With Edalji by this time freed from gaol, another man may have felt that nothing further needed to be done, but Conan Doyle was outraged by the government’s refusal to acknowledge any fault or to pay Edalji any compensation for having his career and three years of his life taken from him through such a careless exercise of the criminal justice system. His report was as much an indictment of the police as a vindication of Edalji, charging the authorities with race prejudice, incompetence, and deliberate deceit.

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Few of Sir Arthur’s more famous works of fiction could boast the impact on the British public achieved by his letter to the Telegraph. The common belief that an injustice had been perpetrated now became nearly universal, and demands for an investigation grew irresistible. Finally, the Home Secretary grudgingly decided to appoint a three-man board to review the case. Astoundingly, one of the three ‘unbiased’ men appointed to the committee was the second cousin of Captain Anson, the Chief Constable of Staffordshire, who had been the first one to jump to the conclusion of Edalji’s guilt.

In the meantime, Conan Doyle had turned his attention to an as-yet-unasked question: If Edalji was innocent, then who had committed the crime? Sir Arthur’s crusade on Edalji’s behalf clearly represented a threat to the mysterious slasher, and before long Conan Doyle received one of the threatening letters that had so long plagued the vicar of Wyrley. ‘Think of all the ghoulish murders that are committed,’ the note read. ‘Why then should you escape?’ The recipient treated the letter not so much as a warning as another piece of evidence, again turning to the Telegraph and the public for help. The 29th May edition contained another letter from Sir Arthur, stating: ‘Upon Monday, the 27th, I received a letter and a postcard, both unstamped, from the unknown correspondent whose writing runs right through the whole Edalji affair from 1892 onwards…. A crease in both documents seems to show…that they may have been sent up under cover, or possibly in somebody’s pocket–a railway guard or other–and then posted. Should this be so one might hope to follow them back to the writer; and I hereby offer a reward of £20 to anyone who will enable me to say for certain whence they came.’

In the event, Detective Doyle found the crucial clue himself in a subsequent letter sent by the anonymous correspondent. The second missive contained a scathing remark about a former headmaster of the Walsall Grammar School in Staffordshire. Conan Doyle remembered that one of the letters sent to the senior Edalji had contained a similar reference, and that a stolen key from the school had once turned up on Edalji’s doorstep. Sir Arthur contacted the ex-schoolmaster and asked if he could think of anyone who had attended the school and might have reason to hold such an unfavourable opinion of him. The schoolmaster suggested a boy whom he had expelled years before for uncontrollable, destructive behavior.

Conan Doyle further learned that in the years since, the boy had become a butcher, and that a friend of his family remembered seeing him with a lancet at about the time of the animal mutilations. Once he was on the right track, Sir Arthur found many more coincidences that identified the butcher as the guilty party beyond any possible doubt.

Conan Doyle provided all this evidence to the three-man commission, which deliberated and then concluded that Edalji had not, in fact, killed the horse and should therefore be pardoned, but that he had ‘to some extent brought his troubles on himself,’ so there would be no compensation. By this, the commission apparently referred to the threatening letters, which it still believed Edalji had written to his father.

Conan Doyle’s response, again in the form of a letter to the Telegraph, was predictable. ‘While the friends of Mr. George Edalji rejoice that his innocence has at last been admitted (though in the most grudging and ungracious fashion), they feel that their work is only half done so long as compensation is refused him. It is clearly stated in the report of the Committee that: ‘The police commenced and carried on their investigations, not for the purpose of finding out who was the guilty party, but for the purpose of finding evidence against Edalji, who they were already sure was the guilty man.’

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