Arthur & George

the cause of the wheezing noises he makes. He looks George up and down, nodding to himself as he does so.
    ‘So you’re the young fellow that found the key?’
    George remembers his attempts to play the detective when Elizabeth Foster was writing on walls. Now there is another mystery, but this time with a policeman and a future solicitor involved. It feels appropriate as well as exciting.
    ‘Yes. It was on the doorstep.’ The Sergeant doesn’t respond to this, but carries on nodding to himself. He seems to need putting at his ease, so George tries to help. ‘Is there a reward?’
    The Sergeant looks surprised. ‘Now why would you be wondering if there’s a reward? You of all people?’
    George takes this to mean that there isn’t one. Perhaps the policeman has only come to congratulate him on returning lost property. ‘Have you found out where it’s from?’
    Upton doesn’t reply to this either. Instead, he takes out a notebook and pencil.
    ‘Name?’
    ‘You know my name.’
    ‘Name, I said.’
    The Sergeant really could be more civil, George thinks.
    ‘George.’
    ‘Yes. Go on.’
    ‘Ernest.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘Thompson.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘You know my surname. It’s the same as my father’s. And my mother’s.’
    ‘Go on, I say, you uppish little fellow.’
    ‘Edalji.’
    ‘Ah yes,’ says the Sergeant. ‘Now I think you’d better spell that out for me.’

Arthur
    Arthur’s marriage, like his remembered life, began in death.
    He qualified as a doctor; worked as a locum-tenens in Sheffield, Shropshire and Birmingham; then took a post as surgeon on the steam-whaler
Hope
. They sailed from Peterhead to the Arctic ice field, off after seal and anything else they could chase and kill. Arthur’s duties proved light, and since he was a normal young man, happily given to drinking and, if necessary, fighting, he swiftly won the confidence of the crew; he also fell into the sea so often that they nicknamed him the Great Northern Diver. And like any healthy Briton, he enjoyed a good hunt: his game-bag on the voyage came to fifty-five seals.
    He felt little but vigorous male competitiveness when they were out on the endless ice battering seals to death. But one day they took a Greenland whale, and he found it an experience of a different order to any he had known before. To play a salmon might be a royal game, but when your Arctic prey weighs more than a suburban villa, it dwarfs all comparisons. From no more than a hand’s touch away, Arthur watched the whale’s eye – to his surprise, no bigger than a bullock’s – slowly dim over in death.
    The mystery of the victim: something was now changed in his way of thinking. He continued to shoot ducks from the snowy sky, and felt pride in his marksmanship; yet beyond this lay a feeling he could grasp at but not contain. Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.
    Next he sailed south, on the
Mayumba
out of Liverpool, bound for the Canaries and the west coast of Africa. Shipboard drinking continued, but fighting took place only over the bridge table and the cribbage board. If he regretted swapping the sea boots and informal dress of a whaler for the gilt buttons and serge suit of a passenger vessel, there was at least the compensation of female company. One night the ladies sportingly made an apple-pie of his bed; the next he took his amiable revenge by hiding a flying fish in one of their nightgowns.
    He returned to dry land, common sense and a career. He set up his brass plate in Southsea. He became a Freemason, admitted to the third degree in the Phoenix Lodge No. 257. He captained the Portsmouth Cricket Club and was judged one of the safest Association backs in Hampshire. Dr Pike, fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, referred patients to him; the Gresham Life Insurance Company hired him to perform medical examinations.
    One day Dr Pike sought Arthur’s view on a young patient who had recently moved to Southsea with his widowed mother and elder sister. This second opinion was a mere politeness: it was evident that Jack Hawkins had cerebral meningitis, against which the entire medical profession, let alone Arthur, was powerless. No hotel or boarding house would accept the poor fellow; so Arthur offered to take him into his own house as a resident patient. Hawkins was only a month older than his host. Despite a thousand palliative cups of arrowroot, he swiftly deteriorated, became delirious, and