Milton looked over Amber’s shoulder, down the corridor through the second door, and saw a sign that indicated a fire exit. Milton shouldered through the door and helped Sakura to the exit.

“You can’t go through there,” Amber said.

“Why not?”

“It’s locked,” she said, gesturing to the padlock that secured the handle. “I know it shouldn’t be, but—”

Milton ignored her, drew back his foot and drove his heel into the door, striking it just above the handle. The door flew open with a crash of splintering wood, and a rush of humidity swept into the corridor.

“Now it’s not.”

14

Katsuro Nishimoto was known to some as Popeye, on account of a muscular build that stood in contrast to his small stature. His beefy arms and powerful shoulders, combined with a technique that had been rendered perfect by hours of repetition, meant that he could hit a golf drive almost three hundred yards in the right conditions. His love of golf had also furnished him with another story that had coloured his notoriety: he had once beaten a man to death with a driver on the eighteenth hole of the Fan Ling course in Hong Kong. The story had it that the man Katsuro killed had wandered across the approach line between his golf ball and the hole. Not only was this a grievous infringement of the rules of golf, but the indentation of the man’s shoes on the green had spoilt Katsuro’s putt. The story was apocryphal, but Katsuro was happy to let it stand uncorrected. The reality was that the man he had killed—a businessman on Hong Kong Island—had owed a great deal of money to Katsuro’s father, Takashi. Several polite requests for repayment had been made, all of them rebuffed. Katsuro was sent to sort the problem out. Takashi did not murder people on a whim, only when there was a serious message to be delivered. This message—that it was not acceptable to renege on your debts—had been deemed sufficiently important, and Katsuro had been dispatched.

Katsuro was waiting in the arrivals terminal. He was surrounded by hopeful-looking people waiting for family members, and bored drivers sweating in cheap suits as they held up signs advertising the names of the passengers they had been sent to collect. Katsuro had moved to the front of the throng to make sure that he didn’t miss Sakura.