The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

  The Home Office eventually relented and in 1906 ordered the prisoner’s transfer to Pentonville, followed by his conditional release. It was noted that Edalji had put on weight during his time in custody, and looked a little flabby. His regulation dark suit was buttoned tightly at the waist. Now aged 30, Edalji emerged to announce that the prison officials, at least at Portland, had been ‘kindness itself’. During the previous three years, his mother and sister had managed to visit him at roughly monthly intervals; his father and brother never did.

  Following his wife’s death in July 1906, Conan Doyle is generally thought to have simply vanished from sight, resurfacing only after several months of solitary introspection. There is no doubt that he underwent a period of deep and prolonged mourning, but recent research questions whether he did so entirely alone.

  As early as 3 August, Doyle felt able to meet his mistress Jean Leckie for a weekend at the well-appointed Ashdown Forest Hotel, about 40 miles east of Hindhead on the Kent–Sussex border. Four days later, he joined in a vigorous debate in the pages of the Daily Express about whether Britain was becoming a more or less religious society; taking a progressive view of the matter, his verdict was that ‘men of all creeds should be [free to] live in amity and charity’. On the 10th of the month, Doyle drove over to join Jean Leckie for dinner at her family home in south London. Writing to ‘the Mam’ on 6 September, Doyle remarked that he had just received a note from Jean’s mother ‘which gave me much pleasure’, that he felt drawn to writing a sequel to his prizefighting novel Rodney Stone, and that in the meantime he would be on holiday at a Scottish country hotel where ‘there is good air and golf & cricket – all of which I need’.

  Even so, there’s no doubt that Louisa’s death triggered one of the rare periods of relative sloth in a life of otherwise iron self-discipline and constant industry. ‘Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him,’ Conan Doyle had written of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, ‘but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.’ This broadly fits the pattern of Doyle’s own life as he cast about for a new project to throw himself into in the autumn of 1906.

  And now the game was afoot. Within days of reading of George Edalji’s release from custody, Doyle had extracted and reviewed the trial records and arranged to meet Edalji himself in London. Striding through the lobby of the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross, for their appointment, the one-time eye specialist extended a ‘bear-like hand’ and greeted his guest with the Holmesian observation, ‘You suffer from astigmatic myopia, I see’. It was as dramatic an opening gambit as anything in Doyle’s fiction, and his subsequent investigation was equally assured in its demolition of the police case.

  Just as Holmes cannot ‘live without brainwork’, we’re told, so his author now sprang back to life with his familiar mixture of cold, scientific logic and warm, chivalric sympathy on behalf of the underdog. Convinced that ‘I was in the presence of an appalling tragedy’, which in all likelihood owed more to the victim’s race than any compelling evidence against him, Conan Doyle went public on 11 January 1907 with the first of a two-part, 18,000-word dialectical blast against the stupidity and shortcomings of the official investigation, called simply, ‘The Story of Mr George Edalji’.

  Both then and in the months that followed, Doyle dwelt at length on the matter of Edalji’s physical unsuitability to commit the crime he was convicted of. It formed the opening argument of his articles, which were initially published in The Daily Telegraph and widely reprinted by other papers before being collected into a pamphlet. ‘I had been delayed and he was passing the time by reading the paper,’ Doyle wrote of his meeting Edalji:

  I recognised my man by his dark face, so I stood and observed him. He held the paper close to his eyes and rather sideways, proving not only a high degree of myopia, but marked astigmatism. The idea of such a man scouring fields at night and assaulting cattle while avoiding the watching police was ludicrous to anyone who can imagine what the world looks like to eyes with myopia of eight diopters.

  So far so good for the logical, self-confident approach to the case, but perhaps the eyesight evidence was less compelling than Conan Doyle first thought. In the following days, the Telegraph hosted a lively debate on the issue. ‘I must take exception to the statement that eight diopters [of myopia] is a very extraordinary amount,’ an optician named James Aitchison wrote:

  On reference to my record of 1,000 cases of short sight I find that nearly 200 equal or exceed that amount, and probably in an ophthalmic surgeon’s casebook, dealing as he would mostly with diseased conditions, the percentage would be greater … There are many persons wearing concave lenses of from ten to 15 diopters power, and getting almost full visual acuity.

  There was considerably more in this vein. A doctor in Hove named I.A. Barry concurred with Mr Aitchison. He wrote:

  I personally happen to have the misfortune to suffer from myopic astigmatism in a degree which is actually greater by about one dioptric than Mr Edalji’s, and yet with correcting glasses my vision is brought up to almost exactly normal. If mine, why not Edalji’s?

  Similarly, a Mr A.H. Henderson-Livesey of London chided Doyle and suggested that he ‘apply to the case more accurately the methods of “deductive analysis” of his great creation’. Edalji might be weak-sighted now, Mr Livesey allowed:

  But what proof is advanced that [he] was in that condition when the crimes were committed? A man with slightly defective eyesight may well become blind in the space of three years, especially when those years are passed in confinement … Why was this evidence not called at [Edalji’s] trial? Because, whatever may be the condition of the man’s eyes now, he certainly was not blind, or nearly blind, three years ago.

  There followed a deluge of correspondence – from, among others, a Mr Lestrade and a Mrs Watson – that battered the letter pages of the Telegraph and other papers like a particularly violent tornado. To Sydney Stephenson, editor of Ophthalmoscope magazine, ‘Assuming that Edalji was familiar with the countryside, and active in his movements, it seems to me that the short-sight from which he suffered would handicap him but little in his errand’. Meanwhile, Captain Anson, writing direct to the Home Office, moved from optometry closer to the realm of the supernatural. Edalji, he informed his civil service colleagues, possessed ‘a panther-like gait and eyes that [come] out with a strange sort of glow, like a cat’s, in a low light’.

  This was far from the end of the whole protracted debate about George Edalji’s eyesight and his physical health generally. Much of the public correspondence on the subject rang with the thrill of the writers’ own ‘self-deluded cleverness,’ Doyle remarked. There was such a thing as being too sure of yourself, his critics replied. ‘Whereas Sherlock Holmes realise[d] he needed to always be learning, his author assumes no such obligation,’ Captain Anson later told a reporter.

  After acquainting himself with Edalji, on 3 January 1907 Conan Doyle took the train to Cannock, where over the course of the next two days he visited the scene of the crime, met with most of the principals involved in the case and arranged to interview Captain Anson. ‘That brings me to what is the most painful part of my statement, and the one which I would be most glad to shirk were it possible for me to do so,’ Doyle wrote in the Telegraph:

  No account of the case is complete which does not deal with the attitude taken up by Capt. Anson against this unhappy young man … I have no doubt [he] was quite honest in his dislike, and unconscious of his own prejudice. It would be folly to think otherwise. But men in his position have no right to yield to such feelings. They are too powerful, others are too weak, and the consequences are too terrible.

  As proof of this pre-existing bias on the part of the police, Doyle quoted an officer, who may have been either Captain Anson or Sergeant Upton, as having remarked to Reverend Edalji as long ago as 1892, ‘You may tell your son at once that I
will not believe any profession of ignorance’, and ‘I will endeavour to get the offender a dose of penal servitude’.

  Anson, publicly denying any impropriety, privately expressed doubts about Doyle’s sanity. For the three hours of their meeting, he had ‘never ceased issuing instructions, making demands, requesting papers, calling in [my] sergeant and giving him orders’. It was as though his visitor had been the king himself, rather than merely a famous writer. Anson was a Sherlock Holmes devotee, and he seems to have struggled hard to make allowance for the character’s author. As a result, we can question the captain’s professional judgement, but not his manners. ‘Since I took up the case I have myself had a considerable correspondence with Anson,’ Doyle wrote later:

  The letters are so courteous to me personally that it makes it exceedingly difficult for me to use for the purpose of illustrating my thesis – viz, the strong opinion which Anson had formed against the Edalji family. One odd example of this is that during fifteen years that the vicarage has been a centre of debate, the captain has never once visited the spot or taken counsel personally with the inmates.

  … although perhaps Doyle had forgotten Anson’s role in investigating the school key that had mysteriously appeared on the vicarage doorstep one night in December 1892, in the course of which he closely interviewed both Reverend Edalji and his son.

  A curious incident occurred at about the time Conan Doyle was writing his articles for The Daily Telegraph and preparing to submit a petition to the Home Office. There was another outbreak of mischievous letter writing in Great Wyrley. Signed by a ‘Martin Molton’, the new correspondence displayed considerable familiarity with daily life at the vicarage, and suggested that George had colluded with a family member in perpetrating the hoaxes of 1892–95 – a campaign, it will be remembered, that had included a flurry of faked newspaper advertisements, as well as unflattering printed references to the reverend’s sex life. ‘Molton’ was also intimate with the details of George’s debts, and referred cryptically to Charlotte Edalji having once sought a divorce from her husband. Taken as a whole, it was agreed that the letters, most of which were addressed to Captain Anson, showed a high degree of knowledge about the affairs of many of those closely connected to the case over the previous two decades. Some eighty years later, a June 1907 memo by the then Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone was discovered, and revealed that a member of George Edalji’s own legal team had wondered if his client might have ‘played some role’ in the various letter campaigns, as opposed to the horse maimings. On reading the Molton correspondence, the lawyer in question is supposed to have remarked, ‘He is at it again’.

  In the following weeks, Captain Anson addressed himself to the source of these latest letters. He came to believe that the 24-year-old ‘spinster Maud Edalgi [sic]’ was the likely culprit, if only to the extent of taking down her elder brother’s dictation. In time, Molton offered to meet the police if £2 was left for him in an envelope at a post office box in central London. This was done, and a plain-clothes detective assigned to keep watch and arrest anyone who showed up for the money.

  On 19 January 1907, George Edalji, accompanied by Roger Yelverton, duly appeared at the post office and tried to claim a separate letter in which they insisted Molton had promised to reveal the name of the pony assailant of 1903. The police heard out this story and released the pair without charge. The Molton letters then ceased.

  Conan Doyle’s visits to Great Wyrley in the winter of 1907 mixed elements of a conventional Sherlock Holmes field trip with the author’s own ‘fiery conviction’, as he put it, that an innocent man had been persecuted largely because of the colour of his skin. Doyle’s investigation thus proceeded with a combination of deductive talent and moral outrage. Holmes himself would have recognised the latter trait, if only to dismiss it from his mind. ‘It is of the first importance not to allow your judgement to be biased by personal qualities,’ he admonishes Dr Watson in The Sign of the Four:

  A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.

  It must be said that Doyle himself sometimes fell short of this objective ideal, but otherwise proved an able and determined investigator, compensating for any technical shortcomings by using his narrative gifts to present the case for Edalji in a clear, methodical, and, to many, convincing argument.

  As if to emphasise his emotional commitment to the case, there are at least two accounts of Conan Doyle’s investigation giving way to significant displays of anger. Both outbursts were the result of being contradicted. The first came when Doyle walked the route between the Great Wyrley vicarage and the scene of the pony slashing of 1903, and as a result informed Captain Anson that George Edalji would have been ‘physically unable to grope about there’ after dark. The captain replied that a Home Office specialist who examined Edalji’s eyes had found nothing much wrong with them – and besides, he, Edalji, had ‘had plenty of practise roaming those same fields at night’. At that, Doyle had turned ‘beet red’, Anson recalled. ‘Let me tell you something about the condition of astigmatic myopia,’ the one-time doctor began. The rebuke that Anson endured, according to his later account, was no ordinary one. It was epic, delivered by Doyle ‘in such a way that a schoolteacher might have chastised a wayward or unusually tiresome child’. Doyle himself was the competent authority here, was the gist of it, and the official policeman ‘merely a foot soldier’, if that, in the campaign to learn the truth.

  A second hour of fury that lived on in Anson’s mind came when the two men had found themselves discussing the sleeping arrangements that prevailed at the Great Wyrley vicarage. The captain repeated the remark that he had made in a private letter a few days earlier. ‘The father had his son sleep in his room for many years, with the door locked,’ Anson factually noted, before adding, ‘The reason has not been given’. Conan Doyle replied that there was nothing mysterious about that, and Anson again contradicted him, saying, ‘We can only guess at the motive’. Doyle seems to have interpreted this as a veiled accusation of sexual impropriety involving the Reverend and George Edalji. In any case, it caused him to again flush bright red, and to turn furiously on his host. According to Anson, Doyle, ‘his eyes flaring’, then remarked that he would prefer ‘not to again hear such a vile canard’, and ‘would not be entirely responsible for his actions’ were it repeated.

  As a rule, Doyle tended to do better in the role of the absolute master of events rather than any lesser capacity. He acknowledged this fact when, a few years later, trying to enlist for active duty on the outbreak of the First World War. ‘I should love the work,’ he told his brother Innes, ‘and would try to be subordinate – which is my failing.’ It was characteristic, then, that on his arrival in Great Wyrley Doyle should promptly grill the local police on a whole series of procedural shortcomings and technical oversights on their part. Why had they not taken precise casts of the footprints leading to and from the crime scene on the morning of 18 August? What precautions had been made to protect the area from being trampled underfoot by curious onlookers? How could it ever have been thought proper to wrap George Edalji’s coat together with a piece of the dead animal’s hide in the same package, prior to sending them off for analysis? Had the word ‘contamination’ occurred to anyone?

  This was the sort of direct, Holmesian line of attack that represented the material side of Doyle’s investigation. He simultaneously made the most specific of allegations of official misconduct (some of which extended to accusing the police of tampering with evidence) and sketched out a broader vision of events in which ‘the Establishment’, as personified by Captain Anson, had covered its own systematic failings by persecuting an innocent young man. In so doing, Doyle mastered the art of the rhetorica
l campaigner for justice by appearing at once concerned about individual lapses on the part of the authorities, and attentive to the larger drama that cast Edalji as the victim of a monstrous conspiracy.

  Conan Doyle thus became a particularly active investigator, striding briskly around the muddy fields of Great Wyrley, ‘a tall, broad-shouldered man, tweed-clad, energetically smoking a cigar,’ in one account. There is no mention of him ever specifically wearing a deerstalker cap or an Inverness cape, but at least one report suggests that at some point Doyle had leant down in the presence of several bystanders to study the grass underfoot with a magnifying glass, thus giving the onlookers instant visual gratification: this was what they had come to see. While in the area he also called on several local residents to canvass their opinions about the whole affair.

  Although there was no shortage of alternative suspects, he appears to have been struck by the frequency with which Edalji himself was named as the guilty party. One woman remarked that ‘the Hindoo’ had for years marched confidently around the place, often at night, routinely travelled in and out of Birmingham by train, qualified as a lawyer, and had even written a book – none of them activities associated with a man who could barely see his hand in front of his face. More than one of those he interviewed told Doyle that the maiming of animals was more common in rural counties than he might suppose. Such things happened, he heard, when a certain kind of young man ‘overdid the Bacchic rites on a Saturday night’. (As Doyle was quick to point out, the crime had occurred on a Tuesday.) The speculation was that the animal ripper was neither a psychotic sadist per se, nor some kind of freakish hybrid out of the pages of a vampire tale, loping across the fields on a moonlit night, but just some drunken adolescent acting out a dark impulse, for a reason concealed somewhere back among the shortcomings of his brutal home life.