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.