The plane was late landing at JFK and it took Wada more than two hours to clear immigration and retrieve her suitcase. A cab carried her through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan she was familiar with from the imported American TV shows her father had loved to watch, and delivered her to the apartment block facing the Hudson river where her brother lived. It was an expensive address, suggesting he’d done well at Nomura, even though the apartment itself was small by American standards and would have looked smaller still if there’d been anything to fill it with. But Haruto didn’t appear to have accumulated many possessions since moving to New York, apart from a wardrobe’s worth of suits.

He greeted her affectionately but wearily. It was past midnight and he generally started early at the bank. There was little in the way of conversation, though he must have been puzzled by her arrival at such short notice. This didn’t surprise Wada. The key to their relationship had always been minimal inquisitiveness about each other’s lives – the secret of harmonious co-existence in the tiny house they’d grown up in. He didn’t even ask how long she planned to stay. If he had, his puzzlement would only have grown.

Realizing he’d never make it to Porthtowan before nightfall, Nick booked himself into a cheapish hotel on the outskirts of Newquay and did his best to ignore the holidaying families around him. He wandered into the town centre, ate something inauthentically Italian, and wandered back again. His mind was fixed on the mystery surrounding the man he knew now he had to think of as his father: Peter Ellery. There was going to come a time – and it was going to come soon – when April would have to explain the lie she and Caro had peddled to him. Meanwhile, Nick felt compelled to see the place where the official record of Peter Ellery’s life had ended, along with that of Alison Parker, forty-two years before.

There was no doubt, of course, that Alison Parker had drowned off Porthtowan beach that June night in 1977, though there was considerable doubt about how she’d drowned. But Peter Ellery’s death was just an assumption, a likelihood, a probability. It was hard not to believe Martin Caldwell thought he could prove Peter Ellery was posing as Peter Evans in London three months after his supposed death in Cornwall. And it was surely a betting certainty he’d planned to tell Nick Peter Ellery was still alive to this day, posing as someone else.