‘I do not know what he has been … “up to”.’

‘That can’t really be true. You came a long way to meet him.’

‘But I have not met him.’

Holgate sighed and leant forward, rubbing his large hands together. ‘Maybe we could help each other.’

‘How?’

‘You tell me what you know in return for … background information from me.’

‘Information about what?’

‘You’re not making this very easy, Mrs Takenaga. They tell me … you lost your husband in the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.’

She looked straight at him. ‘Yes. I did.’

‘My condolences.’

‘Thank you.’

‘That must have been a terrible experience.’

‘It was. And the journalists who came to see me then said they could help me. But I learnt they were only helping themselves. I was just … something to fill a column.’

‘Ouch.’ Holgate visibly winced. ‘Well, I can’t deny my profession doesn’t have the highest of reputations.’

‘You could do your reputation some good, Mr Holgate.’

‘How?’

‘Tell me about Nancekuke. And the people who lived at eighteen Barnfield Hill in 1977.’

‘You’ve never heard of Nancekuke?’

‘Never. Until today.’

‘Well, it was a wartime airfield on the Cornish coast converted after the war into a nerve gas production plant. It’s about a hundred miles west of here. Nothing much to see there now. It’s all been cleaned up. The site was chosen because of its remoteness: no nearby large centres of population at risk in the event of an accident, and any gas that leaked likely to be blown out to sea. They produced sarin there throughout the nineteen fifties. It continued as a research station, producing smaller amounts of chemical agents, until the late seventies. It actually closed in 1980. None of what I’ve just said was officially available information when it was up and running, you understand. That’s all come out since. So, when I was writing those articles and people like Martin Caldwell and his activist friends were handing out leaflets to holidaymakers stuck in summer traffic jams on the A30 – that’s the main road into Cornwall – protesting about what was going on at Nancekuke, what was going on was basically just rumour and conjecture. I suppose you could say it was rumour and conjecture that got two of his friends killed there in June of seventy-seven.’

‘How so?’