The Bulgarian umbrella murder
London, England, 1978
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian writer who had fled his country's communist regime and lived in London, where he worked for the Bulgarian service of the BBC and sent critical commentaries about the government in Sofia through Radio Free Europe. On 7 September 1978, while waiting for a bus near Waterloo Bridge, he felt a sharp pain at the back of his right thigh, like an insect sting. Behind him, a man picked an umbrella up off the ground, murmured an apology in a foreign accent and left in a taxi.
That same night, Markov ran a high fever. He was admitted to St James's Hospital in Balham and died four days later, on 11 September, aged 49. Scientists at the military laboratory of Porton Down found in his thigh a 1.70 millimetre sphere of platinum and iridium, with two 0.35 millimetre holes crossing each other, which probably held ricin, a poison extracted from the castor bean, sealed with a substance that melts at body temperature. Ten days earlier, another Bulgarian exile, Vladimir Kostov, had been hit the same way in the Paris metro and survived.
Sources
In the game
The Sting on the Bridge
London, September 1978. Thursday, 6 pm, the bus stop at the south end of a bridge over the Thames. Emil Dorev, a writer exiled from an Eastern Bloc country and a broadcaster on the international service of a London radio station, felt a prick behind his thigh while waiting for his bus.
Suspicion fell on the Bulgarian secret service, with technical help from the KGB, but no one was ever tried. Bulgaria closed the investigation in 2013, when the statute of limitations expired, and London's police say the case has never been closed. The game borrows the bus stop at Waterloo Bridge, the sting in the thigh, the umbrella, the taxi getaway and the pierced sphere. Characters, investigation details and outcome are fiction.
