It is two weeks before Christmas. George is now sixteen, and no longer feels the excitement of the season as he once did. He knows our Saviour's birth to be a solemn truth, annually celebrated, but he has left behind the nervous exaltation that still infects Horace and Maud. Nor does he share the trivial hopes his old schoolfellows at Rugeley used openly to express: for frivolous presents of a kind which have no place at the Vicarage. They also annually set their hearts on snow, and would even demean the faith by praying for it.

George has no interest in skating or sledding or the building of snowmen. He has already embarked on his future career. He has left Rugeley and is studying law at Mason College in Birmingham. If he applies himself, and passes the first examination, he will become an articled clerk. After five years of articles, there will be final examinations, and then he will become a solicitor. He sees himself with a desk, a set of bound law books and a suit with a fob chain slung between his waistcoat pockets like golden rope. He imagines himself being respected. He imagines himself with a hat.

It is almost dark when he gets home late on the afternoon of December 12th. As he reaches the front door of the Vicarage he notices an object lying on the step. He bends, then squats to examine it more closely. It is a large key, cold to the touch and heavy in the hand. George does not know what to make of it. The keys to the Vicarage are much smaller; so is that of the schoolroom. The church key is different again; nor does this seem to be a farm key of any kind. But its weight suggests a serious purpose.

He takes it to his father, who is equally puzzled.

'On the step, you say?' Another question to which Father already knows the answer.

'Yes, Father.'

'And you saw no one put it there?'

'No.'

'And did you meet anyone coming away from the Vicarage on your way from the station?'

'No, Father.'

The key is sent with a note to Hednesford police station, and three days later, when George returns from college, Sergeant Upton is sitting in the kitchen. Father is still out on his parish rounds; Mother is hovering anxiously. It crosses George's mind that there is a reward for finding the key. If this was one of those stories the boys at Rugeley used to love, it would open a strongbox or treasure chest, and the hero would next require a crumpled map with an X marked on it. George has no taste for such adventures, which always strike him as far too unlikely.

Sergeant Upton is a red-faced man with the build of a blacksmith; his dark serge uniform constricts him, and is perhaps the cause of the wheezing noises he makes. He looks George up and down, nodding to himself as he does so.

'So you're the young fellow that found the key?'

George remembers his attempts to play the detective when Elizabeth Foster was writing on walls. Now there is another mystery, but this time with a policeman and a future solicitor involved. It feels appropriate as well as exciting.

'Yes. It was on the doorstep.' The Sergeant doesn't respond to this, but carries on nodding to himself. He seems to need putting at his ease, so George tries to help. 'Is there a reward?'

The Sergeant looks surprised. 'Now why would you be wondering if there's a reward? You of all people?'

George takes this to mean that there isn't one. Perhaps the policeman has only come to congratulate him on returning lost property. 'Have you found out where it's from?'

Upton doesn't reply to this either. Instead, he takes out a notebook and pencil.

'Name?'

'You know my name.'

'Name, I said.'

The Sergeant really could be more civil, George thinks.

'George.'

'Yes. Go on.'

'Ernest.'

'Go on.'

'Thompson.'

'Go on.'

'You know my surname. It's the same as my father's. And my mother's.'

'Go on, I say, you uppish little fellow.'

'Edalji.'

'Ah yes,' says the Sergeant. 'Now I think you'd better spell that out for me.'

Arthur's marriage, like his remembered life, began in death.

He qualified as a doctor; worked as a locum-tenens in Sheffield, Shropshire and Birmingham; then took a post as surgeon on the steam-whaler Hope. They sailed from Peterhead to the Arctic ice field, off after seal and anything else they could chase and kill. Arthur's duties proved light, and since he was a normal young man, happily given to drinking and, if necessary, fighting, he swiftly won the confidence of the crew; he also fell into the sea so often that they nicknamed him the Great Northern Diver. And like any healthy Briton, he enjoyed a good hunt: his game-bag on the voyage came to fifty-five seals.

He felt little but vigorous male competitiveness when they were out on the endless ice battering seals to death. But one day they took a Greenland whale, and he found it an experience of a different order to any he had known before. To play a salmon might be a royal game, but when your Arctic prey weighs more than a suburban villa, it dwarfs all comparisons. From no more than a hand's touch away, Arthur watched the whale's eye – to his surprise, no bigger than a bullock's – slowly dim over in death.

The mystery of the victim: something was now changed in his way of thinking. He continued to shoot ducks from the snowy sky, and felt pride in his marksmanship; yet beyond this lay a feeling he could grasp at but not contain. Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.

Next he sailed south, on the Mayumba out of Liverpool, bound for the Canaries and the west coast of Africa. Shipboard drinking continued, but fighting took place only over the bridge table and the cribbage board. If he regretted swapping the sea boots and informal dress of a whaler for the gilt buttons and serge suit of a passenger vessel, there was at least the compensation of female company. One night the ladies sportingly made an apple-pie of his bed; the next he took his amiable revenge by hiding a flying fish in one of their nightgowns.

He returned to dry land, common sense and a career. He set up his brass plate in Southsea. He became a Freemason, admitted to the third degree in the Phoenix Lodge No. 257. He captained the Portsmouth Cricket Club and was judged one of the safest Association backs in Hampshire. Dr Pike, fellow member of the Southsea Bowling Club, referred patients to him; the Gresham Life Insurance Company hired him to perform medical examinations.

One day Dr Pike sought Arthur's view on a young patient who had recently moved to Southsea with his widowed mother and elder sister. This second opinion was a mere politeness: it was evident that Jack Hawkins had cerebral meningitis, against which the entire medical profession, let alone Arthur, was powerless. No hotel or boarding house would accept the poor fellow; so Arthur offered to take him into his own house as a resident patient. Hawkins was only a month older than his host. Despite a thousand palliative cups of arrowroot, he swiftly deteriorated, became delirious, and smashed up everything in his room. Within days he was dead.

Arthur looked more carefully at this corpse than he had done at the white, waxen thing of his infancy. He had begun to find, during his medical training, that there was often much promise in the faces of the dead – as if the strain and tension of living had given way to a greater peacefulness. Post-mortal muscular relaxation was the scientific answer; but part of him wondered if this was the full explanation. The human dead also bore in their gizzard pebbles from a land the maps ignored.

As he rode in the one-carriage funeral procession from his own house to the Highland Road cemetery, Arthur's chivalrous feelings were aroused by the black-clad mother and sister, now alone in an unfamiliar town with no male support. Louisa, once her veil was raised, proved a shy, round-faced young woman with blue eyes shading to sea-green. After a decent interval, Arthur was allowed to call at her lodgings.