Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery by Kerry Greenwood

Author:Kerry Greenwood [Greenwood, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742241289
Google: Lh_r1_W4GV0C
Amazon: B00B0SA9K2
Barnesnoble: B00B0SA9K2
Publisher: UNSW Press
Published: 2017-12-13T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days

Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:

Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,

And one by one back in the Closet lays.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, stanza 49

In a very Australian move, Somerton Man was buried by a pub, the Elephant and Castle hotel in West Terrace, Adelaide. The publican, Leo Kenny, was a well-liked man and a member of a well-known family, and the pub itself was the main port of call for the funeral trade, the pathologists, the police and the stonemasons, which I’d wager meant that they had very little trouble from the local toughs. It takes a rare form of suicidal insanity to attack people who can kill you without a trace, declare you dead, bury you and erect your headstone While-U-Wait. Police pubs are usually very quiet. Officers who really need a quick drink to face the world outside get desperately intense about being interrupted. Even my clients at the Magistrates Court, not known for their quick wit or sense of self-preservation, were never silly enough to try to hold up a police pub.

The patrons of the Elephant and Castle took up a collection so that Somerton Man should not be buried as a pauper in an unmarked grave. The Salvation Army conducted the service when he was interred on 14 June 1949. ‘This man had someone who loved him,’ said Captain E J Webb. ‘He is known only to God.’

Over the grave a headstone was erected, which says, ‘Here lies the unknown man who was found at Somerton beach 1st Dec 1948’. Thereafter, a woman was observed putting a red rose on his grave every year on 1 December. Police interviewed the woman and reported that she had no connection to the case but, frustratingly, they do not give her name. Later, observers noticed that pebbles had been piled on the grave, which is a way of marking a Jewish resting place, but Somerton Man was uncircumcised and therefore very unlikely to be a Jew. Though it is possible. Some Jewish children, trapped in Germany and sent to Christian institutions by prescient parents, remained uncircumcised to escape annihilation. But Somerton Man, who must have been born around the turn of that century, was too old for this to have been his fate.

Years passed without much more than a series of by now predictable headlines declaring that the body of Somerton Man had been identified, followed next day by the news that he had not. Lost luggage was inspected without result and missing persons were either found or continued missing. Nothing. Finally, on 14 March 1958, the long-suffering Coroner, Thomas Cleland, came to the reluctant conclusion that he had to close his inquiry, saying, ‘I, the said Justice of the Peace and the Coroner, do say that I am unable to say who the deceased was. He died on the shore at Somerton on the 1st of December 1948. I am unable to say how he died or what was the cause of death’.

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