SPOILER ALERT: don't read this if you don't want to know about a plot twist at the end of Sunflower.
Whose dead body was used to make it look as if Strasser had been killed by the car bomb? Does MI-5 have a bunch of corpses lying around that they can use whenever the need arises? (Actually, I wouldn't put it past Hilda Pierce.)
If there was an explanation for this in the episode, either PBS cut it or I just missed it.
I would assume that is exactly what they have--
access to any dead body that won't be claimed by family...and even if the body WAS claimed by family, it doesn't necessarily have to go into the ground...
many people were not embalmed in that era so a dead body wouldn't necessarily have sutures visible from embalming...
they had time enough to make the plan to spirt Strasser out from under the US Army and Tommie's attempts to rattle him and eventually try to kill him certainly worked to their advantage..
I knew when the two "guards" left him so readily and there was another guy walking in the street same time he was leaving that something was in the wind...
When the body was gone before Valentine and Foyle got there you could bet the fix was in...
The writers of these 3 episodes have managed to come up with some nasty people for MI5 to want to claim as "useful"...
And Samantha is just a danger to Foyle and her husband....that was a pretty obvious example of another side of "the greater good"...
and Honeywell Weeks has aged much worse than Michael Kitchens IMO...
"...That's the beauty of argument, Joey. If you argue correctly, you're never wrong..."
I'm just getting around to watch Series 8 as it's relatively "new" to Netflix and I don't any other way to see it.
I would imagine that it's not really THAT difficult to do. Nobody except close family members and long-term friends are involved in burying a loved one and sometimes there is a service with a closed casket (or no body to claim at all). Truthfully, anybody suggesting that something feels "strange" or "seems off" would probably be dismissed as just suffering from grief. Where would they go? Who could they turn to if higher ranking people ordered a cover-up of some kind?
Keep in mind that the internet is basically in its infancy stage at this point. Information is disseminated at an almost instant rate and available 24 hours a day/7 days a week. Yet, even with the most amazing resource of information and connection with almost everyone else on the planet...some information is STILL inaccessible to everybody. Now, imagine how it would be even slower, muddled, classified, etc. PRIOR to the internet. It definitely gives one pause.
Get busy living, or get busy dying. Andy (The Shawshank Redemption)
When the devil drives, needs must...
As another poster said--
if Ms. Pierce needed a dead body, I am sure she has minions she would willingly sacrifice in the cause...
"...That's the beauty of argument, Joey. If you argue correctly, you're never wrong..."
They actually did that in WWII in Operation Mincemeat. They planted a corpse with false invasion plans for Greece off the coast of Spain to cover the real invasion of Sicily. The plan was devised by then spy Ian Fleming of James Bond fame. The corpse was from a suicide of a Welsh man, and they went to great lengths to create his new persona as a British military courier. There's a good doc. of the story, should be online in the UK.
Well, LaserDoug, actually there were big problems in finding a corpse compatible with the couse of death they wanted the Spanish/Germans to believe to, as well as a huge anxiety about possible reclaimers/ relatives and their reaction. Not as simple as it would seem, EVEN in war time, so maybe not simple at all in peace time - even for Mrs Pierce.
shareThe last time Mrs Pierce needed a body for a fake death, it was abtained by grave robbing a freashly buried corpse(The French Drop). They do seem to stay with the tricks they know.
shareActual grave robbing(digging up a grave) wasn't done - the British government had access to a number of bodies that were quite often unclaimed by anyone. This was in part due to the evacuation non-essential people from cities(causing loss of contact), plus they WERE being bombed - bodies from a bombed-out house fire are hard to I.D.(even today with modern forensics and extensive records).
And .. as someone else has already mentioned - many deaths during the bombing of Britain were closed casket for a reason. No way to tell if it was sand bags or a body when carried.
They made a movie about Operation Mincemeat. It was called "The Man Who Never was." They chose a man who had a record of petty crime and had no family. He went unclaimed and actually died of pneumonia which mimicked having drowned. The lungs were filled with water.
They floated the body ashore from a submarine off the coast of Spain. Spain was a so called neutral county so they were in charge of the investigation. The Spanish secret service leaked the falsified information to German spies stationed in Spain.
I don't know everything. Neither does anyone else