CH 4 – Jestyn
1945
She would miss him.
The engineer was to be posted north and in a month would be gone. No more boozy nights at the hotel, no more waiting for a slip of information to pass in conversation, something she felt uncomfortable about at times, like she was betraying him which of course she was. Noticing this her handler insisted she take more care and keep an emotional distance from the engineer, a difficult task given his avuncular nature, lately he had been in the habit of giving her a chaste kiss on the cheek when they met and he never allowed her to buy a round.
The nurse decided to present him with a going away gift and remembering the night he had admitted knowing nothing of Omar Khayyam’s Rubiayat and after some searching she found a rare second hand copy without an inscription, fully intending to write one herself.
But words failed her.
However there was one verse in the book she hoped wouldn’t get him into too much strife if his wife happened to read it – Verse 70 – so she set about transcribing it.
Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore – but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.
Then, obeying the cardinal rule when it came to working for the cause she didn’t sign off with her own name, instead using one she hoped would remind him of their relationship.
©
The Somerton Man .. 
This… “Harkness was a spy and Boxall was inadvertently supplying her lots of information”… all falls over by the fact that at the ABSOLUTE, EARLIEST opportunity, Harkness pointed out Boxall as SM when it would have been easy as pie for her to say “DUH…I dunno…Never seen anyone who resembles this plaster cast.”
She personally and unilaterally injected Boxall into the story. We would never have ever heard of the smug, ugly bugger!
In short…What kind of inept, half-arsed spy would Harkness have needed to have been that she would give away her “info-victim” so easily?
LikeLike
You lost me there Guzz, all she remembered, according to the police, was that she gave Boxall an ROK and here’s a dead man with one.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think that I’m swaying back to the thinking that this was simply a case of some, already depressed bloke, trying to re-establish a relationship with Harkness…was told to bugger off…and topped himself and the rest of the intrigue was fueled by the utter incompetence from SAPOL.
The point I was making (poorly, as usual) is that, if Harkness was some kind of honey-trap spy, then she seemed to have been a bit quick to bring attention to the guy who had inadvertently supplied her with information.
Then again, there’s a hundred questions that need answering. And it does appear that the authorities are STILL hell bent on keeping SM’s identity a secret. (I still don’t buy the Charles Webb thing…Despite the great efforts by people like Shabs, no one has come up with any connection, whatsoever, between Harkness and Webb, other than Jo saying the suburbs in Melbourne where they lived were pretty nearby to each other.)
Of course, this time next week, I’ll have totally changed my mind again.
LikeLike