Skelton's Guide to Blazing Corpses by David Stafford

Author:David Stafford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2022-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Monday, 24th November 1930

He found himself preoccupied by eels. On the train into Paddington, in The Times, he read that students had disrupted an anti-vivisection meeting at the Westminster Central Hall, by releasing several containers of live eels that they’d smuggled in and throwing them among the crowd. People fled and the meeting was abandoned in chaos.

A release of eels – like a trampling of elephants – confirms the suspicion that there is only chaos. Our brains are in the habit of making patterns of events creating the illusion that there is some order in the universe, but there isn’t. As a species we’ve just got good at making patterns and the universe takes a long time, billions of years, to reveal its irrationality. Just because day has regularly followed night ever since humans started noticing, it’s no guarantee it will tomorrow. You can’t trust these things. Elephants could trample the sun or eels cause the earth to stand still in its orbit.

As soon as he got into the office, he telephoned Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the Home Office pathologist at Bart’s and got through to an assistant, who told him that Sir Bernard was away on business. Could he help at all?

Skelton asked whether it was correct that the fatal wound to Musgrave’s skull was definitely at the back rather than to one side. The assistant spent a couple of minutes looking out the notes, then came back to the phone and confirmed that it was indeed at the back.

‘Was another wound, or a lump of some sort visible at one side of the skull?’ Skelton asked.

‘There is a very distinctive lump at the side of the head visible in the photograph,’ the assistant said.

‘I wonder, could you arrange to have copies of the postmortem photographs sent over?’

Skelton put the phone down slightly disappointed. He knew it was extremely unlikely that an autopsy would mistake an old war wound for the results of a much more recent assault, but one lives in hope.

He rang Holland, the solicitor, in Bedford.

‘Do we have Musgrave’s medical records?’

‘Only for the past couple of years.’

‘Not his army medical records, then? He was apparently quite badly wounded.’

‘It’s difficult. The Auto-Vac-It people had him down as a lieutenant in the Prince of Wales Dragoons, but the Dragoons have no record of him at all.’

‘I met one of his lady friends. She seemed to think he was in the Hussars.’

‘I’ll get on to them.’

‘Although, maybe a cavalry regiment was one of his stories. I’d have thought that, since he’s from Coventry, it’s most likely he’d have been in the Royal Warwicks.’

‘I’ll give them a try, too.’

‘And he may, of course, have lied about his rank.’

‘Good point. I’ll chase it up.’

‘I’d be very grateful.’

Skelton stood and looked out of the window. The wind had caught a flour sack, or perhaps a pillowcase making it dance in midair like the ghost in a story that had terrified him at school. It started him thinking about elephants and eels again.

Justice was victim to the same nonsense, the same disorder.

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