The importance of the exact time of the death of a victim often comes up in crime fiction. In reality, it is an imprecise science. Forensic pathologists invariably warn that their opinion is only that. Many different factors can affect the way a body reacts after death: position, body weight, clothing, ambient temperature, and so on. Frejah in her story mentioned that the pathologist on the Antterland case had used blowfly measurement to try to establish the time of death. This method works from the knowledge that within minutes of dying, carrion blowflies arrive on the scene and lay their eggs. By measuring the developmental stages of the larvae or young flies, a pathologist can estimate the time of death with greater accuracy than with more conventional methods. That time was recorded in several accounts of the investigation.

The observations of Antterland leaving his house were also narrowed down to more or less exact times: between one and two hours after the murder. This was of course a significant mystery.

Even if the timing was wrong, both by the pathologist and the witnesses, Antterland was definitely seen leaving the house and locking it up. No one saw him returning later to meet his end, and for that matter there was no other person, the possible murderer, spotted hanging around outside.

But mysteries are there to be solved, and I believed that Spoder had already supplied the explanation. Lew Antterland had a brother, a twin brother, quite likely an identical twin brother, Dever Antterland. He must have been the killer.

Why one twin should murder his brother was something I would never understand, but it seemed there was an overwhelming circumstantial case against Dever.

Dever’s plan. He could enter his brother’s house without breaking in – possibly he had his own key. After he killed his brother he would exit from the house in a normal seeming way, locking the door behind him, presumably hoping this would provide an extra delay before the discovery of the body. Whether or not he intended to be seen by witnesses and mistaken for his brother was a matter of speculation, but if this was what happened then from Dever’s point of view that would be so much the better. If they did not see him, then he had made himself briefly invisible.

The problem of the fingerprints would also be explained. Identical twins do not have identical fingerprints. However, in some cases the fingerprints of identical twins are alike in appearance, with minor distortions, slight differences in size. They are not similar enough to be wrongly identified by a fingerprint expert, but in certain circumstances they can be easily mistaken for each other. It seemed to me that the ungloved hands of the murderer on a humid day, seizing a baseball bat in a fierce grip, using it violently, would leave behind several blurred or smudged fingerprints, looking little different from the ones already there, the ones they partially obscured.