Arthur & George

initiate to firmer ground; and it is the same when a man is morally lost. The path lies where honour directs. Honour has told him how to behave in the past years; now honour must tell him where he is to head. Honour binds him to Jean, as it bound him to Touie. He cannot tell at this distance if he will ever be truly happy again; but he knows that for him there can be no happiness where honour is absent.
    The children are away at school; the house is silent; winds rip the trees bare; November turns to December. He feels a little steadier, as they suggested he would. One morning he wanders into Wood’s office to look at his correspondence. On average he gets sixty letters a day. Over the last months Wood has been obliged to develop a system: he answers himself anything that can be dealt with immediately; items requiring Sir Arthur’s opinion or decision are placed in a large wooden tray. If, by the end of the week, his employer has not had the heart or stomach to offer any guidance, Wood clears it off as best he can.
    Today there is a small package on top of the tray. Arthur half-heartedly slides out the contents. There is a covering letter pinned to a file of cuttings from a newspaper called
The Umpire
. He has never heard of it. Perhaps it deals with cricket. No, from its pink newsprint he can tell it is a scandal sheet. He glances at the letter’s signature. He reads a name that means absolutely nothing to him: George Edalji.

THREE
    Ending with a Beginning

Arthur & George
    EVER SINCE SHERLOCK Holmes solved his first case, requests and demands have been coming in from all over the world. If persons or goods disappear in mysterious circumstances, if the police are more than usually baffled, if justice miscarries, then it appears that mankind’s instinct is to appeal to Holmes and his creator. Letters addressed to 221B Baker Street are now automatically returned by the Post Office stamped ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN; those sent to Holmes c/o Sir Arthur are similarly dealt with. Over the years, Alfred Wood has often been struck by the way his employer is simultaneously proud of having created a character in whose true existence readers effortlessly believe, and irritated when they take such belief to its logical conclusion.
    Then there are appeals directed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
in propria persona
, written on the presumption that anyone with the intelligence and guile to devise such complicated fictional crimes must therefore be equipped to solve real ones. Sir Arthur, if impressed or touched, will sometimes respond, though unfailingly in the negative. He will explain that he is, regrettably, no more a consulting detective than he is an English bowman of the fourteenth century or a debonair cavalry officer under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte.
    So Wood has laid out the Edalji dossier with few expectations. Yet on this occasion Sir Arthur is back in his secretary’s office within the hour, in mid-expostulation even as he barges through the door.
    ‘It’s as plain as a packstaff,’ he is saying. ‘The fellow’s no more guilty than that typewriter of yours. I ask you, Woodie! It’s a joke. The case of the locked room in reverse – not how does he get in but how does he get out? It’s as shabby as shabby can be.’
    Wood has not seen his employer so indignant for months. ‘You wish me to reply?’
    ‘Reply? I’m going to do more than reply. I’m going to stir things up. I’m going to knock some heads together. They’ll rue the day they let this happen to an innocent man.’
    Wood is as yet unsure who ‘they’ might be, or indeed what ‘this’ is that has ‘happened’. In the supplicant’s petition he observed little, apart from a strange surname, to distinguish it from dozens of other supposed miscarriages of justice which Sir Arthur is expected single-handedly to overturn. But Wood does not at this moment care about the rights or wrongs of the Edalji case. He is only relieved that his employer seems, within the hour, to have shrugged off the lethargy and despondence that have afflicted him these past months.
    In a covering letter George has explained the anomalous position in which he finds himself. The decision to free him on licence was taken by the previous Home Secretary, Mr Akers-Douglas, and implemented by the present one, Mr Herbert Gladstone; but neither has offered any official explanation of their reasons. George’s conviction has not been cancelled, nor has any apology been tendered for