The Fine Art of Invisible Detection

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Takenaga?’ April’s expression suggested this wasn’t the first time she’d heard that name. ‘What do you know about her?’

  ‘Well, she told Holgate she’d arranged to meet Martin in London because he claimed to have information about how Aum Shinrikyo – you remember them? – got hold of the manufacturing method for the sarin they used in their attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Her husband was one of their victims. Martin didn’t show up for the meeting. So she’d headed down to Exeter.’

  ‘Why would Marty have information about Aum Shinrikyo?’

  ‘God knows. But sarin was manufactured at Nancekuke, wasn’t it? That has to be the connection.’

  ‘It can’t be. That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘It might, if you told me what you know about Mimori Takenaga. Because it’s obvious you know something.’

  April frowned and rubbed her forehead. ‘Was she saying Marty had contacted her? Or was it the other way round?’

  ‘No. He contacted her.’

  ‘Christ. How did he …’ Her thoughts seemed frozen. Something was troubling her. Deeply.

  ‘How did he what?’

  ‘Wait here.’ She jumped up and hurried out into the hall. Then he heard her pounding up the stairs.

  He didn’t wait, as instructed, but got up and followed, as far as the foot of the stairs. He looked up and saw her shadow moving on the wall. He could hear her panting as she struggled with something in the cupboard at the end of the landing. ‘April?’ he called.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ she called back breathlessly.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ He started up the stairs.

  By the time he reached the landing, he saw she’d removed several bags and boxes from the cupboard and had pulled up the square of carpet beneath them. ‘Fuck,’ she said dismally beneath her breath.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She sat slowly down and leant back against the banister. Tears were visible on her cheeks as she looked towards him. ‘Your mother,’ she said in an uneven voice. ‘So sentimental. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Literally.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I loved her because of her gentleness. Because of her … humanity.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘She must have taken pity on him at the end. Or near the end. No surprise, really. She took pity on everyone. Except herself.’

  ‘Who did she take pity on?’

  ‘A few days before Christmas, about a week before she died, I came home and realized from the state she was in that she’d … exerted herself somehow. She said she’d gone for a walk, which was crazy. She was in no state to leave the house unaided. I thought maybe it was … an imaginary walk. But now I think she did go. And my guess is she went to the post box. And posted a letter to Marty.’

  Nick moved to where she was sitting and knelt down beside her. ‘Containing what?’

  ‘An advert that appeared in the Evening Standard in May 1992.’

  ‘Placed by Mimori Takenaga.’

  She seemed shocked by the realization that he already knew about the advert. She thumbed away her tears. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Miranda. Martin showed it to her. He didn’t say how he’d got hold of it.’

  ‘Why did he show it to her?’

  ‘I suppose he hoped she’d agree with him that Peter Evans was Peter Ellery. She didn’t. Even though she admitted to me there was a resemblance. But I think she’s worried about Martin.’

  ‘Miranda only worries about herself.’

  Nick patted April’s hand and felt the moisture of her tears on her thumb. ‘Don’t you think you’re a bit hard on her?’

  ‘Maybe. But she has no principles. You can’t trust someone who has no principles.’

  ‘Caro had principles.’

  ‘Oh yeah. By the bucketload. More than I could handle sometimes.’

  ‘But she didn’t tell me about the advert, which was evidence – not clinching, but still evidence – that my father didn’t die that night at Nancekuke.’

  ‘She wanted to tell you. I talked her out of it. You were going through a difficult phase around then. How old would you have been? Fourteen? Fourteen-year-old boys are quite a handful, let me tell you. Fortunately, though, they don’t tend to leaf through the pages of the Evening Standard when they come home from school every day.’

  ‘Did you think it was Peter in the photograph?’

  ‘We weren’t sure. That’s the honest truth. And to tell you he was your father rather than Geoff Nolan? That’s quite a deception to unravel when you don’t have to. If he was alive, he obviously didn’t want any of us to know. So, we … said nothing … and prayed none of the others had seen the advert … or, if they had, that they’d say nothing either. Marty didn’t live in London, of course, so we reckoned he wouldn’t have seen it. The same went for Vinod. That only left Miranda. And she was in the middle of running for Parliament at the time. We were confident she’d do nothing that drew attention to her connection with Peter.’

  ‘But you kept the advert?’

  ‘Caro insisted. She said the day might eventually come when you needed to be told about it. Instead, it looks like the day came when she decided Marty needed to be told. The advert gave the name and address of a woman in Japan who was offering a thousand pound reward for information identifying Peter Evans, who’d worked for her father in London in September 1977. I guess Marty took the hint. He wrote to her.’

  ‘And eventually got a reply. Suggesting they meet in London. Earlier this week. He was planning to meet me as well. To tell me what he’d unearthed about my father. But his contact with Mimori Takenaga seems to have attracted some hostile attention. Now Martin’s missing. And Takenaga might as well be missing, because I’ve no idea where she went from Exeter.’

  ‘It sounds like someone doesn’t want Marty or anyone else following up the Peter Evans connection.’

  ‘Peter himself, perhaps?’

  ‘It’s possible. There was always a hidden side to his nature. He never let you in on what he was really thinking. Unknowable is what he was. Which made him attractive on one level. And he had, well, I suppose you’d call it charisma. Caro couldn’t stop herself being fascinated by him, though she was over that by the time he … well, did or didn’t die. If he’s alive, then he must have deliberately turned his back on his old life and remade himself as someone else. Maybe he can’t afford to have his previous identity dragged into the light. I wouldn’t want to go up against Peter. I think he could be … ruthless … if he felt he needed to be.’

  ‘And dangerous?’

  ‘Who knows what forty years might have done to him? I knew Peter Ellery, Nicky. This other man he’s become – if he has become him – is an unknown quantity.’

  ‘But he’s my father.’

  April leant her head against his shoulder. ‘Is that really so important?’

  ‘Maybe it shouldn’t be, but … it feels as if it is.’

  The phone started to ring in the kitchen downstairs. ‘That’ll be Nan,’ said April. ‘Wondering where I am. Actually, I’m wondering that myself. When’s Kate due back?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘You should talk this through with her. Before you do anything about it, I mean. Marty’s not your responsibility. Nor is this Japanese woman. And Peter, if he’s alive, clearly doesn’t think you’re his responsibility either.’

  ‘He probably doesn’t even know I exist.’

  ‘It might be better for you to leave it that way.’ The phone stopped ringing. ‘But you’re not going to, are you?’

  ‘I may have no option. If I can’t find Martin. Or Mimori Takenaga.’

  ‘I wish I could believe that would stop you. But you’ve inherited Caro’s stubbornness. There were things she just wouldn’t give up on. That goes for you too. And this is one of those things. Maybe she sent Marty the advert because she knew he’d end up telling you about Peter. And then …’

  ‘The truth would come out?’<
br />
  ‘Yeah.’ April nodded glumly. ‘Whatever the truth is.’

  TWELVE

  a SECOND LONG FLIGHT in twenty-four hours wasn’t a prospect Wada had been relishing, but she reckoned the effort was worth it. If anyone had been paying attention – and she suspected someone had – she’d done all she could to give them the impression she was baling out of Kodaka’s enquiries into Nishizaki’s business affairs. She’d even used her personal credit card to pay for this leg of the journey rather than the company card.

  She had little clear idea of what was awaiting her in Iceland and tried to prevent herself brooding on the point by returning to her comfort reading, The Makioka Sisters, as soon as the plane took off from JFK. It proved a futile effort, not because she wasn’t in the mood to enjoy Tanizaki’s playful storytelling, but because the man sitting next to her, a paunchy, shock-haired American in a business suit he’d obviously bought when he was about ten kilograms lighter, insisted on conversing with her.

  Wada’s prejudices about Americans – particularly American men – were confirmed by almost everything George Guptill said. He volunteered his name and a handshake she found difficult to refuse, then alternated unsought disclosures about himself (married, childless, resident in New Jersey, en route to Iceland to try to establish a franchise arrangement for his boss’s East Coast burger chain) with unwelcome curiosity about Wada. She thought her responses were cool if not curt enough to persuade him to give up, but he seemed to regard her reticence as a challenge and started making wild guesses about her which she ended up correcting, thereby giving him the satisfaction of finding out more about her than she’d intended.

  It wasn’t much, of course. But George was undaunted. ‘There’s nothing more attractive in a woman than an air of mystery, Miss Wada.’ (She’d dodged giving him more than her surname.) ‘That’s something my wife’s never understood.’

  By the time George had embarked on his third in-flight drink, he was quizzing Wada about the writings of Tanizaki and the intricacies of the Japanese language. Slowly, to her own astonishment, she was drawn in. She even found herself illustrating a linguistic point to him by explaining that the Toyoda family were thought to have changed their corporate name to Toyota because it could be written with the numerologically auspicious eight strokes foretelling prosperity. For some reason, this amused him enormously. What was she thinking, she later wondered.

  George fell asleep shortly afterwards, for which she was grateful.

  Falling asleep herself took rather longer.

  It was as the plane began its descent to Keflavík airport through thick cloud and drizzle on Saturday morning that Wada realized why she’d succumbed to George’s attempts to engage with her. He had nothing to do with Kodaka or Nishizaki or any of the many mysteries set in train by the death of Shitaro Masafumi. He was completely and reassuringly uninvolved. He was safe. And in talking to him she’d succeeded in forgetting, at least for a short while, the problems she was going to have to confront.

  George didn’t wake until the plane had actually landed. Bleary-eyed and dishevelled, he was still hunting for his bag in the overhead locker when Wada disembarked. And that, she assumed, was the last they were going to see of each other.

  But she’d underestimated him. Hiring a car was out of the question, for the simple reason that Wada couldn’t drive. Like many residents of Tokyo, she’d never seen any reason to learn. Accordingly, she joined the queue to buy a ticket for the bus into Reykjavík. Within minutes, George appeared beside her. ‘Why don’t we share a cab, Miss Wada? I don’t know about you, but personally I hate waiting for buses.’ There was something in his rumpled smile that made it impossible to refuse.

  Instructing the taxi driver meant they both knew which hotel the other was staying in. The Hilton, in George’s case, while Wada had booked herself into the Sol, which had the advantage of being quite close to the Hotel Arnarson, where Caldwell had last been heard of.

  They drove away from the airport through blackened and desolate lavafields across which the low cloud rolled like smoke. ‘This for sure is nothing like New Jersey,’ was George’s reaction.

  It was for sure nothing like anywhere, in fact, that Wada could think of.

  Reykjavík was a sprawl of mostly modern buildings, the Hilton a big glass and steel block beside a busy highway just outside the centre. George gave Wada his card and urged her to contact him if she found herself with time on her hands in the evening. ‘You can rely on me to show a girl a good time.’ Wada wasn’t sure when she’d last been called a girl, but the novelty wasn’t enough to make her give him her phone number. A good time, in the evening or at any other stage of the day, simply wasn’t on her agenda.

  The Sol was in a quieter location, neither new nor old, middle-ranking, with modest facilities, all of which suited Wada just fine. She went to her room, unpacked, showered and gave in to the mild jet lag the flight had left her with by taking what she thought would be a short nap.

  Nick hadn’t slept well in Greenwich. Crossing time zones wasn’t the problem in his case. But travelling into other people’s pasts had taken a similar kind of toll in its way. He felt disorientated and half removed from his normal life. Only a few days ago, he’d been looking forward to Kate’s return home that afternoon. Now he found himself wishing she was away for longer, freeing him to delve further into the mystery surrounding his father without having to explain to her what he was doing and, fundamentally, why he was doing it.

  He got up early, aware that Kate would expect him to do some food shopping before she arrived. But the idea of checking what he needed to buy and then going out to buy it, as if this was an ordinary weekend and nothing had changed in his world, wasn’t so much absurd as ungraspable. He needed answers to the many questions April’s admission had left him with, answers she’d been unable to supply.

  At the moment, he could only think of one person who might be able to tell him more. He reckoned the earlier he called on her the better his chances of catching her unawares, so he hurried through breakfast, threw on some clothes and headed out.

  The residential streets of Chelsea, lined with stuccoed townhouses and colourfully prinked front gardens, were quiet so early on a Saturday morning. The weather was cool, shower-clouds blocking the sun at fitful intervals. Parking was at a premium and Nick was left with a five-minute walk to Miranda’s door.

  As he approached, he was surprised to see a tall dark-haired man emerge into view from behind a swag of wisteria blossom and step out on to the pavement.

  Nick’s surprise was heightened when he realized the man was Asian and could easily be Japanese, though unusually tall if he was. The intruder at Caldwell’s flat in Exeter had been an unusually tall Japanese man, according to the description Mrs Takenaga had given the police. Was this him again?

  The man turned smartly left and walked away from Nick, but gave him a fleeting yet piercing glance over his shoulder as he did so. The effect was chilling. Nick pulled up, then started moving again, more slowly, waiting for the man to reach the end of the street and turn out of sight. It was a relief when he did.

  The response to Nick’s knock on the door was much quicker than he’d anticipated. Miranda yanked the door open and glared out at him. Then her expression softened. It was obvious she hadn’t been expecting to see Nick on her doorstep. She was wearing a tracksuit and looked markedly less well groomed than when they’d met for lunch. Less relaxed, as well. Much less.

  ‘Nick,’ she said. ‘This is a surprise.’

  ‘Did you think he’d come back?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your last visitor. I saw him leaving.’

  She gazed past him and along the street. ‘You mean the Irishman.’ There was something wary but also dismissive in her tone. Nick couldn’t quite get the measure of her mood.

  ‘He didn’t look Irish to me.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was.’

  ‘Well, if he’s not Irish, why—’

  ‘Are
you coming in?’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘Of course.’ A little of her jauntiness had been restored.

  She led the way along a high-ceilinged, corniced hall to the kitchen – large and well equipped in a stripped-down style. They were at the back of the house now, overlooking a well-kept garden, vibrant with spring blooms. Birdsong was audible through a half-open window, though the house itself felt silent and empty.

  ‘You want a cup of coffee? I just made some.’

  ‘Thanks. That’d be great.’

  She picked up her cup and drank from it, then grabbed the cafetière and poured a cup for him. He noticed a whisky bottle standing open-topped near her cup. His guess was she’d added some to her coffee. His further guess was that this wasn’t something she generally did on a Saturday morning.

  ‘Sorry if I’ve, er …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. What’s brought you here, Nick?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘I think I said everything I had to say about Geoff over lunch.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Geoff Nolan.’

  ‘But you just said—’

  ‘Peter Ellery. My father. My real father.’

  ‘Ah … Right.’ She sat down at the kitchen table and waved for him to do the same. ‘So, Marty went ahead and told you.’

  ‘No. He didn’t.’

  ‘But you met him?’

  ‘He never showed up.’

  ‘Well, that’s Marty for you. One hundred per cent unreliable. So, who did tell you? Not April, surely.’

  ‘Barry Holgate.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Retired journalist. Used to work for the Western Morning News. Down in Exeter.’

  ‘You’ve been to Exeter?’

  ‘Yes, Miranda, I have. I’ve been to eighteen Barnfield Hill, as a matter of fact. Looking for Martin Caldwell. But he wasn’t there. No one knows where he’s gone. But lots of people are looking for him apart from me. Including you, if the message you left on his phone is anything to go by.’