Arthur & George

hang.
    ‘Ah. You are looking even more puzzled than at the beginning. Quite understandable. The point. Two points. One, Beck was convicted on the mistaken identification of numerous female witnesses. Ten or eleven of them, in fact. I make no comment. But he was also convicted on the clear evidence of a certain expert in forged and anonymous handwriting. Our old friend Thomas Gurrin. Obliged to present himself to the Beck Committee of Inquiry and admit that his testimony had twice condemned an innocent man. And scarcely a year before this confession of incompetence he had been swearing himself black and blue against George Edalji. In my view he should be barred from the witness box and every case in which he has been involved should be re-examined.
    ‘Anyway, point two. After the Committee’s report, Beck was pardoned and awarded five thousand pounds by they 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 resorted, 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