Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter Two

Somerton Man, in extremis, was five feet, eleven inches tall, which is 180 centimetres. He had grey eyes, also called hazel – admittedly a fugitive colour – and blond to reddish hair, greying at the temples. He was healthy, well-muscled and clean, with manicured fingernails and toenails. He was uncircumcised. His legs were tanned. His toes were unusual, forced into a wedge as though he habitually wore tight, pointed high-heeled boots, like a stockman or a dancer or a person willing to suffer to be beautiful. His legs were tanned, in the manner of someone who worked in shorts, and he had what they called ‘bunched’ calf muscles, as seen in people who walk a lot, run long distances, dance or bicycle.

I examined the calf muscles of many of my friends, in itself a fascinating if unscientific exercise. (None of them wear high heels, by the way. The definition of high heels in 1949 Adelaide appears to have been about two inches and a riding boot has a two-inch heel so the boot doesn’t slip through the stirrup iron.) The bunched calf muscles, which look so good in trunk-hose, belonged to a middle distance runner, three medieval dancers, five bicyclists, several inveterate hikers, a rock-climber, a mountaineer, a rider and one ballet dancer, who had calf muscles like rocks. Somerton Man may have followed one – if not all – of these occupations, although he was probably not a ballet dancer. (Only because he was too old, I hasten to add.) Of course, if he was a cargo master, he would have had to walk miles every day, around decks and up and down companion ways, all day.

His age was estimated as ‘about fifty’. He had only three small scars on his body – no tattoos, barcode or other marks. The absence of tattoos is significant because most working men at that time had tattoos. My father had lots. I used to call him the illustrated man, from a Ray Bradbury story he gave me to read when I was eight. My father’s first tattoo, a black cat was on his inner wrist, placed there when he was underage with a forged permission from his own father. There were two hula girls, one on each thigh. A full rigged ship on his arm. Jeannie (my mother’s name) on his other arm. A swallow, the navy’s good luck bird, which signifies land, and more on his chest. I thought they were bold and fascinating. As he grew old, the hair over the illustrations turned grey, making him look ancient and shamanic, blue lines visible through the silver fur.

The urge to decorate the body with ink has been with the male ever since poor Bronze Age Otzi, murdered on the way to Italy, his body only revealed when a glacier in the Otztal Alps melted. Any visit to a swimming pool in my youth yielded hours of tattoo watching. There is not a decorative mark on Somerton Man, however, and his ears were not pierced. Almost all sailors had a pierced ear, done when the seaman crossed the equatorial line, usually by the cook with a cork and a baling needle. Even my brother, who builds ships, has one pierced ear, as did my father. But officers usually did not have their ears pierced and Somerset Man’s ears were pink and perfect. In my view, he was not a working-class man.

His neat hands bear this out. There were three small scars inside his left wrist, a curved one-inch scar inside his left elbow and a round mark, possibly from a boil, on his upper left forearm. Those scars on his left wrist confirm my belief that he was a seaman. I have seen them before.

Someone who wears an oilskin, standing in salt seaspray, gets the sleeve of his non-dominant hand wet and the sleeve then scrapes across his inside wrist, where the skin is thinner. Salt is a powerful abrasive. It produces scrapes, then sores and then scars. A cargo master on a ship, giving orders about stowage in heavy weather, might easily have such scars. Somerton Man was probably right handed because it is his left wrist that has what the fishermen call ‘gurry sores’.

I met many of my father’s wharfie friends and a lot of them had been sailors. They used to gather in a cargo shed on the docks, which had been fitted out as a recreation room. I have always loved waterfronts. Apart from all their other fascinations they never sleep, and at that age, according to my mother, neither did I. So I used to tag along after my father, as unnoticed and accepted as a little dog, while the men played cards and gossiped. Yarned. Told stories. I would sit quietly in my chair with my orangeade, ears flapping, and I remembered it all. At eight years old I had a memory like a sponge. I could reproduce whole conversations and if I didn’t understand them, I stored them for future reference. I learned primitive Greek in the same way, just by being around Greeks. It’s like cooking rice by the absorption method, only where rice sucks in water I took in information. Voices. Accents. Clothes. Scents.

One old man, Harry, saw me looking at his wrist. It was the third time I had seen those white scars and I was curious. Harry explained that they were gurry sores and told me how he got them. Several other men had them too and they stripped back their sleeves to show me. The same Harry taught my father a very complex knot called a star knot and showed me his other scars – wide, flat bands across the palms of his hands. He said that as a boy he had been reefing topsails in a windjammer going around Cape Horn and his hands had frozen to the lines. He told me he had been lucky and when I expressed surprise, he chuckled and said that if he hadn’t been secured by his icy grasp, he would have fallen either into the sea or onto the deck and, thus, he would be dead. In those latitudes, he said, it wouldn’t make much difference which one you hit. Deck or sea would be equally fatal.

It never occurred to me, not once, how privileged I was to hear those stories.

The other scars on Somerton Man meant nothing to the examiners and they don’t mean a lot to me either, unless that boil mark was an injection scar. He was missing most of his back teeth and the remaining ones were stained from smoking. His hands and feet were smooth and well cared for. He had no bunions or callouses on his feet, even though he had forced them into wedge-shaped shoes. His nails were short and neat, cut and filed, not gnawed. His toenails had been neatly cut. His hair had been neatly cut. He was a fine presentable corpse.

The pathologist said that he had a ‘fine Britisher face’ and my mother thinks he looks Baltic. But he also looks dead, which is not helpful. Physiognomy is not an exact science, despite Lombroso, or indeed a science at all. Anyone involved in the legal system has seen little angels who like nothing more than torturing their classmates, and ugly old men with hearts of pure gold. If there is an art to find the mind’s construction in the face, we don’t have it.

But as to Somerton Man’s body and internal processes, there was a lot of information. Several doctors were involved in the investigation of the cause of death. The first was John Barkley Bennett, a legally qualified medical practitioner (or LQMP), who declared life extinct in the first place. Rigor was established and he thought that death had occurred within eight hours of his examination, at about 2 am.

By the time that John Matthew Dwyer LQMP saw Somerton Man, rigor was intense. The post-mortem lividity behind the ears and neck was deep, indicating that the body had not been moved. There was a patch of dried saliva on his cheek, which had run out of his mouth as he slumped to one side and the cigarette fell onto his lapel. Dwyer said that ‘His pupils were smaller and unusual, uneven in outline and about the same size. Certain drugs may be associated with a contraction in the pupils. Even barbiturates may do it, but it is by no means a distinguishing point.’

He added:

So far, what the learned doctor appears to be saying is that there was some poison present but that he observed no poisonous matter – leaves, herbs, toadstools, berries, dyes, ground glass – in the stomach contents. Those contents are interesting precisely because they are there. Irritant poisons, even alcohol, usually announce themselves by violent vomiting, until the person has thrown up the entire contents of their stomach and are just vomiting bile. One recalls the dreadful wines of one’s youth – I particularly have it in for Yalumba Autumn Brown Sherry but other contenders are Blackberry Nip, Cold Duck and a certain chianti derived from vines grown on the cold, polluted side of a Tuscan hill, which turned the lips purple. One starts throwing up and continues to eject liver, lights and everything one has eaten since primary school, including breast milk. Since Somerton Man had the remains of a pastie still in his tummy, there is no way he died of an ordinary irritant poison, not with all that starch and potato and pastry in his belly.

The final verdict was that he died of heart failure, which is like saying ‘he died because his heart stopped’. This was said to be caused by poison, whether self-administered or given with homicidal intent by another person or persons unknown could not be determined. Having said as much (or as little), the Coroner adjourned the inquest sine die – that is, for another day, when hopefully someone might be able to tell him something helpful.

Then again, suggested my learned friend and a senior scientist Vanessa Craigie – I have been boring my friends to death about Somerton Man for months – what about blue-ringed octopus or snake venom? Death, in fact, by natural causes?

What an interesting idea. Dad was always going on about Adelaide snakes and I unashamedly sponged on her for introductions. And got Nick Clemman, a senior scientist at The Threatened Fauna Project at the Department of Sustainability and Environment and author of A Field Guide to Reptiles and Frogs of… Practically Everywhere. He has never met a scaly person he didn’t like.

After outlining the problem and reading the documents, Nick said:

And generally on Adelaide snakes he had the following to say:

Yeah, I still prefer the snake idea – sounds more likely than the octopus, even though it certainly would occur in the area. And a snakebite mark is almost invisible. No local rash or swelling, so don’t give up on the bite idea. Not impossible for someone who had a captive snake to bring it into contact with the victim.

My friend, Vanessa Craigie also had a suggestion to make:

Nick added to this information:

Nick Clemman put me onto an even more eminent colleague, Dr Ken Winkel, the Director of the Australian Venom Research Unit at University of Melbourne, who was kind enough to read the autopsy results. He, unfortunately, could not advise me further. Though he could not have been more kind.

Snake venom often causes nausea and vomiting. So again no sign of that here as his pastie was still intact. Dr Winkel went on to explain further:

And that about wraps it up for snake poison, unless it was injected into Somerton Man through that ‘boil mark’ or he put his hand down on a snake. In either eventuality, he was unlikely to retain his dinner or light a smoke. Oh, well, it was worth a try. And I am so grateful to all the kind persons who bent their minds to my problem. And my friends, who must feel seriously nagged by now. Sorry. But you have to admit that it is fascinating.