Tamam Shud Read Free

one back collar stud
    Toothbrush and paste
    So what can we make of these pitiful relics? As my father said, Somerton Man had good taste in clothes,though tending towards the gaudy. His case contained only enough for a few nights, a week perhaps. No extra shirts, for a start. This was a cleanly man who changed his clothes every day. He must have owned more shirts or what was the point of having more than one tie?
    The most exciting discovery in the suitcase was the orange Barbour thread, which was not sold in Australia. Identical thread had been used to repair the pocket of Somerton Man’s coat. Waxed thread is not usually used to mend clothes: it must have been an emergency repair, intended to last only until he could lay hands on a seamstress. It seemed unlikely that the Barbour thread in the suitcase and the Barbour thread in Somerton Man’s coat were not connected, so the suitcase probably belonged to Somerton Man. Also, the clothes are his size and the slippers would fit his feet.
    And some of the garments in the suitcase actually had labels with a name on them. There must have been cautious rejoicing amongst the exasperated police at that point, although they should have known it was too good to be true. The name, written on a singlet, a laundry bag and a tie, was T. Keane. Or possibly T. Kean. The call went out and a local sailor named Tom Reade was said to be missing. Was Somerton Man perhaps Tom Reade?
    But when Tom Reade’s shipmates viewed the body, they all said that it was not their Tom Read. Meanwhile widespread searches through maritime agencies hadrevealed that no one was missing a T. Keane or Kean. Rats (or the equivalent), one can hear the law enforcement persons say.
    The clothes were also marked with drycleaning or laundry marks, which were applied to clothes when they were submitted for cleaning, so that the cleaner could identify them if their tag was lost. These marks were 1171/1 and 4393/7 and 3053/7 but extensive searches of laundries and drycleaners found no one who used those combinations of numbers. Notably, the only marked clothes in the suitcase, which also had a name on them were those where the name could not be removed without destroying the garment – for instance, the singlet, where the name was written inside the band in indelible ink. And it also seems reasonable to assume that Somerton Man left the names where they were because he knew that he was not Tom or any other Kean(e) – not Terence, Tipton, Trevelyan and so on. Besides, it is unusual to buy second-hand underwear. Even if you are very poor, you usually save to buy new knickers. I speak from personal experience.
    So why did Somerton Man have T. Keane’s laundry bag? It’s another mystery: this matter has a plethora of them. Tom Keane was said to be a sailor, so the laundry marks may relate to a ship’s laundry. Somerton Man might have been on the same ship as Tom Keane and picked up his laundry by mistake – although thatdoesn’t explain the tie, given that ties are drycleaned, not laundered. Somerton Man might also have deliberately swapped his own marked garments for similar garments belonging to Tom Keane, who would probably not mind, as long as he got a singlet of some sort, although it was not kind to nick Tom Keane’s tie as well. If the name on Somerton Man’s own tie was a problem, he could have adopted the solution used when I was a child – blacking out the old name in Indian ink and writing your own beside it. Indian ink is really black.
    The clothes were all examined by experts. The police called in a tailor, Hugh Possa of Gawler Place, who explained that the careful construction of the coat, with feather- stitching done by machine, was definitely American, as only the American garment industry used a feather stitching machine. So the clothes were very high value schmutter indeed. Such coats, the police were informed, were not imported. They were made up to a certain