He read the letters forwards; he read them backwards; he read them in a random sequence; he shuffled them like a pack of cards. And then his eye caught something, and five minutes later he was thumping his secretary's door back on its hinges.

'Alfred, I congratulate you. You hit the nail squarely on the head.'

'I did?'

Arthur thrust a letter on to Wood's desk. 'Look, there. And there, and there.' The secretary followed Arthur's stabbing finger without enlightenment.

'Which nail did I hit?'

'Look, man, there: boy must be sent away to sea. And here: waves come over you. This is the first Greatorex letter, don't you see? And here too: I don't think they would hang me but send me to sea.'

Wood's expression made it clear that the obvious was escaping him.

'The gap, Woodie, the gap. The seven years. Why the gap, I asked, why the gap? And you replied, Because he wasn't there. And I said, Where'd he gone, and you replied, Perhaps he'd run away to sea. And this is the first anonymous letter after that seven-year interval. I'll double-check, but I'll wager your salary there isn't a single reference to the sea in all the letters of the earlier persecution.'

'Well,' said Wood, allowing himself a touch of complacency, 'it did seem like a possible explanation.'

'And what clinches it, in case you have the slightest doubt,' – though the secretary, having just been congratulated on his brilliance, was not inclined immediately to doubt it – 'is where the final hoax came from.'

'You'll have to remind me, I'm afraid, Sir Arthur.'

'December 1895, remember? An advertisement in a Blackpool newspaper offering the entire contents of the Vicarage for sale by auction.'

'Yes?'

'Come on, man, come on. Blackpool, what is Blackpool? The pleasure resort for Liverpool. That's where he took ship from, Liverpool. It's as plain as a packstaff.'

Alfred Wood was kept busy that afternoon. There was a letter to the Headmaster of Walsall School enquiring about the teaching of Milton; one to Harry Charlesworth instructing him to trace any local inhabitants who had been away to sea between the years 1896 and 1903, and also to trace a boy or man called Speck; and one to Dr Lindsay Johnson requesting an urgent comparison between the letters in the accompanying dossier and those in George Edalji's hand already supplied. Meanwhile Arthur wrote to the Mam and Jean informing them of his progress in the case.

The next morning's post included a letter in a familiar envelope. The postmark was Cannock:

Honoured Sir,

A line to tell you we are narks of the detectives and know Edalji killed the horse and wrote those letters. No use trying to lay it on others. It is Edalji and it will be proven for he is not a right sort nor…

Arthur turned the page, read on, and let out a roar:

… there was no education to be got at Walsall when that bloody swine Aldis was high school boss. He got the bloody bullet after the governors were sent letters about him. Ha, ha.

A supplementary request was despatched to the Headmaster of Walsall School, asking about the circumstances of his predecessor's departure; then this latest piece of evidence was forwarded to Dr Lindsay Johnson.

Undershaw felt quiet. Both children were away: Kingsley in his first half at Eton, Mary at Prior's Field, Godalming. The weather was gloomy; Arthur took solitary meals by a blazing fire; in the evenings he played billiards with Woodie. He could see his fiftieth birthday on the horizon – if a horizon could be as close as a mere two years away. He still turned out at cricket, and every so often his cover drive proved a thing of beauty, on which opposing captains were kind enough to comment. But all too often he would stand at the crease, watch a disrespectful bowler arrive in a whirl of arms, feel a thud on his pads, glare down the pitch at the umpire, and hear, from twenty-two yards away, the regretful judgement, 'Very sorry, Sir Arthur.' A decision against which there was no appeal.

It was time to admit that his glory days were over. Seven for 61 against Cambridgeshire one season, and the wicket of W.G. Grace the next. Admittedly the great man had already scored a century when Arthur came on as fifth-change bowler and dismissed him with off-theory, that duffer's trick. But even so: W.G. Grace c W. Storer b A.I. Conan Doyle 110. In celebration he had written a mock-heroic poem in nineteen stanzas; but neither his verse nor the deed it recorded were enough to get him into Wisden. Captain of England, as Partridge had once predicted? Captain of Authors v Actors at Lord's last summer was more his mark. On that June day, he had opened the batting with Wodehouse, who got himself comically bowled for a duck. Arthur himself made two, and Hornung didn't even get an innings. Horace Bleakley had made fifty-four. Perhaps the better the writer, the worse the cricketer.

And it was the same with golf, where the gap between dream and reality grew wider with every year. But billiards… now billiards was a game where decline was not automatically the order of the day. Players continued without any obvious falling-away into their fifties, their sixties, even their seventies. Strength was not paramount; experience and tactics were the thing. Kiss cannons, ricochet cannons, postman's knock, nursery cannons along the top cushions – what a game. Was there any reason why, with a little more practice and perhaps some advice from a professional, he should not enter the English Amateur Championship? He would need to improve his long jennies, of course. He had to tell himself each time: spot the ball in baulk for a plain half-ball into the top pocket, and then play it as a steady half-ball with as much pocket side as you can manage. Wood had little trouble with long jennies; though he still had a devil of a distance to go with his double-baulks, as Arthur constantly pointed out to him.

Nearing fifty: the second half of his life about to begin, if tardily. He had lost Touie and found Jean. He had abandoned the scientific materialism he had been inducted into, and found a way to open the great door into the beyond just a crack. Wits liked to repeat that the English, since they lacked any spiritual instinct, had invented cricket in order to give themselves a sense of eternity. Purblind observers imagined that billiards was the same shot played over and over again. Poppycock, both notions. The English were not a demonstrative race, it was true – they were not Italians – but they had as much of a spiritual nature as the next tribe. And no two billiards shots were alike, any more than any two human souls were alike.

He visited Touie's grave at Grayshott. He laid flowers, he wept, and as he turned to go, he caught himself wondering when he would come next. Would it be the following week, or would it be in two weeks' time? And after that? And after that? At a certain point the flowers would cease, and his visits would become rarer. He would start a new life with Jean, perhaps over at Crowborough, near her parents. It would become… inconvenient to visit Touie. He would tell himself that thinking of her was sufficient. Jean would – God willing – be able to bear his children. Who would visit Touie then? He shook his head to clear away this thought. There was no point anticipating future guilt. You must act according to your best principles, and then deal with what came later on its own terms.

Even so, back at Undershaw – back in Touie's empty house – he found himself drawn to her bedroom. He had given no instructions for it to be rearranged or redecorated – how could he? So there was the bed on which she had died at three o'clock in the morning with the scent of violets in the air and her fragile hand resting in his great clumsy paw. Mary and Kingsley sitting in exhausted and frightened politeness. Touie raising herself with almost her last breath and telling Mary to take care of Kingsley… Sighing, Arthur crossed to the window. Ten years ago he had chosen this room for her as having the best view, down into the garden and the private narrowing valley where the woods converged. Her bedroom, her sick-room, her death-room – he had always tried to make it as pleasant and as painless as he could.