Katsuro returned to the master bedroom and picked up a photograph from the small dresser. Sakura and Miyasato in happier times. He looked at his brother and felt a fresh jolt of disgust at what he had done. Stealing from their father… it was abhorrent. After all the advantages that Miyasato had been accorded… He had been the favourite, hand-picked to take the clan and move it forward. Miyasato could have done it, too; with his brain and Katsuro’s muscle, they could have taken the fight to the hangure and all the other pretenders and restored the Nishimoto-kai to a position of pre-eminence. And then, what? Miyasato had squandered all that potential for that woman. Katsuro, on the other hand, had carried out his father’s wishes without compunction. Miyasato was guilty of the most heinous of betrayals and deserved the fate that Takashi had decreed and that Katsuro had arranged.

He didn’t miss him. The two of them had never been close, and, as Miyasato had concentrated on his wife, the rift had deepened. They had had no relationship at all at the end; Miyasato was a dog who had deserved to be put out of his misery.

Katsuro was glad that he had been chosen to pull the trigger.

He replaced the photograph, made his way back down the stairs and went into the small study. There was a laptop on the desk and he flipped it open. The machine emitted a bleep and the screen lit up. He sat down and looked at it. The screensaver was a picture of Sakura and Yamato; the two of them were eating ice cream, and the boy had a dollop of it daubed on his nose. Katsuro tapped a key and the screensaver was replaced by the log-in screen. It prompted him for a password.

Katsuro stared at the blinking cursor. He typed YAMATO and hit return. Nothing. He tried MIYASATO. Nothing. He leaned back in the chair and gazed around the room. There was another photograph on the bookcase to his right and a yellow Post-it note had been stuck to the frame. He pushed the wheeled chair across the room so that he could swipe the Post-it. A combination of letters, numbers and symbols had been written across it in red ink. He wheeled back to the desk and, carefully referring to the note, he typed in the characters and hit return for a third time.

The log-in screen disappeared and was replaced by Sakura’s email browser.

There were more than sixty unopened emails. Most were marketing spam, but one that had arrived yesterday caught his eye.

The sender was noted as GRACERY and the subject line was YOUR RECEIPT.