Kerry Greenwood - Tamam Shud

After that I would take my SS Deborah down the coast and around Australia, then past Fremantle to Africa and thence to Israel. I would sniggle my way through the blockade and arrive in Haifa, which was under Haganah control from 22 April, where I would donate my armaments and my ship, starting the nucleus of an Israeli Navy. And I wouldn’t have been the only Gentile to do so. If the Adelaide Jews knew that Somerton Man had been smuggling arms to Israel, for instance, they would certainly have put the little commemorative pebbles on the grave of a righteous Gentile.

So could our Somerton Man have been a smuggler? That would explain the sand in the cuffs of his other trousers and confirm the idea that he might have been landed by dinghy, avoiding official attention, and walked ashore. It would explain his cargo master’s gear and the way his hands were unmarked, even though he was definitely connected to the sea. It would explain why he was sitting and waiting on Somerton Beach. He was waiting for a boat to fetch him. Like any smoker who is faced with an uncertain wait, he lit a cigarette to beguile the time and died, so gently that the cigarette went out in his mouth, and didn’t even singe his cheek or the collar of his expensive, snazzy coat.

But even if we conclude that Somerton Man was a smuggler, how likely is it that he was smuggling arms to Israel? He may, of course, just have been moving various precious cargoes through various dutiable ports but that theory doesn’t seem to be consistent with the manner of his death. Certainly, smugglers are sometimes killed because a crate of watches has gone suspiciously astray or because they are suspected of being a nark but Somerton Man wasn’t tortured or even roughly handled, which tends to be the first recourse of scoundrels. He was simply killed, efficiently and cleanly, in a manner more consistent with politics than criminality. In smuggling terms, that would seem to define him as an arms smuggler and if he was selling arms, where else other than Israel could he sell them in 1948?

Let us survey that rather grim and depressing year. In terms of conflicts, it began with the attacks on Jews in Palestine and their appeal to the United Nation leading to the 14 May declaration of the state and the consequent war. In February there was the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia but since the Czechoslovakians were selling arms to Israel, no one was likely to be smuggling them into that country. There was a civil war in Costa Rica and Tito had finally split with Stalin, so the Russian advisors were recalled from Yugoslavia, but in both cases there is not a lot of connection with Australia.

For most of 1948, the Russians blockaded Berlin and the Berlin airlift kept the city going. Dennis Pryor told me that the planes flew in one continuous stream, approaching, landing, unloading, refuelling and taking off. If a plane missed it’s landing it could not go around and try again. It had to land elsewhere because the planes never stopped. A remarkable effort. It lasted for eleven months, after which the Russians gave up and lifted the blockade. Again, an interesting story but not something that would have been considered terribly important down in the Antipodes.

Greece was having a terrible civil war but Greek affairs mostly involved Greeks – and still do, whereas Jewish affairs involve Jews, who are much more widespread than Greeks. Any Greeks in Australia were probably so thankful to be out of Greece that the idea of supporting either side would not have struck them as a possibility. That, at least, is what the Greeks I knew in the fifties said to me.

Meanwhile, President Truman was re-elected. The US Marshall Plan (or the European Recovery Program) went ahead providing monetary support. Europe was being repaired, settling into the new world order. South Africa had embraced apartheid, which was unpleasant but not relevant to this enquiry. The Phillipines had a rebellion. There was an oncoming war between South Korea and North Korea, exacerbated by Russia, China and America putting their oars in as usual. The Dutch were in trouble in Indonesia, which is closer to Australia but already had a lot of unclaimed ordnance, both Japanese and American, so neither the Dutch nor the Indonesians would have needed to buy extra from Australia. And as 1948 shaded into 1949, Ireland became independent of Britain, the Communists defeated the Nationalists in China and the Soviets detonated their first A-bomb. Makes you feel privileged to live in the present, doesn’t it?

In short, if we decide that Somerton Man was an arms smuggler, the only likely destinations from Australia would seem to be Ireland or Israel. In a Phryne Fisher short story (see page 176) I considered the possibility that Somerton Man had been involved in smuggling armaments to Ireland, so I shall concentrate on Israel here. If Somerton Man was supplying arms to Israel, why would his associates or masters or enemies decide to kill him? Who would want to intercept his cargo? The British? Any local Arabs? Possibly the Catholics, who had opposed the establishment of Israel very fiercely? Or perhaps our very own security service?

Let us see how that might play. By going against the blockade, Somerton Man had offended the spooks’ sensibilities. They didn’t want to hurt him or bruise him. They just want him dead and they must have hoped that the death would be marked ‘natural’ and not investigated. But they didn’t know that Somerton Man had already disposed of all his identifying documents, right down to his luggage labels, and purged his baggage of all those incidental coins and stamps and talismans of home. As a result, the very solitude and peace of Somerton Man’s death attracted the attention that it was designed to avoid.

In which case, that satisfied expression which so haunts me might be caused by the fact that his boatload of armaments had sailed, that the crates in its hold were on their way to defend Israel, and it was too late, far too late, for it to be intercepted. Those arms might have been abstracted from an ammunition dump in Adelaide or from Woomera, where my father worked briefly. During the war and in its aftermath, there were always those quartermasters who improved the shining hour by selling their stock.

But for Somerton Man, the fight was over.

So who was Somerton Man and how did he come to be dead on Somerton Beach? I have floated a score of hypotheses to explain him and now it is time to tell you a story – although first I shall award him a name, using the ones most commonly given to children in 1900. (I researched 1900 birth names when I was working on the very first Phryne Fisher novel. My mother always did tell me that nothing you learn is ever wasted.)

The story goes like this. Henry Charles Reynolds is British and has been a sailor most of his life. He joined the merchant marine and has landed in a lot of ports but he likes America and may have lived there for a while. He joined the navy when the war broke out and served in the North Sea convoys and perhaps even our own Scrap Iron Flotilla, whose names I learned because they were so compelling – Vampire , Voyager , Vendetta , Waterhen and Stuart , which prowled the lethal waters around New Guinea, looking for trouble. And finding it.