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This note was to be presented two decades later in Rome as part of the prosecution evidence for the trial of Calvi’s alleged murderers.
    Simpson conducted his post-mortem at 2 p.m. and the body he dealt with was still that of the obscure Mr Calvini. Roberto Calvi was not correctly identified by the London police until around 7 p.m. on that Friday, when, according to a City of London Police report, the head of Rome’s Special Branch telephoned to say ‘he believed the body to be that of Roberto Calvi, an important banker, who had been missing from Romesince approximately 11th June 1982.’ At that point the City Police were also informed that Calvi ‘was involved in a large bank fraud concerning Banco Ambrosiano, a private bank of which he was president’. News of the identification appears to have leaked quickly in Italy. The Rome newspaper
Il Tempo
was tipped off by an anonymous phone call at around the same time that evening. A woman with a Milanese accent told the paper that the body of Roberto Calvi had been found in London, according to a report by the Carabinieri paramilitary police.
    The City Police might have been quicker in establishing Calvi’s true identity: his real name was on a label sewn into the lining of his jacket near the breast pocket. 1
    In his handwritten account Simpson elaborated on the international shake-up and court cases that followed over the next few weeks, and acknowledged: ‘It was no ordinary hanging for sure. Yet I could find absolutely no trace of violence or manhandling – and analysis revealed no drugs that might have been slipped into a drink to make Calvi unconscious, easy to overcome, slip into a noose and hoist onto the scaffolding on which he was hanging.’ The only mark Simpson found on the body was that left by the noose around the neck. The sort of mark, he wrote, ‘I had seen on hundreds of self-hanging suicides over whose deaths no further argument had arisen’. Tiny blood spots had burst out on his scalp and the whites of the eyes owing to constriction of the neck veins – petechiae, or ‘Tardieu spots’ after the French police surgeon who first described them in deaths from asphyxiation. ‘No, there could be no doubt he had hanged alive and died quietly – if that is the word – in that noose.’
    More details of the exact circumstances of Calvi’s death can be gleaned from the witness statements of other officers who attended the scene and from a City of London Police report drawn up by Detective Inspector John White, one of the officers who oversaw the original investigation, on 20 July1982 – one month after the event. Whether the police and other authorities correctly gathered and interpreted that evidence remains controversial to this day.
    Police Constable Donald Bartliff was patrolling with the Thames River Police when he was called to Blackfriars Bridge at 7.48 a.m. His testimony, delivered ten days after the event, provides one of the fullest accounts of the crime scene on the morning of Calvi’s death. ‘On arrival at the scene at 8 a.m. under the north arch of Blackfriars Bridge, I saw the lifeless body of a man who I now know to be Roberto Calvi hanging from the scaffolding by a rope which was tied round his neck. The rope which was orange in colour is of a type commonly used on the river. The scaffolding was built on the foreshore alongside the river wall and the body was hanging on the down-river end close to the wall facing upstream. The feet were just resting on the fifth horizontal scaffold pole from the top. The left arm was draped over the third horizontal scaffold pole close to the wall. The full weight of the body was taken by the rope, which had been tied about three feet above the head by two half hitches to a securing eyelet, level with the second horizontal scaffold pole from the top.’
    Like PC Palmer, Bartliff noticed ‘a half brick in the front of the trousers under the flies which were buttoned up’. This piece of brick