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 hi
s 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!”
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