Arthur & George

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