End of the World Blues

CHAPTER 1 — Friday, 15 August 2003

Later, Kit Nouveau was to realise that his world unravelled in Tokyo, six months after a cos-play stuffed large amounts of money into a locker that could be opened with a cheap screwdriver, had anyone known what it contained. Until then, he’d thought it ended fifteen years earlier, at 10.38 pm, on Friday, 15 August 2003, behind an old barn on the chalk hills above Middle Morton, a small town in Hampshire.

Who knew? Certainly not the nineteen-year-old squaddie leaning against the barn’s wooden wall. He’d come to the party with his latest girlfriend, a high-breasted Welsh girl called Amy who had a filthy laugh and, he hoped, filthy habits. Only she was inside sulking and the girl whose bandeau top he’d just undone was going out with someone else.

“Hey,” said Kit. “It’s okay.”

Pushing him away, the girl re-tied a ribbon. “No,” she said. “It’s not.” Mary O’Mally wore lipstick, black eyeliner, and bare legs under a frayed white miniskirt…Both makeup and attitude put on in a bus shelter roughly half way between her parents’ house and the barn. She’d cut her hair since Kit last saw her and had red highlights put in.

Under his own waxed jacket Kit wore a Switchblade Lies tee-shirt, with jeans and biker boots. His fair hair had been cropped and the faintest trace of a blond, very non-regulation goatee ghosted his chin.

Inside the hut someone took off Original Pirate Material and slung on Tight Smile, jacking up the volume.

“Wait,” said Kit, when Mary tried to say something. And they both listened to the bass line, as Vita Brevis thumbed a Vintage five-string. Then came Art Nouveau, splintering Vita’s bass line with a three-chord crash, and Kit found himself fingering fret shapes onto empty air.

Mary grinned.

“I’ll walk you home,” he said.

“Kit…”

Undoing her top had been stupid but old habits died hard. Josh was a nice guy, in a rich-boy kind of way, but Mary was Kit’s ex-girlfriend and he still occasionally dreamed about her. Reassuring dreams, at least reassuring to someone who’d puked his way through an Iraqi firefight, put his sniper training into practise, and was on compassionate leave while his Colonel worked out what to do about an incident no one really wanted to make the papers.

“I’d better go back.”

“Okay,” said Kit.

“You coming with me?”

Shaking his head, Kit said, “Better not. Can you get Josh to give Amy a lift home? And, you know…” Kit stopped, wondering how to put his thoughts into words.

“What?” said Mary.

“You know. If you and Josh ever…”

“If we…?”

“If you split up,” said Kit, “then maybe we could try again?” His voice trailed off as he realised Mary wanted to slap him, which wouldn’t be the first time. “I know,” he said, holding up his hands.

“No you don’t,” she said, dirty blonde hair brushing bare shoulders as she shook her head, each shake fiercer than the one before. “You have no fucking idea.”

Mary and Kit went out for five months, right up to the start of last year’s exams. She’d just about convinced her mother that Kit and band practise weren’t about to ruin her grades when Kit broke up Switchblade Lies, dumped Mary, and talked himself into a thirteen-week Army Preparation Course, all in the same afternoon.

Josh was the one who picked up the pieces and walked Mary to her exams and convinced her life could still be good. Josh was the one Mary’s mother liked, though she’d probably have liked him more if his mother hadn’t been Korean.

“It was just a thought,” said Kit.

“Yeah,” said Mary. “A shit one.” And there it might have rested, except the moon chose that moment to slip between clouds, and Mary caught tears in the eyes of the boy opposite.

“You broke it off,” she said crossly.

“It’s not that.”

“What then?”

“I don’t know,” said Kit. “Life, I guess…You’d better go back inside. Josh will be wondering where you’ve gone.”

“He doesn’t own me.”

“Hey,” said Kit. “No one owns you, I know that. No one owns me. No one owns anyone. We just get to borrow each other for a while.”

She glared at him. “Did you make that up?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Kit thought about it. “At least, I don’t think it’s stolen from anybody else.”

Kit and Mary ended up pushing his Kawasaki between them, while the moon stretched an elongated couple and bike onto Blackboy Lane and night winds whispered through fields on the far side of the hedge.

The barn was stained black and had been built before any of them had been born, the pub to which the hut belonged and the three farm cottages that made up Wintersprint were half a mile behind. Two of the cottages had been knocked together to make a house. It was his mother’s idea.

“What are you thinking?”

“About Mum.”

Anyone else would have left it there. “Do you regret testifying?”

Kit’s mother had been American, an artist from New York. His father was small-town Hampshire, a Sergeant on the local police force. It would have been hard to find two people more unsuited. Their marriage had been coming apart for most of Kit’s childhood; certainly for as long as he could remember, and Kit had a good memory.

One night, three years before, his parents had argued, which was nothing new. And Kit’s mother had demanded a divorce, which was also nothing new. Only this time she meant it, which was. A jogger found her at the foot of Ashley chalk pit, her skull broken and her ribs badly fractured. She’d been dead for roughly two hours, according to the coroner.

Suicide, said his father.

Kit was interviewed and told the inspector what he’d heard. Which was far more than he’d ever wanted to hear. When asked, It was the first such argument, wasn’t it? He said no. And kept saying no, all the way through to appearing as a witness for the prosecution in court.

Kit’s evidence was tainted, that was the position of the defence. He’d had his own argument with his father, a day earlier. A fierce and vicious argument, that saw Sergeant Newton forced to physically restrain his son. This was the boy’s revenge. A twisted attempt to use the death of his mother to hurt his father, a man who was already heartbroken by the loss. The jury believed the defence, and Kit and his father had not spoken since, not a single word. Although, until Kit enlisted, they’d shared the same house.

“You don’t think that maybe…”

“No,” said Kit, “I don’t.”

She glanced away, moonlight on her face. Kit saw it happen. She glanced aside and bit her lip. Say it, he wanted to tell her. Only Mary wouldn’t and if he was honest Kit wasn’t sure he wanted it said. Being wrong about his father was as bad as being right.

“A pity,” said Mary, some time later.

“What? About my mother?”

“No,” she said, sighing. “About the band.”

Art Nouveau, Vita Brevis, and Joshua Treece…Kit managed a smile. “Not really,” he said. “We were shit. None of us could even play.”

“That’s harsh,” said the girl who’d briefly been Vita Brevis—bass/ vocals/keyboards/lyrics.

“We were worse than shit.”

One single, a week’s airplay on local radio, and a final fumble with Mary in the back of a van, while Josh pretended to sleep and Colonel Treece kept his eyes on the road. Kit had bought the Kawasaki with money he got selling his guitar and the only thing he’d kept was his new name, although the Art bit of that had gone the way of his hair.

“You want a cigarette?”

“No,” said Kit, “I’ve given up.” Kicking his bike onto its stand, he took the packet from her fingers and tapped one free, lighting it with a high-chrome Zippo that read, Iraq 2003, the Democracy in Action Tour. He’d borrowed it from an American Sergeant who was still waiting for him to give it back.

“Here,” he said.

“You know,” said Mary. “We should get out of the road.”

So Kit rolled his bike through a gap in the hedge and parked it. In the old days people would have read meaning into the jagged clouds and back-lit sky, the wind that dragged shivers from both their bodies and a moon as cold and clear as a world trapped in the cross-hairs of a gun sight.

“Time to go,” said Kit, watching Mary grind her cigarette underfoot.

Mary raised her eyebrows.

“Curfew, remember?” As if either of them could forget. One of the reasons Mary’s mother disliked Kit—he had treated her rules as something negotiable.

“They’re away.”

Kit looked at her.

“Yeah,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the lecture I got.”

“I would…no friends back to the house and no staying out all night. Your dad knows exactly how many beers there are in the fridge and the level of every bottle in the drinks cupboard. I’ve had it,” he added, when she looked surprised. “That time my parents went to London.”

Back in the days when my mother was alive.

“The weekend you had the party?”

Yeah, that weekend.

Clouds continued to scuttle across the sky and eleven o’clock came and went, measured in bells carried on the wind from the village below. At Mary’s insistence, they counted off the bells, but called the first bell two and ended at twelve to muddle the devil.

“Don’t ask,” she said. “Blame my grandmother.”

A battered red Mini came by, followed by a taxi. It looked as if those unable to squeeze into Josh’s car had banded together to get a cab. Amy was among them.

When the next round of bells began, Mary and Kit counted them from two to thirteen and then stood up. It was meant to be a simple thank-you for watching the clouds, letting him count bells, and not holding their last argument against him. A farewell to what had been, little more.

Leaning forward, Kit took Mary’s face in his hands. He expected a kiss, a shrug, and to walk her home. A snog for old times’ sake. Something by way of goodbye. Only, something happened.

As Mary’s hand came up to touch his face, his fingers brushed the bare skin of her waist and a circuit closed between them, the shiver of excitement catching them both by surprise. Her lips tasted of cheap cigarettes and expensive brandy that she’d stolen from home. She said nothing when his hand found the knot on her bandeau top for a second time and even less when he reached for the buttons on her skirt. He was her first, something unexpected.

“I thought you and Josh…”

Mary said nothing, just raised herself on one elbow and stared until Kit looked away. “No,” she said, into his silence.

Slivers of daylight had begun to warm the chalk hills around them. A maroon Volvo trundled out of the village, headed for Southampton or London. Its headlights sweeping blindly over the spot where Mary and Kit lay.

“Sorry,” said Kit. “Wrong question.”

Reaching over, Mary patted his face. “You don’t say.”

CHAPTER 2 — Friday, 8 June

The bar occupied the second floor of a narrow building in Roppongi, behind a tourist drag of burger bars, clothes shops, and strip joints running south from Almond crossing. The building stood low on a slope in an area full of crooked, dirty alleyways, one of few such areas remaining in Roppongi or anywhere else.

A small patch of cinder-block parking occupied what was once garden, but because the original garden sloped away from the road, a wall had been built and ground in-filled to make space for three cars. This had been done sixty years before, when most of Tokyo was crooked lanes or bomb sites, and US and British soldiers were abandoning Roppongi to the bar owners and pimps who’d kept them so well entertained.

These days the cinder patch was empty by day and home to a row of motorcycles at night. This area, directly opposite the cemetery, smelled slightly of sewage; the whole of Roppongi smelled of sewage in summer. Mixed with the odour of noodles, it was one of Tokyo’s signature smells.

The man who stared from Pirate Mary’s basement window inhaled a deeper sourness, one that danced in wisps of smoke from the heated foil in his fingers. Kit Nouveau kept his habit on a tight leash, limiting himself to one fix a day, but the dragon was restless and beginning to strain against its chains. One of them was winning and Kit guessed it wasn’t him.

Crumpling blackened foil, Kit tossed it into a bin and went to fetch his wife. “Come inside,” he told her, shrugging himself into a bike jacket. “I need to go.”

“Okay,” said Yoshi. “I’m leaving at nine.”

“I’ll be back,” Kit promised.

Yoshi Tanaka nodded, not really seeing her husband. She was wearing a blue yukata tied clumsily around her narrow waist with the belt from something else. Her feet were bare and clay splattered, and she’d twisted her sweat-darkened hair into a knot and fastened it with a yellow rubber band. In her hand was an unfired bowl, unlike any work of hers he’d ever seen.

“What are you doing?” Kit’s voice must have been abrupt, because his question made Yoshi flip her gaze towards him. Her eyes were as glazed as the pots she made.

“Getting rid of it,” she said.

There were so many things wrong with this Kit barely knew where to begin, so he started with the first thing that came to mind. “You never waste clay,” he said. “I thought you told me it brought bad luck.”

Yoshi scowled.

“Anyway,” said Kit. “What’s wrong with it?”

He watched her think. And just when he was sure her thoughts had turned to something else altogether, Yoshi glanced at the bowl and began to shake her head.

“It’s not me,” she said.

This, for Yoshi, was a statement of such overwhelming egotism that Kit was shocked. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Look at the thing…”

She peered at it doubtfully.

“Bring it inside,” said Kit. “If you still hate it tomorrow we’ll chuck it out.” He led his wife through the basement door and into the utility room. It was no cooler inside than out, but at least Yoshi was away from direct sun and no longer standing semi-naked in full view of the street.

Sweat slicked Yoshi’s face and gathered in the valley between her breasts. She’d been awake for thirty-two hours and treadling her potter’s wheel for almost fifteen of those. A stranger could have told how exhausted she was from the way her eyes kept sliding out of focus.

“Get some sleep,” Kit suggested. “Before we open again.”

Pirate Mary’s was one of five Irish bars in Roppongi. The area still traded on its reputation for seediness and sex but it was rapidly becoming smarter than expats like Kit really liked. Exclusive designers opened as fast as brothels shut. The tiny cemetery behind Kit’s bar had started appearing on postcards, and the prostitutes walking Gaien-higashi-dori now wore faux rather than real fur in winter, so as not to upset their clients’ sensibilities.

One day, the real Roppongi, with its hostess bars and filthy courtyards would vanish forever, like Montmartre or London’s Soho before it, leaving an ersatz theme park of perversion lite. In the meantime, the Irish bars pulled in regular crowds, with Pirate Mary’s gathering one of the largest.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you settled.”

Footsteps followed Kit up three flights of stairs and when he led Yoshi into their bedroom he was relieved to discover that she’d left the bowl behind. “I’ll set the alarm clock for you.”

Her nod was slight.

Lifting the yukata from her shoulders, Kit steered his wife towards a naked lavatory in the corner and listened to her piss. She didn’t bother to clean her teeth in the basin or remove the smear of lip gloss that served as makeup. When she finally moved it was to examine herself in a long mirror.

“You can stop,” he said.

Yoshi shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

Rope burns circled her wrists, thighs, and breasts. The knots had been too loose the first time and she’d made him tie them all again. It was a regular ritual, one he still failed to understand.

Outside on the balcony her treadle was sticky with slops and the bucket of raw clay had been left uncovered. So Kit found a cloth, ran it under water, and protected the clay. Having done that, he cut the slops from her table and cleaned its wheel with the edge of a wooden blade, flicking the scrapings on the floor to dry. He could sweep them up later.

Yoshi was asleep by the time he finished.

The new bowl was where Yoshi left it, next to one of the bins on the cinder patch beside the bar. She’d been carrying it clumsily and her thumb had smudged a dark print beneath the rim, the bowl already dry enough to produce a white bloom around the edge.

Kit’s first instinct was to run the bowl under a tap, but its rim was so thin that it looked as if it might bend at the slightest pressure. So he put the bowl on a tray, found some gauze, and soaked this in water and draped it over the bowl, protecting both with a large upturned ceramic cake tin. As an afterthought he put the cake tin in a cupboard by the back door, checked the front door was also locked, and went to get his motorbike.

“Noovoo-san…”

The old man who tended the graveyard was waiting for Kit by the railings. In his arms, Ito-san carried a long bundle of prayer sticks, stained with age.

“Mr. Ito…”

“Police were here.”

“What?” said Kit. He should have said, I’m sorry, who…? And thank you for letting me know. But all he wanted to do was arrive in time for his language lesson.

“Police,” Mr. Ito said. “From the ward office. One kept trying the door. I said you were probably out…”

Mr. Ito seemed embarrassed.

“It’s okay,” said Kit. “Thank you for telling me.”

Ito-san gave a brief bow.

CHAPTER 3 — Friday, 8 June

“Oniji-chan,” said Kit, “I probably shouldn’t ask this, but where’s your husband?”

Elegant, middle-aged, and happily naked, the Japanese woman lifted herself onto one elbow, revealing a heavy breast. “He’s busy.”

Kit considered that.

“What kind of busy?” he asked finally. There were many things about Mrs. Oniji’s life that puzzled him. Including why her husband spent so little time with his wife.

“Torturing someone.”

“God…” Kit sat up in bed. “Why?”

Mrs. Oniji shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never ask.” She smiled. “Does my answer make you feel afraid?”

When Kit shook his head, Mrs. Oniji sighed.

“It should,” she said, “but then I’m not sure you feel much anything.” She paused. “Is that correct?”

“Just about,” said Kit. “Much about anything or anything much would be better…”

“Ahh,” said Mrs. Oniji. “I see.”

Later, when they’d made love again, rinsed themselves under a power shower, and returned to the bed, Kit put his hand on Mrs. Oniji’s stomach and felt it rumble.

“We should eat…”

Mrs. Oniji rolled over to stare into the pale blue of his eyes. She seemed puzzled. “Is that an order?”

“No,” said Kit. “More of a suggestion. An order would be, We must eat now, or You will eat.”

Mrs. Oniji smiled. “I’ll remember that,” she said. Having understood its meaning and how the phrase should be used, Mrs. Oniji would undoubtedly return to it, probably the next time they met. “You know,” she said a minute later, “there is no food in this house. However, I have booked a restaurant.”

Kit’s heart sank.

The bed on which he and Mrs. Oniji lay was a hundred and fifty years old and as uncomfortable as the day it was made. It sat in the upstairs room of a wooden house in the lanes behind Aoyama-dori. The building originally belonged to her grandfather, and if Mrs. Oniji’s husband ever knew his wife owned it he’d forgotten.

Everything Kit knew about Mr. Oniji he’d learned from Mrs. Oniji, relayed to him in increasingly complex and confident sentences. Kisho Oniji had interests in construction and shipping, both of which kept him very busy. Also, fuzoku, the ejaculation industry. He owned a hostess bar in Roppongi, five soapland brothels, a large love hotel in Kabukicho, and Bottomless Kup, a franchise where ostentatiously subservient waitresses waxed their pubic hair and served coffee, without knickers.

He also liked gold watches and ceramics, but hated golf. Which was a problem because he owned a golf course in sight of Mount Fuji. The members, who paid handsomely for their membership, would have liked their chairman to play.

When Kit first arrived in Tokyo it was to work for an exclusive and very expensive language school that catered to the wives of high-ranking executives expecting to be sent overseas.

The job was well paid and secure in the way that only Japanese jobs back then could be. It was also fantastically boring. Although what finally drove Kit out were the classroom posters, one of which read, Talent requires reformatting what you know. Having identified the Japanese as the world’s first post-modern race, Per Sorenson had created post-modern language tuition, ideally suited to a country where people inevitably told you something by telling you something else.

Kit’s second job paid substantially less but catered to a wider variety of students, one of whom was Mrs. Oniji. It was only later that Kit discovered A1 Language Learning was owned by her husband.

When Kit resigned from A1 it was on the understanding he would continue to give Mrs. Oniji her monthly lesson, and that was ten years ago. She’d been thirty-one and he’d been twenty-five. The arrangement had continued happily until six months earlier, when they’d somehow ended up in bed.

“Are you happy?”

It was unusual for Mrs. Oniji to ask such questions. And the fact she felt able to ask a question quite that personal came as a shock.

“Why?” asked Kit.

“Just wondered,” she said.

Pushing her down, Kit pulled aside the sheet and stilled the hand that came up to cover her breasts. “I’m not unhappy,” he said, positioning himself over her.

Mrs. Oniji sighed. “That makes two of us, I guess…”

Most people when they mention Tokyo mean the twenty-three wards. Metropolitan Tokyo is actually formed of twenty-three wards, twenty-six cities, three towns, one village, and two islands. For Mrs. Oniji the city was smaller still, contained within only three wards: Chiyoda-ku, Chuo-ku, and Minato-ku.

Within these could be found the restaurants of Akasaka, the shopping district of Ginza, and Marunouchi itself, the centre of all things commercial and political. It was in Marunouchi that Kisho Oniji had offices.

Inevitably enough, the restaurant to which she took Kit was in Akasaka, set back behind Hitosuki-dori and separated from the bustle of the street by wooden fencing and a quiet garden. In its courtyard a senior and junior salaryman were finishing one of those clipped conversations that looked—to outsiders—like the verbal equivalent of a punishment beating. Whatever was said, the younger of the two bowed deeply and turned for the exit, standing aside to let Mrs. Oniji pass.

Kit doubted she even noticed.

Walking into the restaurant was like walking into a bamboo grove; dried lengths had been used to divide the low room into waiting area, bar area, and restaurant proper. Not by making walls, because that would be far too obvious, it had been used to suggest where walls might be, as if each upwards stroke of bamboo existed to provide structural supports for a wall that had never been built.

Maybe the lengths were real, or perhaps they were cast from resin. Whatever, the light within each was bright enough to illuminate its skin like neon bars on a cage. There were three dozen such strands, rising from a slate floor and disappearing into the ceiling. The tables were also slate, the chairs wooden. A length of counter was lined with rattan stools, each claimed by someone smart enough to pass muster. The tables might need reservations, but despite complaints Café Ryokan resolutely refused to take reservations for places at the bar.

It was a million miles from Pirate Mary’s in Roppongi, where bozozoku bikers mixed with Western expatriates, Tokyo’s art crowd, and a smattering of Japanese students who believed, sometimes rightly, that they were living dangerously.

“Another sake?”

Kit shrugged, caught himself, and smiled. “Sounds neat…”

The Japanese woman opposite repeated the words to herself and Kit could see her think them through, consider all possible meanings to be found in the phrase, and fail to come up with one that made sense of being offered a drink.

“Slang?”

Nodding, Kit watched her file away the word for later use.

“We should eat,” she said.

Fragments of sea urchin slid across Kit’s bowl, and even black pepper did little to improve their taste, which was over-rich and slimy to the tongue.

This was, he knew, the entire point of eating ezobafun. Its texture being as important as its taste, maybe more important. He could tell himself ezobafun tasted like Mrs. Oniji at the mid point of her cycle, but still his throat tightened with every fresh piece. No amount of sake was enough to wash it down, and he was drinking a lot of sake.

“Slowly,” said Mrs. Oniji. “It is best to eat ezobafun slowly.”

Kit looked up from his bowl.

“Savour it,” she suggested.

He nodded doubtfully.

“You like this place?”

Ordinarily yes, he wanted to say. Only today he was late getting home and Mrs. Oniji and he had at least another three courses to go. The mistake had been in not booking a restaurant himself. Still, Kit understood the compliment she was paying in bringing him here.

“It’s very elegant,” he said. “Very sophisticated.”

“Elegant,” said Mrs. Oniji, turning the word over in her mouth. “Sophisticated.” She got the stress slightly wrong both times and swallowed the middle of her second word, but her English was still infinitely more impressive than Kit’s Japanese, which consisted of five hundred or so words or phrases and could be reduced to the three that mattered.

Domo arigato, Dozo, Sumimasen.

Thank you, Please, I’m sorry.

“There is a difference?”

“Between…?”

He’d been too abrupt. “Let me see,” he said, pushing his bowl aside, while he explained why the arrangement of bamboo in the rock garden outside was elegant while the American woman at the bar was sophisticated. The weather, clothes, food, Impressionist art, and books, these were the things Mrs. Oniji and Kit discussed during their weekly meetings.

“I thought, perhaps,” said Mrs. Oniji, “we could go late-night shopping…” She waited for Kit to nod, his acceptance that this was a good idea. “I need a dress for New York.”

He could hear the simple pride in that sentence. She was flying to America for a week’s holiday, with her sister, her sister-in-law, and her mother. Her husband was too busy to make the trip—Kisho Oniji was always too busy—but his would be the money that paid for first-class flights, the hotel near Central Park, and, quite probably, the presents that all three women would buy him at the Takashimaya department store on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

Standing up, Kit pulled back Mrs. Oniji’s chair. He had been her English tutor for ten years, her friend for three, and her lover only recently. He was not proud of cheating on his wife, but life with Yoshi was infinitely more complicated than most people realised.

Neither Mrs. Oniji nor Kit noticed the man who watched them collect their coats and it would have made little difference if they had. Hiroshi Sato had been selected for the absolute averageness of his looks, height, hair, and complexion.

He was nearly invisible.

Waiting a few seconds, Kisho Oniji’s personal assistant pushed back his stool, dropped a 10,000-yen note onto the counter, and followed the couple outside.

CHAPTER 4 — Friday, 8 June

Below a cast-iron streetlight that rusted in the shadow of an overpass built for Tokyo’s 1964 Olympics (and scheduled for demolition should Japan win the next Olympic bid), on a corner by Best Soul Burger, and a bit beyond where the Shuto Expressway 3 forks west to Shibuya or south towards the ersatz Parisian splendour of the Tokyo Tower, a cos-play-zoku in a faded red cloak made knives appear and disappear.

The knives came into being between the girl’s first finger and thumb and disappeared at a flick of her wrist. She wore white gloves with the fingers cut away and was watched only by a cat.

At least that was the night’s audience until Mr. Oniji’s personal assistant arrived.

“Clever,” he said.

The girl bowed, bent quickly to scoop up half the coins the man dropped into her plastic coffee cup, and tossed one of her knives high into the air before catching it behind her back.

He noticed, almost too late, that the girl in the cloak and white-lace wedding dress kept her eyes shut. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not really.”

Hiroshi Sato kept watching anyway. Although what he really watched was the alley beyond the girl, where the foreigner headed for home. Mr. Oniji’s instructions had been very clear, Sato was to observe without being seen.

The job had begun five hours earlier when Mr. Nouveau ambled out of Pirate Mary’s, conversed briefly with an old man, and climbed onto a Kawasaki W650, which he rode north. Having paid a Brazilian mechanic in advance, Mr. Nouveau left his W650 at a machine shop on Akasaka-dori, walking the rest of the way, to arrive at a tiny wooden house near Temechi-dori at 4.30 exactly, the time given for Mrs. Oniji’s lesson.

Two and a half hours later, Mrs. Oniji and her tutor had left the house. A short while later they reached a well-known restaurant, where they sat at a corner table. Mrs. Oniji did the bulk of the talking and Hiroshi Sato regarded this as appropriate, since she was the one practising her conversation. After this, they went shopping.

The boss had not asked for a full report. He had merely told Hiroshi Sato where the foreigner lived and when the lesson would begin and ordered him to follow the man. He had not told Hiroshi Sato to write a report or make notes. Although Mr. Sato was making them anyway, just in case. So far as he could tell, nothing unseemly was taking place. Whether walking, talking, or eating, the boss’s wife and the foreigner treated each other with polite respect.

Leaving the cos-play to her knives, Mr. Sato abandoned the corner near Best Soul Burger for air conditioning inside. He nodded absent-mindedly at the sing-song “irashaimase” greeting from a Korean girl behind the counter and ordered a teriyaki burger. When it came, by itself on a white plate, with a thick soy and plum sauce, he carried it to a table away from a window and began to expand his notes.

Even if windows had let Hiroshi Sato watch the alley outside, it’s unlikely he’d have noticed the tramp who staggered from a Club Kitty doorway. This was the man who’d watched Mr. Sato break off his careful if over-obvious shadowing of the drunken foreigner. It was even less likely Mr. Sato would have noticed the cat, which ambled over to look at the homeless man at a nod from the cos-play.

“Trouble?” Neku asked.

“Think so,” said the cat. At least, that’s what she thought he said.

The cat might not be able to name days of the week, but he knew good days from bad, and, until Neku appeared, the cat had been suffering bad traffic, weird weather, and a row of metal bins where plastic ones used to be.

This was a problem, because the cat had been able to lift plastic lids. In fact, since he first stopped to watch the juggling girl two months earlier, those bins had been where he ate every night. The cat wasn’t to know his eating habits had led to a call from the Citizens Recycling Society, suggesting Best Soul adopt metal bins as good practise suggested.

“You’re odd,” the cat said.

“And you’re not?” said Neku, twisting her hair into a knot and fixing it in place with two long ivory pins. The blades she slipped into her pocket.

“Where are we going?” asked the cat. Although, what he actually said was, Now…?

“Work.”

The cat scowled.

“I’ve got this,” Neku said, reaching into her pocket for smoked eel. “Unagi set.” She added, “You eat it.” They walked in silence, with Neku taking cold boiled rice for herself and tossing the cat slivers of meat from her bento box, applauding every time the cat caught a fragment before it hit the ground.

“All gone,” she told him.

Having checked to make sure she told the truth, the cat twisted between Neku’s ankles, almost tripping her.

“Sorry,” said Neku, “I need to be alone now.”

So the cat asked, Why? Which he did with a simple twitch of his whiskers and a quarter turn of one ear.

“Hunting,” said the girl.

At this the cat looked interested. “More food?”

Neku shook her head. “Enemies…”

“Ahh,” said the cat. Food, hunting, sex, and fighting, such things he understood. Conversation waited for none of those.

“Good to meet you,” said Neku.

The cat nodded and watched her walk away. He liked her cloak, which was long and lined with shiny stuff. And he’d liked the eel, very much. After a few seconds’ thought, the cat trotted after her.

Violent crime is still rare in Japan. That’s the official version. The truth is somewhat more complex, though nothing like as grim as the hipper guide books suggest, with their dark rumours about heavily massaged figures and officially sanctioned underreporting. Violence happens. It’s still relatively common within families, between senior and junior classes in school, and remains the currency of choice inside gangs, but it occurs within rigidly defined hierarchies. Everybody understands that.

It felt out of place on darkened steps leading to a Roppongi graveyard.

Maybe this was why Kit was so slow to realise he was being followed. Alternatively, his slowness might have been down to the sake sweating itself out of his body and making him stumble on the steps, already aware he was too late to do anything but hope Yoshi had left No Neck in charge and gone to visit her sister Yuko as originally planned.

He was inside his own thoughts, oblivious to the cloying humidity around him. His life was not right, it was not even wrong, it just was…and had been that way for so long Kit found it impossible to imagine life being any different. So he didn’t try, he just put one foot in front of the other and wished himself home.

Neku sighed. If she’d been hunting she would have struck by now, so much time wasted on tracking was merely silly; unless the man with the Colt was having doubts? This seemed possible—the gap between hunter and prey remained the same ten paces as it had been a minute earlier, only now the hunter was glancing back, as if aware he too might be followed.

And he was, for reasons that probably made sense only if you were Neku, the original…The foreigner gave her coffee. He’d never actually asked if she liked coffee, but every morning, when he returned from his walk, he presented her with a cup, giving Neku a slight bow. Once she changed doorways just to see what would happen and he arrived at her new doorway, carrying her cup, as if that was where she always slept.

And before this, he’d given her 5,000 yen. At a kiosk on the way to the Meiji Shrine. One day when he was feeling sad and Neku was feeling scared. In the early days when she was still getting used to being herself. It was unacceptable that someone should hunt him.

The Rolex was a fake but it was a good fake, triple-wrapped white gold, with a pearl face and appliqué numbers, Korean made. Kit stared drunkenly at the man’s Colt automatic, then at his own watch. “Okay,” said Kit, deciding to do what he was told. “It’s yours.”

This was not the response his mugger had been expecting.

“Drop it.”

When Kit bent, the man shook his head. “Drop it,” he said.

The fake Rolex hit the dirt with a thud, then bounced against the railings of the graveyard to become lost in darkness.

“Now your wallet.”

Extracting a small leather billfold, Kit flipped it open, peered inside, and shrugged. Fifty thousand yen. About the price of a good meal in Akasaka, a week’s heroin, or a proper service for his bike. Hardly worth getting killed over.

“No,” said the man, when Kit got ready to drop it. “Hand the thing to me.”

Kit did as he was told.

His mugger was openly sneering now.

“And the rest.”

Kit began to search his own pockets. Nothing but keys to the bar and a handful of coins, mostly 500-yen coins or lower. It was only when he dipped his hand into the inside pocket of his wax jacket that Kit hesitated, although he imagined the expression on his face was surprise.

“Come on…”

“It’s just a postcard.”

“I don’t care,” said the man.

I always thought this is where we’d both end up. How wrong can one girl be? Signed with a heart, which was really just an M for Mary with the first and last downstroke squeezed together. If her card had sentimental value, how come he hadn’t answered the thing?

Dear Kit, it probably seems a long time ago now…

She’d got that right.

“Come on,” said the man.

“I’m late,” Kit said.

The man stared at him.

“You’ve already got my wallet. And my watch. What difference can a postcard make?” Quite why it mattered to Kit was hard to say. Although, from the mugger’s scowl it obviously mattered that Kit was refusing to do as he was told.

“Afraid?” the man demanded.

This was when Kit realised he was shivering. “Drugs,” said Kit, so matter of factly the man actually flushed.

“Fuck that,” said the mugger, raising his gun. “This should cure you.”

And just as Kit decided that perhaps it wasn’t worth dying for a black and white card of Amsterdam, his world exploded into a hurricane of white lace and scarlet silk, the mugger’s shot going wide as the cos-play spun between Kit and the firing gun, knocking it aside. Silver hair shook free and an ivory hair pin punched home, freezing a facial nerve as it ruptured the mugger’s eardrum and entered his brain.

As Kit watched, the homeless man sank to his knees and tipped forward, coming to rest with his head against the railings. The last thing he did was stare at the cos-play who’d dropped to a crouch beside him.

“Too slow,” she told him. “Way too slow.”

“What have you done?” said Kit.

“Spiked him,” she said. “Simple, neat, and looks to the untrained eye like a simple aneurysm.”

“What about that?” said Kit, nodding to the juggling knife now sticking from the man’s ribs.

“Oh shit,” she said. “Overkill…I’m Lady Neku,” she added, before executing a small bow and offering her hand. When Kit shook, he couldn’t help noticing that her fingers were sticky.

“You all right?” asked Neku.

“Drugs.” He said it without thinking. “I’ve got a…” Kit looked at the dead body, and then from the cos-play to the black cat who’d just appeared behind her. “Is this for real?” he said. “I mean, is any of this happening?”

Neku shrugged. “It’s as real as anything else on this planet.”

CHAPTER 5 — Friday, 8 June

When Kit looked again the girl was gone and so was her cat. The body, however, was very definitely still there.

“Oh fuck,” said Kit, a fairly useless thing to say.

Picking up his watch, Kit threaded his wrist through its metal strap and managed to click the catch on his third attempt. It was ten minutes after midnight, which meant it was actually fifteen, because the watch could be guaranteed to lose five minutes in a day. Apart from a splatter pattern, his wallet looked fine, so Kit pocketed that too, having first wiped it on the dead man’s jacket.

If this was shock…

A hot night wind, a dead body, and the shakes.

I should call the police, thought Kit, only what would he say? I was about to be shot when a cos-play saved me. No, I don’t know why. Actually, he didn’t know why he had been getting mugged either. His clothes were cheap, his fake Rolex out of sight, and there had to be better targets out there.

He’d seen bodies before, of course. Watched the living die through the cross-hairs of a sniper rifle, each hit walled off in an area of his mind Kit no longer visited. Before that there was Josh, looking neater than he’d ever looked when alive, hair combed and shoes shined, wearing a tweed jacket he’d have hated.

Getting mugged, that was also shocking. And yet, it was the ease with which the cos-play turned the homeless man to meat…A spike through the ear and a blade to his side, before victim or Kit even knew it had happened.

That was the real shock.

He should leave before someone saw him standing next to a body and called the police anyway. In the time it took Kit to think this, he put a dozen paces between himself and the dead man, only to turn back. Had the girl been wearing gloves? Most cos-play-zoku did. Long black gloves that went up to their elbows, white-lace mittens, or some atrocity of chain mail and steel. What if her gloves had been fingerless? Some of the kids wore those. She’d have left fingerprints.

The drunken conversation Kit had with himself halted him on the edge of flight. In the end he went back, if only because if he decided to leave he’d waste more time frozen to the spot, worrying it was the wrong choice.

Kit knew himself well.

Trying to look as if he’d only just stumbled over the body, Kit touched a hand to the man’s throat and then reached for the knife, but it refused to move. Eventually he remembered to twist its handle and the blade slid free with a sucking sound.

“Nouveau-san…”

Kit turned at his name and found himself staring into the worried eyes of Mr. Ito, who still carried his rickety home-made brush. The man bowed and, after a second, Kit remembered his own manners and bowed back.

Sweeping the cemetery might actually be Mr. Ito’s job. Although it seemed more likely that the old man did it from respect or out of love for his dead wife. Whichever, he was there most hours of the day, dressed in a traditional jacket and wearing wooden clogs that were down at the heel.

“A thief,” said Kit.

The old man looked at the corpse.

“I didn’t kill him,” Kit added, wanting to make this clear. The old man glanced from the dead mugger to the thin blade in Kit’s hand.

“It was someone else,” said Kit.

“Ahh.” The man nodded, something clicking into place behind his eyes. “It was someone else. I understand.”

“It was someone else.”

“Hai.” A little bow. “Yes, I understand. Someone else.” Glancing anxiously at the blade in Kit’s hand, he asked, “Did I see this someone?”

Kit sighed. “I’m going now,” he said. “You might want to call the police.”

The man thought about that. “Might I?” he asked finally. “Only they were here again…” He paused. “Apparently, I didn’t see them either.”

CHAPTER 6 — Friday, 8 June

An uyoku van blocked the steps to Pirate Mary’s parking lot. Revere the throne. Expel the barbarian, announced lettering down both sides. Unlike most such vans, which were black with a gold chrysanthemum, this one was gold with the imperial chrysanthemum picked out in black. It still had a revolving fog-horn though, bolted to the cabin roof, ready to harangue people on all sides.

The van was empty, all its doors locked.

Kit shrugged. He was drunk, tired, and stank of someone else’s wife; which was probably just as well, at least being drunk was, because had Kit been sober he’d be terrified. Not about the fascist van, but about the dead man behind him and the cos-play’s blade hanging heavy in his pocket.

Three Suzuki cruisers, all chopped beyond recognition, blocked the truck’s access to the alley. So its driver would need to climb two flights of stairs to Pirate Mary’s, track down three drunk bozozoku bikers, and persuade them to let him out. The faithful-sword-to-the-throne was going to require all the luck he could get.

Kit knew he should go in. And yet…

From habit, he reached into his back pocket for a multitool, flipped out the flat-blade screwdriver, and began to re-fix Pirate Mary’s history to the alley wall. Someone was forever trying to steal it. Towards the end of the 1500s a single figure controlled the seas around Ireland—Gráinne Ni Mhaille, known to Elizabeth Tudor, the Queen of England, as Grace O’Malley and to Elizabeth’s government as a wicked director of thieves and murderers.

She held hostage Elizabeth’s ships, raided villages on the English mainland, stole cattle, and forced Elizabeth to the negotiating table. Máirín Ni Mhaille was Grace O’Malley’s eldest daughter, better known as Pirate Mary. Some reports said she ended on the gallows in Dublin, others that she took James Stuart’s offer of a small castle on the Connemara coast. A revisionist version, recorded by the Bishop of Santiago, had her repenting of her sins and living out her final years as a nun in Spain.

About half of that was true. The rest Kit had invented after he bought the narrow wooden building in Roppongi and begun fitting out its second floor as an Irish pub. Such is the nature of history that Máirín ending her days at a Spanish convent now featured as fact in a TV documentary examining the links between Ireland and Spain.

Buying the house had been Yoshi’s idea. Cold and brilliant Yoshi, who blew into Kit’s life and left him standing, because unlike her other lovers he let her blow right through him. He’d asked Yoshi once, near the beginning, if something terrible had happened in her childhood and she’d given a smile both slight and mocking.

“So simplistic,” she said.

A day later she asked him if that was his excuse. Kit intended to tell her about his mother, but talked about being a sniper instead.

“A rurouni,” said Yoshi, at the end of it. “A hitokiri and a rurouni…A killer and a traveller with no destination.”

It took her three days to make the Kawakami Gensai sequence, a series of twelve pots in shades of desert yellow, slashed across the sides with quick flicks of a knife. The sequence sold within hours of going on display in Mitsukoshi, the majority going to private collectors, although one ended up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It had taken two years to repair the wreck of a building, but they’d done it eventually. Another six months were lost in creating a bar, installing the bathrooms and white-washing wooden walls. The sign came last, painted by a small Vietnamese woman who owned a tattoo parlour behind the Almond coffee shop. She did it from a tatty snapshot of Mary O’Mally and a postcard showing the Disney version of Captain Hook.

Pirate Mary’s—Tokyo’s Best Irish Bar. No one but Kit knew where Máirín Ni Mhaille got her face.

CHAPTER 7 — Friday, 8 June

“Dozo…”

The bozozoku glanced round, ready to take offence, recognised his host, and decided to move aside, albeit reluctantly and without bothering to take his hand from the panties of a girl in a tartan skirt.

Oh well, thought Kit, it gives the place colour. Dope thickened the stairs around him and a snatch of jig, ripped from an old Riverdance DVD, ran on a wall screen outside the bar.

Without thinking about it, Kit tucked the cos-play’s knife above the lintel, where he usually left a spare key. Then he took a deep breath and pushed open the pub door. The room stank of warm beer and too much skunk. Someone had ripped a chrome grill off the juke box in the hope of making it louder, and two bozozoku in leathers and replica WW2 helmets had crashed a table of art students and were coming on to the girls. No Neck was meant to be having a word with his friends about that.

“Kit, mate. Over here…”

People began calling before Kit even shut the door. Yoshi was still here, working the Guinness pumps, a job she hated. No Neck was definitely missing and the food cabinet was entirely empty.

“Listen…” It was Gaz, an Englishman who ran a studio by day, with a sideline in “portfolios” by night. Every would-be hostess who staggered off a plane at Narita already knew she was selling her breast size, hair colour, and smile. When Gaz suggested life could be better as a model most were happy to believe it.

He charged them camera use, studio time, the use of cheap clothes, and the services of a bad makeup artist. Model cards came extra. Cards being the best shot printed up with the model’s name, age, and vital statistics.

These lied as often as Gaz did.

Kit didn’t really dislike him. He was just one of those people…one of a thousand expats who’d dragged their unhappiness to the other side of the world, expecting everything to be different, and never quite got over the fact it felt the same. At least Kit had arrived with no such expectations.

“Sweet fuck,” said Gaz, cancelling what he was about to say. “You look wrecked.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Tough night, catch you later…”

Until Micki appeared, Kit really thought he might make it across the smoky room without being stopped. She looked about twelve but then she also looked like a boy. Her twenty-first birthday had been at Pirate Mary’s, courtesy of her friends in the bozozoku.

“I’m so sorry,” said Micki, bowing. “My fault…”

“What is?”

“Everything,” she said, and promptly burst into tears.

Kit took a deep breath. “What happened?”

“Yoshi-san fired No Neck.”

“She what…?”

“When he wouldn’t leave, she called the police.” Tears were streaming down the Japanese girl’s face. “They hit No Neck with sticks,” she said, “very hard…”

“The police?”

Micki nodded, her mouth a tight butterfly of misery. Tommy No Neck had been chapter leader with the Rebels, Australia’s most notorious gang of bikers. And he was the only foreigner Kit knew who rode with the bozozoku, Japan’s very own speed tribe.

“Yoshi…”

Looking up from her pump, Yoshi glanced back long enough to check a glass was full and slapped the lever, delivering a pint of Caffrey’s to the counter with a slight bang. For Yoshi, this counted as full-on rage.

“Kit,” she said, just his name.

“About No Neck…”

“Leave it,” said Yoshi. “I’m not having this discussion.”

“He’s my best friend.”

“That’s why he sells drugs, drinks beer without paying for it, and steals money from the till…”

“Small change,” Kit said.

“Also packets of cigarettes, whole boxes of condoms, whisky from the cabinet. He treats this pub like he owns it.”

“Okay,” said Kit, “we’ll discuss this later.”

Shaking her head, Yoshi said, “No, we won’t. There’s nothing to discuss.” She glanced at her watch. Almost an hour after midnight. Officially the bar shut at 11 pm. In practise, because his clientele were mostly foreign and the bozozoku fought only among themselves, the police overlooked the fact he stayed open late. Whether that arrangement would last beyond their arrest of No Neck was another matter.

“You want me to ring the bell?”

Yoshi shrugged.

“Last call,” Kit shouted at the noisy crowd. Ten minutes after this, he rang the bell for drinking up and ten minutes after that he called time, simultaneously turning up all the house lights. Calling time was tradition, and tradition was what Tokyo’s Irish pubs sold.

It was as he hooked back the doors and began to herd his customers towards the stairwell that Kit finally heard the furious howl of a police siren, coming closer by the second. Mr. Ito, it seemed, had left the body for someone else to find.

Yoshi and he cleaned the bar together, Kit taking four trays on which newly pulled pints were placed and tipping their slops into a bucket. He collected up the glasses and emptied the ashtrays into a plastic bag, tying it tightly. Yoshi wanted to say something. It was the way she stood, with one foot forward and her arms awkward at her sides.

“You were late,” she said.

“Yes,” said Kit, “I know. Something happened…”

“I was meant to see Yuko tonight.”

Yuko and Yoshi, the Tanaka twins. Yuko was a few minutes younger, and had married Tek Tamagusuku, a well-known property developer. Yoshi was famous, so famous that complete strangers turned up begging Yoshi to sell her pots to them. It had taken Kit years to work out what she wanted from him and why they were still together: he kept her family away, apart from Yuko.

“You were meant to…?”

“I told you,” Yoshi said. “Tamagusuku-san’s in London. So Yuko invited me to supper. I was meant to stay the night. I even bought the baby presents.” This wasn’t as big a commitment as it sounded. Yoshi spent her life buying presents for Yuko’s children.

“You promised,” said Yoshi.

That was the problem. Yoshi kept her promises. If she said she was going to do something she did it. Kit was into territory he understood, without actually feeling the intricate web of Japanese emotions that accompanied it.

“About No Neck…”

“I fired him,” Yoshi said crossly. “He kept saying you’d be back. I asked him where you were. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“I was giving an English lesson.”

Yoshi shook her head. “No,” she said, “that was over hours ago. Why wouldn’t No Neck tell me?”

“He didn’t know,” said Kit. “Mrs. Oniji booked a table at Red Bamboo. You know how long those things take.”

“You’re lying.” Yoshi’s eyes were large with tears.

“No. I’m not…Look,” Kit said, “why don’t we get you a taxi. Yuko will understand.”

“It’s too late,” said Yoshi.

He hoped she was talking about the taxi.

CHAPTER 8 — Friday, 8 June

Neku’s cloak was actually a coat. That is, it was cut with sleeves rather than mere slits through which to put one’s arms, though its sleeves were very short, almost vestigial. The garment appeared to be modelled on one worn by Vampire Hunter D in an old film, with an upturned collar and a silk lining that glistened wetly as Neku climbed the stairs towards Pirate Mary’s.

In an ideal world the cloak would keep her warm at night, wrap itself around her against the rain, and harden to a shell should anyone try to kick her while she slept. But in an ideal world Neku wouldn’t be sleeping in doorways in the first place and she was in this world, so her cloak just flapped, although it still managed to look better than she did.

Wrapping the cloak around her, Neku knocked politely at the half-open door of the bar. “Gomen-kudasi.”

“We’re shut.”

The voice was flat to the point of being hostile. So Neku knocked again, because she wasn’t sure what else to do, then put her head round the edge. The bar was empty, chairs upended on tables and the tiles wet from having been recently mopped.

“I told you, we’re…” The woman looked up and whoever she was expecting to see she saw someone else.

“Yoshi…”

Seeing the woman blink, Neku realised that perhaps she should have called the woman something more formal. Yet Yoshi was famous. People wrote about her in Tokyo Today. How could Neku not know her name?

“Who are you?”

“Lady Neku,” said Neku, bowing slightly. “In exile on this world.”

Yoshi scowled. “I don’t have time for games,” she said. “If someone’s told you about the bar job I’ll need to know your proper name. And you will call me madame.”

“Bar job?”

“You didn’t come about No Neck’s job?”

Neku shook her head. “Your man,” she said, looking around. “Is he here?”

“Why?” demanded Yoshi.

“Because we have business.”

“You have…?”

Watching the other woman’s eyes open, Neku wondered what this famous potter saw. A curve of cheek? A single line encompassing Neku’s nose, mouth, and chin…? When Neku caught herself in a shop window she saw a ragged cos-play, with flattish face and hunched shoulders. The lithe and deadly assassin Neku remembered had been missing for a while.

“What business?” Yoshi demanded.

“He has something of mine.”

“Of yours?” Yoshi must have known how lame that sounded, Neku decided, because the woman blushed and then shook her head in irritation. “What?” Yoshi demanded. “What could Kit-san possibly have of yours?”

My knife.

This seemed an inappropriate thing to say, so Neku just shrugged. “He borrowed something,” she said. “I want it back.” She looked round for somewhere to sit.

“He’s out,” said Yoshi. “Banking tonight’s cash. You can’t wait here.” She seemed torn between insisting Neku leave and a need to ask more questions. And it was obvious, at least to the younger of the two, that the fewer questions anyone asked the better.

“I’ll be downstairs,” said Neku.

“Wait…” Yoshi held up one hand. “This thing, when did he borrow it?”

Well, Neku almost said, it wasn’t exactly borrowed. She’d gone back for her knife the second she realised it was missing and found the body, still warm and slumped against the railings, only her knife was gone and the police were due to arrive. So she’d come here because this was where the cat said the foreigner lived, and because her knife was important.

“About an hour ago,” said Neku, then wondered what she’d said.

When Kit got back he found the outside light still on. That was his first warning all was not right. His second was that the cos-play sat on Pirate Mary’s bottom step, wrapped in her cloak. Kit’s third and final clue came when Yoshi threw an ashtray from the top of the stairwell. She threw it badly, possibly because tears ruined her aim. It was also possible she intended to miss.

“How could you?”

“What?” Kit asked.

“Look at her,” said Yoshi.

Neku clambered to her feet. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cause problems.”

“She’s just a kid,” said Yoshi.

Neku’s chin came up at that. “No, I’m not.”

Kit looked between Yoshi and the cos-play, who were now glaring at each other. “God,” he said. “Yoshi. How could you even…”

The girl stamped, it was a very childish gesture. “Look,” she said, holding out her hand. “Just give it back.” Her fingernails beneath her lace gloves were bitten and broken, the gloves themselves were torn.

Pulling 15,000 yen from his wallet, Kit held the notes out to her. “Find somewhere to sleep,” he said. “Have a shower. Get something to eat.”

“I want my—”

“I don’t have anything of yours,” said Kit. Turning to Yoshi, he shrugged. “She’s a street kid,” he said. “I’ve given her a couple of coffees, bought her a bowl of noodles, that’s all.”

“Kit…”

He hadn’t expected Neku to know his name.

“Leave,” he told her. “Before we call the police.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Try me,” said Kit. What else could he say? Yoshi was within listening distance.

“Yeah,” said the girl. “Ain’t that the truth…”

CHAPTER 9 — Saturday, 9 June

When Kit got back after locking the door to the alley where the bins were kept, and the door at the top of the stairs, which let customers into Pirate Mary’s, he found the dishwasher rumbling and Yoshi nowhere in sight. So he checked the window locks, wiped down the counter one final time, and began to type out a note advertising No Neck’s job, since this looked like the price Yoshi intended to extract for making peace.

“You okay?” he asked, having tracked Yoshi down to the bathroom. A question too stupid to merit an answer.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll talk tomorrow.”

Kit shut the bathroom door on his way out. He shut it softly, climbed the stairs to the next level, and walked out onto the balcony, to watch Tokyo’s lights twinkle like a mat of stars around him. He no longer felt drunk, he no longer felt afraid. Kit was coming to accept that he no longer felt anything very much at all.

The bath was large enough for two adults to sit upright, and so deep when filled that the level would reach their necks. Made from cast iron, it had been dragged to the third floor years earlier and sunk so far through the floor that it protruded into the area below, which was the bar these days. Above the bath was a shower that took water from a rain tank on the roof. The spray was warm in summer and cold in winter, which was the way Yoshi liked it.

The house had belonged to a grandfather on her mother’s side, and when Kit put up the money it had been to buy the wreck of a building from Yoshi’s cousin, the old man’s heir. The price had still been low enough to make the rest of Yoshi’s family mutter.

It was her grandfather who originally dragged the metal bath to the third floor, before the walls had even been put in place. The bath was destined for the top floor, but her grandfather settled on the floor below, having decided that getting it that far was a miracle.

Such a bath would never now get planning permission. Partly this was because its weight made the cast-iron bath unsuitable for a wooden-framed house and partly because electric cabling ran close to one side. But mostly it was because the bath was heated by a gas burner bolted directly to its rim.

Naked flame played on metal and this heated the water. The only time Yoshi slipped as a child she had burned herself so badly the scar on her hip was still there, although growing had shrunk it to the size of a flower.

As always, Yoshi showered before taking a bath. Her other grandfather had squatted naked at an outside tap and rinsed himself with a cloth, but most of the old man’s children and grandchildren had grown up with showers. Kit was the first person Yoshi met who actually washed in the bath and he stopped the moment he understood how much this upset her.

She was no fool. Yoshi knew Kit didn’t love her. At least, not any longer. He was fond of her and put up with her moods and bound her tightly when she demanded it, but that wasn’t love. He admired her work, the way she had of throwing pots so fine they looked too fragile to exist. And he admired her body, which was lean and spare and his whenever he wanted. But he didn’t love her. Which was fine, because she’d always been honest about not loving him.

Discarding her dressing gown once the water was hot, Yoshi sank beneath its surface, letting the heat make her sleepy. And as she sat, with the water up to her neck, barely half awake and trying not to get the pages of her paperback wet, the frivolous flickering of a billion stars fought the city’s sodium glare for the right to the night sky beyond her window. Silent backdrop to the street noise of Roppongi.

Drunken tourists leaving a club. A motorbike at the lights, something large. The dying howl of a cop car and an amplified order to behave properly. A woman in a house opposite having sex, more noisily than was strictly necessary. Yoshi knew her city and its sounds. Kit might insist he belonged here. So he’d told her, right at the beginning, the summer he arrived at Narita with one suit, three battered Murakami paperbacks, and a Berlitz phrase book. She’d been right not to believe him.

She heard a cat first, then a bin going over.

“Kit…?”

Yoshi listened in vain for his answer.

“You want to check that?”

The cat was expected, round here there was always a cat; but the bin was heavy, too large she’d have thought to be knocked over by an animal that small. Sighing, Yoshi climbed out of the bath and reached for her dressing gown, without bothering to dry herself first. She shuffled on some slippers and climbed the single flight of stairs to their bedroom to fetch her husband.

The sheet was thrown back and his yukata was missing from its hook on the door. Since it was hardly worth going back in her bath, Yoshi collected her book of poems, relit the gas to heat the water for Kit, and returned to the bedroom, climbing wearily into bed.

Outside, a car started up and a cat yowled, wooden walls creaked, as they often did, and a metallic clang at ground level told Yoshi that Kit had opened the grill which covered Pirate Mary’s rear door. She fell asleep to thoughts of Yuko, her sister’s new baby, and how she’d telephone in the morning to apologise.

CHAPTER 10 — Saturday, 9 June

Kit wore a jacket over his yukata, though he’d forgotten to put on shoes. The baseball bat in his hand came from a stall in Asakusa and was so old it had a facsimile of Babe Ruth’s signature, the words 1948 Memorial Edition and Produced in Occupied Japan stamped into the handle.

Flicking on the overhead lights, Kit said, “I know you’re in here.”

Halogen strips stuttered into life overhead, revealing three microwaves, a Zanussi deep fat fryer, an industrial-size dishwasher, and a butcher’s block that had been there when he and Yoshi bought the building.

Other than this his kitchen was empty.

Bat in hand, Kit returned to the bar, realising too late that he’d just provided a perfect target for anybody now hidden behind the door.

“I’m armed,” he added.

Kit recognised the snort before he saw the girl. She was over by a window, wrapped in the folds of her cloak. It would have made more sense to Kit to discard the thing before she broke in, but then he wasn’t fifteen or a cos-play-zoku and who knew what rules they worked to?

“Found it,” she said, holding up her knife. “That’s all I wanted.” Neku did something clever with her fingers and the blade disappeared, only to pop back into being when she reversed the movement.

“See,” she said. “Not hard.”

Another twist of the wrist and it was gone again.

“I’m leaving now.”

Kit nodded.

“I won’t be back.”

“That works for me,” he said.

“Okay, I’m off…” Neku hesitated on the edge of leaving. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask…”

“How did you know I was down here?”

“That bin lid,” Kit said. “You shouldn’t have knocked it over.”

Neku looked puzzled. “I haven’t been near the bins,” she said, before shifting to her next question. “And why did you buy me coffee?”

“You looked cold,” said Kit.

She sighed. “You know,” said Neku, “I’m not sure I’m ever going to understand this world.”

“I’ll see you out,” he said.

Stepping onto cinder block, Neku flicked open her cloak and twisted one hand, summoning the knife she’d taken from the bar. A flick of her other wrist and she had the second knife. With a twirl, she cut one blade through the air and then cut again with the other, folding them out of sight with a simple twist of her fingers.

And then—and this is where it became impossible—Neku forced her fingers into the cut in the air and began to prise it apart, the tips of her fingers vanishing from sight.

“Wait,” Kit demanded.

Neku shook her head.

“Please,” said Kit.

“You’re drunk,” she told him. “And the drugs are eating what little you have left inside. Go to bed, get some sleep…I’m going home.” Neku didn’t sound very happy about this.

“No,” he said, “not yet…”

Kit shouldn’t have touched her. That was his first mistake. He reached out and tried to grab her arm, his fingers closing on her wrist, and then Neku was behind him, beside him, and in front, a blur of movement that ended with Kit sitting in the dirt holding Neku’s broken bracelet, a wicked knife gash disfiguring the palm of his left hand.

…Incredible heat.

Bone splintering as a child flipped backwards, his ancient Lee-Enfield tracing a parabola before it hit desert behind him, Kit’s cross-hairs already hunting their next target…

…Silver night and no stars. A wedding dress in the dirt, the body within it also discarded. A web of ropes holding the sky in place.

A girl on her bed, knees pulled up to her chin and her arms wrapped tight around her legs, in tears and naked…

“Shit,” said Neku, shaking her head. “I so didn’t need to know that.”

As the air around her began to shimmer, Neku rammed her hands into the haze and began to drag it apart, one arm disappearing as she began to squeeze through the gap.

“Come back,” Kit demanded. “I need…”

And then what he needed stopped mattering. Because glass exploded from the upper windows behind them and the front of Pirate Mary’s peeled away, fragments of broken boards splintering across the street. The broken ceiling of the bar, now open to view, curled billows of smoke into a downward roll.

Made almost entirely of wood, the old building did what wooden buildings do best, it began to burn. Dark and oily from seven decades of paint, the smoke billowed above the fire. Kit didn’t remember climbing to his feet or charging towards the stairs. And he barely registered the flames that forced his retreat into the grip of Mr. Ito.

“Who has the keys?”

Kit looked blank.

“That van,” said Mr. Ito. “It will block the fire engine. We must move it.” He shook Kit’s shoulder. “Come on, who has the keys?”

“I don’t know.” Pulling free, Kit screamed, “Yoshi.”

A wall of flames roared back.

“My wife,” said Kit.

Hands dragged him away and when Kit looked again there was no doorway from which to be dragged. The fury had swallowed every detail within its flames.

A fire officer was demanding answers. Try as he might, Kit couldn’t remember having been asked a question. After a second, he understood.

“Hai,” he said. The two Iwatani burners in the kitchen used butane. Yes, there were spare bottles stacked near the grill. Four, maybe five. But what he really needed to do was find…

“Yoshi,” he yelled.

The next time he tried to break free, a girl in a white coat appeared at a nod from the officer and snapped open her leather bag. The jab took less than five seconds to disconnect Kit from the chaos around him.

CHAPTER 11 — Nawa-no-ukiyo (Floating Rope World)

Stumbling through the door, Lady Neku, otherwise known as Baroness Nawa-no-ukiyo, Countess High Strange, and Chatelaine of Schloss Omga, fell to her knees and threw up all over mother-of-pearl floor tiles. What she’d seen inside his head clung to her like static, and he’d taken memories from her. Lady Neku could still feel the holes.

“Fuck.”

Polyglot, polygoyle…

Polyandrous?

Double fuck. She wasn’t allowed to forget what shape those tiles were, remembering stuff like that was her job.

Lady Neku was also Duchesse de Temps Perdu. Sometime around the start of the last millennium there had been a bout of title inflation. Hyperinflation, her grandfather said sniffily, guards became captains, captains became generals, and the fugees got rights. Although, to be honest, they were no more free than before.

When Lady Neku looked again the tiles were triangular.

“Stop it,” she told Schloss Omga, her family’s castle.

Maybe the castle was listening, or maybe it just got bored and decided to stop the architectural equivalent of twiddling its hair. Whatever, next time Lady Neku looked, the tiles in her bedroom had changed back to polygons and that was the last change of the day.

Dragging herself to her feet, Lady Neku stared around her. The vomit was already gone, swallowed by the floor and fed back to the castle. Schloss Omga was good at telling the difference between living organics and waste. It hardly ever got this wrong.

“Shit.”

She felt sick. Hell, she’d been sick. The damage to her shadow must be worse than she thought. Lady Neku turned the cloak over in her hands until she found a small tear. He shouldn’t have grabbed her like that, she’d almost let the rip close around her. And then where would she have been?

Dead, obviously.

So cross was Lady Neku at having damaged the red cloak that it took her five minutes to notice her memory bracelet was missing, and another five to realise her real body wasn’t in the room waiting for her. No back-up beads and no original from which to burn more. This was serious. Actually, it was beyond serious.

She’d left her body on a chair beside the door. At first she imagined her bedroom had just tidied it away, but all her wardrobes were empty. So she checked the room she’d used as a child, just in case household gods were being more forgetful than usual, only her body wasn’t there either.

“Castle,” Neku demanded.

All she got by way of answer was an echoing emptiness in her head.

“Come on,” she said.

Again silence.

This was not unusual. The Katchatka family castle could sulk for decades if really pushed, and everyone but Neku regarded Schloss Omga as irretrievably senile and did their best to ignore it. Work arounds, her Lady Mother called them.

Work arounds involved cutting new doors rather than waiting for them to grow and quarrying storage space out of the bloody flesh beneath the council chamber rather than asking the living core of the castle to withdraw.

Just to be certain she hadn’t overlooked her body, Lady Neku checked the first bedroom again, walking along each wall in turn and opening every wardrobe. The castle knew she was looking because wardrobes started to appear that she’d never even seen before. Needless to say, all were empty.

The castle could imitate marble and manage a very good approximation of granite—which seemed to be constructed from the glue it used to stick itself to the slopes of their mountain—but what Schloss Omga really liked was mother of pearl. Neku imagined this was because it had originally been a snail. Although, obviously enough, it had only been a snail in the sense that her ancestors had been human.

They were talking a very long time back. Certainly pre-Cenoarchean, if not actually pre-Cenoproterozoic.

All of the wardrobes that appeared out of her walls were made from mother of pearl, many extruded into intricate rococo shapes that Lady Neku recognised from the library. Either the castle had remembered how to do this stuff, or she was being shown work that no one had seen for generations.

Art had been the topic of the only real conversation she and the castle ever had, though that talk had been rather one-sided. Mostly because few of the castle’s thoughts seemed to make sense. Half a million years glitched between humanity’s first flint blade and its first image, on a cave wall. Before pictures had been beads and before beads, pigments to make colour. This indicated a conceptual lag between technology and art that reflected a slowness in the species to understand the importance of symbolic thought. Which was, apparently, the basis for all sentient behavioural organisation.

At this point the castle had paused. Which was Lady Neku’s cue to think of something intelligent to say. So she’d wondered, What’s flint? And the conversation had been over. Personally, she thought it impressive she’d known what a human was…Humans were fugees, unless it was the other way round.

“These are wild,” said Lady Neku, running her fingers across a pair of flying babies holding a heart pierced by an arrow. Not to mention, kitsch and hyper-clichéd. Although Lady Neku refrained from saying this. The castle could be sensitive about such comments.

Having examined all the alcoves, cupboards, and wardrobes, Lady Neku climbed inside the largest, so the castle could impress her with its false back and spiral stairs up to an entire floor that waited empty and anxious. Lady Neku knew this, having been shown the wardrobe before. Its style and the winding stairs had an organic smoothness that spoke of her family’s very earliest years at the end of the world.

It wasn’t really the end of the world, of course…That would be when the planet turned to cinder and the last wisps of atmosphere burned off, as the seas would do first, given time. Meanwhile, six over-worlds kept the sun at bay and protected the planet as best they could.

Six families owned the off-world habitats, the biggest of which was High Strange, belonging to her family, the Katchatka. And a mesh of sky ropes held a mantle of silver gauze in place exactly a hundred kilometers above the world’s surface.

Her brother Petro, who was oldest, said the ropes were alien and no one knew what the mantle around the planet was meant to do. Antonio disagreed, because Antonio always disagreed with Petro. It was Nico, the youngest of her brothers, who took Lady Neku’s question seriously. He said the gossamer ate charged particles and the ropes created a magnetic field, which was why it was bad that their bit of sky had ripped.

Lady Neku had a theory about this. Mind you, she had a theory about everything and she was aware her body was still missing. She was merely avoiding panic and trying to approach the matter in a grown-up fashion. Lady Neku’s theory said the earliest styles of furniture were fluid and organic because this reflected confidence in the future.

Her family were explorers, new to the end of the world and owners of what remained of human time, which could still be counted in tens of millennia. Not much, maybe, for a planet that had already existed for countless billions of years, but it was enough.

When the sky tore, doubts set in. As the fugees stopped coming, the need for reassurance became stronger, hence the regression into fussier styles, an explosion in pointless titles, and an endless recycling of cultures long gone. Of course, fugee was a misnomer. They were temporal exiles, removed from their own cultures. Although it had taken Lady Neku’s family more centuries than was sensible to realise that they themselves were also exiles, as much imprisoned as the fugees they ruled.

If the cupboard was warm and the stairs warmer, the suite of rooms into which Lady Neku made herself venture was claustrophobic beyond description.

“Hot,” she said.

Inside her head Lady Neku felt the castle agree and instantly felt guilty. She wasn’t the one endlessly crawling up a slope, trying to get away from the shrinking lakes, methane pockets, and somatolite mats of the dead lands. No one lived in the castle these days, all her family preferred High Strange.

“Need to go home,” said Lady Neku, and felt the castle signal its understanding. She had more of Schloss Omga’s attention than she remembered having been given before. “My body,” she added, trying to keep the hope out of her thoughts. “Don’t suppose you remember where you put it?”

“Didn’t,” said the castle.

“Didn’t what?” asked Lady Neku.

The castle thought about that. It thought about it while Lady Neku retraced her steps to the twist of stairs. It thought about it while she scrabbled her way down the stairs and out of the cupboard, rank with sweat that stuck her dress to her spine and made her hair feel disgusting. And it thought about it while she stripped off her dress, gloves, and thong and watched them dissolve into a puddle on the floor.

There had been a time when Schloss Omga was not alive. Lady Neku knew this because her brother Nico had told her. Walls had been spun from simple shell, the rooms had been soulless, many of them barely sentient. It seemed unlikely, but Neku had come to understand something about Nico. However much he might tease her, Nico never lied.

“So,” said Neku, when she felt the castle’s attention begin to drift. “About my body…?”

“Not me,” said the castle.

“You’re sure?”

“Quite.” It seemed certain about that.

With a sigh, Lady Neku broke the connection and let the castle return its attention to whatever had been occupying it when she first interrupted; crawling up its slope most probably. All that now remained of Lady Neku’s clothes was the cloak. This would never dissolve or need cleaning and that was its virtue. The garment was indestructible and guaranteed to protect its wearer from family explosions, black ice, and electric rain…

She’d listened to the label once, hidden in a doorway in Shinjuku, one afternoon when she was very bored. It had kept talking until she had to tell it to stop. And yet, guarantee or not, her cloak was now damaged. Which, Lady Neku guessed, was what one should expect if one caught it on a rip in time.

Because Lady Neku was stubborn, and being stubborn often did unnecessary things because she’d already decided to do them, she rechecked the wardrobes in her room. There were a hundred and thirteen, which was at least seventy more than normal.

Among these was her new favourite, the mother-of-pearl wardrobe with the winged cherubs. Neku checked this last, just in case the castle was trying to tell her something, but it was as empty as the others. Her body was definitely gone.

Unless…

Now that was a thought.

Her mother was perfectly capable of having taken Lady Neku’s current real as a way of telling her daughter it was time to grow up. There was only one problem with this. It would mean, firstly, that Lady Katchatka knew her daughter had been breaking bounds. Secondly, it would require Lady Katchatka to visit the schloss in person, something that had not occurred in Lady Neku’s lifetime.

The corridor down to her mother’s castle quarters twisted more than was strictly necessary to accommodate the spiral nature of Schloss Omga. Sometimes it seemed that the castle wasted too much effort trying to match form, not so much to function as original inspiration.

“My Lady…”

Silence greeted her.

So Lady Neku waited enough time to be polite and then called again. The Katchatka were a very formal family. Dust covered the table and something sticky smeared the oiled paper screen dividing her mother’s study in two. Forbidden from touching or changing anything in Lady Katchatka’s room, the castle had chosen to assume this rule applied to cleaning it as well.

When it became clear that not even servants had visited her mother’s quarters for weeks, if not longer, Lady Neku turned to go, turned back, then went with her original choice, making herself walk away without another glance.

“Castle,” said Lady Neku, “prepare me a lift to High Strange.”

“Madame. The overworld is empty.”

Lady Neku wondered if she’d heard that correctly. “Patch me through,” she demanded. “Do it now.”

“Link made,” said the castle.

Having tried to contact her mother, Lady Neku tried each of her brothers in turn, starting with Nico, her favourite. “Where are they?” she asked. When Schloss Omga failed to reply, she asked again.

“I haven’t seen them,” the castle admitted. “Not since…”

“Since what?”

“Your wedding,” said the castle. And Lady Neku found herself kneeling on the tiles, vomiting again. Polyglot, polygoyle…

Polyandrous?

There was so much Lady Neku needed to remember. So much she needed to forget.

CHAPTER 12 — Tuesday, 12 June

A naked girl sifted hot rubble with her bare hands. She was watched by a cat. A sign on a fence behind them read, Danger—Keep Out. The girl clawed at the dirt so frantically that anyone observing would imagine she fought to save a life. But when she finally sat back on her haunches, darkness between her knees and in her eyes…

“Fever,” someone said, when Kit whispered Neku’s name. “Drug induced, we’re investigating.”

“Also,” another voice announced, “cuts, bruises, and minor burns.” If they were so minor, Kit wondered, why was he lying naked on a foam sheet being sprayed with electrolysed water, whatever that was.

After the voices came a darkness both cool and forgiving. When Kit woke he had a plaster cast on one arm, bandages around his ribs, and was wired to a monitor. A fat blood bag hung from a hook above his head, its tube feeding into his left wrist. Another tube, with a twist valve, seemed to be draining old blood.

Kit looked around for someone to plunge him back into the darkness but the room was empty.

Outside the window a blue sky hung above a small garden filled with plum and cherry trees. The fruit on the plum trees was green, and that was how Kit knew he’d been lost in darkness for days rather than weeks. The ion-rich skies of his dreams, the heat and the matrix of silver threads that hung static overhead were nowhere to be seen. An ugly gash across the palm of his right hand had been stitched shut.

Kit Nouveau, read a tag on his arm. It was written in kanji.

He was in hospital, Kit realised, then wondered if he already knew this. He was in hospital because…

The Korean orderly who came running wore a green uniform that hid her hair under a square cap. She was on her knees and wiping up Kit’s vomit before the nurse behind her even made it through the door. The nurse had one of those upside down watches, which she flipped up to note the time, then wrote something on a board hooked to the end of his bed.

“Yoshi,” said Kit.

“Tell them he’s awake.”

Hesitating on the edge of wiping up the last of Kit’s mess, the orderly jumped to her feet at a barked order from the nurse. When she returned it was with a suited man and the floor cloth was still in her hand.

“They’re coming,” he said.

The first policeman had the glossy-peaked cap of a regular officer. As did the man behind, although he also had a shiny stripe down the outside of his trousers. The third officer wore a soft cap that proclaimed him a Detective. But it was the last man, the one in the suit, that Kit really noticed.

His hair was grey and worn cropped. Heavy glasses hid eyes that were flat and watchful, the eyes of an Ainu hunter from the northern islands. A man whose ancestors would have grown used to watching their boats sunk and houses ripped apart by storms, who knew what it was like to rebuild life from the ground up. It seemed strange that such a man could rise so high in the Tokyo police.

Now was when the newcomer should announce that he was with the Organised Crime Squad. He would tell Kit that Yoshi was dead and his bar destroyed—and ask about recent enemies, unpaid bills, or protection payments overdue. Although, perhaps, he would ask first about a dead tramp found against cemetery railings near the bar.

Kit tried to think of a suitable answer, but his head was empty and what could he say anyway? That a cos-play-zoku with a neat line in juggling knives had broken into his bar looking for the murder weapon, then cut open thin air to crawl inside…

As for Yoshi.

“Here,” said the man.

Reaching for the tissue, Kit snagged his wrist on a drip tube and three people started forward at once, only to hesitate. It was the nurse who replaced the drip, renewed the sticking plaster holding the needle in place, and wiped Kit’s eyes for him. At a nod from the man she opened a buff folder and extracted an MRI scan, clipping it to a light box on the wall.

“Show me,” he said.

Stepping aside, she pointed to a smudge of shadow. “Brodmann’s area 10, in the rostral prefrontal cortex.” She seemed to be reciting words from memory.

“Dangerous?”

The nurse shook her head. “Just unusual.”

“What is?” Kit demanded.

“Unexpected development within your prefrontal white matter,” said the man, then offered his hand. From the shock on the faces of the uniformed officers, this courtesy was a surprise. “I’m Mr. Oniji,” he added. “I believe you know my wife.”

Darkness felt welcome.

When Kit woke someone was sliding a needle from his arm. “His body’s coping with drug withdrawal,” said the someone. “He’ll probably go under again, so you might want to ask your questions now.”

“Right,” said Mr. Oniji. “About these lessons.”

“English lessons,” said Kit, working hard to pull himself together. “She’s good.” It seemed best not to mention the time Mrs. Oniji rendered the saying Out of sight, out of mind, as invisible/insane. “Hard working,” said Kit. “Extremely conscientious.”

“I’m sure she is,” said Mr. Oniji. “She’s good at many things…” He paused. “Did you know she was a marine biologist?”

“No,” said Kit, he could confidently say this had passed him by.

“Eleven kilometres down, the gap between biology, chemistry, and physics becomes immaterial.” Mr. Oniji smiled. “Or so she told me on our first date. She was working on foraminifera, which are billions of years old. Unless that’s just microbes in general…”

He hesitated, as if he’d forgotten what he intended to say. After a moment, he glanced at the officers, a fact that left them looking unhappy. All the same they went. The orderly, the nurse, and the suited administrator followed without having to be asked.

“May I sit?”

“Of course,” said Kit. “I’m sorry.” He nodded to a chair in the corner. It was steel, with raw leather and bead highlights. Dragging it across the floor, Mr. Oniji positioned himself close to Kit’s bed. When he sat it was formally, his back straight and his legs together, his elbows on the arms of the chair, his hands flat and angled slightly inwards where they rested on each knee.

“How good is your Japanese?”

“Good enough,” said Kit.

Mr. Oniji nodded. “There are things I need to say,” he said. “We can speak in English if that is better for you?”

Kit shook his head.

“Okay,” said Mr. Oniji. “The most important thing I have to say is this…You need to leave Tokyo.”

“Tokyo?”

“Japan,” Mr. Oniji said, amending his words. “I suggest you go soon. Visit Australia or Thailand. Take a holiday…”

“For how long?”

“A month, two months, maybe longer.” The Japanese man ran one hand through his salt and pepper hair, wiping his fingers on a tissue. He looked tired, but determined. “It is not safe for you to remain here.”

Was that a threat? Kit wondered.

Straightening the jacket of his suit, Mr. Oniji brushed invisible dust from one knee of his trousers and shot the cuffs of his shirt, revealing simple gold cuff links. The oyaban was nervous, Kit realised. An idea that seemed absurd.

“My wife will have told you I am High Yakuza. Maybe she’s said I am rarely at home and have little to do with her family or my own. If she has not already told you then you have probably deduced we have no children…”

When Kit nodded, Mr. Oniji smiled.

“Only the last of those is true,” said Mr. Oniji. “We have no children.” He paused, choosing his words with care. “Have you ever done anything you really regret? No,” he said. “No need to reply. I can see the answer in your eyes.”

Mr. Oniji took a sip of water from a fresh glass on Kit’s bedside table.

“My regret,” he said, “is marrying my wife…” He must have decided he’d either said too much or too little, because after a slight hesitation, he added, “I knew from the beginning we were not suited.”

“So why marry?”

“You know how it is,” said Mr. Oniji. “She was young and pretty and I needed a wife.”

“But you didn’t love her?”

Whether Mr. Oniji looked sad for himself, his wife, or the world in general was hard to say. “This is difficult,” he said. “Women have never been of much interest to me. Unfortunately, a wife was necessary…I should have told her,” he added. “Explained things. That is my regret.”

“Why tell me?”

“The police will want to ask you questions,” said Mr. Oniji. “They will ask you, because they always ask, if you have any enemies…”

“I don’t,” said Kit.

Mr. Oniji’s smile was tight. “Everyone has enemies,” he said. “I would like to make clear that I am not one of them. Also, there is the possibility of arson. If that is true, I had nothing to do with it.”

Early next morning a Korean orderly carried a small book and a business card into Kit’s room and presented the card first, his fingertips barely touching its edges as he offered the object to Kit.

Hiroshi Sato, second assistant to Mr. Oniji, presented his compliments. Should Mr. Nouveau wish to send a message to Mr. Oniji, he could do so through the good offices of Mr. Sato. An e-mail and telephone number were both given on the card. Quite why Kit might need this went unsaid.

The book had been wrapped by a professional. A sheet of hand-laid paper, folded so every edge formed a perfect line, was wrapped into the covers and tied in place with a length of dried grass. The grass bisected the book twice, the angle between each length chosen with care.

On the front of the book was a wood-block illustration of a samurai in a wolf skin coat. In the Shadow of Leaves announced the title. The date was 1934, the language English. It had been printed by the Board of Tourist Industry, on behalf of Japanese Governmental Railways.

The essence of speaking is in not speaking at all. If you think you can accomplish a task without words then do so…When compelled to choose between death now or death later, choose now. It just is…

There were eighty-six pages of such aphorisms, with five more wood-block prints and a foldout map of feudal Japan. Mr. Oniji’s note was tucked between the cover and the title page. Read this, he said.

Some hours later, just as Kit was finishing In the Shadow of Leaves for the second time, a nurse arrived to change the staples in his face. Her name was Lucy, at least that was the name on her badge, and until she began tossing ant-like pincers of plastic into an enamel dish Kit hadn’t even known his face had staples.

When this was done, she fixed two metal splints to his right ankle, braced the splints with steel cross bars, and fed strips of foam over the braces and under the cross bars, hardening the padding with a UV light wand.

“Wednesday,” she said, when Kit asked what day it was. She shaved him very carefully, helped him to the lavatory, and waited, telling him to lean on her when he walked back to his room. “Now I’m going to give you a blanket bath,” Lucy announced when Kit was back in his bed.

“I can manage a shower.”

“No.” Lucy shook her head. “You’re much too weak. In fact, you can barely answer questions…”

“Questions?”

Unbuttoning his pajama top, Lucy extracted a sterile flannel from its foil wrapper and dunked the flannel into a basin that had appeared on the locker beside Kit’s bed. She wiped his face and neck, washed under his arms and across the top of his chest, taking care not to wet the bandages over his ribs.

“A cut,” she said, in answer to his question. “Metal shrapnel from the explosion. You were lucky…” Lucy must have caught the shock on Kit’s face, because she smiled. “It barely grazed your side,” she said. “And it was hot enough to sear the edges of the wound.”

After she’d washed his chest, she washed his back and undid his pajama bottoms. “You stink,” she said, when he tried to protest. She said this firmly, but with a smile. “A Major from the National Police is going to question you. His arrival is unexpected and he intends to catch you unaware. We will, as a hospital, make the strongest protest possible.”

“If it’s unexpected…”

“Then how do we know?”

Kit nodded.

“I believe the manager had a call from police HQ.”

When Kit looked puzzled, Lucy sighed. “Mr. Oniji owns this hospital,” she said. “He owns many things in Tokyo and his contacts are good.” Having washed Kit’s legs, genitals, and backside with casual competence, the nurse dried him with a different cloth and helped him into a fresh pair of pajama bottoms.

A few minutes later Kit was sat up in bed, new drips inserted into one wrist, and the window opened to let in the warm breeze. His leg, with the new ankle cast, had been attached to a system of pulleys.

“You are Christopher Alan Nouveau, known as Kit…?”

“Yes,” said Kit, with a wince. Maybe trying to pull himself up in bed was a mistake, what with the traction weights tugging on his ankle.

“Hurt?”

Kit nodded.

The officer wore fawn slacks and a tweed sports coat. His hair was dark and swept back, worn slightly longer than Kit expected, and he carried a small leather bag, half way between a wallet and a brief case. “I’m Major Yamota,” announced the young man, carefully handing Kit his card.

MAJOR TOM YAMOTA

Organised Crime Section/Tokyo Branch

Inside the leather carry case was a voice recorder, obviously far too hitech to bother with anything like buttons, since Major Yamota merely put the machine on the table beside Kit’s bed and began talking.

“So,” he said. “I gather you were badly injured in the explosion. Also, that you’ve only recently regained consciousness?”

At least two things were wrong with this suggestion. The most obvious being that Kit had been conscious almost from the time he was brought in for treatment. Well, more or less.

“The hospital told us you were unfit for questioning. The local police agreed. We have been waiting for four days.” Major Yamota did not seem happy about this.

“Unfit…?”

“You can speak Japanese? You understand what I’m saying?”

Kit nodded.

“Good.” The Major glanced down at a notebook. Since he was having trouble deciphering the characters, the notes had to be compiled by someone else. “You’ve lived in Japan for twelve years. Your wife owned Pirate Mary’s. You were happily married…This is what I’ve been told by the local force. Is that correct?”

“I owned the bar.”

The Major looked up. “Ms. Tanaka’s sister says Ms. Yoshi owned it. Also…” Major Yamota scowled at the notes. “My department can find no official record of your marriage.”

“We got hitched in San Francisco,” said Kit. “Yoshi was going to register the marriage with the Shimin-ka on our return.”

“Still,” the Major said. “No record exists. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Yoshi never got round to it.”

Major Yamota chewed his lip. “And you’re certain,” he said. “About having no enemies?”

Kit thought of Mr. Oniji and his promise that Yoshi’s death had nothing to do with him. And he thought of the strange cos-play returning to collect her knife. Neither seemed like an enemy to him.

“None,” Kit said.

After a final question, about any enemies Yoshi might have, Major Yamota stood up, bowed very slightly, and left without bothering to say goodbye.

CHAPTER 13 — Friday, 15 June

“Put the following statements in order of descending incongruity…” On screen the final round of a trivia quiz kicked off and a man in a black suit and dark glasses began to read from his list.

As Kit was the only person in the room, he got up and changed channels. A teen drama, in which three school friends tried to talk a new girl out of throwing herself off the roof. A comedy cop show about an ex-Yakuza turned policeman and a documentary about spawning eels. He’d lived too long in Tokyo to find anything about that selection unusual.

In Kit’s hand was a photograph, found tucked into the back of his wallet. One of those thumbnail pictures that everyone was printing out back when camera phones were still news. It showed a girl with dirty blonde hair, a smile to kill, and wide eyes, wrapped up in a face that was all cheekbones.

She looked more fragile than he remembered.

As fifteen minutes crawled towards thirty and finally became forty-five, Kit stood up from his bench in Roppongi’s police station and decided to see what happened if he tried to leave. At which point a young officer stuck his head round the door and glanced from Kit to the suitcase he’d just picked up. Kit was pretty sure it was an officer he’d seen at the hospital.

“Are you all right?”

Rather sheepishly, Kit nodded.

“Major Yamota won’t be much longer.”

“What’s he doing?” asked Kit, quickly adding, “Of course, I realise he’s very busy.”

For a second it looked as if the young man was about to say that Major Yamota was doing something both important and secret. Instead, he shrugged. “Who knows,” the man said. “He’s from Organised.”

It seemed the junior officer was there to inspect the level in the water cooler and check that the coffee machine was functioning. As the water cooler was virtually empty, the officer removed its old bottle, upended a fresh one, and left Kit to his thoughts and memories. In an ideal world, of course, he’d have left the rubbish and taken the memories.

On the morning Yoshi died, Kit and Yoshi had made love, if that was the right word. Kit bound nine metres of cord around his wife’s body, in a complicated pattern that went between her legs and around her neck, squeezed both breasts and constricted her hips, before coming to a knot over her belly button.

Edo rope bondage.

On the days she really needed to lose herself, Yoshi had Kit hoist her from the floor, in the gyaku-ebi-tsuri position. For this they used a single rope, a hook attached to the storeroom ceiling, and a pulley bought from a chandler in Chiba, where her brother-in-law got fittings for his precious yacht.

That morning was simpler. Kit just bound Yoshi tight, lay her flat on a tatami mat, and left her alone for an hour. Then he untied her and helped her shower, telling her to get some rest. The next time they saw each other, she had been standing by the bins behind Pirate Mary’s, about to destroy a pot so perfect it was almost not there…

On screen a Korean girl raced towards a finish line, with her mouth open and one hand stretched desperately for a Japanese child waiting to start the next lap. The Korean was too self-conscious to run happily, her bust thick beneath a black tracksuit. Although ten girls ran at any one time, five in black and five in white, the camera stayed with the girl at the back, its focus tight to her upper body. In the final seconds, it flipped to the face of the girl she needed to reach.

Although this one ran herself into the ground, rolling onto her side to gasp for air, the race was already lost. When she raised her face for the camera, her eyes had flooded with tears. Child by child, the camera cut from one losing face to another, twenty-five schoolgirls in black, every single one crying.

What was interesting was that the Korean—who was large by Japanese standards, but would pass unnoticed on the streets of any capital in the Western world—had known her team was losing before she even began to run, as had the girl who took her place. Yet both had run themselves into gasping despair at not being able to close the gap. Maybe that had been how Yoshi felt.

A police car had collected Kit from hospital and delivered him to this room on the ground floor of the new Azabu Police Station. A courtesy, that was how his transport arrangements had been presented. Equally, there had been no suggestion Kit might refuse the ride.

He would have signed himself out of hospital days before, but this suggestion had produced the administrator. A small man in a dark suit and tortoiseshell glasses who appeared in the doorway and announced, politely but firmly, that the doctors insisted Kit stay in bed for at least a week. He still needed to recover.

“From this?” said Kit, indicating the cast on his left arm.

The small man had smiled.

“Is it really broken?” Kit’s fingers worked perfectly, and apart from a dull ache in the elbow, his arm felt fine. The worst thing that could be said was that his skin itched like fuck beneath the plaster.

“We have X-rays showing a minor fracture. Nothing too serious.” The man spoke with a Hokkaido accent, the extra stress on each Z added a harshness to words someone from Tokyo would have left soft.

“What about my ankle?” Kit said.

The administrator appeared to think about this. “All right,” he said. “The cast on that can come off.” He hesitated. “You were killing yourself with drugs,” he said finally. “I don’t expect you to believe that because addicts never do, until they become ex-addicts. Only you know on which side of that line you now stand…”

The arrival of a police driver at lunchtime the following day was enough to make the administrator reappear, flanked by two technical assistants who looked as if they’d been chosen mostly for the width of their shoulders. Standing once again in Kit’s doorway, the administrator looked as if he personally intended to stop his patient and the police officer from leaving.

“I am troubled by this,” said the small man. He looked at the driver, who nodded to indicate that the administrator’s reservations had been noted. “Obviously, we are happy to do everything we can to help the authorities, but…”

“I have my orders,” said the driver.

The administrator sighed, his sigh obviously intended to indicate both his unease and the fact the matter was now out of his hands. “I’ll have his cases sent to the station,” he said. It was all Kit could do not to ask, What cases?

Half an hour after Kit arrived at the police station, still in pajamas and a dressing gown, a pair of matching leather suitcases turned up, full of clothes in his size. A brown envelope tucked into the top of his case contained a broken watch, a broken bead bracelet, and Kit’s wallet, minus its last twist of heroin. Mind you, the wallet bulged with money, far more than when Kit was bundled into an ambulance outside Pirate Mary’s.

So now Kit wore dark cotton trousers, a pale blue shirt with short sleeves, and a tan leather belt. Not his style at all, but they seemed to play well with everyone who came through the waiting room door.

“If you’re ready?”

“If I’m…?” Kit shut his mouth and followed a young policewoman along a corridor and up a flight of stairs. It was obvious that the carpet in the public areas was more expensive than the carpet in areas seen only by the police and those they brought in for interviews.

“Ah,” said Major Yamota. “There you are…This won’t take long.” Nodding to his assistant, he waited while the junior officer spread papers and photographs across a desk. The photographs mostly showed the ruins of Kit’s bar. The papers were more varied, with one whole pile relating only to Yoshi, everything from a certified copy of her family register to school certificates and a newspaper article about her status as one of Japan’s rising stars.

The paper Major Yamota actually wanted was an official-looking document from the Tokyo Institute of Police Science, Investigation Division/Explosions. “It was an accident,” said Major Yamota, holding up the report. “A gas explosion. All the evidence is in here.”

“Evidence?”

“Of fire patterns,” said the Major. “Smoke signatures and burning rates. Deeply regrettable, but still an accident.”

Kit held out his hand. “May I see the report?”

Major Yamota’s mouth twisted.

He had, Kit realised, just insulted the man. An insult so deep that it would have been regarded as utterly unforgivable had Kit not been gaijin. As such, his crassness was excused on the simple grounds that it would be unreasonable to expect better from a foreigner.

“I’ll have a copy made.”

“Thank you,” said Kit. “And the rest?” he asked, indicating the papers and files spread across the desk.

“Let’s see,” Major Yamota said. He gathered up a couple of forms and hesitated for a second over a third, before selecting it and a handful of other pieces of paper. “All of these you can read. Unfortunately, to see reports relating directly to Miss Tanaka you will need her family’s permission.”

A stab of a button produced Major Yamota’s assistant, who rushed away the bundle of forms. Seconds later the sound of a photocopier could be heard through the walls.

“Why do I need their permission?” Kit demanded.

“Because of the complication,” said Major Yamota, and before Kit could ask which complication, the Major told him. “It seems the two of you were not married.”

“But we…”

“Under Japanese law,” said the Major. “Citizens who wed abroad must register their marriage with the relevant ward office within a year. This did not happen. As you were not actually married to Miss Tanaka your rights to information are limited by statutory regulation. Her family also have the right to claim her remains. I should probably tell you,” he added, “that the funeral was yesterday.”

“In Tokyo?”

“No,” said Major Yamota. “They took her home.”

Kit knew where Yoshi’s sister lived and that Yoshi had an aunt in Kobe. Yoshi and Kit had shared a bed, lived in the same house, and together run a bar but he still didn’t know where she’d been born. Some shitty little village in the hills…That was what Yoshi said, when he asked her in the early days.

He had no idea which village or which hills.

CHAPTER 14 — Friday, 15 June

Major Yamota cut Kit loose from Azabu station with the two suitcases full of clothes he hadn’t chosen and a replacement resident’s permit. He had some money in his wallet and about 2,000,000 yen in his savings, roughly £10,000. Without it ever being put into words, Mr. Oniji had made it clear that Kit’s job teaching English to Mrs. Oniji was now over. At the door to his office, Major Yamota asked Kit where he intended to go.

“Back to the bar,” Kit said.

The Major opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind. This is no longer my business, said the expression on his face. That Kit could read Major Yamota’s expression was a surprise. Maybe Kit had learned more from his time in Tokyo than he thought.

The wind outside was warm and stank of the river, which was a slightly sour smell, like that of an unwashed dog. It was years since Kit had smoked anything but the dragon, but a slot machine stood outside the steps to the metro and he found himself feeding coins into the slot before he even realised what he was doing.

Crumpling cellophane, Kit pushed the wrapper deep into his pocket and realised he still needed a light.

“Here,” said a boy. He looked about thirteen, bleach-blond hair and brutally ripped jeans. Too old to be out this early from school, but still young enough to offer his lighter to a foreigner standing on a street corner with an unlit cigarette.

“Domo arigato,” said Kit.

The truant brushed away his thanks. “Tourist?”

“Probably more than I realised…”

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing,” said Kit. He smiled at the boy. “Your English is very good…”

The boy nodded. In the end, because Kit was unable to face the ruins of Pirate Mary’s, the boy found him a taxi. None of this was put into words. Instead, the boy looked at Kit’s suitcase, looked at the crowds streaming around them, and smiled sympathetically. Putting up an arm, he pulled an empty taxi out of the afternoon traffic as if performing magic and stepped back so the automatic doors could open.

“Green for occupied, red for empty,” said the boy. “Don’t tip.”

Nodding to show he understood, Kit watched the boy wave brightly as the taxi pulled away. It felt really shitty to check he still had a wallet and his watch but Kit checked anyway.

The taxi dropped him outside the Shinjuku branch of Mitsukoshi, next to a bank of ATM machines and a street down from Ryuchi’s Burger Bar. There was a two-star hotel above the bar, run by Ryuchi’s mother and catering mainly to sex tourists too nervous to base themselves in the heart of Kabukicho. Mrs. Keita knew all the local girls and kept an eye on their comings and goings, having once been one herself. On occasion, she would even call their pimps if customers got ugly or things looked like they were getting out of hand.

“Konban wa,” Kit said, reaching the top of the stairs.

Mrs. Keita glanced up from her paper and Kit caught the moment she recognised him. Very carefully, Mrs. Keita folded her copy of the Asahi Evening News, although she’d quite obviously finished it, right down to doodling little squares across the sports section at the back.

“Can I help you?”

It wasn’t the reply Kit had been expecting.

“It’s Kit Nouveau,” he said. “Ryuchi’s friend.”

The woman nodded.

“I need a room,” said Kit, “for a week, maybe more. Until…” He expected her to say something about Pirate Mary’s. At the very least to mention Yoshi, but the woman remained silent.

“A room,” repeated Kit.

“Very difficult,” she said, consulting her ledger. “Unfortunately we’re fully booked.” She made a pretence of studying the ledger to make sure, shifting her bulk onto her elbows as she pored over its pages. “Sadly,” she said, “they’re all taken. You could try…”

She recommended a love hotel at the edge of the Golden Gai shopping mall, once site of Kabukicho’s most notorious maze of nomiya bars, jazz clubs, and pigeons permanently drunk on salaryman vomit. The Moonlight Venus got by on location alone, being within spitting distance of two soaplands, a strip club, and a branch of Bottomless Kup. It was sleazy even by Piss Alley standards.

Opening his wallet, Kit extracted 50,000 yen. “Surely you must have one room?”

Mrs. Keita regarded the money wistfully, something very close to regret crossing her wide face. “Unfortunately not,” she said. It seemed unlikely, given Mrs. Keita’s hotel had never been booked out in its long and insalubrious life. This was the place that charged a group of Germans floor space in the boiler room when a typhoon had ripped away the hotel’s roof and made their original room unusable.

“Okay,” Kit said. “No problem.”

Hair bleached and a new stud through his lip, Ryuchi leaned against a wall by the counter, a position undoubtedly chosen so he could watch a young Filipina flash fry a tuna burger. Having drenched the nugget of yellow fin with mango relish, she sprinkled chopped coriander over the top.

“One to go,” she said.

So low slung were the girl’s jeans that it looked only a matter of time before gravity eventually won. Mind you, Kit still reckoned Ryuchi could have done more than glance across at him and then look back.

“Hi,” said Kit. “How’s it going?”

Ryuchi had spent two summers in London in the late nineties, which had frozen his personal style and command of English into something resembling a manga interpretation of post-rock lite.

“Fine,” Ryuchi replied.

“You got a moment?” said Kit, wanting to ask what he’d done to offend Ryuchi’s mother, a woman who made a living out of being almost entirely unshockable. “I could buy you a beer.”

“I’m kinda busy…” Ryuchi shrugged. “You know, work to do.”

There was one customer in the café, a foreigner in a dark suit scrawling something into a black notebook with a silver pen. He’d finished his tuna burger in a couple of bites and was now trying to wipe mango relish from his book’s cover.

“Supplies,” said Ryuchi, noting Kit’s glance. “I’ve got to fetch the supplies.”

“Sure,” Kit said. “Maybe see you later.”

“Yeah.” Ryuchi’s wave of the hand was casual, the tightness around his eyes anything but…“Good luck.”

The transvestite behind the counter at Moonlight Venus named a price for a room that was outrageous, halving it when Kit turned away, and halving it again when he reached the door.

“We don’t get much call for all-nighters,” s/he said, adjusting a flowered kimono.

Kit kept his comments to himself and went to check a cluster of back-lit photographs on the wall. There were twenty-five photographs, each showing a different room. The ones lit were free. He could have a room draped in black satin, red velvet, silver rubber, or ivory coloured faux fur. Two of the rooms were old school/high concept, one mirrored on all four walls, its ceiling and floor, the other done up like a stage set from Casablanca, complete with miniature grand piano.

The final room on offer was the one Kit chose. It was pink, had a school desk, and came with a free pair of fluffy handcuffs. Other than that, it looked relatively normal.

Barely large enough to qualify as a real room, the box-like space Kit rented for the night offered a double bed, a video screen, and—a nice touch—a kettle, a black lacquered tray, and two incredibly delicate tea cups. Three condoms and a pack of what claimed to be obstetrical wipes were hidden inside a Hello Kitty box next to the kettle.

The handcuffs hung from a hook above the bed. They were sealed into a plastic bag and came with a little note asking that the cuffs be used in a manner that was both thoughtful and safe. Consent is mandatory, said the note.

On the back of the door were two other notes. The first announced that Moonlight Venus had been licensed, under the Entertainment & Amusement Trades Control Law (Revised), the second reminded patrons that criminal gangs were forbidden to block book hotels.

Having unpacked and then repacked both leather cases, to see exactly what was in each, Kit tried to sleep, wrapping himself in a sheet and dimming the lights; but sleep was difficult to find, largely because the couple in the room next door were obviously new to each other and still excited.

Cardboard-thin walls left little to the imagination, from rising moans that became shouts to the slap of flesh against flesh and the laughter of release. So Kit listened for a while and let his thoughts wander, none of them being important enough to be dragged back for questioning. Technically speaking, he was fucked; how much thought did it take to work that out?

His wife was dead, not that anyone but him seemed to consider she was his wife. His bar was burned. His friends had turned into strangers. He would like someone to blame, but was afraid that if he examined that thought too hard he’d discover the someone was himself.

Couples came and went, with a peak at just after midnight and another at around four, when some of the hostess bars closed. Pretty soon the noise of people making love, having sex, and sometimes just talking to each other blurred into the background, became familiar, and finally slipped out of Kit’s mind altogether.

Bizarrely enough, he fell to sleep smiling.

CHAPTER 15 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

Lady Neku walked very slowly round herself as she’d been two years earlier. It was a salutary lesson. Her eyes were instantly forgettable, and if she had shape beneath those cheeks, it was only because bones were a biological necessity, required to keep her smug little face from collapsing.

Average height, slightly above average weight, her shoulders accentuated the broadness of her back; even her breasts managed to be too large for her age, while being too small for the ribs over which they lay.

As for her pubic hair.

This grew like lichen, if lichen was black and wiry and glinted in the castle’s light. She’d hated that body and still did, but today’s hatred was as nothing to what she felt when it was first presented to her. It was only after Lady Neku killed herself for the third time that her mother agreed she could change.

“Shit,” she said, kicking the thing.

The glass tube in which it floated rang like a bell.

At the age of three, Lady Neku had blonde hair and eyes the colour of a cold summer sky. At five, her hair was silver, like the spires of High Strange seen on a cloudless night and her eyes the amber of a Baltic morning.

Her mother loved her best between those two ages, and looking at herself Lady Neku could understand why. She’d been beautiful, a faithful shadow, willing to trot from meeting to meeting or sit in silence while Lady Katchatka worked at her desk.

At nine, Lady Neku had black hair, white skin, and brown eyes. It was a very ordinary look. A transition point between the fading prettiness of her seven-year-old self and the cruel plainness of her body aged eleven. Lady Neku knew exactly why this had happened. Her mother could forgive anything except competition for attention from Antonio, Nico, and Petro.

Lady Neku’s whole history was in the figures who stood blank-eyed and empty before her. The tiny, blonde-haired infant, the silver-haired girl…She could take any of them back, revert to the child she’d once been. Five orphaned bodies, neither living nor dead, just existing at the point where she abandoned them.

She’d taken this body she wore. At least, Lady Neku was pretty sure she had. Walked out of the night and into a squalid little house. A dozen faces had watched as she looked round the tiny room and chose a girl of roughly her own age.

“You’re bleeding,” they said, rising from the table. And then one of them realised who Lady Neku was and concern turned to fear.

“Don’t,” they said.

“Take me instead,” said one. A woman who looked old enough to be Lady Neku’s mother, though she was probably no older than her visitor. Time was counted differently among fugees.

“Please,” said the woman. “Choose me.”

“I’m sorry,” Lady Neku said. “You’re not the one I want.” And she walked round to the far side of the table, where three children sat frozen on a bench. The youngest, a boy of about ten, stood to defend his sister and Lady Neku felt a tightness in her throat and tears come into her own eyes.

So brave, so stupid.

When she put her fingers to the boy’s temples, it was gently, and she lowered him to the dirt so he didn’t bang his head on the way down.

His mind was simple, barely more than a single emotion and the most banal level of self knowledge…fugees and family shared their origins, but at times like this even Lady Neku had trouble believing them the same.

“I’ll bring her back,” Lady Neku told the mother.

“As what?” It seemed the girl’s father had finally found his voice. “What will she be?” He glared at his wife. “We don’t want her back, you understand…we won’t take her.”

Touching the girl on her shoulder, Lady Neku led her from the house, leaving the family arguing behind her. They were dirt poor, they had to be. Anyone richer would have been somewhere else. Only the poor still lived near the surface, where even the thickest ceilings struggled to keep back the heat outside and where fugees went unprotected from people like her.

It hurt Lady Neku to think of herself as a predator. “Guardians,” she said to the girl. “Custodians.”

These words were unknown to the child.

“Keepers,” said Lady Neku.

She understood that one.

“What’s your name?”

“Mai…”

“Well, Mai, I’m not going to hurt you,” Lady Neku promised. “And I’ll bring you back…”

Mai chewed her lip while she considered what the keeper said. The girl was sweet and simple, the blood flushing her filthy cheeks a saline echo of the sea that originally spawned all life. For a fugee she was almost beautiful. Compared to Lady Neku, she was the drabbest moth to a butterfly.

“Really?” said Mai.

“Promise,” Lady Neku said, reaching out to touch the girl’s cheek. Without even knowing it, she lied.

CHAPTER 16 — Saturday, 16 June

The laws governing the playing of pin ball in Tokyo’s arcades are as complex as the game is simple. The player buys a handful of pachinko balls and launches them into a table, using each ball’s speed to negotiate its way through a forest of pins and into a winning hole, if all goes well. There are no flippers. Selecting the speed is the only skill in what is otherwise a game of chance.

Because pachinko relies on chance, it is illegal to play for money. At least, that’s the pretence. The winnings pay out in additional steel balls, which can be exchanged at a counter for prizes; such as playing cards, stuffed toys, and decorative dolls. At an entirely different counter, usually outside the pachinko parlour, the toys can be “sold” for money.

According to No Neck, the arcades were a perfect way to pass time while waiting for other more interesting things to happen. And since the biggest pachinko parlour in Roppongi was Pachinko Paradise, that was where Kit tried first, once a taxi had decanted him into the Saturday morning crowd near Almond crossing.

He was almost within sight of Azabu Police Station, but Kit wasn’t worried. If Major Yamota wanted Kit, the police would just pick him up again. How hard would it be to find a shell-shocked thirty-five-year-old Englishman in Tokyo? He didn’t look Japanese, he didn’t look Korean, and he certainly didn’t look like a tourist…

The suit helped with that. He’d found it the night before, in the second of the leather cases, and it had been the only thing he’d kept, apart from a black tee-shirt and the shoes obviously. The rest he’d sold—including the cases—to the transvestite behind the counter at Moonlight Venus, getting what Kit thought was a good price; until he saw the suit for sale in a Mitsukoshi window and realised he’d probably just been robbed blind.

Having tried Pachinko Paradise, Kit stuck his head through the entrance of a couple of noodle bars on Gaien-higashi-dori, before walking south towards the Family Mart on the corner, where Micki worked. His plan to leave a note for No Neck was unnecessary, because the man was already there, his bulbous body stuffed into a white tee-shirt and jeans. Even his tattoos looked stretched.

No Neck was busy examining a brightly coloured bubble pack that included Day-Glo dark glasses, a water bottle, and a bush hat, with a clip-on sun flap at the back.

Have a Happy Summer, announced a banner. Buy Our Holiday Beachside Set. From the way the man was examining the packet, No Neck seemed about to take the banner at its word. He was wearing dark glasses of his own…large ones, presumably to hide the purple bruising around his eyes.

“No Neck,” said Kit.

The other man said nothing, what could he realistically say? No Neck might be sorry at Yoshi’s death but she still fired him and had him beaten up by the Tokyo police. So Kit picked up a beach set of his own and turned it over, wondering what he was missing. “You really interested in this?”

“I’ve got a granddaughter,” said No Neck. “It’s her birthday soon.”

“When?”

“Don’t know. They won’t tell me.” He looked at Kit, then glanced at the bubble pack in his own hand. “I send the presents to her grandma.”

“And she sends them on?”

“Maybe…Never had a letter back.” No Neck kept his gaze on the beach set, until Kit finally realised this was because the biker was close to tears and doing his best to hide that fact.

“Need a razor,” said Kit, “back in a second.”

Shit happened and then everyone pretended it hadn’t. Life was easier that way. Yoshi’s death. No Neck’s family. Kit’s mother. All that shit in Iraq…A month or so before the incident with the truck, Kit took shrapnel below one knee. The cut was nothing, six inches of bone showing where metal split flesh.

When a medic arrived Kit had stood to salute and went down sideways. It was instinct that made him stand, nothing more. The reptilian bit of his brain still firing after everything more intelligent went into shock.

The medic told her Major, who told the Colonel. Since this was better than the reports he usually got, about squaddies drunk on cheap beer and boredom, flogging bits of uniform on eBay to sad fucks back home, the old man came to see Kit for himself, dragging some obedient hack behind him like a shadow.

Having told Kit not to stand this time, he shook Kit’s hand and stamped out again. The picture made the front of the Sun, page two in the Mail, page five of the Daily Telegraph, and page seven of the Mirror.

That was when he got the first postcard. Saw the photograph. Sorry you were injured. Look after yourself. All the best. Mary. So many hollow spaces between so few words.

He wrote back but got no reply.

Picking out the cheapest razor, Kit carried it to the checkout and was collecting his change when No Neck joined the queue, still clutching a Beachside Fun Set.

“I didn’t do it,” said No Neck, the moment they got outside. “Okay? And I’m genuinely sorry about…” He stopped before he could tell Kit what, though they both knew.

“You didn’t do what?”

“Bomb Pirate Mary’s. You know me. I wouldn’t do something like that. We’re friends.” The huge man was close to tears again.

“No one bombed the bar,” said Kit. “It was a gas explosion. I’ve read the…”

No Neck shook his head. “You seen what’s left of your bar?”

“Not yet…”

“A right fucking mess,” said No Neck. “You did time in Iraq, right? It’s okay,” he added quickly. “Been there, done that, got my own tattoo…” Pulling up his sleeve, he flashed a faded dagger inside a wreath. “Shit, you know how it goes.”

Yeah, Kit did.

“Someone wanted a job done,” said No Neck. “Take a look at the wreckage if you don’t believe me…Phosphorous and plastique. A really nasty mixture.”

Only most of the wreckage was gone and a truck was hauling away the last of the rubble, leaving charred timbers and a Dumpster full of earth when Kit and No Neck reached the site where Pirate Mary’s had been. The only bit of actual building still standing was a far corner, at the bottom of the slope. Most of this was fire-blackened concrete but a single jagged post stuck defiantly into the air.

A sign on the alley wall announced Pirate Mary’s—Tokyo’s Best Irish Bar and pointed to a building that wasn’t there.

Vomit soured Kit’s throat.

It wasn’t the sight of the blackened ruins nor the fact Yoshi had died here. A fact made infinitely more real by being there. It was the smell. The stink of charcoal and death. Yoshi’s body was gone, but other things had died here, rats or birds, mice and other rodents. He could smell the corruption, that unmistakable, utterly cloying signature of dead flesh.

“Fuck,” said Kit, swallowing sourness.

“You okay?” No Neck shook his head. “Shit, sorry…Of course you’re not okay.”

“It’s the smell,” said Kit, spitting.

No Neck looked at him. “What smell?” he asked.

A thick-set man in a hard hat tried to wave Kit away as he approached two Brazilians busy loading chunks of concrete into a fresh Dumpster. “Please stay back,” he said. “We’re working.”

“Yeah?” said No Neck. “Well we’re…”

Kit stepped between them. “This was my bar,” he said. “My wife died here.”

Whatever the foreman saw in Kit’s eyes was enough for him to order the Brazilians to stop working. “We’re going to take a break,” he said. “We’ll be back in ten minutes…” Left unspoken was the fact this was all the time Kit would get.

“I thought you owned this place,” said No Neck, as he watched the crew head uphill towards Roppongi’s main drag.

“Yeah,” said Kit.

“So you’ve just sold it, right?”

Kit shook his head. “I know nothing about this,” he said. He looked around at the scattered rubble, the half-filled Dumpster and a silent pneumatic drill. “No one’s mentioned this at all.”

CHAPTER 17 — Monday, 18 June

At 5.30 am a man in the next capsule coughed himself awake, flicked down the video screen in his roof, and began to drum his nails as he waited for the news.

Japan’s biggest fraud trial collapses, CEO Osamu Nakamura too ill to give evidence. File closes on Kitagawa family suicide. Washington, London, Moscow ramp up their war on narco-terrorism.

And then Kit heard Yoshi’s name.

At Christie’s in New York an example of work by Ms. Yoshi Tanaka sells for an unprecedented sum…

Ten minutes later the same man began to shave with a loud and erratic razor. About half an hour after this, a woman on the female-only floor farted loudly and spent the next five minutes chuckling to herself.

By 7.30 am, the sole guest at Executive Start Capsule Hotel was Kit, and he’d been awake all night, trying to work out why Yuko wouldn’t take his calls. So he rolled up the blind covering his glass door and scrambled out, maneuvering himself over the lip; the capsules stacked two deep along a corridor and he’d chosen an upper one.

Of course, Kit could have taken a room at the Tokyo Hilton, on the far side of Shinjuku station, about half a mile west of where he was. He still had Mr. Oniji’s money, mostly untouched. But in his own way Kit was saying goodbye to a city that had been saying goodbye to itself for as long as he could remember. A trial separation from Tokyo felt as lonely as leaving a lover.

It was only as he sweated out last night’s beer in a communal sauna that Kit realised he’d obviously taken Mr. Oniji’s advice to heart. Until then, he’d have said he had no intention of going anywhere. Kit was still wondering about that as he showered. And then, when he’d put it off for as long as possible, he shaved carefully, dressed, and checked himself in the mirror.

Hollow eyes stared back. Other than that, he’d do.

The sub-manager at Kyoto Credit Bank was apologetic. Ms. Tanaka’s sister and brother-in-law had closed her account a week earlier and emptied the strong box Ms. Tanaka had been renting. The joint account Mr. Nouveau held with Ms. Tanaka still existed. Unfortunately, under Japanese law, it was now frozen until a certificate of probate was filed at the ward office. He believed from what Ms. Tanaka’s brother-in-law said that this would be very soon.

On his way to the door, not just of his office but the bank itself, the sub-manager added his profound regret at the incalculable loss of an Important Intangible Cultural Property and so much of her work. When Kit told him that most of Yoshi’s recent pieces were on tour in New York, the man looked almost relieved.

“A tragic loss never the less.”

Nodding, Kit shook hands, bowed briefly, and cut across the road, headed for No Neck’s waiting Speedmaster. It was either that or kick the shit out of KCB’s sub-manager.

“Okay,” said No Neck, after Kit told him what had happened. “Next stop, her lawyers.”

The woman behind the desk at Yamanoto & Co was so embarrassed at Kit’s arrival that she sat frozen at her desk, repeating Yoshi’s name to herself, while she fretted about what to do next. She was still glitching when a young woman in a dark suit stopped to listen, overheard Yoshi’s name, and introduced herself.

“Suzuki,” she said, offering her hand. “Ako Suzuki. Mr. Togo’s senior assistant.”

“Suzuki-san…”

“Perhaps,” said the young woman, “it might be best if we used Mr. Togo’s office?” She gestured to a cherry-wood door behind her.

“I’ll see you outside,” said No Neck.

Having turned down the offer of both tea and coffee, Kit accepted a glass of water, because turning this down would only have produced the offer of fruit juice or something else. When his water finally arrived, brought by the receptionist, it came in a glass, with ice and a slice of lemon, and Kit and Ms. Suzuki had just agreed it was a pity Mr. Togo was not here himself, that the spring blossom around Inokashira Pond had been spectacular, and the weather was surprisingly humid, even for June.

Only when Kit had sipped from his glass did Mr. Togo’s assistant put both her hands on the table and bow, very slightly. “We are sorry,” she said, “for your loss.” The language Ms. Suzuki used was so formal that Kit barely understood what she said. He waited for her to add something about Yoshi’s work or the fact Ms. Tanaka was the best potter of her generation. Instead she just reached across the desk for a desk diary.

“Mr. Togo had the meeting on Tuesday with Mr. Tamagusuku,” she said, flicking back a couple of pages. “Ms. Tanaka’s brother-in-law said he would update you on what was said. I imagine he’s been in touch?”

Kit shook his head.

“Ahh…” Ms. Suzuki considered the diary in front of her very carefully. As if it might explain why. “That is unfortunate.”

She shuffled a few pages and then shuffled back again, got up and went to a filing cabinet, only to turn round and come back again. Although young, Ms. Suzuki did not look like the kind of woman who got flustered.

“There was a will,” she said. “We gave it to Mr. Tamagusuku.” Of course there was. Of course they did.

Artists in the West were meant to be untidy and driven by inner demons. Yoshi had demons, all right. Only she’d probably kept their details filed in the order in which they first appeared.

“You had more than one copy,” Kit stated.

Ms. Suzuki stared at him.

“I know Yoshi,” said Kit. “She’d have asked Mr. Togo to notarise two copies, then she’d have filed another with her bank, kept a spare at home, and for all I know, given a final copy to Yuko…”

He caught Ms. Suzuki’s glance and thought about what he’d said.

“Okay, maybe not that last one,” admitted Kit, because then Yuko’s husband wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to collect the original.

“Forgive me for asking,” she said. “How long were…” Ms. Suzuki caught herself. “How long did you and Yoshi live together?”

“Ten years.”

Ms. Suzuki made notes on a piece of paper. “No children?”

Kit shook his head.

“Probably for the best.”

When Kit looked surprised, he got a short lecture on single mothers and Japanese inheritance law, followed by a longer lecture on probate for childless couples, both married and unmarried. As Yoshi’s parents were dead, Kit would have inherited three quarters, with Yuko sharing the rest. Unfortunately, the situation with unmarried couples was not nearly so favourable…

Which raised a whole new set of questions. Such as, if Yoshi was really so organised, why had she filed multiple copies of her will while failing to register their marriage at the ward office as she’d promised she would?

CHAPTER 18 — Wednesday, 20 June

“Guinness or Caffrey’s?” No Neck asked.

Kit nodded, without thinking, and reached the last free table in Paddy’s Tavern a second or so before three Australian backpackers who took one look at No Neck’s tattoos and the bleakness in Kit’s face and decided they’d rather stand at the bar.

No Neck sighed. “I’ll get Guinness,” he said.

Slitting open a buff envelope, Kit shook its contents onto the rickety table in front of him. It was just before 1 pm, two days after Kit met Ms. Suzuki and the promised copy of Yoshi’s will had finally been cleared with Mr. Togo himself for collecting.

Getting the beers while Kit read the will was No Neck’s idea of tact. A gesture No Neck promptly ruined by banging two pints of Guinness onto the table and demanding to know exactly what the will said.

“Nothing good,” said Kit, killing half of his pint in one go. Having skimmed the document, he read it again more carefully. Ms. Suzuki had kindly included a notarised English translation, but Kit felt he should read the original. It was handwritten and the writing was Yoshi’s own. There was something harsh about knowing this was probably the last piece of her writing he’d see.

Yoshi’s will was a very simple document, little more than a single page. She left everything to her sister. There was no reference to a loan from Kit and the bar was barely mentioned. The will had been drafted three months earlier and Kit didn’t recognise the name of either witness.

“You okay?” asked No Neck.

“Sure,” said Kit. “Everything’s great.”

No Neck left to get another two beers without being asked. And when he came back it was with the beers, a bowl of udon noodles, and a pair of disposable chopsticks. “Eat,” he said, dumping his tray on the table in front of Kit.

“What about you?”

“Micki made noodles for breakfast,” said No Neck. “You look as if you haven’t eaten in weeks.”

“Micki?”

The huge man actually blushed. “She’s looking after me,” he said. “Just a temporary thing.”

The trucks were gone and the jack hammer stood silent when Kit and No Neck reached the site where Pirate Mary’s had been. Someone had swept grit from the road and piled it into a heap. A handful of cigarette ends and a broken polystyrene cup were caught in the sweepings and now mixed with dirt like artifacts from some strange archaeological dig. The concrete foundations they’d seen on their last visit had been reduced to rubble and carried away.

Coming Soon, announced a sign. Executive Manshon. 9 Apartments. South Facing. A picture on the board showed an elegant block filling the area where Pirate Mary’s and its parking space had been.

Where jagged foundation once stood the jack hammer had exposed a well. The slab that originally closed off the well shaft was cracked down the middle and someone had used a crow bar to shift the smaller of two pieces. Kit knew this because the bar still stood beside a broken section of slab and both leaned against the low wall around the well.

“You can’t go in,” No Neck protested, when Kit tried the new metal gate.

“I own this place.”

“Maybe,” said No Neck. “But it’s still padlocked. Talk to Mr. Togo in the morning…”

“I own this place,” repeated Kit, rattling the fence. He felt hands grip his shoulders from behind and the bozozoku lifted him aside.

“Leave it,” said No Neck. “Learn when to walk away.”

“I can’t,” said Kit.

Dark eyes looked at Kit from a face that would scare hardened criminals, the light from a street lamp falling across the bozozoku’s cheek like a scar. “This matters that much?” he said.

“Yes,” said Kit, “it does.”

“You want to tell me why?” The bozozoku stood between Kit and the gate, his head bent slightly to show that he was ready to listen. Kit knew almost nothing about No Neck and the man knew even less about him, it was one of the things that let them remain friends. “I mean,” said No Neck. “It’s not as if you and Yoshi even liked each other.”

“It’s not just Yoshi,” admitted Kit. “It’s the way it’s all getting whitewashed. No bomb, tragic accident. No bar, new apartments. I feel like a ghost in my own life. I want the bar back.”

No Neck considered that.

“Okay,” he said.

The metal fence was designed so that sections locked together. It should have been possible to separate one section from another merely by lifting. Unfortunately practise turned out to be very different from theory.

An old woman in a yukata had appeared from one of the few remaining wooden houses, a building even more ramshackle than the bar had been. And Mr. Ito now stood at the edge of the darkened graveyard, leaning on his broom. Both were watching intently and neither looked like being much help.

“We need more people,” Kit said, looking round.

“Tomorrow,” promised No Neck. “We’ll have lots of people. Let me make some calls first.”

“Want to talk about Yoshi?” asked No Neck, a few hours later, after one of the many calls he’d promised to make delivered them to another bar. With No Neck it was always a bar, unless that was just Tokyo.

“No,” Kit said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Okay,” said No Neck. “You ever wondered what it was you and Yoshi had in common?”

“I just said…”

“You’re not talking about it,” said No Neck. “I am. You ever wonder?”

Kit shook his head.

“Nothing,” said No Neck. “That was what you had in common…All those empty rooms. No television, no radio, no computers. Four floors of your own building in central Tokyo and the only room you bothered to decorate was the bar. Everything else was just storage space, without the storage.”

“Yeah,” said Kit. “Probably.”

“Does that sound like a marriage to you?”

Kit looked at him.

“She didn’t register it,” said No Neck, “because that way Yoshi could walk away…”

“If she needed,” said Kit.

No Neck nodded.

“Look,” Kit said. “You want to tell me what happened that night?”

Kit and No Neck sat in Seventh Gear, a biker shack on the northwest edge of Kabukicho, built under a raised section of the Seibu Shinjuku line. And Kit had earned his share of stares and comments just by pushing his way through its bead curtain. No Neck had to do some quick talking, his share of stares, shoulder slapping, and arm gripping before Kit’s presence became accepted.

“Sure,” said No Neck, taking off his shades to reveal bruises purple enough to make a goth rainbow. “Why not? She shopped me to the cops…The cops decided to beat the crap out of me, repeatedly.”

“Shit,” said Kit. “You know why?”

No Neck snorted. “Why do you think?” he said. “By then, they wanted me to sign a confession saying my friends bombed your bar.”

“They gave you a translation?”

“I can read Japanese.”

Kit stared at him. “You’re worse than me,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”

No Neck looked embarrassed. “I can read it,” he said. “And talk Japanese, if I must.”

“So why the me no speaks stuff?”

“Think about it,” said No Neck. “Why does Micki keep coming round to my apartment?”

“To teach you…” Kit stopped.

“Yeah.” The huge man smiled. “I’ve been here for twenty-five years,” he said. “Remember Madori? Namiko? Mai? They all wanted to teach me Japanese. You’d be surprised how many of those lessons ended up in bed.”

Actually, Kit wouldn’t.

“The police knew it wasn’t me,” said No Neck, with a shrug. “But it would have been tidier. One gaijin bombs another, famous Japanese artist caught in the conflict…they came very close,” No Neck added.

“Close to what?”

“Getting their confession.” Upending his bottle, No Neck killed what was left of his Kirin. “Not sure what changed,” he said. “One moment some psycho has me in a cell, the next there’s a knock at the door and I’m alone on the floor with foot prints on my face.” The Australian checked he really had finished his beer and got up to fetch another.

When No Neck returned it was with four Kirin and a saucer of chili nuts. “The bastard didn’t even bother to come back,” he said, sounding more fucked off by that than anything else. “Just left me on the floor in my own piss…a uniform kicked me free. Gave me back my wallet, permit, and resident’s card and told me to behave myself in future. He looked about twelve…”

“It could have been worse,” said Kit. “They could have shipped you back to Sydney.” For reasons unspecified, the bozozoku had let it be known that returning home could be fatal.

“Ex-wife,” said No Neck, as if hearing Kit’s thought. “Turkish, big family, half a dozen brothers.” Reaching for the chili nuts, he emptied the saucer with a single scoop and swallowed the lot, pulling a face. “Her father hated how it began and loathed how it ended.”

“How did it start?”

“In a school gym.”

Kit looked at No Neck. “I was teaching,” said No Neck. “She wasn’t…”

It was a long story, not pretty and the only thing No Neck would say in his defence was that he’d loved the girl. She’d been six months under legal and he’d married her as soon as he was allowed. Things had gone downhill from there.

“You know how many bodies I buried in the first Iraq war?”

Kit shook his head.

“Nor do I,” said No Neck. “There were that many, kids and conscripts…we just bulldozed sand over the top. I always thought that was my worst and then Maryam announced she was leaving and taking the kids.”

He caught Kit’s look, the unspoken question. “I was drinking,” he admitted. “Spending too much time with the Rebels. Things were rough.”

“So you ended up here?”

“There are worse places,” said No Neck, glancing round. He nodded to a couple of bozozoku in the far corner. One was wearing a white headband with shades, the other just had the shades. “These guys are family,” No Neck said, thumping his ribs over the heart. “Know what I mean?”

The Australian was missing when Kit got back from taking a piss. Although Kit found him easily enough, over in the far corner with the guy wearing a headband. “Meet Micki’s brother Tetsuo. He’s going to help us shift that fence.”

Kit shook, trying not to wince at the other man’s grip.

“According to Tetsuo,” said No Neck, “someone out there is looking for you.”

“Police?”

Micki’s brother and No Neck exchanged glances. “No,” said Tetsuo. “A gaijin, someone like you…A woman.” He thought about it some more. “An old woman.”

“Has this woman said why?”

Tetsuo shook his head. “No,” he said. “She just said whoever finds you gets 500,000 yen. So if you want help tomorrow shifting that fence…”

The bozozoku escort was presented as a compliment, an honour guard to escort Kit and No Neck through the neon squalor of north Shinjuku. “Tell her I’ll come by the hotel for my money,” said Tetsuo, and No Neck nodded.

Like most bars in the city Pom Pom Palace had a lurid sign. Only this one was bleached almost white by time and advertised girls who probably hadn’t danced in years. A Korean in a shiny tuxedo opened a door at the bottom of some steps and began bowing them inside.

“You’re expected,” he said.

A girl was on stage under a single light. She wore a silver G-string and white gloves and was dancing, fairly badly, to “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine.” Half a dozen Italian tourists sat round a Formica table in front of the stage that looked as if it had been salvaged from a sandwich shop. They looked like they’d been expecting rather more for their money.

There was something intrinsically sad about Shinjuku. A vacuum-packed hollowness that no quantity of neon could hide. Roppongi was the same, only there the sadness was older and more Western. All that movement to so little purpose. A million strangers searching for a cure to the darkness behind their eyes in the void between someone else’s legs.

It could be on film, behind glass in a peek booth, printed out and pasted on walls; or it could be on stage under a single light, looking down at strangers, beyond caring why the strangers stared back.

“Rock ’n’ Roll Lies.”

Another band, another nearly forgotten track, another girl about to dance. Wrapping one arm around Kit’s shoulders, No Neck said, “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

“You knew about this?”

“Not until just now,” said No Neck. “Well, maybe a little…I’d heard someone was asking for you.” He shook his head sadly. “I mean, that’s not exactly news. But I figured…”

“You figured what?”

The huge Australian seemed embarrassed. “You know, someone wanted to finish what they started. Except Tetsuo says it’s not like that at all. This woman wants to hire you. And, God knows, you need something to stop you coming apart.”

“I’m fine,” Kit said.

No Neck sighed. “Take a look at yourself,” he suggested.

“So they found you…” The woman who stood up from the corner table looked her guest up and down as one might look at a cut of meat in the butcher’s before arguing about price. Which was entirely fitting because Kate O’Mally began life in a butcher’s shop, before her lack of squeamishness and facility with a blade let her move into more profitable areas, allegedly…

She looked older than Kit remembered and was wearing a tweed sports coat, utterly out of keeping with her surroundings. But then, Mary’s mother never had known how to dress.

The last time they’d talked, the woman had threatened to have Kit’s legs broken and his testicles crushed with pliers if he went near Mary again. Kate O’Mally had found her daughter bent over a lavatory, vomiting. Mary thought she might be pregnant.

As one half-naked girl replaced another on stage and silence stretched thin between No Neck, Kit, and Mrs. O’Mally, Kit finally remembered the woman’s promise of when they’d next meet.

“I guess,” he said, “this means hell’s finally frozen over.”

CHAPTER 19 — Wednesday, 20 June

Slung under a concrete overhang, in a building designed by Hiroshi Oe and built by one of his followers, the top-floor bar of Kate O’Mally’s hotel looked out on a handful of lanes running south from Akasaka Mitsuke. At first sight these looked to be a typically working-class jumble of thin alleys, short cross lanes, red paper lanterns, and a mix of ramen shops, chemists, and pachinko parlours. The kind of area that could be found almost anywhere.

Appearances were wrong. Akasaka was a favourite haunt for senior staff from Japan’s civil service, which explained the prices in some of the kaiseki ryori restaurants.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Kate O’Mally.

And Kit knew hell really had frozen over. The Kate O’Mally he remembered would never have bothered with small talk.

“Very,” said Kit. “I knew the wife of the man who owns most of it, once…”

Kate went back to her whisky. The bar in which they both sat was panelled in dark oak, had low leather sofas and coffee tables made from fat slabs of industrial glass.

As with most Tokyo hotels, the waitstaff were female and dressed with such discretion they were almost transparent with good taste. A heavy pall of cigar smoke hung cloud-like around them, from three cigars that had been whisked away the moment their stubs hit the ashtray in front of Kate.

“Sherry and vanilla,” said Kate, sniffing her glass.

It smelled like whisky to Kit.

So now they sat, not quite opposite each other. Their bowl of rice crackers was empty and the suits in the corner had abandoned their conversation for a club in one of the alleys beyond the main road.

Every so often, Kate would lean forward and then change her mind about whatever she’d been about to say. Having slipped another Cuban cigar from a leather holder, Kate sliced it with a silver cutter and lit it using a gold Ronson. She stubbed the cigar out within three puffs and it vanished a second later.

“Just say it,” he said. “This place closes in half an hour. After that, I’m going home.”

“And where would that be?” said Kate. “I’ve seen the ruins, and your bloody pub sign. You used my daughter’s face.” She shook her head angrily. “You think she’d like that?”

Kit’s smile was cold. “You think I’d care?”

Kate turned away.

Outside the picture window a Kawasaki cruiser had stopped at the lights far below, its modified pipes echoing off the concrete canyon around it, loud enough to shake windows twenty-eight floors above. A steady stream of Kawasakis, Harleys, and chopped Hondas had been rolling past the hotel. No Neck’s idea of keeping his eye on a friend.

“I’m not a fool,” said Kate. “I always knew it was you.”

“Yeah…” Kit nodded. “So you said.” Pushing back his chair, he watched the Kawasaki jump the lights as a police cruiser pulled up behind. What had been a noise violation became something more serious.

“I’m off,” he said. “You can settle the bill.”

Kate tossed down a 50,000-yen note without bothering to check the denomination. “I’m coming too,” she said. They took the lift in silence. Kit in his new clothes, Kate with her drunk’s face, hair curled so tight it fit like a helmet. She wore too many gold rings and a Rolex better suited to a deep-sea diver. For all her wealth she seemed as ill at ease in her clothes as Kit felt in his skin.

“Finished staring?”

“Yeah,” said Kit. “I guess age nails us all in the end.” He looked Kate in the face, rather than watching her in the mirrored wall of the lift. “I used to be afraid of you,” he said. “Everyone was.”

“Not Mary.”

“Oh yes,” said Kit. “Especially Mary. Ask her.”

“I can’t fucking ask…” Whatever time had failed to do, his words completed. The jaw always held so rigid began to tremble and Kate’s eyes, usually flint-like, spilled with tears. As the lift reached the lobby Kate retreated to the safety of an inside corner.

Leaning past the lift girl, Kit punched the Floor 28 button for himself. “Forgot something,” he told a waitress, when he walked back into the bar. Kate was still staring fiercely ahead when Kit returned, while the lift attendant did her best to act as if everything was normal.

One can learn a lot about someone in the time it takes a lift to descend two dozen floors, a lot about how their life came apart. It didn’t even take that many words.

“You’ve quarrelled?”

“Mary’s dead.”

“Oh shit,” said Kit, half a dozen floors passing as he reached for his next question. “She got sick?”

“No,” said Kate. “Although that would be bad enough.”

“A car accident?”

“Killed herself,” Kate said. “Wrote a note, changed her clothes, bought a ticket, and stepped off the side of the Ostend ferry. She left this…” The woman dug into her jacket to retrieve an envelope just as the lift reached the ground.

“Police,” said Kate, nodding to a slit in the envelope’s flap. “Not me…I wasn’t going to come,” she added. “Even if I did I wasn’t going to find you. But Pat insisted.”

Patrick Robbe-Duras, Kit could remember him. A small man with a Dublin accent that had survived twenty-five years of life in London and the home counties. Mary had adored her father.

“Mr. Duras made you?”

“Said it was what she wanted. Only I don’t think Mary had any fucking idea what she…”

“We should move,” Kit said, stepping forward to stop the lift doors from closing again. “Come on.” He led Kate out of the Otis and nodded his thanks to the lift girl, who bowed, smiled, and hit a button to shut their problems out of her life. Drunks got special dispensation in Tokyo, which was just as well; there were usually enough of them.

“Ramen,” said Kit. “A bit like spaghetti. Eat the shrimp and noodles, then drink the soup. It’ll help soak up the alcohol.”

“I know what ramen are,” Kate said. “Mary took me to Waga-mama.”

They were in a tiny café under an arch in Asakusa, delivered there in a reluctant taxi. If the driver noticed the ancient Speedmaster trailing him, he probably put it down to some bozozoku having fun at his expense. The café was the only place Kit knew for sure would be open at 3 am on a weekday. Well, there were strip joints in Kabukicho, the kaiseki ryori of Akasaka, and enough hostess bars in Shinjuku to keep an army of suits happy, but Kit was looking for something more discreet.

“Is this all anyone does in Tokyo?”

Kit looked puzzled.

“Eat and drink,” said Kate. “Stay out all night partying?”

He considered mentioning the lack of living space, the fact love hotels existed because so many couples still lived with their parents, the way worlds overlapped, the conflict between public and private pleasures and the part communal drinking played in establishing hierarchies, then decided not to bother. Kate was just being difficult for the sake of it.

“Drink the pink stuff,” he said.

Surprisingly, Kate did as she was told, tipping back a glass of sugar water mixed with amino acids. It was reputed to cure drunkenness, improve mental function, and extend life. Kate looked like she needed all three.

“Okay,” said Kit, “now give me Mary’s letter.”

Kate hesitated, as he knew she would.

Bringing a bowl to his lips, Kit slurped down his broth. “I understand,” he said. “You hate me. You don’t want to be here. You’re only here because of Pat…Now show me the letter.”

Kate dug into her pocket.

Somehow, given Kate’s reappearance in his life, Kit had expected to see his own name. Instead Mary had addressed her letter to everyone and no one at the same time. To whom it may concern. Taking the envelope, Kit extracted a key and a single sheet of cheap paper. I’m sorry, I know it’s selfish, but life has become impossible. Misery laid out on the page in words written a thousand times before.

Kate’s reason for being in Tokyo came in the final paragraph. And, having read it, Kit could understand why Kate had been reluctant to make the trip. Given how she felt about him it must have hurt just getting on the plane.

Mary had owned a flat in central London, an art gallery in Canterville Mews, five goldfish, and a cat called Miu. The cat was being looked after by Pat, the goldfish had gone to a friend. The art gallery was run by a half-Czech woman called Sylvia and could look after itself. All of these, however, now belonged to Kit.

“Is this legal?”

“That’s all you can ask?” Kate’s voice was raw. “Is it legal?” The bang as she slammed down her bowl was enough to make a market porter at the next table stare across. A nod from Kit and the man in overalls and yellow boots went back to his paper, foreigners forgotten.

“What do you want me to say?” asked Kit. “You think I want her flat and all this other shit?” Reaching deep into his wallet, Kit slid out a thumbnail print he’d forgotten until recently was even there. He pushed it over to Kate, who glanced down, grabbed the square of cardboard, and held it close to her face.

It was a cruel thing to do, Kit knew that. It was meant to be cruel.

“That’s how I remember Mary,” he said. “That’s the Mary I knew.” Without asking, Kit reached over and took back his photograph.

Thursday, 16 May 2002, a single day of blazing sunshine, trapped between a day of drizzle and an almighty thunder storm. The Doves were top of the charts. Slipknot, White Stripes, and Mercury Rev were scheduled to play Reading. He’d just bought new strings for his guitar. Mary was still going out with him. All the bad stuff was yet to come. The one perfect day of his life.

“Who took the picture?” demanded Kate.

“Who do you think?” said Kit. “Josh, obviously…”

Josh with his new Nokia, photographing his best mate and his best mate’s girl, as they sat almost facing each other. So bohemian, beneath a clear blue sky. As if Mary’s naked top and Kit’s faux casual insolence in the face of a camera phone meant all other restraints had been lost.

They looked like the kids they’d been. Only one had to be old to think like that and Kit wasn’t, not really; just tired and drunk and doing his best to hold Kate’s news at bay. “Why are you really here?”

“Because I told Pat I’d find you.”

“You could have lied,” Kit said, “holed up in a hotel, told him I’d left for somewhere else.”

“I did,” said Kate. “Twice. The last time was a month ago.”

She drank off the rest of her broth, without seeming to notice it was cold, and picked up a disposable chopstick, which was crude enough to have split along one edge when separated from its pair.

Years back, yanking her fingers apart, Yoshi had described how, until he met her sister, Yuko’s new husband had chopsticked his way through office ladies. It turned out she meant he split them open, used them once, and tossed them away. Every time Kit used disposable chopsticks he thought of Mr. Tamagusuku.

“Cheap,” Kate said, putting down one chopstick and snapping the other in two. She regarded the pointed end with interest and Kit felt himself tense.

“Maybe back then,” she said. “Not now.”

“So why come looking a third time?” asked Kit, returning to what really worried him.

“I’ve told you,” said Kate. “Pat.”

“What about him?” Kit prompted.

Kate O’Mally took a deep breath. Kit thought it was a sigh until he saw her shoulders lock and she blew the air out again. It was frustration that drove the breath from her body with the force of a punch.

“We’ve separated,” she said. “Happened about five years ago. Still stay in touch. Well, we did, mostly about Mary. He thinks she’s still alive.”

Putting down his green tea, Kit waited.

“I know for a fact,” said Kate, “my daughter stepped off a ferry into the sea. The police, the coroner, all Mary’s friends…we know that’s the truth. Only Pat refuses to believe it.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? Because he can’t stand the thought of Mary drowning herself.” From the scowl on Kate O’Mally’s face she wasn’t handling the truth much better herself. This was a woman who’d used pliers as a negotiating tool, Kit reminded himself. Now was probably not the time to start feeling pity.

“What?” demanded Kate.

“Just remembering,” Kit told her.

“Pat says Mary wouldn’t kill herself.” Kate sighed. “He says suicide wasn’t in Mary’s character.”

“So what does he think happened?”

“He told the police he believes she was kidnapped and murdered.”

“Then there should be a body or a ransom note.”

“That’s what they said.” Kate shrugged. “An Inspector came down from London. I think Pat had been giving them trouble. You know, calling them with new ideas and suggestions. You remember Mike?”

Kit shook his head, not that it made any difference.

“Surprise me,” said Kate sourly. “He took over the business a few years back.” She grimaced. “Good at it too, much smoother than me. Anyway, he called. It turned out he’d been in contact with Mary all those years that she wouldn’t even talk to me.”

Mary wouldn’t…

“Why did he call?”

“To say I should do what Pat wanted.” From the flatness in Kate’s voice, it sounded as if her nephew had said a lot of other things as well.

An early wash of dawn was weakening neon beyond the café’s curtain, turning the lights from a mating display to a jumble of glass tubes and tatty flex. Across the street a group of Chinese cleaners were tumbling out of a white van, in a clatter of mops and pails, their conversation fractured by the rattle of early-morning trains overhead.

No Neck’s motorbike was parked on the street and Kit knew the bozozoku would be watching from somewhere nearby. The man and his machine were rarely parted for long.

“Come on,” said Kit, “let’s get you back to your hotel.”

Pushing back her chair, Kate reached for her coat, forcing her arm through its sleeve on her third attempt. “I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “You can show me the sights.”

CHAPTER 20 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

Stumbling through the door, Lady Neku, otherwise known as Baroness Nawa-no-ukiyo, Countess High Strange, and Chatelaine of Schloss Omga, fell to her knees and vomited all over slate tiles. What she’d seen clung to her like smoke, her thoughts rubble through which the last wisps of necessity demanded she search.

“Fuck.”

Hoplite, heliocentric…

Hemispherical?

Double fuck. There was something important she needed to tell her brother Nico. Only she’d forgotten it already.

Lady Neku was naked, her fingers bleeding from broken nails. A scratch on her ankles had obviously oozed liquid and then sealed itself. From what she could tell the glue her body had produced was…was…tied to extra cellular matrix receptors, linked to the initiation of granulation tissue formation.

She jumped, shocked that the castle had been the one to speak first. “You’re back,” it said. “Did you get what you were after?”

“What was I after?” asked Lady Neku.

The castle sighed. “Obviously not,” it said.

Squatting naked like some fugee, Lady Neku let the tiles melt around her and felt herself sink into the floor, until the level came up to her neck. It was wet and warm but not unpleasant, like damp flesh on damp flesh, which is what it was, Lady Neku realised.

“Can you mend me?” she asked.

“Define mend.”

“Repair the cuts and heal the bruises.” She felt the castle’s amusement. “I can still do the small stuff,” it said. “It’s the bigger stuff…”

“What bigger stuff?”

“Neku,” it said, and Lady Neku realised this was the first time Schloss Omga had ever called her by name. “You’re sweet, but not very bright.”

“I’m more intelligent than my brothers,” Lady Neku said crossly.

“Yes,” said the castle, “there is always that.”

Later, when the aches had gone, Lady Neku dipped her head beneath the tiles and let Schloss Omga heal the scratches on her face. “Thank you,” she said, clambering out of a fleshy softness that returned itself to tile once she’d climbed free. “I need to find Nico now.”

“Neku…”

“Yes?” said Lady Neku, realising she hadn’t yet asked the castle for her clothes back. “What?”

“You know,” Schloss Omga said. “You need to think really hard about why you’re still wearing that body.”

“You know why,” said Lady Neku. “Someone stole my real one.”

“Were you wearing this body when you left just now?”

Lady Neku nodded.

“What about the time before?” prompted the castle. “What were you wearing then?”

She thought about it, she really did. And in thinking about this realised something else. She’d gone back to get her memory bracelet, because how could she function without it? Only, her wrist was still bare. Which meant…

“You should go back,” said the castle.

“To find my memories?”

“That too,” said Schloss Omga. “Though there are better reasons. Meanwhile, I want you to think really hard about why looking for Nico is a bad idea.”

“But I’ve lost…”

“Doesn’t matter,” said the castle. “All memories get filed twice, once in the bracelet and once in your head. Use the wetware,” it said. “And start now, while your mind is still imprinted on that body. Begin with something simple, something recent. What’s the very last thing you can remember?”

“Waking,” said Lady Neku.

“Where was this?”

“In my bedroom. Someone asked me a question.”

“Begin there,” said the castle. “Try to recall what happened next…”

She was asleep in her room at High Strange, a circular room at the top of a spire. In the old days the spires were called spindles and there was a lot of history attached to them, but Lady Neku did her best to ignore it.

Lady Neku had chosen her room because it looked towards the stars, what few remained within her light cone, rather than towards the earth, which a room at the other end of the spire would have done.

Her mother had an earth room as tradition demanded; so the head of the family could view the lands she protected. Although the Katchatka did little to protect anyone these days, now that the sails of nawa-no-ukiyo were ripped and the sun was free to lay waste to their segment.

How strange, everyone said, when Lady Neku chose that room. Which was odd, because it seemed to make perfect sense for her to live as far from her family as possible.

Words woke her on the night she remembered. Unexpected, because she’d added a filter to her thoughts to keep her brothers away.

“Neku…Hey, you there?”

She recognised his voice instantly. Young, well spoken, and slightly arch. I mean, she thought, how many boys—excluding brothers—were there in High Strange…

None.

And how many boys in the overworlds?

Thirty-eight, working to a tolerance of two years either way. Eleven of these were blood related within the last three generations. Of the remaining twenty-seven, just over half were habitually female. Not that Lady Neku had anything against that, obviously…that left thirteen spread across six segments. Two of those segments were hostile and Lady Neku knew of their five possibilities from records only. Which left eight boys, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen. Who were, almost without exception, contemptible in their hunger to make friends with her. The exception was Perfect.

This wasn’t his real name. That was something so absurd he refused to use it when introducing himself. If segment titles had suffered from inflation, then names in the Menham Segment had suffered worse still. Lady Neku had her own suspicions about why this had happened.

“Neku?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”

“Oh, right.” Per sounded puzzled. “You sound different.”

The fact they were even talking would be regarded as an outrage by Lady Neku’s mother. That Lady Neku and Per one day planned to meet, albeit at ground level…

“Take a guess why?”

“Don’t know,” Per said, sounding cross. “I’m rubbish at guessing games. Your throat’s sore?”

“Close,” said Lady Neku. “I cut it with Nico’s knife.”

“You…?”

“I want a new body. My dear Lady Mother won’t give me one.”

Perfect Lord Menham was eighteen months older than Lady Neku. Whoever told him that girls liked their men dissolute, damned, and dangerous (and Lady Neku’s bet was on his sister), they should also have told him there was no point asking questions if he was going to be shocked at the answers.

“It’s healing,” she said. “Worst luck. Why did you call me?”

“The d’Alamberts,” said Per.

Information flowed from the web of beads around Lady Neku’s wrist, maps of d’Alambert influence and schematics showing their sections of the rope world, flicking across her mind until she told the information to stop.

“What about them?” demanded Lady Neku, more crossly than was polite.

“It’s just,” said Per. “I’ve heard…”

Whatever Perfect had heard was obviously so stupid he decided not to say it; because Lady Neku suddenly got a head full of static and then silence. When she was certain Per was gone, she tried to call Nico, Petro, and Antonio in turn, but apparently her brothers didn’t want to talk to her either.

CHAPTER 21 — Thursday, 21 June

Kit intended to leave Kate where she slept, he really did. The bench was large, Shinjuku Chuo Park was safe, not even the homeless would disturb a middle-aged woman snoring drunkenly in front of an artificial waterfall under the gaze of a lost Mandarin duck.

The last thing he needed was Kate O’Mally bringing her hangover to his meeting with Tetsuo, who really was going to help Kit with his problems in Roppongi…well, according to No Neck.

All Kit had to do was walk away. He could fold Mary’s letter back into its envelope and place the envelope inside Kate’s coat, and leave the woman to her sadness and a hangover that would do little to ruin a day already ruined from the moment she woke.

It was so tempting.

He owed her nothing. After all, Kate O’Mally was the person he’d once promised to destroy, in a fit of teenage bravado. But life had already done that for him. Her daughter was dead, Kate’s relationship with Patrick Robbe-Duras was ended, and the house above Middle Morton echoed with so much loneliness she could barely stand to live there.

Who knew Kate could be so poetic? So honest about the horror she was facing. It was that honesty which put its hook into Kit’s flesh. So that every time he stood up to walk away, sharp tugs of guilt sat him down again. It was her honesty, and one final admission.

“You know,” said Kate, when they first reached the bench. “There’s another possibility.”

“There is?”

“Pat originally thought Mary was running away.”

“From what?” asked Kit.

The face Kate turned to Kit was ravaged by alcohol, guilt, and a level of self-awareness more cruel than anything a teenage Kit could have wished on her. “From me,” she said. “And you know what Pat said? Better late than never…”

It took the duck an hour to realise the couple on the bench were useless as a source of food and get cross. By then, the sun had got stuck behind the government buildings to Kit’s right and the roads around the little park had become crowded with traffic. Carbon monoxide mixed with the sour smell of camp fires from a collection of blue plastic tents nearby. It was no longer early and the homeless were hanging out their blankets to air or washing shirts in the splash pool of the waterfall.

Mrs. Oniji had once explained to Kit that ducks divide into ahiru and kamo, those that are white and those that are not, but then Mrs. Oniji used different words for water, depending on whether it was hot, cold, or merely warm. Maybe she’d miss the lessons? Kit hoped so, at least he thought he did.

“Shoo,” Kit told the duck. One tiny eye peered at him from a slash of white like plate armour along the side of its head. After a moment, the duck decided to leave anyway.

When it came the ring tone was loud enough to make Kit jump. Tokyo was a city of video phones that doubled as DVDs, diaries, and e-mail organisers. The big problem for tourists was that only Japanese-registered phones seemed to work. One needed to rent a phone on arrival and top it up with credit.

It seemed that Kate O’Mally had.

The longer Kit ignored the phone, the louder the ring tone got and less likely it seemed that Kate would wake. In the end, Kit simply reached into her pocket and found the phone, flicking it to voice only.

“Hello…?” All Kit got was an echo of his own voice and the sense of distance which satellite lag imparts, technology making the world tiny and then guaranteeing it felt very large again.

“Hello,” repeated Kit.

Satellite distance, and a taste of something else.

“Katie?”

“No,” said Kit. “She’s sleeping.”

For a moment it sounded as if the man at the other end had broken the connection and then Kit heard his own name, the authorised version. “Christopher Newton?”

“Nouveau,” said Kit, without even thinking. “And it’s Kit.” Only then did he realise who was on the other end of the line.

“Oh fuck,” said Patrick Robbe-Duras. “Katie found you.”

“Yes,” said Kit. “That she did.”

“She’s been looking for months. You know, I told her you’d probably moved. For all we knew you were in Australia or back in England.”

“Mr. Duras…”

“Patrick,” said the man. “Call me Patrick.” He hesitated. “Katie’s already told you what this is about?”

“Of course,” Kit said. “You believe Mary’s still alive and you want me to find her.”

There was a silence. “That’s what she said?”

“Yes,” said Kit. “Did I get it wrong?”

“You could say that…” Patrick Robbe-Duras said. His voice was ghostly, made distant by more than the five thousand nautical miles and fifteen bitter years between them. “My daughter killed herself. She booked a ferry, left her shoes by the railings, and stepped into the sea. Katie is the one who believes Mary is alive. She’s the one who has spent the last six months of her life trying to find you. And you know why?”

Only, Kit had stopped listening.

Water tumbled from the long lip of the artificial fall onto carefully placed rocks below, watched only by a duck, Kit, and a homeless couple, both of whom had stripped to the waist before washing themselves in its pool. At Kit’s side, Kate O’Mally slept off a hangover that would have felled a man half her age, while Kit gripped her phone in trembling fingers, already thumbing its Off button.

Six months. Late December.

“Oh fuck,” Kit said, vomiting udon noodles, green tea, and alcohol onto the paving at his feet. As Pat’s words finally managed what Yoshi’s death had been unable to achieve, make Kit face what had really happened.

I’m not sure if this is going to reach you. I hope so. There are some things I really should have told you at the time… When she’d written that, the inhabitants of Middle Morton had already burned their famous bonfire. In Tokyo, the kouyou season was over, each day’s news no longer ending with an update on the autumn foliage. And Mary O’Mally, the only person he’d ever really loved, was preparing to kill herself.

Kit tried to remember the date of its postmark, thought about it some more and realised he could. He could also remember the day her card arrived. It was the day he fucked Namiko and the day he went to pray at the Meiji Jingu Shrine. Although it began as the day he woke to discover Yoshi had gone for a walk.

CHAPTER 22 — Flashback to Winter

The dampness in Pirate Mary’s storeroom was made worse by a broken window, which let rain dribble down the inside of one wall. Yoshi said she liked the cold, that everyone from Hokkaido liked the cold.

Kit often wondered if that was true.

The sunken bath had been given a little room of its own near the stairs, but everything else on the third floor was stripped back to bare walls and rafters, so that any footsteps across the floor could be heard clearly in the bar below.

A long bench, an expensive black leather and steel punishment rack, and something that looked like medieval stocks comprised its only furniture. All three had arrived with Yoshi and never been used, at least not during the years that Kit had known her.

A hook in the ceiling, a coil of rope, carefully boiled to silk-like softness, and a twelve-foot length of bamboo, made up the three items that Yoshi still used. The bamboo pole was the most versatile, being utilised in more ways than Kit would have thought possible.

It had been five weeks since Yoshi had even looked at a potter’s wheel. She’d served behind the bar at Pirate Mary’s, talked ceramics to first year students at the Tokyo Design School, and cooked impossibly complicated dishes involving three kinds of eel and two types of noodle. She took to walking in the Meiji gardens to watch crimson leaves fall from the winter trees. When that failed, she tracked Kit down at the bar, where he was mending a beer pump, and told him she wanted tying.

That was the deal. She always asked, Kit wasn’t expected to volunteer. Like most such deals it was unspoken and possibly entirely unconscious.

“You know,” said Yoshi, as she stripped off her yukata. “All I want is an empty mind…” She looked for a second as if she was about to ask, Is that so unreasonable?

She began to relax the moment the ropes began to constrict her body. Her eyes glazed and turned inwards and the tightness around her eyes smoothed away. Kit needed a hit to reach anything approaching that state. Even then, Kit doubted if what he extracted from the dragon came close to the utter serenity Yoshi seemed to find.

“Thank you,” she said, when the final knot was tied.

“Shhh…” Kit touched his finger to her lips.

Yoshi smiled.

Her needs had little to do with masochism and even less to do with sex, at least in any way Kit understood those terms. Edo rope bondage was Yoshi’s way of reaching clarity and if Yoshi lacked clarity…Well, for Yoshi, work was what made life worth living.

She was still smiling as he went back to mending his pump. An hour and a half later, about ten minutes after Kit unbound her, the sound of Yoshi’s wheel could be heard as it spun steadily. An hour after that Kit decided he might as well take himself for a walk.

“Nouveau-san…” The post boy held out one white gloved hand and bowed slightly. The dark blue uniform he wore already looked familiar, though the firm he represented was new. A dozen stories had already run about the fall in standards now that Japan’s post office was privately run. To Kit the service seemed immaculate.

Barely noticing the boy’s bow, Kit took the card and flipped it over, his thoughts already on which of a dozen tasks he needed to do first. And then Kit saw the writing, read Mary’s message before realising he’d even done so, and everything else ceased to matter.

About the baby, wrote Mary. I lied.

Usually it was No Neck who wanted Kit’s help getting drunk. This time round, Mary’s postcard still clutched in one hand, Kit went in search of the other man. Although, in Kit’s defence, he really did think he just needed to talk.

No Neck was doing what he usually did on Tuesday afternoons…handing out highly inaccurate flyers to any tourist stupid enough to think Roppongi was a place worth visiting in daylight.

“Doing okay?” No Neck asked three Swedish backpackers.

Glancing round, they saw a shaven-headed man with a tattooed ring of barbed wire around one naked bicep. In the hot days of summer No Neck wore a tank top to show off his abs. In winter, he added a waistcoat to the mix. If one got close enough, which was not necessarily a good idea, it was possible to see frayed stitches across the back, where a three-part patch had once announced his nomad status within Australia’s Rebel MC.

“Here,” said No Neck, thrusting out one hand.

All new girls, said his latest flyer. Highly trained & highly professional. Which was code for, Have danced before/not sex workers. Both these statements were open to argument, but were included to convince the local police that Bernie’s Bar was clean, tourist friendly, and not going to give them trouble.

“Filthy,” said No Neck to the backpackers. “Absolutely filthy. You guys been to Bangkok?”

All three nodded.

“Infinitely dirtier,” No Neck said. “Show this at the door for a twenty percent reduction.”

They took a flyer each.

“Not quite fun for all the family,” he told an American couple, “but not far off. A bit like burlesque, only the Japanese version…”

Taking a flyer, the man gave it to his wife. A hundred paces down the road, the woman handed the flyer back to her husband, who dumped it into a bin.

“Can’t win them all,” said Kit.

The deal was that No Neck got 500 yen for each tourist who arrived at Bernie’s Bar clutching a flyer. If he got arrested, then someone he met on the street sub-contracted the work, the club had never seen him and certainly hadn’t employed him. It was a convenient fiction.

“Want a drink?”

No Neck glanced from the flyers in his hand towards the entrance to Kaballero Kantina, which happened to be just across the street. Beer money or free beer? If Kit had been feeling less upset it would probably have been funny.

“Come on,” he said. It was enough.

Stuffing the rest of the flyers into his sleeveless jacket, No Neck wrapped one heavy arm around Kit’s shoulders and waded into the traffic.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” said No Neck. “You get your best friend’s girlfriend pregnant, freak out when she tells you, and blame your friend when her psycho ma comes calling?”

Kit nodded.

“What I don’t understand,” No Neck said, taking a pull at his bottle, “is why your ex-friend had nothing to say about this.”

“Because he was dead.”

That got everyone’s attention. Kit had intended this to be a quiet drink, but the crowd around their table was growing and No Neck wouldn’t let the matter lie.

“Crashed his bike,” added Kit, before No Neck had time to ask.

“Fuck,” No Neck said, “that’s harsh. Did he know about you and…?”

That was No Neck for you. The bozozoku could always be relied on to go straight to the heart of the matter, and, having got there, rip it out and dump it on the table in a bloody puddle so everyone else could get a good look.

“Yeah,” said Kit, admitting the unthinkable. “I think he did.”

No Neck picked up his empty bottle and peered at it. The signal Kit should buy everyone another round. At present, everyone included Kit, No Neck, Micki, and Namiko, a girl No Neck used to fuck before he started going out with Micki.

“Get some nachos,” suggested Namiko.

Having eaten half the nachos and emptied his next bottle, No Neck wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and sat back, considering. “Okay,” he said. “She told you she was pregnant, then she told you she wasn’t, and now she says she was…”

Kit nodded.

“Fucking hell,” said No Neck. “What happened about the baby?”

“I took care of things myself,” Kit quoted, then returned the card to its resting place in his pocket. “Pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

“It was a test,” said Micki.

“Yeah,” Kit said. “I worked that out myself.”

“And you fucked up,” said No Neck. Sat next to him, Micki looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Kit went to the bar and bought a final round without being asked, paid for the nachos, and went back to the table to tell the others that he needed to take a walk.

“Want company?” No Neck asked.

“No.” Kit shook his head. “Stay here. I’ll catch you all later.”

“I need a walk,” said Namiko, pushing back her chair. “And it’s good you’re upset.”

Kit looked at her.

“If you weren’t,” said Namiko, “that would say bad things about you.” Slipping her arm through his, she steered him towards the door.

“Where are we going?” Kit asked.

“For that walk,” said Namiko.

They went to her room, which was in a small tenement block above an American diner that specialised in post-rock and late forties GI kitsch. That was where he’d seen her originally, Kit realised. She used to wait tables.

The room was tiny, which was the way with such rooms, and most of its space was filled with computer screens, old laptops, and a jumble of wires. “I farm,” Namiko said, catching Kit’s glance.

“Make much?”

“Enough,” said Namiko, handing him a scrap of paper in English. It contained a list of powers, weapons, and gold required by a fourteen-year-old in California who wanted to skip straight to the end of a new computer game. The deal was done through eBay and the fee had already been paid.

“Not bad,” Kit said.

Namiko smiled. “You want a drink?”

“Not really,” he said. “I’ve had plenty.”

So Namiko put the Kirin back in her fridge and ran a tap long enough to get the water cold. Having washed out her mouth, she gave the glass to Kit, who drank a couple of sour mouthfuls before doing the same. He couldn’t remember saying he needed sex. He certainly couldn’t remember propositioning her. Though Namiko seemed pretty certain that was why he’d come to her room.

“The sheets are none too clean,” she said.

Kit shrugged. The whole room was filthy. It seemed unlikely her sheets would be anything else.

“You like me?” asked Namiko.

He nodded, because this seemed the right response.

“Good,” said Namiko. “I’ve always liked you. You’re not like the others.”

Of course I am, Kit thought. Why else would I be here?

Namiko stripped easily, with none of the embarrassment he associated with Japanese girls. And her body was riper than he expected, heavy breasts tipped with dark nipples set into stretched circles. Her belly protruded over a tuft of thick pubic hair.

When Kit was done, Namiko shifted him off her and sucked him hard and clean, then rolled him onto his back and straddled him.

“My turn,” she said.

It was only later that she produced a twist of paper and shook out the dirty brown powder inside. “You ever tried this?” asked Namiko. “Like real heroin, but cheaper. Doesn’t dissolve in water,” she added, when Kit looked puzzled. “You smoke this stuff instead…”

CHAPTER 23 — Thursday Evening, 21 June

“Find yourself a seat,” suggested Kate, dumping her flight bag next to a recliner in the British Airways lounge at Narita. So Kit left his own case on a chair overlooking the darkened runway and nodded towards a bank of computer screens in the corner. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

“Sure,” said Kate, settling herself down.

Kit was able to use the lounge because Kate O’Mally had paid for Business Class flights for the both of them. Having found herself a copy of yesterday’s Mail, Kate was preparing to tut over some celebrity outrage and sip from a glass of mineral water on the table next to her. A Nurofen packet rested beside her glass and an unopened cheese sandwich rested next to that.

The morning’s tears in Shinjuku Chuo Park were gone and not to be mentioned, Kate had made that clear. She was, it was fair to say, back to being the demanding, hard-eyed bitch that everyone who knew her expected. Which explained why Kit felt the need to kill time at a screen while Kate skimmed her paper on the other side of the room.

The first e-mail Kit opened was from Micki. It showed a kitten drinking milk from a saucer, which was roughly what he’d expect from No Neck’s girlfriend. The second was from No Neck himself, and said simply, Watch this space!

It was the third e-mail that was unexpected. Micki’s brother Tetsuo had registered Kit with the Asahi Shimbun news site and given his interests as motorcycles, urban development, and political dissent…A link in the e-mail fed to a story Asahi Shimbun apparently thought he might like.

Kit read it in mounting disbelief. Late that afternoon a hardcore of bozozoku had ripped down the fences protecting a building site in Roppongi and occupied the area, surrounding it with totally unnecessary burning braziers and a ring of motorbikes. Anyone who touched one bike touched them all.

No Neck could be seen in the accompanying photograph, but only just. The most obvious character was Tetsuo, standing in the middle wearing a studded jacket and a white headband. He was carrying a bokken, while the boy directly behind held a flag. After a second, Kit realised it wasn’t a boy at all. It was Micki, wearing sun glasses and a biker jacket several sizes too big.

“Fuck,” said Kit, earning himself a stare from a woman on the next terminal. So this was what No Neck meant when he said Tetsuo had an idea. In response to Kit’s query as to what, No Neck had replied, “The 47 Ronin.”

Quite how that translated into this…? Kit was still wondering, when a frenzy of bowing at the door caught his attention. Both receptionists came out from behind the desk and ushered a young Japanese man into the executive lounge. In his arms he held a cardboard box tied with string. Nothing else, no briefcase, suit-carrier, or overnight bag. None of the badges of status carried by every other passenger in the room. Just a battered box from Circle K.

Sapporo Ichiban (Chicken) Noodles. 24 x 100gm, read the stencilling on its side.

Looking round, Hiroshi Sato saw Kit at the terminal and said something to one of the women. She disappeared behind her desk and when she returned it was to whisper something in the man’s ear.

The man nodded.

“Nouveau-san?”

Kit bowed.

“Mr. Oniji asked me to give you this.” Mr. Sato held out the box, waiting for Kit to take it. He should take the thing, Kit knew that. People were watching…

“Do you know what it is?”

The young man shook his head, but he was lying. Hiroshi Sato knew all right.

What now? wondered Kit.

The box was packed with straw made from a flat-bladed grass. The choice of material was probably significant, almost everything in Tokyo was. Thrusting his hands into the straw, Kit closed his fingers around something and began to pull.

“Nouveau-san!”

So real was the young man’s horror that Kit let go of whatever he held and began to unpack the straw instead.

“What’s in there?” demanded Kate, curiosity having finally forced her to abandon her place near the window.

“How would I know?” Kit asked.

Handful after handful of dried grass piled up on a glass table until Kit could finally see what Mr. Oniji had sent after him. A small bowl, twisted very slightly along one edge where gravity had touched the rim. Flame blackened its inside, but the underneath was fired to the colour of ash. A smudge had been fixed by heat into its base, Yoshi’s fingerprint fossilised like an ancient shell into rock.

“Fuck,” he said.

Looking round, Kit realised the entire lounge had come to a standstill. Middle-aged men, well-dressed women, complete strangers, even Kate O’Mally; all of them reduced to awed silence.

“It’s beautiful,” said Kit, speaking entirely to himself.

The young man nodded. “Her best work,” he said. “Unlike anything before it. It has…” He hesitated, searching for the right words. “A quality we believe only great artists achieve. Mr. Oniji is at a loss to know how it survived the fire.”

“In a cake tin,” Kit said flatly.

Hiroshi Sato stared at him.

“I put it in a ceramic cake tin.”

The young man considered this. “Still,” he said, “its survival is unusual. When the museum at Kobe was destroyed by an inferno many thousands of priceless ceramics cracked in the flames.”

A woman behind him began nodding.

“The bowl was unfired,” said Kit, deciding this would make a difference. “And covered with a damp cloth…” Now Kit came to look, he could see the blackness inside the bowl carried a weave where cotton had smouldered and fallen to ash.

“Who found it?” Kit demanded.

Mr. Sato looked embarrassed. “No one seems to know,” he said, shuffling immaculately shined shoes. “It was left with a note on the doorstep of a small town house in Akasaka.”

“This house, did it belong to someone known to Mr. Oniji?”

Hiroshi Sato’s nod was so slight as to be almost invisible.

So beautiful. Cold and beautiful and fragile and able to survive the ruining of his life, the bowl had Kit’s attention and held his gaze. Everything he’d loved and respected about Yoshi was represented in that bowl. As was everything he’d feared and failed to understand.

“You take it,” he told Hiroshi Sato.

The man opened his mouth.

“Return it with my heart-felt thanks. Ask Mr. Oniji to keep the bowl safe.”

Very carefully, as if suddenly aware he might drop it, Hiroshi Sato took the bowl from Kit and put it back in the noodle box. Then he began to pack the box with thin-bladed straw, while all the passengers and both of the women from behind the desk continued to watch in silence.

CHAPTER 24 — Friday, 22 June

The battle began at dawn, in a blaze of outrage, long-focus lenses, and electronic flash. A couple of police vans pulled up, blocking the road south from Roppongi’s main drag. Having arrived, they proceeded to do nothing. Which was fine with the bozozoku, because it let them concentrate on one enemy at a time.

A row of bikes had been positioned to face away from the road, as if the owners planned to ride straight into Pirate Mary’s cinder-block parking area. At five minutes before noon, as baseball-bat-wielding chimpira entered the narrow road that ran along the lower edge of the graveyard, a girl carrying a cat slipped between two bikes and headed away from the coming confrontation. A second later, another girl followed. Although she went unwillingly, still complaining and almost in tears.

“They should…” Micki said.

But the ranks had already closed. Namiko left first because of the cat and because no one really knew why she was there in the first place. Micki went, under extreme protest, because her brother Tetsuo felt girls shouldn’t fight.

Micki had her own opinions on that. Which she was fucked if she was going to keep to herself.

“Go,” said Tetsuo. “This is going to get ugly.”

She went, low-level Yakuza thugs with clubs parting under the eye of the cameras to let her through.

“Wait up,” Micki said.

Namiko kept going.

“Wait,” demanded Micki, then added, “Out of my way…” But she was talking to a photographer who’d decided to get close and much too personal. Small, male, and not her favourite person, the man fired his flash right in Micki’s face.

“Fuck off,” said Micki, using up most of her English.

Gaz Maguire, erstwhile provider of portfolios to would-be models, grinned, stepped sideways to block Micki’s path again, and snapped another shot at the exact moment Micki stuck one finger up and scowled at the camera. “Perfect,” he said. “Thank you.”

Gaz was about to say something else when Namiko shoved him aside, grabbed Micki by the shoulder, and dragged her away from the photographers that had begun to gather around her.

“That’s enough,” said Namiko crossly, passing the cat to Micki. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

“What’s going to happen?”

Namiko snorted. “They’ll fight,” she said, stepping around a vast stone torii near the entrance to the graveyard. Gravel crunched underfoot as they walked towards an old man leaning on a broom.

“Konichiwa,” said the old man.

“Konichiwa,” Micki and Namiko said together. Everyone bowed. After names had been exchanged, Mr. Ito made space for them by moving a pile of prayer sticks he’d leaned against a moss-covered tomb. “Big fight,” he said. “But over soon.”

“How do you know?” asked Micki.

“Bozozoku,” said Mr. Ito, appearing to weigh the word in one hand. “Little monkeys…” He juggled his hands slightly, before finding the first heavier. “As long as the police stay quiet this will be quick.”

Mr. Ito was right. As a first wave of yelling chimpira charged towards the bikes, the bozozoku fired up their engines, blipped the throttles, and hit switches crudely wired to the handle bars.

Micki grinned. “Afterburners,” she said, as flame lanced from each bike and a chimpira dropped his bat and began clutching his ankle.

“Clever,” Mr. Ito said. “Also inventive.”

What was most interesting was that the police continued to do nothing.

True, they’d left their vans. But that was the only movement they made, apart from securing both ends of the street and moving the press back slightly. And yet, in their black-visored riot helmets, body armour, and studded gauntlets they looked easily the most frightening of the three groups gathered at the site of Kit’s old bar.

“When it’s over,” said Mr. Ito. “That’s when they’ll move.”

Micki looked at him.

“I lived through the sixties,” he said, with a smile. “You watch. They’ll arrest the losers…”

Ito-san’s prophesy probably explained why the police eventually climbed back into their riot vehicles, having done little more than watch, keep casual spectators off the street, and stop the photographers from getting themselves hurt. Because when the battle ended, everything was pretty much as it had been.

Paramedics treated five chimpira with burns, but since all the burns were below the knee, the journalists were refusing to take the injuries seriously. A couple of bozozoku had broken heads and one chimpira had been carried away unconscious, his colleagues angrily refusing offers of medical help.

“Interesting,” said Mr. Ito.

“What is?” asked Micki.

“Most things,” he said. “Particularly this.”

CHAPTER 25 — Friday, 22 June

Five miles above Siberia, with the clouds below the plane set out like a slab of ice, the youngest of the Japanese cabin crew brought Neku a copy of TunaBelly to sign.

Approaching diffidently, the girl dropped to a crouch beside Neku’s seat, before producing the battered paperback.

“I wondered, perhaps…?”

Without a word, Neku produced a pen and opened the book at its title page. TunaBelly was a million-selling novel about teenage lust, love, and murder set in the half-lit world of Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. It featured drugs, graphic sex, and a working-class boy who loved a twenty-eight-year-old Yakuza hit woman against his better judgment. The neatly made-up girl holding the book looked exactly like Neku’s idea of the target reader.

Cherry, read the nametag on her jacket. So Neku inscribed the book to Cherry, added her best wishes, and signed the title page with a scrawl.

It was as well the real Mika Aiko was a recluse. This was the third copy of TunaBelly to be thrust at Neku since she presented herself at the check-in counter with a regular ticket and a fake passport. If anyone had known what Aiko really looked like then Neku would have been in trouble. As it was, the fake passport was a good one, its biological data was spot on, and fame, even borrowed fame, was becoming addictive. Not least for its ability to clear problems out of the way.

If the woman at the check-in counter had got her way Neku would now be travelling Business Class, maybe even first.

“No,” Neku had insisted.

“We must, please,” the woman had said. “It would be terrible for us to make Mika Aiko…”

Neku’s first excuse having faltered against the woman’s certainty that anonymity could be guaranteed wherever Miss Aiko sat, Neku admitted that her real reason for wanting to travel Economy was because this was how her next heroine would fly on a similar trip to London.

After that everything was easy. Neku was given a choice of the remaining seats and chose one right at the back—near the toilets—where no one could sit behind her. So far Neku had refused offers of wine, gin, and beer and turned away a meal one of the crew tried to serve her an hour after take off. This seemed to be entirely what the cabin crew expected of a media brat travelling as incognito as five piercings, red hair, and a ripped skirt allowed.

“Miss Aiko?”

Having checked that her celebrity passenger really was awake, the stewardess who’d wanted her book signed wondered if Miss Aiko would like to see the cockpit. Since refusing seemed rude, Neku agreed—and found herself being escorted through a darkened cabin towards the front.

A handful of people watched their screens in Premium Economy and a solitary man in Business was stubbornly working at his laptop, surrounded by darkness. Most of the beds in first were empty, with the only bed actually occupied carrying two people, though they slept chastely, curled around each other and half covered by a blue blanket.

Neku smiled, though mostly her amusement was reserved for Kit Nouveau and his companion. They were on this plane, as she’d been told to expect, on the far side of Business, their seats ratcheted back and their feet on flip-up stools. The woman slept with a whisky glass clutched in one hand. Nouveau-san had a copy of Hagakure Kikigaki open on his lap.

Those two were the reason she’d refused an upgrade. Neku didn’t want to be seen yet, and just agreeing to come forward like this had taken more nerve than she expected.

It had been Kit’s friend who had told Neku where Kit was going and why. She’d found him in a gaijin bar, along with two girls, half a dozen bozozoku, an English photographer called Gaz, a black cat, and a map of Roppongi spread out across a table. It was the third Irish bar she’d tried.

“Ah,” said the huge man. “It’s the goth kid.”

A couple of bozozoku looked up.

“Which kid?” demanded one.

“That one,” he said, nodding towards the door. “She’s friends with Kit…”

A girl snorted.

Making herself approach the table, Neku bowed slightly. “Can I talk to you?”

The man pointed to a stool at the next table and made dragging motions, indicating that Neku should join them.

“Not here,” said Neku.

The man sighed.

His name was No Neck and his first kiss tasted of beer. There wasn’t a second, because Neku had turned her face away by then. “It wasn’t like that,” Neku said, when he asked how long Neku and Kit had been friends.

“Wasn’t it?” No Neck looked doubtful. “You sure? I mean, everyone knew he had a Japanese lover.”

“Yoshi,” said Neku.

No Neck shook his head. “Yoshi wasn’t his mistress. Not sure what she was,” he added, half sobered by Neku’s mention of the dead woman. “It was complicated, that relationship.” No Neck stared at Neku, suddenly seeing her. “Until I saw you,” he said, “I wasn’t sure Kit did normal…”

“I’m seventeen,” said Neku, adding another two years to her age.

“Yeah,” said No Neck. “That’s what I mean.”

“Are you all right?” Cherry was looking anxiously at her celebrity passenger, who’d stalled a handful of steps from the cabin door.

“Just thinking,” said Neku. About what was not a matter for sharing. Life was complicated and death made it more so. Kit Nouveau owed her a life, which meant he was bound to her. Although Neku wasn’t sure Kit understood that. But in saving him, she’d assumed responsibility for his happiness. She wasn’t sure he understood that either.

He also had her memory beads, or what was left of them. At least, Neku hoped he had.

“Through here,” said Cherry, knocking twice on a door.

Neku heard the sound of a lock being flicked on the far side. It made sense to secure the doors, she supposed. Neku might have been anyone.

“Is this Miss Aiko?”

The stewardess nodded.

Somehow, Neku had expected the pilot to be a man. Maybe middle aged, with swept back hair going grey at the temples. Instead the woman wearing the Captain’s uniform looked young and businesslike.

“Konichiwa,” said the Captain.

Neku bowed slightly. “Konichiwa,” she offered in turn. Since it was dark in the main part of the plane but daylight outside, konichiwa was just as good as konbanwa or ohayo gozaimasu. It being neither morning, afternoon, or evening, but something out of time, in between.

“God,” said the Captain. “Will you look at those studs.” Her words were for the co-pilot beside her. “That’s what Annabel wants. You wouldn’t believe the fights we’ve been having.”

“How old is your daughter?” asked Neku.

It was meant as a simple question. Although, from the shock on the Captain’s face, Neku assumed her question had been taken as criticism. And then Neku understood the truth was simpler still…the Captain simply hadn’t expected Neku to be able to cope with colloquial English.

“I spent…” Neku paused. She had no idea if Mika Aiko had spent time in America or England. And while the Captain was unlikely to know, it was possible Cherry might. “I learn languages fast,” Neku said, then smiled.

Like all the best lies it was impossible to refute. Not the least because it happened to be true.

CHAPTER 26 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

Chaos began with six words, Lady Neku could remember that much. It was a simple enough statement…little to suggest her life was about to change irrevocably. Your mother is looking for you.

The voice came from an alcove, where a marble statue glared at the floor of a corridor few even knew existed. The corridor was wider than it was tall, windowless and lit with flickering globes set into a low ceiling.

Lady Neku sneezed—dust had that effect on her.

A simple maintenance duct under a hydroponic farm, before title inflation hit High Strange and the farm became the Stroll Gardens and the duct acquired statues, the metal tube ran the entire length of a bigger spur, from one side of the ring all the way through to the other. Doors sealed the duct where it left the spire, clumsy welds holding them in place, though these looked newer than the seamless joins found on most doors leading off the maintenance tunnels.

She’d been five when she first found the corridor, maybe six, when her hair was still faded silver and her eyes strange enough to make her brothers look away. She gained entrance by kicking the back off a cupboard and stepping into a circular room. The room had three other doors, two of them leading to other cupboards and the third to this corridor.

It was, she felt, an impressive find…although it would have been more impressive if she hadn’t kicked the backs off a dozen other cupboards first. And it wasn’t just cupboards, there was that panelling in her mother’s study and a huge portrait of the first Duke of High Strange. Lady Neku had been certain the painting hid a secret door.

Lady Neku had spent much of her sixth year trying to discover if the lights in her corridor were always on or if they lit as she entered. She also wondered why the dust remained, when spider bots automatically ingested dust everywhere else.

It was months before she realised High Strange put the dust there especially for her. The access tunnel was sealed at both ends. She was the only person, so far as she knew, to know it existed. No way could that much dust settle in the days between her visits.

“Your mother is looking for you,” said a second statue. “As are your brothers.”

The figure was naked, wore winged sandals, and had his hair twisted into a marble top knot. He was the latest addition to the corridor’s collection and looked exactly like Nico.

“My brothers?” That did surprise Lady Neku. Most weeks she could be forgiven for believing her brothers had forgotten she even existed.

“Your brothers,” insisted the statue. “And your mother.”

Lady Neku sighed.

Miss a couple of meals, skip a week’s worth of lessons, cut your throat, and everyone wanted a bit of your hide. Lady Neku ran through the things she might have done wrong. On balance, she’d have to say she’d been pretty good. Maybe it was her most recent trip to the schloss? But…I mean, she thought, they couldn’t possibly know about that.

Of course not.

Scuffing dust, Lady Neku slid her way to the middle of the corridor and finished with a quick twirl that left her dizzy and slightly breathless in front of a double helix of steps. The spiral came out behind a tapestry in the audience chamber above. Up close one could see that the tapestry of a girl with a unicorn was stitched, but from a distance the picture looked like a painting.

It was very old.

Millions of years had been mentioned. Right back to the far side of the Great White, when there was only one inhabited planet and this was it. Of course, millions was relative. Like most things to do with time, it all depended on how fast you were going, who was doing the counting, and where they stood.

On that basis, her great-great-great-great-grandfather had been nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, three hundred and twenty when he died, which was ridiculous, because everyone knew he’d died young.

History only made sense if one discounted the jump. Always assuming one could define jump in a way that actually made sense. It seemed to Lady Neku that the originators had undertaken the temporal equivalent of dumping waste. Small wonder her world now came with its own exclusion zone.

In a galaxy rich with life no one came calling and the last people to be shifted forward were the families themselves; falling into a world where the future had arrived before them.

It was a cheap trick, that was what her mother said.

“Where are my brothers?” Lady Neku demanded.

A simple answer would have been enough. Instead she got a visual of her mother’s study, with its amber-panelled walls, old carpets, and stained glass windows. Lady Katchatka sat in a gilded chair beneath a huge mirror, her greying hair brushed back from a ravaged face. There were wooden stools set out for the boys, but they still sat at her feet. Lady Katchatka was stroking Petro’s hair as she might stroke a cat, absent-mindedly and only half aware.

“Who was the last to see her?”

That was Nico, the youngest. A good three years older than his sister, he looked younger, his face still round with childhood and his dark hair worn so it flopped elegantly into one eye. “Well?” he demanded, brushing imaginary dust from a black velvet sleeve.

Petro and Antonio shrugged as one.

“You know what she’s like,” said Petro. “I’m not even sure this is a good idea.”

The fingers stroking his hair stopped their caress.

“I can see its good points,” he said quickly. “I’m just worried about what will happen if the plan goes wrong.”

“It won’t,” said Lady Katchatka. “All she has to do is shut up and smile. How hard can that be?”

“For Neku…?” said Antonio, only to drop into silence the moment he realised her question was rhetorical.

“What interests me,” Nico said, “is what you’re going to tell her. I mean, this is Neku. When did she last do anything expected of her? As far as she’s concerned, we might as well not exist.”

I wish, thought Lady Neku. “Do they know I’m watching?” she asked, not bothering to vocalise her question. “No…What I mean is…Oh fuck, you know what I mean.”

“They don’t know you’re watching,” said High Strange. “Besides,” it said, “you’re not, I am.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Once upon a time,” said High Strange, “humans believed the earth was flat.” Before Lady Neku could protest that she already knew this, High Strange dipped the lights around Lady Neku, then re-lit them. She was meant to listen, Lady Neku realised.

“They believed the earth was flat because it looked flat.”

“Well, obviously,” began Lady Neku, then stopped. “Sorry,” she said, when she realised she’d interrupted anyway.

“No,” said the voice. “Go on. What shape is the earth?”

“Round,” said Lady Neku.

“How do you know?”

“Because I can see it from most of the windows.” She stopped, wondering why the voice laughed.

“People see only what they expect to see,” it said. “To you, the planet is round, because that’s how it looks. You need to ask yourself how it looks to people who live under its surface.” Lady Neku thought about that. “Flat,” she said finally. She wasn’t convinced by this answer, but it seemed to be the answer expected. “Although they know it’s round…”

“How?”

“Because we tell them.”

“You tell them lots of things. Since the bulk of what you say is lies, why should they know which fragments are true? You say they are here for their own good. You say you exist to protect them. How simple do you think these people are?”

“Very,” said Lady Neku.

High Strange sighed. “You should go,” it said. “You know how your Lady Mother hates to be kept waiting.”

“Okay,” said Lady Neku, then hesitated. “What does believing the earth is flat have to do with my mother?”

“Think about it,” said the voice. “And tidy yourself up before you go in.”

Obviously enough, since Lady Neku was officially unaware that her mother wanted to see her, and since her mother’s study was not somewhere the girl would usually go, she needed to find a reason to visit.

“Fish,” she told her cat.

This was enough to get the animal’s attention.

“Real?”

“Of course,” promised Lady Neku, wondering where she’d get fresh fish this time. Her mistake had been to feed the animal Nico’s goldfish in the first place, no matter how much her cat begged.

“Now?”

“Later,” she said firmly.

All the cat had to do was get comprehensively lost. Since High Strange had a hundred and nineteen levels in the spire alone, twelve spars, ninety knot rooms in the ring to handle karman lines and more maintenance tunnels than anyone had ever bothered to count, that should be relatively easy.

Once the cat had sloped off, adding extra demands and sub-clauses tied to any late delivery of its food, Lady Neku took a shower. The water was warm and undoubtedly tasteless, but she still kept her mouth firmly shut. Lady Neku used water because Nico once told her about a great aunt who was cooked so thoroughly in a malfunctioning cleanser that flesh fell from her bones.

A week later, he stopped her in a corridor and wondered, idly, if she realised the liquid in which she now bathed was distilled from his piss? An hour passed before Lady Neku started to worry about how Nico knew she’d begun taking showers.

Having dried herself, Neku dressed in a simple white frock and combed her hair until it fell around her shoulders. She debated using a silk scarf to hide the scar on her throat and decided against.

The staircase to her mother’s study was empty. Lady Neku stopped, rephrasing that thought. There were no members of her immediate family on the stairs. There were, however, numerous servitors, a guard, and a kitchen girl. All looking slightly breathless, as fugees did when placed in high orbit. The girl had been crying.

“It’s okay,” said Lady Neku. “You can tell me if something’s wrong.”

The girl kept her mouth shut and her eyes on her feet.

“Or not…” Having opened the study door, Lady Neku barged her way into the room and froze just inside.

“I’m…” She caught herself. “Lady Mother.” The curtsey Neku sketched was almost elegant. “Lord Brothers.”

Lady Katchatka’s smile spoke of deep thoughts and dark plans. Her smile and her eyes were two of Lady Katchatka’s strongest assets. Her daughter took care not to smile back.

“You’re late,” said Nico.

“For what?” Lady Neku did a good job of looking puzzled. Since all four of them regarded her as an idiot, this took remarkably little effort. She just pulled a face and her brothers and mother imposed their own meanings onto the expression.

“My message,” Lady Katchatka said.

“What?” Lady Neku bowed her head. She had no wish to get slapped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have missed the call.” Neku saw her mother blink and knew she was checking with the major domo.

“I sent it an hour ago.”

“Ah…” Neku took time to consider this. “I’ve been looking for my cat.” What correlation there could be between the cat being missing and the call went unspecified, but no one asked her to explain. One of the great advantages of being the family idiot was that she had very little to live up to.

“Did you try asking the kami?” said Nico, with a smirk.

“Nico.” Their mother’s voice was sharp.

“Just wondering,” he said.

“Well stop.” Lady Katchatka glared round at the boys, softening her gaze as it reached her daughter, which worried Lady Neku greatly. “We’ll have no such talk…you can go,” she told Nico. “You can all go.” She meant the boys. “Your sister and I have a wedding to discuss.”

CHAPTER 27 — Saturday, 23 June

“Next…”

The immigration officer at Heathrow flicked through the Japanese girl’s passport to check the stamp marks, uncovering New York, Paris, and Milan. After this, he matched her face to the smiling photograph and took fingerprints, checking these confirmed a twelve-point match with the example held on her passport’s digital strip.

The fingerprints tallied. And the passport definitely showed the young girl shuffling her feet in front of him, though her hair looked shorter, having been pinned back before the picture was taken. Neku was pleased with that touch. She already knew the digital strip said all the right things, down to height, weight, original hair colour, and iris pattern. So far no one had checked these, but it was good to know the details were correct if they did.

Besides, what else was she going to do with all that stolen cash, if not give a fistful of it to Tetsuo for top of the range fakes…Invest it, buy herself an apartment in Marunouchi, give the stuff back? She could just imagine trying. Hi, I’m no longer the person who took your money. These days I’m someone else…No, honestly.

“Why are you here?”

“Holiday,” said Neku.

“And you’re staying at…” The officer examined the form Neku had filled out on the plane. “Flat 7, 5 Hogarth Mews, Fitzrovia?”

“North of Soho,” said Neku brightly. “A friend of the family. I’m using his flat.” She’d gotten the address from No Neck, who’d been given it by Kit.

“Do you plan to find work in England?”

It was one of those trick questions. Neku knew it was a trick question because the man left a slight gap between each word and watched her eyes.

“I intend to write.”

While he was still thinking this one through, Neku unzipped her shoulder bag and dumped a paperback of TunaBelly in front of him. When he still looked blank, she took back her passport and opened it, pointing out the match between names.

“It contains a clear and troubling truth,” Neku announced, translating the cover quote.

The man looked blank.

“You know fan boys,” said Neku.

He looked blanker still.

“They love manga, video games, fighting beauty…” He was muddled, Neku could tell by his strange green eyes. “Fan boys,” she said. “People think they want to fuck fighting beauty, anime gun-wielding girls. No, otaku want to be fighting beauty. Bishoujo, cute teenage girls, they want to be fighting beauty too. So everyone liked this book, even old people…”

“You wrote this?”

Neku nodded, watching him check her date of birth and work out her age.

“Right,” he said, “I see.”

Quite what he saw went unsaid, but it probably didn’t matter. He stamped her passport with an inky square and handed it back to her. No one stopped her in customs, which was probably just as well because Neku had lined the bottom of her shoulder bag with $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills, three bundles at a time wrapped in dust covers stolen from hardback books.

Having debated what to do with the rest of her haul, given that she could only leave her bag in a locker for three days at a time, Neku had come up with a solution that was either extremely clever or unbelievably stupid, only time would tell. She took the bag to Mrs. Oniji, along with the bowl dug from the ruins of Pirate Mary’s.

She told the woman how she found the bowl, then suggested by implication that the bag belonged to Kit Nouveau. The bowl was to be a present for Mr. Oniji, a man famous for collecting ceramics…Neku would let her know what to do with the bag.

After Mrs. Oniji got over her initial surprise, which divided into three parts:

1) That Neku knew where she lived

2) That Neku knew about her friendship with the Englishman

3) That Neku thought it might be a good idea to give Mr. Oniji the bowl

She invited Neku inside and offered the girl tea.

A metro ran from Heathrow airport to one of the most famous underground stations in London. She knew this because it was in a magazine stuck into the back of the seat in front of her on the plane. The magazine said using the London metro system was very easy, which turned out to be a lie. By the time the third train was ready to leave, Neku had planned her route, bought a ticket, found a seat, and settled herself in for the journey.

If the train was dirty the stations through which it passed were worse. As for Piccadilly Circus…this was one of the world’s greatest tourist areas, London’s equivalent of Ginza, or so it said in the magazine. Neku wasn’t sure what she expected, but English people came somewhere near the top of her list.

A dozen people jostled Neku as she left the station. One man even moved her aside on the escalator, as if shifting some inanimate object out of his way. The steps up streamed with all races and colours and no one seemed to notice the mix of languages or the wild and wide variety of clothes. Identifying groups was impossible, because everyone seemed to be a group of their own. And yet how could all these people know who they were without a framework to define them?

“You might want to move.”

“I might…?”

“Come on,” said the boy in a black suit. “Let me get you out of here.” He led Neku away from the steps and around a fat metal rail that existed to stop people stepping into the road. It didn’t work, because men kept jumping over it.

“Japanese?” asked the boy.

Neku nodded, which seemed easier than trying to explain why he was both right and wrong.

“Thought so,” he said. “You look Japanese.”

When Neku touched her face, he smiled. “No,” he said. “Your clothes.”

“My…?” Neku glanced at herself in a shop window, catching glimpses of herself in the occasional gap between other people’s reflections. He was right, she did look very foreign. Too mote, much too soft and cutesy for this city.

“I’m Neku,” she said, making a decision.

“Charlie…” He shook her hand, and grinned as Neku gave a bow. “Let me buy you a latte,” he said, then stopped, seeing her smile. “What?” Charlie demanded.

“Just wondering,” Neku said, as she linked her arm through his. “What it is about strange men and coffee.”

“I’ll just be late,” said Charlie, putting a tray down on the table. “God knows, they owe me.”

Neku looked puzzled.

“I work at the Virgin Megastore,” he said. “Weekends only.”

On the café table next to the tray was a Time Out, an Elle, and a GQ…Those had been the magazines Neku recognised. Also on the table was a Mirror, Mail, and Times, plus a free paper and a magazine she’d bought from a homeless man with a dog on her way to the café in Oxford Street.

“This city smells,” she told Charlie.

He looked offended.

“All cities smell,” Neku said hastily.

“Of what?” he asked, sliding a chip into the mobile they’d picked up three doors before Caffé Nero, after Neku suddenly stopped dead in front of Vids4U and nearly caused a pile up of pedestrians.

“It varies,” she said, adding, “I’m serious,” when Charlie glanced up. “London smells of coffee and cars and women’s perfume. Also sweat.”

“And Tokyo?”

“Noodles,” she said, “and sewage.”

Charlie looked mollified. “Your battery needs a charge,” he said. “But you’ve got enough to last until then. Plug the phone in overnight, okay?”

“And I can just buy more credit?”

“Sure,” said Charlie, “that’s not a problem…” He glanced round the busy café and then looked at his watch. “I should move,” he said, sounding reluctant. “Maybe we could get coffee again sometime…”

When Charlie left it was with Neku’s new phone number and a promise they’d meet soon. “All those magazines,” he said, as he hovered on the edge of going. “Are you trying to catch up on our culture?”

“On your world,” said Neku, glad that he smiled.

She started with the Times, because that looked the most serious and she believed in getting the difficult jobs over first, then she read the Mail and the Mirror and all the magazines.

Black was back, Cartagena was the new Bogotá, Rome still believed it might win the Olympic bid, and bikers had rioted in Tokyo. The M25 corpse was currently unidentified and fifteen men had been arrested in Leeds. The police were refusing to say on what charge…

At the end of it all, having read every single sentence of every single paragraph, Neku wasn’t sure she was all that much wiser, but at least the film posters she’d seen on London bus shelters and the pictures on other people’s tee-shirts had finally begun to make sense.

The laptop Neku bought from a second-hand shop in Tottenham Court Road came with Web access, obviously enough. The small Indian woman behind the counter even threw in six months’ free connection when she realised Neku intended to pay cash, albeit in dollars rather than local currency. After that, Neku went clothes shopping, had her hair cut, and dropped her piercings in a bin. Well, the facial ones anyway.

A man in a taxi looked put out when Neku asked to be taken to Hogarth Mews. At first, Neku thought this was because of how she dressed, although there were many girls out shopping dressed far more strangely, and in some cases barely dressed at all. And then Neku decided it was because she was Japanese, but couldn’t see why that would worry him, since he looked African.

It was only when he turned down one street, turned up another, and stopped outside an arch that Neku realised she’d been less than two minutes’ walk from where she needed to be.

“Thank you,” she said, giving the man twenty dollars. When it looked as if he was about to complain, she handed him another twenty.

He drove off without saying goodbye.

CHAPTER 28 — Saturday, 23 June

Hogarth Mews came to a halt at a red door in a white wall, shortly after the little courtyard turned abruptly right. Four other houses made up the mews, three to the left of the entrance, one almost directly on the right. The house with the red door was around the corner and invisible from the street.

This house had six windows. One of them was at ground level and this had iron bars covering a rotting window frame. On the plus side, all the other windows to number 5 Hogarth Mews had flower boxes and the front door had been painted recently enough to still be sticky.

Putting down her shopping bags, Neku examined the buzzers. Not a name or a number between the lot of them. Choosing one at random, she pushed hard and when no one answered, she pushed it again. On her third try someone shouted from inside. At Neku’s fifth attempt, footsteps were heard and a woman with paint in her hair yanked open the door. Whatever she expected to see it obviously wasn’t a smartly dressed young Japanese girl in black jeans, white sneakers, and black Banana Yoshimoto tee-shirt, all from RetroMetro in Covent Garden.

Bowing deeply, Neku smiled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Could you repeat that?”

“The buzzers,” said the woman, then stopped. “It doesn’t matter…”

“What about them?”

“Fucking broken,” said the woman. “Doesn’t matter which one you choose, they all ring.” She flicked ash from her cigarette, dragged a last gasp from its stub, and dropped the filter onto cobbles, crushing it with a bare heel. “Someone’s going to have to mend it, probably me…”

Neku decided not to explain that she had, in fact, been ringing all of them.

“Which flat were you after?”

“The top one,” said Neku. “I’m looking for Kit Nouveau.”

The English woman was blonde, with long curling hair and jeans far tighter than those Neku wore. She had on a man’s shirt, with the tails untucked and enough buttons undone at the neck for Neku to see her breasts, which were very small. Vermillion paint smudged her cheek. Her teeth when she smiled were slightly yellow.

“Are you sure you’ve got the right flat?”

Pulling No Neck’s note from her pocket, Neku checked the address. Flat 7, 5 Hogarth Mews, Fitzrovia, London, WC1…as an afterthought, she handed over the note.

“Right,” said the woman, “I guess this means Mary sold the place.”

“No,” said Neku. “Mary committed suicide.”

Over gin in a courtyard that had been glassed over to make a small studio, Neku told Mary’s story as No Neck had told it to her, complete with the holes and contradictions he’d appeared not to see. But first Sophie Van Allen, artist and bell mender, introduced herself, having finally remembered that she didn’t know Neku’s name.

“Really…Lady Neku?” said Sophie, sounding impressed. “I didn’t know the Japanese went in for that stuff.”

The gin, when Sophie fetched it, came in tooth mugs, and the chips were still in their packet rather than a bowl, but she listened attentively as Neku relayed all the things No Neck had told her, about Mary stepping off the side of a ferry and about how Mary hadn’t seen Kit for fifteen years but had still left him everything she owned.

“That’s love, I guess,” said Neku.

Sophie’s face twisted.

“You don’t agree?”

“Can’t have pleased the cokehead.”

Neku waited politely for Sophie to realise she had absolutely no idea who that might be…“Mary’s boyfriend,” explained Sophie. “Too pretty for his own good. You know how it is. Looks get to be a problem in the end, because you end up relying on them just around the time they begin to fade.”

It sounded to Neku as if the woman might be talking about herself.

“I thought,” said Sophie, “you know, that Mary and Ben had just moved in together. Happens all the time in London. Couples share, but keep their own flats just in case the shit starts flying. Common sense really.”

“Didn’t you notice the police?” Neku said, then wondered if that was too rude. “I mean, when they searched the flat?”

“They might have come by,” she admitted. “You know, collect a sample of Mary’s writing, that kind of stuff. When did you say this happened?” Sophie Van Allen counted back on her fingers to reach an answer. “I was in Italy,” she said, nodding to herself. “Christmas in Florence.”

“Really,” said Neku. “When did you get back?”

“About five weeks ago.”

Taking a sip of almost-neat gin, Neku grimaced. Nothing would surprise her, and the English woman’s natural habitat seemed to be squalor, to judge from the empty cups and the unwashed plates that stacked a dozen deep, with forks still protruding between each plate. Pizza boxes covered the floor like tiles. How anyone could eat that much take-out and remain thin was beyond Neku.

A row of five canvasses stood drying against one wall, all showing a variation of the same picture. The subject was topless, had wild blonde hair and nipples so dark they were almost black. So far as Neku could tell, that woman was currently drinking gin opposite her.

“Self portraits,” said Sophie, catching Neku’s gaze. “For an exhibition in Amsterdam. 33/33 @ Thirty-three…That’s my age,” she added. “Thirty-three oils showing me aged thirty-three, to be exhibited at Gallery 3+30.”

“Where are the others?” asked Neku.

“I haven’t painted them yet.”

Putting her cup down among the others, Neku stood. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should let you get on with your work.”

“Guess so,” said Sophie. “Who did you say you were meeting?”

“Kit Nouveau.”

“And he owns the flat now?”

Neku nodded.

“Okay,” said Sophie, “I don’t mean to be nosy—but you’re a friend of his, right?” It was hard to tell from the way Sophie said friend if the word meant to carry more than its obvious meaning.

“He used to buy me coffee.”

Sophie smiled. “I’ll get you a spare key.”

None of the lights in the flat worked because the electricity was off, as was the gas. Water still ran from the taps in its tiny kitchen and even smaller bathroom. Obviously enough, it ran cold. So Neku took a cold shower and then used the lavatory, which was incredibly primitive but still flushed and refilled on demand.

It was the lavatory that told Neku the police had been there, because they’d removed its lid and left the thing propped against a shower cubicle. Also, the bed was on its side, the under sink cupboard was open and someone had turned out most of Mary’s drawers, without bothering to repack any of the clothes.

That was the flat—a bedroom, a kitchen, and a shower room. Neku had expected something bigger. A frosted-glass door across the landing had bolts above and below its glass, with an old key sticking from a battered lock. Since the note asking people to keep this door shut was signed Mary, and that meant its secrets had to belong to flat 7, Neku yanked back the bolts, twisted the key, and found herself on a small roof garden.

Roof ex-garden, really. Dead lavender spiked from a terra-cotta pot. An old ceramic sink had been filled with peat and planted with…“Mint,” Neku decided, dropping crumbled leaves to the floor.

It was pretty, the garden; walled and elegant and not really overlooked, unless you included an office block three streets away and the Post Office Tower. What was more, it had a tiny wooden shed built against the far wall. She could sleep there, Neku decided. In the meantime she might as well clear up.

CHAPTER 29 — Saturday, 23 June

“Look,” said Patrick Robbe-Duras. “Have you any idea how badly you hurt Mary?” Liver spots covered the backs of his hands, which were so thin that his fingers looked like twigs wrapped in wet paper. Never the less, Pat shook off Kit’s attempt to take the tray with an abrupt shake of his head.

“Well?”

There were those who said Pat was the brains behind the move to unite half a dozen areas of London into one rigidly controlled fiefdom. They were usually people who’d never actually met his ex-partner.

“Yes,” said Kit. “I have. It was unforgivable.”

He waited while Pat put a tray on the table, and waited some more for Pat to remove two cups and place them on slate coasters. Kit was having trouble reconciling this cardigan-wearing old man with the dapper, tweed-coated figure he remembered from his childhood.

“I’m glad you know that,” said Pat. “If you’d denied it, I was planning to get very cross.” They sat at a pine table in a long kitchen, with low ceilings and leaded windows that stared out across sloping lawns towards the stump of an old cherry tree and a silver twist of river beyond.

For all that he’d been born in Dublin and shared most of his adult life with Kate O’Mally, the man quietly sipping tea had obviously become a Londoner at heart, with a Londoner’s dreams of retiring to a little cottage in the country.

“You don’t approve?”

“A little too pretty for me.”

“You and Mary both,” said Pat. “She hated this place. Too chi-chi, too neat, too everything really.”

“Still, you like it. That’s what matters.”

“Actually,” said the man, “it leaves me cold. That was what made Mary so cross.”

“So why buy it?”

Pat sighed. “You visited Seven Chimneys,” he said. “Damn it, that was probably where…No,” he said, “let’s not even go there. You visited the house. So you must know why I bought this.”

“Because it couldn’t be more different?”

“Story of my life,” said Pat. “You should have seen my first wife.”

“Quiet, discreet, understated?”

Pat Robbe-Duras nodded. “It was a disaster. She took my surname, so Katie wouldn’t…my family hated that. Not that Katie could have children, as it turned out.”

Kit looked at him.

“Mary was adopted,” said Pat. “Surely she told you?”

“No,” Kit said. “Never. You don’t regret not…”

“I adored Mary,” said Pat. “And Katie is the love of my life.” He looked at Kit, and shook his head, almost gently. “We separated only because I insisted,” said Pat. “I’m dying. I’d have thought that was obvious to anyone. Come on, let me show you the garden.”

The lawns were cut by a boy who came in on Wednesdays. A woman came in from the village to clean the house on Mondays and Fridays. Dr. Porteus tried to drop by on Tuesdays and, if possible, on Thursdays as well. Mary used to come down some weekends. The police drove by a couple of times a week to check that everything was okay and the farmer who owned the fields next door kept half a dozen Charolais cattle in Pat’s paddock, and was around every other day.

“So you can see,” Pat said, as he stopped by the stump of the cherry. “You’re lucky to find me alone.” He nodded at a battered oak bench, indicating that Kit should sit. “There are a couple of questions I’d like to ask you.”

“You can ask,” said Kit.

“The first,” said Pat, “is why you hung up on me in Tokyo.”

“I was busy being sick,” said Kit, which was close enough to the truth to do. He’d have hung up anyway, probably.

“But you’d already been told that Mary was dead.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “But not when it happened.”

Pale blue eyes hooked into his. Watery and old, framed by lower lids that drooped and brows so low they must limit what Pat Robbe-Duras could actually see. It wasn’t a cold or even angry gaze, more curious, as if the man had moved beyond extremes, despite his earlier threats of anger.

“The date matters?”

“Mary wrote,” said Kit. “She sent me a postcard.”

“When?” Such a simple word.

Kit took a deep breath. “The week before she killed herself.”

“Are you going to tell me what it said?”

“No,” said Kit, shaking his head. “But I promise you one thing. It didn’t mention suicide or give a reason for doing what she did.”

“Assuming she did.”

“I thought you were the one who…?”

Pat leaned back on his bench and stared at a twist of silver river. A willow draped its branches into the water and a flotilla of baby coots were chirping their way around rushes on the far bank. It looked idyllic, if you liked that sort of thing. When Pat finally spoke his voice was flat, stripped of all emotion.

“Mary’s dead,” he said. “I’m just not sure it was suicide…That’s what I wanted to see you about. Let me be honest…I never expected Katie to find you. But telling her to keep looking beat having her disturb the police with mad theories about what was really going on in Mary’s life.”

“Which was…?”

“What you’ll find out for me,” said Pat, reaching for Kit’s wrist.

Kit unpeeled the old man’s fingers. “People can do things without reason,” he said.

Standing up, Pat said, “You’re wrong. Everything has its own logic. If Mary killed herself I want to know why. Which brings us to my final question. Why would someone like Katie, who believes you ruined her daughter’s life, ask Kit Newton for help?”

“Because,” said Kit, “she’s desperate.”

“Thank God,” the old man said. “At least you understand that much.”

They ate cold chicken in a small dining room with oak boards and a granite overmantel carved in a flat, almost stark style. A huge gilded mirror had been fixed to the wall with its base resting on two wooden blocks that, in turn, rested on the mantel below.

“Too heavy to hang properly,” said Pat. “But the room needs the light.”

A couple of early Victorian oil landscapes adorned one wall, above a silver jug which was tarnished with lack of cleaning. The table had wooden pegs in place of screws and a Persian rug covering the floor had a hole in one corner. Kit found it impossible to know if he was looking at discreet poverty or a priceless collection of antiques he was too ignorant to recognise.

“You know,” said Pat, “I’m grateful you came. I wasn’t even sure Katie would pass on my message.”

“It was a close run thing,” admitted Kit. “She almost forgot.”

Pat snorted. “Katie has a memory like an elephant,” he said, reaching for his white wine. “She never forgets and rarely forgives. If you only understand one thing about Katie O’Mally, understand that. She believes Mary is alive, I don’t…I do, however, want to know why my daughter killed herself.”

“Suppose I find out,” said Kit. “Are you really sure you want the answer?”

“Let’s face that when we get to it.”

By the time a taxi arrived to take Kit to the railway station he knew everything Pat knew about his daughter’s recent life; which was either surprisingly little or Patrick Robbe-Duras was being less than honest.

Kit knew she’d had a handful of lovers, none of them serious. Apparently, Katie had hated the lot.

“And you?” asked Kit. “How did you feel?”

Pat’s smile was sour. “I’m a pragmatist,” he said. “After you, anything was an improvement.”

Kit tried to remember how Major Yamota had framed his questions. The way the Japanese detective had approached each fact from a dozen different angles, like a swordsman looking for the perfect strike. It was hard to know if such skill was an art or science. Whichever, Kit lacked the experience to interview deftly and he stumbled instead through what might have been wrong with Mary’s life.

By the end of the afternoon Kit knew that Mary’s gallery was breaking even, which was more than could be said for most galleries in central London. She seemed happy on the occasions Pat saw her, which was less often than he would have liked.

Her flat had been a belated eighteenth birthday present, Mary having returned home shortly after her actual birthday. She’d been in Amsterdam and Dublin, then gone to Madrid, travelling. At least that was how Mary explained her two year absence.

Mary owned the flat in Hogarth Mews outright, without mortgage. She had an allowance from Kate. Most of what Pat owned was already held in trust for her. She worked the hours she worked because she wanted to…

Nothing Kit discovered came close to suggesting a reason for suicide. Which either meant Pat was keeping silent about something or knew less about Mary than he wanted to believe. Maybe that was true of every family.

As the cab from a local firm pulled into Pat’s little drive, crunching gravel in front of his ivy-covered front door, Kit turned back to ask the only question that mattered.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

Pat’s answer was unexpected. It was also grubby and friable from having been read too many times and had muddy fingerprints across the flap. Kit’s name was scrawled across the front of an envelope in ink that had faded with age.

“Take it,” said Pat. “Better late than never.”

Kit, hi…

Reading in the back of the cab made Kit feel sick. So he slipped Mary’s letter into its tatty envelope and saved it for the twenty-five minutes he had to wait for a train on a windy platform in the middle of nowhere.

The letter had been given to him without apology.

“You found this after she died?”

“No,” said Pat. “I’ve always had it. Mary posted it through your letter box.”

“So how did you get it?”

“Your father. He recognised Mary’s writing and kept it. For safety, he said.”

The words inside were simple. Grief, anger, and guilt had stripped away any pretence of literary style. Her other notes to him, few as they were, had been clever or witty, carefully worded and designed to impress. All of that was missing. Mary wanted to know what he’d said to Josh the morning before Josh died. She wanted explanations.

“When did he give it to you?”

“After he heard Mary was missing. We’d reported it to the police.”

Yeah, Kit knew all about that. Somehow he’d ended up at the top of their suspect list. It said so in the newspapers.

“Katie was convinced you’d killed her.” It seemed Kit had been saved by a single line on a card posted in Dublin. Even Kate O’Mally had accepted Mary was unlikely to be writing from beyond the grave.

“Did my father say why he kept it?”

“He thought you were a bad influence on Mary.”

“And you,” asked Kit, feeling emptiness in his stomach. “What did you think?”

Pat smiled sadly. “Me,” he said, “I always thought it was the other way round.”

CHAPTER 30 — Saturday, 23 June

Three hours and two changes of train took Kit to London. And by the time he reached the head of a taxi queue at Waterloo station, he’d added another twenty minutes to this. The sky above the Houses of Parliament was already turning pink as a black cab carried him over the flat greyness of Waterloo bridge. The flood lights on the Savoy Hotel were lit and the river level was low.

It was colder than Tokyo, less humid. But it was still hotter than Kit remembered. What little energy he had after the flight and his meeting with Mary’s father had been leached away by reading her letter. He was nine hours behind where his body believed it was and fifteen years removed from the boy to whom that letter had been addressed.

Reading it still hurt.

At first the city was as he remembered; grand buildings gone slightly to seed, a jumble of Victorian hotels and theatres cheek by jowl with office blocks, too much traffic and too little road planning. It was only when he looked back at the National Theatre with its neon lifts rising to the roof gardens that Kit began to accept that London had changed. The police checkpoint near Holborn confirmed his view.

Kit took a taxi because he was too tired to find the flat on his own. In his pocket he had a Japanese video phone, as useless in London as its English equivalent was in Tokyo. Also in his pocket was a passport, a leather wallet containing £500 in small notes, and the keys Kate O’Mally had given him to Mary’s old flat.

Whatever Mary had said in her note about the flat being his, Hogarth Mews was only on loan until Mary wanted the place back, Kate was very clear about that. It had seemed best to nod.

“Okay,” said the taxi driver. “I’d better drop you here…No room to turn,” he added, while Kit fumbled with the door. This was true. Even if the driver moved the bins waiting at the entrance for next day’s rubbish collection, turning inside the mews was still impossible. A silver Porsche took up too much of the available space under the arch. Vivaldi played from a half-open window on the left and someone had watered their flower boxes, so that water dripped like rain onto the car. Money, said the Porsche. Arsehole, said its parking.

“She’s upstairs.”

Turning, Kit found himself facing a blonde woman with tied-back hair, in a white shirt splattered with paint, a Gauloise hung from her mouth. Just in case Kit had missed the fact she was artistic, she was holding a fat brush and a multi-hued palette.

Maybe he was being unfair.

“I gave her Mary’s spare key.” The woman hovered on the edge of saying something else. “I’m Sophie,” she added, though this was obviously a prelude to what she really wanted to say.

Shaking hands, Kit found his own fingers sticky with paint. “Who’s upstairs…?” He began to ask, but Sophie had already moved on.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You know…about Mary. Must have been a real shock. I was away and…” Sophie stopped. “I’m just sorry, all right? Really sorry.” She sounded almost cross to find herself explaining things.

“Who’s upstairs?” Kit asked.

“The kid…Apparently the electricity to Mary’s flat is off, so I’ve lent the kid my lighter and a couple of Diptyque candles.”

Which kid?

The obvious question answered itself in a crash of feet on winding stairs and a head suddenly appearing round the corner. Neku had been waiting and listening. She looked defiant rather than nervous.

“Fuck,” said Kit. “What are you doing here?” Then he took another look at the Japanese girl and blinked. “And what the hell happened to your hair?”

Sophie snorted. “I’ll leave you to it,” she said.

After Neku’s third attempt to explain why she was in London, Kit decided it could wait. He decided this because every attempt to explain reduced Neku to tears which seemed to be of anger. She felt the answer should be obvious. “Who else knows you’re here?” he demanded, settling his back against the railings of the flat’s little roof garden.

“No Neck,” said Neku.

Kit was shocked.

“And Mrs. Oniji…I gave her Yoshi’s bowl,” Neku added, seeing Kit’s look. “Someone has to look after it. You were in hospital and I was frightened it might, you know…” She looked sick at the mere thought. “That would be a disaster.”

“What would?” Kit wanted to know.

“If the bowl broke.”

He took a deep breath. “Why should it break?”

“It has a crack,” said Neku, “down one side. Hairline, almost impossible to spot without X-rays.”

Kit stared at her.

“It begins below the rim,” said Neku. “And runs from there to the base. I’ve been wondering if the crack is intentional. An artist’s acknowledgement of the flaws inherent in all perfection…” Looking at Kit, she said, “You don’t have the faintest idea why this matters, do you?”

“No,” said Kit, going to fetch another jug of water.

Refilling her glass, Neku returned to her cushion. They were watching the sun settle behind slate roofs, as seagulls circled the London sky above and the western edge of the city finally turned from dark pink to purple. Searchlights already swept the sky, clustered above the obvious places—Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, and the financial centres of the city.

“Are you going to tell me?” Kit asked.

Neku considered the star-specked sky and shivered in the first stirrings of a night wind. This planet was weird, its cities chaotic and its social structures fragmented to the point of being incomprehensible. Every breath she took was probably poisoning her.

“No,” she said finally. “I don’t think I am. You wouldn’t understand anyway.” She shrugged, shuffled on her cushion, and got up, only to sit down again a few seconds later.

“What’s wrong?”

“This body,” she said. “I just can’t get used to it.”

“You will,” said Kit. “That’s just an age thing.”

“Yeah,” said Neku. It was the first time he’d seen her grin.

CHAPTER 31 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

“Marriage?” So shocked was Lady Neku that she forgot to keep the horror out of her voice, but for once her mother seemed not to notice. The girl could remember that much.

“Happens to us all,” said Lady Katchatka.

“Whom will I marry?”

“Luc d’Alambert. You’ll like him.”

Lady Neku froze.

“I’ve got some pictures,” said her mother, touching the wall. “Here…”

I’ll like him?

A boy of Lady Neku’s age stared out at her. Ash blond hair, pale eyes, and skin so thin it was almost marble. Someone must have said something funny out of sight because Luc d’Alambert suddenly grinned. Although a glitch froze his top lip and shut one eye.

“What’s wrong with the picture?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Lady Katchatka, waving away the connection. “Luc has a tiny problem with one side of his face. Nerve damage. We’ll have it fixed when he arrives.”

“Why doesn’t he have it fixed himself?”

Lady Neku’s mother shrugged. “The d’Alamberts can be odd,” she said. “His father has firm views on augmentation. As I said, we can have it fixed when Luc arrives.”

Inbreds, throwbacks…Odd wasn’t a word her mother usually applied to the d’Alamberts. Although Neku had heard her use plenty of others. And little about this proposed marriage made sense.

“I thought we hated the d’Alamberts?”

“Neku…” The reprimand was swallowed. Instead, the elderly woman stood up and walked to a mirror, flicking her fingers so the glass revealed the dusty landscape laid out below. An ocean filled the window’s upper corner. It looked sullen and lifeless, matted with purple weed. The waters had been teeming with life once, or so the kami insisted. Unfortunately, nowadays the shade cast by High Strange covered less than a quarter of the Katchatka segment, and it was out there, in the naked sunlight, that Schloss Omga could just be seen clinging to the side of a mountain.

“It used to be beautiful,” said Lady Katchatka.

“The desert?”

“Grasslands back then. Grasslands and forest and savannah. The desert came later.”

“Can you remember when the world was different?”

Lady Katchatka glanced at her daughter to see if Neku was serious. “How old do you think I am?” she asked.

“How old would you need to be?”

Her mother smiled sourly. “Older than this.”

Lady Neku nodded. “Mother…” She was taking a risk using the word without an honorific to formalise it, but from the slight nod she got in reply, it had been a risk worth taking. “Where will I live?”

“With your husband.”

“Luc d’Alambert?”

It was Lady Katchatka’s turn to nod.

“And the wedding?”

“Will be here,” said Lady Katchatka with a smile. “We will invite the d’Alamberts and the major retainers. I have already ordered our major domo to open up the unused circles of High Strange. It will be magnificent.”

Lady Neku considered this. The idea still troubled her. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I really thought the d’Alamberts were our…”

“You don’t have to understand.”

She watched her mother rein in her anger and take a very deep breath, the kind most people followed by counting to ten.

“Something must change,” her mother said. “If it doesn’t then the families are going to tear each other apart. No one knows how much longer we can support life, at least at its present level. Five thousand years, ten thousand, maybe more…but first we need peace.” Lady Katchatka shrugged. “I’m sorry it comes at a price.”

That was when Lady Neku realised the price was her.

Personally Lady Neku doubted if the moon really had been split into six and divided between families like an orange. All reliable records suggested the moon had a mass of 7.35 x 1022 kg, roughly an eightieth of the original mass of the earth. The total mass of High Strange and the other five knots in Nawa-no-ukiyo, plus all the karman lines and the sails came to less than half this. So if the habitats had really been grown from segments of moon, then where had the rest of it gone?

Lady Neku raised this with Nico, but he wasn’t interested. As for her other two brothers they barely understood the question.

“Moon,” said Lady Neku, leaning against the wall of the duelling room. “You know, used to go round us like a baby planet back when the days were shorter?”

“Who’s us?” Petro asked.

“The earth,” said Lady Neku, nodding towards a window.

“We’re not earth,” said Petro. “We’re family.”

“Anyway,” said Antonio. “Who said days were shorter?” He glanced at Petro, who grinned. “Oh, I get it,” Antonio said. “The kami told you.”

Both brothers burst into laughter.

Lady Neku left them to their laughter and the fight. Since High Strange could protect itself and fugees were forbidden to use weapons, training with blades was utterly pointless. Apparently, the sheer pointlessness was the point. At least it was according to Nico, who could beat both his brothers without even breaking a sweat. Not caring was what he told Lady Neku, when his sister first asked how he managed it. She’d been working hard to copy him ever since.

The d’Alamberts arrived in eleven ships. They arrived on the morning of the third day after her mother told Lady Neku about her marriage and the whole of High Strange gathered to meet them.

“Empty,” said Petro, looking at the ships. “No one has this many servitors.”

“No,” Nico said. “I’ve checked. The major domo says the vessels are full.”

Petro laughed.

“Multiple life signs,” insisted Nico. “On all of the ships.”

“Animals then. To make them look occupied.”

“Maybe not,” said Antonio. “It could be ground dwellers.”

“Same thing.”

“But they’d die,” said Neku. Everyone knew ground dwellers grew sick if moved out of their sphere. “The d’Alamberts wouldn’t do that.”

“Who the fuck knows what they’d do?” said Petro, then shut his mouth at a very pointed stare from his mother.

“Look straight ahead,” Lady Katchatka told her daughter. “And for heaven’s sake start smiling.” Lady Neku did as she was ordered.

The first ship was the biggest. It was red and yellow, although the yellow had faded. The ship behind looked newer, being bright red with no contrasting colour, and the ships beyond that were shades of violet, pink, and blue. Despite herself, Lady Neku was impressed. She’d never seen a ship that wasn’t black.

“Family colours,” said Nico, wrapping his arm about his sister.

She edged away.

“Provincials,” said Petro. “What can one expect?”

Lady Katchatka shook her head. “You’re wrong,” she said. “They just like to appear that way. Always remember, looking weak can sometimes be a strength.”

An army poured from the first ship. A hundred men streamed down the ramp. They wore gold and red, carried hand weapons, and gazed intently at the family and servitors gathered to meet them. It was only when Lady Neku looked closely that she realised the group included old men and those who were little more than children.

“And this is meant to impress us?” asked Nico.

The hundred men gathered into two lines and turned to face the door of the second ship. “Lord d’Alambert,” muttered Nico before the door had even begun to open.

“No,” said his mother. “Luc…”

“How did you know?” asked Lady Neku, when a thin figure hesitated in the doorway, only to flinch at a command from someone out of sight. Raising his chin, Luc d’Alambert put one foot on the ramp and forced himself to take another step. His subsequent steps came more easily.

“If we let the boy live then the old man will follow.”

Lady Neku looked at her mother in case she was joking. From the look on Lady Katchatka’s face, her daughter guessed not. “Is that how you’d do it?”

“Probably,” said her mother. “But then I have three sons. Lord d’Alambert has only one.”

The boy in the red jacket walked slowly towards the foot of the ramp, only too aware that all eyes in the hangar were on him. He hesitated slightly at the bottom, before stepping onto the deck.

“What does he think?” said Antonio. “That we’ve electrified that exact patch of ground?”

Nico looked interested. “Is that possible?”

Antonio ruffled his brother’s hair. “Anything’s possible,” he said, “given sufficient will.”

Glancing up, Luc d’Alambert caught the entire Katchatka family watching him and looked away. He was shaking, Lady Neku realised. For a second she considered walking out to meet him. Her mother might be furious. On the other hand, her mother might be impressed. The problem with Lady Katchatka was that it was never possible to work out which it would be in advance, and besides there were her brothers’ opinions to consider.

Lady Neku decided to stay where she was.

“God,” said Petro, watching the boy walk slowly towards them. “I’m surprised they didn’t drown the little shit at birth.”

Luc d’Alambert was short of stature. Scrawny, with a narrow face and deep set eyes. And his skin…it was pale enough to be almost transparent. A paper cut-out of a real person.

“Lady Katchatka, my Lords, Lady Neku…”

Neku liked that she and her mother got name checks while her brothers were lumped in together, although she could tell from the stiffening of Nico’s shoulders that he’d already taken offence.

“My Lord Luc…” Somehow, while Lady Neku had been watching Nico, Petro, and Antonio and wondering which was going to sneer first, her mother had moved forward to meet the boy.

Shit, thought Lady Neku.

“Go on,” hissed Nico.

She shook her head. Waiting until she was summoned now seemed the safest option. What did he see? Lady Neku wondered. What did the boy see when he looked at her mother? A small woman in a black dress who walked with a stick, or a monster rumoured to have strangled her husband the moment she tired of him? Harsh times produced harsh people and few came harsher than Isabeau Katchatka, who joined the family as the fourteen-year-old bride of a man thirty years her senior and still ruled endless decades later.

There was another rumour. One that said Nico, Petro, and Antonio shared no DNA with the father who died before they were born. If this was true, then the heirs to High Strange had no link to the original family other than name. It also threw an interesting light on an even darker rumour. That Lady Katchatka shared her bed with all three of her sons.

If they came from her body alone, then Lady Katchatka was, if rumour be believed, effectively sleeping with herself. Personally Lady Neku doubted it. According to Nico, the only times he’d shared a bed with his mother, the woman had done nothing but fall asleep and snore.

CHAPTER 32 — Sunday, 24 June

A house phone started ringing half way through breakfast. Until then neither Kit nor Neku had realised the flat in Hogarth Mews possessed one. It was Neku who found the thing in an alcove behind a Warhol print near the front door.

A joke, Kit decided, given the endless repetition of silk-screened ears on the print itself.

The phone was ivory white, and so old it teetered on the edge of being fashionably retro. Although what Kit noticed was a row of keys hanging from hooks on the wall above. It looked like the police hadn’t needed to break the locks on Mary’s cupboard after all.

“Kit Nouveau,” he said, picking up the receiver.

The laugh at the other end was mocking. “How much longer are you going to keep calling yourself that?” demanded Kate, sounding herself now she was back on home ground.

“Until I can be bothered to change it back.”

“Which will be when?”

“Probably never,” said Kit. “Maybe sooner. What do you want…?” He hadn’t intended to be so blunt, but with Kate it was probably the best way to be.

“You saw Pat?”

“Yes, of course. I told you I would.”

“And how was he?”

“Dying,” said Kit.

When Kate spoke again, even Neku, who hovered at Kit’s shoulder, could tell the woman was fighting to hold her temper. “He gave you Mary’s original letter?”

“Yes,” admitted Kit. “He did.”

“I knew he would,” she said. “Pat always wanted to send that letter on. Unfortunately, by the time he argued me into it you’d vanished. Anyway, I was more worried about tracking down my daughter.”

“Who came back,” said Kit.

“Eventually…So what have you found out so far?”

“Kate!”

“Just asking.”

Kit considered what he knew. Wondered what the underlying tidiness of the flat said about Mary’s state of mind in the hours before she’d locked the door for the last time, leaving a bag of rubbish forgotten inside. The chaos was superficial, upturned drawers and emptied cases. The carpets had been clean and the floor tiles in the shower room wiped down. Even the wastepaper bin in the bedroom had been emptied.

“She cancelled her milk, gas, and electricity,” said Kit. “But not her telephone. The washing up was done, her washing basket was empty, ditto the fridge, and her cooker’s been cleaned.”

Mary had also put unwanted vegetables into a Sainsbury’s bag to throw away, then left them by the door. A single flaw to suggest she had bigger things on her mind. Neku had dumped the bag before Kit arrived, only to watch in bemusement as he hauled it back and upended it into the shower cubicle, sorting through a slush of long-rotted lemons, peppers, and carrots.

“I thought it would be messier,” said Kit, “what with a police search and everything.”

“They didn’t do one,” Kate said. “Apparently, once Pat confirmed Mary’s writing there was no need.” Her voice made clear exactly what Kate thought about that. “The police were too busy to come out.”

“Really?” Kit was pretty sure the flat had been searched by someone. “Doing what?” he said.

“Whatever they do these days instead of solving crimes. Rounding up people in Bradford probably.”

It took all Kit’s will not to snort. Kate O’Mally, ex-crime boss and icon of old London—well, in certain circles—complaining about police inefficiency and their lack of commitment. He wanted to give the woman more…some hope, for whichever one of them really believed Mary was still alive, except nothing in the flat suggested she was. All the neatness, the card to Tokyo, cancelling the milk—it looked to Kit like a woman tying up the loose ends of her life.

“Tell me again,” said Kit. “Why do you…” He paused, rewording his question. “What makes Pat think she’s alive?”

“Her Visa card,” Kate said. “Someone used it in Gwent the day after she…” Kate’s voice trailed into silence.

“Took the ferry,” said Kit, finishing the sentence for her. “What did the police say?”

“Did Mary know her pin numbers by heart? Or might she have written them down…because her wallet and purse were both missing when her suitcase was found.”

“And what was the answer?”

Kit heard a deep sigh. “Mary couldn’t do numbers to save her life.”

“Which means…”

“I’m aware of what it means,” said Kate, breaking the connection.

Kit had woken that morning to the clatter of dishes and the smell of burning toast. An acrid catch at the back of his throat had him out of bed before he remembered where he was. Stumbling from Mary’s bedroom, still glitching with jetlag, he found himself suddenly face to face with Neku, who seemed to be wearing nothing but a long black jersey. She was scraping carbon into an empty supermarket bag that she’d suspended from a door handle.

“Built a fire,” she said.

“You’ve—”

“On the roof…it’s okay,” she added. “I’ve put it out again.”

“And the bread?”

“Bought it when I couldn’t find noodles. There’s a shop round the corner that sells underwear, bread, batteries, and milk. Also these.” She nodded to an MP3 player and that was when Kit realised he could hear music.

“You didn’t go out like that?”

Neku saw him gaze at her bare legs. “As if,” she said, putting the scraped toast onto a plate and placing the plate on the tiny breakfast bar in front of him. “I’ll buy butter tomorrow,” she promised. Huge eyes watched him from across the table. Eyes that were dark and speckled in colours he couldn’t remember having seen before.

“What?” Neku asked.

Kit shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “You still have to tell me why you followed me.” The shrug she gave was neither sullen nor pointed, simply matter of fact.

“What choice did I have?” she said.

Maybe he was missing something. Actually, thought Kit, it was a fair bet he was missing a lot more than one thing. Where Neku was concerned, he got the feeling everyone missed more than they caught. Her change of image for one thing. She’d gone from the ripped lace of a cos-play to black jersey and minimal make-up in a single week.

“You’re going to have to tell me sometime,” he said.

“So are you,” said Neku.

“Tell you what?”

“What all this is really about.” And then, luckily for both of them, Kate O’Mally telephoned. About three minutes later Neku’s new video phone started buzzing. She took one look at the number, began blushing, and retired to the roof garden outside.

Charlie Olifard read maths at Imperial, wrote his own code until he was thirteen, when he got bored and began trying to work out if the Fibonacci sequence contained an infinite number of primes. In his spare time he mixed music, releasing his work into common ownership so it could be mixed further. He was quite keen on joining Government Communications Headquarters, but felt most spooks were probably boring by nature. So he was worried what joining GCHQ might say about him.

Neku, by contrast, studied English at a language school behind Oxford Street. At least she did in the version of her life she gave Charlie. But then, according to her new friend, life was a mathematical construct, with solutions that made sense only if one first understood the question. So what did lying matter?

“Your English is really good,” Charlie said. “You must have been studying for years.”

“About six months,” said Neku, blushing when the boy turned to her.

“God,” Charlie said. “And people claim I’m intelligent…now, what was it you wanted to do?” He ran one hand through shaggy blond hair. It was a nervous tic, the hair thing. Neku hoped he’d get over it.

In response to Charlie’s original proposal that he show her the London Eye, Neku had suggested meeting outside the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street. Look rich, artistic, and messy, she’d told him.

Neku had to admit he did it rather well.

A battered suede jacket, black jeans, tight tee-shirt, and a watch that looked old and incredibly expensive. It was the gold Rolex that made Neku wonder if he was all of those things anyway.

“You’ll find out,” she said.

Canterville Gallery in Conde Street looked like any other boutique. Positioned between a lingerie shop selling hand-made silk bras and a place offering Moroccan ceramics, it had a green canvas canopy shading its front, bay trees on either side of a glass door, and a huge burglar alarm half way up the wall, which flashed at lazy intervals as Charlie and Neku approached.

Open, announced the sign.

A plastic mannequin in the window helped add to the idea that Canterville Gallery was a simple shop like any other. Although the fact that the mannequin was naked apart from a triangle of pubic hair made from copper nails rather undermined the effect.

“Well,” said Charlie, as Neku reached for the door. “I take it we’re here.”

“Good afternoon.”

A woman in a black dress looked up at Neku’s greeting. Having stared for slightly longer than was polite, she remembered to smile. “Can I help?”

“I hope so,” said Neku. “I’m a friend of the new owner.” As intended, her words knocked the smile from the other woman’s lips.

Charlie shut the door behind him and nodded at the mannequin. “Is that a Tessa Markham?” he asked.

The woman nodded.

“Thought so,” said Charlie. Of course it was, the mannequin’s base had a label at ground level. He’d simply read the thing before entering the shop.

“I’m Charlie Olifard,” he said. “And this is…”

“Lady Neku,” said Neku, wondering why Charlie blinked.

“I’m Sylvia,” said the woman. “I run this place. Can I ask what your particular interest is?”

Neku nodded. “Of course,” she said. “I’m thinking of buying it.”

“The Tessa Markham?”

“No,” said Neku. “The gallery.”

Take a look at the gallery. Be discreet, Kit had said, when finally pestered into giving Neku something to do that didn’t involve her making plans to fly home. Something that was impossible, because to do that she needed a home in the first place. And take a look at Major Yamota’s police forms for me. Neku chose the gallery first because it sounded more fun. Besides, Neku had company…translating the police forms into English would be a waste of Charlie’s time.

As for the boast about buying the place, maybe she would; but that wasn’t what this was about. Her brothers always said take control from the start. How better to make this woman nervous?

Half a dozen oils hung from one wall. A glass dildo sat in a glass cabinet next to a Benin fetish mask. The dildo featured a spiral of cobalt blue along the shaft, like vapour trails within glass. The African mask had gold studs hammered flat around the edges and looked as old as the glass looked new.

“Murano,” said Sylvia.

“Of course,” said Neku, wondering if Sylvia meant the mask or the paperweight. Stepping back, Neku looked around more openly. It was hard to imagine how anyone could make money from the objects on display. At least, that was what Neku thought until she asked Sylvia the price of the mask. Buying it would take a substantial slice of the money Neku had left with Mrs. Oniji. One wouldn’t have to sell too many objects like it to pay the bills.

“Can you tell me what happened to Mary?”

“She killed herself.” Sylvia hesitated on the edge of saying something else. “I don’t know why…” Whatever she’d been planning to say, Neku guessed it wasn’t that.

“Boyfriend trouble?”

Sylvia shook her head.

“Money?”

The other woman sighed. “Look,” she said. “Do you two want a coffee? We close at 3 pm on Sunday anyway and there’s a place on Goodge Street…”

CHAPTER 33 — Sunday, 24 June

Neku let Charlie take her hand on the way back from the café. He did this almost casually, his fingers having brushed hers a few seconds earlier; by accident, she’d thought at the time.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Neku, “I’m fine.” There were obviously a dozen things Charlie wanted to ask her about their visit to the Canterville Gallery, but he kept his peace and said nothing. Neku was impressed. Discretion was a valuable commodity in any man.

“So,” Charlie said. “Are we going home now?”

Home…her fingers pulled free as Neku tripped on his word and Charlie stepped out of her reach.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” said Neku. She could almost feel his sideways glance, which slid away when she turned to him. So she took Charlie’s hand again, smiled, and bent her head, listening as he began to talk about some incredibly good band due to play in a basement in Camden. As Charlie’s words trailed to a halt Neku realised he’d been inviting her out.

“Sounds good,” she said.

He smiled the rest of the way back to Mary’s flat. “Wow,” said Charlie, as they turned under the arch and he saw the flower boxes, black front doors, and tiny white-painted houses that made up Hogarth Mews. “Cool place.”

“Not bad,” Neku admitted. Pulling the key from her back pocket, Neku opened the front door to find Sophie doing something complicated to a racing bicycle in the hall.

“This is Charlie,” said Neku.

“Hi,” said Sophie, offering her hand; which meant the first thing Neku had to do on reaching the flat was find kitchen paper so Charlie could clean bike chain grease from his fingers.

“She’s an artist,” said Neku.

Charlie nodded sourly, as if he’d suspected as much.

There was cola and milk in the fridge, fresh bread in a wooden box next to the sink, and a bowl full of pears and bananas on the tiny work surface. Rice and spaghetti had been stacked by the box. Kit had even found instant noodles that came with sachets of miso soup. The only flaw was the fridge being warm, because the electricity still needed to be turned back on, and gas resolutely refusing to hiss from the range.

“You’ve been cut off?”

“No,” said Neku. “We’re waiting for it to be turned back on.”

Neku should have been able to read his expression. She’d have been able to read him if he was one of her brothers. All the same, it was only when Charlie mouthed we that his scowl made sense.

“I share with a friend,” she said. “It’s his flat.”

“Right,” said Charlie. “I see.”

No, you don’t… instead of saying this Neku took a Coke from the fridge and a couple of wineglasses from the cupboard and led Charlie out onto the roof, where her mattress aired in the sun, her pillow rested against the side of the little wooden hut, and her sheet swung gently from a washing line in the breeze. Having dumped her shoulder bag in the hut, Neku returned with a notebook, her ink block, and a brush.

So young, she thought, watching Charlie’s eyes flick from mattress to hut to pillow. “You thought Kit and I…”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did,” Neku said.

Charlie wasn’t good at sulking. In fact he lasted less time than it took a wineglass full of diet cola to lose its bubbles, which was barely any time at all. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe I did.”

Neku smiled.

“Can I ask you something?”

She nodded, wondering which of the dozen questions it would be.

“Are you really planning to buy that gallery?”

“No,” Neku said, dripping flat Coke onto a saucer and grinding her ink block into the liquid until it was thick enough to use. She drew a circle, because she always began everything with a circle, then began to note down everything she could remember from her conversation with Sylvia No-last-name. “I was lying…”

Charlie looked sweetly shocked.

“Unsettle people,” said Neku. “It’s one of the first rules of control. Unsettle them and they’ll answer your questions or do what you want because they’re too busy being unsettled to close down or object…My brothers taught me that.”

“You have brothers?” Charlie asked. Which was the point Neku burst into tears. And that was how Kit found them. Neku on her knees, an abandoned brush on the tiles in front of her, and a boy, all curly blond hair and bat-wing cheek bones, frozen with embarrassment as he tried and failed to comfort her.

“Meet Charlie,” said Neku through bitter sobs.

Charlie tried to shake hands.

“What did you do?”

Charlie let his hand drop. “I asked Neku about her brothers.”

“Brothers?” Kit said.

CHAPTER 34 — Monday, 25 June

Kit was the one to see Charlie out, offering his hand at the last minute, if only to tell the boy that he didn’t hold what had happened against him.

“See you some time,” said Kit.

Charlie nodded doubtfully.

When Kit got upstairs the shower was running and there Neku stayed, washing away whatever it was she needed to wash away with an hour’s worth of cold water. She came out of the room shivering and wrapped in a towel, trailing wet footprints onto the roof garden, where she spent the rest of the afternoon, plugged into her MP3 player, with a pile of Japanese police files, a notebook, and a cup of coffee Kit had got from a local café cooling on the tiles in front of her.

The first two times Kit went to see her, she looked up politely and waited, going back to her papers when she realised he was just fussing.

“You knew this woman…Mrs. Kate?” she asked, when he came out a third time, still fussing, with a bowl of takeout noodles and a fork, because he’d been unable to find wooden chopsticks. She took the noodles without comment, placing them next to the coffee.

“Kate’s mentioned in there?”

Neku nodded. “Who gave you these files?”

“Major Yamota,” said Kit. “They’re to do with the fire at Pirate Mary’s. I wasn’t allowed the ones to do with Yoshi.”

“I wondered about that,” Neku said, crossing something off her list. “Most of these are statements from the fire officer, the first policeman on the scene, the paramedic who gave you a sedative. There’s a forensic report from the Police Scientific Bureau, but there are other papers not to do with the fire.”

“They must have got in by mistake,” said Kit.

Neku’s mouth twisted. “Japanese police,” she said, “don’t make that kind of mistake. Not unless they intend to.”

“What are the papers?”

She hesitated. “A report on a murder. A list of collectors known to buy stolen ceramics. A credit check on Pirate Mary’s. One of the reports links you to a career criminal known to be making trips to Tokyo. Kathryn Robbe-Duras, nee O’Mally.”

“She never took Pat’s name,” said Kit. “And she’s retired.”

“This is the woman No Neck mentioned? The one who called you this morning?”

“Yes,” said Kit.

“She’s an old friend?”

Kit shook his head. “An enemy,” he said. “An old enemy.”

Neku nodded. It seemed she could understand that.

The buzzer sounded at midnight. Since the row of buttons beside the front door was illuminated and Sophie had already warned Kit that drunks used the courtyard to piss or worse, he ignored it. At which point the noise got louder as whoever it was began to kick the door instead.

Scrambling for his jeans, Kit reached the landing in time to hear Sophie open the door herself. “Prove it,” he heard her say, and a second later the front door shut and Sophie began stamping her way upstairs. She was swearing.

“It’s the police,” she said. “Well, one of them. A big fucker. Apparently he wants to talk to you.”

“Where is he?”

“Outside. I told him to get a warrant if he wants to come in. Unless, of course, he thinks we’re terrorists, in which case I suggested he organise back-up and a few guns…”

“And what did he say?” Kit could imagine what a Japanese policeman would have said. Actually, Kit couldn’t, because he doubted anyone in Japan would leave a police officer on the doorstep, far less be that rude to them.

“Some bollocks about Section 44. So I told him I used to be a lawyer.”

“Were you?”

Sophie shrugged. “A paralegal…It’s close enough. Do you want a witness? Because I can stay around if you need.”

“It’ll be fine,” promised Kit.

There were a dozen reasons why this was unlikely to be true. Desertion from the British Army had no statute of limitations. So the original arrest warrant was technically valid. And you didn’t go AWOL only to return to the place that issued the arrest warrant unless you were stupid, or had people like Mr. Oniji suggesting you go back to your own country for a while.

And that was before Kit even factored in Kate O’Mally, his own guilt at Yoshi’s death, or his memories of Mary.

“You certain?” Sophie asked.

“Sure,” said Kit, nodding his thanks.

“Whatever,” she said. “Call me if you need me…”

“Mr. Noover?”

“Nouveau,” said Kit, looking out into the half darkness. An officer in uniform was back-lit by lights from beyond the arch. Flicking on the hall lights, Kit saw the huge man blink.

“Come in,” said Kit.

“You don’t want to see my search warrant, sir?”

“Have you got one?”

A sour smile.

“Whatever,” said Kit. “Come in anyway.”

Without waiting to see if the officer would follow, Kit made his way towards the stairs and heard the front door click behind him. As the two of them passed the door to Sophie’s flat, her door opened slightly and then shut again.

“She didn’t like me.”

“It’s late,” said Kit. “You worried her.”

“Really, sir? Well, people who don’t like the police worry me.”

By the time they reached the top landing the officer was stopping for the occasional rest and gasping for breath. Kit found that oddly reassuring. “In here,” he said, undoing the door. “Let me get some candles…I’m waiting for the electric to come back on.”

Only a candle was already burning and Neku stood in the kitchen doorway.

“I heard noises,” she said.

A flame lit her fingers, until Kit looked again and the match went out, leaving Neku outlined in flame and a thin sodium haze that filtered between the slats of a wooden blind. It didn’t help that Neku was dressed in her black jersey and very little else.

“Go back to bed,” said Kit.

The girl gave him a look, but disappeared as ordered.

“How old is she?” asked the officer.

Kit shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never asked.”

Silence followed this answer. And when Kit finished finding a saucer for the candle, it was to find the huge man staring at him.

“What?” said Kit.

“You send her to your bed and you don’t know how old she is? People like you need to be more careful.” All pretence of politeness was gone, along with the sirs the officer had been dropping into his sentences like redundant punctuation.

“She’s not going to my bed,” said Kit.

He watched the officer leave the kitchen and count off the exits leading from the tiny hall; front door, half-open bedroom door, and one other, from behind which came the flush of a lavatory. As the officer watched, that door opened and Neku stalked out, stared straight through both of them, and left the flat. A second later, an unseen door crashed shut, rather louder than was necessary.

“Roof garden,” said Kit. “She’s got a mattress.”

The huge officer ran his fingers through thinning hair and wiped his hands on his trousers. The sheer smallness of Mary’s flat seemed to be giving him problems. “Mattress?” he said, before deciding not to take it further.

Digging into his pocket, the man produced a leather wallet and flipped it open. A badge inside introduced him as Sergeant Samson. That was all Kit had time to see before the Sergeant flipped it shut and stuffed the wallet back into his jacket.

“I’ve got some questions,” he said. “I’d be grateful if you’d answer them honestly…”

“If I can,” Kit said.

“You were a friend of Mary O’Mally?” The Sergeant obviously had no doubts that Kate’s daughter was dead.

Kit nodded, embarrassed to feel almost sick with relief. It seemed the questions were about Mary, rather than him.

“When did you last see her?”

“About three days after the funeral of a friend…”

“And how long ago was this?”