Caldwell responded differently this time. Could be him. Facetrail probed further and turned up a Japanese connection beyond the mere existence of a branch office in Tokyo. Quartizon was fifty per cent owned by … the Nishizaki Corporation.

It was him. It had to be. And finally …

Caldwell had given Facetrail the names of four friends of the Subject: Miranda Cushing, Vinod Hardekar, Caroline Miller, April Vyse. And Facetrail had scored a hit with one of those names.

It was the woman who’d left a message on Caldwell’s phone: Miranda Cushing – Baroness Cushing as she now was – who had shared a house with Peter Ellery in 1977. She was paid by Quartizon as an occasional consultant, though what they consulted her about was unclear. Facetrail speculated it was for access to decision-making circles at Westminster.

Whatever her exact role, Wada reckoned it made her a good choice for indirect communication with whoever had sent the man she’d encountered in Caldwell’s flat: Nishizaki, Driscoll, maybe both. And Caldwell had helpfully included her home address in the background information he’d supplied to Facetrail.

Wada studied Baroness Cushing’s face in the photograph adorning her website. It was a very English face and she looked good for her age. Born 1956. Graduate of Exeter University. But there was nothing about her brush with activism while she was a student there.

That was only to be expected. Wada saw … what was it: wariness, caution, cynicism? … behind the baroness’s relaxed smile. She always put her own best interests first. And yet she wasn’t wholly unreasonable. That was Wada’s conclusion. And it was one she proposed to take advantage of.

She copied the contents of the stick on to another stick she’d bought on arrival at the internet café. Then she made an airline booking she could cancel if she needed to. And then she prised open the parcel from Dobachi.

It held the kage-boshi file, as promised. It was dog-eared, which suggested Kodaka had consulted it frequently. The papers comprised notes in his recognizable scrawled hand, along with copies of emails and letters too, dating back years in some cases. Wada was going to have to give them her close attention. And she didn’t have time to do that now. She stowed them in her bag and set off.

Barry Holgate lived in a semi-detached house in one of the eastern suburbs of Exeter. It was obvious from the street he was no gardener. And once indoors it was equally obvious to Nick he didn’t devote much time to housekeeping either. The photograph on the drawing room mantelpiece of a warm-eyed woman who might easily have been Mrs Holgate, combined with the sensed certainty she no longer lived there, suggested he was probably a widower. But Nick didn’t ask and Holgate didn’t say. They weren’t there to swap life stories.