“And then you went back and reported your discovery?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And then what happened?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
George was pleased to observe a slight change in Cooper’s tone; as if he knew he were being led somewhere but could not yet make out the destination.
“I mean, Constable, what happened after you reported what you had found?”
“I was put to searching the grounds of the Vicarage, sir.”
“I see. But at some point, Constable, you went back and showed someone of higher rank the marks you had discovered.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And when would that be?”
“In the middle of the afternoon.”
“In the middle of the afternoon. By which you mean, three o’clock, four o’clock?”
“Around then, sir.”
“I see.” Mr. Vachell frowned and gave himself rather theatrically to reflection, in George’s view. “Six hours later, in other words.”
“Yes, sir.”
“During which time the area was guarded and cordoned off to prevent further trampling?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly. Does that mean yes or no, Officer?”
“No, sir.”
“Now, I understand that it is often normal procedure in such cases to take a plaster of Paris cast of the heelmarks in question. Can you tell me whether this was done?”
“No, sir, it wasn’t.”
“I understand that another technique would be to photograph such marks. Was that done?”
“No, sir.”
“I understand that another technique is to dig up the relevant piece of turf and bring it for forensic analysis. Was that done?”
“No, sir. The ground was too soft.”
“How long have you been a police constable, Mr. Cooper?”
“Fifteen months.”
“Fifteen months. Thank you very much.”
George felt like cheering. He looked across at Mr. Vachell, as he had done before, but failed to catch his eye. Perhaps this was court etiquette; or perhaps Mr. Vachell was just thinking about the next witness.
The rest of the afternoon seemed to go well. A number of the anonymous letters were read out, and it was clear to George that nobody in his right mind could possibly imagine he might have written them. The one he had given Campbell, for instance, from the “Lover of Justice”: “George Edalji—I do not know you, but have sometimes seen you on the railway, and do not expect I would like you much if I did know you, as I do not like natives.” How on earth could he have written that? It was followed by an even more grotesque attribution of authorship. A letter was read out describing the behaviour of the so-called “Wyrley Gang,” which might have come from the cheapest novel: “They all take a fearful oath of secrecy, and repeat it after the Captain, and each says, ‘May I be struck dead if I ever split.’ ” George thought he could rely on the jury to work out that this was not how solicitors expressed themselves.
Mr. Hodson, the general dealer, gave evidence that he had seen George on his way to Mr. Hands of Bridgetown, and that the solicitor was wearing his old house-coat. But then Mr. Hands himself, who had been with George for half an hour or so, asserted that his client had not been wearing the said coat. Two other witnesses reported seeing him, but were unable to remember his garments.
“I feel they’re shifting their ground,” said Mr. Meek after the court had risen for the day. “I sense they’re up to something.”
“What kind of something?” asked George.
“At Cannock their case was that you went to the field during your walk before dinner. That was why they called so many witnesses who had seen you out and about. That canoodling couple, do you remember? They haven’t been put up this time, and they’re not the only ones. The other thing is that at the committal the only date mentioned was the 17th. Now the indictment reads the 17th or the 18th. So they’re hedging their bets. I sense they’re moving to the night-time option. They might have something we don’t know about.”
“Mr. Meek, it doesn’t matter which they go for, or why they go for it. If they want the evening, they haven’t a single witness who saw me anywhere near the field. And if they want the night, they have my father’s evidence to contend with.”
Mr. Meek ignored his client and continued thinking aloud. “Of course, they don’t have to go for one or the other. They can merely suggest possibilities to the jury. But they put more stress on the bootmarks this time. And the bootmarks only come into play if they go for the second option, because of the rain in the night. And if your house-coat has moved from damp to wet, that also confirms my supposition.”
“So much the better,” said George. “There was nothing left of Constable Cooper after Mr. Vachell had finished with him this afternoon. And if Mr. Disturnal wants to continue with that line, he will have to claim that a clergyman of the Church of England is not telling the truth.”
“Mr. Edalji, if I may . . . You must not see it all as so clear-cut.”
“But it is clear-cut.”
“Would you say that your father is robust? From a mental point of view, I mean?”
“He’s the robustest man I know. Why do you ask?”
“I suspect he will need to be.”
“You will be surprised how robust Hindoos can turn out to be.”
“And your mother? And your sister?”
The morning of the second day began with the testimony of Joseph Markew, innkeeper and former police constable. He described being sent by Inspector Campbell to Great Wyrley & Churchbridge railway station, and how the prisoner had declined his request to take a later train.
“Did he tell you,” asked Mr. Disturnal, “what business was so important that it required him to ignore the urgent request of a police inspector?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you repeat your request?”
“I did, sir. I suggested that he might take a day’s holiday for once. But he refused to change his mind.”
“I see. And Mr. Markew, did something happen at this point?”
“Yes, sir. A man on the platform came up and said he’d heard another horse had been ripped that night.”
“And when the man said this, where were you looking?”
“I was looking the prisoner full in the face.”
“And would you describe his reaction to the court.”
“Yes, sir. He smiled.”
“He smiled. He smiled at the news that another horse had been ripped. Are you sure of that, Mr. Markew?”
“Oh yes, sir. Perfectly sure. He smiled.”
George thought: but that isn’t true. I know it isn’t true. Mr. Vachell must prove it isn’t true.
Mr. Vachell knew better than to attack the statement directly. He concentrated instead on the identity of the man who had allegedly come up to Markew and George. Where had he come from, what kind of man was he, where did he go to? (And, by implication, why was he not in court?) Mr. Vachell managed to express, by hints and pauses and finally by direct statement, considerable astonishment that a publican and former policeman, with the widest acquaintance across the district, should be unable to identify the useful yet mysterious stranger who might be able to corroborate his fanciful and tendentious claim. But this was as far as the defence could get with Markew.
Mr. Disturnal then had Sergeant Parsons repeat the prisoner’s remarks about expecting his arrest, and his alleged statement at the Birmingham lock-up about making Mr. Loxton sit up before he had done. No one attempted to explain who the said Loxton might be. Another member of the Wyrley gang? A policeman George was also threatening to shoot? The name was left hanging, for the jury to make of it what they might. A Constable Meredith, whose face and name George did not recall, cited something harmless George had said to him about bail, but managed to make it sound incriminating. Then William Greatorex, the healthy young English boy with the pleasing manner, repeated his story of George looking out
of the carriage window and showing unaccountable interest in Mr. Blewitt’s dead horses.
Mr. Lewis, the veterinary surgeon, described the condition of the Colliery pony, the manner in which it was dropping blood, the length and nature of the wound, and the regrettable necessity to shoot the animal. He was asked by Mr. Disturnal what conclusions he might be able to draw as to the time the mutilation had taken place. Mr. Lewis declared that in his professional opinion the injury had been inflicted within six hours of his examining the pony. In other words, not earlier than two thirty in the morning of the 18th.
This felt to George like the first good news of the day. The argument about which clothes he had been wearing on his visit to the bootmaker’s was now quite irrelevant. The prosecution had just closed off one of its own avenues. They had boxed themselves in.
But if so, it did not show in Mr. Disturnal’s demeanour. His whole attitude implied that some initial ambiguity in the case had now been cleared up thanks to diligent work by police and prosecution. We no longer allege that at some point in a twelve-hour period . . . we are now able to allege that it was very close to two thirty in the morning when . . . And somehow Mr. Disturnal made this growing precision imply an equally increasing confidence that the prisoner in the dock was there for the reasons stated in the indictment.
The last part of the day was given up to Thomas Henry Gurrin, who agreed to the description of himself as an orthographical expert with nineteen years’ experience in the identification of feigned and anonymous handwriting. He confirmed that he had frequently been engaged by the Home Office, and that his most recent professional appearance had been as a witness in the Meat Farm murder trial. George did not know what he expected an orthographical expert to look like; perhaps dry and scholarly, with a voice like a scratchy pen. Mr. Gurrin, with his ruddy face and muttonchop whiskers, could have been the brother of Mr. Greensill, the butcher in Wyrley.
Regardless of physiognomy, Mr. Gurrin then took over the court. Specimens of George’s handwriting were produced in enlarged photographic form. Specimens of the anonymous letters were also produced in enlarged photographic form. Original documents were described and passed across to members of the jury, who took what seemed to George an interminable time examining them, constantly breaking off to stare lengthily at the prisoner. Certain characteristic loops and hooks and crossings were indicated by Mr. Gurrin with a wooden pointer; and somehow description moved to inference, then to theoretical probability and then to absolute certainty. It was, finally, Mr. Gurrin’s considered professional and expert opinion that the prisoner was as responsible for the anonymous letters as he was for those manifestly in his own hand over his own signature.
“All of these letters?” asked Mr. Disturnal, waving his hand around the court, which seemed to have been turned into a scriptorium.
“No, sir, not all.”
“There are some which in your opinion were not written by the prisoner?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How many of them?”
“One, sir.”
Mr. Gurrin indicated the single letter whose authorship he did not ascribe to George. An exception, George realized, which had the effect of endorsing Gurrin’s assertions about all the others. It was a piece of slyness disguised as caution.
Mr. Vachell then spent some time on the difference between personal opinion and scientific proof, between thinking something and knowing it; but Mr. Gurrin showed himself an adamantine witness. He had been in this position many times before. Mr. Vachell was not the first defence counsel to suggest that his procedures were no more rigorous than those of a crystal-gazer, a thought-reader or a spiritualist medium.
Afterwards, Mr. Meek assured George that the second day was often the worst for the defence; but that the third, when they presented their own evidence, would be the best. George hoped so; he was struggling with the sense that, slowly yet irrevocably, his story was being taken away from him. He feared that by the time the defence case was put, it would be too late. People—and in particular, the jury—would respond by thinking, But no, we’ve already been told what happened. Why should we change our minds now?
The next morning, he obediently practised Mr. Meek’s patent method of putting his own case into perspective. MURDER AT MIDNIGHT. CANALSIDE TRAGEDY IN BIRMINGHAM. TWO BARGEMEN ARRESTED. For once, the ploy failed to have its usual effect. He moved across the page to TIPTON LOVE TRAGEDY, about some poor devil who for the love of a bad woman ended up throwing himself into the canal. But the stories failed to engage him, and his eye kept being drawn back to the headlines. He found himself resenting the fact that a squalid canalside murder was a TRAGEDY, and a miserable suicide was also a TRAGEDY. Whereas his own case had remained, from the beginning, an OUTRAGE.
And then, almost to his relief, he found LADY DOCTOR’S DEATH. He felt it almost a social duty to keep up with Miss Hickman, whose decomposing body was still withholding its secrets. She had been his companion in misfortune since the committal proceedings began. Yesterday, according to the Post, a medical knife or lancet had been discovered near the Sidmouth plantation in Richmond Park. The newspaper surmised that it had fallen out of the woman’s clothing while her body was being moved. George wondered how credible this was. You found the corpse of a missing lady surgeon, and as you moved it, things dropped from the pockets and you did not even notice? George was not sure he would believe this if he were on the coroner’s jury.
The Post further suggested that the knife or lancet had been the property of the deceased, and that it might have been used to sever an artery, thus causing her to bleed to death. In other words, a suicide, and another TRAGEDY. Well, thought George, that was one possible explanation. Although if Wyrley Vicarage were in Surrey rather than Staffordshire, the police would construct a more convincing theory: that the Vicar’s son had broken out of a locked room, acquired a lancet he had never seen before in his life, followed the poor woman until she reached the plantation, and then, lacking any conceivable motive, slaughtered her.
This slug of bitterness revived him. And picturing his own fantastical appearance in the Hickman case also reminded him of the assurance Mr. Vachell had given him at their first conference. My defence, Mr. Edalji? Merely that there is no evidence that you committed the crime, no motive for you to have done so, and no opportunity. Of course I shall wrap it up for the judge and jury, but that will be the essence of my case.
First, however, there was Dr. Butter’s evidence to deal with. Dr. Butter was not like Mr. Gurrin, who appeared to George a charlatan posing as a professional. The police surgeon was a grey-haired gentleman, calm and cautious, who came from a world of test tubes and microscopes, who dealt only in specifics. He explained to Mr. Disturnal his procedures when examining the razors, the jacket, the waistcoat, the boots, the trousers, the house-coat. He described the various stains found on various garments, and identified which could be classified as mammalian blood. He had counted the hairs picked from the sleeve and left breast of the jacket: there were twenty-nine of them in total, all short and red-coloured. He had compared them with the hairs on a piece of skin cut from the dead Colliery pony. These were also short and red-coloured. He had examined them under the microscope and pronounced them to be “similar in length, colour and structure.”
Mr. Vachell’s technique with Dr. Butter was to grant both his competence and his knowledge full respect, and then attempt to turn them to the defence’s advantage. He drew attention to the whitish stains on the jacket which the police had concluded were the saliva and foam from the wounded animal. Was there any confirmation of this from Dr. Butter’s scientific analysis?
“No.”
“What, in your view, did the stains consist of?”
“Starch.”
“And how might such residues come to be on clothing, in your experience?”
“Most probably, I would say, they were residues of bread and milk from breakfast.”
At which point George heard a noise whose existence he
had almost forgotten: laughter. There was laughter in court at the idea of bread and milk. It seemed to him the sound of sanity. He looked across at the jury as the public hilarity continued. One or two of them were smiling, but most had retained sober countenances. George judged all this a heartening sign.
Mr. Vachell now moved on to the bloodstains on the sleeve of the defendant’s jacket.
“You say these stains are of mammalian blood?”
“Yes.”
“There is no possible doubt about that, Dr. Butter?”
“None at all.”
“I see. Now, Dr. Butter, a horse is a mammal?”
“Indeed.”
“So is a pig, a sheep, a dog, a cow?”
“Certainly.”
“Indeed, everything in the animal kingdom that is not a bird, a fish or a reptile may be classified as a mammal?”
“Yes.”
“You and I are mammals, and so are members of the jury?”
“Certainly.”
“So Dr. Butter, when you say that the blood is mammalian, you are merely saying that it could belong to any of the above-mentioned species?”
“That is true.”
“You do not for a moment claim that you are showing, or would be capable of showing, that the small spots of blood on the defendant’s jacket came from a horse or pony?”
“It would not be possible to make such a claim, no.”
“And is it possible to tell from examination the age of bloodstains? Could you say, for instance, that this stain was produced today, this one yesterday, this one a week ago, this one several months ago?”
“Well, if it is still wet—”
“Were any of the bloodstains on George Edalji’s jacket wet when you examined them?”
“No.”
“They were dry?”
“Yes.”
“So on your own evidence, they could have been there for days, weeks, even months?”
“That is the case.”
“And is it possible to tell from a bloodstain whether it has been produced by blood from a living animal or a dead one?”
“No.”
“Or indeed from a joint of meat?”