Tamam Shud

Chapter Four

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.)

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:

and:

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:

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:

Curare is the good old colourless odourless tasteless soluble and undetectable South American poison of Sherlock Holmes fame. It was used along the Amazon as an arrow poison but it had surgical uses in 1948, producing complete shutdown of all involuntary muscles, which rather precludes the heart beating and the lungs breathing. But it wasn’t curare that killed Somerton Man.

The indefatigable Cleland investigated other possibilities as well, saying:

Cleland also dismisses insulin, otherwise a rather attractive cause of death. I have been told by my diabetic sister that one oozes imperceptibly into a diabetic coma. ‘It sneaks up on you’ are her precise words. But apparently such an overdose would show up in an absence of glycogen in the liver and as abnormally low blood sugar. And it didn’t.

The second expert witness, Sir Cedric Stanton Hicks, University Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, had another suggestion. Not wanting to give anyone who might read the inquest report any ideas, he wrote a name on a piece of paper and gave it to the Coroner. This might sound excessively cautious but consider the dreadful experience of our own Arthur Upfield, who, sitting around a campfire with some like-minded friends working on the rabbit-proof fence, concocted a murder method which was damn near impossible to solve. All you need to do, instructed Upfield, is to shoot the person, shoot a few kangaroos at the same time, burn all the bodies together and then sift the ashes and remove all identifiable human bits – teeth, buttons, gallstones, bullets. After that you put the ashes through a prospector’s dolly-pot, crushing them into powder, allow the powder to blow away on the wind and bury the tin containing the identifiable bits a long way away under an unmarked bush.

One of his audience thought this was such a good idea that he actually carried it out. His name was ‘Snowy’ Rowles, aka John Thomas Smith. Fortunately Rowles blew the original water-tight scheme by stealing the murdered man’s goods and being careless with the disposal of the remains. Notably, a wedding ring which had been repaired with the wrong alloy of gold – nine carat on an eighteen-carat ring – clinched the identification. At Rowles’ trial, Upfield had to testify that he had invented the murder method as an intellectual exercise. ‘I shall never forget Mr Justice Draper, the Trial Judge, and how he looked at me on the witness stand,’ he told his interviewer, Eric Clegg. Upfield was about to start his next Napoleon Bonaparte crime novel, The Sands of Windee. I find it amazing that he ever wrote anything again.

Returning to Sir Cedric Hicks, his handwriting is just as one would expect from a doctor but it is possible to make out the word ‘glucosides’. The two varieties mentioned were Digitalin and Strophantin, which are derivatives of digitalis purpurea, a heart stimulant which in the old days used to be called foxglove tea. Sir Cedric said that these drugs would have been easy to obtain – for instance, by pinching them from someone with a heart condition – and ‘difficult if not impossible to identify even if it had been suspected in the first case’. However, he was concerned that there was no evidence of vomiting because he believed that glucosides would have produced vomiting, convulsions and coma, although he speculated that perhaps the convulsions were minor and people may have walked over the marks in the sand. I was driven around the bend by Sir Cedric, who seemed incapable of making up his mind, but in the end he says that it’s glucosides or nothing. And, of course, if it had indeed been nothing, Somerton Man would have been able to attend the inquest and solve all the mysteries himself.

That was all the witnesses had to say about poisons but the Coroner himself made a very interesting observation, saying:

Now that is a very interesting thought. When the Coroner, who had a fine legal mind, observed that there was no legal nexus between one set of observations and another, he was right. We do not know for certain where Somerton Man was between noon and approximately 7 pm, when he or someone very like him was sitting on the beach, dying. His polished shoes showed Somerton Man had not been trolling around Glenelg in dust all day, indicating that he had probably been inside. But if the man seen lounging asleep on the beach on 30 November, at the exact spot where Somerton Man was found dead the next morning was not, in fact, Somerton Man, then who was he – and what was he doing there – and where, oh, where was Somerton Man during the night? Was the man on the beach just keeping his seat warm for him?

Let us consider the arguments against the Coroner’s theory. One is that the beach was busy. It was a hot night and there were a lot of people around. Even in the early morning men were exercising horses and swimming in the sea. Adelaide may be a strange place but it is not so strange that no one would have noticed a man – or more probably two men – carrying a body down all those steps to the beach and arranging it so neatly that the dead cigarette in the corpse’s mouth just dropped onto his collar.

Moreover, if Somerton Man had died of digitalin poisoning but had vomited and convulsed elsewhere, as the Coroner suggests, he would not have had any stomach contents for the doctors to analyse. Nor, having convulsed and vomited in the process of dying, would he have suddenly become peckish for a pastie from the Glenelg railway station pie cart, the only source of any delicacies in Adelaide after about six o’clock, apart from a private home. What’s more, as anyone who has ever been nauseous would know, he would certainly not have lit a cigarette. Really not.

Oh dear, I do hope you are not reading this at dinner.

So, an examination of the available information suggests strongly that it was our man on Somerton Beach, all along. The evidence and theories presented at the inquest are comprehensive but inconclusive. Well, almost comprehensive. There was a Crippled Children’s Home in Moseley Street, just above the beach, but no one appears to have enquired there about strangers calling and dying inconveniently on the premises.

The Crippled Children’s Association, established in 1939, set up Somerton Home as a place where the victims of polio could be cared for and receive an education, but in 1948 it was fully occupied by children with polio. A dreadful affliction. Polio killed many and maimed many others, all the way up to the President of the United States, until Salk and Sabin found vaccinations for it, for which we are eternally grateful. I still have the scar but better a vaccination scar than a life in an iron lung. Polio has largely vanished now in the developed world (although it is making something of a comeback as immunisation rates are falling) along with scarlet fever and diphtheria, whooping cough and the other plagues that rid the world of small children throughout history. (One of the reasons why I do not pine for the past, although I write about it, is the number of diseases from which I probably would have died before the age of five. Death puts a bit of a crimp in one’s writing career.)

The Crippled Children’s Home (also known as Somerton House) was established in an old bluestone house which had belonged to the Bickford family. Later, the Home accepted children with other disabilities including mental disabilities, and was renamed Minda, causing nasty little children to add ‘You’re a Minda!’ to their terms of abuse. But in 1948 only the poor polio victims lived there. They were as bright as buttons – the disease does not affect the mind – but badly damaged. Most of them would be unable to walk, except with calipers. The home has a good reputation. Inmates have written to the disability website in South Australia praising the matron, a World War I nurse called Matron Hacket, who ran the place like clockwork with compassion and intelligence. (This is, by the way, quite unlike the horror stories I have just been reading about the Magdalen Laundries run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. I must say it made a nice change.)

A children’s home probably went to bed early and would, of course, have had a kitchen, which might have been the source of Somerton Man’s supper, and an infirmary, which might have been the source of those glucosides – and the source of Somerton Man’s death, too. But no enquiries were made at the time and it is now really far too late to even try to find out. Besides, even with the trained imagination of a crime novelist, I find it difficult to imagine such a place and such a matron as a haven for murderers or secret spies.

Although stranger things have happened, especially in Adelaide.