was paler-skinned than his son, with a flat-topped head balding at the front, and a strong, bulldoggy aspect to him. He shared the same mouth with George, but to Arthur’s eye looked both more handsome and more Occidental.

Two thick files were produced. Arthur took out an item at random: a letter folded from a single sheet, making four closely written pages.

“My dear Shapurji,” he read, “I have great pleasure in informing you that it is now our intention to review the persecution of the Vicar!!! (shame of Great Wyrley).” It was a competent hand, he thought, rather than a neat one. “. . . a certain lunatic asylum not a hundred miles distant from your thrice cursed home . . . and that you will be forcibly removed in case you give way to any strong expressions of opinion.” No spelling mistakes either, so far. “I shall send a double number of the most hellish postcards in your name and Charlotte’s at the earliest opportunity.” Charlotte was presumably the Vicar’s wife. “Revenge on you and Brookes . . .” That name was familiar from his researches. “. . . have sent a letter in his name to the Courier that he will not be responsible for his wife’s debts . . . I repeat that there will be no need for the lunacy act to take you in charge as these persons are sure to have you arrested.” And then, in four descending lines, a mocking farewell:

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and New Year,

   I am ever

      Yours Satan

         God Satan

“Poisonous,” said Sir Arthur.

“Which one is that?”

“One from Satan.”

“Yes,” said the Vicar. “A prolific correspondent.”

 

Arthur inspected a few more items. It was one thing to hear about anonymous letters, even to read extracts from them in the Press. Then they sounded like childish pranks. But to hold one in your hand, and to be sitting with its recipients, was, he realized, quite different. That first one was filthy stuff, with its caddish reference to the Vicar’s wife by her Christian name. The work of a lunatic, perhaps; though a lunatic with a clear, well-formed hand, able lucidly to express his twisted hatreds and mad plans. Arthur was not surprised that the Edaljis had taken to locking their doors at night.

“Merry Christmas,” Arthur read out, still half in disbelief. “And you have no suspicion who might have written any of these noxious effusions?”

“Suspicion? None.”

“That servant you were obliged to dismiss?”

“She left the district. She is long gone.”

“Her family?”

“Her family are decent folk. Sir Arthur, as you may imagine, we have given this much thought from the beginning. But I have no suspicions. I do not listen to gossip and rumour, and if I did, what help would that be? Gossip and rumour were the cause of my son’s imprisonment. I would scarcely wish done to another what has been done to him.”

“Unless he were the culprit.”

“Indeed.”

“And this Brookes. He is the grocer and ironmonger?”

“Yes. He too received poison letters for a while. He was more phlegmatic about it. Or more idle. At any rate, unwilling to go to the police. There had been some incident on the railway involving his son and another boy—I no longer remember the details. Brookes was never going to make common cause with us. There is little respect for the police in the district, I have to tell you. It is an irony that of all the local inhabitants we were the family that was most inclined to trust the police.”

“Except for the Chief Constable.”

“His attitude was . . . unhelpful.”

“Mr. Aydlji”—Arthur made a specific effort with the pronunciation—“I plan to find out why. I intend to go back to the very beginnings of the case. Tell me, apart from the direct persecutions, have you suffered any other hostility since you came here?”

The Vicar looked questioningly at his wife. “The Election,” she replied.

“Yes, that is true. I have, on more than one occasion, lent the schoolroom for political meetings. There was a problem for Liberals in obtaining halls. I am a Liberal myself . . . There were complaints from some of the more conservative parishioners.

“More than complaints?”

“One or two ceased coming to St. Mark’s, it is true.”

“And you continued lending the hall?”

“Certainly. But I do not want to exaggerate. I am talking of protests, strongly worded but civil. I am not talking of threats.”

Sir Arthur admired the Vicar’s precision; also his lack of self-pity. He had noted the same qualities in George. “Was Captain Anson involved?”

“Anson? No, it was much more local that that. He only became involved later. I have included his letters for you to see.”

Arthur then took the family through the events of August to October 1903, alert for any inconsistency, overlooked detail, or conflict of evidence. “In retrospect, it’s a pity you did not send Inspector Campbell and his men away until they had equipped themselves with a search warrant, and prepared yourself for their return with the presence of a solicitor.”

“But that would have been the behaviour of guilty people. We had nothing to hide. We knew George to be innocent. The sooner the police searched, the sooner they would be able to redirect their investigations more profitably. Inspector Campbell and his men were, in any case, quite correct in their behaviour.”

Not all of the time, thought Arthur. There was something missing in his understanding of the case, something to do with that police visit.

“Sir Arthur.” It was Mrs. Edalji, slender, white-haired, quiet-voiced. “May I say two things to you? First, how pleasant it is to hear a Scottish voice again in these parts. Do I detect Edinburgh on your tongue?”

“You do indeed, Ma’am.”

“And the second thing concerns my son. You have met George.”

“I was much impressed by him. I can think of many who would not have remained so strong in mind and body after three years in Lewes and Portland. He is a credit to you.”

Mrs. Edalji smiled briefly at the compliment. “What George wants more than anything is to be allowed to return to his work as a solicitor. That is all he has ever wanted. It is perhaps worse for him now than when he was in prison. Then things were clearer. Now he is in a state of limbo. The Incorporated Law Society cannot readmit him until the taint is washed from his name.”

There was nothing which galvanized Arthur more than being appealed to by a gentle, elderly, female Scottish voice.

“Rest assured, Ma’am, I am planning to make a tremendous noise. I am going to stir things up. There will be a few people sleeping less soundly in their beds by the time I have finished with them.”

But this did not seem to be the promise Mrs. Edalji required. “I expect so, Sir Arthur, and we thank you for it. What I am saying is rather different. George is, as you have observed, a boy—a young man, rather—of some resilience. To be honest, his resilience has surprised both of us. We imagined him frailer. He is determined to overthrow this injustice. But that is all he wants. He does not wish for the limelight. He does not want to become an advocate for any particular cause. He is not a representative of anything. He wishes to return to work. He wishes for an ordinary life.”

“He wishes to get married,” put in the daughter, who until this moment had been quite silent.

“Maud!” The Vicar was more surprised than rebuking. “How can he? Since when? Charlotte—did you know anything of this?”

“Father, don’t be alarmed. I mean, he wants to be married in general.”

“Married in general,” repeated the Vicar. He looked at his distinguished guest. “Do you think that is possible, Sir Arthur?”

“I myself,” replied Arthur with a chuckle, “have only ever been married in particular. It is the system I understand, and the one I would recommend.”

“In that case”—and here the Vicar smiled for the first time—“we must forbid George from getting married in general.”

Back at the Imperial Family Hotel, Arthur and his secretary took a late supper and retired to an unoccupied smoking room. Arthur fired up his pipe and watched Wood ignite some low brand of cigarette.

“A fine family,” said Sir Arthur. “Modest, impressive.”

“Indeed.”

Arthur had a sudden apprehension, set off by Mrs. Edalji’s words. What if their arrival on the scene provoked fresh persecutions? After all, Satan—indeed, God Satan—was still out there sharpening both his pen and his curved instrument with concave sides. God Satan: how peculiarly repellent were the perversions of an institutional religion once it began its irreversible decline. The sooner the whole edifice was swept away the better.

“Woodie, let me use you as a sounding board, if I may.” He did not wait for an answer; nor did his secretary think one was expected. “There are three aspects of this case which I at present fail to understand. They are blanks waiting to be filled. And the first of them is why Anson took against George Edalji. You’ve seen the letters he wrote to the Vicar. Threatening a schoolboy with penal servitude.”

“Indeed.”

“He is a person of distinction. I researched him. The second son of the Second Earl of Lichfield. Late Royal Artillery. Chief Constable since 1888. Why should such a man write such a letter?”

Wood merely cleared his throat.

“Well?”

“I am not an investigator, Sir Arthur. I have heard you say that in the detective business you must eliminate the impossible and what is left, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Not my own formulation, alas. But one I endorse.”

“So that is why I would not make an investigator. If someone asks me a question, I just look for the obvious answer.”

“And what would be your obvious answer in the case of Captain Anson and George Edalji?”

“That he dislikes people who are coloured.”

“Now that is indeed very obvious, Alfred. So obvious it cannot be the case. Whatever his faults, Anson is an English gentleman and a Chief Constable.”

“I told you I was not an investigator.”

“Let us not abandon hope so quickly. We’ll see what you can do with my second blank. Which is this. Leaving aside that early episode with the maidservant, the persecution of the Edaljis takes place in two separate outbursts. The first runs from 1892 to the very beginning of 1896. It is intense and increasing. All of a sudden it stops. Nothing happens for seven years. Then it starts up again, and the first horse is ripped. February 1903. Why the gap, that’s what I can’t understand, why the gap? Investigator Wood, what is your view?”

The secretary did not enjoy this game very much; it seemed to be constructed so that he could only lose. “Perhaps because whoever was responsible wasn’t there.”

“Where?”

“In Wyrley.”

“Where was he?”

“He’d gone away.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know, Sir Arthur. Perhaps he was in prison. Perhaps he’d gone to Birmingham. Perhaps he’d run away to sea.”

“I rather doubt it. Again, it’s too obvious. People in the district would have noticed. There’d have been talk.”

“The Edaljis said they didn’t listen to talk.”

“Hmm. Let’s see if Harry Charlesworth does. Now, the third area I don’t understand is the matter of the hairs on the clothing. If we could eliminate the obvious on this one—”

“Thank you, Sir Arthur.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Woodie, don’t take offence. You’re much too useful to take offence.”

Wood reflected that he had always had a deal of sympathy for the character of Dr. Watson. “What is the problem, sir?”

“The problem is this. The police examined George’s clothing at the Vicarage and said there were hairs on it. The Vicar, his wife and his daughter examined the clothing and said there were no hairs on it. The police surgeon, Dr. Butter—and police surgeons in my experience are the most scrupulous fellows—gave evidence that he found twenty-nine hairs ‘similar in length, colour and structure’ to those of the mutilated pony. So there is a clear conflict. Were the Edaljis perjuring themselves to protect George? That would appear to be what the jury believed. George’s explanation was that he might have leaned against a gate into a field in which cows were paddocked. I’m not surprised the jury didn’t believe him. It sounds like a statement you are panicked into, not a description of something that happened. Besides, it still leaves the family as perjurers. If the hairs were on his clothing, they’d have seen them, wouldn’t they?”

Wood took his time over this. Ever since entering Sir Arthur’s employ, he had been acquiring new functions. Secretary, amanuensis, signature-forger, motoring assistant, golf partner, billiards opponent; now sounding board and stater of the obvious. Also, one who must be prepared for ridicule. Well, so be it. “If the hairs weren’t on his coat when the Edaljis examined it . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“And if they weren’t there beforehand because George didn’t lean on any gate . . .”

“Yes . . .”

“Then they must have got there afterwards.”

“After what?”

“After the clothing left the Vicarage.”

“You mean Dr. Butter put them there?”

“No. I don’t know. But if you want the obvious answer, it’s that they got there afterwards. Somehow. And if so, then only the police are lying. Or some of the police.”

“A not impossible occurrence. You know, Alfred, you’re not necessarily wrong, I’ll say that for you.”

A compliment, Wood reflected, that Dr. Watson might have been proud to receive.

The next day they returned to Wyrley with less pretence of concealment, and called on Harry Charlesworth in his milking parlour. They squelched through the consequences of a herd of cows to a small office attached to the back of the farmhouse. There were three rickety chairs, a small desk, a muddy raffia mat, and a calendar for the previous month at an angle on the wall. Harry was a blond, open-faced young man who seemed to welcome this interruption to his work.

“So you’ve come about George?”

Arthur looked crossly at Wood, who shook his head in denial.

“How did you know?”

“You went to the Vicarage last night.”

“Did we?”

“Well, at any rate two strangers were seen going to the Vicarage after dark, one of them a tall gentleman pulling his muffler up to hide his moustache, and the other a shorter one in a bowler hat.”

“Oh dear,” said Arthur. Perhaps he should have gone to the theatrical costumier after all.

“And now the same two gentlemen, if disguising themselves less obviously, have come to see me on business I was told was confidential but was soon to be revealed.” Harry Charlesworth was enjoying himself greatly. He was also happy to reminisce.

“Yes, we were at school together, when we were littl’uns. George was always very quiet. Never got into trouble, not like the rest of us. Clever too. Cleverer than me, and I was clever back then. Not that you’d know it now. Staring up the backside of a cow all day does rub away at your intelligence, you know.”

Arthur ignored this diversion into vulgar autobiography. “But did George have any enemies? Was he disliked—on account of his colour, for instance?”

Harry thought about this for a while. “Not as far as I can recall. But you know what it is with boys—they have likes and dislikes different from grown-ups. And different from month to month. If George was disliked, it was more for being clever. Or because his father was the Vicar and disapproved of the sort of things boys got up to. Or because he was shortsighted. The master put him up the front so he could see the blackboard. Maybe that looked like favouritism. More of a reason to dislike him than being coloured.”

Harry’s analysis of the Wyrley Outrages was not complex. The case against George was daft. The police were daft. And the notion that there was a mysterious Gang flitting around after nightfall under the orders of some mysterious Captain was daftest of all.

“Harry, we shall need to interview Trooper Green. Given that he’s the only person hereabouts who actually admits to ripping a horse.”

“Fancy a long trip, do you?”

“Where to?”

“South Africa. Ah, you didn’t know. Harry Green got himself a ticket to South Africa just a couple of weeks after the trial was over. It wasn’t a return ticket either.”

“Interesting. Any idea who paid for it?”

“Well, not Harry Green, that’s for certain. Someone interested in keeping him out of harm’s way.”

“The police?”

“Possible. Not that they were too thrilled with him by the time he left. He went back on his confession. Said he’d never done the ripping, and the police had bullied the confession out of him.”

“Did he, by Jove? What do you make of that, Woodie?”

Wood dutifully stated the obvious. “Well, I’d say he was lying either the first time or the second. Or,” he added with a touch of mischief, “possibly both.”

“Harry, can you find out if Mr. Green has an address for his son in South Africa?”

“I can certainly try.”

“And another thing. Was there talk in Wyrley about who might have done it, given that George didn’t?”

“There’s always talk. It’s the same price as rain. All I’d say is, it’s got to be someone who knows how to handle animals. You can’t just go up to a horse or a sheep or a cow and say, Hold still my lovely while I rip your guts out. I’d like to see George Edalji go into the parlour and try and milk one of my cows . . .” Harry lost himself briefly in the amusement of this notion. “He’d be kicked to death or fall in the shit before he’d got his stool under her.”

Arthur leaned forward. “Harry, would you be prepared to help us clear your friend and old schoolfellow’s name?”

Harry Charlesworth noted the lowered voice and cajoling tone, but was suspicious of it. “He was never exactly my friend.” Then his face brightened. “Of course, I’d have to take time off from the dairy . . .”

Arthur had initially ascribed a more chivalrous nature to Harry Charlesworth, but decided not to be disappointed. Once a retainer and fee structure had been agreed, Harry, in his new capacity as assistant consulting detective, showed them the route George was supposed to have taken that drenching August night three and a half years previously. They set off across the field behind the Vicarage, climbed a fence, forced their way through a hedge, crossed the railway by a subterranean passage, climbed another fence, crossed another field, braved a clinging, thorny hedge, crossed another paddock, and found themselves on the edge of the Colliery field. Three-quarters of a mile at a rough guess.

Wood took out his pocket watch. “Eighteen and a half minutes.”

“And we are fit men,” commented Arthur, still plucking thorns from his overcoat and wiping mud from his shoes. “And it is daylight, and it is not raining, and we have excellent eyesight.”

Back at the dairy, after money had changed hands, Arthur asked about the general pattern of crime in the neighbourhood. It sounded routine: theft of livestock, public drunkenness, firing of hayricks. Had there been any violent incidents apart from the attacks on farmstock? Harry half-remembered something from around the time George was sentenced. An attack on a mother and her little girl. Two fellows with a knife. Caused a bit of a stir, but never went to court. Yes, he would be happy to look into the matter.

They shook hands, and Harry walked them to the ironmonger’s, which also served as the grocery, the drapery and the Post Office.

William Brookes was a small, rotund man, with bushy white whiskers counterbalancing his bald cranium; he wore a green apron stained by the years. He was neither overtly welcoming nor overtly suspicious. He was about to take them into a back room when Sir Arthur, nudging his secretary, announced that he was in great need of a bootscraper. He took an intense interest in the choice on offer, and when purchase and wrapping were complete, acted as if the rest of their visit was just a happy afterthought.

In the storeroom, Brookes spent so long digging around in drawers and muttering to himself that Sir Arthur wondered if he might have to buy a zinc bath and a couple of mops to expedite matters. But the ironmonger eventually located a small packet of heavily creased letters bound with twine. Arthur immediately recognized the paper on which they were written; the same cheap notebook had served for the letters to the Vicarage.

Brookes recalled, as best he could, the failed attempt at blackmail all those years ago. His boy Frederick and another boy were meant to have spat upon some old woman at Walsall Station, and he had been instructed to send money to the Post Office there if he wanted to avoid his son being prosecuted.

“You did nothing about it?”

“Course not. Look at the letters for yourself. Look at the handwriting. It was just a prank.”

“You never thought of paying?”

“No.”

“Did you think of going to the police?”

Brookes gave a scornful puff of the cheeks. “Not for a moment. Less than a tenth of a moment. I ignored it, and it went away. Now the Vicar, he was all of a pother. Went around complaining, writing to the Chief Constable and all that, and where did it get him? Just made it all worse, didn’t it? For him and his lad. Not that I’m blaming him for what happened, you understand. Just that he’s never understood this sort of village. He’s a bit too . . . cut and dried for it, if you know what I mean.”

Arthur did not comment. “And why do you think the blackmailer picked on your son and the other boy?”

Brookes puffed his cheeks again. “It’s years now, sir, as I say. Ten? Maybe more. You should ask my boy, well, he’s a man now.”

“Do you remember who this other boy was?”

“It’s not something I’ve needed to remember.”

“Does your boy still live locally?”

“Fred? No, Fred’s long left. He’s in Birmingham now. Works on the canal. Doesn’t want to take on the shop.” The ironmonger paused, then added with sudden vehemence, “Little bastard.”

“And might you have an address for him?”

“I might. And might you want anything to go with that bootscraper?”

Arthur was in high good humour on the train back to Birmingham. Every so often he glanced at the three parcels beside Wood, each of them wrapped in oiled brown paper and tied with string, and smiled at the way the world was.

“So what do you think of the day’s work, Alfred?”

What did he think? What was the obvious answer? Well, what was the true answer? “To be perfectly honest, I think we’ve made not very much progress.”

“No, it’s better than that. We’ve made not very much progress in several different directions. And we did need a bootscraper.”

“Did we? I thought we had one at Undershaw.”

“Don’t be a spoilsport, Woodie. A house can never have too many bootscrapers. In later years we shall remember it as the Edalji Scraper, and each time we wipe our boots on it we shall think of this adventure.”

“If you say so.”

Arthur left Wood to whatever mood he was in, and gazed out at the passing fields and hedgerows. He tried to imagine George Edalji on this train, going up to Mason College, then to Sangster, Vickery & Speight, then to his own practice in Newhall Street. He tried to imagine George Edalji in the village of Great Wyrley, walking the lanes, going to the bootmaker, doing business with Brookes. The young solicitor—well-spoken and well-dressed though he was—would cut a queer figure even in Hindhead, and no doubt a queerer one in the wilds of Staffordshire. He was evidently an admirable fellow, with a lucid brain and a resilient character. But if you merely looked at him—looked at him, moreover, with the eye of an ill-educated farm-hand, a dimwit village policeman, a narrow-minded English juror, or a suspicious chairman of Quarter Sessions—you might not get beyond a brown skin and an ocular peculiarity. He would seem queer. And then, if some queer things started happening, what passed for logic in an unenlightened village would glibly ascribe the events to the person.

And once reason—true reason—is left behind, the farther it is left behind the better, for those who do the leaving. A man’s virtues are turned into his faults. Self-control presents itself as secretiveness, intelligence as cunning. And so a respectable lawyer, bat-blind and of slight physique, becomes a degenerate who flits across fields at dead of night, evading the watch of twenty special constables, in order to wade through the blood of mutilated animals. It is so utterly topsy-turvy that it seems logical. And in Arthur’s judgement, it all boiled down to that singular optical defect he had immediately observed in the foyer of the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross. Therein lay the moral certainty of George Edalji’s innocence, and the reason why he should have become a scapegoat.

In Birmingham, they tracked Frederick Brookes down to his lodgings near the canal. He assessed the two gentlemen, who to him smelt of London, recognized the wrapping of the three parcels under the shorter gentleman’s arm, and announced that his price for information was half a crown. Sir Arthur, accustoming himself to the ways of the natives, offered a sliding scale, rising from one shilling and threepence to two and sixpence, depending on the usefulness of the answers. Brookes agreed.

Fred Wynn, he said, had been the name of his companion. Yes, he was some relation to the plumber and gas-fitter in Wyrley. Nephew perhaps, or second cousin. Wynn lived two stops down the line and they went to school together at Walsall. No, he’d quite lost touch with him. As for that incident all those years ago, the letter and the spitting business—he and Wynn had been pretty sure at the time it was the work of the boy who broke the carriage window and then tried to blame it on them. They’d blamed it back on him, and the officers from the railway company had interviewed all three of them, also Wynn’s father and Brookes’s father. But they couldn’t work out who was telling the truth so in the end just gave everyone a warning. And that was the end of it. The other boy’s name had been Speck. He’d lived somewhere near Wyrley. But no, Brookes hadn’t seen him for years.

Arthur noted all this with his silver propelling pencil. He judged the information worth two shillings and threepence. Frederick Brookes did not demur.

Back at the Imperial Family Hotel, Arthur was handed a note from Jean.

My Dearest Arthur,

I write to find out how your great investigations are proceeding. I wish I were by your side as your gather evidence and interview suspects. Everything that you do is as important to me as my own life. I miss your presence but have joy in thinking of what you are seeking to achieve for your young friend. Hasten to report all you have discovered to

Your loving and adoring

  Jean

Arthur found himself taken aback. It seemed uncharacteristically direct for a love letter. Perhaps it wasn’t a love letter. Yes, of course it was. But somehow different. Well, Jean was different—different from what he had ever known before. She surprised him, even after ten years. He was proud of her, and proud of being surprised.

Later, as Arthur was rereading the note for a final time that night, Alfred Wood lay awake in a smaller bedroom on a higher floor. In the darkness, he could just make out, on his dressing table, the three wrapped parcels sold them by that sly ironmonger. Brookes had also made Sir Arthur pay him a “deposit” for the loan of the anonymous letters in his possession. Wood had deliberately made no comment either at the time or afterwards, which was probably why his employer had accused him on the train of sulking.

Today his role had been that of assistant investigator: partner, almost friend to Sir Arthur. After supper, on the hotel billiards table, competitiveness had made equals of the two men. Tomorrow, he would revert to his usual position of secretary and amanuensis, taking dictation like any female stenographer. This variety of function and mental register did not bother him. He was devoted to his employer, serving him with diligence and efficiency in whatever capacity was necessary. If Sir Arthur required him to state the obvious, he would do so. If Sir Arthur required him not to state the obvious, he was mute.

He was also expected not to notice the obvious. When a clerk had rushed up to them in the foyer with a letter, he had not noticed the way Sir Arthur’s hand trembled as he accepted it, nor the schoolboyish way he stuffed it into his pocket. Nor did he notice his employer’s eagerness to get to his room before supper, or his subsequent cheerfulness throughout the meal. It was an important professional skill—to observe without noticing—and over the last years its usefulness had increased.

He thought it might take him a while to adjust himself to Miss Leckie—though he doubted she would still be using her maiden name by the end of the next twelvemonth. He would serve the second Lady Conan Doyle as assiduously as he had served the first one; though with less immediate wholeheartedness. He was not sure how much he liked Jean Leckie. This was, he knew, quite unimportant. You did not, as a schoolmaster, have to like the headmaster’s wife. And he would never be required to give his opinion. So it did not matter. But over the eight or nine years she had been coming to Undershaw, he had often caught himself wondering if there was not something a little false about her. At a certain moment she had become aware of his importance in the daily running of Sir Arthur’s life; whereupon she made a point of being agreeable to him. More than agreeable. A hand had been placed upon his arm, and she had even, in imitation of Sir Arthur, called him Woodie. He thought this an intimacy she had failed to earn. Even Mrs. Doyle—as he always thought of her—would not call him that. Miss Leckie made considerable play of being natural, of seeming at times to be reining in with difficulty a great instinctive warmth; but it struck Wood as being a kind of coquetry. He would lay anyone a hundred-point start that Sir Arthur did not see it as such. His employer liked to maintain that the game of golf was a coquette; though it seemed to Wood that sports played you a lot straighter than most women.

Again, it did not matter. If Sir Arthur got what he wanted, and Jean Leckie did too, and they were happy together, where was the harm? But it made Alfred Wood a little more relieved that he had never himself come near to marrying. He did not see the benefit of the arrangement, except from a hygienic point of view. You married a true woman, and became bored with her; you married a false one, and did not notice rings were being run around you. Those seemed to be the two choices available to a man.

Sir Arthur sometimes accused him of having moods. It was rather, he felt, that he had his silences—and his obvious thoughts. For instance, about Mrs. Doyle: about happy Southsea days, busy London ones, and those long sad months at the end. Thoughts too about the future Lady Conan Doyle, and the influence she might have upon Sir Arthur and the household. Thoughts about Kingsley and Mary, and how they would react to a stepmother—or rather, to this particular stepmother. Kingsley would doubtless survive: he had his father’s cheerful manliness already. But Wood feared a little for Mary, who was such an awkward, yearning girl.

Well, that would do for tonight. Except: he thought that in the morning he might accidentally leave the bootscraper and the other parcels behind.

 

At Undershaw, Arthur retreated to his study, filled his pipe and began to consider strategy. It was clear there would have to be a two-pronged attack. The first thrust would establish, once and for all, that George Edalji was innocent; not just wrongly convicted on misleading evidence, but wholly innocent, one-hundred-per-cent innocent. The second thrust would identify the true culprit, oblige the Home Office to admit its errors, and result in a fresh prosecution.

As he set to work, Arthur felt back on familiar ground. It was like starting a book: you had the story but not all of it, most of the characters but not all of them some but not all of the causal links. You had your beginning, and you had your ending. There would be a great number of topics to be kept in the head at the same time. Some would be in motion, some static; some racing away, others resisting all the mental energy you could throw at them. Well, he was used to that. And so, as with a novel, he tabulated the key matters and annotated them briefly.

1. TRIAL

Yelverton. Use dossier (with perm.), build, sharpen. Cautious—lawyer. Vachell? No—avoid reit. defence case. Pity no official transcript (campaign for this?). Reliable newspaper accounts? (besides Umpire).

Hairs/Butter. W. probably right!! Not before (o/wise Edaljis perjurers) . . . after. Unintentional, intentional? Who? When? How? Butter?? Interview. Also: hairs found, any latitude/ambiguity? Or must be pony?

Letters. Examine: paper/materials, orthography, style, content, psychology. Gurrin, fraudulence of. Beck case. Propose better expert (good/bad tactic?). Who? Dreyfus fellow? Also: one writer, more? Also, Writer = Ripper? Writer X Ripper? Connection/overlap?

Eyesight. Scott’s report. Enough? Others? Mother’s evidence. Effect of dark/night on GE’s vision?

Green. Who bullied? Who paid? Trace/interview.

Anson. Interview. Prejudice? Evidence w/held? Influence on Constab. See Campbell. Ask for police records?

One of the advantages of celebrity, Arthur admitted, was that his name opened doors. Whether he needed a lepidopterist or an expert on the history of the longbow, a police surgeon or a chief constable, his requests for an interview would normally be smiled upon. It was largely thanks to Holmes—although thanking Holmes did not come easily to Arthur. Little had he known, when he invented the fellow, how his consulting detective would turn into a skeleton key.

He relit his pipe, and moved on to the second part of his thematic table.

2. CULPRIT

Letters. see prec.

Animals. Slaughtermen? Butchers? Farmers? Cf. cases elsewhere. Method typical/untypical? Expert—who? Gossip/suspicion (Harry C).

Instrument. Not razor (trial) . . . what? Butter? Lewis? “curved with conc. sides.” Knife? Agricultural instr.? purpose? Adapted instr.?

Gap. 7yr silence 96–03. Why?? Intentional/unintentional/enforced? Who absent? Who wd know?

Walsall. Key. School. Greatorex. Other boys. Window/spitting. Brookes. Wynn. Speck. Connected? Unconnected? Normal? Any GE business/connection there (ask). Headmaster?

Previous/subsequent. Other maimings. Farrington.

And that was about it for the moment. Arthur puffed his pipe and let his eye wander up and down the lists, wondering which items were strong, and which weak. Farrington, for instance. Farrington was a rough miner who worked for the Wyrley Colliery and had been convicted in the spring of ’04—just about the time George was being moved from Lewes to Portland—of mutilating a horse, two sheep and a lamb. The police naturally maintained that the fellow, despite being a rude, illiterate loafer in public houses, was an associate of the known criminal Edalji. Obvious soulmates, thought Arthur sarcastically. Would Farrington lead him somewhere or nowhere? Was his crime merely emulative?

Perhaps the mercenary Brookes and the mysterious Speck would yield something. That was an odd name, Speck—though the only direction it was leading his brain at the moment was to South Africa. When he’d been down there he’d eaten a great deal of speck, as they called their colonial form of bacon. Unlike the British version, it could be derived from any number of animals—indeed, he recalled that he had once eaten hippopotamus speck. Now where had that been? Bloemfontein, or on the journey north?

The mind was wandering now. And in Arthur’s experience, the only way to concentrate it was first to clear it. Holmes might have played his violin, or perhaps succumbed to that indulgence his creator was nowadays embarrassed to have awarded him. No cocaine syringe for Arthur: he put his trust in a bagful of hickory-shafted golf clubs.

He had always regarded the game as being, in theory, perfectly made for him. It required a combination of eye, brain and body: apt enough for an ophthalmologist turned writer who still retained his physical vigour. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, golf was always luring you on and then evading you. What a dance she had led him across the globe.

As he drove to the Hankley clubhouse, he remembered the rudimentary links in front of the Mena House Hotel. If you sliced your drive you might find your ball bunkered in the grave of some Rameses or Thothmes of old. One afternoon a passerby, assessing Arthur’s vigorous yet erratic game, had cuttingly remarked that he understood there was a special tax for excavating in Egypt. But even this round had been outdone in oddity by the golf played from Kipling’s house in Vermont. It had been Thanksgiving time, with snow already thick on the ground, and a ball was no sooner struck than it became invisible. Happily, one of them—and they still disputed which—had the notion of painting the balls red. The oddity didn’t stop there, however, because the snow’s icy crust imparted a fantastical run to the slightest decent hit. At one point he and Rudyard had launched their drives on a downward slope; there was no reason for the garish balls ever to stop, and they skidded a full two miles into the Connecticut River. Two miles: that is what he and Rudyard always believed, and damn the scepticism of certain clubhouses.

The coquette was kind to him that day, and he found himself on the eighteenth fairway still in with a chance of breaking 80. If he could get his niblick pitch to within putting distance . . . As he contemplated the shot, he suddenly became aware that he would not play this course many more times. For the simple reason that he would have to leave Undershaw. Leave Undershaw? Impossible, he answered automatically. Yes, but nevertheless inevitable. He had built the house for Touie, who had been its first and only mistress. How could he bring Jean back there as his bride? It would be not just dishonourable, but positively indecent. It was one thing for Touie, in all her saintliness, to hint that he might marry again; quite another to bring a second wife back to the house, there to enjoy with her the very delights forbidden to him and Touie for every single night of their lives together under that roof.

Of course, it was out of the question. Yet how tactful, and how intelligent, of Jean not to have pointed this out, but to have let him find his own way to that conclusion. She really was an extraordinary woman. And it further touched him that she was involving herself in the Edalji case. It was ungentlemanly to make comparisons, but Touie, while approving his mission, would have been equally happy whether he had failed or succeeded. So, doubtless, would Jean; yet her interest changed matters. It made him determined to succeed for George, for the sake of justice, for—to put it higher still—the honour of his country; but also for his darling girl. It would be a trophy to lay at her feet.

Rampant with these emotions, Arthur charged his first putt fifteen feet past the hole, left the next one six feet short, and managed to miss that too. An 82 instead of a 79: yes indeed, they ought to keep women off the golf course. Not simply off the fairways and putting greens, but out of the heads of the players, otherwise chaos would ensue, as it had just done. Jean had once mooted taking up golf, and at the time he had replied with moderate enthusiasm. But it was clearly a bad idea. It was not just the polling booth from which the fair sex should be barred in the interests of civic harmony.

Back at Undershaw, he found that the afternoon mail had brought a communication from Mr. Kenneth Scott of Manchester Square.

“There we have it!” he was shouting as he kicked open Wood’s office door. “There we have it!”

His secretary looked at the paper laid in front of him. He read:

Right eye:		8.75 Diop Spher.
		1.75 Diop cylind axis 90º
Left eye:		8.25 Diop Spher.

“You see, I told Scott to paralyse the accommodation with atropine, so that the results were entirely independent of the patient. Just in case somebody tried claiming that George was feigning blindness. This is exactly what I would have hoped for. Rock solid! Incontrovertible!”

“May I ask,” said Wood, who was finding the part of Watson easier that day, “what exactly it means?”

“It means, it means . . . in all my years practising as an oculist, I never once remember correcting so high a degree of astygmatic myopia. Here, listen to what Scott writes.” He seized the letter back. “ ‘Like all myopics, Mr. Edalji must find it at all times difficult to see clearly any objects more than a few inches off, and in dusk it would be practically impossible for him to find his way about any place with which he was not perfectly familiar.’

“In other words, Alfred, in other words, gentlemen of the jury, he’s as blind as the proverbial bat. Except of course that the bat would be able to find its way to a field on a dark night, unlike our friend. I know what I shall do. I shall issue a challenge. I shall offer to have glasses made up to this prescription, and if any defender of the police will put them on at night, I will guarantee that he will not be able to make his way from the Vicarage to the field and back in under an hour. I will wager my reputation on that. Why are you looking dubious, gentleman of the jury?”

“I was just listening, Sir Arthur.”

“No, you were looking dubious. I can recognize dubiety when I see it. Come on, give me the obvious question.”

Wood sighed. “I was only wondering whether George’s eyesight might not have deteriorated in the course of three years’ penal servitude.”

“Aha! I guessed you might be thinking that. Absolutely not the case. George’s blindness is a permanent structural condition. That’s official. So it was just as bad in 1903 as it is now. And he didn’t even have glasses then. Any further questions?”

“No, Sir Arthur.” Although there was a lurking observation he did not think fit to raise. His employer might indeed never have met with such a degree of astygmatic myopia in all his days as an oculist. On the other hand, Wood had many times heard him regale a dinner table with the story of how he boasted the emptiest waiting room in Devonshire Place, and how his phenomenal lack of patients had given him time to write his books.

“I think I shall ask for three thousand.”

“Three thousand what?”

“Pounds, man, pounds. I base my calculation on the Beck Case.”

Wood’s expression was as good as any question.

“The Beck Case, surely you remember the Beck Case? Really not?” Sir Arthur shook his head in mock disapproval. “Adolf Beck. Of Norwegian origin as I recall. Convicted of frauds against women. They believed him to be an ex-convict by the name of—would you believe it?—John Smith, who had previously served time for similar offences. Beck got seven years’ penal servitude. Released on licence about five years ago. Three years on, rearrested again. Convicted again. Judge had misgivings, postponed sentence, and in the meantime who should turn up but the original fraudster Mr. Smith. One detail of the case I do recall. How did they know Beck and Smith were not one and the same person? One was circumcised and the other wasn’t. On such details does justice sometimes hang.

“Ah. You are looking even more puzzled than at the beginning. Quite understandable. The point. Two points. One, Beck was convicted on the mistaken identification of numerous female witnesses. Ten or eleven of them, in fact. I make no comment. But he was also convicted on the clear evidence of a certain expert in forged and anonymous handwriting. Our old friend Thomas Gurrin. Obliged to present himself to the Beck Committee of Inquiry and admit that his testimony had twice condemned an innocent man. And scarcely a year before this confession of incompetence he had been swearing himself black and blue against George Edalji. In my view he should be barred from the witness box and every case in which he has been involved should be re-examined.

“Anyway, point two. After the Committee’s report, Beck was pardoned and awarded five thousand pounds by the Treasury. Five thousand pounds for five years. You can work out the tariff. I shall be asking for three thousand.”

The campaign was advancing. He would write to Dr. Butter requesting an interview; to the Headmaster of Walsall School to enquire about the boy Speck; to Captain Anson for the police records in the case; and to George to check if he had ever had any contentious business in Walsall. He would look up the Beck Report to confirm the extent of Gurrin’s humiliation, and formally demand of the Home Secretary a new and final investigation into the entire matter.

He planned to devote the next couple of days to the anonymous letters, trying to make them less anonymous, seeking to progress from graphology to psychology to possible identity. Then he would turn the dossier over to Dr. Lindsay Johnson for professional comparison with examples of George’s handwriting. Johnson was the top man in Europe, having been called by Maître Labori in the Dreyfus Case. Yes, he thought: by the time I have finished I shall make the Edalji Case into as big a stir as they did with Dreyfus over there in France.

He sat at his desk with the bundles of letters, a magnifying glass, a notebook and his propelling pencil. He took a deep breath and then slowly, cautiously, as if watching for some evil spirit to escape, he undid the ribbons on the Vicar’s parcels and the twine on Brookes’s. The Vicar’s letters were dated in pencil and numbered in order of receipt; those of the ironmonger were in no evident sequence.

He read them through in all their poisonous hatred and leering familiarity, their boastfulness and their near insanity, their grand claims and their triviality. I am God I am God Almighty I am a fool a liar a slanderer a sneak Oh I am going to make it hot for the postman. It was risible, yet risibility on risibility amounted to cruelty of a diabolical kind, under which the very minds of the victims might have broken down. As Arthur read on, his anger and disgust began to quieten, and he tried to let the phrases soak into him. You dirty sneaks you want twelve months penal servitude . . . I am as sharp as sharp can be . . . You great hulking blackguard I have got you fixed you dirty Cad you bloody monkey . . . I know all the toffs and if I have got a dare devil face it is no worse than yours . . . Who pinched those eggs on Wednesday night why you did or your man but I don’t think they would hang me . . .

He read and reread, sorted and re-sorted, analysed, compared, annotated. Gradually, hints turned to suspicions and then to hypotheses. For a start, whether or not there was a gang of rippers, there certainly appeared to be a gang of writers. Three, he posited: two young adults and a boy. The two adults seemed at times to run into one another, but there was, he judged, a distinction to be made. One was solely malicious; while the other had outbursts of religious mania which veered from hysterical piety to outrageous blasphemy. This was the one who signed himself Satan, God and their theological conjoining, God Satan. As for the boy, he was exceedingly foul-mouthed, and Arthur put his age at between twelve and sixteen. The adults also bragged of their powers of forgery. “Do you think we could not imitate your kid’s writing?” one of them had written to the Vicar in 1892. And to prove it, there was a whole page elaborately covered with the plausible signatures of the entire Edalji family, of the Brookes family, and of others in the neighbourhood.

A large proportion of the letters were on the same paper, and had arrived in similar envelopes. Sometimes one writer would begin and then give way to another: the effusions of God Satan would be followed on the same page by the rough scrawl and rude drawings—rude in every sense—of the lad. This would strongly suggest that all three of them lived under the same roof. Where might this roof be? Since a number of the letters had been hand-delivered to their victims in Wyrley, it was reasonable to assume a proximity of not much more than a mile or two.

Next, what sort of roof might shelter three such scribes? Some establishment housing young males of different ages? A cramming school, perhaps? Arthur consulted educational directories, but could find nothing within any plausible distance. Could the malefactors be three clerks in an office, or three assistants in a business? The more he considered the matter, the more he was driven to conclude that they were members of the same family, two older brothers and a younger one. Some of the letters were extremely long, which argued for a household of idlers with time on their hands.

He needed more specifics. For instance, Walsall School seemed to be a constant factor in the case, yet how important a factor? And then, what about this letter? The religious maniac was quite evidently alluding to Milton. Paradise Lost, Book One: the fall of Satan and the burning lake of Hell, which the writer announced as his own final destination. It certainly would be if Arthur had his way. So, here was a further question for the Headmaster: had Paradise Lost ever been on the syllabus at the school, if so when, and how many boys had studied it, and did any of them take it especially to heart? Was this clutching at straws, or exploring every possibility? It was hard to tell.

He read the letters forwards; he read them backwards; he read them in a random sequence; he shuffled them like a pack of cards. And then his eye caught something, and five minutes later he was thumping his secretary’s door back on its hinges.

“Alfred, I congratulate you. You hit the nail squarely on the head.”

“I did?”

Arthur thrust a letter on to Wood’s desk. “Look, there. And there, and there.” The secretary followed Arthur’s stabbing finger without enlightenment.

“Which nail did I hit?”

“Look, man, there: boy must be sent away to sea. And here: waves come over you. This is the first Greatorex letter, don’t you see? And here too: I don’t think they would hang me but send me to sea.”

Wood’s expression made it clear that the obvious was escaping him.

“The gap, Woodie, the gap. The seven years. Why the gap, I asked, why the gap? And you replied, Because he wasn’t there. And I said, Where’d he gone, and you replied, Perhaps he’d run away to sea. And this is the first anonymous letter after that seven-year interval. I’ll double-check, but I’ll wager your salary there isn’t a single reference to the sea in all the letters of the earlier persecution.”

“Well,” said Wood, allowing himself a touch of complacency, “it did seem like a possible explanation.”

“And what clinches it, in case you have the slightest doubt”—though the secretary, having just been congratulated on his brilliance, was not inclined immediately to doubt it—“is where the final hoax came from.”

“You’ll have to remind me, I’m afraid, Sir Arthur.”

“December 1895, remember? An advertisement in a Blackpool newspaper offering the entire contents of the Vicarage for sale by auction.”

“Yes?”

“Come on, man, come on. Blackpool, what is Blackpool? The pleasure resort for Liverpool. That’s where he took ship from, Liverpool. It’s as plain as a packstaff.”

Alfred Wood was kept busy that afternoon. There was a letter to the Headmaster of Walsall School enquiring about the teaching of Milton; one to Harry Charlesworth instructing him to trace any local inhabitants who had been away to sea between the years 1896 and 1903, and also to trace a boy or man called Speck; and one to Dr. Lindsay Johnson requesting an urgent comparison between the letters in the accompanying dossier and those in George Edalji’s hand already supplied. Meanwhile Arthur wrote to the Mam and Jean informing them of his progress in the case.

The next morning’s post included a letter in a familiar envelope. The postmark was Cannock:

Honoured Sir,

A line to tell you we are narks of the detectives and know Edalji killed the horse and wrote those letters. No use trying to lay it on others. It is Edalji and it will be proven for he is not a right sort nor . . .

Arthur turned the page, read on, and let out a roar:

. . . there was no education to be got at Walsall when that bloody swine Aldis was high school boss. He got the bloody bullet after the governors were sent letters about him. Ha, ha.

A supplementary request was despatched to the Headmaster of Walsall School, asking about the circumstances of his predecessor’s departure; then this latest piece of evidence was forwarded to Dr. Lindsay Johnson.

Undershaw felt quiet. Both children were away: Kingsley in his first half at Eton, Mary at Prior’s Field, Godalming. The weather was gloomy; Arthur took solitary meals by a blazing fire; in the evenings he played billiards with Woodie. He could see his fiftieth birthday on the horizon—if a horizon could be as close as a mere two years away. He still turned out at cricket, and every so often his cover drive proved a thing of beauty, on which opposing captains were kind enough to comment. But all too often he would stand at the crease, watch a disrespectful bowler arrive in a whirl of arms, feel a thud on his pads, glare down the pitch at the umpire, and hear, from twenty-two yards away, the regretful judgment, “Very sorry, Sir Arthur.” A decision against which there was no appeal.

It was time to admit that his glory days were over. Seven for 61 against Cambridgeshire one season, and the wicket of W. G. Grace the next. Admittedly the great man had already scored a century when Arthur came on as fifth-change bowler and dismissed him with off-theory, that duffer’s trick. But even so: W. G. Grace c W. Storer b A. I. Conan Doyle 110. In celebration he had written a mock-heroic poem in nineteen stanzas; but neither his verse nor the deed it recorded were enough to get him into Wisden. Captain of England, as Partridge had once predicted? Captain of Authors v Actors at Lord’s last summer was more his mark. On that June day, he had opened the batting with Wodehouse, who got himself comically bowled for a duck. Arthur himself made two, and Hornung didn’t even get an innings. Horace Bleakley had made fifty-four. Perhaps the better the writer, the worse the cricketer.

And it was the same with golf, where the gap between dream and reality grew wider with every year. But billiards . . . now billiards was a game where decline was not automatically the order of the day. Players continued without any obvious falling-away into their fifties, their sixties, even their seventies. Strength was not paramount; experience and tactics were the thing. Kiss cannons, ricochet cannons, postman’s knock, nursery cannons along the top cushions—what a game. Was there any reason why, with a little more practice and perhaps some advice from a professional, he should not enter the English Amateur Championship? He would need to improve his long jennies, of course. He had to tell himself each time: spot the ball in baulk for a plain half-ball into the top pocket, and then play it as a steady half-ball with as much pocket side as you can manage. Wood had little trouble with long jennies; though he still had a devil of a distance to go with his double-baulks, as Arthur constantly pointed out to him.

Nearing fifty: the second half of his life about to begin, if tardily. He had lost Touie and found Jean. He had abandoned the scientific materialism he had been inducted into, and found a way to open the great door into the beyond just a crack. Wits liked to repeat that the English, since they lacked any spiritual instinct, had invented cricket in order to give themselves a sense of eternity. Purblind observers imagined that billards was the same shot played over and over again. Poppycock, both notions. The English were not a demonstrative race, it was true—they were not Italians—but they had as much of a spiritual nature as the next tribe. And no two billiards shots were alike, any more than any two human souls were alike.

He visited Touie’s grave at Grayshott. He laid flowers, he wept, and as he turned to go, he caught himself wondering when he would come next. Would it be the following week, or would it be in two weeks’ time? And after that? And after that? At a certain point the flowers would cease, and his visits would become rarer. He would start a new life with Jean, perhaps over at Crowborough, near her parents. It would become . . . inconvenient to visit Touie. He would tell himself that thinking of her was sufficient. Jean would—God willing—be able to bear his children. Who would visit Touie then? He shook his head to clear away this thought. There was no point anticipating future guilt. You must act according to your best principles, and then deal with what came later on its own terms.

Even so, back at Undershaw—back in Touie’s empty house—he found himself drawn to her bedroom. He had given no instructions for it to be rearranged or redecorated—how could he? So there was the bed on which she had died at three o’clock in the morning with the scent of violets in the air and her fragile hand resting in his great clumsy paw. Mary and Kingsley sitting in exhausted and frightened politeness. Touie raising herself with almost her last breath and telling Mary to take care of Kingsley . . . Sighing, Arthur crossed to the window. Ten years ago he had chosen this room for her as having the best view, down into the garden and the private narrowing valley where the woods converged. Her bedroom, her sick-room, her death-room—he had always tried to make it as pleasant and as painless as he could.

That is what he had told himself—told himself and others so often that he had ended up believing it. Had he always been fooling himself? For this was the very room where, a few weeks before her death, Touie had told their daughter that her father would marry again. When Mary reported the conversation, he had tried to make light of the matter—a foolish decision, he now realized. He should have taken the opportunity to praise Touie, and also to prepare the ground; instead he had been panicked into jocularity and asked something like, “Did she have any particular candidate in mind?” To which Mary had said, “Father!” And there was no doubting the disapproval with which that word had been pronounced.

He continued looking out of the bedroom window, down past the neglected tennis ground to the valley which once, in a moment of whimsy, he had found reminiscent of a German folk tale. Now it looked no more than the part of Surrey that it was. He could hardly reopen the conversation with Mary. But one thing was certain: if Touie knew, then he was destroyed. If Touie knew and Mary knew, then he was doubly destroyed. If Touie knew, then Hornung was right. If Touie knew, then the Mam was wrong. If Touie knew, then he had played the grossest hypocrite with Connie and shamefully manipulated old Mrs. Hawkins. If Touie knew, then his whole concept of honourable behaviour was a sham. On the wold above Masongill, he had said to the Mam that honour and dishonour lay so close to one another that it was hard to tell them apart, and the Mam had replied that this was what made honour so important. What if he had been paddling in dishonour the whole time, fooling himself yet nobody else? What if the world took him for a common adulterer—and even though he was not, he might as well have been? What if Hornung had been right and there was no difference between guilt and innocence?

He sat heavily on the bed and thought of those illicit journeys to Yorkshire: how he and Jean would arrive by different trains, and leave by different ones, so that they could pretend to innocence. Ingleton was two hundred and fifty miles from Hindhead; there they were safe. But he had confused safety with honour. Over the years, it must have become perfectly plain to everyone. What were English villages but vortices of gossip? However Jean might be chaperoned, however clearly he and Jean never stayed under the same roof, here was the famous Arthur Conan Doyle, who married in the parish church, striding over wold and fell with another woman at his side.

And then there was Waller. All that time, in his blithe smugness, he had never asked himself what Waller made of it all. The Mam had approved his course of action, and this had been sufficient. It did not matter what Waller thought. And Waller, being a smooth and easy fellow, had never been crude. He had behaved as if he entirely believed whatever story was put in front of him. The Leckies being old friends of the Doyles; the Mam having always been fond of the Leckie girl. Waller had never said more nor less than common courtesy and common prudence enjoined. He did not try to put Arthur off his golf swing with some comment about Jean Leckie being a handsome young woman. But Waller would have seen the subterfuge immediately. Perhaps—God forbid—he had discussed it with the Mam behind Arthur’s back. No, he could not bear to think as much. But in any case, Waller would have seen, Waller would have known. And—which was the hardest part, Arthur now realized—Waller would have been able to look at him with immense self-satisfaction. While they shot partridge together and went out ferreting, he would have been remembering that schoolboy back from Austria, who had viewed him as a cuckoo in the nest, who stood there galumphingly ignorant yet full of violent speculation and violent embarrassment. And then the years had passed, and Arthur began coming to Masongill for a few stolen hours alone with Jean. And now Waller was able silently, without the slightest murmur—which made it all the worse, of course, and all the more superior—Waller was able to take his moral revenge. You dared to look at me and disapprove? You dared to think you understood life? You dared impugn your mother’s honour? And now you come here and use your mother and myself and the whole village as camouflage for a rendezvous? You take your mother’s pony cart and drive past St. Oswald’s with your inamorata at your side. You think the village does not notice? You imagine your best man an amnesiac? You tell yourself—and others—that your behaviour is honourable?

No, he must stop. He knew this spiral too well already, he knew its descending temptations, and exactly where it led: to lethargy, despair and self-contempt. No, he must stick to known facts. The Mam had approved his actions. So had everyone except Hornung. Waller had said nothing. Touie had merely warned Mary not to be shocked if he remarried—the words of a loving and considerate wife and mother. Touie had said nothing more and therefore known nothing more. Mary knew nothing. Neither the living nor the dead would benefit from him torturing himself. And life must go on. Touie knew that and Touie had not resented it. Life must go on.

Dr. Butter agreed to meet him in London; but other correspondents were less encouraging. George had never done business of any kind in Walsall. Mr. Mitchell, the Headmaster of Walsall School, informed him that no pupil by the name of Speck had been on their roll in the last twenty years: further, that his predecessor Mr. Aldis had served with distinction for sixteen years, and the notion that he was either denounced or dismissed was plain nonsense. The Home Secretary, Mr. Herbert Gladstone, presented his compliments and respects to Sir Arthur, and after several paragraphs of flummery and twaddle regretfully declined any further review of the already much-reviewed Edalji case. The final letter was on the writing paper of the Staffordshire County Police. “Dear Sir,” it began, “I shall be much interested to note what Sherlock Holmes has to say about a case in real life . . .” But jocularity did not signal cooperativeness: Captain Anson was not inclined to assist Sir Arthur in any respect. There was no precedent for turning over police records to a member of the public, however distinguished he might be; no precedent either for permitting such a member to interview officers of the force under the Captain’s command. Indeed, since Sir Arthur’s evident intention was to discredit the Staffordshire Constabulary, its Chief Constable could not see that cooperation with the enemy was strategically or tactically advisable.

Arthur preferred the combative bluntness of the former artillery officer to the mealy-mouthedness of the politician. It might be possible to win Anson round; though his use of military metaphor made Arthur wonder if rather than civilly answering his opponents shot for shot—his expert against their expert—he should not lay down an artillery barrage and blast their position to smithereens. Yes, why not? If they had one handwriting expert, he would produce several in return: not just Dr. Lindsay Johnson but perhaps Mr. Gobert and Mr. Douglas Blackburn as well. And in case anyone doubted Mr. Kenneth Scott of Manchester Square, he would send George to several more eye specialists. Yelverton had favoured attrition, which had produced satisfactory results until the final stalemate; now Arthur would switch to maximum force and an advance on all fronts.

He met Dr. Butter at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross. This time he was not late as he turned in from Northumberland Avenue; nor did he linger surreptitiously to observe the police surgeon. In any case, he could have deduced the man’s character in advance from his evidence: it was measured, cautious, and not given to wild or frivolous speculation. At the trial he had never claimed more than his observations could support: this had been advantageous to the defence over the bloodstains, disadvantageous over the hairs. It had been Butter’s evidence, even more than that of the charlatan Gurrin, which had condemned George to Lewes and Portland.

“It is good of you to spare me the time, Dr. Butter.” They were in the same writing room where only a couple of weeks previously he had obtained his first impressions of George Edalji.

The surgeon smiled. He was a handsome, grey-haired man about a decade older than Arthur. “I am happy to. I am glad to have the opportunity of thanking the man who wrote”—and here there seemed to be a microscopic pause, unless it was only within Arthur’s own brain—“The White Company.”

Arthur smiled in reply. He had always found the company of police surgeons to be as agreeable as it was instructive.

“Dr. Butter, I wonder if you would agree to talk on a frank basis. That is to say, I have great regard for your evidence, but I have various questions and indeed speculations to put before you. Everything you say will be treated in confidence, and I shall not repeat a single word without giving you the opportunity to endorse it, correct it, or withdraw it completely. Would that be acceptable?”

Dr. Butter agreed, and Arthur led him, to begin with, through the parts of his evidence which were the least controversial, or at any rate irrefutable by the defence. The razors, the boots, the stains of various kinds.

“Did it surprise you, Dr. Butter, that there was so little blood on the clothing, given what George Edalji was accused of doing?”

“No. Or rather, you are asking too large a question. If Edalji had said, Yes, I mutilated the pony, this is the instrument I did it with, these were the clothes I was wearing, and I acted by myself, then I would be competent to offer an opinion. And in those circumstances I would have to say to you that yes, I would be very surprised, indeed astonished.”

“But?”

“But my evidence was, as it always is, about what I found: this amount of mammalian blood on this garment, and so on. That was my evidence. If I cannot tell how or when it got there, I am unable to comment further.”

“In the witness box, of course not. But between ourselves . . .”

“Between ourselves, I would think that if a man rips a horse, there would be a lot of blood, and he would be unable to control where it fell, especially if the deed is done on a dark night.”

“So you are with me? He cannot have done it?”

“No, Sir Arthur, I am not with you. I am very far from with you. There is a wide expanse between the two positions. For instance, anyone going out deliberately to rip a horse would know to wear some kind of apron, just as slaughtermen do. It would be an obvious precaution. But a few spots might fall elsewhere, and escape notice.”

“No evidence of any apron was given in court.”

“That is not my point. I am merely giving you a different explanation from your own. Another might be that there were others present. If there were a gang, as has been suggested, then the young man might not have done the ripping himself, but might have been standing by, and a few drops of blood might have fallen on his clothes in the process.”

“Again, no such evidence was given.”

“But there was a strong suggestion of a gang, was there not?”

“There was deliberate mention of a gang. But not a shred of proof.”

“The other man who ripped his horse?”

“Green. But even Green did not claim there was a gang.”

“Sir Arthur, I quite follow your argument, and your desire for evidence to support it. I merely say, there are other possibilities, whether or not they were brought out in court.”

“You are quite right.” Arthur decided not to press further on this. “May we talk instead about the hairs? You said in your evidence that you picked twenty-nine hairs from the clothing, and that when you examined them under the microscope they were—if I remember your words correctly—’similar in length, colour and structure’ to those from the piece of skin cut from the Colliery pony.”

“That is correct.”

“ ‘Similar.’ You did not say ‘exactly the same as.’ ”

“No.”

“Because they were not exactly the same as?”

“No, because that is a conclusion rather than an observation. But to say that they were similar in length, colour and structure is, in layman’s terms, to say that they were exactly the same.”

“No doubt in your mind?”

“Sir Arthur, in the witness box I always err on the side of caution. Between ourselves, and under the conditions you have proposed for this interview, I would assure you that the hairs on the clothing were from the same animal whose skin I examined under the microscope.”

“And from exactly the same part too?”

“I do not follow you.”

“The same beast, but also the same part of the beast, namely the belly?”

“Yes, that is true.”

“Now, the hairs on different parts of a horse or pony would vary in length, and perhaps thickness and perhaps structure. Hairs from the tail or mane, for example, would be different?”

“That is also true.”

“Yet all of the twenty-nine hairs you examined were exactly the same, and from exactly the same part of the pony?”

“Indeed.”

“Can we imagine something together, Dr. Butter? Again, in complete confidence, within these anonymous walls. Let us imagine—distasteful as it might be—that you or I go out to disembowel a horse.”

“If I may correct you, the pony was not disembowelled.”

“No?”

“The evidence given was that it had been ripped, and was bleeding, and had to be shot. But the bowels were not hanging from the cut as they would have been had it been attacked differently.”

“Thank you. So, imagine we wish to rip a pony. We would have to approach it, calm it down. Stroke its muzzle, perhaps, talk to it, stroke its flank. Then imagine how we might hold it while we rip it. If we are to rip the belly, we might stand against its flank, perhaps put an arm over its back, holding it there while we reached underneath with whatever instrument we were using.”

“I do not know. I have never attended such a gruesome scene.”

“But you do not dispute that this is how you might do it? I have horses myself, they are nervous creatures at the best of times.”

“We were not in the field. And this was not a horse from your stables, Sir Arthur. This was a pit pony. Are not pit ponies notorious for their docility? Are they not used to being handled by miners? Do they not trust those who approach them?”

“You are right, we were not in the field. But indulge me for the moment. Imagine that the act was done as I described it.”

“Very well. Though of course it might have been done quite differently. If there was more than one person present, for example.”

“I grant you that, Dr. Butter. And you must grant me in return that if the deed were done roughly as I described it, then it is inconceivable that the only hairs which ended up on the individual’s clothing were all from the same place, namely the belly, which in any case is not where you would touch the animal to calm it. And further, the same hairs are found on different parts of the clothing—on both the sleeve and the left breast of the jacket. Would you not expect, at the very minimum, some hairs from another part of the pony?”

“Perhaps. If your description of events is the true one. But as before you offer only two possible explanations—that of the prosecution, and your own. There is a wide expanse between them. For instance, there might have been some longer hairs on the clothing, but they were noticed by the culprit and removed. That would not be surprising, would it? Or they might have blown away in the wind. Or again, there might have been a gang . . .”

Arthur then moved, very cautiously, towards the “obvious” solution proposed by Wood.

“You work at Cannock, I believe?”

“Yes.”

“The piece of skin was not cut by you?”

“No, by Mr. Lewis who attended the animal.”

“And it was delivered to you at Cannock?”

“Yes.”

“And the clothing was also delivered?”

“Yes.”

“Before or afterwards?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did the clothing arrive before the skin, or the skin before the clothing?”

“Oh, I see. No, they arrived together.”

“At the same time?”

“Yes.”

“By the same police officer?”

“Yes.”

“In the same parcel?”

“Yes.”

“Who was the police officer?”

“I have no idea. I see so many. Besides, they all look young to me nowadays, so they all look the same.”

“Do you remember what he said?”

“Sir Arthur, this was over three years ago. There is not the slightest reason why I should remember a word he said. He would merely have told me that the parcel came from Inspector Campbell. He might have said what was in it. He might have said the items were for examination, but I hardly needed to be told that, did I?”

“And during the time these items were in your possession, they were kept scrupulously apart, the skin and the clothing? I do not intend to sound like counsel.”

“You do a very good likeness, if I may say so. And naturally I see where you are heading. There was no possibility of contamination in my laboratory, I can assure you.”

“I was not for a moment suggesting it, Dr. Butter. I was heading in a different direction. Can you describe to me the parcel you received?”

“Sir Arthur, I can see exactly where you are heading. I have not stood cross-examination by defence counsel for these last twenty years without recognizing such an approach, or without having to answer for the procedures of the police. You were hoping I might say that the skin and the clothing were all rolled up together in some old piece of sacking into which the police had incompetently stuffed them. In which case you impugn my integrity as well as theirs.”

There was a steeliness now overlaying Dr. Butter’s civility. This was a witness you would always prefer to have on your side.

“I would not do such a thing,” said Arthur mollifyingly.

“You just have, Sir Arthur. You implied that I might have ignored the possibility of contamination. The items were separately wrapped and sealed, and no amount of shaking them around could have made the hairs escape from one package into the other.”

“I am obliged to you, Dr. Butter, for eliminating this possibility.” And thus leaving it down to a choice of two: police incompetence before the items were packed separately, or police malice while this was happening. Well, he had pressed Butter far enough. Except . . . “May I ask one more question? It is purely factual.”

“Of course. Forgive my irritation.”

“It is understandable. I was behaving too much like a defence counsel, as you observed.”

“It was not so much that. It is this. I have worked with the Staffordshire Constabulary for twenty years and more. Twenty years of going to court and having to answer sly questions based on assumptions I know to be false. Twenty years of seeing a jury’s ignorance being played to. Twenty years of presenting evidence which is as clear and unambiguous as I can make it, which is based on rigorous scientific analysis, and then being treated, if not as a fraud, then as someone who is merely giving an opinion, that opinion being no more valuable than the next man’s. Except that the next man does not have a microscope and if he did would not be competent to focus it. I state what I have observed—what I know—and find myself being told disdainfully that this is merely what I happen to think.”

“I entirely sympathize,” said Sir Arthur.

“I wonder. In any case, your question.”

“At what time of day did you receive the police parcel?”

“What time? About nine o’clock.”

Arthur was amazed by such despatch. The pony had been discovered at about 6:20, Campbell was still in the field at the time George was leaving home to catch the 7:39, he arrived at the Vicarage with Parsons and his band of specials some time before eight. Then they had to search the place, argue with the Edaljis . . .

“I’m sorry, Dr. Butter, without sounding like counsel again, surely it was later than that?”

“Later? Certainly not. I know what time the parcel arrived. I remember complaining. They insisted on putting the parcel into my hands that day. I told them I could not possibly stay till after nine. I had my watch out when it arrived. Nine o’clock.”

“The mistake is entirely mine. I thought you meant nine o’clock in the morning.”

Now it is the surgeon’s turn to look surprised. “Sir Arthur, the police are, in my experience, both competent and industrious. Also honest. But they are not miracle-workers.”

Sir Arthur agreed, and the two men parted on friendly terms. But afterwards he found himself thinking exactly that: the police are miracle-workers. They are able to make twenty-nine horse hairs pass from one sealed package to another merely by the power of thought. Perhaps he should write them up for the Society of Psychical Research.

Yes, he might compare them to apport mediums, who were supposedly able to dematerialize objects and then rematerialize them, making showers of ancient coins fall upon the seance table, not to mention small Assyrian tablets and semi-precious stones. This was one branch of spiritism about which Arthur remained deeply sceptical; indeed, the most amateur detective was usually able to trace the ancient coins to the nearest numismatist’s. As for the fellows who dealt in snakes and tortoises and live birds: Arthur thought they belonged more in the circus or the conjuror’s booth. Or the Staffordshire Constabulary.

He was getting skittish. But that was just exhilaration. Twelve hours—therein lay his answer. The police had the evidence in their possession for twelve hours before delivering it to Dr. Butter. Where had it been, who had charge of it, how had it been handled? Was there casual contamination, or a particular act done with the specific intention of incriminating George Edalji? Almost certainly, they would never find out, not without a deathbed confession—and Arthur had always been dubious of deathbed confessions.

His exhilaration mounted further when Dr. Lindsay Johnson’s report arrived at Undershaw. It was backed by two notebooks full of Johnson’s detailed graphological analysis. The top man in Europe judged that none of the letters submitted to him, whether penned by malevolent schemer, religious maniac or degenerate boy, had any significant consonance with genuine documents written by George Edalji. In certain examples there was a kind of specious resemblance; but this was no more than you would expect from a forger who admitted trying to counterfeit another’s handwriting. You would expect him capable of achieving occasionally a plausible facsimile; yet there were always giveaway signs to prove that George had—literally—no hand in it.

The first part of Arthur’s list was now more than half ticked off: Yelverton—Hairs—Letters—Eyesight. Then there was Green—still work to do on him—and Anson. He would beard the Chief Constable directly. “I shall be much interested to note what Sherlock Holmes has to say about a case in real life . . .” had been Anson’s sarcastic response. Well, then, Arthur would take him at his word; he would write up his findings so far, send them off to Anson, and invite his comments.

As he sat down at his desk to begin his draft, he felt, for the first time since Touie’s death, a sense of the properness of things. After the depression and guilt and lethargy, after the challenge and the call to action, he was where he belonged: a man at a desk with a pen in his hand, eager to tell a story and to make people see things differently; while out there, up in London, waiting for him—although not for too much longer—was the woman who, from now on, would be his first reader and the first witness of his life. He felt charged with energy; the material teemed in his head; and his purpose was clear. He began with a sentence he had been working on in trains and hotels and taxicabs, something both dramatic and declaratory:

The first sight which I ever had of Mr. George Edalji was enough in itself both to convince me of the extreme improbability of his being guilty of the crime for which he was condemned, and to suggest some at least of the reasons which had led to his being suspected.

And from there the narrative sped out of him, like a great unrolling chain, its links as hard-forged as he could make them. In two days he wrote fifteen thousand words. There might still be things to add, when the additional reports came in from oculists and handwriting experts. He also dealt lightly with what he took to be Anson’s role in the affair: no point expecting a useful response from a fellow if you went hard at him before you had even met him. Then Wood typed up the report, and a copy was sent by registered post to the Chief Constable.

Two days later a reply arrived from Green Hall, Stafford, inviting Sir Arthur to dine with Captain and Mrs. Anson on any day of the following week. He would, naturally, be welcome to stay overnight. There was no comment at all on Arthur’s report, only a whimsical postscript: “You may bring Mr. Sherlock Holmes with you if you wish. Mrs. Anson would be delighted to meet him. Let me know if he too requires accommodation.”

Sir Arthur handed the letter to his secretary. “Keeping his powder dry by the looks of it.”

Wood nodded in agreement, and knew not to comment on the P.S.

“I suppose, Woodie, you don’t fancy coming as Holmes?”

“I shall accompany you if you wish, Sir Arthur, but you know my thoughts on dressing up.” He also felt that, having already been cast as Watson, playing Holmes as well would be beyond his dramatic elasticity. “I may be more use to you practising my billiards.”

“Quite right, Alfred. You hold the fort. And don’t neglect your double-baulks. I’ll see what Anson’s made of.”

While Arthur is planning his trip to Staffordshire, Jean is thinking further ahead. It is time to address her transition from waiting girl to non-waiting wife. It is now the month of January. Touie died the previous July; clearly, Arthur cannot marry within the twelvemonth. They have not yet talked about a date, but an autumn wedding is not an impossible thought. Fifteen months—few could be shocked by such an interval. The sentimental prefer a spring wedding; but the autumn suits a second marriage, in Jean’s opinion. And then a Continental honeymoon. Italy, of course, and, well, she has always felt a yen for Constantinople.

A wedding means bridesmaids, but this has long been settled: Leslie Rose and Lily Loder-Symonds are marked for the task. But a wedding also means a church, and a church means religion. The Mam brought Arthur up a Catholic, but both have since deserted the faith: the Mam for Anglicanism, Arthur for Sunday golf. Arthur has even become covert about his middle name, Ignatius. There is little chance then, that she, a Catholic from the cradle, will marry as one. This may distress her parents, especially her mother; but if that is the price, Jean will pay it.

Might there be a further price? If she is going to be at Arthur’s side in all things, then she must face what up till now she has run from. On the few occasions that Arthur has mentioned his interest in psychical matters, she has turned away. Inwardly, she has shuddered at the vulgarity and stupidity of that world: at silly old men pretending to go into trances, at old crones in frightful wigs gazing into crystal balls, at people holding hands in the darkness and making one another jump. And it has nothing to do with religion, which means morality. And the notion that this . . . mumbo-jumbo appeals to her beloved Arthur is both upsetting and barely credible. How can someone like Arthur, whose reasoning power is second to none, allow himself to associate with such people?

It is true that her great friend Lily Loder-Symonds is an enthusiast for table-turning, but Jean regards this as a whimsicality. She discourages talk of seances, even though Lily assures her they are full of respectable people. Perhaps she should talk the matter through with Lily first, as a way of conquering her distaste. No, that would be pusillanimous. She is marrying Arthur, after all, not Lily.

So when he arrives on his way north, she sits him down, listens dutifully to news of the investigation, and then says, to his evident surprise, “I should very much like to meet this young man of yours.”

“Would you, my darling? He is a very decent fellow, horribly traduced. I am sure he would be honoured and delighted.”

“He is a Parsee, I think you said?”

“Well, not exactly. His father—”

“What do Parsees believe, Arthur? Are they Hindoos?”

“No, they are Zoroastrians.” Arthur enjoys requests like this. The fundamental mystery of women can, he thinks, be encompassed and held at bay as long as he is allowed to explain things to them. He describes, with settled confidence, the historical origins of the Parsees, their characteristic appearance, their headgear, their liberal attitude to women, their tradition of being born on the ground floor of the house. He passes over the ceremony of purification, since this involves ablution with cow urine; but is expatiating upon the central position of astrology in Parsee life, and heading towards the towers of silence and the posthumous attention of vultures, when Jean raises her hand to stop him. She realizes that this is not the way to do things. The history of Zoroastrianism is not helping make the smooth transition she has somehow hoped for. Also, it feels dishonest, against her view of herself.

“Arthur, my dear,” she interrupts. “There is something I wish to talk about.”

He looks surprised, and slightly alarmed. If he has always valued her directness, there is a residual suspicion within him that whenever a woman says something must be talked about, it is rarely something to a man’s comfort or advantage.

“I want you to explain to me your involvement in . . . do you call it spiritism or spiritualism?”

“Spiritism is the term I prefer, but it seems to be losing currency. However, I thought you disliked the entire subject.” He means more than this: that she fears and despises the whole subject—and, a fortiori, its adherents.

“Arthur, I could not dislike anything you are interested in.” She means less than this: that she hopes she cannot dislike anything he is interested in.

And so he begins to explain his involvement, from experiments in thought-transference with the future architect of Undershaw to conversations inside Buckingham Palace with Sir Oliver Lodge. At all points he stresses the scientific origins and procedures of psychical research. He goes very carefully, making it sound as respectable and unthreatening as he can. His tone as much as his words begins to reassure her a little.

“It is true, Arthur, that Lily has talked to me a little about table-turning, but I suppose I have always considered it against Church teaching. Is it not heresy?”

“It goes against Church institutions, that is true. Not least because it cuts out the middleman.”

“Arthur! That is hardly a proper way to speak about the clergy.”

“But it is what, historically, they have been. Middlemen, intermediaries. Conveyors of the truth at first, but increasingly controllers of the truth, obfuscators, politicians. The Cathars were on the right line, that of direct access to God untrammelled by layers of hierarchy. Naturally they were wiped out by Rome.”

“So your—do I call them beliefs or not?—make you hostile to my Church?” And therefore, she means, to all its members. To one specific member.

“No, my dearest. And I would never seek to dissuade you from going to your Church. But we are moving beyond all religions. Soon—very soon in historical terms—they will be things of the past. Look at it this way. Is religion the only domain of thought which is non-progressive? Wouldn’t that be a strange thing? Are we forever to be referred to a standard set two thousand years ago? Cannot people see that as the human brain evolves, it must take a wider outlook? A half-formed brain makes a half-formed God, and who shall say our brains are even half-formed yet?”

Jean is silent. She thinks that the standards set two thousand years ago are true ones which should be obeyed; and that while the brain might develop, and produce all sorts of scientific advances, the soul, which is the spark of the divine, is something quite separate and immutable, and not subject to evolution.

“Do you remember when I judged the Strong Man competition? At the Albert Hall? He was called Murray, the winner. I followed him out into the night. He had a gold statue under his arm, he was the strongest man in Britain. Yet he was lost in the fog . . .”

No, metaphor was the wrong approach. Metaphors were for the institutional religions. Metaphors paltered.

“What we are doing, Jean, is a simple thing. We are taking the essence of the great religions, which is the life of the spirit, and rendering it more visible and thus more understandable.”

These sound like tempter’s words to her, and her tone is crisp. “By seances and table-turning?”

“Which look strange to the outsider, I freely admit. As the ceremonies of your Church would look strange to a visiting Zoroastrian. The body and blood of Christ on a plate and in a cup—he might think that was sheer hocus-pocus. Religions—all religions—have become mired in ritual and despotism. We do not say, Come and pray in our church and follow our instructions and perhaps one day you will be rewarded in the afterlife. That is like the bargaining of carpet salesmen. Rather, we will show you now, as you live, the reality of certain psychic phenomena, which will prove to you the physical abolition of death.”

“So you do not believe in the resurrection of the body?”

“That we go into the ground and rot, then at some future time are put back together whole? No. The body is a mere husk, a container which we shed. It is true that some souls wander in darkness for a while after death, but that is only because they are unprepared for the transition to the farther side. A true spiritist who understands the process will pass easily and without anguish. And will also be able to communicate more quickly with the world he has left behind.”

“You have witnessed this?”

“Oh yes. And hope to do so more frequently as I understand more.”

A sudden chill goes through Jean. “You are not, I hope, going to become a medium, dear Arthur.” She has a picture of her beloved husband as an aged huckster going into trances and talking in funny voices. And of the new Lady Doyle being known as a huckster’s wife.

“Oh no, I have no such powers. True mediums are very, very rare. They are often simple, humble people. Like Jesus Christ, for instance.”

Jean ignores this comparison. “And what about morality, Arthur?”

“Morality is unchanged. True morality, that is—which comes from the individual conscience and the love of God.”

“I do not mean for you, Arthur. You know what I mean. If people—ordinary people—do not have the Church to tell them how to behave, then they will relapse into brutish squalor and self-interest.”

“I do not see that as the alternative. Spiritists, true spiritists, are men and women of high moral calibre. I could name you several. And their morality is the higher because they are closer to an understanding of spiritual truth. If the ordinary person to whom you allude were to see proof of the spirit world at first hand, if he were to realize how close it is to us at all times, then brutishness and self-interest will lose their appeal. Make the truth apparent, and morality will take care of itself.”

“Arthur, you are going too fast for me.” More to the point, Jean feels a headache coming on; indeed, she fears, a migraine.

“Of course. We have all our lives ahead of us. And then all of eternity together.”

Jean smiles. She wonders what Touie will be doing for all of the eternity she and Arthur have together. Though of course the same problem will present itself, whether her Church turns out to be telling the truth, or those low-born mediums who so impress her husband-to-be.

Arthur himself is far from getting a headache. Life is on the move again: first the Edalji case, and now Jean’s sudden interest in the things beneath that truly matter. He will soon be back to full gusto. On the doorstep he embraces his waiting girl and, for the first time since Touie’s death, finds himself reacting like a prospective bridegroom.