'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 mutton-chop 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.