The fifth member of the group, who had to be Peter Ellery, had a camera looped round his neck. He was gazing across the road, straight at the photographer. He looked calm but committed. His expression was somehow challenging and passive at the same time.

But it wasn’t his expression that caught Nick’s attention and held it fast. It was his face – the set of his features, the flop of his hair across his brow, the angle of his chin. It was instantly familiar.

‘I saw the resemblance the minute I opened the door to you at Barnfield Hill,’ said Holgate. ‘I’d call it pretty striking, wouldn’t you?’

‘This is Peter Ellery?’ Nick asked numbly.

‘Oh yes. That’s him.’

That was him. Peter Ellery, presumed drowned at twenty-four, in June 1977, eight months before Nick’s birth. Peter Ellery. His father. Not Geoff Nolan. But this man. Peter Ellery. Unmistakably.

TEN

BARONESS CUSHING LIVED in a large white-fronted house in an expensively quiet street in Chelsea. Wada asked the taxi to wait while she rang the doorbell. The result was as she’d feared: no response. That left her with no choice but to try the phone number Cushing had used to call Caldwell’s flat. Wada would much have preferred to seize whatever advantage she could from an unannounced face-to-face encounter, but there was nothing else for it now. Time was short.

Rather to her surprise, the call was answered with a brisk, ‘Hello?’

‘Baroness Cushing?’

‘Yes. Who’s this?’

‘I am the Japanese woman your friend Martin Caldwell was supposed to meet in London two days ago.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I think you do. Please don’t hang up. I have a proposal.’

‘A proposal?’

‘To solve our problem.’

‘We don’t have a problem.’

‘Yes we do. Martin Caldwell. Peter Ellery. Nancekuke. Shitaro Masafumi. I have … material … I am willing to surrender.’

Silence ruled at the other end of the phone for several stretched moments. Whatever Cushing was thinking, it was clear she was thinking hard.

‘Can we meet?’

‘I’m at Westminster. I’m very busy.’

‘It won’t take long.’

There was another long pause. Then she said, ‘Parliament Square. Half an hour. OK?’

Wada had barely got her own ‘OK’ out when the call was ended.

The pavement outside the Houses of Parliament was crowded with campaigners waving flags and banners. They were a loud and colourful symbol of the Brexit controversy Wada had read about in the newspapers. She supposed Baroness Cushing, as a member of the House of Lords, was playing some part in the continuing debate. But the taxi driver’s discontented muttering as he dropped her off didn’t suggest he’d be impressed if he knew what it was. ‘More crooks in there than Wormwood Scrubs,’ he growled.