“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.