'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: