He followed the line of the chain-link perimeter fence as it rose and dipped with the level of the cliffs, wondering where and how Peter and Alison had entered the site. He wasn’t in any serious doubt they had gone in, though for what purpose exactly he wasn’t sure. Neither was Holgate. Whatever Tom Noy had told them he’d kept quiet about in the aftermath of the drowning. So had Martin Caldwell. The shock of Alison’s death – and Peter’s presumed death – had effectively silenced them, perhaps because it had frightened them. And with good reason.

Tom Noy had taken the secret to his grave in 1982, killed by liver cancer at the age of fifty-seven. ‘There was never any danger of the MoD overspending on pensions for Nancekuke workers,’ Holgate had wryly remarked.

As for Caldwell, at some point he’d obviously stopped being frightened. Or perhaps the discovery that Peter Ellery probably hadn’t died that night had finally driven him to act. But still, it seemed, there was good reason to be frightened. Even forty-two years later.

Half an hour’s stiff walking showed Nick all of the little there was to be seen of Nancekuke – or RAF Portreath as it had officially been renamed. An old airfield with a few buildings on a wind-scoured plateau on the edge of the land high above the Atlantic Ocean. Its death-dealing past had been erased, its buildings demolished, its materials buried, its land decontaminated. All gone. And best forgotten. If you believed what you read in the newspaper.

The signs on the fence remained, however, as uncompromising echoes of that past. MINISTRY OF DEFENCE PROPERTY – KEEP OUT. Keep out; stay away; pretend it never happened. That was the message. Whatever it was that had happened … officially hadn’t. There was no story. There was no secret. Nothing.

Except the clean, cold wind blowing in.

And the question, lodged in Nick’s mind, sharpened by the belief – the growing certainty – that Peter Ellery was his father. What happened that night? What really happened?

Haruto admitted to Wada he’d never eaten at the restaurant where they met at twelve thirty that day. But it wasn’t far from his office, its sushi came highly recommended and he’d engineered a full hour’s break to spend with his sister, so she stifled her objections to the tastelessly large ‘Hello Kitty’ figurine waggling its paw at her from the corner of the bar.

It transpired Haruto hadn’t spoken to their mother for several weeks. ‘Every time I think of calling her I think of how she’ll cross-question me about my social life, and decide it can wait,’ he admitted. Wada sympathized. ‘Are you still working for that private detective?’ he asked.

‘Sort of,’ she replied. Well, that was true enough. Kodaka was dead and technically she was no longer his employee, but she was carrying on his work.