Arthur and George (39 page)

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:

“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.