Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter Nine

So who was Somerton Man and how did he come to be dead on Somerton Beach? I have floated a score of hypotheses to explain him and now it is time to tell you a story – although first I shall award him a name, using the ones most commonly given to children in 1900. (I researched 1900 birth names when I was working on the very first Phryne Fisher novel. My mother always did tell me that nothing you learn is ever wasted.)

The story goes like this. Henry Charles Reynolds is British and has been a sailor most of his life. He joined the merchant marine and has landed in a lot of ports but he likes America and may have lived there for a while. He joined the navy when the war broke out and served in the North Sea convoys and perhaps even our own Scrap Iron Flotilla, whose names I learned because they were so compelling – Vampire, Voyager, Vendetta, Waterhen and Stuart, which prowled the lethal waters around New Guinea, looking for trouble. And finding it.

Henry has an interesting war but is not injured or scarred. After the war he is employed in the British naval blockade of Haifa, where the British sternly turn back the refugee boats from ruined Europe. He feels for those Jews, for the drained, exhausted women and children, and he decides to help them if he can. Discharged from the service, he is at a loose end, so he obtains a position on a cargo vessel plying around Australia. It is a biggish ship, which does its own laundry, and he bunks with a man called Tommy Keane. When Henry decides on a smuggler’s life, he docks all his labels, packages all his memorabilia and swaps a couple of his more unimportant garments with his cabin mate. He knows who he is and he isn’t T. Kean or Keane.

Henry has made all the contacts that a cargo master always makes and he may have done a little smuggling of watches and perfumes on his own account. He now wants arms for Israel, so he joins a tramp steamer – we shall call it Hatikvah – run by a member of the Jewish Overseas Brigade whom he met during the blockade. There were a lot of these irregular troops around. They helped the Israelis to kidnap the German Nazi Lieutentant Otto Eichmann from Argentina, for instance, and take him back to Israel for trial.

After the arms are obtained from Adelaide or Woomera, Henry asks for permission to go ashore to see his sister or cousin Teresa Powell, who lives just above Somerton Beach. The vessel has to be refuelled, so the captain gives him leave, and he packs his case, taking only as many garments as he will need for four days, leaving behind all his talismans and pictures. He can’t go ashore at Somerton for some reason, so he is dropped at Glenelg and then goes into Adelaide itself, where he has a wash and a shave and changes his clothes. That tramp is a dirty little scow and he wants to make a good impression.

Uncertain of his welcome, Henry puts his suitcase in the station locker. Teresa is not the only person he knows in Adelaide. He is expecting to pick up some money, come back from Somerton, collect his suitcase and go somewhere else in the city to stay with a friend. Possibly he dials the phone number he has penciled in the back of his copy of The Rubaiyat and finds that no one answers but he decides to go there anyway. He arrives in Somerton, finds that Teresa is not at home and decides to wait.

Then he realises that he has his code book in his pocket, having brought it because it has her phone number in it. This is a major breach of security. The code is a one-time algorithm, relying on a mnemonic. Henry drops the book into an open car, meaning to retrieve it later, but first he tears off the page with the key words on it, rolls it up small and stuffs it into his fob pocket, where an ordinary search will not find it.

And while he is idling there in Moseley Street, someone recognises him and entices him into a private house or, perhaps, the kitchen of the Crippled Children’s Home, where he is given food and tea and many questions are asked, politely and quietly. No one lays an ungentle hand on him. Who are his interrogators? They might be our very own CIS (Commonwealth Investigation Service), the highly inefficient collection agency which pre-dated ASIO, at the point when Australia leaked all its secrets to good old Wally the Comm – the reason, in fact, that ASIO was invented. They might be Americans, anxious to guard their atomic secrets. Or they might be any local chapter of murderous fanatics. And they might be the local representatives of the British Secret Service, though the British seem to have been much more effective and less prone to clumsy mistakes.

This matter was handled clumsily. It attracted a great deal of attention.

Henry’s interrogators may have given him sodium pentothal or scopolamine, regarded at the time as truth drugs. They may have reacted catastrophically, rendering Henry not talkative but sleepy or paranoid. I am sure that he didn’t speak. He looks far too smug and safe in his death for that. But his questioners decide that he has to be disposed of. They notice that he smokes and offer him a handful of very expensive cigarettes. Henry takes them. He hasn’t a penny on him and he has a heavy nicotine habit.

Then his interrogators let him go and he walks down to the beach to wait for his relative to come home. Like every smoker in the world faced with a wait, he lights a cigarette. And the poison in the cigarette, inhaled and potent, kills him very quietly and he dies on the sand.

Alternatively, the interrogators inject him with snake venom through the ‘boil scar’ on his arm but in either case he dies as though he is falling asleep.

And passes into mystery, taking all his secrets with him.

My dad came home from Adelaide, eventually, in early 1950, with a beautiful new tan, a craving for frog cakes, and his old mate Killer, who had avoided any further trouble and was settling down with his wife and his baby. My father was leaving behind his army life, doffing his slouch hat, and going back to the wool classing. But it was the off-season, so he got a job on the wharf, and was so enchanted by the company that he stayed there for the rest of his working life. The only remnant of his shearing life was a disinclination to eat roast lamb. He had picked up a lot of useful skills – he could mend anything, make anything, cut hair, tailor clothes, fix engines. An all-round useful man.

And I miss him so much. He had no son until my little brother was born, so he taught me his country skills – I can make rabbit nets, mend toys, re-glue fine china, replace glass, make knots. I remember being so proud of myself when I finally finished a Great Ocean Platte, which was a doormat for many years.

And his reflexes were still very fast. When a criminally negligent loon loaded a cargo container with engine parts at one end and candles at the other, making it terminally unbalanced, it broke the forklift and fell towards my father. He fled and rolled so fast that instead of being crushed, he just had ‘Harbour Trust’ emblazoned in a bruise on his broken ribs, where he had rolled against a bollard.

Old soldiers do die, but you have a lot of trouble catching them.

And now I have to leave 1948, say goodbye to the Adelaide of my youth, when I was strong enough to work all day dragging a bag of grapes through the rows of vines, and happy as the sun was long, when no one I loved had ever died. I have to abandon the contemplation of the mystery of Somerton Man and leave him to sleep quietly in his grave, with all his secrets safe. And I have to watch my father, with his beautiful brown eyes and his mop of red curls, my splendid father, dead three years, walk off through the door into Night, where I can hear his mates, also dead, popping the crown caps off bottles of Fosters. The door into Night is shut.

And I am here. At the door of Day. And now I can open it.