Call this one mine.
An unidentified dead man. A slip of paper torn from a Rubaiyat hidden in his fob pocket. The Rubaiyat containing an unfathomable code and one phone number.
The Rubaiyat was found inside a car parked near Chemist Freeman’s pharmacy in Glenelg. But it wasn’t Freeman’s car. It was Dr Lica Delprat’s. She was thought to be filling a surgery order, her business relationship with Freeman going back many years.
Dr Delprat spoke about it to her nephew, knowing he had wide experience of official matters of a mysterious nature. She told him what she had found, when and where the car had been parked. She described the book with its hole in the back page and phone number written in pencil on the back cover.
Then Hemblys-Scales heard the news that an unidentified body had been found not far from Freeman’s Pharmacy.
But it all appeared of no consequence.
On April 19th 1949, Hemblys-Scales heard that the missing piece of paper had been found in the clothing worn on the body.
The hair on the back of his neck lifted and a cold air passed into his room through the closed window.
His Canberra office immediately liaised and took governance of the case.
Hemblys-Scales traced the phone number to a woman who was once employed by the Australian security services as a low-level go-between in servicing a communist operative with useless naval shipping information.
He was convinced the book wasn’t lodged in his aunt’s car randomly and whoever did it expected the news to break quickly, as it did with the finding of the piece of paper. For that reason he kept the Rubaiyat, because it would have been the end of him if he had not.
Interviews with both the woman and her covert contact were completed. Combined legends created for both.
May passed, June: the inquest adjourned.
Then, on the 23rd of July 1949 an anonymous man delivered the Rubaiyat to the South Australian Police and no untoward complications of a security nature have been encountered from that day to this.
The body has still to be identified.
The South Australian Government will not release any DNA results.
The case remains open but inactive.
……. call this one mine.
