Wada had given up trying to persuade Caldwell to release her. He was a stubborn as well as infuriatingly polite jailer. Considerate too, in his way, supplying her with a duvet to keep warm and a pillow to help her sleep. She could reach the loo from where she was chained and he brought her food and drink whenever she wanted it, although the food he gave her was either tinned or frozen. The house had been provisioned for a long but scarcely luxurious stay.

Employees of Quartizon – which meant employees of Peter Driscoll – had done the provisioning. Caldwell didn’t try to deny it. Nor did he deny Peter Driscoll was his friend of student days, Peter Ellery, aka Peter Evans. Caldwell had traced him to Iceland, where he’d evidently met him and been instantly recruited to whatever exactly Emergence was. He never precisely said as much, but Wada couldn’t otherwise make sense of what he was doing. His earlier promises to help Mimori Takenaga identify and track down the man she blamed for her father’s death clearly no longer held good.

He was tight-lipped about Driscoll’s present whereabouts and intentions. He insisted Driscoll wasn’t to blame for Kodaka’s murder – or Shitaro Masafumi’s death back in 1977, come to that. Hiroji Nishizaki was responsible for everything, apparently. And Ohara answered directly to him. When Wada pointed out that Driscoll ultimately answered to Nishizaki as well and had loyally done his bidding for the past forty years, all Caldwell said was, ‘You don’t understand, Miss Wada.’ And evidently he didn’t think it was for him to make her understand.

Caldwell moved Ohara’s car to the barn. He nailed a board over the broken window at the end of the passage and mopped up the blood in the bathroom, passage and kitchen. As for the bodies in the chest freezer, Caldwell seemed blithely confident Driscoll’s representatives would deal with the problem in due course. Out of sight was, as far as Caldwell was concerned, out of mind.

His assurances about Driscoll cut no ice with Wada. She didn’t believe he was blameless in the matter of Kodaka’s murder. And therefore she didn’t believe she could simply wait for Thursday to roll round, confident that whoever Driscoll sent to Stóri-Asgarbær would release her and allow her to leave. That didn’t seem to her a remotely likely outcome. The longer she stayed where she was, the greater the danger she was in.

But Caldwell had the key to the handcuffs, hidden she knew not where. And he’d made it clear he was determined to see she went nowhere until Thursday, when, in his words, ‘Everything will be sorted out.’

‘Maybe it won’t be sorted out the way you imagine,’ she’d countered.