She was out over the Atlantic on a flight bound for New York before she’d got the measure of the information Kodaka had amassed about Hiroji Nishizaki and his business operations. Some of it was culled from cases he’d handled over the years: sokaiya operations, commercial espionage, missing persons; some appeared to be his own conclusions and speculations about Nishizaki’s activities based on an overview of those cases.

There wasn’t much doubt Kodaka thought Nishizaki had often engaged in illegal activities: bribery, blackmail, rigging of share prices, corrupt use of inside information. And there were suggestions of worse than this as well. Several missing person cases involving executives in companies Nishizaki had had dealings with had ended with the discovery of bodies floating in Tokyo Bay.

It looked to Wada as if Kodaka had started amassing information about Nishizaki after sensing his hand in a number of cases, and then, perhaps to his surprise, he’d found him everywhere, in reports and documents and obituaries and court rulings and police files, even though his name hadn’t actually appeared in any of them. Initially, it had only been by constant cross-reference that Kodaka had been able to make the connections. Then, at some ill-defined point, those connections had acquired a critical mass of their own.

Nishizaki’s success appeared to be based on not being what the authorities instinctively looked for in commercially related crime. No known sokaiya groups were associated with him. He had nothing to do with yakuza. As far as they were to know, he was just a phenomenally accomplished entrepreneur.

But they hadn’t looked hard enough. They had no reason to. There was always something else to move on to.

Kodaka was a different matter. When Wada thought about him, as she did through that long flight into the night, she remembered both his stubbornness and his patience. He’d never give up. And he’d take as much time as it took. The kage-boshi file was a testament to that. The detail. The precision. The accuracy. Dates; times; names; places; links; associations; conclusions hinted at but never spelt out. Was it really Nishizaki’s shadow the file was named after? Or was Kodaka the one casting a shadow – a shadow over his prey?

If so, his prey had eventually noticed. And Kodaka had paid for that with his life. Wada knew what he’d say to her if he could. ‘Don’t make the same mistake.’ And she knew what she’d say to him. ‘I won’t.’ Yet here she was, reading the file, preparing, in all likelihood, to ignore his advice.

And there, contained in its own clear plastic wallet at the end of the file, was the clinching piece of information: the reason why, as Kodaka must have anticipated, she was bound to make the same mistake. Exactly the same mistake.