Tamam Shud (5 page)

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:

I thought about blue-ringed octopus, which also causes death from motor paralysis and respiratory arrest within minutes of exposure, leading to cardiac arrest due to a lack of oxygen. They deliver venom by a bite from a horny beak, but given it's such a tiny beast, such a bite probably wouldn't leave much of a wound. They tend to live in crevices, but another Adelaide colleague says she's seen them in a can on the beach. My problem with this one is again, what was the beach like – that is, were there any rockpools or beach rocks? Any sign that the victim had been in the water, even wading? On the downside, symptoms can include fixed, dilated pupils and nausea, so I'm not so keen on this one as an undetectable killer.

Nick added to this information:

Snakes in the
Pseudonaja
(Brown Snake) genus kill more people in Australia than other species, due to a combination of factors including: highly toxic venom that works especially well on mammals (like you and me), being common and abundant in disturbed areas where there are lots of people, and being more aggressive and inclined to bite than other species (as opposed to just bluffing, which many other snakes do, and humans frequently misinterpret as an attack).

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.

As to this mystery case, it certainly is that. I am not immediately struck by the possibilities of venom [no evidence of asphyxial mode of death, for example, whereas venom-induced paralysis is a very common mechanism of death after snakebite, especially in highly toxic elapids such as we have here in Australia, that is, things like death adders]. Ingested venom is not toxic so it would have to be injected. Many snake venoms cause inflammation and even tissue death at the site of injection, for example rattlesnake, vipers and many cobras, and this is associated with regional lymphadenopathy making their injection site somewhat conspicious – no evidence of that here as I understand it.

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:

Also, as far as I can see digitalis [a heart stimulant
derived from foxgloves] has been repeatedly suggested. This can be ingested and rapidly lethal. The pity is that this could have been confirmed today if they had kept tissue (especially blood) samples. The first thing I would look into is bone mineral analysis that should reveal where this person lived and something of their diet and habits in life. I would not think formaldehye would affect that kind of analysis – but I am not a forensic scientist.

Other ingested toxins could be responsible but, like Tetrotoxin (TTX) or a potent neurotoxin as used in Michael Crichton's
State of Fear
scenario, this would most often cause a paralytic type of death leaving post-mortem evidence of that mechanism. One could posit a pure snake venom cardiotoxin but that would have been very hard to purify in that era and, due to the availablity and lack of means of chemical detection at that time, of digitalis-type cardiotoxic ‘poisons', rather pointless.

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.

Chapter Three

The Wordly Hope Men set their Hearts upon

Turns Ashes – or it prospers; and anon

Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face

Lighting a little Hour or two – is gone.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, stanza 14

And so matters rested, with the overworked Adelaide police force receiving answers to their requests for information from all over the world. J. Edgar Hoover wrote back to say that Somerton Man's fingerprints were not on record with the FBI and no one at Scotland Yard had identified them. Somerton Man was entirely, as police parlance says now, ‘off the grid'.

He had no passport, no demob certificate, no ration card, no seaman's ticket, no union membership card. Without these things, or at least one of them, he would have found work hard to come by in Australia, where the police were prone to ask for identification from anyone
who was in any way different – on the street late at night or consorting with known criminals (my dad said you could do that any night just by walking down Rundle Street) or simply unknown to them personally. Losing, abandoning or being robbed of his identity card was a very serious matter for Somerton Man.

I have my father's demobilisation certificate before me and I am wearing his Redheads T-shirt, which I bought for him, as I type. He feels very close to me at the moment because I have just sorted out his papers, three years after he died. The beige booklet instructs me that Army Number VX501875 Signaller Alfred William Greenwood of West Footscray followed the correct procedure to get out of the army. On 25 March 1948, he was medically examined and X-rayed and found to be fit. On 24 April 1948, he received whatever pay was owing – twenty-four pounds and five shillings, to be exact. And suddenly he was unemployed, dropped at Central Station in Adelaide and given a railway warrant to take him back to Melbourne. No longer a number but a free man.

My father went home to see his mother and his sweetheart, my mother. (He even named his cat Jeannie, so she knew he was serious). Somerton Man, on the other hand, walked into oblivion. More can now be guessed about his movements after he arrived at Central Station on 30 November. He bought a ticket for the Henley train. He then requested a wash and a shave and was told that the station amenities were closed and he would need to go to the City Baths, which housed not only a swimming pool but an actual set of bathtubs for travellers who needed a wash. This detour would have caused him to miss the train, so when he returned to Central and checked his suitcase, all shaved and clean, he decided to take a bus. Both tickets in his pocket are now explained. I find it very pitiable that he groomed himself so neatly for what was about to come.

So, how much do we know about what happened next? Somerton Man took the bus to Glenelg and would have arrived there by noon. He is next seen sitting on the beach and – probably – dying at 7 pm on a hot night, wearing lots of clothes. His shoes are still highly polished. Where had he been in the interim? Somewhere along the way someone gave him supper – the pastie, which was still in his stomach. And in his watch pocket, folded up very small, was the last page of
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, the words ‘Tamam Shud', which means, in effect, the end.

The police began another vigorous rummage through public libraries and bookshops hoping to find the actual book from which the page was torn. Amazingly, on 22 July, Mr Ronald Francis remembered that his brother-in-law had left a copy of
The Rubaiyat
in the glove box of his Hillman Minx. When he called to enquire, he was told that his brother-in-law had found the book on the floor of the car and put it tidily in the glove box. On 30 November the car had been parked in Moseley Street, the street above Somerton Beach.

The next day Mr Francis took the book to the police. The torn out page matched and, what's more, it contained a code and a telephone number in pencil. The case of Somerton Man had just become even more complicated.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
was a free – some say unduly free – translation of a Persian poet's series of verses. How much of
The Rubaiyat
is Edward FitzGerald's work and how much comes from old Omar is a matter
for conjecture. As that eminent scholar, Renaissance man and good friend Professor Dennis Pryor once told me, ‘All translation is betrayal'. One can never get translation right. All that we translators can do is to do the best that we can to convey the meaning and the spirit of the writer, taking the different historical, linguistic and social conditions into account. That's hard enough in Latin languages, like Provençal, and it must be hideously difficult in Persian. At least Khayyam was writing social criticism and love poems, which is a universal theme – although I find it hard to fully understand why he had it in for Sufis.

From the moment it hit the bookshops in London in 1859,
The Rubaiyat
was a success. I suspect I would not have liked Mr FitzGerald if I had met him but he was a good poet, despite his views on women as authors. He observed at one point:

Mrs Browning's death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank God! A woman of real genius, I know: but where is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and the Children: and perhaps the Poor; except in such things as little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better, leaving that which Men do worse or not at all.

He said this in a letter to WH Thompson on 15 July 1861 and I do wish he hadn't. I really like
The Rubaiyat
but I am one of the female writers of ‘little novels' he so despises. On the other hand, Robert Browning, the widower, wrote a very ferocious poem in response to this heartless comment, so I suspect honours are about even.

Besides, one must not confuse the writer and the book, especially when the writer is a translator.
The Rubaiyat
is a collection of quatrains, expressing a free, unsentimental yet lyrical and definitively alcoholic view of the universe, which quite captured the Victorian imagination. They were a serious people and here was a reprobate old poet who cared for no one, with no philosophy and no religion, apart from wine, women and song.
The Rubaiyat
is exotic, positively reeking of the mysterious Orient, with towers and minarets and bulbul, but familiar enough in its sentiments to be easily applicable to everyday life. It is easy to remember because the verse is so beautifully scanned and rhymed.