The coffee cups always came paired with a silver bowl of icing sugar. Mrs Nakano had said once that she’d heard how foreigners put milk and sugar in coffee, but sugar hadn’t really caught on here yet and he doubted that many people knew there were different types of it. No one had mentioned it to her. It would have been ungrateful, and it was too much fun to play with. He dropped the spoon in it to make a mushroom puff of powder that tasted sweet when he leaned over it.
There was no cutlery anywhere, except chopsticks. Even the teaspoon was porcelain. He wondered at first if it was some kind of subtle revenge against Vaulker, who thought chopsticks were heathen, but then realised that it was probably the electricity. If his cufflinks were getting too hot to wear, the silverware would be too hot to use.
With the cup warm between his hands, he watched the stablehands in the courtyard fitting out the good carriage with ribbons for the occasion. Once the coffee had wound up his springs enough, he fetched the paperwork about Grace Matsumoto. A single form to launch a full murder inquiry was forty pages long. He’d done most of it now, but he was having to come up with some creative lies to keep Matsumoto’s name out of it, and that had involved telegraphing Grace’s father, Lord Carrow, in London. The reply wouldn’t come for a few hours yet at least, with the time difference. Thaniel had signed it just as ‘British legation, Tokyo’. His own name wouldn’t do any good.
Hands landed on his shoulders. He jumped.
‘Easy! I hate to interrupt you with sublunary considerations, but is that a murder investigation? And is it someone delicious and interesting?’
‘Standard practice for when a citizen goes missing,’ he said, as someone with a carnation in his buttonhole sat down and stole the rest of the milk. Feeling grateful for the interruption, Thaniel decided it probably counted as an honour to have your milk stolen by the Minister for Education.
Arinori spent a lot of unnecessary time at the legation, which he used like a gentlemen’s club; he’d been the ambassador in London five years ago and he had a horror, he said, of letting his English slide. Thaniel thought he did it mainly to annoy conservatives. Kuroda hated the Anglicisation of hats, never mind the government. ‘You know,’ Arinori said, ‘you could be handsome if you didn’t cut your hair like a sailor.’
‘What are you doing here?’ said Thaniel, who cut his hair like a sailor because it meant having it cut less often.
‘I stayed the night. I was writing a speech.’ Arinori dipped his fingertip into his coffee, then into the icing sugar, and sucked it pensively.
‘Oh, a speech. Abolishing kanji still?’
‘I’d have thought you’d be for the idea.’
‘What, because I’m a stupid gaijin?’
‘Well, yes,’ Arinori said. ‘You have smaller brains. Look at you, you weren’t made to write, you were made to nut a mammoth.’
Thaniel stole the milk back. ‘But it wouldn’t help foreigners or anyone learn, would it, to write Japanese in Roman letters? Niwa niwa niwa niwa ga iru.’ In the garden are two chickens. ‘How are you going to know if you’re talking about a garden or a chicken if you don’t have the pictographs? Or tell the difference between jishin like confidence and jishin like an earthquake, or your nose or a flower … or any of the other fourteen million identical words you never phonetically differentiated because the entire language is nicked from Chinese but you couldn’t be bothered with the tones?’
‘That was quite a good rant. Did you practise on the mammoths?’
‘The speech isn’t about kanji, is it.’
‘No, it’s about the sovereignty of the Emperor.’ Arinori smiled. ‘Anyway. How are you?’
‘Not bad,’ Thaniel said. ‘What about this weather, though?’ Now that he’d said it, he wondered what was going on in the kitchen. They’d been so adamant about the fires that he couldn’t imagine the ovens were running. But here they were with hot coffee and pastries.
Arinori moved his cup to one side and collapsed face-first on the table. ‘I’ve died of boredom. You’ll have to apologise to my wife.’
‘I’ll send some flowers,’ Thaniel said, starting to laugh. Arinori made friends with the lower orders like other people kept hamsters or songbirds; he looked in on them every now and then to see if they were doing anything interesting, and if they weren’t, he tickled them.
‘I’m determined to get to the bottom of you and your mysteries.’
‘I’m not mysterious,’ said Thaniel, surprised.
‘Where did you learn Japanese then? Your gorgeous, Imperial, courtly Japanese which you could have learned only from one of a handful of people who both speak like that and have been to London, all of whom I know?’
Thaniel smiled. ‘I think I’d better protect him from you, don’t you?’
‘You are No Fun. That can be your Chinese name.’
There was a skitter against the window. The snow was coming down fast now, and even since Thaniel had sat down, a new layer had sifted over the courtyard. Thunder rumbled from the south, over Fuji, a deep snarl that came up through the floor as much as down from the sky. Everyone looked around and up at the big windows over the garden.
Arinori made an unwilling sound. ‘I’d better get changed. Many unearned medals to put on before the whatsit.’ He looked nervous, and Thaniel realised that he had been trying to distract himself. The cabinet had been compiling the new Constitution for years, but in the last few months there had been shouting matches at the Palace if even half of what the papers said was true.
‘You’ll be fine,’ Thaniel said. ‘Although – careful of the medals. Anything metal is getting a bit hot.’
‘Oh, hence your boring poverty-stricken cufflinks on our day of constitutionally significant days, I see.’ Arinori pursed his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth. ‘I must say, this electricity is passing beyond the bounds of fun and into inconvenient.’
Thaniel agreed and went to see what was going on in the kitchen. Looking cheerful, Mrs Nakano pointed out the heap of cutlery glowing in the open stove, the kettle nestling among it, steaming. Thaniel went out to buy some blank bullets and spent a happy ten minutes with Pringle tying them up in handkerchiefs. They were heavy, but they made excellent hand-warmers.
TWENTY-SIX
When the carriages arrived, they cut black lines through the snow. Arinori came down nervously early to watch the stable-boys putting the last fittings on the horses, a heavy coat on over his state clothes. Thaniel went to wait with him and persuaded him to come just inside, into the empty office. The junior diplomats had the day off and everyone was still taking their time over breakfast.
While they waited, he composed the weekly telegram to Fanshaw in his head. Yes, they’re still seeing ghosts, no they still won’t tell me if something else is going on; meanwhile, we’re using hot cutlery for cooking now and I’m imagining people sitting in my fireplace.
He looked back, surprised, when Mrs Vaulker touched his sleeve and drew him aside.
‘I’m afraid Tom’s ill,’ she murmured. ‘It’s the cold. You won’t mind going instead?’
‘He’s not ill, is he, he just doesn’t want to go,’ Thaniel said, a little irritated and a little amused that Vaulker felt the need to deploy his heavy guns.
‘He’s too proud to admit that he has bad nerves,’ she said, inclining her head, unimpressed. ‘He served in Africa, you know. He’s been fretting all night. The fires debacle hardly helped.’
Thaniel lifted his eyebrows. ‘It wouldn’t really matter if he’d just lost an arm; he needs to turn up to this thing. People will notice if he’s not there. And I notice you did light a fire this morning.’
‘Well, he isn’t going, I’ve forbidden it, and if you don’t go, then nobody will.’
Pringle appeared in the doorway of the translation office. ‘Ah, sir, I wonder if you know how to tie a—’
‘Pringle, it’s a tie, not atomic theory,’ Thaniel said, because Pringle knew exactly how to tie a bow tie but asked unnecessary que
stions when he was anxious. Thaniel didn’t like answering them seriously. It seemed patronising.
‘Sorry sir,’ Pringle said, looking soothed. He was going out to see the parades with the lady who’d sold him the silk shirt.
‘I think that boy might have your name tattooed on his chest,’ Mrs Vaulker said sweetly.
‘If Mr Vaulker doesn’t go,’ Thaniel said, trying to scrub the image off his mind and failing completely, ‘the second page of all the papers tomorrow will be about how the British missed the ceremonies. All he needs to do is sit in a carriage to the parade, stand for an hour and then come back. I’ll go with him if that would be better, but—’
‘If it’s so easy then you’ll be perfectly all right by yourself,’ she interrupted.
‘They’ll notice at Whitehall. He wants Berlin, doesn’t he?’
‘Carriage’s here,’ Arinori said. He had kept a polite distance, but he must still have heard everything, despite having pretended to be concentrating on his cigarette. The smoke drifted towards them in the draught from under the door, woody and warm. ‘Where’s – aha,’ he sang, because his wife Akiko had just come around the corner. She had a camera with her; she was a journalist for The Times.
‘Unearthed that actress from the coalshed?’ Arinori said cheerfully.
‘You’re sneering,’ his wife said, ‘but I guarantee Kuroda’s murdered both of them.’
‘What are they saying?’ Mrs Vaulker asked, a little sharp. ‘Are they talking about Tom?’
‘No, they’re talking about a …’ Thaniel stopped. ‘Arinori. What was that about Kuroda?’
‘Oh, we think he might have vanished an actress and a glamorous nobleman, but there’s a press embargo and obviously Akiko is now only all the keener,’ Arinori said wryly. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had a single conversation at home since New Year that has not in some way involved Takiko Pepperharrow.’
‘Like it or not, my dear, famous actresses and their husbands vanishing is news much more than ministers huffing at each other,’ said his wife. She had a fur coat over a gorgeous kimono, but Western boots, which she was tapping together now to knock off the snow.
‘Sorry,’ said Thaniel, ‘but I – you said Kuroda might have killed them both?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘It’s all very hush-hush and no one’s admitting anything, but—’
‘I know them.’ Thaniel interrupted without meaning to. ‘I mean – I know her husband. I came here with him.’
Arinori pointed at him. ‘Scoundrel. He taught you Japanese. I knew it was someone good.’
His wife sharpened, attentive. ‘How do you mean, you came here with him?’
‘What in the world is going on?’ Mrs Vaulker demanded.
Thaniel should have been dragging Vaulker down the stairs by the back of his shirt, but he had no idea when he was going to see Arinori again.
‘Sorry, yes. I’m going,’ he said to Mrs Vaulker, who looked suspicious to have such a sudden and unexpected victory. ‘See you in a few hours.’
As they left the embassy district, the buildings became more and more traditional, all wood and paper. Open doors let out cooking steam and light into the deep gloom of the morning, and tiny snatches of the people inside. The roads followed a long curve, skirting the Palace moat. Every now and then the water gleamed black through a gap between houses. There were rivermen out despite the holiday, poling barges beneath single paper lamps. Under the storm clouds, the dark hadn’t quite gone away. It felt like evening. Purple banners hung everywhere.
‘How could they have disappeared?’ Thaniel asked Arinori’s wife. ‘People would know. She’s – quite famous. Isn’t she?’
‘Well, the actors at her theatre say she’s on holiday, but no one knows where,’ she said. ‘When you say you know Keita Mori …?’
‘But then why don’t you think they’re on holiday?’ Thaniel pressed.
‘How much do you know about what Mori used to do here?’ she asked.
‘Um – he was civil service. An intelligence officer.’
She and Arinori both laughed.
‘No, he ran every intelligence officer in Japan. And then he went to live in England. Everyone thought he defected. And then back he comes, just as the Russians begin to look like they might invade. Now, call me cynical, but no pragmatic Prime Minister – and Kuroda is the most pragmatic man I’ve ever met – would let such a person wander about free to chat to whoever he likes. Either he’s dead or Kuroda has him somewhere,’ Arinori said.
‘Could I interview you, later?’ his wife asked Thaniel.
‘What? No,’ said Thaniel, with a shot of fear that he had to scramble to cover over. ‘I don’t know him that well, I just rented the spare room. Has Kuroda said something?’
‘No. And he hasn’t started any kind of investigation. If he didn’t already know what was going on, he would have started a manhunt.’
‘But really it’s the fact that Takiko Pepperharrow has vanished too that persuades me,’ Arinori said. ‘She owns the Shintomi-za. That’s like our version of the Royal Opera House,’ he added when Thaniel looked blank. ‘If she thought anything had happened to Mori, it would have been on a stage inside a week. She doesn’t care about injunctions.’
Thaniel hesitated. In the small quiet, the driver’s voice reached them, trying to soothe the horses, whose hoofbeats were getting more and more skittish. The carriage bobbed, and slewed them to the left. ‘Well – all right, but even spies and actresses go on holiday. You still haven’t said why you think they haven’t.’
Arinori glanced at his wife.
She nodded. ‘Because of their house. You can’t get in. Can’t get near it. There’s a police cordon, and when I tried to go, I was firmly escorted away by a man who said he was with a gas company. Some kind of problem, dangerous, they’re fixing it, but I went to see the gas company. Yoruji isn’t even connected to their lines.’
‘That hasn’t been in the papers,’ Thaniel said incredulously.
She drew an imaginary needle through her lips. ‘Court order. We can’t print it. A man barged into the office to tell us so.’
Thaniel could only stare at her. If she’d told him that somebody had stolen his own left arm, it wouldn’t have been much stranger.
‘Did you notice anything strange, when you were with Mori?’ she said.
‘He and Kuroda were fighting. I couldn’t tell why. He made out like it was nothing, but …’ Thaniel shook his head. ‘He looked scared, but he wouldn’t tell me what was happening. Then my contract at the legation started. I’ve not seen him since.’
‘You know I really would like to hear what was going on,’ Akiko said. ‘I don’t have to use your name, you can be an anonymous source.’
‘I can’t, I’m diplomatic staff. Anyone who was there would work out who I was. Kuroda included.’
‘We could pay.’
‘I can’t,’ he said again.
‘Only you seem very worried, for someone who claims to hardly know the man. If something bad is going on and we print this, it might help. The injunction won’t hold if Kuroda’s using it to cover something illegal.’
Thaniel had to clench his hands. She was right, perhaps it would help, but Kuroda would know who the source was instantly. One telegram to Whitehall, and Thaniel was in an asylum forever, and Six would be sent God knew where. ‘I don’t really know him,’ he said. ‘I’m just surprised.’
She leaned across and gave him her card and an encouraging look, but she didn’t push any more.
‘What I find interesting is that it’s not just Keita and Takiko,’ Arinori murmured. ‘People are disappearing all over the place. Half the pamphleteers in Tokyo are suddenly missing. A shedload of scientists, too. There are injunction papers everywhere.’
‘I had someone come in the other day looking for his wife,’ Thaniel agreed, desperately glad to be even slightly off the topic of Mori. ‘She’s a physicist.’
‘A woman physicist?’ Arinori said doubtf
ully. ‘Like a pretend one?’
Akiko hit him.
‘A rich white woman,’ Thaniel explained.
‘Oh! You mean Grace Matsumoto, don’t you? I didn’t know she’d gone missing – what’s happened?’
‘Her husband doesn’t know. Someone came after him with a baseball bat when he tried to find out.’
‘Someone went after Baron Matsumoto with a baseball bat?’
Thaniel nodded. ‘He was shaken up.’
‘Kuroda’s going to go full tyrant any day now,’ Arinori growled.
Thaniel had to look out of the window. His reflection was older than he was. A police cordon and a court order. They couldn’t be dead. Mori wouldn’t have done that. Not without saying something.
Only, if he were going to do something like that, he would absolutely do it without saying anything. Thaniel would have lifted him bodily back onto a ship straight to England if he’d got so much as an inkling of it.
He didn’t know he had been sitting with his hand pressed over his mouth until Arinori leaned forward and brushed his arm.
‘Are you all right?’ Arinori said quietly.
He said something incoherent about the electricity hurting his teeth.
They were rounding a bend, which brought the horses into view through the window. One of them was chafing. He frowned when he saw a spark. Blue light trailed from the tips of their ears and the edges of the reins. He watched it for a while, not sure if he was seeing a reflection or something real.
One of the horses reared and the carriage swung hard.
The door snapped open by itself and flung him out. He landed in the road, which hurt less than it could have, because they hadn’t reached the cobblestone stretch yet, but his head smacked into the base of a telegraph pole. Through bursts of white, he saw the carriage jack-knife. Everything seemed to hang still for a long time. Later, he could remember how the silver studs on the harnesses were winking in the blue fire that trailed the horses’ ears and tails, and the odd stormlight behind the clouds that wasn’t quite lightning. He dragged himself up and ran to catch the nearest set of reins. The driver yelled at him to get back, but though he saw it, a flash of orange, he didn’t hear it. He didn’t remember hearing anything. He put his arms up to catch the horse’s blinkered eyes and then snatched the reins to drag it back down. He pulled open the buckles on the harness until the first horse was free to run, then the other. They crashed past and charged down the road, hooves still sparking, blue fire in their tails. He stood still in the road and began to feel the bruises down his side and the sting in his hands. When he looked down, there were strap marks across his palms from the reins. A silver noise was still whining inside his head.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Page 22