Michael Mosley
And the path best not taken
All week I‘ve been thinking about Michael Mosley and how he died. We were much of an age and in our careers had overlapped a couple of times, trying out various new health programmes at the suggestion of our employers. I never met him but felt an affinity for him. And that last fatal walk of his on the island of Symi is something I easily could have done.
When he disappeared I did what a lot of other people did and went to Google maps and looked at the topography of the area in which he walked off and which seemed to have swallowed him up. At 1.30 on a predictably hot afternoon he set off along an uneven but in no way precipitous path from the St Nicholas beach to the village of Pedi. From the map this looks like a walk of no more than half an hour. Reports said that he was making his way back to where he and his wife were staying with friends, inland from the village. He was not carrying his mobile phone. As you might very well not when going to the beach for the morning.
Even by the time the CCTV emerged from Pedi village of him walking through using an umbrella for shade, it was clear that whatever everyone might hope for, he must be dead. Had he fallen somewhere? Had he drowned? To me it seemed very unlikely. Nowhere was quite steep enough – not any path he was likely to have taken, and nowhere did the land bank sharply enough to the water for someone to just fall in.
But the CCTV deepened the mystery. In it he walks on one side of the bay to Pedi, reaches the bend in the U and seems to exit on the opposite side of the bay, walking along almost parallel to (and in sight of) the path he had just been travelling on. There is nowhere really to get lost. To his left now is a small range of bare hills, through which a rough path goes up, follows the line of the bay, and then down to a resort - Agia Marina - which can’t be seen until you crest the hills. He seems to have taken this path, which can’t possibly be mistaken for the road that would have taken him back to his apartment. The topography is too obvious and too open.
We don’t know how long he was on this hill in the high heat of the afternoon, and we don’t know when (or if) he lost the path, but as everyone by now has read, he was found yards away from holidaymakers at the secluded resort, just the wrong side of a low wall and wire fence. His estimated time of death is 4.30 pm - just three hours after he set out.
It seems incomprehensible. One explanation is that by the time he got to Pedi - after just half an hour of walking - Mosley was tired, overheated and seriously disorientated and went off almost in the opposite direction to the one he intended. But we don’t know.
My first escape
In 1983 I went with my friend Jane to Corfu in high, hot summer. We were staying in a resort called Benitses, south of Corfu town. The town was full of young Brits, the beach was packed and we decided to look for something more peaceful. We drove the hire car south, through the kiss-me-quick hell of Kavos and round the southern tip of the island. The map showed a large, long secluded sandy beach in the lea of some cliffs and which could only be reached by a couple of rough paths.