Arthur & George

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