Tamam Shud (2 page)

I had my own Adelaide connection as well. I used to go there every summer in the seventies for the fruit picking. I stayed in East Terrace with a friend of mine and enjoyed the city, especially as a relief from all those grapes. But I have always been uneasily aware that under its hypercivilised veneer, Adelaide is an eerie place, where they
rather go in for strange killings – Truro, Snowtown, The Family. Murder is universal but Adelaide murder always has a twist. I remember thinking, as I lazed around Central Market, drinking Italian coffee and eating jam doughnuts from the pie cart, that I would love to investigate the history of the city one day and see if I could work out what made it such a fey place.

They are all gone into the world of light. My Adelaide of the seventies is gone, along with my youth and strength. The Adelaide of 1948 is gone, both the authorised version and the one related to me by my dad. The man found on Somerton Beach is gone, cocooned in his mystery. My father has gone, three years dead. In this book I will try to understand all of them and provide some explanations and then I will have to close the book and let them all go.

I cannot tell you how that feels.

Chapter One

Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate

I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,

And many Knots unravel'd by the Road;

But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, stanza 31

On 30 November 1948, Mr John Baines Lyons, a jeweller, went for a walk with his wife along Somerton Beach, as was their habit if the weather was warm. It was the last day of spring and hot, so they were strolling along the foreshore at about 7 pm. Near the foot of the steps which led down to the beach they saw a man sitting, supported by the sea wall. As they passed, he extended his right arm and then let it fall. They concluded that he was not dead, although possibly dead drunk, and walked on.

Some time later, around 7.30 pm, a woman called Olive Constance Neill, a telephonist, saw the seated man from the road above the seafront. It was a warm night and there were other people about, including a man in his fifties, wearing a grey suit and hat, who was looking down, possibly at the man on the beach. Miss Neill directed her companion Gordon's attention to the seated man and said, ‘Perhaps he's dead!' Gordon gave a cursory glance, observed that the man might indeed be dead because he wasn't reacting to the mosquitos, and they passed on. Possibly with other things on their minds.

At about 6.50 am, the same John Lyons, who must have been a very athletic man, went for an early morning swim. When he emerged from the sea, he met a friend of his and they noticed men on horses gathered around the man Mr Lyons had seen the night before. On inspection, Mr Lyons affirmed that the man was dead. He went
home to call the police and then returned to the scene. Brighton Police Station sent their Constable Moss, who found a body in which rigor was already fully established.

The man was lying with his feet toward the sea, still against the sea wall. He was well-dressed but he had no hat. He didn't appear to have suffered any stab wounds or bullet wounds. No bruises or blood were observed and there was no disturbance of the scene. He seemed to have died, very quietly and peacefully, where he sat. His half-smoked cigarette had fallen out of his mouth and onto his lapel as he slumped but his chin was not even blistered.

And there you have him. Somerton Man as he is called these days.

My dad told me about him as though he was a myth. In a way, he is. Certainly, he has become an object over which many theories have been laid. But he is also himself, poor man – cold as a stone, slouched on the sand like a marooned sailor, with his last smoke dropping gently out of his mouth – and he deserves his dignity. He was somebody's son. Somebody, somewhere, missed him and mourned for him. I must never write about him as though he were a thing. He wasn't just a mystery. He was a man.

The police ambulance took Somerton Man to the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace. There, at 9.40 am, the doctor declared that life was extinct, an ancient ritual which must be enacted, even if there is absolutely
no chance that life is present – for example, in a person whose head is at least 5 metres away from their body. (In case you think I am exaggerating I should say that this example comes from my own legal experience. Traffic accident.)

Life could hardly have been more extinct in Somerton Man. The doctor who declared him dead suggested that he must have had a heart attack and sent him to the morgue for a post-mortem. The body was processed in the usual way, being stripped and tagged and refrigerated. There was nothing odd about a heart attack victim, so no special notice was taken of the half-smoked cigarette, but the contents of his pockets were logged, as follows:

Railway ticket to Henley Beach

Bus ticket to North Glenelg

American metal comb

Packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum

Packet of Army Club cigarettes with seven Kenistas cigarettes inside

Handkerchief

Packet of Bryant & May matches

He had no wallet, no identity documents, no money and no passport.

My father was convinced that Somerton Man was an American because of his clothes, which he called ‘sharp'
(My dad was pretty sharp himself and had a keen eye for tailoring). Somerton Man was wearing jockey shorts and a singlet, a white shirt with a narrow tie in red, white and blue, fawn trousers, a brown knitted pullover, a brown double-breasted suit coat, socks and highly polished brown, laced shoes. Snazzy.

Somerton Man was a snappy dresser but it was a hot evening and he was wearing very heavy clothes for the weather. My own experience of Adelaide on a hot day is you find yourself wishing you could strip off your clothes at midday and bathe in the sea. Somerton Man was wearing the ensemble of someone who had come from somewhere cold, or who had nowhere to leave a change of clothes, or no lighter clothes into which he could change.

On examination of the clothes, it was found that every identifying label had been removed. This should have been the point at which someone smelt a Rodent of Unusual Size. Various commentators on this case have stated definitively that second-hand clothes always had the labels removed but as one who has dressed in op shop garments since early youth, I know this is not the case. What's more, according to my more aged relatives, it never has been the case.

Before the seventies, when cheap mass-produced fabrics flooded into the West, clothes used to be much more valuable, by a factor of about ten, and consequently one labelled one's clothes. In the days before iron-on glue,
the labels bearing the name of the garment's owner were usually sewn onto the manufacturer's label. When you bought the garment in an op shop, you unpicked the original name tag and replaced it with your own. No used-clothes shop hoping for a profit would ever remove a prestigious tailor's label from an expensive coat because the label would double the price. The only reason I can think of for removing all the labels is the concealment of Somerton Man's identity.

Somerton Man had no money in his pockets. If he'd had any, it had gone with his wallet – if he had a wallet. And, to complete our survey of his garments, folded up into a tight little wad in his fob pocket, overlooked during the first survey, there was a scrap of paper torn out of a book that bore the words ‘Tamam Shud'. Of which, much more later.

Naked and cold, Somerton Man waited for his attending physician, whose task was to determine how he had
died. The doctor in question, Dr JM Dwyer, decided that he had died of some irritant poison and sent samples of his organs – liver, muscle, blood, urine and stomach contents – for analysis. His fingerprints were taken and he was photographed. Somerton Man was now officially a Suspicious Death.

Not only Suspicious, but Unknown. While the forensic tests were performed and Somerton Man rested in his refrigerator, the police set about trying to find out who he was. Detective Strangway of Glenelg Station and his associates began by checking all the missing persons reports on hand but Somerton Man fitted none of them. Then they checked his fingerprints, which were not on record. And after that they went to the papers.

Police are almost always reluctant to make a newspaper appeal because they know they will be buried under the paperwork. Tips will flood in from people who have lost sons, brothers and, particularly, defaulting husbands and lovers all over Australia. Two people were sure that he was Robert Walsh, a woodcutter, but this positive identification was withdrawn when one of them looked at the body again and decided that it wasn't him. In any case, Walsh was sixty-three and Somerton Man was younger and had soft hands, which woodcutters don't, as a rule. Another firm identification as EC Johnson rather fell flat when the man concerned walked into a police station and asserted very firmly that he wasn't dead. So
Somerton Man wasn't EC Johnson either. (Oddly, when I'm writing novels I always use Johnson as my default name for a character. If you see a Johnson in one of my books it's because I haven't been able to think of another name for him or her.)

I see no need to revisit all the dead ends which eventuated from this appeal. Suffice to say that Somerton Man wasn't any of the 251 people he was, over time, thought to be. A vigorous and comprehensive rummage through all the missing persons in Australia failed to reveal his identity, although it must have eaten up a spectacular number of police man hours and cost a fortune in overtime.

While all of this was going on, the autopsy had taken place and the body wasn't getting any fresher, so an embalming was arranged. Photographs taken before and after demonstrate the difference that embalming makes. The original police pictures show a younger, slightly plump man but after he has been embalmed, he looks aged and shrunken and not himself. If he had been an acquaintance, I might have recognised him from the original picture, but I suspect I wouldn't have recognised the embalmed corpse. In any case, I know from experience that it is hard to identify the dead. Everything that made the face individual is gone with the last breath. The body cast they made of Somerton Man looks like a marble statue, Roman and ancient.

So far, so inconclusive. Then on 14 January, in response to a police appeal for unclaimed baggage directed to all lodging houses, hotels and railway stations, a suitcase was found in a locker at Adelaide's Central Railway Station. It had been checked in after 11 am on 30 November 1948, the last day of Somerton Man's life.

It was a nice, clean, respectable and not inexpensive brown leather suitcase. All the labels had been removed. In those days, labels were not tied on, as they are in airplane travel today. They were glued or pasted onto the leather. Having tried to remove some of the labels from my grandmother's favourite suitcase because they were so pretty, I can tell you from first-hand experience that they cannot be stripped or cut off. They can only be removed by patient, gentle soaking with a sponge, which argues time and determination. Somerton Man really didn't want anyone to know where he had been.

The suitcase contained the following items:

Red checked dressing gown

Red felt slippers, size 7

Undergarments – four pairs

Pyjamas

Four pairs of socks

Shaving kit containing razor and strop, shaving brush

Light brown trousers with sand in cuffs

A screwdriver

A cut-down table knife

A stencilling brush

A pair of scissors

A sewing kit containing orange Barbour's waxed thread

Two ties

Three pencils

Six handkerchiefs

Sixpence in coins

A button

A tin of brown shoe polish, Kiwi brand

One scarf

One cigarette lighter