Mick Hartley

Something I don’t quite understand about this Bob Woolmer affair. Originally we were told simply that he’d died. It was two days later, after the post-mortem, that they announced that the death was being treated as suspicious:

“A post-mortem examination established that the former England player had died as a result of “manual strangulation”, police commissioner Lucius Thomas said.

“In these circumstances, the matter of Mr Woolmer’s death is now being treated as murder,” he told a news conference.

Yet now the Times describes “a struggle of such violence that, when he finally lay lifeless on the white-tiled bathroom floor, the walls were splattered high and wide with vomit, his body was surrounded by pools of blood and excrement, and a bone in his neck had snapped”.

Could Kingston’s finest not perhaps have guessed at the time that this was not quite your usual coronary?