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.

The Death Club

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.