I had been thinking about what Jo said, so as soon as I was settled I pulled the page proofs towards me and began reading and checking them in earnest. I completed them within an hour and a half.

In the evening I felt a return of the restlessness that the Antterland story had induced in me. I had a spurious feeling of triumph: I had worked out what had happened the day he was killed. I was sometimes able to anticipate the revelation in someone else’s novel, but that was not the same as this. Lew Antterland was real, his death came about through a violent attack.

I read Frejah Harsent’s account again. It seemed increasingly unreliable every time I looked at it or thought about it. As I read the words I had transcribed I remembered the noisy restaurant where she had spoken them, the semi-guilty way she had looked, my own feelings of uncertainty about what she was telling me and why. The coldness of print both smoothed those impressions away, but also revealed more and more duplicity.

At the end of her story Frejah had drawn attention to what she called three inconsistencies in what she had experienced. These were: the lack of evidence at the murder scene of Stud’s (Stod’s) involvement, the dubious quality of his confession leading to the way the investigating police officers had tried to fit the available evidence to him, and the effect of the mutability she had detected within the house. (Of this last one, I had no opinion.)

As a police officer, Frejah had a duty to report these findings, but instead she signed off what she had investigated, adding nothing to the file compiled by the police on Salay Hames. At the very least this indicated incompetent police work, but as Jo had said to me, the duplicity hinted that Frejah knew more than she admitted. That in turn suggested she might have been somehow involved with the crime, and/or was covering something up, and/or that she had pre-knowledge of it.

Now that I had been able to compare her account with what was objectively recorded in the media at the time of the incident, I could see several more ‘inconsistencies’, to use her word.

The most glaring of these was that she had said she was sent to Salay Hames alone, whereas the record showed two Dearth detectives were there. Frejah seemed certain to have been one of them. Detective Serjeant Jeksid would be the obvious companion. What then was his role in checking the facts of the murder? Was he also somehow involved with the crime itself?