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.
David Greagg breaking down the code
The code has been studied by the devoted cryptologists Professor Derek Abbott with Dr Matthew Berryman (supervisors) and Andrew Turnbull and Densley Bihari (Honours students). Critical design review 2009: who killed the Somerton man? www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/index.php/Cipher_Cracking_2009 and if anyone can break it by computer, they will. The work is ongoing.
Following is mathematician David Greagg’s analysis of the code which also shows the workings of the box code. Box codes were popular between the wars. The idea for this approach comes from Dorothy L Sayers’ Have His Carcase, where there is an elegant description of how a box code works.
A lot of problems are immediately apparent. There are (possibly) 50 characters in the message. Everyone else seems to think that the opening letter is M. However, whoever it is, he writes M differently. It may well be a W. The letters are arranged in five lines as follows:
w/m rgoababd
m liaoi
w/m tbimpanetp
mliabo aiaq (c?)
(i?) ttmtsamstgab
The Ws are possibly M, though this, is in my view, questionable. It could even be an H. There is rough underlining beneath (and indeed through) line 2 and a double line with a cross just above line 4 over the O. The MS is messy, not well calligraphed and there is doubt over the two letters between lines 4 and 5. Our writer was arguably not accustomed to writing and it is possible that these are merely accidental scribbles. For this reason, the possibility than line 2 is meant to be deleted is also probably not sustainable. There is also some doubt about the M at the beginning of line 2.
The most tempting hypothesis in the first instance is a box code based on the keyword TAMSHUD. The absence of J anywhere might well point to a 5 x 5 box code where I and J are traditionally conflated. Against that, there is also the problem that there is also no F, H, K, U, V, X, Y or Z. So we have only a 20-letter alphabet to choose from. If other writers are correct, there is also no W. There are also major problems because a box code needs all letters in pairs. The letter distribution per line is 9, 6, 11, 11, 13; or else 9, 6, 11, 10, 12 if the C and I are omitted.
How this works is that the key letters of Tamam Shud are arranged first in a 5 x 5 box, with I and J treated as equivalent letters. All the remaining letters are then written in ordinary alphabetical order thereafter. Using this box the letters must be arranged in pairs, and the pairs of letters are swapped around a vertical axis. In this code, the word ‘so’ is coded as AQ. The word ‘go’ remains as it is, since G and O are on the same vertical axis.
The idea behind a crib is that cryptologists look at incomprehensible ciphertext (or encrypted text) and use a clue about a word or phrase that might be expected in the ciphertext. In this case, Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat, FitzGerald and so on. If this phrase was appropriate, this would create a ‘wedge’ or a test to attempt to break the code. A sample of cribs with tamshud as the keyword is as follows:
1st line with initial W: ZOGOMDMD (plus an extra letter)
1st line with initial M: HPGOMDMD (plus an extra letter)
1st line with first letter omitted: OLOADMDB
2nd line: HIGMPG
This really doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere. I also attempted box codes with other keywords: omarky (Omar Khayyam), rubaiyt (Rubaiyat), fitzgerald and jestyn (the possible name of the nurse). Sample cribs are shown below:
omarky:
1st line with initial W: XAEAABAB (plus an extra letter)
1st line with initial M: RMEAABAB (plus an extra letter)
1st line with first letter omitted: AIAOBADB
2nd line: KFGRRE
rubaiyt:
1st line with initial W: SBHNBABA (plus an extra letter)
1st line with initial M: MRHNBABA (plus an extra letter)
1st line with first letter omitted: FUPBABAC
2nd line: QFAIQB