Alf Boxall reported that he had given The Rubaiyat to his wife in June 1945, which argues extreme brazen effrontery, complete innocence or something even odder. Mr Boxall said he owned a copy with Jestyn’s verse in the front but Mrs Boxall showed the police a Rubaiyat with no writing in it at all. Which seems to mean that Mrs Boxall had been given a clean copy (she said she’d had it since Christmas 1944) and that Mr Boxall’s inscribed copy was still in the bookcase. There were a lot of copies of The Rubaiyat around at the time but two in one household seems extreme. Someone is fibbing, although it might be no more than the standard marital covering up of a harmless flirtation. When Mr Boxall was interviewed in 1978 by ABC TV, he insisted that Jestyn was just one of a group of nurses with whom he and his mates had the occasional swift snort when they could get away from the hospital but it seems clear that he singled her out from the group, at least to some extent.
Teresa herself is an intriguing person. In 1945 she was nursing at Royal North Shore, where she was Jestyn and unmarried. Then she moved back to her mother’s house in Melbourne, had a baby and moved to Adelaide. When she told the police that she was now married, it was not true. She had taken the name of her future husband, Prestige Johnson, whom she would marry when his divorce came through in early 1950.
When Teresa was interviewed by the indefatigable Gerald Feltus, he found her evasive, unwilling to talk about The Rubaiyat and Boxall, insisting that ‘She didn’t know anything then, and she did not know anything now’. Feltus came to the conclusion that Teresa knew the identity of Somerton Man but he also thinks that her family knows nothing about it, so there is no point in harassing them. If an acute and experienced detective like Feltus couldn’t find out what Teresa knew, then no one can.
Researchers may have hoped that after her husband died, she would reveal something interesting, such as that Somerton Man was her lover, but they were disappointed. Teresa has taken her secret, if she had a secret, to the grave.
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.)
Murder by poisoning is a crime of devilish wickedness and inhumanity which no language can adequately describe. Of all forms of murder it is probably the most cruel, and one of the most difficult to prove. The reasons for this are not far to seek. It is a secret crime based on a well conceived and thoroughly premeditated plan; the poisoner acts alone and adopts every precaution to avoid suspicion and evade detection… Cunning is an essential element in the successful poisoner and the exclusion of every sense of pity from his make-up is an inestimable asset, since he has to witness the results of his handiwork and watch the life of his helpless victim slowly drawing to its close.
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: