‘What’s my father got to do with any of this? He didn’t go on the trip to Nancekuke. Did you actually ever meet him?’

‘Geoff Nolan? No. I don’t think so. But maybe you’re asking the wrong question.’

They’d reached the door of the Stapletons’ flat on the floor below. Nick looked at Holgate in puzzlement. ‘What’s the right question, then?’

‘Could you give me a lift back to my house? There’s something there you ought to see. I expected to find another … example of it … upstairs, but …’

‘An example of what?’

‘Just come and see, Nick. I think you’ll find it very … revealing.’

Wada’s thoughts were only slightly better organized when she arrived at the internet café north of Oxford Street than they had been when she checked out of the Envoy. She had the parcel from Dobachi, unopened, in her bag, having decided to give immediate priority to Caldwell’s facetrail computer stick. Beyond that her mind was racing to assess what her best and safest options were. Her head still ached. And her brain’s strange tendency to lag a few fractions of a second behind her movements was still troubling her.

She slid the stick into the computer and opened it. There were lots of email communications over the course of a couple of months between Caldwell and someone called Kirk Mosley at Facetrail. Many of the emails had attachments. Caldwell had engaged the company’s services to trace a man, referred to only as the Subject, missing, so far as Caldwell was concerned, since 1977. He had supplied Facetrail with a photograph and some biographical information. Born 1953. Educated Sherborne and Cambridge. Fluent in Japanese. It sounded as if the Subject could be Peter Evans. And it sounded as if Caldwell knew him well.

Facetrail applied staged facial ageing processes to the photograph, producing plausible likenesses of the Subject at five-yearly intervals since his disappearance. At the same time they trawled a vast range of pictorial images available on the internet in search of men of the right age, appearance and qualifications. Within weeks, they had begun supplying Caldwell with candidates, noting the degree of likelihood in each case, which was never high. Caldwell ruled out each one with a stock response. Not him.

Then, just a few weeks previously, the breakthrough came.

Peter Driscoll. Right first name. Right age. Photographically a good match to the computer modelling. His background was vague, but that was actually an argument in his favour. His career was veiled in a certain amount of mystery as well. He was currently chairman and CEO of Quartizon, a company specializing in facilitating complex negotiations between organizations that preferred it not to be known they were negotiating at all. They had offices in Brussels, New York, Tokyo and London. The London office was described as being in a ‘discreet location’ in Mayfair.