We’d started combing through the Yellow Pages from 1979, looking for handcrafted furniture businesses in Carlton. There were a dozen or so. We phoned them all, and deleted any that were still operating. That left us with eight. We got an assistant to go through back records to find information about their owners, but it was thirty-seven years ago. We weren’t hopeful.
Just when I was beginning to think we’d hit another roadblock, a courier delivered the forensic report on Hobie’s mallet. Two sets of prints had been found, one set was Hobie’s, identified from the autopsy, and the other belonged to someone called Henryk Stanley.
Our luck was improving.
Henryk Stanley had been brought in for minor offences years before, and his prints were still in the system. It only took minutes to find h
