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?