She jumped to her feet and started down the narrow, crumbling footpath that led to the beach. She could hear voices away to her right: occupants of the cottages and holiday lets along the lane she’d walked up earlier, roused by the explosion and venturing out to investigate. The village was stirring.

She pressed on down the path, slithering on loose patches of earth, but determined to intercept Nick Miller before he reached the spot where his father had died.

As Nick walked along the beach, he was aware of a growing level of movement on the shore. He could see people standing out on the balconies of houses, craning and pointing. Someone was hurrying down the footpath from the headland ahead of him. He heard the roar of a car engine. A pick-up truck barrelled past the lifeguard station and came to a halt on the sand. A guy who looked as though he could be a lifeguard himself, dressed in a red wetsuit, jumped out and ran towards the smoking crater.

He’d turned back and was shouting into a phone by the time Nick was within earshot. ‘An explosion, that’s right. Like a bomb’s gone off. And … there are body parts. Everywhere. People have been killed.’

Nick looked past the guy and saw in the middle distance something lying on the sand. It was too far away for him to identify. But within a few more paces—

‘Nick Miller?’

He pulled up and, turning, saw a small, spryly built middle-aged Asian woman running towards him. She was wearing jeans, an orange and red sweater and a thin yellow anorak. A white canvas bag was looped over her shoulder.

She stopped a few metres from him, breathing heavily. Her hair was short – black streaked with a few strands of grey. Her face was round, her features unremarkable. But something in the way she held herself contrived to convey a strength greater than her slender frame implied. And Nick knew at once who she was.

THIRTY

NOW SHE’S ACTUALLY caught up with nick miller, wada can’t seem to find the right words to express what she wants to say to him.

While she’s still tongue-tied, he says, ‘You’re Umiko Wada, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she manages to reply. ‘I am Wada.’

‘If you’re here, you must have known’ – he gestures ahead of him – ‘that this was going to happen.’

‘No. But, now it has, I understand why Driscoll-san decided it had to.’

‘You knew him?’

‘A little.’

‘That’s more than I did, even though …’

‘He was your father.’

‘Yes. He was.’

‘You should not go any closer, Miller-san. You will gain nothing except bad memories.’

People are spilling on to the beach now. The man from the pick-up truck is waving and shouting for them to stay back, but they’re not taking a lot of notice.