Hardekar frowned. ‘I understand how difficult this is for you. You’ve never met him, so you’ve no way of judging whether you can trust him. And some of the things you’ve learnt recently must make you doubt it. But I know him. You can trust him.’
‘Like Alison Parker trusted him?’
‘Staying here, at this time, in this situation, puts your life in danger. You must leave. But you will hear from him. And when you meet him … he’ll answer all your questions.’ Hardekar leant back in his chair and spread his hands. ‘There’s nothing else I can tell you.’
TWENTY-ONE
‘I WILL NOT tell you … how ohara died.’
Wada’s refusal to answer was the only way she could defy Zayala. And she was grimly content for those to be the last words she spoke.
Then a shadow moved behind Zayala. His right arm was wrenched upwards just as he fired. The shot went through the hole in the ceiling. And the blade of a knife gleamed in reflected flame. In the next instant, his throat was opened in a tide of blood.
His assailant was a bulky, darkly clad figure. He lowered Zayala gently to the floor, where the blood went on flowing and the man who’d been about to kill Wada died beside her in a spasm of twitches.
His killer strode past her and on along the passage. She rolled clear of the blood and began struggling to her feet. She was still half stunned by her fall through the ceiling and her brain couldn’t for the moment compute what had happened.
Before she was fully upright, Zayala’s killer was back, scooping her up as if she weighed no more than a child and carrying her out of the burning house into the yard. He propped her against the wing of George’s car and held her by the shoulders. He had bright blue eyes and a lined, serious, faintly Asiatic face with a few days’ growth of grey-brown beard. He was wearing a woolly hat, windcheater and jeans. The knife he’d used on Zayala was back in a holster at his waist.
‘Who … are you?’ she managed to ask.
‘Espersen.’ The name – and his accent – suggested he was Icelandic. ‘Can you stand?’
‘Y – yes.’
‘Good.’ He let go of her, at which point she realized she was visibly trembling. ‘Caldwell is dead. Shot through the head. By Zayala, yes?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Where is Ohara?’
‘There’s a … freezer in the room behind the kitchen. His body’s … in there.’
‘Who killed him? You?’
‘Yes. It was … partly an accident.’
‘A lucky accident for you, I would say.’
‘There is another body in the freezer. A friend of mine. Ohara shot him.’
‘Did Ohara also handcuff Caldwell to the wash-basin pipe?’
Wada didn’t know how to shape an answer to that. ‘It is … difficult to explain.’
‘If I search you, will I find the key to the handcuffs?’
Wada tried to think what was the best thing to do. But thinking didn’t seem to take her very far. She took the key out of her pocket and handed it to Espersen.
‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’
He turned and ran back into the house. The fire had spread the whole length of the roof by now. The ground floor was still intact, but filling fast with smoke.
Wada watched numbly as the flames rose. Roof timbers were cracking in the heat like gunshots. She wondered who Espersen worked for. There was a white pick-up truck in the yard she hadn’t seen before, but whether it belonged to Zayala or Espersen she had no way of knowing. Maybe she should try to run away. But she felt too weak to consider the idea seriously.
Then Espersen was back, coughing and blinking. She noticed he was carrying her shoulder bag, which he must have found in the kitchen. He grasped her by the elbow and moved her further away from the house. Without the car to lean on, she tottered and might have fallen but for his support. She sensed an ox-like strength in him.
‘I took the handcuffs off Caldwell and checked the freezer,’ he said, his voice hoarsened by smoke. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t mention the handcuffs again.’
‘Who wouldn’t I … mention them to?’
‘I can’t read Japanese, but I’m guessing the papers in this bag are Kodaka’s kage-boshi file and the stuff you printed out from the Emergence files. Correct?’
She nodded.
‘We’ll take those with us. My car is down by the gate. Think you can walk that far?’
She nodded again. ‘Yes. If you … give me a moment.’
‘Where’s Ohara’s car?’
She pointed towards the barn. ‘In there.’
‘Right. So, Zayala came in the pick-up. And this car’s yours?’
‘It was George’s.’
‘The dead friend. OK. The vehicles have to burn with the house. Fire cleanses. Fingerprints. DNA. You understand?’
‘Who do you work for?’
‘Who do you think I work for?’
‘Not Nishizaki … obviously.’
‘No. Not Nishizaki. Listen to me, Wada. We don’t have long. I’ll deal with the cars and the truck. You start walking as soon as you think you can make it to the gate. I’ll catch up. Don’t try to run away. You wouldn’t make it far and having to waste time catching up with you would seriously piss me off. OK?’
She nodded. ‘OK.’
‘Good. Go when you’re ready.’
He let go of her then and strode purposefully towards the barn, her bag still slung over his shoulder.
She took a few gingerly steps, which went steadily enough, then started walking. She didn’t look back.
It must have taken her five or six minutes to cover the distance to Espersen’s SUV, pulled up in the gateway and facing away from the house. She was feeling less shaky by then, which left her with more attention to spare for the spattered patches of Zayala’s blood on her clothes. There was quite a lot on her hands as well and, to her horror, in her hair.
She heard a couple of muffled detonations behind her as she neared the car, deeper sounds than the continuing snap and crackle of the fire. Then she looked back and saw Espersen loping towards her along the track.
He passed her without a word, releasing the door locks on the car as he went. He opened the tailgate, tossed the bag inside and removed a sheet, which he spread over the passenger seat.
‘You can get in now,’ he said, gesturing to the covered seat.
She hesitated. ‘Who sent you here?’
‘I work on contract for Quartizon.’
‘Driscoll, then.’
‘Ohara followed you here, yes? And you managed to kill him. What brought Zayala here?’
‘I made a phone call this morning.’
‘You made more than a phone call. You made a big mistake. Whose phone did you use?’
‘Ohara’s. Mine did not work.’
‘And Caldwell didn’t have one. Just in case he was stupid enough to use it. Zayala was monitoring Ohara’s phone. Standard practice. Once it was activated, it became a homing beacon. Luckily for you, I was monitoring it as well.’
‘Are you taking me to Driscoll?’
‘Yes. You may have to explain to him why his friend Martin Caldwell died here today. But the alternative’s worse. After we’ve left, I’ll make an anonymous call to the emergency services reporting the fire. When they sift through the wreckage, they’ll find four bodies. Eventually, they’ll work out none of them actually died in the fire, so they’ll start looking for the person who murdered them. And the only way you don’t end up being that person is to come with me. Right now.’
In the final analysis, it wasn’t a difficult decision. Wada wasn’t remotely equipped to make a run for it across the Icelandic interior. She was fortunate still to be alive, well aware Espersen could have killed her along with Zayala if he’d wanted to. What would happen at the end of their journey – how Driscoll would react to her account of all that had happened at Stóri-Asgarbær – she couldn’t predict. There were plenty of ways it could go badly.
But she was tired and out of options. And Espersen seemed to radiate the certainty that defying him was a very bad idea.
Beyond that, though, Wada had a certainty of her own to steady her nerves. Somehow, against the odds, she’d emerged from Stóri-Asgarbær alive. She’d survived. Since leaving Tokyo, she’d become more cunning, more resourceful. And the discovery of what she was capable of had made her stronger.
After they’d been on the road for half an hour or so, Espersen pulled over and phoned in the fire report. By then, Stóri-Asgarbær was likely to have been reduced to embers and ashes. Identifying the bodies was going to be a complicated exercise. The launch of a quadruple murder inquiry was still a long way off. Just so long as no one pointed the police in the right direction. That, apart from anything else, was the hold Espersen had over her.
There was nothing to stop her questioning him, however. ‘Do you know what is in the Emergence file I printed, Mr Espersen?’ she asked as they set off again.
‘Pretty much. Some vendors needed a special kind of persuasion to sell an option on their land.’
‘And you are fine with Quartizon buying and selling chunks of your own country?’
‘It’s not my country. I’m Danish.’
‘But even so …’
‘You’re a clever woman, Wada. You wouldn’t have gotten this far otherwise. But you keep making mistakes. Hard to avoid when you don’t know what’s really going on, I suppose.’
‘What is really going on?’
‘A big play. In a long game.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means if you don’t shut up I’ll have to turn on the radio. And, believe me, you don’t want to have to listen to an Icelandic phone-in the rest of the way to Reykjavík. So, shall we drop the subject?’
It was late afternoon when they reached Reykjavík. Espersen told Wada to wrap the sheet round herself as they headed into the centre. ‘We don’t want anyone seeing all that blood on you.’ He drove to a quietly affluent residential area which Wada calculated couldn’t be far from her hotel. She was surprised when he pulled in through the open gate of a big house right next to an embassy. She wasn’t sure which embassy it was. Danish or Norwegian was her guess, based on the flag. She could have asked Espersen, but something deterred her.
The door of a large double garage opened ahead of them. Espersen drove in and stopped. The door closed behind them. He got out, fetched Wada’s bag and signalled through the passenger window for her to get out as well.
Nothing was said as she followed him through a door at the rear of the garage into some kind of annexe detached from the house. There was a kitchenette and, beyond that, a small plainly furnished bedroom, with en-suite bathroom.
‘You need to take a shower,’ he said. ‘Wash all the blood off. Leave your clothes in the tub. They’ll have to be burnt. I’ll put some clean clothes for you to wear on the bed.’
‘And then?’
‘That’ll be up to Mr Driscoll. But no one’s going to hurt you, Wada. Not while you’re here.’
‘I have your word on that?’
He nodded. ‘You do.’
It was good to peel off her bloodstained clothes – some of the stains had even penetrated to her underwear – and wash away the visible evidence of what had happened at Stóri-Asgarbær. For some reason she couldn’t properly analyse, she believed she could rely on Espersen’s guarantee of her safety. She still had no idea what Driscoll was going to say to her. But part of her was perversely looking forward to facing him at last.
The clothes Espersen had left for her were a reasonable fit, though she would never have chosen them herself. Jeans and a chunky sweater divided into bands of orange and red were about as far from her natural look as it was possible to get.
The annexe seemed to be deserted, which surprised her. Was there actually anything to prevent her leaving through the garage? She certainly had no sense of imprisonment or confinement. Meeting Driscoll felt more like an invitation than an obligation.
Lured by this sensation, she followed a short corridor leading into the main part of the house, then another passage at the end of which double doors stood open to a large, minimally furnished lounge. The room looked out on to the garden. There was something Japanese about the atmosphere. Wada thought she could detect, at the very edges of her hearing, koto music being played somewhere.
There were more double doors on the far side of the lounge, leading into a dining room. As Wada crossed the parqueted floor, a figure appeared in the doorway ahead of her: quite tall, though hunched slightly at the shoulders, white-haired and square-jawed with a frowning, far-seeing gaze. There wasn’t a lot of spare flesh on him. He was wearing a well-cut dark blue suit and a white open-necked shirt. He looked rather as Wada might have expected Peter Driscoll to look: like a successful if unconventional businessman whose success hadn’t given him as much satisfaction as he’d once anticipated.
‘Wada-san,’ he said. ‘Where on earth did Kodaka find you?’ His voice was husky, his accent educated English with a subdued stress of individual syllables that hinted at long exposure to Japanese pronunciation.
‘He put an advertisement for a secretary in Asahi Shimbun.’
‘But it seems he got rather more than a secretary for his money.’
‘I became his general assistant.’
‘And proved yourself invaluable in that role, I have no doubt.’
‘You are Peter Driscoll, formerly Peter Evans, formerly Peter Ellery?’
‘I’m Peter Driscoll, yes. For the rest, they’re lives I no longer lead.’
‘I must thank you for sending Espersen to Stóri-Asgarbær. He saved my life.’
‘But he didn’t save the life I sent him there to save, did he?’
‘I suppose you think that was my fault.’
‘Fault? Well, there’s a lot of that to share round.’
He invited her with a gesture of his hand to sit down on one of the low soft-leather armchairs and sat down himself on the sofa facing her. He looked at her with a frown that was part bafflement, part disappointment.
‘If Marty hadn’t contacted Mimori Takenaga …’ he began, ‘if she hadn’t hired Kodaka … if he hadn’t kept a file full of dirt on Nishizaki … if you hadn’t insisted on continuing with the case after Kodaka was killed … and if you’d stayed off the phone, as I expressly told Marty to …’ He sounded sad rather than angry as he itemized the chain of events that had led to Caldwell’s death. ‘Then, amongst other things, we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation.’
‘I am sorry Caldwell-san died.’
‘Me too. You realize, I trust, that I had nothing to do with your employer’s murder?’
‘Who killed him?’
‘It would have been set up by Ohara. Acting on Nishizaki’s orders.’
‘Do you not act also on Nishizaki’s orders?’
‘Ostensibly, yes. But I’m sure you’ve worked out that he and I aren’t … serving the same agenda, shall we say?’
‘What is your agenda?’
‘To put it simply, none of your business.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Why did you go on with the case after Kodaka was killed? You weren’t working for him any more. He wasn’t paying you. You owed him nothing. And you must have known you were taking a big risk by continuing. Why didn’t you just give up?’
‘Have you read the kage-boshi file?’
‘I cast an eye over it while you were in the shower. None of the contents came as a surprise to me. But for a private detective to have amassed so much damaging information about Nishizaki? That was a surprise. I fear Kodaka may have been skating on thin ice for a long time. His intervention in the affairs of Shitaro Masafumi’s family wasn’t something Nishizaki was ever likely to tolerate.’
‘Did Nishizaki have Masafumi killed?’
‘I suspect so, though I can’t be absolutely sure. It could genuinely have been suicide. But back to you, Wada-san. Why didn’t you give up when it was obviously the b
est and safest course of action?’
‘Because of what’s in the kage-boshi file.’
‘Nishizaki isn’t the only villain operating in the Japanese business world. He isn’t even the biggest. I can’t believe you were shocked by what you read. It didn’t affect you personally in any way.’
‘But it did.’
‘How?’
‘Yozo Sasada.’
‘Sasada? What was he to you?’
‘My husband’s killer. That is what he was to me.’
‘Ah.’ Driscoll slid back on the sofa and looked at Wada with greater attention than before. ‘Your husband died in the sarin subway attack. I didn’t know that. I should have known, of course. Sarin.’ He sighed. ‘Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’
‘Sasada worked for your company.’
‘But he was always Nishizaki’s man. He’d been given a secret mission: to penetrate Aum Shinrikyo and use their people to carry out elimination operations against Nishizaki’s enemies in exchange for know-how and funding. The plan had to be abandoned after Nishizaki realized the organization was becoming dangerously unstable. By then, Sasada had succumbed to their crazed philosophy.’
‘Did Aum Shinrikyo use sarin of their own accord? Or did Sasada suggest it to them?’
‘You’re going to blame me, aren’t you? You’re going to say my past, which I didn’t – couldn’t – hide from Nishizaki, was the germ of the idea – the cause of the whole mad murderous mess.’
‘Was it?’
‘There’s no yes or no answer. Not one I’ve ever found, anyway.’
‘Have you looked?’
‘I could tell you I have and be lying. I could claim I’ve lain awake at night wondering what measure of responsibility I bear and you wouldn’t know any better. What difference does it make what I say? The dead will stay dead.’
‘What will you do with the kage-boshi file?’
‘I’ll destroy it.’ The ghost of a disingenuous smile hovered at the corner of his mouth. ‘Obviously.’
‘What is Emergence?’
‘Something I can’t allow you to imperil.’
The Fine Art of Invisible Detection Page 24