Tamam Shud (7 page)

Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before

I swore – but was I sober when I swore?

And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand

My thread-bare Penitence a-pieces tore.

The police seemed to have read it in the same way as I do. At any rate, when Teresa pleaded that she was now married and such exposure would damage her reputation, the police acceded to her plea that they shouldn't allow her name to be publicly known. She was known as ‘Jestyn', which was the name by which she signed Alf Boxall's copy of
The Rubaiyat
until her real name was accidently disclosed years later. Now we know her name but since she and her son and her husband and Alf Boxall are all dead, it probably doesn't help all that much.

Alf Boxall reported that he had given
The Rubaiyat
to his wife in June 1945, which argues extreme brazen effrontery, complete innocence or something even odder.
Mr Boxall said he owned a copy with Jestyn's verse in the front but Mrs Boxall showed the police a
Rubaiyat
with no writing in it at all. Which seems to mean that Mrs Boxall had been given a clean copy (she said she'd had it since Christmas 1944) and that Mr Boxall's inscribed copy was still in the bookcase. There were a lot of copies of
The Rubaiyat
around at the time but two in one household seems extreme. Someone is fibbing, although it might be no more than the standard marital covering up of a harmless flirtation. When Mr Boxall was interviewed in 1978 by ABC TV, he insisted that Jestyn was just one of a group of nurses with whom he and his mates had the occasional swift snort when they could get away from the hospital but it seems clear that he singled her out from the group, at least to some extent.

Teresa herself is an intriguing person. In 1945 she was nursing at Royal North Shore, where she was Jestyn and unmarried. Then she moved back to her mother's house in Melbourne, had a baby and moved to Adelaide. When she told the police that she was now married, it was not true. She had taken the name of her future husband, Prestige Johnson, whom she would marry when his divorce came through in early 1950.

When Teresa was interviewed by the indefatigable Gerald Feltus, he found her evasive, unwilling to talk about
The Rubaiyat
and Boxall, insisting that ‘She didn't know anything then, and she did not know anything
now'. Feltus came to the conclusion that Teresa knew the identity of Somerton Man but he also thinks that her family knows nothing about it, so there is no point in harassing them. If an acute and experienced detective like Feltus couldn't find out what Teresa knew, then no one can.

Researchers may have hoped that after her husband died, she would reveal something interesting, such as that Somerton Man was her lover, but they were disappointed. Teresa has taken her secret, if she had a secret, to the grave.

Chapter Four

And as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted – ‘Open then the Door!

‘You know how little while we have to stay,

‘And, once departed, may return no more.'

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, stanza 3

Meanwhile, various physicans with an interest in the mystery of Somerton Man were considering the subject of poison, a subject on which I also have some expertise. Not because I meditate mass murder on an hourly basis, though there have been days, but because I write detective stories and poison can be the basis of a nice hard-to-solve plot. Mr A striking Mrs A over the head with the kitchen shovel and then sobbing that everything went black can only really give one a chapter or two, even after going into the psychology of that marriage. But Mrs A, who devotedly nursed Mr A through a sad, long drawn-out illness until he died, wept over his grave and
claimed his insurance money – that is another matter.

The primary source for 1928, the year in which I have set most of my own novels, is Dr Glaister, a true trailblazer. He was a Scottish doctor from Edinburgh University who decided that what modern law enforcement needed was a textbook. Well, more of a casebook, actually.
Glaister on Poisons
is, for instance, where Dorothy Sayers learned that mushroom toxin has two forms, the synthetic or left-handed optical isomer and natural or right-handed optical isomer, information she made use of in the novel
The Documents in the Case
.

This is what Glaister says about poisoners. (One gathers that he is against them.)

Murder by poisoning is a crime of devilish wickedness and inhumanity which no language can adequately describe. Of all forms of murder it is probably the most cruel, and one of the most difficult to prove. The reasons for this are not far to seek. It is a secret crime based on a well conceived and thoroughly premeditated plan; the poisoner acts alone and adopts every precaution to avoid suspicion and evade detection … Cunning is an essential element in the successful poisoner and the exclusion of every sense of pity from his make-up is an inestimable asset, since he has to witness the results of his handiwork and watch the life of his helpless victim slowly drawing to its close.

I have always admired Glaister's writing style, ever since I read the following sentence many years ago: ‘do the advances which are constantly being made in criminal investigation actually keep, not only abreast, but well ahead of the more enlightened poisoner?' I also like ‘Women have always set a high standard in novel methods of poisoning but also that they seem to have found poisoning a simple and acceptable means for elimination'.

By the way, there are two Dr John Glaisters, father and son, both forensic pathologists, which is filial but confusing. Until I ascertained this, I thought that Glaister had lived a very long time indeed.

Scientific advances like the identification of DNA are recent – very recent. Back in the twenties they were still learning to group blood. Sherlock Holmes lacked a test to distinguish human blood from rabbit blood, so he invented one, but Sherlock Holmes was fictional, despite the number of letters he still gets at 221B Baker Street. The precipitin test for human blood was invented in 1901 but required a fair amount of blood. Mineral poisons like antimony and arsenic, that old favourite – the French court called them
poudres d'inheritance
– were effective but detectable. However, it was very hard to test for organic or vegetable poisons and there are so many of them, so easily available.

In an average garden there is laurel and belladonna lilies and yew trees. When I was a child we were all told
the terrible story of a boy who decided to make a steak
en brochette
, used oleander stalks to cook it and poisoned his whole family. It doesn't appear to be true – at least, I have not been able to find any record of it – but it did underline how dangerous an ordinary backyard could be. You can even distil cyanide from apricot pits or apple pips. Potatoes produce little green fruits above ground which are stuffed with solanium, a deadly poison in the nightshade family. (That information is, come to think of it, used in another Dorothy Sayers story,
The Leopard Lady
.) In Australia we have henbane, deadly nightshade and some of the most impressively toxic toadstools, Death Cap and Destroying Angel, so lethal that you should probably not spend too much time looking at them, much less handling them. Crunch up a few of those pretty beans produced by the castor oil tree and you can kill an elephant, although please don't. Elephants are endangered. I like elephants.

Even now, organic poisons are hard to diagnose. By the time they have killed their intended victim, they have already metabolised into something that occurs naturally in the body and all of our science will not help if the person's death is never investigated because they appear to have died a natural death. I suspect that there are a lot of perfect murders out there and that most of them involve poisoning. So neat, so quiet and so distant in time from the original dose.

So what did the distinguished experts make of the neat, quiet death of Somerton Man? The first suggestion, from John Dwyer LQMP, who had conducted the post mortem examination of Somerton Man at the city mortuary, was that a barbiturate or soluble hypnotic had been used. Such things vanish out of the body very quickly. At the inquest, the Coroner was shown a series of extracts from
Poisons, their Isolation and Identification
by Frank Bamford, the late director of the Medico-Legal Laboratory in Cairo, the second edition being revised by CP Stewart, reader in clinical chemistry at the University of Edinburgh: evidently a standard text. The foreword is written by Sydney Smith, a famous Home Office pathologist, who also wrote a very instructive book of reminiscences called
Mostly Murder
. Dwyer drew the Coroner's attention to a series of specific quotes from
Poisons
– notably:

A patient sometimes dies of sulphonal poisoning long after the administration of the drug has ceased, and even after its complete elimination from the body …

and:

It is, however, a common experience of toxicologists that they have failed to detect certain
alkaloids when there has been strong evidence of their administration; this occurs in the case of addicts whose ability to tolerate large doses is possibly due to the acquired power of the organs to destroy the drugs and some simple urethides and thiobarbiturates (pentothal for example) adaline and bromural appear to be entirely destroyed. Roche Lyon, another pathologist, reports five cases, three of them fatal, in which he failed to find these drugs in the urine or viscera, although in every case bromine was detected.

[Note: there is no bromine in pentothal but there are usually traces in the body.]

Dwyer was convinced that ‘While these quotations do not enable any conclusion to be reached concerning the cause of death in the Somerton case, the information does offer a possible solution to the dilemma'. But, as a matter of fact, what the information does is to confuse the matter even further. The writers of textbooks for the profession are not obliged to write down for the general populace but I wish these writers had told us what the sentence in square brackets actually means. Are they saying that there is usually a trace amount of the element bromine in any body at any time? In that case why is it significant? If it is not significant, why mention it
at all? And why doesn't pentothal contain any bromine if it is
esjudem generis
with the rest of the drugs in that paragraph? (See, I can use trade jargon as well as the next woman.) On a related tack, does the second quotation suggest that Somerton Man was a junkie? All in all, I suggest that Dwyer's summary is extremely optimistic.

Indeed, by the time of the inquest, Dwyer had come to doubt his own theory, especially after hearing from the expert witnesses. He told the Coroner:

I think that it is a possible explanation, that barbiturate was taken or administered; it caused death, and became decomposed. That must be considered, but I do not think it is under ordinary circumstances a likely explanation … There is a big variation in the amount which people can stand. Even a quick acting one would require a massive dose to produce death by midnight if the man were alive at seven o'clock. If the dose were massive, one would expect to find it on analysis … in view of the chemist's findings it is unlikely that barbiturates are responsible for the death …'

Dwyer also checked for signs that a hypodermic needle had been used, examining two marks between the knuckles and the back of the right hand, which, he said, ‘appeared to be recent abrasions before death', but deciding
that they were not significant. He ruled out an overdose of insulin as the cause of Somerton Man's death, ‘on the findings of the liver'; he ruled out botulism because it required a twelve-hour incubation period and he ruled out prussic acid, whose ‘action is so rapid as to be practically instantaneous, so there would not have been time for the finding in the organs to have developed, particularly the microscopic finding'. And while he was unable to rule out diptheria toxin and aconite or aconitine altogether, he was also unable to confirm any of those possibilities. In short, Dwyer's testimony established that Somerton Man was poisoned by a poison which could be detected, of which no trace remained in the body, and it was impossible to say whether he took it himself or whether he was murdered.

The Chemist and Department Government Analyst, Robert James Cowan, was the next witness at the inquest. He explained that he had tested for all common poisons, including cyanides, alkaloids, barbiturates and carbolic acid. He also tested for insulin. Somerton Man's body contained none of them and Cowan concluded that ‘If he did die from a poison, then it was no common poison'.

After that, Professor John Burton Cleland LQMP, the Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Adelaide, informed the inquest that there was nothing to indicate death from natural causes. He was a comparatively young man. The vessels of the heart and brain are described as being free from theroma [fatty deposits],
so that if his death was attributed to a natural cause, one would have to think of some vagal inhibition, which would mean a sudden and unexpected death for which no preparation could be made, or possibly something like a diabetic coma, which would begin to overcome a person anywhere before they had time to retire to a place in which to lie down.

Vagal inhibition is usually a result of pressure applied to the side of the neck, something that can happen when the victim is playing sport or fighting. I remember being warned about it when I was learning karate. The blow or pressure, which might not even leave a mark, instructs the whole body to shut down and it does so permanently.

Continuing with the ghastly details, Cleland observed that:

Every poison we have suggested seems to have been discounted. We found no evidence of vomiting. A possible stain on his trousers did not look like vomit, and we did not detect any evidence of potato, and he had been eating potato. The internal organs were somewhat congested, but not deeply congested as might be expected from failure of respiration. If he had given himself an injection of tuberine, which is curare, he should have died a death from asphyxia. It does not seem that there is sufficient evidence from the post-mortem to suggest that.