The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  In later years there were reports, never substantiated, that George had run up a series of gambling debts, and embezzled £200 to pay them. The psychiatric factor again surfaced in 1905, when a senior Scotland Yard officer, Neville MacNaughton, compared aspects of the Edalji case to that of the late Dr Neil Cream, a predatory killer who had been hanged in 1892 for poisoning prostitutes. ‘There is no doubt that the fellow who perpetrated the [Great Wyrley] outrages is a sexual maniac,’ MacNaughton wrote to a colleague in the Home Office:

  … and if physionomy goes for anything, Mr Edalji junior has the face of such an individual … Dr Cream was a man of good education, but morally perhaps the worst specimen I have ever come across … Having poisoned his victims, Cream invariably wrote letters to any public men whose names were at that time appearing frequently in the papers, accusing them of murdering the women. He also found great pleasure in discussing the case with police officers, and it was by reason of these imprudent actions that suspicions were primarily attached to him. History seems therefore to have repeated itself.

  Many who knew him have described George Edalji as keeping a certain remove between himself and others, as though he had his guard up, or as though for sheer diffidence he preferred not to mingle unduly with his fellow man. Others simply described him as aloof. He was unquestionably intelligent, bookish and a bit intense, with a habit of fixing the huge headlamps of his eyes on those he met, while his nose and lips twitched slightly, as if betraying the inner strain of the occasion. Edalji’s conversational technique was once described as:

  Long periods of silence, punctuated by sudden bursts of direct, almost embarrassing questions about the state of one’s health, or marriage, for instance, of a kind both intrusive and completely divorced from any interest in the answer. At the end of each cross-examination he would abruptly fall back into coma again. Small talk was not his forte.

  Nonetheless, George Edalji made significant progress in life between the ages of 18 and 25. On graduating from Rugeley Grammar School, he entered Mason’s College in Birmingham to study law, travelling the 20 miles to and from the vicarage by foot and train. Edalji proceeded to win the Birmingham Law Society’s first prize in three successive years. He qualified at the age of 23; set up his own solicitor’s practice in Birmingham at 24; and at 25, perhaps reflecting his already long experience as a commuter, published a well-received book on railway law.

  As usual, he seems to have restrained himself when it came to his social life. Edalji never drank, appeared to have no interest in women, and continued to share a modest attic bedroom with his father. As a hardworking young solicitor, commuting in and out by train, he was up at 6 most mornings, returning home around 7.30 in the evening and then often making it his habit to see clients at the vicarage for an hour or more each weeknight. Keeping the hours he did, he could have been forgiven had he chosen to simply relax at the weekends, but characteristically Edalji did the opposite, setting up a regular Saturday morning law clinic where anyone was welcome to come to Great Wyrley to consult him without charge.

  While George’s calm, scholarly manner proved an asset professionally, it also offended certain people whose aversion to him was perhaps further excited by his skin colour. To such individuals, it seemed he was ‘putting on airs’ and ‘getting above himself’. There was an incident in December 1900 when two local youths accosted him when he was out walking in the fields around Snareshill, a village about 3 miles from Great Wyrley. For once, Edalji had ‘blown up’, a court later heard, shouting at his assailants that they were no better than animals, vowing ‘to see them caged up’. A Walsall magistrate agreed that George had been the victim of an unprovoked assault, and fined the two men £5 each. The following year, a clerk to the same Walsall court, C.A. Loxton, publicly accused Edalji of painting ‘immoral and offensive’ comments about him and his fiancée in various public spaces. Loxton was unable to substantiate the charge, however, and was eventually removed from his post to the Stafford County Lunatic Hospital.

  A more serious professional challenge came in June 1900, when Edalji’s law partner absconded with some £900 (about £65,000 today) of their clients’ funds. George himself made good the losses, falling heavily in debt as a result. Threatened with a judgement of bankruptcy, he took the simple if rather un-English expedient of writing letters to prominent citizens – Conan Doyle among them – requesting donations. When later reviewing the Edalji case in the House of Commons, the Conservative MP and future Lord Chancellor F.E. Smith remarked that George was:

  A man of studious habits, with a good character … The only circumstance which had been or could be alleged against him was that at the age of 25 he was in pecuniary difficulties – a not uncommon circumstance in the case of men of his position in life qualifying for an expensive profession.

  On the morning of 2 February 1903, a work horse belonging to Joseph Holmes, a Great Wyrley shopkeeper, was found to have been disembowelled during the night. There seems to have been relatively little attention paid to the crime until later in the spring, when in quick succession three more horses, three cows and a sheep met the same fate. At that stage it became clear that a serial maniac was loose in the community. Following another outrage on 6 June, Captain Anson of the Staffordshire Police assigned four of his men to patrol the fields around Great Wyrley at night. Despite this precaution, two more horses were soon found gored in a manner that the local newspapers were unable to fully report; it involved the use of a sharp knife with a curved, scimitar-like blade. The wretched animals had evidently bled slowly to death.

  Clearly, whoever was responsible for the attacks was unusually strong, proficient in his butchery work, and sadistically minded: during the course of his rampage, a succession of farm animals were stabbed, slashed, tortured and sexually mutilated. Another of Holmes’s horses was found with a knife embedded in one of its buttocks. When Captain Anson came to decide on his prime suspect as the mad ripper, there were not many candidates, and the verdict was quickly reached. Anson reported to his superiors at the Home Office that George Edalji had been seen ‘prowling about’ the area late at night, an emotive choice of words that may have owed something to the officer’s pre-existing animus towards the family. George himself insisted that what the police saw as ‘prowling’ was really no more than his habit of innocently strolling around the nearby lanes in the hour before going to bed.

  Meanwhile, the campaign of anonymous letters and mocking advertisements resumed after a seven-year silence, with most of the more choice abuse now directed at George rather than his father. ‘Edalji the lawyer’ had carried out the maimings at full moon to give the impression there was ‘a looney’ afoot, one note insisted. In another, the police were tipped off to watch for a passenger with ‘eagle eyes and ears as sharp as a razor and fleet of foot as a fox’ who would be travelling on the evening train from Walsall to Great Wyrley. ‘He crawls on all fours up to the poor beasts, an’ fondles them a bit, and then he pulls the hook smart across ’em, and out their entrails fly, before they guess they are hurt,’ the writer elaborated:

  You want 100 detectives to run him in red-handed, because he is so fly, and knows every nook and corner. You know who it is, and I can prove it; but until £100 reward is offered for a conviction, I shan’t split no more.

  The phrasing of this letter, and more specifically the use of the semi-colon, later led Conan Doyle to believe that it had been co-authored by a ‘blithering lunatic’ working in league with an educated man. A third note warned chillingly that Edalji and his associates were planning to ‘do 20 wenches like the horses before next March’.

  While most of the correspondence was unsigned, some purported to come from a ‘Greatorex’, which was the surname of a graduate of Walsall Grammar School who happened to be a cousin of the seafaring Royden Sharp, a former butcher’s apprentice. Sharp had just returned to the area after several years’ service on the Atlantic ships. The actual Wilfred Greatorex later testified that he had known George Edalj
i by sight ‘for three or four years’, and that they had quite often travelled around on the same train. He denied all knowledge of the letters.

  Most of them were to the effect that George was the leader of a cut-throat gang that was roaming the fields at night for the purpose of molesting cattle – ‘there will be merry times when they start on little girls,’ the writer warned:

  Mr Edalji, mean[time], is going to Brum on Sunday night to see the Captain, near Northfield, about how it’s to be carried on with so many detectives about, and I believe they are going to do some cows in the daytime instead of at night.

  Another ‘Greatorex’ letter reached the police on 7 July 1903, and named several young men in addition to George Edalji as engaged in certain imaginatively detailed atrocities. Among the group’s past or intended activities were animal sacrifice, witchcraft, and the wholesale rape of Great Wyrley’s juvenile female population. One letter taunted the police that they would never ‘gess’ the writer’s identity, and another seemed to suggest that ‘Irish Fenians’ were behind the carnage. What strikes the reader now is the sheer variety of the perversions said to be about to engulf Great Wyrley, which went well beyond the normal rural vices. (Several American newspapers such as the New York Times would later insist that the Edaljis had lived in a community of irreproachable public morals, and completely immune to the temptations of drink and sex, but this was merely to confirm their ignorance of English country life.)

  A series of further notes and letters followed during the summer, climaxing in a postcard addressed to George Edalji at his Birmingham office. It accused him of unusual sexual conduct with a local young girl and concluded, ‘Rather go back to your old game of writing anonymous letters and killing cows and writing on walls’. At trial, the police maintained that Edalji had written this card himself, apparently in an attempt to finally convince them that he was the victim of a demented prankster. Another note arrived on 23 July. Admitting to not caring much for ‘natives’ like Edalji, it nonetheless advised him to quickly leave the area in order to provide himself with an alibi when the next slashing occurred. It was signed, ‘Lover of Justice’. Edalji, who came to believe that his disgraced former law partner might be involved, now offered a £25 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case; another brazen ruse, the police believed, to draw suspicion away from himself.

  On 17 August 1903, a wet and blustery Monday, George Edalji arrived home from his day’s work in Birmingham at about 6.30 p.m., followed his usual practice of entertaining some neighbouring clients for an hour or so, and then changed from a light linen jacket into a blue serge overcoat and a pair of stout boots in order to walk around the village before his supper was ready at 9.30. After that he sat in the parlour and chatted to his 21-year-old sister Maud before retiring around 11 p.m. to the bedroom he shared with his father. The elderly reverend later testified that he had then locked the door of their room as he always did, before abruptly waking up at around 4 a.m. with one of his regular bouts of lumbago. His son had been ‘completely motionless’ in his own bed within a few feet of him.

  There was a fresh wind rattling the vicarage windows, and the five or six policemen posted by Captain Anson around the garden and nearby fields were exposed to a monotonous, drenching rain. They saw no one leave the house. While the officers commendably trudged to and fro all night in the summer squalls, 27-year-old George Edalji apparently slept soundly in the same child-sized iron bed he had used since the age of 9. He had no way of knowing that it would prove to be his last night of freedom for more than three years.3

  Shortly after 6 on the morning of 18 August, a young colliery worker named Henry Garnett crossed a field about a mile from the vicarage and found a pit horse slashed across its stomach. ‘It had a cut on the side,’ Garnett testified. ‘The blood was trickling from the wound. It was dropping pretty quickly.’ The police arrived promptly and apparently discovered blood smeared on the nearby grass – the attacker’s attempt to wipe his hands clean, they believed – as well as several pairs of footprints leading to and from the scene. Over the course of the morning, it became clear that no logical method was to be applied in preserving either the bloodstains or the footprints, with up to fifty policemen and curious passers-by successively strolling up to peer at the evidence and offer an opinion. A veterinary surgeon, Dr Robert Lewis, was summoned and reported that the horse had been assaulted at some time between 2 and 6 that morning. The wretched animal itself was humanely destroyed.

  Conan Doyle later tended to find fault with the overall professionalism of the police investigation of the Edalji case, and their approach to the initial forensic analysis of the scene gives some backing to that judgement. The area was later described in court as a ‘shambles’ in every sense of the word. Captain Anson happened to have just left on a shooting holiday in Scotland, and in his absence the investigation was led by an Inspector Campbell from the Hednesford station. Around 7 that morning, Campbell dispatched a constable to intercept George Edalji as he caught his usual train to Birmingham, with the request that he return to answer a few questions. Edalji, thinking it all had something to do with the receipt of another anonymous letter, rather than a case of sadistic animal slaughter, politely declined to accompany the officer, citing the amount of work awaiting him at the office, and continued on his way. Edalji later remarked in court that this struck him as being entirely consistent with the attitude of an innocent man who merely wanted to get on with his day’s business, and that had he anything to hide he would have surely returned to the vicarage to dispose of any incriminating evidence. Nonetheless, in the weeks ahead the story grew that George had somehow fled from arrest at his local station – ‘A response that cast suspicion on the accused and apprised us that there must have been precisely such anxiety and guilt on his part as had manifested itself throughout,’ Captain Anson later remarked, on his return from the grouse moors.

  At 8 a.m. that same morning, Inspector Campbell and his men called at the Great Wyrley vicarage, where they quickly relieved the Edaljis of George’s linen house coat from the evening before. According to the inspector, this bore clear traces of bloodstains and horse hair, an opinion the family hotly disputed. It was never fully explained why the police believed that Edalji might have ventured out into a raging storm wearing what was essentially a smoking jacket rather than his heavy topcoat. Campbell then asked to see any ‘knives’ or ‘daggers’ on the premises, but had to content himself with a small gardening trowel belonging to Maud. Five minutes after the police left one of their party returned, seemingly as an afterthought, to remove a pair of George’s damp boots with worn-down heels, allegedly a match to some of the footprints found at the crime scene.

  Boasting as it did an Indian cleric, a bolted room, and an attacker who evidently armed himself with an oriental sword, it was all a plot intricate enough to qualify as the basis for a Sherlock Holmes story. At 11 that morning, Inspector Campbell and two other officers arrived at George Edalji’s office and placed him under arrest. The accused, who seems to have remained calm throughout, merely remarked that in his opinion it was Loxton, the clerk of the Walsall Court, who was behind the recent outbreak of anonymous letter writing. At 1.30 p.m., Edalji was taken by train to Cannock Police Station and formally charged under the Malicious Damages Act of 1861 with deliberately wounding a horse. Staring ahead, the young solicitor stayed doggedly on theme as he spoke about his family’s harassment by Loxton and others over the course of the previous fifteen years. ‘I am entirely innocent,’ George repeated.

  If the Edalji case seems to show the dark side of Edwardian society at work, Conan Doyle’s progress in these same years represents a model of upward assimilation. The author born in poverty, son of a mentally fragile and fitfully employed alcoholic, would present himself at Buckingham Palace in October 1902 to receive a knighthood. In short order, he also found himself Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey and the organiser of a 300-strong private militia he called the Undershaw Rifle Club. Now in h
is mid forties, Doyle was to report feeling at the ‘absolute top’ of his energies and earning power.

  There had once been a time when he had been floundering around as a ‘feckless young hack’, and there was to come a moment when that same writer metamorphosed into an elderly occult propagandist, irascible and dogmatic and open to widespread ridicule. But in between there was a wonderful golden late summer. Doyle was not a man who, having found a winning formula, was content to practise it with little or no variation for the rest of his life, any more than he could stand to be idle for more than a few minutes at a time. He continued to ski at breakneck speed and to play competitive tennis, golf and billiards, enthusiastically strummed the banjo, and in 1902, when he was 43, ascended some 6,000ft in a hot air balloon, an experience that ‘thrilled’ him and in turn led to his taking to the air in a rickety biplane.

  Doyle was also something of a pioneer motorist, paying 400 guineas for a 10-horsepower navy blue Wolseley, in which he bowled around the Surrey countryside dressed in tweed plus fours and a yachting cap, collecting various speeding tickets and once crashing the car as he rounded a corner, leaving his brother Innes and him trapped upside down (‘Well, dear boy,’ Doyle observed, ‘I’m afraid this means a late luncheon’) until help arrived. His one obvious disappointment on the games field – and a non-sporting one – came in June 1901 when he appeared for the MCC side in a series of cricket matches at Lord’s. Strolling around the ground arm in arm with Jean Leckie in the tea interval, he encountered his younger sister Connie and her husband, the Raffles author ‘Willie’ Hornung. They were not amused that Arthur would choose to parade his mistress while his wife lay gravely ill at home. A subsequent clear-the-air interview at the Hornungs’ flat ended acrimoniously. Doyle was left to write to his mother protesting that his own family had behaved ‘monstrously’ in the matter.