The next morning I slept late – Jo had already been up for two hours before I was awake. She was due to visit a stage designer in Chor, a town on the other side of the island, and had her own preparations to make for a trip. I pottered around slowly, feeling tired, listless in my body. People who invite you away to a function where you are to appear or speak, or to take part in a workshop, or simply to be a guest at some celebration or other, do not realize the collateral loss of time and energy that is involved.
My trip to Dearth, for instance. I more or less stopped work on my current novel about three days before I departed. I was distracted then by the thought of the long journeys ahead, the unknown venue and what would be expected of me. My speech too was a problem. I kept looking at it, fiddling about with details, worrying about what it would sound like. And the mail-order company from which I had ordered my arctic outer wear alarmingly delayed the delivery. It all worked out in the end, but in essence those three extra days were lost to me.
Then came the four days on Dearth – closer to five, in fact. They made me feel like an alien, a visitor, someone who did not understand and therefore had to have everything explained or translated. I met a senior cop. I was calmly reminded of my serfdom.
Now I was home, but I was dragging around in memory a large shadow. All that stuff I had heard about crime-not-actually-crime, the weirdness of the mutability effect, the serf-loathing cop who had befriended me. It had left me feeling vague and undirected, but I was relieved it was not happening any more and that I was at home. Two more days had slipped uselessly into nowhere.
Jo departed for Chor the next morning. I was up in time to see her leave. Soon after her car drove away I made myself a large mug of coffee and went to my study, feeling purposeful once more. I caught up with several unanswered emails, visited my usual social media sites, checked my bank. All the normal routines of a morning.
At last I opened the document where I had been working on the first draft of my next novel. I had reached page eighty-six, well into it but a long way from the end. I read through recent pages, remembering writing them, of course, but I had trouble recollecting what I had had in mind. Back then, a week ago, pre-Dearth.
I closed the document. I needed time to reflect.
I looked at the small stack of my reference books that Jo had put out for me. I moved them to my desk. Each one had slips of paper marking certain pages. I opened the top one, and immediately found a handwritten note from Jo:
Hey Todd – in case we don’t get a chance to talk about this before I leave:
Here is what I have found for you on the murder case you told me about. It’s not much and everything might be referring to another case entirely. I drew a complete blank on the name Waller Alman, or any variant of that. I tried the other spellings you guessed at. You said it had happened about fifteen years ago. As you know, there haven’t been many murders in the Salay Group, and there was only one in that time frame, but it was in fact on Salay Hames, as you said. I felt it was probably the right one? The victim was called Lew Antterland. Nothing like ‘Waller Alman’. The police thought Antterland had been murdered, but later it was judged by the inquest court to be a suicide case, so the file was closed.
But listen to this! Lew Antterland had a brother who WAS murdered five years later. This happened on Salay Sekonda. His name was Dever Antterland, but he was also known as ‘Willer’. Coincidence, or what? There isn’t much about him in the books, but I’ve marked every mention I could find from the index.
Why not see what Spoder can turn up? He happened to phone while you were away – he said it was not important. Maybe you should call him?
See you back here soon, I hope.
Jo XXX
I looked at the pages Jo had marked for me, but as she had warned me there was not much there. Lew Antterland committed suicide, his brother Dever was murdered a few years later. The file on Lew’s death was closed. Dever’s murderer had never been identified or caught, and after a long delay the inquest court on Sekonda had declared a verdict of unlawful killing. That file remained in theory open, but there had been no further investigation for ten years.
It was a strange surname: Antterland. I had never come across it before on Salay. Two people dying on Salayean islands, two Antterlands? My crime writer’s antenna briefly twitched with interest.
I thought I should call Spoder back, but then I remembered that I should be correcting the proofs for my publisher. I had not started on them before I went to Dearth. There were nearly three hundred pages to read and correct.
I looked briefly at them, put them aside. I decided to call Spoder instead.
As I had mentioned to Frejah Harsent, I did not know his first name. He always said it was unimportant. He had been Detective Inspector Spoder of the Salay Raba police, but he had left the force before I had any contact with him.
I met him when he answered an advertisement I placed, hoping to find a technical consultant for the crime novels I was writing. He was eager for the job, and had decided before we even met that he was the ideal applicant. There were no others, so Spoder became my police consultant and had been for several years. He worked hard, and sometimes the exactness of his memory surprised me.
He was not forthcoming about his past experience in the police, although he had certainly risen to the rank of DI, and was still well connected with the Raba force. He had proved useful to me, and I had learned to trust most of the information he passed to me.
He retired from the police early – why? That was a question you never asked a senior police officer who took early retirement. In fact, I did ask Spoder that question at our first meeting, and that was the answer he gave me. I never asked again, although of course I continued to wonder.
He had his weaknesses. One was that he was out of touch with many of the minutiae of current police procedures, which he said were constantly changing, and which did not matter. I had discovered this shortcoming of his when I wrote The Tanglewood Mystery. However, he still had many contacts and he remained informed about personnel, policies and new initiatives. Best of all, from my point of view, he was still able to access police files, although mostly on cold cases. I was never sure how he did this, whether it was legal or not, but thought it best not to ask.
He also had odd quirks. He travelled around on an elderly motorcycle, which I put up with but which Jo detested because of the noise. He was over-effusive about some of the subjects I asked him to look at, urging me to use everything he had found, no matter how trivial. Sometimes his enthusiasm for the work wore me out. We usually communicated by landline. He did have a cellphone but rarely used it. He often called me ‘sir’, which I found slightly uncomfortable, but I had grown used to it. We met irregularly, usually when he had papers he wanted to pass to me in person.
I paid him a monthly retainer, and considered it money well spent. I had grown to like Spoder, and he did good work for me.
On the phone I said to him: ‘Spoder, I’ve heard about a sudden death in Salay Hames, the fifth, about a decade and a half ago. I believe it was a suicide. A man named Antterland. Would you know anything about it?’
‘I was never involved with suicides. They are not usually a police matter, unless there’s something suspicious when the body is discovered. Anyway, Hames was not my area.’
‘I know that – but it was linked to a murder on Salay Sekonda, not long after.’
‘Same again,’ he said. ‘I rarely went off-island, and I never went to Sekonda for a case.’
‘Can you try to find out what happened?’ Spoder said nothing. He was silent for about a quarter of a minute, until I said: ‘Spoder?’
‘I’m trying to remember.’ He was silent again. I had learned about his occasional silences, so I waited. Then he said: ‘These two deaths, sir – you say they were connected. Is this the case of the two brothers? The name Antterland rings a bell.’
‘There were brothers involved. That’s what I’d like you to check for me.’
>
‘I might have something for you. I wasn’t involved myself – I think I was on some other case at the time. But I remember now that it was something the guys used to chuckle about, in the squad room. I assumed it was some kind of private joke, the way Antterland had killed himself. Is this for a new book you’re planning, sir?’
‘I think it might be,’ I said, not wanting to go into the whole background. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ll get on to it as soon as I can. It’s starting to come back to me now. The brother who was murdered – he was the twin of the brother who killed himself.’
‘A twin? An identical twin?’
‘I think so,’ Spoder said. ‘It wouldn’t change anything, would it?’
After we had hung up, I thought: Identical twins? That wouldn’t change anything. Not in the real world it would not.
I was getting interested.
It became urgent to listen again to what Frejah had told me. She had described it as a murder, not a suicide. The name was different, very different, but as Jo had pointed out there weren’t many murders to choose from. Salay is a relatively peaceful place. Murders were rare. Frejah had said nothing about a brother, any kind of brother. Twins: Waller and Willer? Maybe I had mis-heard, or my attention had wandered? Were they identical?
I had been dreading the thought of transcribing her long story. Transcription is slow, difficult and tiring, an expert job usually handled by professional agencies, but I did not want to pay an agency to do the work for me. With the other tasks I was already late completing it seemed like something to postpone for a while.
But I had remembered that morning that my cellphone came with an app I had never actually used. It claimed to convert the spoken word into written text, with an accuracy of some 90 per cent. I thought it might be worth a try. Even at that level of accuracy it would be short work to check back to the recording for omissions or mistakes, and make corrections.
I found the app on the phone, clicked on the icon, then went through the usual process of registering myself as user, waiting for the latest upgrade to be downloaded, and so on. When the program was ready, I ran it against the recording I had made. After ten minutes it declared itself finished, and the first page appeared on the cellphone’s monitor.
It was indecipherable: an alphabet soup of letters and weird symbols, not even an occasional identifiable word. I scrolled through the rest of the pages, but the constant background noise in the restaurant had obviously interfered with the recording.
When I listened to it on the speaker, I could fairly easily make out what Frejah was saying.
I settled down, transferred the recording to my desktop, loaded my word processor, and started the transcription. With several breaks it took the rest of the day, but by the evening I had what I was sure was an accurate copy of the story she had told me.
12
The Death Club
Transcript of the account of Commissioner Frejah Harsent, Dearth Police:
After a long wait I had recently graduated from uniformed police work to plainclothes investigation. I was partnered with a slightly older but more experienced detective called Enver Jeksid, a detective serjeant. Jeksid also acted as my mentor and adviser. I was unusual on the force because I was not native to Dearth. I was born on Salay Hames, the fifth. Jeksid claimed I still had a Salayean accent, and sometimes teased me about it, but any trace of accent must have been lost years before. I was six years old when my parents moved from Hames.
Most of the transgression work we did was in Dearth City itself. Neither of us was senior enough to be a given a police mobile unit of our own. To get to any incident we normally had to beg a lift from one of the other teams we worked alongside. Resources were always a problem at that time. It slowed our response, so Jeksid and I had probably the worst clear-up record on the force, but apart from that we were no different from the other detective teams. Most of the transgressions we investigated were minor.
I enjoyed the work and felt a growing commitment to policing, but it was a slow progress. Detective work is usually routine and uncontroversial, and when we were in the station house we spent our time peering at computer databases, making endless phone calls or completing by hand the case and information forms demanded by the seignioral management of the force.
In those days, we were expected to carry a certain handheld device called a 6M8. It was designed to reverse or suppress temporarily the effects of a mutability event. The reason for that was because in the past defence lawyers had frequently argued in court that our investigation of an incident was inadmissible, because a mutability event might or might not have taken place since the alleged incident. This would make forensic evidence unreliable: measurements, placement, movement of evidential objects, and so on.
We were therefore issued with the 6M8, a battery-powered wave generator which had the effect, for a short time and in a restricted area, of reversing any recent mutability event. Its total range was no larger than an average room in a house. We called it, unofficially, the mute-muter. Most of the time it made no difference at all, but occasionally it had the dramatic impact of restoring the scene to the condition it was in when the transgression took place.
We used it a few times and so did the other cops, but in the end it was taken away from us. The same lawyers who had argued that mutability might have interfered with evidence since the transgression now argued the other way: that our little wave generator was contaminating evidence. We haven’t been allowed to use it for years.
I mention this because I was still routinely using the 6M8, the mute-muter, when I was asked by my department head if I would be prepared to investigate an off-island incident that involved someone born on Dearth, but living on Salay. I would be working alone. The trip would run up travel and hotel bills, and for that reason they could not afford to send two officers. The case was straightforward: I was to check the detective work carried out by the local force. It was well within my ability level. I leapt at the opportunity.
The detective interviewing me said: ‘We understand you were born on Salay Hames. We thought if there was any difficulty with local patois . . .’
‘I don’t think it will be a problem,’ I said.
Because I was thrilled to be offered this solo job I wanted to maintain the belief that I was ideal for it. I therefore did not add that I had never spoken patois at any time, and that Salay was a modern, civilized island group with many trans-island connections. The speaking of patois was a thing of the past.
I departed the next morning. In those days, now long gone, there was a small, privately run airfield that linked Tristcontenta Hub with Dearth City, so the first part of the journey was a mere two hours in the air. I had a few hours to wait for the flight to Salay at Tristcontenta, but I had brought the file on the case. I found a quiet corner in one of the transit lounges.
I learned the details. A man named Waller Alman had been savagely murdered in his home. His full name was Lew Waller Alman, but he never used his first name. He was a Dearth citizen, vassal to a manorial landlord in the Dearth City, but he had been resident on Salay Hames since childhood. As an immigrant he had been removed from the vassalage and reduced to serf status while he remained on Salay. However, his birthplace and fief heritage made it mandatory that the investigation into his death was overseen by a member of our force.
Waller Alman’s body had lain unnoticed until a friend or acquaintance had called at the house and made the shocking discovery. Because Salay Hames is a warm island with a humid climate the body had started decomposing rapidly, and the forensic pathologist had used the method of blowfly hatching as a means of establishing a time and day of death. The Salay Hames police had immediately set up the SCI – Serious Crime Investigation – and as far as I could tell from the file they had done a good job.
The body was swiftly but provisionally identified as that of Waller Alman. He lived alone in a large house in a wealthy area of Hames. There were no signs of other occupants anywhere in th
e house. A driver’s licence found in a pocket of the dead man’s clothes confirmed the name and address. The victim was believed to have a brother, but he could not be traced anywhere in the Salay Group. Eventually a neighbour was able to identify the body.
The likely murder weapon, a wooden bat or club, presumed to be a baseball bat and marked with the badge of the sporting club Waller Alman played for, was in the room close to the body. There were abundant traces of blood and flesh tissue on the club which matched Waller Alman’s own. These traces were consistent with a massive impact wound to the back of his head.
There were no witnesses to the killing, but there were extensive interviews with Waller Alman’s neighbours, his manorial landlord in Dearth City, and his non-manorial landlady on Hames. Attempts to trace his brother remained unsuccessful. Telephone calls and text messages made and sent by Waller Alman had been logged, and the names verified. His internet activity was examined and found to be unexceptional. None of the interviews produced any hint of the possible identity of the killer.
Door-to-door enquiries elicited several mentions of a homeless man seen sleeping rough in the area. Few people knew who he was, but he was believed to be known as Stud. He was often seen in the streets, and when drunk he could be aggressive.
The local police rounded up Stud and he was taken in for questioning. At first he denied all knowledge of the murder, but the interviewing officer noticed flaws and contradictions in his story. Questioning was intensified. After two days Stud suddenly surrendered resistance and confessed that he had done it. He said that he had broken into the house in search of alcohol or money, but he was discovered by Waller Alman. He said he panicked, seized the baseball bat and beat Waller Alman to death. Afterwards he fled the scene. At the time he was arrested he was trying to find some way of moving on to another part of the island.
The Evidence Page 10
