It wasn’t much, of course. But George was undaunted. ‘There’s nothing more attractive in a woman than an air of mystery, Miss Wada.’ (She’d dodged giving him more than her surname.) ‘That’s something my wife’s never understood.’

By the time George had embarked on his third in-flight drink, he was quizzing Wada about the writings of Tanizaki and the intricacies of the Japanese language. Slowly, to her own astonishment, she was drawn in. She even found herself illustrating a linguistic point to him by explaining that the Toyoda family were thought to have changed their corporate name to Toyota because it could be written with the numerologically auspicious eight strokes foretelling prosperity. For some reason, this amused him enormously. What was she thinking, she later wondered.

George fell asleep shortly afterwards, for which she was grateful.

Falling asleep herself took rather longer.

It was as the plane began its descent to Keflavík airport through thick cloud and drizzle on Saturday morning that Wada realized why she’d succumbed to George’s attempts to engage with her. He had nothing to do with Kodaka or Nishizaki or any of the many mysteries set in train by the death of Shitaro Masafumi. He was completely and reassuringly uninvolved. He was safe. And in talking to him she’d succeeded in forgetting, at least for a short while, the problems she was going to have to confront.

George didn’t wake until the plane had actually landed. Bleary-eyed and dishevelled, he was still hunting for his bag in the overhead locker when Wada disembarked. And that, she assumed, was the last they were going to see of each other.

But she’d underestimated him. Hiring a car was out of the question, for the simple reason that Wada couldn’t drive. Like many residents of Tokyo, she’d never seen any reason to learn. Accordingly, she joined the queue to buy a ticket for the bus into Reykjavík. Within minutes, George appeared beside her. ‘Why don’t we share a cab, Miss Wada? I don’t know about you, but personally I hate waiting for buses.’ There was something in his rumpled smile that made it impossible to refuse.

Instructing the taxi driver meant they both knew which hotel the other was staying in. The Hilton, in George’s case, while Wada had booked herself into the Sol, which had the advantage of being quite close to the Hotel Arnarson, where Caldwell had last been heard of.

They drove away from the airport through blackened and desolate lavafields across which the low cloud rolled like smoke. ‘This for sure is nothing like New Jersey,’ was George’s reaction.

It was for sure nothing like anywhere, in fact, that Wada could think of.