“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 l
ong, 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?