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.