Wada still felt safe, reasoning no one could know where she was. But she was aware that could change when she met Caldwell. His affiliations and intentions were unknown. Plenty of people might know where he was. Their rendezvous was a moment of risk.
But it was a risk she had to take.
She entered the British Museum at ten o’clock, brandishing a Japanese language guidebook to London she’d bought at Narita airport. She wandered round a few rooms full of ancient statues. A memory surfaced of walking round the same rooms with Hiko, but the memory felt so distant it could have belonged to someone else, not Wada as she was now. She went to the café specified by Caldwell – not the main one, in the Great Court, but the small Montague Café near the museum’s rear entrance. There she sat sipping green tea and leafing conspicuously through her book. No one paid her the smallest amount of attention. This was reassuring in its way. She’d always been someone others found easy to disregard. And, just now, being disregarded was what she preferred to be.
She kept an eye out for a solitary middle-aged Englishman matching her mental picture of Martin Caldwell as ten thirty came and went and became ten forty.
No solitary middle-aged men of any nationality came in. No one glanced meaningfully in her direction. She checked her phone, to see if Caldwell had sent her a message saying he’d be late. He hadn’t. She sent him a message of her own. Where are you? There was no reply.
And there was no Caldwell.
She’d flown thousands of miles to meet this man. To learn what he knew about Peter Evans and the death of Shitaro Masafumi.
But she wasn’t going to meet him. Not here. Not now. By eleven o’clock, she knew, though she stayed another half an hour. He wasn’t coming.
There was still no message.
She walked out into the courtyard at the front of the museum, turning over in her mind all the contingent possibilities at play. Kodaka was dead. Was Caldwell dead too? Everything seemed and felt normal, this spring morning in London. Pigeons. Tourists. Red buses. Grey clouds.
But something wasn’t normal. Something had happened. And might still be happening. Beyond her grasp. Out of her control. The file was going to take at least a couple of days to reach her. Until then, she knew nothing. She was helpless. And quite possibly in danger as well.
Think, she told herself. Reason it through. It was what her father had often told her to do with a troublesome piece of school homework. He’d tap the side of her head and say, ‘You have a brain in there. Use it.’
She pulled her shoulders back and strode out through the gates into Great Russell Street. She was alone. She was vulnerable. But she wasn’t resourceless.
And she wasn’t giving up.
SIX
NICK COULDN’T SETTLE to anything, certainly not the landscape he was trying to finish in Kate’s absence. The mystery of Martin Caldwell’s intentions and the hint of defensiveness in April’s account of their time together in Exeter niggled away at him. Until, by Tuesday morning, he’d decided to do whatever he could to find out more about Caldwell before meeting him.
Tuesday morning was Pilates morning for April. He took a guess on the timing, reckoning he could come up with some kind of cover story if she hadn’t left by the time he arrived or came back while he was still there. But since, as he recalled, she usually adjourned to a coffee shop in Catford Broadway afterwards with some of her classmates, he was confident he’d have the place to himself.
And he was right. As he let himself in after the short drive from Greenwich, he knew at once that the house was empty. And silent. Though, if he let it, the silence would fill with memories of his mother’s voice.
He went up to her bedroom. There were still strands of her hair in a brush, though whether April had left them there deliberately or not he couldn’t have said. He willed himself not to be sucked into thinking about such things.
He’d come for the old hatbox Caro kept at the bottom of her wardrobe, containing not a hat but cards, letters and messages received from friends and relatives during her illness, including daubed paintings of smiling faces from her niece’s four-year-old daughter. It was a poignant collection. And, somewhere in it, Nick felt sure, was the letter Miranda Cushing had sent her a few months before her death.
‘Don’t tell April Miranda’s written to me, Nicky,’ Caro had said to him when he popped round one afternoon and she showed him the letter. ‘She’ll have a fit. She’s always thought she was some kind of traitor to the class struggle for accepting a peerage.’
‘You were pretty down on her yourself,’ Nick had said.
Caro had smiled gently at him. He could picture her smile exactly, and the way the sunlight shafting through the window had fallen across it. ‘Letting politics come between friends seems ever so slightly ridiculous when you look at the world from my current situation.’
‘What does she say in the letter?’
‘Oh, what everyone says. How sorry they are. How much they hope I’ll be better soon. She’s not really a bad person. I haven’t actually met many of those. Still, vellum paper and an embossed letterhead would be too much for April. So, can it be our little secret?’
‘Sure.’
Caro had held the letter out for him to see. He’d glimpsed large, curlicued handwriting and an address in SW10. ‘She talks about the crazy times we had when we were all living together in Exeter. God, we were young then. And we did some stupid things. Some were worse than …’
Her words had tailed off there. She had fallen silent and leant back thoughtfully against the cushion behind her. Her gaze had drifted to the window. And the blur of sunlight beyond it.
When, eventually, she’d looked back at him, all she’d said was, ‘Why don’t you make some tea, Nicky? Camomile for me.’
And there was the letter, in his hand again. With address, telephone and email details printed at the top. His eye drifted down across the sentences.
I was really sorry to hear … I know we’ve had our differences … It seems desperately sad to me now that we let political disagreements come between us … I often think about the year we all lived together in Exeter … There are a lot of memories tied up in 18 Barnfield Hill, aren’t there – the good, the bad and the downright incredible? … Can you believe all that madness was more than forty years ago? … Do you ever think about Peter and Alison? … Do you ever wonder if it could have turned out differently? … You don’t have to reply to this letter … I just want you to know you’re in my heart, Caro.
Nick had intended merely to lift Miranda’s contact details from the letter, but after reading it he decided to take it with him. Certainly April didn’t want it. She probably didn’t even know it existed.
Back in his car, after pondering the matter for a few moments, he decided to chance his arm. He rang the mobile number printed on the letter.
Unsurprisingly, it went to voicemail. ‘This is Nick Miller. Caro’s son. We met … well, a long time ago. I’m hoping … Well, I need to talk to you about Martin Caldwell and I know Caro was very touched by the letter you sent her a few months before she died and I thought you’d be able to help me understand what’s going on with Martin. He’s contacted me, you see, and, er … Well, it’d be really great if you could spare me a few minutes on the phone. I’ll hope to hear from you.’
The landline number went unanswered as well. Nick recorded a slightly better organized version of the same message. He wondered if Miranda would decide to ignore him. A sympathetic letter to a dying friend was one thing. Getting involved with the friend’s unknown quantity of a son after her death was quite another. He looked at the heading on the paper. Miranda, Baroness Cushing. That would have been a red rag to a bull where April was concerned.
He’d started the car and was about to move off when his phone rang. It was Miranda.
‘Nick. How nice to hear from you. And surprising.’ She sounded unfazed by his call. Her voice had the firmness of someone who’d given more than a few speeches in her time.
<
br /> ‘I’m sure it must be a surprise, yes. Thanks for calling back.’
‘No problem. I’m sorry I wasn’t at Caro’s funeral. I just thought … it might be difficult.’
‘Caro always thought of you as a friend.’
‘I know. She phoned me. Not long after I wrote to her. We had a good chat. But she warned me April was still sticking pins in my effigy.’
‘She has her principles.’
‘I wouldn’t argue with that. Anyway, I gather you didn’t call about April.’
‘No. Martin Caldwell.’
‘Has he been bothering you?’
‘Not exactly. But he wants to meet me and, well …’
‘He came to see me recently. He was in a bit of a strange state. Nothing new there, to be honest.’
‘Why did he come to see you?’
‘I think he’s lonely. Simple as that. Did he give you some special reason for meeting?’
‘Yes. But, er, I wanted to check him out beforehand with someone who knew him when he was a student.’
‘He’s harmless. Good-hearted, in his way. A bit prone to fantasizing, that’s all.’
‘Fantasizing about the past?’
‘Is it the past he wants to talk to you about?’
‘Yes. Something to do with … my father. Geoff Nolan.’
‘Well, you certainly shouldn’t believe everything he says. About Geoff or anyone else. When are you meeting him?’
‘Late this afternoon.’
‘Mmm.’ Miranda paused for thought. Then she said, ‘It’d be nice for us to meet, don’t you think? You could tell me all about yourself. I’d like that.’
‘OK.’
‘Can you make it to Chelsea for lunch? There’s a lovely Italian just round the corner from me.’
Miranda Cushing – Baroness Cushing – was tall and elegant, with delicately tinted hair, blue-grey eyes, high cheekbones and a mischievous smile. She was waiting for Nick when he reached the restaurant, where ladies who lunch were in some abundance. Her clothes looked expensive and she wore them well. She was halfway through a glass of Prosecco and more or less insisted he have the same.
Even if Nick had wanted to dislike Miranda for April’s sake, it wouldn’t have been easy. She had a ready laugh and a self-deprecating twinkle in her gaze. She seemed genuinely interested in what he’d done with his life and was disarmingly frank about what she’d done with hers: early marriage and divorce – from an Italian, which explained her fluency when ordering from the menu – single motherhood, politics – with more than a hint that she’d backed whatever policies were calculated to advance her career – and now part-time participation in the House of Lords, leaving her a lot of free time in which to enjoy herself, which Nick had the impression she was adept at doing.
When he showed her a few of his paintings on his phone, she noted the stylistic resemblance to Morandi. This only confirmed him in the belief that she was hiding a wide-ranging intelligence behind a frivolous façade, heightening his interest in what she had to say about the Exeter household she’d been a part of in her student days.
‘It was a long time ago,’ she began, as a third glass of wine lubricated her memory. ‘We were young. We were wild. It’s not a new story. There was a lot of bed-hopping and dope-smoking. We were badly behaved boys and girls. And most of the time it was enormous fun. I’m sure Caro and April must have told you what sort of scene it was. And what they haven’t told you I expect you’re able to imagine, based on your own time at university. Where did you go?’
‘Liverpool.’
‘Where you didn’t lead a monastic existence, I assume.’
‘Not exactly, no.’
She looked thoughtful. ‘I can’t really imagine what Marty plans to tell you about Geoff.’
‘What can you tell me?’
‘Well, he was very good-looking. My mother would have called him dashing. In fact, I think that’s what she did call him after catching sight of him on graduation day. Definitely dishy. Girls flocked to him. But he never knew where to stop – with anything. I mean, we smoked a lot of cannabis, as I say. But Geoff moved on to cocaine. And he got hold of some LSD at one point. He did drugs the way he drank. To excess. I couldn’t keep up with him. Neither could anyone else for long. When I heard how he died, it wasn’t a huge surprise. He had a self-destructive streak that was part of his attraction. But you couldn’t rely on him or trust him or expect him to think about anyone except himself.’ Miranda shrugged. ‘Sorry.’
‘No need to apologize. I’ve heard it before.’
‘I never knew Caro had a thing with him, even though I was under the same roof at the time, until she told me years later he was your father. It can’t have lasted long. Just long enough to produce you, I guess. It wouldn’t have meant anything to Geoff, I’m afraid. That’s how he was.’
‘So what’s Martin Caldwell going to be able to add?’
‘God knows. He and Geoff didn’t get on very well, as I recall.’
‘How many people lived in the house?’
‘Eight. There were three floors and lots of bedrooms.’
‘So you, Caro, April, Martin, Geoff. Plus?’
‘Well, there was Vinod. Vinod Hardekar. His curries were something else. He became an accountant, I think. We lost touch.’
‘In his phone call, Martin mentioned Peter Ellery and Alison Parker.’
‘Yes. They were the other two.’ She grew momentarily solemn. ‘The two who didn’t make it.’
‘Didn’t make it?’
‘They drowned. Early June, 1977. Not long before the end of term. It was a terrible thing. I often think of them, Alison in particular. She had so much life in her it’s hard to believe it was over at twenty-one. Haven’t you ever heard about this from Caro and April?’
‘No. Not a word.’
‘Well, it was a painful episode. I suppose they thought it was best forgotten.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was a bank holiday weekend. In fact, Tuesday was a holiday as well, for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. I wasn’t there. I’d taken off to France for a few days with my latest boyfriend. Anyway, Peter, Alison and Marty decided to go down to Cornwall. A spur-of-the-moment thing. That was on the Sunday. Peter had a camper van. He was older than the rest of us. Did I mention that?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. Well, actually Peter owned the house. He’d inherited it from his parents when they were killed in a car crash. He’d been to Cambridge. Quite the brainbox. He was doing a master’s degree at Exeter. Don’t ask me what in. Something ancient historical. Probably Oriental. He could speak Japanese. He even had some books in Japanese. Which I always thought odd, because he once told me his father had been a prisoner of the Japanese during the war. But then he was odd, in lots of ways. Still, he didn’t charge us any rent. We just chipped in to cover the utility bills. So … no one was complaining. Least of all Alison.’
‘They were an item?’
‘Towards the end, yes. Much to Marty’s chagrin. He had the hots for Alison. I suppose that’s why he went to Cornwall with them. To see if he could prise them apart.’
‘How did they drown?’
‘No one exactly knows. They were drunk. They were high. They were on the beach. Night fell. They went in for a swim. Well, Peter and Alison went in. Marty had fallen asleep. They left him behind. After that … it’s anyone’s guess. But they didn’t come back. And two days later Alison’s body was washed up.’
‘What about Peter?’
‘His body was never found. It’s probably in a sea cave somewhere, trapped between rocks. And that’s always been the problem for Marty. Without a body, he’s never managed to convince himself Peter’s actually dead. I’m not sure he’s ever really wanted to.’
‘But you’re in no doubt?’
‘We were at first, of course. We all wondered if somehow he could have survived. But, if he had, where was he? And the longer it went on, well, the more obvious it became. He’d
drowned too.’
The conversation paused as their plates were removed. They asked for time before considering dessert.
‘A tragic accident is what it amounts to,’ said Miranda musingly. ‘But Marty’s never been happy to leave it at that. And now …’
‘Now what?’
‘This hasn’t got anything to do with your father, Nick. Geoff didn’t go on that Cornish jaunt. I guess Marty’s mentioned him because he thinks that’ll get you to listen while he sets out his latest theory. Maybe he hopes you’ll give it more credence than I did.’
‘And what is his latest theory?’
‘Somehow, he’s got hold of an advert that appeared in the Evening Standard back in the early nineties. A woman in Japan – yes, Japan – was seeking information about a young Englishman called Peter Evans who’d worked for her late father in London in September 1977. There was a photograph printed in the advert. Of Peter Evans. And, well, he looked a bit like Peter. Our Peter.’
Nick looked intently at her, studying her face to see what she believed in all of this. ‘You’re saying Peter Evans was Peter Ellery?’
‘I’m saying there was a resemblance. In a blurry newspaper photograph. That and the similarity of the names was enough to convince Marty Peter hadn’t drowned in Cornwall. He was alive and well three months later, working for a Japanese businessman in London.’
‘But what did you think?’
‘That I couldn’t be sure. The photograph just wasn’t distinct enough. It looked like a blow-up, cropped from some larger picture. Peter Evans had a beard. He was thinner than our Peter. He looked, I don’t know, a lot more than three months older. Plus I’ve got no photograph of Peter to compare it with. Marty has, but he hadn’t brought it with him to show me, which suggested to me he wasn’t confident it would stand up to examination. Exact memories of faces fade over the years, just like other memories. If I’d chanced on the newspaper photograph without Marty leaning over my shoulder, it wouldn’t have occurred to me it was Peter. But is that because I’m sure he drowned in Cornwall? Is it all down to what you want to believe?’
The Fine Art of Invisible Detection Page 5