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.

The Riddle of the Hands

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?