Stud was in custody, awaiting a court date for the evidence to be confirmed, and for dates to be set for trial and sentencing.
Waller Alman’s body was in the mortuary. All witnesses and pieces of evidence would be available to me. My job was to satisfy myself that the local investigation had been thorough, that the dead man was indeed who they said he was, and that the man held in custody was the likely perpetrator. Because this was a case of murder the forensic evidence had to be of the highest standard. With that done, Waller Alman’s body could be released to his family.
From the information on file it appeared to be an open and shut case.
After the long wait in the transit lounge I caught the trans-island flight to Salay. All trans-island flights land at Salay Ewwel, the first. I stayed one night in an airport hotel, and the following morning took an inter-island shuttle flight from Ewwel to Salay Hames, the fifth. I was welcomed by the police on the island, assigned a car and a driver, and a young detective constable. He had no part in the enquiry but was there to act as liaison to the force, should that be necessary.
I went first to the mortuary, where I was able to confirm the body had been correctly identified and labelled. I approved the release of the body to the family, who would have to arrange for transporting it back to Dearth, if that was what they wished. The mortuary assistant said they were still trying to trace any family member who could make such decisions, otherwise the body would be interred in a serf grave.
I then went to see the man called Stud, on custodial remand, awaiting sentence. After this I was taken to the station house where I was shown the police paperwork, including several pieces I had not seen in the file I had been given in Dearth. Finally, I was driven to the house where the murder had taken place. It was indeed an impressive and in my view ostentatious house. I made a close examination on my own for nearly half an hour.
I returned to the station house, where I formally confirmed the papers were in order, signed the necessary release, thanked everyone I had met for their help and cooperation, and after a quick lunch I was driven to the airport. Once I was back in Dearth City I filed my report and returned to normal duties with Serjeant Jeksid.
There it could have ended, but there were several inconsistencies I had noticed. I had either been discouraged by the Hames force from investigating further, or for various reasons I felt the anomalies were beyond my jurisdiction.
Firstly, there was no evidence that placed the prisoner, Stud, inside the house at any time, let alone at the point when the murder happened. There were, for example, no signs of a forced break-in. Stud’s fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon, nor indeed on anything else in the house.
But Stud had confessed to the murder. In fact, he had confessed twice – the second time it was written down and he signed his name. He incriminated himself and although he was given several chances to withdraw the confession he re-affirmed it. The police in Hames maintained that it was inescapable proof of guilt.
However, the interview in which Stud made the first confession was videoed. There is a gap in the recording, both sound and vision. Before the gap he can be seen repeatedly being threatened and bullied by the interviewing officer. Stud appears confused and sounds incoherent, frightened. He is complaining of a pain in his side, asks to see a doctor and says that he has been repeatedly kicked. There are traces of blood on his face.
When the recording resumes, the scene has changed. The interviewing officer is no longer visible on camera, but he, or someone like him, is in the room and questioning Stud. There is still blood on Stud’s face, and some of it has seeped into his shirt. Stud is lying back on the bench, his arms over his head. He is largely inarticulate. He is crying.
Then he says: ‘Yes, I killed that man. It was me.’ He goes on to say more.
It has all the appearance of a coerced confession, forced out of a vulnerable suspect after a long period of rough interrogation. If presented to a seigniory panel on Dearth there is little doubt that it would be deemed inadmissible.
However, for all that it was a full confession. Stud’s version of events aligned almost exactly with what the other evidence showed happened. Most compelling of all, no other suspect had been found or charged. Waller Alman did not kill himself – someone else was involved. Stud was the only possible killer in the frame.
My training had already made me familiar with certain attitudes held by police officers, and I had sometimes been aware of them myself – usually off-guard remarks while investigating a transgression. It amounted to this: when there is unchallenged partial evidence, and if it is supported by circumstantial evidence, and there is only one suspect in the case, there is a strong temptation to ignore everything else. The known or assumed facts are then fitted to the person they are questioning. It is known as confirmation bias.
If I had not already been suspecting it in the case of Waller Alman, everything was made clear when the young constable who was in the car with me said informally, as we drove away from the custody remand building: ‘As soon as Stud was brought in we all knew for sure that we had the right man. After that it was just a question of waiting for him to confess.’
There was a third evidential problem, one the local police were totally unaware of. This was not their fault as they had little or no experience of mutability, but it was one of the procedures I was tasked with carrying out. I was to try to establish if there was a mutability element to the killing, because if there was it could affect the quality of the forensic work. In the past Salay Hames had known few mutability events, but was considered high-risk on the scale of Mutability Incipience.
While I was in Waller Alman’s house I made a visual examination of the room where he had been murdered, comparing what I could see with police photos taken shortly after discovery of his body. I then routinely took a reading from the mute-muter, which recorded a major incursive event: horizontal and vertical mutability had occurred immediately after the estimated time of death of the victim. The latter reading was off the scale of the device. What could this mean? I stored the results. I then followed another standard procedure, in which it is possible to reverse engineer the mutability effects: I selected the day before the attack. This should have restored the ‘normal’ state of the room, but the readings again were much higher than anything we had been trained to accept as normal. I had never encountered anything like it before.
It meant, in short, that no evidence taken from the scene of murder could be used in court. That also meant that Stud’s confession was unchallengeable. There was no evidence that anyone else might have been the murderer.
Two weeks after I arrived back in Dearth, news came through that Stud, still being held in solitary confinement while waiting for sentencing, had hanged himself in his cell. The police files on the murder of Waller Alman were later closed for good, both on Salay and Dearth.
13
The Riddle of the Hands
Why were there differences between Frejah’s story and the relatively superficial accounts Jo and I had dug out of the reference books? The entries were short and synoptic, but all of the four or five mentions Jo had found in the books of lists, the court records of crime, tended to agree.
There was in fact a murder, or a violent death, recorded on Salay Hames about fifteen years ago. Murder was unusual on our islands – it must be this one. Why had she changed the name of the dead man? She called him Waller Alman, and at one point on the tape she said his full name was Lew Waller Alman. According to the references Jo and I had found, the victim was called Lew Antterland. (Had Frejah actually said ‘Antterland’, and slurred the word, or I misheard it? When I played part of the tape again, that was unlikely. She said the name several times. Anyway, I had checked the spelling of the name with her. No mistakes.)
Lew Antterland’s brother, himself later murdered, was called Dever Antterland, and was sometimes known as ‘Willer’. A reference in one of the books gave his full name as Dever Willer Antterland.
/> What were Frejah’s motives for telling me the story?
This was itself a mystery if I accepted that our acquaintanceship had started casually, but I was no longer so sure. Belatedly it appeared otherwise. She had meant to locate me and in some way had engineered our meeting. So this deepened the mystery. Was part of her purpose in approaching me with the intention of telling me this story? It was hard to see why, unless it was, as she had said, a wish to pass on an anecdote in the hope I might turn it into a novel. That seemed to me a trivial reason.
If not trivial, then there was something contained in the story, or perhaps omitted from it, that was intended to get my interest. She had certainly succeeded in that. While I pondered all this, the unchecked novel proofs were lying on my desk, a silent rebuke.
I alleviated the guilty feelings by spending an hour checking the proofs, then set them aside. It was now evening. I turned on the lights in my study, and closed the windows against the large and sometimes aggressive insects that I knew would otherwise fly in. I made myself a meal. I played with Barmi the cat, then fed him. I read a few more pages of the proofs while I ate.
I switched on my desktop computer and began a systematic internet search for any information that would confirm, enhance or explain Frejah’s story. Of course, many of the results were much the same as Jo had found for me in the reference books. But I had a range of specialist websites I often looked at when researching, and I had subscriber access to several privately maintained archive sites.
There was nothing at all about anyone called Waller Alman in the newspaper archives, TV news channel archives and the usual news pages. I looked up the police gazette and court records without success. The subscriber websites returned nothing. To be sure, I ran similar checks on ‘Willer Alman’ and various spelling changes of the surname. Nothing at all.
With that established, I turned to checks on the name Antterland. Here I was more successful, although I was soon aware that too much time had passed for complete reliability. Files were closed or sometimes lost, or had been moved to another archive under a different name. Even so, a few facts emerged. Facts are for me the core of a story.
Lew Waller Antterland lived alone in a large house on Salay Hames. He was believed to be wealthy. In interviews after his death several neighbours said that he appeared to live well but not ostentatiously, and he rarely spoke about himself. He was polite, but seemed secretive.
His death was caused by a heavy blow to the back of the head. Next to the body was a baseball bat, badged by a local sports club, bearing blood and hair traces that were consistent with the wound. The only fingerprints on the bat were his.
The house was locked, with no sign of a forced entry. The body was found by a neighbour who had a spare key to the house, normally used at times when watching the house if Antterland was away. This woman noticed that mail deliveries were being left outside the main door.
Two features of the death could not be explained.
The time of death had been calculated with an error allowance of about one hour on either side. However, the neighbour who held the spare key, and another woman who worked in a local restaurant a couple of hundred metres along the road, both reported seeing Antterland leaving the house and locking it up two hours later. That is: he was seen between one and three hours after he was killed. He was carrying a large shoulder bag, one they had seen him using before. He did not speak to either of them, but this was not at all unusual. (Frejah’s account had not mentioned the singular fact of Antterland being seen alive after the murder.)
The other feature was that when Antterland’s bank and other financial records were examined he was found to have virtually no money. Audits of his accounts discovered that all his wealth had been converted to cash on the morning of the day he died. There was no trace of the cash, either inside the house or anywhere else that it might have been concealed. The large shoulder bag he was seen with was never located. (Again, Frejah did not include this in her story.)
Because of these unexplained and inconsistent matters a murder investigation was launched.
A vagrant who had been seen in the area at the time of Antterland’s death, name of Stodson, known on the street as Stod, was arrested and held on suspicion. When questioned he boasted unconvincingly but also unwisely that Lew Antterland was a friend, his best friend. He maintained his innocence even under sustained questioning. A heavy drug user and an alcoholic, Stodson was in poor physical and mental health and while being questioned about Antterland’s death he collapsed. He died later in hospital. There was no evidence to link him to the crime.
With no other possible suspect, and all the evidence pointing to Antterland’s injury as self-inflicted, no matter how extraordinary the circumstances, an inquest court found the death to be occasioned by suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed.
Because Lew Waller Antterland was a manorial vassal in fief to a demesne lord from the island of Dearth, two detectives from that island arrived to oversee the investigation.
But Frejah said she was sent to Salay Hames alone. Two separate archives reported in factual terms that two Dearth officers went to investigate. Who was the other? Frejah’s partner and mentor, Serjeant Jeksid?
At least I could forget the name ‘Waller Alman’. ‘Stud’ was Stod, or Stodson. Stod maintained his innocence throughout, he did not break down and confess, he was not put on remand in prison, he died of ill-health and, perhaps, police maltreatment, but he did not kill himself.
The more I considered it, the more the post mortem verdict on Antterland of suicide seemed increasingly perverse. The mere thought of someone picking up a baseball bat as a suicide weapon defeated all logic. The bat, admittedly an efficient club should one want to use it as that, held behind with both hands then swung against the back of the head? With enough strength to crush the skull and inflict deadly pressure on the brain? And just one swing?
So it had to be murder as Frejah had said, and perhaps more sinisterly, as she actually knew. She still seemed to me complicit in some way. Who then might have committed it, and why?
The fingerprints on the handle of the baseball bat were the only hard evidence, but they did not incriminate anyone else and revealed nothing of how the murder was carried out. The disappearance of Lew Antterland’s money established a motive, but not the method.
If Antterland was a member of a sports club, or played for a local baseball team, then the fingerprints found on the handle were likely to be his. That assumed he did not wear protective batting gloves when playing, which he probably did. Alternatively, if he only used the bat as an exercise aid of some kind, or if he simply liked picking it up from time to time, then he would probably not wear gloves at all.
The killer might of course have been wearing gloves when he or she smashed the bat against the back of Antterland’s head, but the pressure and gripping action of the gloves would almost certainly have removed or blurred patches of the existing prints. Salay Hames was hot and humid at the time of the crime, a summer month, so gloves would not naturally be worn – unless the murder was planned and premeditated. If no gloves were worn by the killer then there would be plenty of traces: humidity makes hands sweaty, which will leave clear fingerprints as well as DNA.
The report I read said that there were fingerprints and palm prints all over the handle of the bat, many of them obscuring others, or blurring across them. There were few blank areas. All the prints were the same: Lew Antterland’s.
The other mystery was the reported witness sightings of Antterland leaving the house after the time of the murder. Assuming the witnesses’ statements were accurate, this raises two questions. Firstly, how reliable are the timings, and secondly, if it was not Lew Antterland himself seen leaving the house, who was it?
The importance of the exact time of the death of a victim often comes up in crime fiction. In reality, it is an imprecise science. Forensic pathologists invariably warn that their opinion is only that. Many different factors can a
ffect the way a body reacts after death: position, body weight, clothing, ambient temperature, and so on. Frejah in her story mentioned that the pathologist on the Antterland case had used blowfly measurement to try to establish the time of death. This method works from the knowledge that within minutes of dying, carrion blowflies arrive on the scene and lay their eggs. By measuring the developmental stages of the larvae or young flies, a pathologist can estimate the time of death with greater accuracy than with more conventional methods. That time was recorded in several accounts of the investigation.
The observations of Antterland leaving his house were also narrowed down to more or less exact times: between one and two hours after the murder. This was of course a significant mystery.
Even if the timing was wrong, both by the pathologist and the witnesses, Antterland was definitely seen leaving the house and locking it up. No one saw him returning later to meet his end, and for that matter there was no other person, the possible murderer, spotted hanging around outside.
But mysteries are there to be solved, and I believed that Spoder had already supplied the explanation. Lew Antterland had a brother, a twin brother, quite likely an identical twin brother, Dever Antterland. He must have been the killer.
Why one twin should murder his brother was something I would never understand, but it seemed there was an overwhelming circumstantial case against Dever.
Dever’s plan. He could enter his brother’s house without breaking in – possibly he had his own key. After he killed his brother he would exit from the house in a normal seeming way, locking the door behind him, presumably hoping this would provide an extra delay before the discovery of the body. Whether or not he intended to be seen by witnesses and mistaken for his brother was a matter of speculation, but if this was what happened then from Dever’s point of view that would be so much the better. If they did not see him, then he had made himself briefly invisible.
The Evidence Page 11