fingers and teeth all there; clearly not foul play; maybe accidental overdose during interrogation?
You presume every strategic professional murder involves a torture session. Operating in hostile territory doesn't guarantee time, safehouses or personnel to cover every action every time. Norway clearly wasn't clued into the cloak and dagger games happening in their territory. Whoever did this, they weren't behaving with legal immunity. They may have had to organize a team on short notice, and act fast. Some people just don't have the stomach to cut off fingers and rip out teeth. If pressed for time, and blocking exfiltration is more important that learning details, and they were short on resources, a team might skip the dungeon.
possible suicide, why not?
Pills, gasoline, secrecy, destroyed evidence and fake foreign passports all sound like parts adding up to professional homicide.
latent poison as murder weapon; she did it to hasten a very slow death; she had bad skin;
Nope. Doubt it. Sedatives are a pretty classic complement to a professional murderer's toolkit. They packed her with barbituates to calm her down, and knock her out then took her some place quiet, and did her in. The skin cream, if anything, hints that maybe she was British. Eczema is a pretty common hereditary problem with the Brits, and this is a BBC story, after all.
I'm sorry but I think you should get over the Litvinenko assassination, put down the comic books and come to terms with the fact that many professional murders are not nearly so elaborate. This is from the 1970's and these kinds of things weren't trying to be tales of science fiction. A hit was a hit back then. Getting shot, stabbed, blown up or in this case, drugged and burned is pretty much how things went down.
unmarked clothes, no giveaway
Makes a lot of sense. I agree this strengthens the spy narrative.
> Pills, gasoline, secrecy, destroyed evidence and fake foreign passports all sound like parts adding up to professional homicide.
Or just unmanaged mental illness, leading to suicide. A lot of the reason things are unexplainable or confusing might be that there is no logical or coherent rationale for them - they are simply the paranoid responses to delusional fantasies.
> You presume every strategic professional murder involves a torture session.
Not. I was thinking in a post-mortem "cleaning" of the corpse. Why to remove the tags in clothes but forget to distroy the fingerprints if they where professionals? It seems that badly damaged but partial fingerprints where recovered.
