‘Yes. You have.’
‘And according to her, Geoff Nolan was your father.’
‘Yes. What about it?’
‘This photograph.’ Holgate delved further in the box file and pulled out a large black-and-white print. ‘I didn’t keep the article it appeared with. But the date’s on the back.’ He turned it over. ‘Ninth of April, 1977. Easter Saturday. They set themselves up by the side of the Redruth to Portreath road.’ He handed the picture to Nick.
He recognized Caro and April at once from other pictures he’d seen of them in their early twenties. He recognized Martin Caldwell as well. And he took a guess the other two in the group of five were Peter Ellery and Alison Parker. They were standing on a grass verge beside a busy road, thick with seemingly stationary traffic. Caro and April were holding a banner mounted on two poles. The lettering on the banner was big and angry. YOU ARE ENTERING A CHEMICAL WARFARE ZONE. Alison – a blonde-haired, attractive young woman in jeans and a sweater – was handing out leaflets for passing motorists to take if they wanted to. Martin was next to her, doing the same.
The fifth member of the group, who had to be Peter Ellery, had a camera looped round his neck. He was gazing across the road, straight at the photographer. He looked calm but committed. His expression was somehow challenging and passive at the same time.
But it wasn’t his expression that caught Nick’s attention and held it fast. It was his face – the set of his features, the flop of his hair across his brow, the angle of his chin. It was instantly familiar.
‘I saw the resemblance the minute I opened the door to you at Barnfield Hill,’ said Holgate. ‘I’d call it pretty striking, wouldn’t you?’
‘This is Peter Ellery?’ Nick asked numbly.
‘Oh yes. That’s him.’
That was him. Peter Ellery, presumed drowned at twenty-four, in June 1977, eight months before Nick’s birth. Peter Ellery. His father. Not Geoff Nolan. But this man. Peter Ellery. Unmistakably.
TEN
BARONESS CUSHING LIVED in a large white-fronted house in an expensively quiet street in Chelsea. Wada asked the taxi to wait while she rang the doorbell. The result was as she’d feared: no response. That left her with no choice but to try the phone number Cushing had used to call Caldwell’s flat. Wada would much have preferred to seize whatever advantage she could from an unannounced face-to-face encounter, but there was nothing else for it now. Time was short.
Rather to her surprise, the call was answered with a brisk, ‘Hello?’
‘Baroness Cushing?’
‘Yes. Who’s this?’
‘I am the Japanese woman your friend Martin Caldwell was supposed to meet in London two days ago.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I think you do. Please don’t hang up. I have a proposal.’
‘A proposal?’
‘To solve our problem.’
‘We don’t have a problem.’
‘Yes we do. Martin Caldwell. Peter Ellery. Nancekuke. Shitaro Masafumi. I have … material … I am willing to surrender.’
Silence ruled at the other end of the phone for several stretched moments. Whatever Cushing was thinking, it was clear she was thinking hard.
‘Can we meet?’
‘I’m at Westminster. I’m very busy.’
‘It won’t take long.’
There was another long pause. Then she said, ‘Parliament Square. Half an hour. OK?’
Wada had barely got her own ‘OK’ out when the call was ended.
The pavement outside the Houses of Parliament was crowded with campaigners waving flags and banners. They were a loud and colourful symbol of the Brexit controversy Wada had read about in the newspapers. She supposed Baroness Cushing, as a member of the House of Lords, was playing some part in the continuing debate. But the taxi driver’s discontented muttering as he dropped her off didn’t suggest he’d be impressed if he knew what it was. ‘More crooks in there than Wormwood Scrubs,’ he growled.
Cushing hadn’t said where in Parliament Square they were to meet, but Wada crossed over to the green in the centre of the square, where it was slightly quieter and there were only tourists and passers-by to contend with.
She’d walked along one side of the green in the direction of Westminster Abbey and turned to retrace her steps when she saw a woman heading purposefully towards her who she guessed was Cushing even before she recognized her face. She was wearing a light wrap-coat and a colourful scarf. And the uptilt of her chin somehow combined dismissiveness with suspicion.
‘You must be Mimori Takenaga,’ she said as she approached.
‘You must know I am not.’
‘Do I? Marty said that was the name of the woman he was meeting.’
‘My name is Wada.’
‘Really? So what was Takenaga? A nom de plume?’
‘You said you were busy.’
‘I am.’
‘Me also. I have a plane to catch.’
‘Where are you flying to?’
‘New York. To visit my brother.’
‘How nice for him.’
Wada took the facetrail stick out of her pocket and handed it to Cushing. ‘Give that to Mr Driscoll.’
‘Who?’
‘Just pass it on. Please.’
‘I don’t know anyone called Driscoll.’
‘The stick belongs to Martin Caldwell.’
‘You stole it?’
‘I took it. Now … I want you to have it. For Mr Driscoll.’
‘No doubt you’ve kept a copy.’
‘I want Mr Driscoll to understand I am no threat to him. I am going to New York. For some time. I am … no longer doing any work on the Takenaga case. I am … out.’
‘Out?’
‘If he leaves me alone, I will leave him alone.’
‘That’s your offer?’
‘Yes.’
‘You do understand I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, Miss Wada, don’t you?’
‘Will you pass on my message?’
Cushing opened her handbag and dropped the stick into it. She gave Wada a strange little half-smile. ‘I hope you enjoy New York.’
‘So do I.’
‘Goodbye, then.’
Baroness Cushing turned and walked away. Wada watched her go. There was no glance back over her shoulder. If a deal had truly been done, it wasn’t one she wished to acknowledge.
And it wasn’t one, come to that, that Wada had any intention of honouring.
Wada walked slowly towards St James’s Park. She hailed the first free taxi she saw and asked to be taken to Heathrow airport. In the back of the cab, as it headed west through the city, she opened the kage-boshi file again and began to inspect the contents, this time in detail.
She was out over the Atlantic on a flight bound for New York before she’d got the measure of the information Kodaka had amassed about Hiroji Nishizaki and his business operations. Some of it was culled from cases he’d handled over the years: sokaiya operations, commercial espionage, missing persons; some appeared to be his own conclusions and speculations about Nishizaki’s activities based on an overview of those cases.
There wasn’t much doubt Kodaka thought Nishizaki had often engaged in illegal activities: bribery, blackmail, rigging of share prices, corrupt use of inside information. And there were suggestions of worse than this as well. Several missing person cases involving executives in companies Nishizaki had had dealings with had ended with the discovery of bodies floating in Tokyo Bay.
It looked to Wada as if Kodaka had started amassing information about Nishizaki after sensing his hand in a number of cases, and then, perhaps to his surprise, he’d found him everywhere, in reports and documents and obituaries and court rulings and police files, even though his name hadn’t actually appeared in any of them. Initially, it had only been by constant cross-reference that Kodaka had been able to make the connections. Then, at some ill-defined point, those connections had acquired a critical
mass of their own.
Nishizaki’s success appeared to be based on not being what the authorities instinctively looked for in commercially related crime. No known sokaiya groups were associated with him. He had nothing to do with yakuza. As far as they were to know, he was just a phenomenally accomplished entrepreneur.
But they hadn’t looked hard enough. They had no reason to. There was always something else to move on to.
Kodaka was a different matter. When Wada thought about him, as she did through that long flight into the night, she remembered both his stubbornness and his patience. He’d never give up. And he’d take as much time as it took. The kage-boshi file was a testament to that. The detail. The precision. The accuracy. Dates; times; names; places; links; associations; conclusions hinted at but never spelt out. Was it really Nishizaki’s shadow the file was named after? Or was Kodaka the one casting a shadow – a shadow over his prey?
If so, his prey had eventually noticed. And Kodaka had paid for that with his life. Wada knew what he’d say to her if he could. ‘Don’t make the same mistake.’ And she knew what she’d say to him. ‘I won’t.’ Yet here she was, reading the file, preparing, in all likelihood, to ignore his advice.
And there, contained in its own clear plastic wallet at the end of the file, was the clinching piece of information: the reason why, as Kodaka must have anticipated, she was bound to make the same mistake. Exactly the same mistake.
Yozo Sasada. The Aum Shinrikyo member who’d released sarin in the subway carriage her husband Hiko had been travelling in on the morning of 20 March 1995. Sasada had also been accused, but not convicted, of participating in the murder eight months previously of the Chijimatsu family, carried out by feeding sarin into the ducting of their air-conditioning system. The court hadn’t been able to identify any motive for Aum Shinrikyo to go after the Chijimatsus and had eventually dropped the charge.
Kodaka had decided to delve into Sasada’s background. As well as the background of Mitsugi Chijimatsu, head of the family. And there he’d found … Nishizaki.
Mitsugi Chijimatsu was a corporate lawyer who’d advised the targeted company in several failed takeover bids by the Nishizaki Corporation over the years. There was no hard and fast evidence on the point, but Kodaka clearly suspected this had made him a thorn in Nishizaki’s flesh.
As for Yozo Sasada, Kodaka’s researches established that before joining Aum Shinrikyo he’d worked in some junior capacity at a company part-owned by Nishizaki: Quartizon.
The circle was complete, a circle Kodaka had only ever seen part of but was now clear and stark in Wada’s mind. Peter Ellery; Peter Evans; Shitaro Masafumi; Hiroji Nishizaki; Yozo Sasada; Peter Driscoll. And in the middle of the circle: sarin.
Many of Wada’s fellow passengers were asleep by now. But she was alert in every fibre of her being. There was a connection. There was a thread woven over forty years. And her own husband’s death was part of the fabric.
She didn’t know what it all meant. She could see the shape of the secret, but not its pattern. Somehow Martin Caldwell had seen it too. He’d reasoned his way to the answer, or something close to it. And now he was at best a fugitive from Nishizaki, at worst another of his victims.
Wada could risk joining the list of those victims. Or she could run and hide and hope to be forgotten. But what would that achieve, for a solitary, newly unemployed forty-seven-year-old woman? Survival, obviously. But a survival full of regrets. She didn’t want that.
And she wasn’t going to have it.
The plane was late landing at JFK and it took Wada more than two hours to clear immigration and retrieve her suitcase. A cab carried her through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan she was familiar with from the imported American TV shows her father had loved to watch, and delivered her to the apartment block facing the Hudson river where her brother lived. It was an expensive address, suggesting he’d done well at Nomura, even though the apartment itself was small by American standards and would have looked smaller still if there’d been anything to fill it with. But Haruto didn’t appear to have accumulated many possessions since moving to New York, apart from a wardrobe’s worth of suits.
He greeted her affectionately but wearily. It was past midnight and he generally started early at the bank. There was little in the way of conversation, though he must have been puzzled by her arrival at such short notice. This didn’t surprise Wada. The key to their relationship had always been minimal inquisitiveness about each other’s lives – the secret of harmonious co-existence in the tiny house they’d grown up in. He didn’t even ask how long she planned to stay. If he had, his puzzlement would only have grown.
Realizing he’d never make it to Porthtowan before nightfall, Nick booked himself into a cheapish hotel on the outskirts of Newquay and did his best to ignore the holidaying families around him. He wandered into the town centre, ate something inauthentically Italian, and wandered back again. His mind was fixed on the mystery surrounding the man he knew now he had to think of as his father: Peter Ellery. There was going to come a time – and it was going to come soon – when April would have to explain the lie she and Caro had peddled to him. Meanwhile, Nick felt compelled to see the place where the official record of Peter Ellery’s life had ended, along with that of Alison Parker, forty-two years before.
There was no doubt, of course, that Alison Parker had drowned off Porthtowan beach that June night in 1977, though there was considerable doubt about how she’d drowned. But Peter Ellery’s death was just an assumption, a likelihood, a probability. It was hard not to believe Martin Caldwell thought he could prove Peter Ellery was posing as Peter Evans in London three months after his supposed death in Cornwall. And it was surely a betting certainty he’d planned to tell Nick Peter Ellery was still alive to this day, posing as someone else.
Nick was disorientated by what he’d learnt in the space of a few hours: that his father wasn’t who he thought he was; that his father might not be dead after all. He’d grown accustomed to the absence of such a figure in his life. But that absence hinged on his death when Nick was a toddler, somehow excusing his neglect of his son up to that point. That had all changed now. Nick’s mother had deceived him. His real father had probably never known he had a son at all.
Was he alive, though? Was Caldwell really on to something? The answer wasn’t waiting for Nick at Nancekuke tomorrow, with the nerve gas factory long since demolished and the site cleared of all traces of what it had once been used for. It was just an RAF radar station now. Officially, anyway. Holgate had said there were still rumours of strange goings-on there. But rumours were always popular. Generally, people couldn’t get enough of them.
Nick had no use for rumours. He wanted facts. He wanted the truth that had for far too long been denied him. And he meant to get it.
But, first, he needed to see where the mystery had begun.
Wada was a light sleeper, especially when she wasn’t sleeping in her own home. It was still dark when she heard Haruto moving around in the kitchen in a manner that suggested he was trying hard not to wake her.
His first words to her when she walked into the room were an apology for disturbing her. She brushed that off and asked for a cup of the tea he was preparing.
They sat with their cups either side of a marble-topped table. The spot-lighting gleamed on the whorls in its surface.
‘I have to be in early this morning,’ Haruto explained. Given that it was not yet five thirty, the explanation wasn’t strictly necessary.
‘They work you hard?’
‘There are just things to be done.’ The reply was evasive, but she wasn’t inclined to press.
‘I will not be staying long.’
‘But for the weekend at least?’
‘No. I’m leaving tonight, actually.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘It’s better for you not to know.’
Haruto frowned. ‘Now you’re w
orrying me.’
‘We could have lunch before I go.’
‘I do not believe you came all the way to New York just to have lunch with me.’
‘No. I did not.’
‘Then why?’
‘I will explain at lunch. Just one thing, though.’
‘What?’
‘Please do not mention my visit to any of your colleagues.’
‘Why not?’ Haruto gave her a knowing look. ‘You’ll explain at lunch, I suppose?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t get long.’
‘We’ll make the most of it.’
He held his gaze. ‘I guess we will.’
Nick left the hotel early and was at Porthtowan by nine o’clock. The village seemed deserted, though the morning was bright, the sunlight skittering over the rolling breakers. But there was a cold wind driving the tide in. Tiny granules of sand pecked at his face as he made his way through the dunes that fronted on to the beach.
According to the account Caldwell had given the police back in June 1977, he and his two companions had brought some bottles of beer and wine down to the beach after leaving the Victory Inn, up above the village. They’d sat in the shelter of the dunes, drinking and smoking, as darkness fell. Caldwell had fallen asleep. The deepening chill had woken him some time after midnight. He was alone, his companions gone.
Eventually, he’d travelled back to Exeter by bus and train, although the presence of Peter’s camper van in the car park had left him baffled as to what he and Alison were doing. He’d hammered on the door but got no response. Were they playing some kind of bizarre trick on him?
When they hadn’t shown up or phoned by the following morning, he and the other residents of 18 Barnfield Hill had agreed the time had come to raise the alarm, little knowing Alison Parker’s body had already been found on the beach where Caldwell had last seen her.
Nick cut back up the beach to the footbridge across the stream that ran through Porthtowan to the sea, then climbed the long slope to the clifftops south-west of the village. With the tide coming in, there wasn’t much to be seen of the shore below the cliffs, or of any of the caves into which Peter Ellery’s body might have been washed and somehow become trapped. There was no sign either of the pipe that had fed effluent from the nerve gas factory out to sea. According to one of Holgate’s clippings, there were claims by bathers to have suffered mysterious neurological complaints after swimming in the area of the pipe when the factory was active, and long after as well.
The Fine Art of Invisible Detection Page 10