The business itself was biased towards commercial matters. There was a lot of vetting of potential recruits for companies or identifying which of their employees might be responsible for leaking sensitive information to competitors or the media or the tax authorities. Kodaka senior had sited the agency within easy reach of the Tokyo Stock Exchange to attract such business. Divorce and missing persons, the other staples of the profession, were less significant at the Kodaka Agency, though Wada enjoyed them when they came along. She found the tangled problems of other people’s lives grimly fascinating.

Most of the time, her involvement with those lives was confined to putting Kodaka’s notes and other records in order and compiling reports to lawyers, which she was much better and quicker at than Kodaka himself, whose talents lay in ferreting out information, staking out addresses and piecing together evidence. More than once, after pulling his bottle of Suntory whisky out of the bottom drawer of the scratched green filing cabinet behind his desk and pouring them both a glass as the lights of the city danced in the night beyond the office windows, he’d say they made a good team.

Sometimes, very rarely, Kodaka asked her to go out into the field and follow someone. This occurred when only a female tail was likely to escape detection. She proved to be rather good at it. Without intending any insult, Kodaka said she had the gift of being invisible. No one noticed her. She was anonymous. She attracted no attention.

Kodaka was unmarried. Wada’s mother had suggested, in her desperation for a grandchild that only grew as her daughter progressed into her forties, that he might be a suitable husband, even though she’d never actually met the man. The idea was absurd. Kodaka found all the female company he desired in his late-night forays to assorted bars and clubs. He often arrived at the office in the morning with the rumpled, unshaven, red-eyed look of someone who’d barely slept, let alone in his own bed. He’d never made any kind of overture to her, probably because he valued her services too highly to risk losing them. He was right. The overtures wouldn’t have been well received. That would have been unfortunate. Because they were a good team.

Yozo Sasada, the Aum Shinrikyo member responsible for Hiko’s death, had finally been executed twenty-three years after the attack, along with the cult’s founder, Shoko Asahara, and twelve others. Kodaka made no reference to their hangings, though when the day came Asahara’s blank, heavy-lidded face was all over the newspapers and the giant TV screens that Wada passed on her way to work. She interpreted her employer’s silence on the subject as an example of his sensitivity, which as ever could only be detected by what he didn’t say rather than what he did.