Monroe had another of his ‘scoops’. A woman from Rugby, Warwickshire, had been in touch with the Graphic to say that she was one of the many who had had a romantic entanglement with Musgrave, but unlike those others she knew the identity of the killer and it was not Tommy Prosser at all.
One day, in early July, she met Musgrave during her dinner hour and he took her for something to eat. When she had to go back to work, she watched him walk back to his car, which he had left parked on Albert Street. As he was crossing the road, he was approached by a man who engaged him in a sharp argument. At one point it looked as if blows were about to be exchanged. Eventually, Mr Musgrave had 232broken away and got into his car, but the man followed, still haranguing him and continued to do so even as the car drove away.
That man was none other than Lawrence of Arabia.
‘Did you see this, Edgar?’
‘What? The thing about Lawrence of Arabia killing Harold Musgrave? Yes, I did. If you read down to the bottom paragraph, to avoid the inevitable libel suits it makes it clear that Lawrence was actually nowhere near Rugby on the day in question but that he is serving in the RAF, stationed in Plymouth, and is so busy testing new speedboat designs he wouldn’t have a moment spare to assault a vacuum cleaner salesman. So, it must have been somebody who merely bears a resemblance to Lawrence.’
‘It’s a useful story all the same. Does help establish that the killer could have been any one of a hundred who felt wronged by his philandering.’
‘Did you see the bit where she says Musgrave had told her he was tracking down Russian saboteurs for MI5?’ Edgar said. ‘That and scouting for aerodromes are his two favourite stories by the looks of things.’
‘Chap I met told me that the MI5 thing could, at a stretch, be true.’
‘Is it actually legal to know that MI5 exists?’
‘Not sure.’
‘I’m fairly sure, even if you do know, it’s treason to mention it.’
‘I expect they’ll come and hang us in a minute.’ 233
Edgar had been thumbing through a bulky magazine. He passed it over to Skelton. ‘Have a look at that.’
Skelton examined a picture of somebody’s living room in which everything was white, or off-white, or cream, as if somebody had been ever so clumsy with a bottle of bleach.
‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’ Skelton asked.
‘In the corner. By the screen.’
‘What?’
‘The cocktail cabinet.’
‘That?’ Skelton said, pointing.
‘It’s exactly the same as mine except hers is bleached oak.’
‘Oh, yes,’.
‘It’s the Yellow House at Fetcham. Syrie Maugham.’
Skelton recognised the words ‘yellow’ and ‘house’, but the rest was just funny noises.
‘Syrie Maugham,’ Edgar repeated, to press home his point.
‘Is that a person?’
Edgar raised an eyebrow. His chief, for all his brilliance, was lamentably ill-informed about things that actually mattered.
‘She’s possibly the most influential interior designer of the age,’ Edgar said. ‘Has a shop on Baker Street, you must have passed it. Used to be married to Somerset Maugham.’
‘The writer?’
‘The Moon and Sixpence, Of Human Bondage.’
‘I’ve heard of him. And his wife …?’
‘Ex-wife …’
‘… ex-wife, designs rooms like these?’ 234
‘Celebrated here and in America.’
‘She does it for a living, then?’
‘Most certainly.’
He looked back at the picture in the magazine. Though his loyalty usually lay with his clerk, in this case he had a lot of sympathy with Edgar’s housekeeper, Mrs Stewart. He tried to imagine living in such a room and the fuss there’d be every time somebody came to visit with muddy shoes, or spilt cocoa on the settee. Your life wouldn’t be worth living.
‘You see my point,’ Edgar said.
‘Not really, no.’
‘I’ve got Syrie Maugham on my side, haven’t I? Proof that I’m right and Mrs Stewart is wrong.’
‘Mrs Stewart’s objections aren’t to do with aesthetics or taste, though, are they? It’s the practicality. Who does Syrie Maugham’s dusting?’
Edgar looked crestfallen. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Have you shown Mrs Stewart the picture.’
Edgar nodded.
‘And she wasn’t impressed?’
‘She said who ever thought up a room like that should be locked up in a sewer and left to drown.’
‘Strong feelings, then.’
‘Very. She said the King of Siam could have a cubist cocktail cabinet for all she cared, it’d still be a bugger to dust. Mirrored surfaces, glass, chrome, she’s happy to polish all day. But those crevices …’ Edgar stared at the wall.
235A parcel arrived with the lunchtime post from Holland, the solicitor in Bedford, containing Harold Musgrave’s army medical records. They’d been right about the rank and regiment being made up. He was Corporal Musgrave of the Royal Warwicks. He’d signed up in 1915 and shipped out to Le Havre in the same year, seen action at Ypres, and taken part in the Battle of Albert and the Battle of Le Transloy before being wounded at the first Battle of the Scarpe in 1917.
The records consisted of pages of doctors’ notes in many different hands.
Skelton pieced together the story.
Musgrave had essentially been blown up. He had broken an arm, several ribs and suffered shrapnel wounds to the left side of his skull. The doctors at the field hospital had patched him up as best they could and when, after three days, he regained consciousness and gave indication that he might stay alive for a little longer, he was shipped back to England. At a military hospital in Kent, the doctors had done things to the wounds to prevent further infection, set and splinted the arm, strapped the ribs and, not expecting much in the way of a favourable outcome, removed the shrapnel from the head and put the bits of skull back together as best they could.
Again, days passed before he regained consciousness, after which his recovery was surprisingly fast. His brain had clearly taken a terrible jolt. He had to learn all over again how to speak and did so in much the same way as a child does, albeit in an accelerated way, first making ‘da-da’ and 236‘ba-ba’ sounds, then acquiring words and forming sentences. Curiously, he had, it seemed, never lost the ability to read, although this did not become apparent until he could speak the words from the page.
When it was felt he had made sufficient recovery, he was transferred to a convalescent hospital in Warwickshire where the doctors reported he was soon walking comfortably and seemed to have regained all of his mental faculties. The only significant anomaly being his taste for spinning elaborate stories, especially when flirting with nurses, although the doctors did not consider these to be ‘delusions’ serious enough to count as evidence of mental disorder, especially since they had no knowledge of what the man had been like before he had suffered the head wound.
Skelton turned back to the post-mortem photographs and looked at the lump at the side of the head, trying to imagine how a skull could deform into such a shape. It was a ridge just above the right ear that protruded what must have been getting on for an inch.
Then something occurred to him. He went back to the doctor’s notes. He looked again at the photograph. There was an anomaly. The notes made it clear that the wound was on the left side of the skull. In the photograph it was on the right side. He remembered that Mrs Clayton, when speaking of the wound, had indicated the right side of her head. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? When somebody has stray custard at the corner of the mouth, you show them like a mirror image. 237
He telephoned Spilsbury’s office. Again, Spilsbury was out, and he spoke to the same assistant as before.
‘When the copies of the photographs that I have were made,’ he asked, ‘could it be that they were done back to front or some such so that left became right and right became left?’
‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
‘Were you actually involved in the examination of Mr Musgrave’s body?’
‘Not personally, no.’
‘I wonder whether I could speak to somebody who was.’
‘Dr Reid might have been.’
‘Could I have a word with him?’
‘I think he’s downstairs at the moment. If he’s free, I could ask him to telephone you from there, shall I?’
‘That would be very kind.’
Skelton put down the telephone and picked up the photographs again, holding them up to his head to make sure he wasn’t doing something daft. He was fairly sure that doctors, when they talked of right and left, were definitely speaking from the patient’s point of view and not their own.
After ten minutes Dr Reid rang back.
‘Do you remember, when you were examining the body, was there any indication that an arm had been broken or ribs?’
‘Several bones were broken, but I believe that happened when the body was removed from the car.’
‘What about the bony ridge at the side of the head. That was definitely on the right-hand side was it?’ 238
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘The lump at the side of the head. It shows quite clearly on the photographs.’
Reid was amused. ‘Oh, that. No, that’s not a bony ridge. That’s the remains of a hat, most likely the inner band of a cap, that had sort of been fused to the head by the heat.’
Skelton breathed hard. Musgrave, Mrs Clayton had told him, never wore a hat.
‘You’ve still got the body in cold storage, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, there was some difficulty about its release.’
‘I’m sending over Musgrave’s medical records from the army. They’ve only just turned up. I’d like you to re-examine the remains in light of what they say.’
‘Is that really necessary?’
‘Oh, yes, I think so. Because that bloke you’ve got there in storage, I don’t think it’s Harold Musgrave at all.’