KEY POINTS:
It was just after midday nine days ago when one of Britain's most experienced police officers rose from his seat on the red leather benches of the House of Lords. Lord Condon, the former commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, was about to make a speech about corruption in sport.
His words of warning about a spreading cancer in cricket and sport more generally - including horse-racing, football and tennis - received no coverage at the time. But at that time, one of the world's leading figures in cricket had not been strangled in his hotel room in Jamaica.
At that time, room 374 of the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston was not sealed off by scene-of-the- crime tape. At that time, Bob Woolmer, Pakistan's cricket coach, was still alive.
In calm words Condon, the chairman of the Anti-Corruption and Security Unit of the International Cricket Council, said corruption was ruining sport across the globe, aided and abetted by star names working with shady bookies to fix the result of matches.
He told how match-fixing syndicates, some linked to organised crime and terrorism, were flourishing in an environment where sums up to £500 million ($1.4 billion) are wagered on the outcome of a one-day cricket international.
"The most sinister and important [development] is the opportunity now to bet on who will lose as well as who will win during a sporting event," Condon said.
"Although a sportsman cannot guarantee that he or his team will win, he can most certainly guarantee that they will lose. That has transformed sporting gambling and the potential for corruption in sporting events.
"The tempting and very profitable prospect for a corrupt sportsman is that working alone or with others, he can fix the outcome of a sporting event, or part of it, and achieve a very significant betting coup. The betting analogy I often draw is that the corrupt sportsman creates the equivalent of knowing in advance when the roulette wheel is going to land on red or black. Imagine the betting potential if you knew that."
Sport, and cricket in particular, has become the focus of large betting syndicates, often illegal, which are wagering huge sums of money on the outcome of matches.
Players are paid to lose. Matches are fixed, results pre-ordained. But what if someone found out? What if someone threatened to go public with such toxic allegations? Would those making millions of dollars be forced to act? Would it be enough to murder?
As speculation increases that match-fixing was the motive for what the Jamaican police have called an "extraordinary and evil murder", cricket is struggling to comprehend how a game once synonymous with fair play and gentlemanly conduct now has this stain - a man lying dead in his hotel room, covered by nothing more than a towel, with his own vomit marking the walls and blood dribbling from his mouth.
Woolmer's death has prompted fresh allegations that cricket, which has worked hard to clean up its act, is still a victim of bribes, players deliberately under-performing and matches with very odd results.
"If I'm honest I do think some corruption still exists in the game," said Michael Vaughan, England's captain. "I've never experienced it with my team or with any players I've played with or against. But my gut feeling is there is still some kind of corruption in cricket."
Lord MacLaurin, the former chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, spoke for many in the sport at the weekend when he urged the International Cricket Council, its global governing body, to undertake a radical shake-up of its procedures to "try to get this awful shadow away from the game".
But the shadow hanging over the sport has not gone. It has just got darker.
Not all remains as before at Kingston's Jamaica Pegasus Hotel. Twelve floors above the good-timers enjoying their barbecues, at the end of a winding, musty corridor, a group of other visitors congregated inside room 374. Throughout the day the team of forensics officers examined its cramped white-tiled bathroom, scene of arguably the most dramatic episode in cricket history.
Woolmer was murdered within 18 hours of Pakistan's defeat by Ireland. He was violently strangled, possibly with a towel twisted into a makeshift ligature, beside his hotel toilet.
Police are looking into whether a professional hitman could have been ordered to do the job. Maybe it was the work of shady figures from an illegal betting syndicate? Or was it the work of a deranged, despondent fan?
During a private briefing on Saturday the silver-haired former Scotland Yard detective Mark Shields, who is leading the murder investigation, raised suspicions over the generous odds - eight-to-one - being touted for an Irish win in the hours before the game.
"One aspect is what were the odds on Ireland if Ireland won. I understand that they were extremely good if you bet on Ireland. The match-fixing thing is being looked at."
Condon himself will be called on to analyse betting patterns on the World Cup. Key figures behind the murky illegal betting syndicates will be approached. Officers from Condon's unit have already arrived in Jamaica and have met Shields and the country's Ministry of National Security.
That the circumstances surrounding the Ireland match are deemed significant is, however, one of only a handful of issues that have emerged in the past week. Most findings have served only to pose fresh questions.
For instance, considerable areas of bathroom 374 were spattered with traces of Woolmer's diarrhoea and vomit. Was he ill before the attack? Had the coach been poisoned to incapacitate his big frame before he was killed?
It is too soon to discover the truth, Shields believes, but it is "possible" Woolmer was drugged and that a professional killer was responsible.
Detectives are likely to investigate claims of a furious row between members of his team and Woolmer in the moments following defeat. As their team bus crawled the 6km across Kingston from the Sabina Park stadium to the Jamaica Pegasus, tempers were short. Shields wants to find out if an argument during the journey went beyond those born of frustration and into allegations of match-fixing.
Back at the hotel, Woolmer chose not to hang around with his squad and retired to his room after presciently noting that the day's events would be remembered as a "historic day for world cricket".
From here, detectives admit the chronology of events is sketchy, but they do know he ordered and ate from the room service menu. They also know he did not go to bed early. Just after 3am he emailed his wife Gill in Cape Town.
"There was no cause for alarm from its contents. It was just another email between husband and wife," said Shields.
It was the last anyone heard from him. At 10.45am a chambermaid found one of cricket's most senior figures lying undressed on his back, his head pointing towards the toilet. Save for some unusual scratch marks on his face, it seemed at first like a natural death.
Although he had been strangled, there was no sign of bruising. The room displayed no signs of a struggle.
"In most murder cases there is a knife or gunshot wound, something that reveals the person was unnaturally killed. That was one of the reasons why it took several days from finding the body to establishing the cause of death," said Shields.
That Woolmer possibly knew his killers has formed the starting point for the murder inquiry, largely because there were no signs of forced entry. Detectives believe the killer may have somehow obtained a copy of Woolmer's keycard or even the hotel mastercard.
Yet the fact the coach was naked when murdered suggests it was a surprise visit.
A large man, Woolmer was more than capable of defending himself and yet not a single hotel occupant that night heard shouts or banging from Woolmer's room. Among them was his friend, West Indies captain Brian Lara, who was staying across the corridor.
Certainly his killer or killers were audacious. Closed circuit cameras guard all entrances to the 12th floor. Plus, the Jamaica Pegasus was packed to bursting that night. Even in the early hours of a Sunday morning, large numbers of people would have been milling around.
Although there is no prime suspect, it seems Woolmer's killers may have stayed at the hotel on the night of March 17.
As a matter of routine, detectives have taken statements from all Pakistan's cricketers and their fingerprints as they look to match those taken from room 374, its white door still smothered in black smudges left by the dust of Shields' forensic science team. All the players have declared they have no knowledge of any reason for Woolmer to be murdered.
Last Friday the Pakistan team was swabbed for DNA. They have since left for Pakistan, quashing speculation that officers would refuse to allow them to depart. But their coach's body will not be leaving with them. An inquest in Kingston is scheduled to be held in the next 10 days and until then his body will remain on the island.
It was 2.30am last Friday morning when Gill Woolmer received a phone call at the family's home in an affluent Cape Town suburb to inform her that her husband had been murdered. Until that call she had insisted his death had been unrelated to a match-fixing betting scandal.
South Africa, and Cape Town in particular, has been stunned by the death of one of its favourite sons. Despite being born in India and playing test cricket for England, Woolmer always called Cape Town home.
One of Bob's closest friends insisted he had "absolutely no doubt" the coach was murdered on the instructions of a match-fixing betting syndicate.
Clive Rice, who was coach at Nottinghamshire when Woolmer was in charge at Warwickshire in the 1980s, said his former colleague knew exactly who had been involved in some of cricket's biggest scandals.
And Rice revealed that Woolmer gave him the names of the senior cricket officials secretly involved in earlier fixing incidents.
"We were actually involved in a match in England at the time [that the Hanse Cronje match-fixing scandal broke] and Bob and I discussed it," said Rice. "He told me a lot that never came out. I'm not just talking about other players being involved but officials, too."
For those hoping cricket had cleaned up its image, Condon's arrival in Jamaica to investigate the Woolmer case will perturb those who had hoped the spate of match-fixing scandals between 1999 and 2001 were a blight of the past.
Back then, the International Cricket Council was forced to clean up the sport after corruption inquiries in no less than six of the 10 test-playing nations: India, South Africa, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and England.
Amid the fallout of Woolmer's murder, no one has dared pretend cricket is honest. Malcolm Speed, the ICC's chief executive, admitted in the West Indies last week that cricket is still cursed "with corruption". A day later South Africa's manager, Goolam Raja, disclosed that a bookie had made overtures to one of the country's players during their tour of India last November.
ICC sources believe corruption is more likely to involve individual players rather than the entire teams of previous scandals.
"That's because of the way betting has gone, where punters now wager money on how many a player will score, how many catches he'll take or drop, who'll bowl the first wide and so on - all things one player can influence, and therefore make money for someone by doing," explained one ICC official.
Former Pakistan cricketer and now broadcaster Qamar Ahmed said: "Man-fixing is now the way it happens. You bribe one or two big fish."
The next stage in the investigation will be the results from histology tests that will help determine the precise time and manner of Woolmer's death.
Emails received and sent from his laptop and his mobile phone records are being scrutinised.
The Jamaica Constabulary Force has no idea how long it will take before those who killed Woolmer are caught, if ever.
The world of cricket is watching and waiting. Its very future depends on what Commissioner Shields discovers and who is guilty of turning cricket into a blood sport.
- OBSERVER
