The Fine Art of Invisible Detection

by Robert Goddard

‘Nick Miller.’ They shook hands.

  ‘Miller?’ Holgate’s eyes gleamed behind his glasses. ‘You’re the fellow Caldwell was supposed to meet in London a couple of days ago.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Mrs Takenaga told me. She listened to a message on Marty’s phone yesterday, apparently. From Baroness Cushing, no less.’

  ‘Really? Is Mrs Takenaga here?’

  ‘’Fraid not. She’s gone missing as well, actually. Discharged herself from the hospital early this morning. Well, walked out, more accurately.’

  ‘Hospital? Why was she in hospital?’

  ‘Long story.’

  ‘I’ve got time to hear it.’

  ‘And I’ve got time to tell it. It’s a strange thing, but …’ Holgate peered at Nick. ‘You remind me of someone.’

  ‘My mother, maybe. She lived here as well back then. Caroline Miller.’

  Holgate shook his head. ‘No, not her. It’s … What year were you born?’

  ‘1978.’

  ‘Ahah.’

  ‘Maybe it’s my father I remind you of. Geoff Nolan.’ Nick had never seen much of a resemblance in the photograph he had of his father, but maybe there was something he’d missed.

  ‘Geoff Nolan?’ Holgate rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Not very.’ But the expression on Holgate’s face suggested otherwise. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Look, why don’t you come inside? I’ll take you up to the Stapletons’ flat. They can explain better than me what happened here yesterday. And maybe you can do a bit of explaining yourself. There’s a lot to take in.’

  ‘There is?’

  Holgate nodded emphatically. ‘Oh yes. A hell of a lot.’

  The hotel manager was summoned to deal with Wada’s report that her room safe had been opened in her absence. He expended a lot of charm and effort in trying to persuade her that she must somehow be mistaken. Perhaps she’d programmed it wrongly. Perhaps she hadn’t programmed it at all. He then reminded her of the notice in the room denying responsibility for the loss of valuables not deposited in the hotel’s own safe at reception. Finally, he put it to her plainly. Did she wish to contact the police and report a theft?

  Wada pondered the question for several seconds and decided against it. ‘Perhaps I was mistaken,’ she said through gritted teeth. Which pleased the manager. But left her in several quandaries. The contents of the laptop would actually tell whoever had taken it nothing about Wada’s current activities. It was, nevertheless, clear they knew where she was staying, which she’d hoped they didn’t. She was more vulnerable than ever. And in greater danger than ever. Somehow, she had to protect herself.

  Her first inclination was to book out of the hotel straight away. But she couldn’t do that before the parcel arrived from Dobachi. Her head was swimming as she left the manager’s office.

  She took a couple of paracetamols and sat in one of the oversized leather armchairs in the hotel’s gleamingly marbled lobby. Time passed. But her anxiety didn’t. She picked up a copy of the Financial Times that was lying on the table in front of her and turned to the shares page. Nishizaki were one of the FT500, priced at ¥10574, up slightly on the week, the only Japanese stock listed that had gone up rather than down.

  Who was Wada kidding? Nishizaki was unchallengeable, certainly by the likes of her. She might as well—

  That was when the reception clerk materialized beside her, smiling broadly, and announced that a package had just arrived for her.

  They went to the desk, where the clerk handed her the parcel. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Could you prepare my bill, please? I’m going up to clear my room, then I’ll be checking out.’ The decision, now she’d taken it, seemed inevitable, even though her plan for what to do next was still barely half formed in her mind.

  ‘You’re leaving us today?’

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  As Holgate had said, there was a hell of a lot for Nick to take in. The Stapletons sympathized with him in that respect, having learnt more about Martin Caldwell in the previous twenty-four hours than they had in all the years of being his close neighbours. They described the events following Mimori Takenaga’s arrival on their doorstep the day before and Barry Holgate recounted how he’d followed up the deaths of Peter Ellery and Alison Parker as a reporter in June 1977. If Nick now understood why Mrs Takenaga had answered Caldwell’s phone, there was much he still didn’t understand, but he wasn’t alone in that either.

  The Stapletons had heard nothing from the police. According to Holgate’s contact on the Force, however, the search for the intruder – described by Mrs Takenaga as an unusually tall Japanese man – was continuing, despite no reported sightings of him after leaving the house. As for Mrs Takenaga herself, it was assumed she’d gone back to London. ‘I don’t think this case is being given much priority,’ Wally Stapleton complained. ‘These days, a burglar has to murder you in your bed for the boys in blue to take much notice.’

  ‘It’s complicated but not serious.’ Holgate treated them to a cynical smile. ‘So I’m afraid it probably won’t get much attention.’

  ‘They won’t even be looking for Martin, as far as I can tell,’ lamented Joan Stapleton. ‘Not missing, they say. Just away from home.’

  ‘The answer to all this,’ said Holgate with a degree of relish he couldn’t quite disguise, ‘goes back forty-two years. I’m certain of that.’

  ‘And what is the answer?’ asked Nick.

  ‘Ah, well, there you’ve got me. But I reckon it must be something to do with you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You said Caldwell had information he wanted to give you about your father. Because of something that happened recently.’

  ‘That’s certainly what he said.’

  ‘Why don’t we pop up to his flat and see if there’s anything we can spot that might give us a clue?’

  ‘Not sure about that,’ objected Wally. ‘The police put crime scene tape across the door and told us to keep out.’

  ‘But you’ve got the key?’

  ‘Yeah. Mrs Takenaga gave it back to me. But …’

  ‘We won’t disturb anything. You can come with us if you like and make sure we tread carefully.’

  ‘Can’t see as it can do any harm,’ said Joan.

  Her approval seemed to swing it for Wally. ‘All right, then. Let’s go.’

  Stooping under the blue and white police tape was easier for Nick than his two companions. Holgate, who was about as nimble as an ironing board, needed a helping hand to manage it. Once inside Caldwell’s flat, they found few signs of the previous day’s events. The desk in the study had been put back the right way up, with the telephone standing on it, apparently undamaged, although close inspection of the flex wound round it revealed the broken jackplug. The lamp Mrs Takenaga had hit the intruder with and the documents that had fallen out of the plastic bag Mrs Stapleton had seen him carrying had been taken away by the police as evidence, along with the empty box.

  This was a big disappointment to Holgate, who’d hoped to find the cuttings of his old newspaper articles waiting for him. But they’d gone. And the remaining boxes didn’t appear to hold anything of interest. The locked filing cabinet promised to be a different matter, but, without the key, they could make no progress there. Otherwise, the flat contained Caldwell’s furniture, books, videos, DVDs, records and CDs. There were no pictures on the walls. There were no framed photographs standing around. The bookcase was filled with crime fiction paperbacks. The record cabinet revealed his musical taste was frozen in the 1970s.

  ‘Seen enough?’ asked Wally when they’d run out of rooms to prowl around.

  ‘Guess so,’ Holgate agreed.

  ‘Haven’t you got a collection of your old cuttings, Barry?’ Nick asked as they left the flat.

  ‘Not as comprehensive a collection as it sounds like Caldwell had.’

  ‘Why did he keep them, do you think?’

  ‘Ah, b
ut were they his? There was Japanese writing on the box, according to Mrs Takenaga. And who do we know who lived here in 1977 who understood Japanese?’

  ‘Peter Ellery.’

  ‘Exactly. Mrs Takenaga never had the chance to study the exact dates of the cuttings. And Caldwell might have added some on his own account. But my bet is most of the contents of that box – the cuttings and all the other documents, whatever they were – belonged originally to Ellery.’

  ‘What’s my father got to do with any of this? He didn’t go on the trip to Nancekuke. Did you actually ever meet him?’

  ‘Geoff Nolan? No. I don’t think so. But maybe you’re asking the wrong question.’

  They’d reached the door of the Stapletons’ flat on the floor below. Nick looked at Holgate in puzzlement. ‘What’s the right question, then?’

  ‘Could you give me a lift back to my house? There’s something there you ought to see. I expected to find another … example of it … upstairs, but …’

  ‘An example of what?’

  ‘Just come and see, Nick. I think you’ll find it very … revealing.’

  Wada’s thoughts were only slightly better organized when she arrived at the internet café north of Oxford Street than they had been when she checked out of the Envoy. She had the parcel from Dobachi, unopened, in her bag, having decided to give immediate priority to Caldwell’s facetrail computer stick. Beyond that her mind was racing to assess what her best and safest options were. Her head still ached. And her brain’s strange tendency to lag a few fractions of a second behind her movements was still troubling her.

  She slid the stick into the computer and opened it. There were lots of email communications over the course of a couple of months between Caldwell and someone called Kirk Mosley at Facetrail. Many of the emails had attachments. Caldwell had engaged the company’s services to trace a man, referred to only as the Subject, missing, so far as Caldwell was concerned, since 1977. He had supplied Facetrail with a photograph and some biographical information. Born 1953. Educated Sherborne and Cambridge. Fluent in Japanese. It sounded as if the Subject could be Peter Evans. And it sounded as if Caldwell knew him well.

  Facetrail applied staged facial ageing processes to the photograph, producing plausible likenesses of the Subject at five-yearly intervals since his disappearance. At the same time they trawled a vast range of pictorial images available on the internet in search of men of the right age, appearance and qualifications. Within weeks, they had begun supplying Caldwell with candidates, noting the degree of likelihood in each case, which was never high. Caldwell ruled out each one with a stock response. Not him.

  Then, just a few weeks previously, the breakthrough came.

  Peter Driscoll. Right first name. Right age. Photographically a good match to the computer modelling. His background was vague, but that was actually an argument in his favour. His career was veiled in a certain amount of mystery as well. He was currently chairman and CEO of Quartizon, a company specializing in facilitating complex negotiations between organizations that preferred it not to be known they were negotiating at all. They had offices in Brussels, New York, Tokyo and London. The London office was described as being in a ‘discreet location’ in Mayfair.

  Caldwell responded differently this time. Could be him. Facetrail probed further and turned up a Japanese connection beyond the mere existence of a branch office in Tokyo. Quartizon was fifty per cent owned by … the Nishizaki Corporation.

  It was him. It had to be. And finally …

  Caldwell had given Facetrail the names of four friends of the Subject: Miranda Cushing, Vinod Hardekar, Caroline Miller, April Vyse. And Facetrail had scored a hit with one of those names.

  It was the woman who’d left a message on Caldwell’s phone: Miranda Cushing – Baroness Cushing as she now was – who had shared a house with Peter Ellery in 1977. She was paid by Quartizon as an occasional consultant, though what they consulted her about was unclear. Facetrail speculated it was for access to decision-making circles at Westminster.

  Whatever her exact role, Wada reckoned it made her a good choice for indirect communication with whoever had sent the man she’d encountered in Caldwell’s flat: Nishizaki, Driscoll, maybe both. And Caldwell had helpfully included her home address in the background information he’d supplied to Facetrail.

  Wada studied Baroness Cushing’s face in the photograph adorning her website. It was a very English face and she looked good for her age. Born 1956. Graduate of Exeter University. But there was nothing about her brush with activism while she was a student there.

  That was only to be expected. Wada saw … what was it: wariness, caution, cynicism? … behind the baroness’s relaxed smile. She always put her own best interests first. And yet she wasn’t wholly unreasonable. That was Wada’s conclusion. And it was one she proposed to take advantage of.

  She copied the contents of the stick on to another stick she’d bought on arrival at the internet café. Then she made an airline booking she could cancel if she needed to. And then she prised open the parcel from Dobachi.

  It held the kage-boshi file, as promised. It was dog-eared, which suggested Kodaka had consulted it frequently. The papers comprised notes in his recognizable scrawled hand, along with copies of emails and letters too, dating back years in some cases. Wada was going to have to give them her close attention. And she didn’t have time to do that now. She stowed them in her bag and set off.

  Barry Holgate lived in a semi-detached house in one of the eastern suburbs of Exeter. It was obvious from the street he was no gardener. And once indoors it was equally obvious to Nick he didn’t devote much time to housekeeping either. The photograph on the drawing room mantelpiece of a warm-eyed woman who might easily have been Mrs Holgate, combined with the sensed certainty she no longer lived there, suggested he was probably a widower. But Nick didn’t ask and Holgate didn’t say. They weren’t there to swap life stories.

  Holgate led the way upstairs to the spare bedroom he used as a study. It was lined with crammed-full bookcases and was clearly where he did the small amount of journalistic work he still engaged in. He pulled open a green steel-doored cabinet and heaved down off the top shelf one of a set of box files. The tattered label on its spine read Nancekuke.

  ‘I expect most of the cuttings I’ve got here were replicated in Caldwell’s collection – or Ellery’s, as I’m inclined to think of it,’ Holgate said as he laid the box file on the desk and opened it. ‘You can browse through them if you like. But you’ll be particularly interested in the article I had in the paper on …’ He slid his glasses to the end of his nose and flicked through yellowed clippings from the Western Morning News. ‘Here we are. Wednesday the eighth of June, 1977.’

  Nick took the cutting from him. The headline was Female student found drowned at Porthtowan – fears for life of male student also. He scanned the column below.

  The body of Alison Parker, 21, a student at Exeter University, was discovered on the beach at Porthtowan early yesterday morning by a woman walking her dog. A post mortem is being performed, but she is believed to have drowned. Fears have also been expressed for the life of another Exeter University student, Peter Ellery, 24, reported missing along with Miss Parker.

  A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police said a third Exeter University student, Martin Caldwell, 21, had been with them on the beach late on Sunday night, but had lost contact with them after falling asleep. He told police they had expressed the intention of ‘going for a swim’. All three had driven down from Exeter earlier in the day and had been seen drinking during the evening at the Victory Inn, Towan Cross. Tidal conditions along the coast west of Porthtowan are known to be hazardous for inexperienced swimmers. The spokesman added it was thought highly likely that Mr Ellery had also drowned.

  ‘Doesn’t sound particularly sinister, does it?’ said Holgate. ‘Drunken students getting into trouble late at night on a Cornish beach with tragic consequences. The editor wouldn’t let me add that Ellery and
Parker had both been arrested and cautioned for staging protests at Nancekuke, which is just a mile or so from Porthtowan. Caldwell was too frightened to say much at the time, but I never believed for a moment they’d gone all the way to Porthtowan for a midnight dip. There was more to it than that, starting with the police impounding Ellery’s camper van. But … there was nothing definite to go on.’

  ‘So you left it there?’

  ‘No. I spoke to Tom Noy, who’d been seen in the pub with them, though I didn’t mention that in the paper. Tight-lipped bugger, unless you wanted to hear about his lawsuit against the MoD. I got nothing out of him except the distinct impression he’d put Ellery and Parker up to something but wasn’t about to say what it was because they’d wound up dead and he’d land himself in a whole load of trouble by spilling the beans. Then I heard from one of my colleagues in our Plymouth office that a contact he had on the Nancekuke staff claimed a guard had suffered a supposedly accidental bullet wound while on duty at the base over the bank holiday weekend. Coincidence? I doubt it, don’t you?’

  ‘A guard was shot?’

  ‘That’s right. Accidentally. Officially.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘I’m suggesting Ellery and Parker broke into the base to follow up some lead Noy had given them and then … God knows exactly what happened, but it ended badly for them. There was serious stuff going on at Nancekuke at the time. You messed with it at your peril.’

  ‘You’re saying they were killed by guards at the base and one of the guards got shot in the process?’

  ‘How can I say that? Alison Parker drowned. She had serious head injuries according to the post mortem, but they weren’t inconsistent with being thrown against rocks after drowning. As for Peter Ellery, the police concluded he’d drowned too, but his body was never recovered. Washed out to sea, or trapped in a cave. That was the verdict. Which you knew nothing about until recently, because your mother never told you. I’ve got that right, haven’t I?’