Tamam Shud (17 page)

Red herrings

I see a few things again in the ‘pathology snippets', which I think only have the potential to give misleading information. These include the description by the pathologist of ‘pupil size' which really can't be ascertained properly after death. Then there is the ‘high set calf and pointy toe stuff' described by the taxidermist/death mask maker (and his qualifications in this area would be???). There is also mention of the deceased having ‘an athlete's heart' and ‘inflammation of the bowels'. Athlete's can have considerably enlarged hearts which may, in themselves, cause an increased susceptibility to cardiac arrhythmia. But is this what the pathologist really said? And it would need to be confirmed by the weight and description of the heart. I don't know what is meant by ‘inflammation of the bowels' – this needs further description.

Toxicology

I recognise that the methods of detection used in those days were fairly primitive, but I think most commonly
available poisons would have been able to be detected in the stomach if they had been ingested by mouth. It is not clear if blood was also tested. This would hopefully pick up injected compounds. The pathologist states there were no needle marks on the body (but then, he did such a great job of examining the clothing that he missed the bit of Tamam Shud paper – what else did he miss?).

The suggestion that the deceased was sitting still but able to move (witness accounts of arm moving and crossing/uncrossing legs) makes the short-acting anaesthetic agents, particularly barbiturates, pretty unlikely. I think the same applies for scopolamine and it should have been able to be detected if there was enough on board to cause death.

The late Justice John Harber Phillips (in his wisdom) says that death was due to digitalis (he also says that ‘the state of the liver would exclude insulin' and I have no idea what he means there or how he manages to reach that conclusion). Again, I think if death was caused by ingestion of a cardiac glycoside such as digitalis, it should have been detected.

In summary, I don't believe death due to natural causes can be ruled out in this case, and the notion that he died by poisoning is problematic to substantiate in the absence
of any discernable poison, even given that testing in those times was fairly primitive compared to current technology available.

Tamam Shud:
A Phryne Fisher Mystery

When I was asked to write a short story for the collection
Case Reopened
I remembered my father talking about Somerton Man. The internet was still called books then, so I obtained all my information from a large volume entitled
Crimes that Shocked Australia
, where the code was printed incorrectly. As a result, I unintentionally misled my mathematician, who laboriously arrived at a solution that is, alas, wrong. Because the Tamam Shud mystery happened in 1948, I had to write about Phryne as she would be after World War II. This is the only story that ages her. I did wonder how she would manage and I should have known that, apart from not liking Dior's New Look, she would be as wonderful as ever.

Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare

And those that after a TO-MORROW stare,

A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries,

Fools ! Your Reward is neither Here nor There !'

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

P
hryne Fisher could have stayed to watch the Germans march into Paris. Being a woman with no taste for Moments of History she had left on a Plymouth-bound fishing boat some days before and had found London more to her taste. She had called upon some Home Office acquaintances, beguiled the Phony War with cocktail parties, and had only enlisted in the French Resistance when Dunkirk had brought its battered, oil-stained soldiers back in the flotilla of little ships. It was the little ships that decided her. Any nation that could have the miraculous luck to retrieve an army which should have been massacred or taken prisoner was the side to be on.

Born with the century, she was a lithe and beautiful forty-one years old when she came into Tours and began to collect the dangerous, secretive women and men who would be her Resistance to German invasion of France. London identified her as the Black Cat:
La Chatte Noire
. The war had been long; the danger and constant strain had frosted her black hair with white, and graven deep lines around her eyes. The fall of France and the defeat of
Hitler came not a moment too soon for Phryne. London had been shattered; she did not stay. As soon as there was a transport going south on which she could wangle a place, she fled back to Australia, wanting sunshine and butter and peace.

And in Adelaide, City of Churches, she had rediscovered sleep without dreams, and wine not bought with blood, and trains in which she could travel without having to worry about partisan bombs. She was still wealthy. Land in Australia had not lost its value. Taxation was still low. Rationing was avoidable. The house in St Kilda Road remained her principal place of residence. But Adelaide had become a holiday place for her, one with such deep immemorial peace as the grounds of Cambridge no longer held.

Therefore, she was very angry when she found a dead man on Somerton Beach.

Only one memory, of all the dreadful memories, still came between her and sleep. Not every night, but often enough to plague her, and to make her wonder if she was forever damaged. A young German, captured by the Maquis, refusing to reply to questions about troop movements and numbers. He had been very frightened; she had smelt his fear. He had cowered back into the wall of the ditch, his flesh shrinking from the idea of torture. And yet he had not spoken. Pale and smug in death as though proud that he had kept faith and honour intact,
his white face haunted Phryne's sleep and occasionally flashed in front of her waking eyes.

And here, as she walked up from the water to the steps that led to the road and her car, was the same face. He was older than the German soldier had been. She put his age at about her own: forty-eight. He was tall, well built and good-looking. His eyes were shut and he looked as though he was asleep, if one could ignore the slackness of the hands and the drooping of the head. She touched him. He was cold. And it was seven in the morning on 1 December 1948, and it was going to be a very hot day.

Surprising herself, she fought down a sob.

‘I've seen enough dead men in the last four years, why should this one affect me?' She called herself roughly to order. That's enough,
Chatte Noire
, up you go. Go to one of these nice houses and have the police called. It is nothing to do with you. This is not your dead man, Phryne!'

Almost against her will, she noticed that there were no marks in the sand around his feet. He was sitting on the bottom step, his feet on the beach. He looked as though he had felt unwell, sat down and died where he was. His clothing was all in order and there seemed to be no mark on him. Nice clothes, brown suit, topcoat, white shirt, his tie still in place and tied with a Windsor knot. Unmarked and quite dead. Yet there was that secret smile on his lips. She wondered what colour his eyes were.

Then she ran up the steps and knocked at one of the house doors, to tell the comatose inhabitants that there was a corpse on their nice clean beach.

***

‘Marie!' Phryne called as she came into her small house on West Terrace. ‘Marie,
p'tit, est-ce que tu dans le maison
?'

‘
Oui
,' replied a light voice from upstairs. ‘
Bonjour
, Madame.'

Marie had been acquired in Carcassone, a child of twelve orphaned by a shell and removed by Phryne from a nasty destination. She had resisted all attempts to send her away after the war, and no one could find any survivors from the Jewish colony in that city. So she had come to Australia with Phryne. She was small, dark and intense, and so pretty that Phryne did not expect to keep her long.

She came down the stairs and caught sight of Phryne's face.

‘What has happened?'

‘I found a dead man on the beach. I have seen enough dead men but I never expected to find one here.'

‘Murdered?'

‘No, he appears to have just died.'

Marie saw that Phryne was more shaken than she was willing to admit. She ran down the stairs and took her arm.

‘Come. We shall have a tisane. With a little cognac'

Side by side in the hall mirror, Phryne saw the dark, glowing, flawless face of Marie and her own countenance. Middle-aged, she thought, surveying the corded throat and the streaks of grey in her hair. Her eyes looked back at her, still intensely green, but wary and dilated.

‘Yes, you've seen a thing or two,' she said to her reflection. ‘All right, Marie, tea and brandy it is. I can't absorb shocks like I used to.'

Marie considered that Phryne was clearly still very attractive and, in any case, the best-dressed woman she had ever seen. She paid no attention and hustled her into the kitchen.

***

Two men sat huddled over a formica table in the most depressing pub in Hindley Street. They were careful not to attract attention; so careful that the other drinkers had noticed the air of cold seclusion that surrounded them and had given them a wide berth, isolating their table in the middle of a pool of silence.

‘When does she leave?' asked the smaller and darker man. His red-headed companion sighed and scrubbed at his jaw with a hand calloused like a bricklayer's.

‘Evening.'

‘Waste a few words on me, Damien,' begged the first. ‘Which evening, for the good God's sake?'

‘Tomorrow evening,' said Damien. ‘And do not go on about words, Brian. It is words which got us into this and words which always betray us.'

‘So it is,' agreed the dark one, ‘so it is. Are you going, then?' he added, as Damien stood up.

‘I am. You will be for Melbourne?'

‘The morning train, yes. No sign of the suitcase? He probably left it at the station.'

‘No sign. They will raid the station tonight. He may have left it in a locker.'

‘They are not going to like this, Damien.'

‘No, Brian. They are not going to like it.'

‘Likely I am going to my death, bringing them the news of our failure.'

‘Yes.'

‘God be with you, Damien.'

‘And with you, Brian.'

***

Phryne had absorbed her tea and brandy, and was having a bath when the policewoman arrived. She came out to speak to her dressed in a heavy silk gown which dated to the 1920s. Such fabric was not to be found in a postwar world, mused Woman Police Constable Hammond, sitting down, at Phryne's invitation, on the couch. At least this lady, she realised with relief, was not going to have hysterics and cry on her uniformed shoulder. In fact,
thought WPC Hammond, as the green eyes of the middle-aged lady met her own soft brown ones, this was a woman who knew a good deal more about death than she did, and was no longer startled by it.

‘Miss Fisher? Er … Lady Fisher?'

‘Just Miss Fisher. What's your name? Nice to see women being given some position in the world at last. Constable, are you? Well, I hope they make you a sergeant. Would you like tea or coffee? And how can I help you?'

‘My name is Hammond, I would like some tea and I came about the dead man on Somerton Beach.'

‘Yes, I thought that it might be that. Marie, can you make some tea? It's all right, this is Australia and she is a police officer.' Phryne smiled at Hammond. ‘Marie has only met people in uniform in the war and they always wanted to send her to Ravensbruck. You'll have to excuse her, Constable. Now, what about the man on Somerton Beach?'

‘What were you doing there, Miss Fisher, and where was he when you first saw him?'

Phryne began to explain, in a crisp, ordered narrative which WPC Hammond took down in her notebook. When Phryne had finished, the officer looked up and asked, ‘Miss Fisher, I'll be frank with you. The bigwigs have been onto us when we made a routine check on you, as a witness. They say that you were in the Resistance during the war in France. I'm going to ask you this, even
though my boss wouldn't like it.'

‘Well, ask.'

‘Did you know the man? Did he have any connection with … with what you were doing during the War?'

‘No, I didn't know him. I don't know anything about him. If I did there are people I would have called, things I would have done, which I won't burden you with. But I didn't call anyone and I didn't do anything because I honestly did not know the man. To my knowledge I've never seen him before. Now have some tea and tell me more. Why all this mystery?'

Hammond took some tea, which was excellent, and said slowly, ‘we don't know who he is. There's no identification on the body – no labels, no tailor's marks, nothing in his pockets.'

‘Nothing at all?'

‘No. No keys, no wallet. Just a little bit of paper with TAMAM SHUD written on it. In his watch pocket where it might have been overlooked by whoever searched him, if anyone did. I say, this is good tea.'

‘Ceylon,' said Phryne absently. ‘Well, well, Tamam Shud, eh? That, as I recall, is the last word in
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, A Persian version of ‘The End'. How … symbolic. Of something. Did he suicide, then?'

‘No – or if he did, the pathologist can't find a cause of death. He seems to have just sat down and . . . and died, Miss Fisher.'

‘Heart failure?'

‘Yes.'

‘Hmm. That's medical jargon for ‘Died of Death'. Interesting.'

‘Thing is,' said the police officer slowly, ‘there is something about his face.'

‘Something?'

‘Yes, he doesn't look like a suicide. No despair. The pathologist says that he has an educated face, but that's not just it … he looks … like he has a secret, like he died well. I'm too fanciful, that's what my sergeant says.'

‘No, you aren't. I saw it too,' Phryne winced. ‘The smug and unassailable face, the Knight with his Quest achieved. Safe in death with his secret unbetrayed.'