End of the World Blues

CHAPTER 35 — Flashback

The love affair of Kit’s life began to unravel two weeks after Kit and Mary first made love and three weeks before Josh crashed his bike. It began unravelling in Mary’s bedroom at Seven Chimneys with an argument about cars.

“Gently,” she said. Mary wasn’t happy to be squatting naked on top of Kit and kept glancing at her stomach. The first two fucks of that day had been great, but this was one too many and it was Kit’s fault for being greedy.

“Here,” he said, folding a sheet around her shoulders. “Better?”

Mary nodded.

It was complicated, because Mary was going out with Josh. Well, technically…except Josh was in Paris for a fortnight with his parents. So he and Mary would need to talk when Josh got back.

“You love me?”

They’d been through this. The first time two weeks earlier, beside the potato field, as the sun edged its way between two hills and stained the spire of St. Peter’s with the first rays of dawn. Kit had been impressed that Mary waited until after he took off her clothes. “Of course I do,” said Kit, which had been his answer then.

“Say it,” Mary demanded.

So Kit did.

“Mean it,” she said.

“I’ll love you forever,” said Kit, and inside that second it was true.

When he was done, Mary wiped between her legs and folded the soiled tissue inside a clean one, then stuffed three foil wrappers into the crumpled cardboard of a condom packet and folded a tissue around this. She left Kit to collect up the used rubbers and add these to her fist-sized ball of rubbish.

“Take it with you,” said Mary.

Kit looked at her.

“We have a cesspit,” she explained. “Dad makes enough fuss about the pipes getting clogged with toilet paper. He’d freak if he discovered we’d blocked them with these.”

“Okay,” said Kit. It felt odd to be in Mary’s bedroom, but not as odd as actually being at her house. Patrick Robbe-Duras and Kate O’Mally keep themselves to themselves. Jumped up, said half the village; the other half wondered which of the two had most to hide.

A high wall ringed the garden and electric gates guarded the entrance with its white pillars and two stone eagles. A turning circle in front of the huge yellow-bricked house was scuffed with tire marks from half a dozen cars and Kit’s own motorbike. Legoland, Josh’s father called it, but obviously not to Mary’s face.

A black BMW 5 Series, a red XK Jaguar, a metallic blue Mini Cooper S convertible, and a new Land Rover were among the vehicles parked outside. They were all still there, visible from Mary’s bedroom window.

“How many cars have you got?”

“One,” said Mary, pulling a sheet over her breasts. “The Mini. The others belong to Mum or Dad…Why?”

“Just wondered.”

“Mum started out dirt poor,” Mary said. “You need to remember that.”

He’d made her cross, Kit realised. Mary’s relationship with her mother was as complicated as his own with his father was simple. Kit hated the man, Kit’s father hated him, both of them knew exactly where they stood. “It doesn’t matter,” said Kit. “I was only wondering.”

“Yeah, right…”

At the gate Kit had to lean over to punch numbers into a keypad that hid itself beneath a stucco-coloured plastic cover. He entered Mary’s birthday from memory, and had just kicked his Kawasaki into gear when Kate O’Mally pulled up on the far side of the gate in a dark Mercedes. Armani sunglasses examined Kit, flicked to his bike, and returned to his face.

The woman was busy lowering her window when Kit blipped his throttle, let slip the clutch, and roared out onto Morton Road, only just missing her wing mirror as he went past.

Josh died in an accident on the B342. The evening was warm, the light was still good, and the road was dry. His Suzuki went out of control on a bend in the road and crashed into a two-hundred-year-old oak tree near the edge of Woodham Common. He died instantly, at least that was what the police told his parents.

A piece in the Advertiser talked about the danger young men on bikes posed to themselves. A kinder piece, under a smiling photograph, highlighted Josh’s achievements, the grades he got at A level, and the fact he’d been offered a place by Trinity, his father’s college at Oxford.

A picture showed a Josh who was younger by three or four years, in the days before he grew his hair, discovered amphetamines, and took to wearing shades. Josh was dressed in a blue blazer, with a white shirt open at the neck. Maybe that was how his family remembered him.

The funeral was delayed by an autopsy, to the outrage of Josh’s father. All the autopsy proved was that Josh had not been drinking. At first it seemed the funeral would be private, then someone must have talked to Colonel Treece, because it was agreed the service would be immediate family, but Josh’s friends could attend the burial and come back to the house afterwards. Mary O’Mally was the only exception. She got to go to the whole thing.

Mary looked terrible, that was the first thing everyone noticed. As she followed Josh’s coffin and its bearers up the lane towards the new graveyard, she looked like someone else. She’d lost weight and dark circles had sunk her eyes into her skull. She was crying, not discreetly, but openly and with sobs that shook her entire body.

Josh’s mother, a tiny Korean woman in a dark coat and gloves despite the heat, had one arm around Mary, trying to console her. Kate O’Mally trailed a couple of paces behind her sobbing daughter, looking out of place in a blue skirt and jacket. When she caught Kit watching her daughter, Kate’s eyes filled with something very dark indeed.

Mrs. Treece, however, simply nodded to Kit, and handed Mary to her mother, as if entrusting the woman with something infinitely fragile, while the pall bearers fiddled with canvas straps and the priest shuffled through an open prayer book, finding his place.

“You’re Christopher Newton,” she said.

Kit nodded.

“I remember. You were in Josh’s band with Mary…” Which was one way of putting it. “So you know Mary well?”

Another nod.

“She’s going to need her friends,” said Mrs. Treece. “It’s strange,” she added. “All the things that matter until something like this happens. Josh wanted to stay here with Mary, you know. His father insisted he go with us to Paris. Now all David can remember is the argument.”

David had to be the Colonel.

“Such a waste,” Mrs. Treece said, before returning to the graveside. As Kit watched, the Colonel tried to wrap an arm around his wife’s shoulder. She shook him off without even noticing what she’d done.

It had taken Josh a week after his return from Paris to track Kit down and thirty seconds and a handful of words to make him go away, there being nothing like the truth for fucking best friends over.

Mary turned up the day after the funeral. Hammering on the door of the cottage in Wintersprint until Kit’s father let her in. When Kit got down to the kitchen he found Mary stood with her back to the sink, clutching a barely touched cup of Brooke Bond and kicking her heel against the cupboard.

Kit’s father walked out as Kit came in.

“We need to talk…”

“Sure,” said Kit, nodding towards the stairs.

“No,” said Mary. “Not here.”

“Where then?” he asked.

“The church,” she said. “But I want to put flowers on Josh’s grave first.” There was no vase for the wild flowers Mary had picked along the way, so she just put them at the top of the mound, below the mock-marble headstone. Then she turned and looked round the silent graveyard, nodding slowly to herself.

“What?” asked Kit.

“Just remembering.”

He followed her down to the church in silence.

“It looks so empty,” she said, her voice echoing from bare walls and a hammer beam ceiling. Someone had tidied away yesterday’s kneelers and removed the wreaths and fresh flowers, although the table at the back where the book of condolences rested was still there.

Mary’s offering had been simple.

A single word.

Sorry.

“You want some time to yourself?”

Mary shook her head, almost crossly. “I told you,” she said. “We need to talk. Somewhere private.”

The door to the tower was open and a spiral of stone steps led to the belfry, with a simple wooden ladder leading to a flat roof above. Kit went first, both up the spiral of steps and the ladder. Either the medieval tower was higher than he’d imagined or the hills were lower, because Middle Morton looked smaller than expected.

Slumping down, he put his back to a stone parapet and watched Mary try to work out where to sit. Okay, he thought, if she sits next to me, that means…if she stays standing… She sat exactly opposite, and Kit tried to tell himself that meant nothing at all.

“You want to talk about Josh?”

“No,” said Mary. “I want to talk about us.” She shifted restlessly and for a moment Kit thought she was about to stand up again, but all she did was twist her head and run one hand across her face. “We may have a problem.”

“Josh’s death?”

Mary sighed. “Just listen,” she said. “I’m late…”

Late for what? Kit almost asked. And then he realised.

“Shit…”

“Yeah,” she said. “Shit and fuck and anything else you want to say. But it’s still true.”

“But we used condoms,” said Kit, sounding like someone else. “You can’t be pregnant.”

“Not that first time,” said Mary. “When my parents were away. You remember?” She said this as if daring him to contradict her.

“But I…” He could recall the stickiness on his fingers and her stomach, where he’d withdrawn before it was too late. “I pulled out, remember?”

“Listen,” said Mary, “I’m late. End of story.”

“How late?”

“Late enough…”

“Oh fuck,” said Kit. “Are you sure it’s me?”

Mary stared at him. She raised her head, opened her eyes against the sunlight reflecting from the lead roof on which they both sat, and glared at Kit, harder than he’d have thought it possible for anyone to glare.

“I’m just asking,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s you.”

“You and Josh…?”

“Me and Josh nothing,” said Mary, crossly. “Forget Josh. We need to talk about what we’re going to do.”

“Who have you told?”

“Christ,” said Mary. “I’ve told no one. Who do you think I’ve told?”

Kit took a deep breath. “I’ve got £450 in my savings.” He thought about it. “That should be enough.”

“For what?”

“You know,” said Kit.

“No,” Mary said. “I don’t know. Tell me. Enough for what?”

“To sort things out.”

Mary repeated his words back to herself. She knew exactly what he meant, Kit was sure of that. All the same, she kept repeating his words, until they sounded like an echo of an echo, soiling the air around them.

“I’ve got to go,” Mary said, climbing to her feet.

“No, wait…” Kit caught her arm, harder than he intended. All the same, the speed with which she turned to wrench herself free shocked both of them.

“Stay here,” she said, from the top of the ladder. “Give me five minutes. I mean, we wouldn’t want to start rumours.”

Her text message arrived next morning. She thanked him for coming to put flowers on Josh’s grave, apologised if she’d been bad company, and told him not to worry about the other thing. It had been a false alarm. He should have known from its politeness that she lied.

“Look,” said Kit. He wanted to say he was sorry, wanted to say half a dozen things but the words stuck in his throat, so he shuffled his heels on the path and bowed his head to the dead flowers at his feet.

A yew tree had been planted near the gate, a sop to tradition for those still angry that the original site next to St. Peter’s was no longer used for burials. In fifty years the tree would look as if it belonged. For now it looked what it was, a stripling planted ten years earlier to counter complaints from everyone in the village who thought such things mattered.

None of the graves on the hillside dated much before the mid-1980s. Even then, Josh’s parents had to fight to get a plot near the gate and have a plaque commemorating his brief life added to the wall of the Treece family chapel inside the church.

It was late, the wind warm and smelling of summer. Kit had the graveyard to himself, an arbitrary patch of hillside consecrated above St. Peter’s. Wreaths from three days earlier hid recently turned earth and a temporary headstone, rag-rolled with grey paint on cheap wood had been painted over with Joshua’s full name and brief dates. A tiny bunch of wild flowers rotted just below the headstone.

Having tried and failed to apologise, Kit headed home. He took the foot path that skirted the edge of Wicker Copse and came out on Blackboy Lane, turning back to see the whole of the village laid out below him. A breeze blew warm and gentle along Morton valley, barely troubling the leaves, the river curved gently in a twisted ribbon of greenish blue. It was an evening destined for memory, almost too still and too perfect in itself.

Kit knew why he’d stopped. He wanted to cry for Josh, for Mary, for himself, and the whole shitty mess they’d made of their friendship; but his eyes remained dry and the simple apology he wanted to make choked his throat. So Kit took off his jacket, and set out for Wintersprint and the cluster of knocked-through cottages he occasionally still called home.

“Kit Newton?”

Nouveau, he almost said.

And then Kit took a look at the man asking and those standing behind him. They’d been waiting at a blind corner screened by brambles on one side and a roofless barn on the other. A spread of elder could be seen through the barn door. Someone had hacked it back to the roots but it stubbornly insisted on resprouting.

The man at the front had gelled hair, a grin, and a photograph, which he compared one final time to the boy standing in the middle of the road in front of him.

“Yeah,” said someone behind. “That’s the little fuck.”

There were five of them, perhaps three or four years older than Kit. Hired muscle mostly, track-suit bottoms, branded tee-shirts, and gold chains. They’d have hated Kit anyway, even if they weren’t being paid for the pleasure.

Pulling a spring-loaded cosh from his pocket, gelled hair flicked it to its full length and tapped the end against his own palm. “One arm and one leg,” he said. “And I’m to tell you, that’s getting off lightly. Feel free to argue, because we can make this as hard or easy as you like.”

“Who sent you?” asked Kit.

The man grinned, and grinned even more when Kit bent to retrieve a broken stick from the roadside. “Oh well,” he said. “It’s your choice.”

The others stood back, raised their eyebrows at each other or stared around as if the rolling fields behind the barn were some alien landscape. One of them even pulled a phone from his pocket, fingers stabbing at its keys as he kept half his attention on Kit and the rest on some text he was answering.

No one was taking this seriously, Kit realised. Hurting him was just a tick on a list, like filling a car with fuel or remembering to buy beer on the way home. A job they’d been given…

Somehow that made things worse. “Who?” Kit demanded.

“Why would I tell you?” Gelled hair tapped the weighted cosh against his hand, anxious to get things moving. “We’re just doing a favour.”

“A favour?”

“How do you think these things work?”

“I don’t know,” Kit said.

“Well, guess what?” said the man. “You’re about to find out.”

The first swing of the cosh smashed Kit’s stick, splintering the wood an inch or two above his fingers. Reversing direction, the man began to sweep the cosh towards Kit’s elbow, harnessing all the energy in its coiled handle.

Two histories hung on the flick of that wrist. In the first, Kit’s ulna smashed under the weight of the blow, a single sliver of bone skewering muscle in what was almost a clean break. This was the most likely outcome, until Kit stepped into the blow and used his arm to block the handle, twisting his body sideways as the weighted end of the cosh snapped round.

Flesh tore, staining the cotton of Kit’s shirt, but it was surface damage only, little more than split skin and blood. If the blow had landed, his elbow would be broken, the fight over, and his leg next in line. Instead Kit now had control of the fight, moving so far into the moment that his Sergeant would be proud of him, if the man hadn’t already been dead.

Flicking upwards, Kit’s own hand was moving before he’d even had time to decide he wanted to fight, the splintered stub of stick he held rising towards the attacker’s jaw, ready to punch through to his brain. But in the last second gelled hair threw back his head, and Kit’s stick scored its way across his cheek and splintered against bone overhanging the man’s left eye.

Instinct made gelled hair clasp a hand to his face. So it was instinct that drove a splinter of wood the final few millimetres into the man’s eye, blinding him. By then the cosh was already in Kit’s hands and he’d cracked the knee of the man closest, stepping over him to reach the person behind. Kit smashed his phone, fingers, and wrist first, in a single blow, before moving on to a leg.

One arm and one leg, Kit took the price from each of them, swiftly and brutally, sparing only their leader, who was on his knees in the road, his hands covering his face.

“Who sent you?” Kit demanded.

When gelled hair refused to answer, Kit knelt in front of him and gripped the man’s little finger, prising his hand away from his face. There was little blood and no sticky liquid running down his cheeks like egg yolk. Just a sliver of wood about the length of a needle protruding from the corner of one eye.

“Tell me,” said Kit, reaching for the splinter.

On his way back to the cottages Kit passed their car. A black Jeep with smoked windows and chrome bars on the front. The glass in the windows was good quality, though it cracked eventually under blows from the cosh, having crackled into tiny diamonds first.

A top-of-the-range, hands-free phone system came with the Jeep, at least it looked ready-built into the dash, so Kit called an ambulance. Leaving the Jeep, he used a bridle path to reach the old main road to London. There was nothing he wanted from his father’s cottage at Wintersprint, and he didn’t recognise the Kit Nouveau who’d broken all those bones or smashed up the Jeep, though Kit guessed his father had always been there inside him, waiting.

Sometimes, decided Kit, the only safe choice was to walk away from yourself. So he did.

CHAPTER 36 — Monday, 25 June

“So what did he want?” asked Neku.

“Who?” said Kit, looking up from his bowl. Somehow Neku had found fresh udon noodles in Soho, and breakfast had been waiting when he finally staggered out of the shower.

“That policeman.”

“Not sure,” said Kit.

“But it was about Mary O’Mally’s suicide?” Neku’s Japanese accent made the first and last parts of Mary’s name sound identical.

“I thought it was,” admitted Kit. “At least to start with. Now I’m not certain.” Aggression and interest had faded from the moment Sergeant Samson realised Kit hadn’t seen Mary in years. It blipped again at Kit’s mention of a letter and disappeared altogether when Kit admitted this had been six months before and the contents entirely personal.

“She didn’t mention boyfriends?” said Sergeant Samson.

A shake of the head was all it took to make the uniformed officer reach for his cap, push back his chrome stool, and remember, at the last minute, to thank Kit for the barely touched can of Coke.

“A friend of the family?” asked Sergeant Samson, on his way out. He was nodding towards the roof garden door, which stood slightly open.

“Something like that.”

“How long’s she been in the country?”

“Less than a week,” said Kit. “She’ll be going home soon.”

“Just as well. Still, she’s pretty. I’ll give you that…” The big man paused on the stairs. “I mean, for a Chink, obviously…”

Now watching Neku ladle the last of the warm noodles into his bowl, Kit wondered how much of that particular conversation she’d overheard and which part of it was making her alternate between frowns and an anxious smile.

“Mary left a suicide note,” said Neku. “So why don’t her parents believe it?”

“How do you know about the note?”

“You told me,” she said. “The night I arrived.” Picking up her bowl, Neku carried it over to the sink and ran it under the cold tap, washing away a solitary strand of udon and the last of the miso. When she looked at Kit again something in her eyes was troubled. “We’re not getting very far, are we?”

We? “I’m not getting anywhere,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” said Kit, “I’m not sure there’s anywhere to get.”

He told Kate O’Mally the same thing when she called half an hour later. It was probably the wrong thing to say, but Kit wanted to be honest. He was also trying to work out if either of Mary’s parents really believed she was alive; he had started to wonder if they both knew she was dead, just didn’t know how to admit it to each other.

“Sergeant Samson,” said Kit, into the static that followed his original admission. “He came by last night.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Wanted to talk about Mary’s recent boyfriends.”

“Why would you know about that?”

“Good question,” said Kit, “I thought you might have an answer.”

A click was his reply.

Personally Lady Neku doubted if the moon really had been split into six and divided between families like an orange…

“I’m going out,” said Kit, opening the door to Neku’s wooden hut. The sun was hidden and the clouds thick enough to be cut in slabs. A chill wind ruffled the few plants that had survived Mary’s absence, but neither the wind, nor the sky, nor the darkness in the little hut seemed to worry Neku. She was inking a diagram and annotations into a notebook, her lips moving in time to the brush.

“My diary,” she said, blowing carefully onto the paper. “Where are you going?”

“Canterville Gallery.”

“Already been,” said Neku. “I went with Charlie.”

“You what?” demanded Kit.

“Yesterday afternoon. You asked me. Charlie and I had coffee with the manager, remember?”

Kit shook his head.

Neku sighed. “Are you sure?”

By the time Kit left, they’d established three things. Kit seriously needed to get more sleep, Neku would remain at the flat while he visited the gallery, and if she wanted to help while he was away, she could keep translating the police files or start making a list of Mary’s possessions. Actually, they established four things, because they also established that Charlie could come round.

“How do you know he’s free?”

“It’s the twenty-fifth,” said Neku. “His term ended on Friday…he texted me,” she added, when Kit looked blank.

“Where’s Charlie now?” asked Kit.

Neku rolled her eyes. “Outside,” she said, as if that was obvious.

“I’ve got a question,” said Neku, putting a can of Coke in front of Charlie and placing a bowl of seaweed crackers beside the can. When he put his hands together, in quick thanks for the food, Neku smiled.

“A question?”

“Well, more of a logic puzzle really.”

“Oh, right.” Neku could practically see Charlie relax. “What is it…?”

They sat on Mary’s bed, surrounded by clothes pulled from one of the built-in cupboards. At least a third of these were male. A blue suit with a thick chalk stripe, a blazer with five gold buttons on each sleeve, something that might be a rugby shirt if not made from raw silk. Now that Neku came to think of it, she’d thought the suit Kit had been wearing looked a little flashy for his taste.

“Suppose the police found a gun,” said Neku.

“This has to do with that woman’s suicide?”

“No,” said Neku. “This has to do with something else. Suppose they found a gun and it had been loaded with…” She looked at him. “You might want to write this down,” she said, offering him a note pad. “Five blanks, two live rounds, and one blank…”

Charlie looked up from his pad. “Which order?” he asked. “Five blanks first, or one blank first?”

“Five,” said Neku. “Definitely five.”

“Okay,” he said. “What’s your question?”

“Why?” said Neku.

After watching Neku for a couple of minutes, while she sorted through the clothes and carefully rehung them by colour, beginning at one end of the visible spectrum and ending at the other, Charlie took his can of Coke, bowl of crackers, and logic question out to the roof garden, leaving Neku to draw up her list of Mary’s possessions in peace. By then, of course, Neku had moved on to Mary’s bedside bureau.

Top drawer.

Seven pairs of panties, size 10, all Marks & Spencer, three nylon slips, five bras (34D, but Europeans were large), an old diary, written in something that wasn’t English, Japanese, or any other script Neku recognised, a key ring vibrator, and a pink plastic egg.

Easy reach, thought Neku, looking from the open drawer to the bed.

Middle drawer.

A dozen black tee-shirts from Topshop. Armani jeans, black, size 10, and well worn. A black jersey, frayed at the cuffs. And, beneath this a torn copy of Sandra Horley’s The Charm Syndrome. Someone had taped it back together.

Bottom drawer.

A collection of art magazines. A catalogue from Christie’s New York, dated 2007. Three copies of Time Out, all the same issue and containing a glowing review for a Tessa Markham exhibition at the Canterville Gallery. Removing the bottom drawer only revealed smooth wood beneath, so Neku tipped the whole unit forward to see if the base was hollow. It was, but it was also empty.

Although a Victorian metal fireplace had been removed and the damage plastered over, the gap between the built-in wardrobe’s middle door and underlying chimney breast was only deep enough to take shallow shelves.

On the shelves were three black, two pink, and one green tee-shirt that looked as if it had never been worn, more panties, a bundle of socks, and rolled jeans. Nothing else, and certainly nothing interesting. The jeans were size 8. So either Mary used these and kept the Armani jeans in her bedside dresser because she couldn’t bear to throw them away, or it was the other way round.

A collection of black jackets hung from wooden hangers in the next wardrobe along. All of the jackets where short and most were nipped at the waist. Some had pockets with flaps, others didn’t. One of them had a tiny pocket in the lining, low down on the left-hand side. It was here Neku found the key.

It was the thirty-eighth pocket she’d searched since Charlie took his logic problem outside and the fifth key she’d found. Although the others had been found in drawers or hanging from nails on the wall. Neku tried to open the obvious items first. A battered suitcase under the bed, which was already unlocked…a metal box file, contents missing…both pointless, since the key was evidently meant for a different kind of lock.

So Neku took the key downstairs and knocked at Sophie’s door. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about Sophie and suspected the woman felt the same about her, but Neku needed to talk to someone who understood English things.

“What things?” Sophie asked.

Neku held up the key.

Taking it, Sophie stepped back and waved Neku into her studio, which was in chaos. “Sorry about the mess,” she said.

“I’ve seen worse,” said Neku, then wondered if she should have been more impressed.

“Right,” said Sophie, “grab a stool while I make coffee.” And with that the woman disappeared inside, leaving her guest alone in the glassed-over yard that, quite obviously, made up Sophie’s life. Would it be rude to say she’d already had enough coffee to last one lifetime? Would it be rude to open a louvre window? Neku wondered. Or would this ruin the portraits now drying in a row along one wall…

“How do you stand the smell?”

Sophie looked surprised.

“I’m sorry,” said Neku. “I didn’t mean to be rude, it’s just…”

Once an overhead window had been opened and Sophie had checked twice that Neku really did like her coffee black and unsweetened, Sophie turned her attention to the little brass key.

“School trunk,” said Sophie finally. “Maybe a tuck box.”

After she’d explained that one was for the uniform and the other for personal possessions, and both were required by children going to boarding school, Sophie remembered to ask where Neku found the key.

“Upstairs.”

And after a few questions, mostly about how she liked London, Neku realised she was meant to go now. So she thanked Sophie for the coffee, trying not to mind the woman’s obvious relief when she showed Neku to the door. By the time Neku had climbed the stairs and was letting herself into the flat, she’d reached a conclusion. The first completely firm conclusion she’d reached since leaving home…pretty much everybody on this planet was weird.

CHAPTER 37 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

“Lady Neku…”

So many people, almost all of them strangers. Yellow cloaks, red tunics, faded blue hats, and belts in a dozen other colours her mother would undoubtedly regard as vulgar. The d’Alambert retainers might look like clowns but they kept their gaze steady and held their ground.

She was being called.

Petro pushed her forward and Lady Neku stumbled to a halt in front of Luc d’Alambert, who bowed. “My father would like to meet you.”

Lady Neku glanced at her mother.

“Apparently Lord d’Alambert wishes you to board his yacht.” The contempt with which Lady Katchatka said that final word revealed what she really thought of the gaudily painted vessel.

Luc blushed. “It’s protocol,” he insisted.

Well, Lady Neku thought, that’s an end to that. From introduction to intractable argument inside a single minute. That was quick, even for the Katchatka family.

“Please,” said Luc, the first time Lady Neku could remember anyone saying this. Well, certainly in her lifetime.

“He insists?” she asked.

Luc d’Alambert nodded.

“Well,” said Lady Neku. “We’d better go.” She watched Luc try to work out if she was mocking him and wondered if she was—maybe a little. Neku mocked everyone while pretending to do the opposite. It made for a shell most people found hard to crack.

“After you,” he said.

If he could descend that ramp to meet the Katchatka family then she could climb it to meet Lord d’Alambert. I mean, Lady Neku asked herself, how hard could it be?

As she neared the top, Lady Neku reminded herself not to ask idiot questions. The answer was very difficult indeed. And not just because the d’Alamberts used a slightly tighter logarithm for gravity.

“You all right?”

“Of course I’m…” Glaring at the boy beside her, Lady Neku got ready to insist she was fine and then shrugged, making do with a small nod.

“He’s made it hard,” said Luc. “On purpose. Even we don’t use gravity this dense.”

“Why are you telling me that?”

The boy looked puzzled. “So you know things will get easier.” Putting his hand under Neku’s elbow, Luc d’Alambert helped her climb the last few steps. They could have been any couple, thought Lady Neku, apart from the fact their families hated each other, she was half a head taller, and Luc was so pale he might as well have been a ghost. He was right though. Lady Neku felt her steps get less sticky and her body lighter as she neared the top of the ramp.

“Brace yourself,” said Luc.

A wave of nausea washed over Lady Neku. A churning sickness that abandoned her almost as soon as it began. When she came to, Luc was still supporting her elbow, only now he held it tight.

“Shit,” Lady Neku said.

Luc nodded, although he also glanced towards his father to see whether the thin man standing just inside the doorway had heard. Lord d’Alambert gave little sign of hearing; if he had, he was too busy examining a wall.

It showed a naked…

Me, Lady Neku realised. As she looked, the scan sank beneath the surface of her breasts, nose, knees, and abdomen, sectioning her into wafer-thin silhouettes that flickered and vanished. She saw her beating heart, brain, lungs, and spine appear and disappear just as quickly. Until the leading edge of the scan passed through her body, leaving only a faint echo of dissolving buttock, seen from the inside out.

“Come in,” said a voice, and Lady Neku realised she still had a few paces to take. Closing the gap between herself and the old man, Lady Neku made a point of glancing at the darkening wall and then bowed.

Should she have curtsied? Seeing the amusement in the old man’s eyes, Lady Neku decided perhaps not. Amusement was good. Certainly better than anger.

“My Lord.”

Luc’s father was rumoured to be as old as Neku’s mother, though the years had treated him less kindly. His eyes were watery and scales disfigured one side of his face and showed in armour-like rows from beneath his cuffs. She could smell the reptile stink of corruption from where she stood.

“Pretty,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

Harsh eyes warned Luc not to answer. Lord d’Alambert was waiting to see how Neku would reply.

“You’re starting to look like a lizard,” she said.

“Very true.” Lord d’Alambert’s smile was sour. “Pretty soon I’ll be as cold blooded as your mother.”

“If it doesn’t kill you first,” said Lady Neku, and Lord d’Alambert actually laughed. Although, from the scowls on the faces of his retainers it looked as if most of them had trouble seeing the joke.

“How much longer before you turn?”

“A century,” he said. “God willing.”

Never show surprise, never show fear, never even pretend to take anything seriously, these rules had been instilled in Lady Neku by her brothers, with slaps and threats and the occasional treat. All the same, she still found it hard to keep the shock from her face. She asked how old Lord d’Alambert was without thinking.

Lady Neku had no idea whether or not he was lying when he told her his age. No way was her mother that old, unless the Katchatkas and d’Alamberts counted their years differently.

“You know why we’re here?”

“A marriage,” said Lady Neku.

“Your marriage,” Lord d’Alambert said. He stared at the girl. “How do you feel about that?”

Lady Neku’s shrug was not the most elegant of responses.

Stepping forward, Lord d’Alambert wrapped one arm around the girl’s shoulders and steered her away from Luc and the yellow-clad retainers who hovered at the edges of their conversation. Maybe this was planned, thought Lady Neku, maybe all those men in their strange suits and yellow cloaks knew to stand back. These were the d’Alamberts, the oldest of all families. According to her mother, they worked at levels of subtlety so deep even she had trouble extracting the real meaning from their words.

“Tell me honestly,” said Lord d’Alambert. “How do you feel about this marriage?”

She would have shrugged again, but something in those eyes told Lady Neku he would return to the question and keep returning to it until she answered.

“Does it matter?” asked Lady Neku.

“Yes,” said the old man. “Your genes will be mixed with those of my son. Has that been explained to you?”

“Yes,” said Lady Neku.

“We’re old-fashioned,” he added, almost sadly. “Hog-tied by tradition. You will be required to live with us. We will also expect you to birth your own children.”

“I’m not sure I can,” said Lady Neku. “Our record in that area is not very good…” She hesitated, wondering whether she dare say what was in her mind. “You’ve heard the rumours?”

Three generations made by splitting cells.

The old man smiled. His breath was sour and he leaned on her arm more heavily than Lady Neku liked. All the same she was shocked to realise she was starting to respect Lord d’Alambert, something so unlikely it made her wonder if he worked at levels more subtle than even her mother realised.

“I’ve heard the rumours,” said the man. “And you’ll be fine. I had you scanned as you came aboard. There’s nothing amiss that can’t be cured by inducing the menarche.” He smiled at Lady Neku’s expression. “You carry an ancient Bayer Rochelle modification for elective sterility…no breeding,” he added, when she looked puzzled. “Until we splice in a key.”

CHAPTER 38 — Thursday, 28 June

There were three likely answers according to Charlie, another seven possible and thirty-eight more that ranged from technically possible to unlikely, each with its own factor of probability. And though every one could be examined in isolation, it was unrealistic to consider why a handgun clip might hold a mix of live and blank ammunition without tightening the parameters.

“Could the difference between types be seen?”

“Unlikely,” said Neku. “Most clips are closed.”

“Would the man unload the clip?”

“Doubt it,” she said.

“And the blanks?”

“Crimped,” said Neku, adding, “No wax plug or fake bullet, just powder, minimal wadding, and crimped metal around the top.”

She grinned at the memory, clung tighter to Kit’s bike jacket, and leaned into a bend. Charlie had taken her problem away last Monday, called her Tuesday with his request for more information, and being refused, disappeared for another day, finally texting this morning to ask how many answers she’d like.

“Okay,” said Charlie, when she called. “I can give you probabilities or divide my solutions into unlikely, possible, and…”

“Give me the most obvious answer,” said Neku, ruining his carefully considered presentation. She knew she’d ruined it, because Charlie’s voice stumbled to a halt, leaving her alone on the roof with a silent phone and a distant police siren for company.

“Is this real?” he asked finally. “I mean, does it have something to do with the dead woman?”

“Mary,” said Neku.

“Yes,” Charlie said. “Mary.”

“No,” said Neku, flicking her Nokia to visual. She caught Charlie’s blink as the streaming video came on line, and then the widening of his eyes.

“Neku, you’re…”

I’m what? she wondered, before realising he meant shirtless. “It’s hot,” she told him. “Tokyo has more wind.” He was about to say something else, but just nodded.

“So it’s not about Mary?”

“No,” said Neku. “Definitely not.”

“But it is for real?” Charlie said, carefully not facing his screen. “I mean,” he added, “you don’t strike me as interested in the hypothetical.”

Neku smiled, then realised it might have been an insult. “It’s real,” she said. “I’ve been trying to work out what it means ever since.” This wasn’t strictly true, she’d simply found the fact in a report amid the mess of papers from Major Yamota’s office and passed the problem straight to Charlie.

“Okay,” he said, “first thought, it’s obviously intentional.” Charlie must have been glancing at his screen because he responded to Neku’s frown. “If the clip had five blanks and three live shells…well, that could have been someone not bothering to empty the clip properly, but five blanks, two live, one blank.”

“Suggests what?”

Charlie took a deep breath. “Taking the five/two combination first,” he said. “Someone wants to frighten someone, while reserving the means to kill them. Second option, someone wants to frighten someone, then kill them. Third option, someone wants to frighten someone, then kill someone else…”

“Go on,” said Neku.

“There are other possibilities,” said Charlie. “But I’d need more background. The clip is logical until you consider that last blank. Why load a final blank having loaded two live shells above it?”

“I imagine,” said Neku, “it all depends on who loaded the clip.”

“On…?”

“How about, scare someone, kill someone else, get killed yourself?”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “That works for me.”

He’d wanted to see her again, obviously enough, which was a fair price. At least Neku thought it was, but she had to tell Charlie she was busy next day and that led into telling him about Kate O’Mally and Pat and all the other slivers of information she’d prised out of Kit as reward for translating his wretched forms.

“Call me when you get back?” asked Charlie.

Neku promised she would.

The sky above the downs was a ridiculous shade of blue and the afternoon stank of warm earth, summer, and grass. It was all Kit could do not to put out one gloved hand to brush the hedge as he roared past.

The mill at Little Westover looked unchanged, the White Bear, on the corner, where Blackboy Lane crossed with the ghost of a Roman road, was festooned with flowers, its car park as full as ever.

But the old hut had gone.

Kit expected to find overgrown foundations or rotten walls and a broken roof, but it was gone completely. Someone had cleared the site, concreted it over, and installed mesh fencing and a steel gate. A Ukrainian tractor and trailer now stood where the hut had been.

For the first half of the ride, Neku had gripped his jacket and held tight. After they stopped at a café and Kit told her how to ride pillion, Neku loosened her grip and now leaned back, holding plastic handles that protruded from the Kawasaki’s cheap seat. They were using Sony earbeads, a modification that had cost almost as much as the old bike. Well, it did when you threw in the cost of earbead-compatible helmets.

“Okay,” said Neku. “Who am I?”

Kit twitched his head, then glanced back at the lane in time to see twin walls of cow parsley twist to one side. “Lean,” he ordered, and felt Neku ride the bend. Of course, Neku being Neku, explaining what she should do to ride pillion had also required him to explain why, so Kit ended up sketching a cross section of wheel onto a paper napkin.

“Precision and deflection,” she said. “Combined with centrifugal force…Simple enough.”

“If you say so.”

Now Neku threw herself into bends, which actually translated as leaning with the bike rather than against it. Kit had ridden these roads a thousand times before in an earlier life, and swept the curves from memory as he headed for Middle Morton and the old humpback bridge, but first he had Wintersprint.

The cottage was still there, although builders had removed the slate roof and added dormer windows. The thatch replacing the slates had been in place long enough to grow moss and turn black along its lower edges. The outside walls had been plastered and painted white. Half tubs, cut from beer barrels, overflowed with flowers on both sides of a glossy black door.

“Well?” demanded Neku, her voice loud in his earbead.

“Well, what?”

“How are you going to explain me to Mrs. O’Mally?”

“Hell,” said Kit. “How do I explain you to anyone?”

“You don’t.”

Flicking on his indicators, Kit kicked down a couple of gears and coasted to a halt beside a gap in the hedge. The potato field still existed. The earth bank around its edge might look a little flatter and the copse of trees at its far end a little closer than he remembered, but its dark earth was still cut into farrows and a trailer rusted in one corner beneath rotting sacks. A sign by the gate advertised, Pick Your Own.

“Why have we stopped?”

“Because I need to stretch my legs,” said Kit.

Having watched him unbolt a five-bar gate, Neku said, “I’ll come with you.”

“No,” said Kit, “you won’t. I need you to stay with the bike.”

Fifteen years had gone and still he stood humbled at the site of a mindless fuck between teenagers, one of them half drunk, the other ramped on speed. A thousand other people would have been having sex that night, ten thousand, a hundred thousand…Yoshi had been wrong. No one could tie you tighter than you could tie yourself and it was the ropes you couldn’t see that bound you tightest.

“You’re crying,” said Neku, when he returned.

Kit put his helmet back on.

Seven Chimneys had changed in the time he’d been away. The yellow brick had lost its rawness and ivy had fanned out around the upper windows. The rose bushes had thickened and the flower bed outside the study been weeded and cut back so many times its earth had changed colour.

Even the huge brass lion of a door knocker had lost its brashness and been cleaned and polished into something that felt greasy beneath Kit’s fingers as he lifted its heavy ring and brought it down with a bang.

He had to knock another three times before he got an answer.

“Who is it?”

“Me,” he said, before realising how ridiculous that sounded. “It’s Kit,” he said. “I need you to look at something…” On the far side of the door bolts were drawn back, and when the door opened it was still held by a heavy chain.

“Who’s she?” demanded Kate.

Neku sighed. “Told you,” she said.

While Kit looked through the attics for a trunk or box that might take the little brass key, Neku and Kate made lunch, which mostly involved slicing tomatoes and sticking fat chunks of cheese between even fatter slabs of bread.

“Make a dressing,” Kate ordered. When Neku looked blank, Kate pulled wine vinegar, olive oil, and black pepper from a cupboard and dumped them in front of the girl.

“Mix them,” she said. “Then grate in some pepper.”

“What proportions?”

“How would I know?” Kate asked, dumping an empty mustard jar in front of Neku. “My husband used to make it.” She nodded at the jar. “He used that.”

Having poured oil and vinegar into the jar, Neku added black pepper and screwed the jar shut before shaking it hard. Then she drizzled the dressing over the top of the sliced tomatoes, because she couldn’t see what else she was meant to do with it.

“It’s pretty here,” she said.

Kate grunted.

Horses ran in a field beyond the kitchen windows and bees clustered around a vast spread of lavender that overflowed a stone trough next to a bench on the lawn immediately outside. The room itself was huge, with stone slabs for a floor and work surfaces cut from railway sleepers. The kitchen was too big for one person, almost too big for one family. It looked as if it belonged in a hotel.

“You and Kit,” Kate asked. “What’s that about?”

So Neku told Kate how she’d met Kit by accident while she’d been stealing a pen, notebook, and ink from a shrine shop in Tokyo because she had a story she needed to write.

“What’s the story about?”

“A marriage.”

“Whose marriage?”

“Mine,” said Neku, “to the son of a lizard prince.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. So Neku told Kate how she met Kit a second time on the streets of Roppongi, when he gave her a coffee one morning, because it was raining.

“Because it was raining?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And when was this?”

“Last Christmas,” said Neku. “He brought me coffee every day after that, and often daifuku cake. Stuffed with sweet bean curd,” she added, when Kate looked puzzled. “I came to rely on it. The days Kit forgot I went hungry.”

“You couldn’t just beg?”

“Maybe that would have been better,” Neku admitted. “Less trouble for everybody, but it seemed wrong.” She told Kate how she’d actually had a coin locker stuffed with millions of dollars she was unable to use. And how taking coffee from Kit had somehow felt different. “Anyway,” she said. “I saved his life from an assassin. So that was repayment.”

“Seems to be catching.”

“What is?” asked Neku.

“Wanting Kit dead.”

Neku shrugged. “He was fucking the wife of a gang boss and bikers used his bar to deal drugs, plus lots of uyoku felt Yoshi Tanaka should be married to someone Japanese. Then there’s chippu he owed to the local police and unpaid bills from a Brazilian transvestite who mends his motorbike. It could have been anyone.”

Kate laughed. “You tell a good story,” she said. “Almost as good as Patrick. All the same, I’d like the real story next time.”

After lunch, Kate carried her own plate to the sink and ran it under cold water, leaving it to dry on a wire rack. It was the action of someone grown used to living alone, life reduced to simple habits. Neku did the same for her own plate, Kit’s plate, and the plate on which she’d put the tomatoes, washing each before placing it next to the plates already there.

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water… Neku found it hard to remember which actions carried weight and which got lost as static and dust in the slipstream from other people’s lives.

“I’m going for a stroll,” said Kate. “You can keep looking,” she added, speaking to Kit. “But there’s no trunk here and no tuck box. Mary didn’t go to that kind of school.” And, with this, Kate headed for the kitchen door.

Neku made to follow her.

“Neku,” Kit said.

“What,” said Neku, “I’m not allowed to take a walk too?”

CHAPTER 39 — Thursday, 28 June

Cars locked up the M25, London’s orbital. They crawled towards turn offs, negotiated endless road works, and slid gratefully away, like single fish leaving a shoal as they finally headed home to leafy and not-so-leafy suburbs. About ten minutes short of his own turn off, Kit spotted a BMW up ahead and thought no more about it, filtering through the gap between the BMW and a white van.

As he did so, an arm reached through the driver’s window and fixed a blue light to the roof. Sirens blipped and the BMW would have remained trapped in molasses-slow traffic if Kit hadn’t obediently pulled over.

“Licence…”

Kit had already removed his helmet and dark glasses, so he smiled and nodded politely. “I’m sorry. Is there…”

“Licence,” said the man.

“Of course,” said Kit. Without hesitation, he unzipped a side pocket and flipped open his wallet, offering the man a small square of plastic. The only instantly recognisable words were Kit Nouveau, everything else was in Japanese.

“What’s this?”

“My licence.”

The policeman turned over the square of plastic. It was obvious from the irritation on his face that he found the vehicle categories outlined in kanji on the back equally incomprehensible. At least the front had a photograph of Kit, a reference number, and something that looked like an end date.

“Where’s your international permit?”

“I don’t need one,” said Kit, careful to keep a smile on his face. “This is good in the UK for a year.”

“Great,” said the man. “I’ve got myself a lawyer.”

“Not at all.” Kit shook his head. “But I checked with the British embassy in Tokyo before I left.” As a lie it was next to impossible to refute, and besides, Japanese driving licences were legal in the UK, everyone knew that.

“What about her?”

Before Kit had time to answer, Neku produced a red and gold passport and handed it over. As an afterthought, she remembered to execute a small bow. A smile was fixed firmly on her face.

“How long’s she been here?” demanded the policeman.

“Almost a week,” said Kit.

“And when she’s due to leave?”

“Soon,” he said, pretending not to notice Neku’s frown.

“Wait here,” the man ordered. A few minutes later he was back. Without a word, he returned Neku’s passport and the Japanese licence taken from Kit, then nodded at the bike. “You can go.”

Car after car had been crawling past even more slowly than traffic conditions demanded, as drivers braked slightly to stare in vague interest at whatever was happening. When the policeman raised his head to stare back, a handful of faces immediately looked away.

“Come on,” Kit told Neku, putting on his helmet and waiting for her to do the same. “Let’s go home.” He turned the Kawasaki in a slow circle and touched his rear brake as he reached the unmarked police car, slowing slightly to peer inside. Two men sat in the front. The one who’d just demanded sight of Kit’s licence and Sergeant Samson, the police officer from three days before.

“Evening,” said Kit, and left the Sergeant to his calls and the numbers he’d been reading to someone over a car radio…

Every city has its own night noises. The talking police cars in Tokyo. A fog horn from a freighter heard between New York’s rumble of trucks. The braying of a tethered donkey in Tunis.

In London the late sounds were composed of lorries, banging doors, and people fighting in the streets. At least, that was how it sounded to Kit as he lay awake and listened to the hours crawl by as slowly as that evening’s traffic on the M25. It was noisy, if less noisy than Sophie had said.

As well as using the mews to piss, drunks stopped off to try their phones or slumped half conscious against a wall, waiting for a call to remind them where they were meant to be. Couples dipped into its depths to kiss or fuck or squabble away from the main street. A typed note in a plastic folder—nailed to a door just under the arch, where it could be read by street light—assured johns that no prostitutes worked from any of the flats in Hogarth Mews.

According to Sophie, a couple of Estonians had started conning tourists in Soho by giving them a key and an address in Hogarth Mews, with a promise that young and beautiful East European girls would be waiting. A Glaswegian trio tricked into visiting the nonexistent brothel had been angry enough to kick down a door.

For all this, Hogarth Mews was a good address. A quick look in the window of a local estate agent had told Kit just how good. Not central Tokyo prices, of course, because few cities in the world had anything approaching those, but Mary had still left him a flat worth more than he’d earned in the previous ten years.

And staring into the half darkness, Kit just wished he knew why. Apology, guilt, some weird attempt to make peace? Any of those would have worked, if only things had been the other way round. If he’d been the one offering Mary everything he owned.

Kit was still worrying at this question when he heard the door from the roof garden open and then the sound of Neku’s key in the front door of the flat. This was not unusual. Neku often passed ghost-like through the hall on her way to get a glass of water or use the bathroom.

Only this time she stopped outside his room.

“You awake?”

“Yeah,” he said, watching his door open.

“Are you okay to talk?”

“It’s three in the morning,” said Kit. “Can’t it wait?”

“No,” Neku said, shaking her head. “Probably not.”

He caught the sweep of one hip, a shoulder, and a curve of breast in silhouette as she turned back from shutting the door behind her. Absolute certainty of her nakedness came with a splinter of street light between her thighs as she walked towards him.

“I’m not going back to Japan,” said Neku. Sitting on the edge of Kit’s bed she reached for the covers, her fingers tugging at the edge of his quilt.

“Neku.”

The tussle was brief and Kit won.

“Why?” she asked, when she’d done what Kit demanded and put on his yukata, tying its belt tight around her. She still sat on his bed, only now her legs were folded under her and only one foot could be seen. Her arms were folded and she’d hunched inside herself, visibly furious with him.

“You’re a kid,” said Kit.

Neku snorted. “In some prefectures,” she said, “the age of consent is thirteen. Anyway,” Neku added crossly, “you wouldn’t be my first.”

“Maybe not,” Kit said, “but that’s hardly the point.”

“So it’s definitely my age?”

He nodded.

“Would it help,” said Neku, “if I told you how old I really was?”

“Probably not.” Kit had her pegged at fifteen or sixteen. Although, since Japanese girls could look young for their age, she might be seventeen, though he doubted it. She behaved like a child, for all that she sometimes pretended to be something else.

“Well?” he said.

“I’m hundreds of years older than you.”

“Hundreds?”

“Thousands,” said Neku. “Ten of thousands. I don’t even know when this is, it’s so long ago…”

CHAPTER 40 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

“Where’s Luc?” Lady Katchatka demanded.

“Being miserable somewhere,” said Nico. “Knowing him.”

“And your sister?”

Lady Katchatka glanced at her three sons. Nico sat at her feet, sharpening the blade of a katana said to be older than the family itself, while the two elder boys knelt by a wall, playing cards. Something simple, like clans.

“Well?”

“She was in the gardens,” said Antonio. “Playing with her stupid cat.” Antonio dealt another card, only to swear when his brother scooped the pile.

“And when was this?” asked Lady Katchatka.

“After lunch.”

The old woman sighed. “Nico?”

Her youngest son ran a sharpening glass down one edge of his blade, then wiped the metal with a finger, checking the silver dust he found there. “She’s asleep in the spire,” he said, without looking up.

Petro snorted.

“I thought it best to check,” Nico said coldly.

She was going to have to deal with this, Lady Katchatka decided. But not now and certainly not before the wedding banquet was over.

“Sound asleep?”

Nico scowled.

“Well,” Lady Katchatka demanded. “Was she sound asleep?”

“Dead to this world,” said Nico.

Also curled up in a corner. Although Nico didn’t need to mention this, because everyone knew how Neku slept. She’d been curling up in stray corners from the day she was born.

How odd, Lady Neku thought. Why would Nico lie about having gone to my room? Shaking her head, the girl edged round a half pillar, looking for a better peep hole. Unlike the pillar’s far side, which pretended to be marble, the side Lady Neku edged round was unpolished metal, with fat bolts that fixed it to the sheet steel beneath her feet. This was because Lady Neku was inside a hollow wall.

She’d been nine when she discovered the trick. A door into the Stroll Garden had been locked and Lady Neku wanted to be on the other side. So angry had Lady Neku been that she hit the door; not softly or in pretend anger, but hard enough to split the skin of her knuckles. Only the pain Lady Neku expected to feel on her second blow never came, because the door dissolved beneath her punch and she found herself with her arm stuck almost entirely through its surface.

When screaming produced no help, she tried reason. At nine, of course, Lady Neku could already outthink Antonio and Petro. Even Nico, who was used to being the most intelligent, had come to realise his sister was talented. Which was probably why he’d locked her out of the garden in the first place.

After reason failed, the nine-year-old began to push at the door with her shoulder, finally falling through. Since this was obviously impossible, she decided not to mention it to her mother or brothers.

So began her travels. At first she simply walked through doors. Although this was a clumsy way to describe the intricate negotiation her body made with the physical boundaries around it. The following year Lady Neku realised that if she approached hollow walls face on and then stepped sideways, she could remain within the wall itself.

By then she’d done some basic research and decided it was down to the molecules of her body negotiating miu space within the molecules making the wall. This was, she later discovered, almost entirely wrong. Whatever, Lady Neku increased her ability to wander, until even Nico became disquieted by the things his sister knew.

She became the family ghost, the half wit others barely mentioned, wandering alone down abandoned corridors or climbing the sheer sides of cathedral-high hangers to hide on ledges for days.

Cold, hungry, lost, and alone—they were some of the happiest days of her life. She discovered the drop zone, filled with pods designed to make one-way trips to the planet’s surface. And having made her first drop, she introduced herself to her family’s castle, which found it hard to accept she’d made no provision for her return.

“Really?” Schloss Omga asked.

“Really,” said Lady Neku, sounding remarkably unworried, given she’d forgotten to bring food and the heat inside the castle’s shell was already gluing her shirt to her back. So the castle returned her anyway. Shifting the nine-year-old a hundred kilometres straight up, from ground level to High Strange, as simply as Lady Neku herself moved through doors.

Next time she did the drop, the castle said, I suppose you expect me to do that again? And Lady Neku simply nodded.

Mostly it was her silence and self-sufficiency that worried Nico, Antonio, and Petro. She avoided physical contact, long talks, sympatico symbionts, and all the other little tics that bound her brothers to her mother. She was herself, the original. Everyone else was just a copy.

“Okay, then,” Lady Neku heard her mother say. “We’re all agreed?”

The idea of her mother asking approval of her brothers was so surprising that Lady Neku hesitated on the edge of leaving and decided to stay where she was.

Looking up from his blade, Nico said, “Are you sure about not telling Neku?”

“It seems best.”

“She’s going to take it badly. You know she will.”

Lady Katchatka nodded, mostly to herself. “Better this way,” she said. “Neku’s going to be upset whatever.”

“So we don’t tell her about Luc?” That was Antonio.

“No,” said Lady Katchatka, “we don’t.” Having carefully placed his cards face down on the floor, Petro glanced between his mother and Antonio. “And we don’t tell her about Lord d’Alambert either?”

“We don’t tell her about anything,” said Nico. “It’s a secret.”

“That’s right,” Lady Katchatka said. “It’s a secret.”

Antonio and Petro nodded.

After the two eldest boys returned to their cards Nico stood up and swished his katana through the air, listening to its note; then he wiped its blade one final time and sat himself at a window seat, staring out over the wastes of Katchatka Segment below. A moment later, his mother joined him. Unfortunately, they were too far away for Lady Neku to hear what was said.

When their conversation was done, Lady Katchatka bent forward and kissed Nico carefully on the forehead. She left without bothering to say goodbye to the others.

Lady Neku half expected Nico to follow, but all he did was stroll over to where Antonio and Petro knelt and squat beside them. At the end of that round, Antonio dealt the cards into fresh piles and all three brothers began to play.

“I don’t get it,” said Luc, when Lady Neku eventually found him sulking in the Stroll Garden. “Why do you dress like that?”

Protocol said he lived with her family for the time it took to complete the celebrations that ensured she would remain for the rest of her life within his. Luc made little pretence about hating every minute of his enforced stay.

“Why do I…” One of the things Lady Neku found most odd about Luc was the innocence with which he asked questions. Surely he’d been told that every question revealed more about the person asking than could be offset by knowing the answer?

Yet Luc simply asked. Odd was one word for it. Stupid was another. Because the other thing Lady Neku found strange about Luc was that he appeared to believe everything she told him. There was a third strangeness. Which was that Neku had begun to find herself giving truthful answers to the questions Luc asked, because tricking him and lying were just too easy. If nothing else, she found a novelty value in being honest.

“Dress like what?” Neku demanded.

“You know.” Luc flapped a hand. “All this black. And that shirt.”

“What about it?”

“It’s…” He shrugged, then flapped his hand again. Lady Neku guessed he meant to indicate the rips. Luc went red every time he got embarrassed. I mean, she thought, how stupid a modification was that?

Lady Neku wore a skirt of crumpled silk ripped to show the layers beneath. The skirt was old and had been spun by tiny worms fed on starlight, or so her mother said. It fluoresced in the daylight, but wear it at night and it became darker than the deepest shadow, a mere absence of light wrapped around the person inside.

It had been Lady Neku’s favourite, until she mentioned this to her mother and Lady Katchatka had replied, dismissively, that she’d also loved it at her daughter’s age. Now Lady Neku hated it, but continued to wear the garment to stop her mother from knowing the effect of those words.

Anyway, it was not the skirt that bothered Luc, nor the niello bangles and memory beads around Lady Neku’s wrists, it was her top. “It’s okay,” said Lady Neku. “You can stare. Everybody else does.”

“Everybody?”

“Nico, Antonio, and Petro.”

When Luc bit his bottom lip it made Lady Neku wonder what she’d said. And that was enough to push her into considering his question carefully. It was only after she’d dragged Luc to a tiny waterfall and sat him beside her on the grass that Lady Neku wondered if his unworldly innocence were some weird double bluff, designed to manipulate her into telling him the truth. If so, then she was impressed, because it was working.

“What?” Luc said.

“Nothing,” said Lady Neku. “I’m just not used to talking to people. So you’ll have to listen carefully.”

“To what?”

“My reasons. Why I wear black.”

“I understand it’s the Katchatka colour,” said Luc. “It’s the way you all dress. You know, it’s just the…” A shake of his head, then one hand went up to rub his eyes.

If he’d only get his mouth fixed, thought Lady Neku, he’d be almost good looking. Pulling up her knees, she twisted her skirt decorously around her ankles and rested her chin on her hands.

Lady Neku was thinking.

“Okay,” she said. “It goes like this…My mother likes torn clothes because they look good on her and my brothers dress the same because they follow my mother’s example. I wear this shirt because it renders me invisible to them…”

Lady Neku held up a hand, stilling Luc’s question. “Let me finish,” she said. “The rips are house style. If I dressed as neatly as you I’d be making an exhibition of myself. Does that make sense?”

Sitting back, Lady Neku lowered her knees and unfolded her arms. “What do you see when you look at me?” she demanded.

His blush was her answer.

“Exactly,” said Lady Neku.

“That’s how you make yourself invisible?” Luc said softly. He nodded, then nodded again, considering her words. “But I still don’t understand. Who are you hiding from?”

It took Lady Neku ninety minutes to explain to Luc the background, history, and internal politics of her family. And at the end, all he said was, “You’re hiding from the lot of them?”

And when she scowled, he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “I can see how that might work.”

Sweeping hair from his eyes, Nico slashed through the air and a dozen invisible enemies died beneath his flurry of blows, then a dozen more as he dropped, swept low with a particularly lethal cut, and danced away across the duelling room. When he finally came to a standstill in front of Lady Neku, his brothers, and Luc, he’d barely broken sweat.

“Sweet,” he said. Nico was talking about the blade.

“Let me try,” said Petro.

Nico shook his head.

“Come on,” Petro said. “It’s not even yours.”

“It is now,” said Nico. “I found it. Go find your own.”

But Petro wouldn’t, because that meant going to the surface, tracking down an object of value, and then wresting it from the original owner. And Petro grew sick simply thinking about surface dwellers and the plagues they carried. Not something that worried Nico, who time and again had returned with blood splattering his arms. “Here…” Nico tossed the katana to Luc, all three brothers grinning as Luc fumbled his catch. “You can borrow it,” said Nico. “I’m sure Petro would be delighted to fight you.”

Petro scowled, mainly because Luc got to try the blade and not him. Which, obviously enough, was why Nico gave Luc the katana in the first place. Lady Neku’s family could be very predictable.

“I’m not that good,” said Luc, as he tried the katana for balance. He was rewarded with a laugh from Nico.

“Have a go, anyway.”

“Okay,” he said. Turning in a circle, with the katana held far too tightly to give him the fluidity he’d require, Luc practised a dozen of the simplest blocks and finished up facing Petro.

“What are the rules?” Luc asked.

Petro grinned. “This is Katchatka,” he said. “There are no rules. At least, not about things like this. You should know that if you’re going to marry my sister.”

“So how do you score?”

Petro glanced at his brothers, who rolled their eyes rather more obviously than was necessary. “Two people fight,” Petro said. “One wins. How hard can that be to mark?”

It was time for Lady Neku to get involved. The question was how? Since coming up with a complex and emotionally satisfying answer would take longer than she had, Lady Neku chose the simplest option. Pushing herself away from the wall, she marched across to Luc and held out her hand.

“Let me see,” she said.

Luc did as he was told.

“Nice balance,” said Lady Neku, cutting air. “Very nice indeed…” Luc was still busy admiring Lady Neku’s sword play, when she spun away from him and slashed the blade hard towards her brother.

As Petro brought up his own blade to block her blow, Lady Neku twisted sideways, reversed her katana in one fluid move, and struck fast and hard, its blade actually cutting her skirt as its point lanced out behind her.

“Fuck,” said Petro, only just stepping back in time. He looked shocked.

“You’ve been practising,” Nico said, his voice amused.

Lady Neku nodded.

“Okay,” said Nico, “my go.”

So Lady Neku tossed him the sword. The spin she put on the handle made the blade difficult to catch, but Nico caught it all the same. He grinned at his sister, nodded once to Luc, and swept hair out of his own eyes.

“Why doesn’t he just get it cut?” whispered Luc.

“Because then he wouldn’t be able to flick it back.” Lady Neku sighed. Surely Luc could see how the floppiness of Nico’s hair was reflected in the ruffles of his shirt and the wide hem to his trousers?

“Ready?” asked Nico.

Mouth sullen, Petro nodded. What had begun as fun at Luc’s expense had turned into fun at his own. “Of course I’m ready,” he said. Stepping forward, Petro swung his blade a couple of times and then stepped back. As Nico moved forward to begin his own warm up, Petro aimed a heavy-handed side slash that would have severed Nico’s leg had it met flesh.

Nico blocked the cut with a smile.

Except, by then, Petro had launched the moves he really wanted to make. A quick reverse, a feint to the head, and then the blow itself. Straight at Nico’s throat.

“Idiot,” said Lady Neku.

Springing aside, Nico let the katana pass, before sinking his own point deep into Petro’s chest. As his elder brother opened his mouth, in something half way between pain and astonishment, Nico yanked his blade sideways, severing his brother’s heart. Blood went everywhere.

“Nico!”

It was too late. By the time Lady Neku reached Petro’s side his eyes were unfocussed and his pulse had stopped. “Mother’s going to be furious.”

“He started it,” said Nico, suddenly sounding like the boy he was.

“Like that will make a difference.”

“Well, he did.” Wiping his blade, Nico returned it to the scabbard.

Lady Neku sighed. “You know what Mother’s like about hurting Petro’s feelings.”

“Feelings?” said Luc.

Nico nodded. “Petro is the oldest,” he said. “So we’re not meant to make fun of him. It makes my mother upset.” Nico paused. “That’s bad,” he added, as if this might be news to Luc. “The problem is Petro’s just rubbish at everything…”

“I suppose,” said Antonio, glancing at the blood, “we’d better get this cleared up before anyone sees it.”

But Lady Neku was one step ahead of them both. Dropping to a crouch, she stroked the tiles next to Petro’s body until they began to sag and opened into a body-sized hole. “I’ll let you two finish off.”

“Okay.” Nico nodded. “Come on,” he told Antonio. “Let’s get it over with.” Walking across to where Petro lay, Nico and Antonio began to roll him into the hole.

“You’ll get him back in two days,” said Lady Neku.

“What…”

“That’s good,” she said. “I had to negotiate to get it done that fast. The kami are working full out on tomorrow night.”

For once her brothers didn’t mock her. “Oh fuck,” said Antonio. “Mother’s party.”

She watched Nico and Antonio glance at each other.

“He’ll miss the wedding banquet,” said Nico.

“I know,” said Lady Neku.

“Mother’s going to be furious.”

Lady Neku nodded. “You should have thought about that before you killed him…”

CHAPTER 41 — Friday, 29 June

Time was spherical, layered within itself, each layer actually a sphere when expanded into three dimensions, although it looked like two when seen from any perspective beyond four, most layers being climbed using a basic Einstein-Rosen bridge.

“Got it so far?” asked Neku.

Kit shook his head. The girl sat against the head board of Mary’s bed, still wrapped in his yukata. Her shoulder was pressed into his arm and her eyes were shut. Neku smelled of soap, shampoo, and Marmite; the last being what Kit had put on the toast he made her.

He’d made toast because Neku began crying and he wanted to give her privacy. Which either constituted cowardice or compassion. Kit could waste time later trying to work out which.

“Okay,” said Kit. “But what’s all this got to do with being upset?”

“Everything,” said Neku.

Settling herself, she brushed crumbs from her chin and started to sketch a jerky spiral in the air with one finger. “This is time,” she said. “Enormously simplified and seen from a different perspective. Think of it as steps circling a central well. Unfortunately the stairs only go in one direction.”

“Why?” asked Kit.

Neku sighed. “Because they do,” she said. “My brother said time is an infinite number of doors forever locking behind you.” Which showed what he knew.

“And what’s at the top?”

“For me,” said Neku, “Nawa-no-ukiyo. The floating rope world. Everything else has gone.” She nodded towards Kit’s window. “All of those stars,” she said. “They’ve shifted, the moon’s been segmented, and the gas giants drained for fuel. It was the Great White,” she added. “Everything that could be used was, to help humanity reach the other side.”

Neku spoke with such conviction that Kit found himself nodding. What she said was impossible. Worse than that, it was largely incomprehensible. But Neku believed it and that made it real for her. Kit had lived for long enough inside his own dreams to recognise someone else’s…

No one should have to carry the ends of time or that quantity of dark dead space inside them. Without thinking, he hugged the child close and felt her hesitate, then snuggle closer to his shoulder.

“Finish your toast,” said Kit.

She chewed in silence.

“Thing is,” said Neku, when her mouth was empty. “You only see this many stars because we’re in your light cone. Even then, about a fifth of those are already dead. Nico says stars shift with time, until distance begins to look like absence.”

Kit nodded.

“And I’m not really sure why earth was chosen.”

“For what?”

“To house all the fugees. Because it was empty, I guess. A planet without a people for a people without a planet.” Neku sighed. “It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Together Kit and Neku watched the sky beyond his window get lighter and the stars, already faded by the city’s sodium glare, fade further, until they vanished into the perfect upturned bowl of an early summer morning.

Kit thought Neku was dozing until she suddenly spoke again. “Okay,” she said. “What are we doing today?”

“I’m seeing Patrick Robbe-Duras,” said Kit. “To show him Mary’s key. Pat says he doesn’t remember Mary owning a trunk but I can take a look anyway.”

“Can Charlie come too?”

Kit was about to say, But I’m going alone…and then decided to save himself the argument.

Quite why Pat expected Kit and Charlie to mow the lawn while Neku sorted buttons from a button box was never explained. Although by the end of the afternoon the grass was trimmed, raked, and mowed and all of the buttons collected by Mary as a small child had been sorted by size and type.

As a reward, Pat gave them tea on the freshly cut lawn. Charlie set up a wooden picnic table and Neku carried the china. She would have made the sandwiches, but Pat insisted on making those himself, somewhat crossly.

“He’s tired,” said Kit.

“No,” said Neku. “He’s dying.”

When Pat returned he found Neku and Charlie crouched by the river. Charlie was feeding digestive biscuits to the ducks, though every now and then he’d dip a finger into the water to take a bit of weed that Neku indicated. Just as Neku would discard a pebble from her mouth to taste another, when she found one she liked better.

Neither looked up when Pat got back.

“I’ve upset them,” said Pat, putting a plate of cucumber sandwiches on the rickety picnic table. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Kit. “You’re tired. Neku understands that.”

“Talked about me, did you?”

At Kit’s nod, Pat sighed. “People have been talking about me my entire life. Well, about Katie really. Speaking of which, she called yesterday to say you’d be in contact about some bloody key. So I told her you’d been in contact already.” He shrugged. “Not sure if Katie was angry about my already knowing or glad you were pushing on with finding Mary.”

Pat held out his hand. “I suppose you’d better show me.”

Taking the key Kit offered, Pat turned it over in his hands and pulled a pair of reading glasses from his jacket pocket to take a closer look.

“Recognise it?” asked Kit.

“No,” said Pat, handing the key back. “Anyway, it’s not like Mary went to that kind of school. You know why?”

Kit shook his head.

“Because the first private school we tried refused to take her. Oh, she passed their exam all right. Except someone told them about Katie, and we had a very embarrassed letter from the headmaster saying he’d made a mistake with class sizes and he was really sorry, but there wasn’t a place after all.”

“What happened?”

“Half the school burned down.”

Kit looked at him.

“Before term began,” said Pat tiredly. “No one got hurt.”

“Were you upset?”

“About Mary losing her place? Of course not. I was delighted. It was Katie who…” He stopped as Charlie escorted Neku up the bank, her fingers closed tight around a dripping mass of leaves, petals, and water weed.

“What’s that?”

Neku smiled. “You’ll see,” she said.

When Neku and Charlie reappeared it was with a glass full of cloudy water and a tiny box made from neatly folded paper. “Drink this,” said Neku, putting the glass on the picnic table. And the fact Pat did showed either extreme faith or an unusual level of tact.

“God,” he said. “That tastes vile.”

“Maybe,” said Neku. “But it will help. My grandmother taught me about plants.”

“About plants?”

“Well, poisons…they’re close enough. It’s what you do at the molecular level that matters.” Holding out her paper box, Neku showed how it opened to reveal one pebble. Kanji characters on each side of the box had bled into soft focus as ink seeped into paper.

“The box is meant to look like that,” Neku insisted.

“I’m sure it is,” said Pat. “What does this charm do?”

“It summons the kami,” promised Neku.

Pat smiled.

CHAPTER 42 — Friday, 29 June

It was Pat’s suggestion that Charlie and Neku travel back in Charlie’s old Mini and Kit stay for coffee. “It’ll only take five minutes,” Pat told Neku. “I just want a quick talk and Charlie needs to get home.”

“But I don’t have front door keys,” said Neku, sounding put out.

“It’s all right,” promised Pat. “Kit will catch up with you.” When Neku looked doubtful, Pat smiled. “Charlie can drive slowly,” he said.

Charlie nodded.

“She’s a good kid,” said Pat, once the gravel was empty and the Mini a memory of noisy horn bursts from the road beyond. “And she’s obviously worried about you.”

“Worried?”

“She told me you were in trouble. Something about Yakuza bosses and fire bombing. Katie mentioned you had problems, but didn’t tell me what…Katie always tried to keep that stuff from me.” Pat took a deep breath, then lost a whole minute to the coughing fit this induced.

“Shit,” said Kit, when he’d finished helping Pat inside.

Spitting into a tissue, Pat nodded. “I’ll live, for a while anyway…What I kept you back to say was that I’m grateful for the help you’re giving Katie, but if you’re really in trouble then tell her. Katie has contacts. Call it payment.”

“Kate hates me,” said Kit. “And the debt is mine.”

“You were kids,” Pat said crossly. “It’s time you forgave yourself.” He sat in silence for a while after that, watching Kit sip luke-warm coffee from a battered mug, while staring out of the window at the river beyond. “I never liked how Katie lived,” said Pat. “It was always a problem between us.”

He was talking about the Firm, Kit realised, the web of criminal connections that Kate O’Mally inherited, built into something altogether grander, and eventually passed to her nephew Michael, the man Kit had half-blinded beside a hedge in Wintersprint.

“She told me once,” said Pat, “that it was just a job.”

“What did you say?”

“That it was a job in which people died. She told me mortality was the human condition.” Pat sighed. “I blame her priest. When I told Katie that wasn’t good enough, she said at least it was the right people who died, and it was the only answer she had.”

“I should go,” said Kit, “if I’m going to catch up to them.”

“What I’m trying to say,” said Pat, sighing, “is that Katie has connections. Global connections. The Yakuza, the Camorra, the ’Ndranghala, the Mafia…Katie’s mob might not have a fancy name but they still command respect. If you have problems talk to her.”

Kit shook his head.

“At least pretend to think about it,” Pat said.

Peeling off his gauntlets, Kit kicked the Kawasaki onto its stand and unbuckled his helmet. Charlie was already negotiating his battered Mini into the spot where the Porsche usually parked, so Kit guessed he was planning to see Neku inside.

The sun was low enough in the sky to be lost behind a tower block and Hogarth Mews stood in shadow, its front doors half hidden. Which might have been why Kit didn’t spot the zinc bust of Karl Marx until he almost tripped over the thing. The door to Sophie’s flat was also wedged open, only this time she’d used a small marble vase overflowing with 5 pence pieces.

“You’re back,” said Sophie, crushing a cigarette under her heel.

“Yes,” said Kit. He caught her glance at the Mini. “Is that a problem?”

“Someone was looking for you. Said they were from the police.”

“The Sergeant again?”

“No.” Sophie shook her head. “Plain clothes this time. A woman, claimed she knew you.”

Kit waited.

“Inspector Avenden…”

“Never heard of her.”

“Whatever,” said Sophie, pulling a battered packet of Gauloise from her jeans. “She wanted to wait. I said she couldn’t. So now she’s in Caffé Nero sulking, well probably…”

“Probably?”

“As I said, she wanted to wait here. I suggested the Inspector find a café in Charlotte Street and wait there instead.”

“Not fond of the Met, are you?”

Sophie’s scowl was fierce. “I’m old enough to remember them unarmed,” she said, “before the laws changed. So are you,” she added. “I used to love this city. Now it’s all fake threats and real guns.”

Beside them, Charlie and Neku had stopped to listen. Charlie was nodding, which Kit found interesting. The boy didn’t look like revolutionary politics came high on his list of interests.

“You okay to take this up?” Kit asked Neku, holding out his helmet. “There’s someone I need to see. It won’t take long.”

“Sure,” said Neku. “I’ll get supper on.”

“If he wants,” Kit said, “Charlie can stay to eat.” The boy seemed pleased, although Neku looked entirely noncommittal.

“I suppose you know what you’re doing,” said Sophie, when Charlie and Neku had disappeared in a clatter of feet on the stairs. “She’s cute. And I know she beds down on the roof terrace…I sleep with my window open,” she added, seeing Kit’s face. “I hear the kid stamping around in the night. All the same, she’s in love with you.”

“No,” said Kit. “She likes Charlie.”

Sophie shook her head. “Charlie likes Neku. Neku likes you.”

“She’s a child.”

“No,” said Sophie. “She’s not. Look at her…She’s cooking, cleaning, wearing neat clothes. She’s digging in for the long haul.”

Kit gave a sigh.

“Someone has to say it,” said Sophie. “And whatever you’re really doing in London, it doesn’t feel like something that should involve a kid.”

A kid who’s killed. One who gets an ex-gangster eating out of her hands in the time it takes to make cheese sandwiches, badly. Instead of saying it, Kit just nodded, because all of the above still didn’t make Sophie’s words untrue.

The ground floor to the café on Charlotte Street had three customers, all at a metal table outside. The counter itself was deserted, and the only member of staff Kit could see leaned against a stool, skimming that morning’s Metro.

The floor above was almost as empty. A Chinese student made notes from a biology textbook at a round table at the top of the stairs. And, in the far corner, looking sullen in a black skirt, white shirt, and plain jacket, was a woman in her mid thirties, already climbing to her feet.

“Inspector Avenden?”

Nodding, the woman offered her hand, then let it drop. Maybe it was the way Kit’s voice turned her name into a question. Or maybe it was the fact he refused to shake. Either way, her eyes went flat.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“No,” said Kit, shaking his head.

Honesty, it seemed, was the best policy. At least where Inspector Avenden was concerned, because her wide face regained a fraction of its smile. “Oh well,” she said, a Welsh lilt to her voice. “You always were more interested in Mary O’Mally.”

He got it then.

A kiss that tasted of cheap cigarettes, a footpath fumble and a promise—still unfulfilled—to go clubbing when she got back from somewhere or other. Amy Avenden had hightailed it out of Middle Morton almost as fast as he had.

“Would you like…?”

“Let me get…”

Her laughter might be self mocking as their questions clashed, but her face was more relaxed than when Kit first appeared at the top of the stairs. He got the feeling this meeting was not entirely willing on her part. Which begged the question as to why it was happening at all.

“I’ll go,” said Kit, and she let him.

When Kit returned Amy had put a small notebook on the table and placed a pen neatly beside it. There was something formal about the arrangement.

“Is this official?” Kit asked, putting down the lattes.

“If it was,” said Amy, “that would be a voice recorder. Call it semi official…” She sat back and stared towards the ceiling, collecting her thoughts; collecting something anyway, because when she leaned forward it was to tell Kit his name had been cross linked on the computer.

“Which means what?”

“You sent an e-mail to Japan that put you on one list…a call you took from Kathryn O’Mally put you on another. When you came up a third time during a licence plate check with the DVLA, the machine flagged you as someone to watch.”

“E-mail?”

“Sent from your flat to an e-mail address in Tokyo. The bozozoku have connections with motorcycle gangs in America, Scandinavia, Russia, and Australia. When Scotland Yard checked with Tokyo’s Organised Crime Section they discovered the address belonged to the girlfriend of a foreign resident. Enquiries to Australia showed Tommy Nadif had a criminal record, involving drugs…”

“Got it all sewn up, haven’t you?” said Kit.

“You don’t approve?”

“Not really…” Kit shook his head. “Although it’s obviously good to see you again.”

Amy’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Always the charmer,” she said, her voice making it clear she meant exactly the opposite. She tapped a cigarette from a packet and fired up before Kit had time to offer.

“Can I ask you something?” said Kit.

“You can ask.”

“Is the fact you’re here and we know each other a coincidence?”

Amy had the grace to look embarrassed. “No,” she admitted, blowing smoke towards the ceiling. “I got a call…”

“So you were sent because you knew me?”

“Wrong again,” said Amy. “I was sent because I knew Mary. My boss called the Canterville Gallery to see if anyone had been asking about Mary or Ben Flyte. Your name came up. That was the fourth time you got tagged and every tag shifts you up a level. We’re used to looking for subtle connections and delicate webs of coincidence. Few people hit code red quite as fast as you did.”

Great, thought Kit, the words frying pan and fire coming to mind.

“I need to ask why you’re in London,” said Amy. “And what makes you think Mary O’Mally might still be alive?”

“I don’t,” said Kit. “But her mother does. Unless it’s her father…I’m meant to help them find her.”

Amy sighed. “What do you know about Benjamin Flyte?”

“The cokehead?”

“Her boyfriend,” said Amy. “The one who mysteriously vanished around the same time. Had the two of you ever met?”

“Of course not,” said Kit. “I was in Japan. You think Mary’s disappearance has to do with Ben?”

“No,” said Amy. “We think it’s much more likely Ben Flyte’s disappearance has to do with Kate O’Mally. He wasn’t a nice man,” she added. “And we’ve got a record of the police being called to more than one disturbance. Mary refused to press charges.”

The Chinese student near the stairs made her final note and snapped shut her biology book, leaving in a tiny bubble of concentrated thought that prevented her from even noticing there were other people in the room. A girl in a black tunic arrived to clean up, carrying a broom and a washing-up bowl in which to collect the dirty plates and empty cups that still littered most tables. She seemed fairly surprised to see Kit and Amy. “We’re closing.”

Amy nodded. “I’ll just finish my coffee,” she said. “Then we’ll be gone.” She said this with such casual authority that the girl was nodding before Amy had even finished speaking. “In fact,” said Amy, “you might want to clean up downstairs first…”

Kit watched the girl disappear, still carrying her bowl and broom.

“Unregistered, probably an illegal,” said Amy, with a sigh. “Anyone who sounds as if they can cause trouble gets obeyed.” She shook her head, the first sign Kit had seen that Amy didn’t think everything was great in the world of policing.

“Tell me about Ben,” he suggested.

“Okay,” said Amy. “Some plod went to his flat in Chiswick to ask questions about Mary. The place was empty. I don’t mean it was deserted, it was empty, five rooms gutted of everything except a bed and a built-in wardrobe, even then, the mattress was gone.”

“Which suggests what?”

“High level competence,” said Amy. “The carpets were missing, the walls newly repainted. A local firm, paid in cash and instructed by phone. Worse than useless when questioned.”

“You think Mary organised it?”

Amy raised her eyebrows. “We considered that,” she admitted. “Only Ben Flyte was seen the day after Mary’s suicide…”

“Where?” demanded Kit.

“Here,” said Amy. “Well, at the flat you’re now using.”

Another five minutes of conversation produced the following: The police had closed the case on Mary O’Mally’s suicide. Amy had pulled the files. No, that wasn’t entirely legal. Amy lived in North Barnet, near where her ex grew up. Yes, she was recently divorced, divorce being infinitely more common in police work than solved cases. No, this was definitely not an official interview. Yes, she’d be happy to grab something to eat for old time’s sake.

On his way out, Kit remembered something from Sophie’s argument with Sergeant Samson, the uniformed officer she’d left standing at the door in Hogarth Mews.

“What’s Section 44?”

Amy stopped so abruptly that Kit almost ran into her. “It’s a clause from the old Terrorism Act that did away with the need for reasonable suspicion. Why?”

Kit shrugged. “Someone mentioned it,” he said.

They ate in a Pizza Express, surrounded by young men in wire glasses and suits, a handful of neatly dressed women who would have qualified as office ladies in Japan, and a raucous table of students whom the first two groups would obviously rather weren’t there. The only people to interest Kit were a couple who came in late, so obviously trying to be anonymous that it was impossible not to notice them.

“Famous?”

Amy shook her head. “Just two people having an affair. Soho’s full of them.”

“That what happened to you?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” said Amy. “But I was the one who climbed into the wrong bed. Also goes with the job, apparently. So Steve told me.”

Steve must be the ex-husband, unless he was the ex-lover.

“You want anything else to drink?”

Amy glanced from the empty Soave bottle to her almost-empty wineglass. “I think we’ve had enough,” she said. “Well, I have.” A margherita pizza flopped virtually untouched on the table in front of her. “Should have eaten some more if I was going to drink that much.”

Kit shrugged. “It’s not every day I meet an old friend.”

“Is that what I was?”

Something about Amy’s voice demanded an answer, so Kit provided one. “I think so,” he said. “But things move on.”

“Which is what we should do,” said Amy. “Or they’re going to shut this place around us.”

Alcohol reduces inhibitions. Other drugs do it better, but alcohol works when these are unavailable. The man who walked up Charlotte Street, turned left opposite the print shop, and cut through a narrow alley behind a pub, knew all about drugs and inhibitions, having shared his life with both.

The woman who walked beside him also knew, though Kit was coming to realise her knowledge of both was mostly hypothetical. A dozen snatches of conversation came and went, signifying nothing but thinly shared memories. It was hard to say exactly when lust crept into Kit’s mind, but creep in it did, arriving somewhere between a child’s cry and the sight of two men scuffling outside the doorway of a 1980s concrete block building.

“I should find you a taxi,” said Kit. It was late, Neku was at home, he’d already missed supper, and Kate O’Mally was bound to phone before breakfast.

“Yeah,” said Amy, nodding. And somehow her nod invited a kiss, the kiss turned into something more serious, and Kit found himself with one hand on her breast and Amy’s fingers holding him through his jeans.

“You know,” said Amy, “we could always go back to Mary’s flat.”

“No.” Kit shook his head.

Amy took a step back. “I thought you’d want…”

“The kid’s there.”

She stared at him, eyes uncertain. “I didn’t know you had a kid.”

I don’t. Well, thought Kit, maybe I do. Only not in the way you think. “It’s complicated,” he said.

Hotel3 was what you got if a London property company bought the gap between two Georgian town houses on the eastern edge of Fitzrovia, then in-filled with a thin cage of ferro-cement clad in smoked glass. The glass was mostly gone, replaced with panels of reconstituted limestone chosen to match the walls on either side, something the hotel’s original façade had failed to do.

In fifteen years Hotel3 had gone from uber chic to has been, and was now half way back, thus occupying a far more enviable place, as a comfort zone for those who’d originally made it fashionable.

“I’m not so sure that…”

“This is a good idea?” Amy smiled. “Of course it’s not. You should be at home, I’m meant to be writing a report on you, and we’re both drunk. But since when did Kit Nouveau worry about things like that?”

Since always.

“Come on,” she said.

Their room was tiny. A chocolate-coloured box, with burlap walls that were either a retro joke or the cutting edge of new design. The bed was a hand-made cherry wood futon, while the kidney-shaped basin came from Syracuse in Italy and was cut from the same horsehair marble as the bath. A sign by the door told them so.

What the sign didn’t mention was that their room looked out onto a fire escape, where kitchen staff gathered to smoke dope and swear loudly about the chef, the sous chef, and the unbelievably shitty pay on which the rest of them were expected to live. When the litany of complaints began for a second time, Amy shut the window with a bang.

“You want a shower or something?”

Kit shook his head. “You?”

“Not really,” said Amy, “unless you think I should…”

Her hair stank of cigarettes, anchovies and garlic from a shared bruschetta, and grease from not having been washed in a while. Without even realising he’d made the comparison, Yoshi floated ghost-like and squeaky clean into Kit’s mind.

“What?” Amy demanded.

“Nothing,” said Kit.

“Good,” she said. “You might want to kill the lights.”

Amy stayed standing while he undid her blouse, finding each pearl button by touch before moving to the next. After the blouse he unzipped her skirt and discovered through touch that she wore a thong. Her bra was pale in the half dark, underwired and unhooked at the front, because some things in life never changed.

Feeling one nipple harden, Kit cupped his fingers under a full breast, until she hooked her hand behind his head and pulled him close. Their kiss was deep and lasted for as long as it took him to slide his hand towards her panties.

Amy groaned. A second later, she said, “Don’t smile.”

“Why not?” asked Kit.

They kissed again, his fingers trapped between her thighs and her hand still wrapped in his hair. And then, as Amy broke for air, Kit edged aside the silk of her thong and slid two fingers into her.

“Fuck,” said Amy.

He grinned. “In a minute,” Kit said.

The kitchen staff came back sometime after midnight, to stand on the metal grid outside the closed window, insult each other and bitch about the chef. Although, after thirty seconds of listening to Amy, their bitching was reduced to the occasional whispered comment and stunned silence.

It was an impressive performance.

Having wrapped both arms around Kit’s neck and hooked her ankles over his, Amy clung so tight that every time Kit tried to pull back, he simply lifted her off the mattress. Yelping turned to something more urgent, as Amy grabbed his hips, jammed her nails through Kit’s skin, and began to ram him into her.

Spitting on his fingers, Kit reached under to spread Amy’s buttocks and eased one finger inside. So far as Kit could tell Amy’s orgasm was real. Her scream certainly was.

“Shit,” she said, when she got her breath back. “So that’s what closure feels like. I always wondered.” And before Kit had time to think that one through, she rolled him onto his back and dropped her head to his lap.

CHAPTER 43 — Saturday, 30 June

The dirt tracks and dunes of his original dreams had gone. Where once trucks had been driven by skeletons, a ragged matrix of dimly visible silver threads patterned the bowl of a silver sky.

Kit didn’t believe in souls or eternity, but was still blinded by both as they pulled tears from his sleeping eyes. His own soul had been lost in the sands, a voice told him. The last life taken in the cross-hairs had been his own, each shot splintering a little of what made him alive, until finally there was nothing left to splinter at all.

He had blown through Middle Morton that summer like a ghost, hungry for forgiveness and angry at the weakness this signified. The voice told him nothing that was new. He’d heard it all before. The voice was his.

Trapped in a half world between waking and sleep where everything was possible only because common sense refused to object, Kit opened his eyes to a tiny hotel room in Fitzrovia and tried to remember how he got there. And then he remembered.

The same way he usually did.

Amy lay across him, naked and snoring. A crumpled sheet was thrown back to reveal heavy breasts, a soft belly, and a butterfly tattoo on her hip. She still stank of unwashed hair and cigarettes, only now sex and sweat had added themselves to the mix.

About the only thing they’d missed out was tying each other to the bedstead, and that was only because Amy shrugged it off when Kit hesitated, offering him something far filthier instead. If Amy had bruises on her thighs, then Kit had scratches across his back and a vicious bite below his neck. Kit was wondering whether to wake Amy, or just start again anyway when a shrill buzz from his phone rewrote his day.

Only three people knew the number—Kate, Pat, and Neku. It was 8.00 on a Saturday morning, and even Kate would think twice about calling him that early.

“Me,” he announced, as he rolled out of bed.

All Kit got was silence.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hi, is that Kit?”

“Yes,” said Kit, realising he didn’t recognise the voice. “Who’s—”

“It’s Charlie. Are you still in London?”

“Of course I’m—” said Kit, then hesitated. Fire and ice, ripped sails where stars should be, the naked woman in the bed behind him, all irrelevant. He’d just remembered what the screen read when Charlie’s call came up.

Neku.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” said Charlie. “But she’s not here.”

“You slept over?”

“In your room,” he said, sounding instantly defensive.

“I’m not bothered about that,” said Kit. “How did you…”

“What is it?” Amy demanded. When Kit turned, he found her sitting up in bed behind him, arms folded across her breasts.

“Trouble,” said Kit, returning to his phone. “Look,” he said. “Charlie…how did you discover Neku was gone?”

“You had a delivery,” said the boy. “I went to get Neku because it needed a signature. The roof door was open but her hut was empty. This was about an hour ago.”

“An hour…”

“I thought she’d gone out. You know, to buy milk or something. So I waited to see if she’d come back. And then I noticed her bag on the floor of the little hut and thought I should call you.”

Charlie’s voice had grown formal and it took Kit a couple of seconds to realise why. He’d heard Amy. So now he knew Kit had missed supper to spend the night with someone. Since he’d gone to meet a police Inspector and not come back it didn’t take a genius to…

Kit sighed. “I’m on my way,” he said. Grabbing his trousers, he found his shirt and struggled into both. Yesterday’s socks were in a corner and his pants on the floor. He was just kicking his heels into his shoes when he caught sight of Amy’s face in the mirror, all hurt and hollow eyes. Someone else bailing out of her life.

When did he get to know this stuff? wondered Kit, turning back. “You coming with me?”

Amy shook her head, but some of the emptiness left her eyes.

“Look,” said Kit. “The kid’s gone missing. Think you can do something for me?”

“Maybe,” said Amy.

“I need the name of a police officer,” said Kit. “Large, slightly fat with a moustache and greased back hair…What?” he demanded, seeing her smile.

“Describes half the guys I know.”

“He was in an unmarked car on the M25 with whoever made that call to the DVLA. Pulled me over a few days back. It wasn’t the first time. A couple of days before that he came by Hogarth Mews asking about Mary O’Mally.”

“Section 44.”

“Yeah,” said Kit, “that’s the man.”

“I don’t suppose you got his registration plate?”

Kit gave her what he could remember, which was the year, the make of car, and a guess for the first two letters of what the plate might be.

“You want to know who he is?” Amy asked, jotting the details on a hotel pad by the bed.

“Also what he thinks I’ve done.”

“Maybe,” said Amy, “it’s what he thinks you’re going to do. You know, a lot of people are surprised you came back.” She hesitated on the edge of saying something else. “Take care,” Amy said finally.

“Say it,” said Kit.

“I just did.”

Peering from her flat, Sophie gave Kit one of the strangest looks he’d ever received and slammed her door without saying a word. A second later, she turned on her sound system and yanked up the volume, until whichever Rai mix she’d put on was loud enough to shake the stairs. Mixing with the enemy was obviously an unforgivable sin.

“Mrs. O’Mally just called,” said Charlie, when Kit opened the door to the flat. “I promised you’d call her back.”

Kit groaned; it was entirely instinctive. “What did you tell her?”

“Nothing,” said Charlie.

“She want to know who you were?”

The boy looked sheepish. “She already knew. Pat had called her last night. But I didn’t tell her about Neku,” he promised. “Well, not really. I said Neku was out shopping.”

“At 8.30 on a Saturday morning? What did Kate O’Mally say?”

“You should call her back. It’s in here,” Charlie added, nodding to the kitchen. “I signed for the package when I realised Neku had gone.” The teenager was torn between being cross with Kit and being worried; so far, worry was winning.

Kit left the box where it was, on the breakfast bar in the tiny kitchen, and went to look at Neku’s hut and the roof garden. The ivy on both sides of the door outside was undisturbed and none of the smaller pots had been knocked over. Neku’s sleeping bag had been left open but the zip still worked. When Kit checked the bottom of the bag a passport, an A–Z of London, and $1,500 fell out.

“Take these,” he said, giving the lot to Charlie.

A cheap laptop in the hut fired up the moment Kit turned it on and proceeded to download pages from Asahi Shimbun, news from BBC Asia, and half a dozen e-mails, mostly from Micki.

Stand off continues in Roppongi…Civil matter, says Tokyo’s new mayor…Opposition demands use of riot police…Dear Neku, No Neck and Tetsuo and Micki say hi…

A lift-up latch had let Kit into the hut and the latch still worked. There was no sign of anyone trying to force the door.

“What are you trying to find?” demanded Charlie.

“It’s what I’m hoping not to find.”

Charlie stared at him.

“Blood,” said Kit. “Torn clothes, broken fingernails, ripped hair, signs of a struggle…” He bent to pick up a bead from the boards. Blue, not threaded but held on a short length of silver wire by a complicated knot that allowed the bead to shift within a mesh cage without allowing it to fall free. It was the first sign that Neku had put up a struggle. At least that was what Kit thought, until Charlie told him otherwise.

“I don’t remember Neku wearing a bracelet,” said Kit, considering.

“It broke. She said you gave her the beads back.”

“I thought those came from her wedding gown,” Kit said, and found himself explaining about cos-play and how Neku used to dress.

“She hangs them from her phone,” Charlie said. “Only they fall off…she said so,” he added, when Kit looked doubtful. “Shouldn’t we open the parcel?”

“In a moment,” said Kit.

No one packed a box that big with something so light unless they were making a point. Taking a kitchen knife, Kit sliced away one side of the box, ignoring the tape holding the package shut.

“It might be a trigger,” he said, answering Charlie’s unspoken question.

Inside the box was crumpled paper, pages from a South London free sheet, and in the middle of these was an envelope. The envelope contained a photograph and Neku’s flat key. She was standing against a red brick wall in the picture, dressed in her jeans and black jersey and her eyes were open.

“Good,” said Kit.

“How can you say that?” asked Charlie, then stopped. “Oh fuck,” he said. “What were you expecting?”

Neku naked. Neku dead. Neku in chains.

“Nothing specific,” said Kit. “But I can think of half a dozen shots that would be infinitely worse.”

The message on the back was simple, a telephone number and a time. A handful of words warned Kit what would happen if he went to the police. “Are you planning to go home?” Kit asked Charlie, who stared at him.

“How can I leave now?”

“Good,” said Kit, “because I need you here.” Someone had to be around to answer the phone and keep Kate at bay. “But are you meant to be somewhere else?”

Charlie shook his head. “My mob are in Italy. Mum might call the house, but she’ll be cool if I’m not around to answer. She’ll just call my mobile to find out where I am.”

“And you’ll lie?”

“Obviously.”

“Right,” Kit said, stripping off his shirt, choosing a new one, and shrugging himself into one of Ben Flyte’s old jackets. “Keep the flat door locked. Don’t answer the buzzer, and if Kate O’Mally calls back tell her Neku and I have gone shopping.”

“That’s what I told her last time.”

“Well, tell her again.”

CHAPTER 44 — Saturday, 30 June

It was hot, the air was sour, and London stank of fried onions, too much aftershave, diesel, and dog shit, maybe it always did. Saturday morning shoppers filled Oxford Street, mostly tourists and teenage girls, every second one of whom reminded him of Neku.

Men in jeans and black tee-shirts crowded a table on Dean Street, talking into their phones, checking their mail and skimming the headlines in that day’s papers. The sun was out and people were smiling, as the city changed into something more relaxed and less English, which it always did at any pretence of good weather.

Tomorrow would bring thunderstorms or smog to send everyone back to their shells, but most Londoners had grown blasé about the meteorological equivalent of mood swings, though that hadn’t stopped a newsagent running his own news board for last Wednesday’s Standard that simply read, Weather Buggered.

Kit was walking the streets in search of answers. He was looking for them inside his head, in the eyes of those coming the other way on crowded pavements, even in the mirrored world he could see in shop windows. So far he’d collected enough wrong answers to make him believe it was only a matter of time before he stumbled over one that was right.

According to Charlie, a mathematician at Cambridge once said that if people saw only the one-in-a-hundred answers that proved correct, then the answer obviously looked extraordinary, because the ninety-nine failures went unseen. It was like videoing yourself throwing four dice, and editing the result to retain only the times when every number came up six.

Kit had a feeling the boy meant to be supportive. In the three hours Kit had to waste before he could make the call, he stamped an unconscious pattern of anxiety into crowded streets from Euston Road in the north to Leicester Square and Piccadilly in the south, throwing dice in his head, making deals with God, wondering what he could offer in return for Neku’s safety.

George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf had both lived in the same house in Fitzroy Square, just at different times. An Englishman was once briefly King of Corsica. The dining club founded by artist Joshua Reynolds was now Blacks, a drinking den for journalists. Soho got its name from the Duke of Monmouth’s habit of calling So-Ho when hunting. In between the dice and deal making, Kit learned back history from heritage plaques on the walls.

Every plan that came to his mind got dismissed for one reason or another. Yoshi always insisted that ideas, like everything else, followed a path made from tiny steps that looked obvious only in retrospect.

Every bowl she made was the result of a hundred bowls she chose not to make. It followed that every act, whether the finding of a new proof for a complex mathematical problem or a twist of vision that turned one school of art into another was a result of endless failure. It was the unconscious editing of the process that made the outcome look clever, not the process itself.

It also followed, at least it did to Yoshi, that every problem, no matter how intricate, could be broken into smaller pieces. How these pieces fit provided one with the answer.

Try as Kit might, he couldn’t make it work. He had the problem, he had a willingness to shuffle endless permutations of what might be behind Neku’s kidnapping, but he couldn’t make his pieces fit. Who was he threatening by asking questions about Mary? Nobody, at least nobody Kit could see. So he tried to tie Neku’s disappearance to what had happened to his bar in Tokyo, but that made even less sense than before.

Outside the French Protestant Church on Soho Square, while still worrying about what he should do, Kit realised it was after twelve and he was five minutes late making his call.

“It’s me,” he said. “I got your note.”

“Ahh…At last, my friend. You’re a difficult man to find. Where are you now?”

“In Soho.” Silence followed. Maybe this was meant to make Kit nervous. If so, it worked. All the same, Kit made himself wait.

“I was sorry to hear about Mary,” said the man. “She was a nice girl. Still, you seem to have found yourself someone else.”

“What do you want from me?” Kit demanded.

“Ben, come on. Let’s not make this harder than it need be.”

“I’m not…” Common sense kicked in a split second ahead of Kit telling the man he wasn’t Ben Flyte. Common sense, and sudden hollowness in his gut. Life had just got very messy indeed.

“You know,” said the voice. “You and Sergeant Samson have to be stupid to keep jerking me around. Very stupid.”

The accent was foreign. East European, maybe.

“No one’s jerking you around,” said Kit. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” He heard muffled voices and an unexpected shriek of feedback, followed by a sharp command. The noise fell silent and inside the silence was music, a vacuum cleaner, and the sound of glasses being stacked.

He was being called from a bar or club, somewhere with a sound system and an open mic. Not a huge surprise. In Kit’s experience clubs were ideal for laundering money and fronting less legit enterprises. Drugs could be confiscated and recycled, girls hired as dancers and then required to diversify, protection rackets marketed as concern for the local good.

Always the first industry to embrace global opportunities, crime had taken the remains of the Soviet Union and created modern Russia, introduced the Balkans to free market values, plus bullets. Whole governments in Central America owed their existence to its patronage, and it worked so seamlessly alongside religion and commerce that most barely noted its existence. Half of Japan still couldn’t tell the difference between crime and politics.

“Mr. Flyte, I want my consignment back. Otherwise…”

Yes, Kit knew about that bit. “Let me talk to the kid.”

“She’s sleeping,” said the man. It was the first thing he’d said Kit didn’t believe.

“This consignment,” said Kit. “What if it’s not all there?”

“Then we kill her anyway,” said the voice. “Call me when it’s ready. You have twenty-four hours.”

“Wait,” Kit demanded. “Please…”

“Why?”

“It’s going to take longer.” Kit needed time, more time than this man was going to give him. Much more. “I need two days,” he said. “What you want is hidden. It will take me two days to recover it.”

“Thirty-six hours,” the man said. “Maximum.” A click told Kit the conversation was over. After a minute or so he remembered to close his phone.

The South London Gazette covered an area of fifty square miles in total, from Lambeth, through Southwark, and across to Lewisham. It was a free sheet, delivered weekly to over 150,000 households. Kit knew, he’d talked to its advertising manager, a woman who sounded as if she habitually worked Saturdays and had been slightly displeased that Kit might think otherwise.

The paper used a basic flatplan, she told him, with the facility to swap stories at a local level. The version in which Kit was interested covered an area of 12,000 households on the Lambeth/Southwark borders. And yes, she’d be happy to e-mail him a distribution map.

Focus, Kit told himself. Find yourself a plan.

He might actually have intended to return to the Queen’s Head, an old pub in the shadow of the Telecom Tower, or it might have been an accident, his feet following a path so faded he only remembered the local landmarks when he saw them. Mary O’Mally had taken him here. It had been the O’Mallys’ local before Kate moved the family out of London.

At the till two members of staff were discussing a third. “Plus,” said the man, “he fucks anything that moves.”

“And you don’t?”

“Well, nothing that goes baa, moo, or Mummy.”

The woman laughed. “When I was a kid in Sydney,” she said. “We fucked but that was just pretending to be grown-up. It wasn’t like we really liked them or anything…”

Speak for yourself, thought Kit.

Cutting between tourists, he chose a table that let him sit with his back to the wall, then took a long look around the pub. No one was smoking. Half of the clientele were drinking Diet Coke or wine. The locals he remembered inhabiting the place had been reduced to a hardcore cluster of old men near the bar.

London wasn’t a city Kit recognised anymore.

Flipping open Neku’s laptop, Kit logged into his mail. Anti-ageing drugs, Chinese porn, a note from the consigliore of a Brazilian crime family offering unspecified riches in return for borrowing Kit’s bank account.

The note from Hiroshi Sato was brief.

A single link to an English-language news story on Tokyo Today. No Neck, Micki, Tetsuo, and half a dozen others had been arrested and unexpectedly released. A teenager had been killed in a battle to retake the site, but since he was bozozoku no one was making much of a fuss. A second note, from Micki, told the same tale in rather more breathless prose. What should Tommy and his friends do if things got really ugly? she wanted to know.

Well, No Neck wanted to know, really.

“Nothing.” His first reply seemed too abrupt, so Kit sipped his brandy and thought about it. What should No Neck do? More to the point, what could No Neck do? Other than marry Micki, find himself a proper job, and walk away from his friendship with Kit…

“There was an uyoku van,” Kit wrote finally. “Gold sides, with the imperial mon picked out in black. See what you can find out about it.” Still too bald, so Kit added, “And take care of yourself…”

The last e-mail Kit opened contained a map showing a tight jumble of streets in the shadow of a new overpass. Layers of history in a muddle of names, as Napier and Maffeking, old generals and battles intersected with Nelson Mandela Drive. Somewhere in that jumble of streets was the bar where Neku was being held. All Kit had to do was find it.

He was aware just how absurd that sounded.

Clubs and pubs needed to be licenced. A place with live music probably needed a different type of licence again. Someone would have that list. It’s all about small steps, Kit reminded himself.

Calling the police station where Amy worked, Kit hit his next problem—no one had heard of her. “You say she claimed to work here?” The Inspector on the other end was more interested in this than anything else Kit had to say.

“Yes,” said Kit.

“And you’re definitely not a journalist?” The Inspector was tapping away at a keyboard, so he had to be checking on Amy, unless he was simply getting on with his own work.

“I’m a friend.”

“Right,” said the man. “Give me a number and I’ll call you back.” Five minutes stretched into ten and then into twenty; when this became half an hour, Kit stopped bothering to watch the time and began watching people instead.

A Saturday crowd came and went, deals were done, four girls went to the bathroom together and came out looking much happier. Money or drugs seemed the obvious answer to what Kit was expected to produce. A bar in South London was the where. In Japan, kidnapping was the preserve of hardcore criminals. Over here, Kit wasn’t sure, maybe amateurs got in on the act as well. He needed someone who would know.

When his mobile buzzed he got her.

“You’ve been looking for me?” It was Amy, her voice guarded enough to give Kit pause.

“Look,” said Kit, “I need some help.”

“Yes,” Amy said. “I enjoyed supper too.”

I enjoyed?

In the background behind Amy, a printer was clattering and half a dozen men discussed flack jackets, raising their voices to be heard above the noise. It sounded like any office, apart from the number of times Guv, Ma’am, and Boss got dropped into the conversation. A conversation that stumbled when Amy said, “No, there’s nothing I need to tell you…”

Someone sniggered. “Hey,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a domestic spat.”

“Shut the fuck up,” snapped Amy, remembering to add, “sir.” Unless that was meant to be part of the insult.

Oh shit, indeed.

“I’m at work,” said Amy. “Call me later.”

“This can’t wait,” Kit told her. “I need to know about Ben Flyte. Everything you’ve got.”

“Why?”

“Because whoever’s taken Neku thinks that’s who I am.”

“Unlikely,” said Amy. “Ben Flyte’s dead.”

“He’s what?”

“Murdered,” she said. “Six months ago. We just haven’t released the news. If I call you back it will be in five minutes. Go somewhere private.”

A courtyard behind the Queen’s Head was stacked with metal barrels and mixer crates full of empty bottles. Its walls were high enough to muffle traffic from the street beyond. No one stopped Kit when he walked through the kitchens and took up position against the wall.

“Kit,” he announced, answering his phone on the first ring.

CHAPTER 45 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

“I’m sorry,” said Luc.

“For what?” Lady Neku had never met anyone like the boy for apologising. He’d been sorry about tripping on the stairs, although she got in his way, rather than the other way round. He regretted taking up her time and not wanting to practise with Nico, Petro, and Antonio in the duelling room. Now he was apologising again. Hadn’t anyone ever told him never apologise and never explain?

“What am I sorry for?” said Luc. “I’m sorry for everything.”

Lady Neku laughed. “You can’t be,” she said. “No apology would be long enough.” She watched him think that through.

“You’re not what I expected,” Luc said finally.

“Really…what did you expect?”

Oh God, thought Lady Neku. Now she’d embarrassed him. They were loitering in a corridor that led from the duelling room to the archives, which was an old name for an area now mostly given over to rubbish.

“Antiques,” her mother called them. “Heirlooms.”

Rubbish all the same.

“I don’t know,” said Luc. “Someone…”

“Weirder?”

He grinned at that. “How long do you think they’ll be busy?” Luc asked, glancing at the entrance to another corridor. One that led to the throne room, where Lord d’Alambert and Lady Neku’s mother were locked in discussion. It amused Lady Neku that Luc had such trouble orientating himself in her habitat. A lifetime of exploring corridors and levels had imprinted a mental map into her subconscious. Unless, of course, it had been imprinted earlier and she’d been born with the thing.

“Hours, I guess,” said Lady Neku. “Maybe days if my mother is feeling difficult. It depends how much negotiating they have left to do.”

Luc looked shocked. “What’s to negotiate?” he asked. “The major domos agreed everything in advance.”

Lady Neku was about to say this was the first she’d heard of it, only she’d been saying this a lot recently and it worried her to discover Luc knew things she didn’t, so she swallowed her comment.

“Come on,” she said instead. “I want to show you something.”

“What?” demanded Luc. He was still asking when Lady Neku reached the drop zone. A dozen opalescent pods sat gathering dust, while the thirteenth was already releasing its door.

“Get in,” Lady Neku said.

“You’re joking…”

“Why would I do that?”

As Lady Neku watched, the door sprang open and its inner membrane began to nictate. The pods liked to do these things for themselves, so Lady Neku made herself wait. Once door and membrane were open, Lady Neku reached for a grab bar and hauled herself inside, sitting patiently while the pod grew straps.

“Yuck,” said Luc, watching sticky tendrils tie themselves tight around Lady Neku’s upper arms and shoulders.

“It brushes off,” she promised. “Come on, climb in.”

Luc did, reluctantly, only realising too late that he should have entered from the other side; after all, that was where the pod had grown a door for him.

“It’s okay,” said Lady Neku, as Luc began to climb down. “Just clamber over me…and hold tight,” she added.

Luc was about to say something when the door membranes finished regrouping, both doors sealed, and the floor fell away, turning the pod a hundred and eighty degrees, before releasing it towards the planet below; which had suddenly become the planet above.

“Warned you,” Lady Neku said.

Slow entry speeds were essential. Even so, the friction on the falling pod was sufficient to ionize its surface and create a luminous bubble that trailed colours behind them like a broken rainbow.

“Is this safe?” said Luc, looking at dials that had begun to spin wildly.

Such a child. Did he really think pods came with dials on the original spec? Lady Neku considered admitting the dials had been her idea and she’d demanded needles that spun, but decided not to bother.

“Well,” she said. “This is my tenth drop and I’m still alive.”

Luc didn’t seem to find this comforting.

After a while, Lady Neku flicked out the wings and had the pod roll through another hundred and eighty degrees, changing her descent to a wide spiral. The forces on her body felt more natural that way.

Cracks in the earth became ruined towns and those towns expanded to reveal districts and finally roads and even houses. Only the very largest buildings could be seen from this height, but half of one town was obviously buried by sand and an earthquake had ripped another across its edge like badly torn paper.

“Welcome to Katchatka Segment,” said Lady Neku. “Glory of Planet Earth.” Leaning forwards, she brushed one finger across the window and sat back as a living town spread itself across glass.

“Shit,” said Luc. “What’s that?”

“History,” Lady Neku said, removing the town with another brush of her finger. “What used to be…how old are you really?” she asked.

“Sixteen,” said Luc, sounding offended. “You know that.”

“And me?” She was going to have to do something about his habit of changing colour. Luc couldn’t keep turning pink at every question, or her brothers would never leave him alone.

“Fifteen,” she told him. “I’m fifteen.” Lady Neku paused. “Do you believe that?”

Luc nodded. “What’s not to believe?”

“What if I’m a copy?” said Lady Neku. “Then how old am I?”

Luc looked at her.

“Okay,” said Lady Neku. “Think about it…Fifteen, plus the age of my mother when the copy was made. Right?”

The boy shrugged.

“But what if my mother was a copy, then how does it work? My age, plus her age when I was copied, plus the age of her mother when she was copied? That would make me…” Lady Neku began shuffling numbers in her head, only to abandon her sum when the pod caught the outer edge of a massive dust cloud.

“Turbulence,” she said. “You might feel sick.”

“I already do.”

As she grinned, Lady Neku watched Luc make himself release his grip on the chair; he minded her noticing his knuckles had gone white.

“Don’t worry,” said Lady Neku.

“I’m not—” Luc caught himself. “Of course I’m worried,” he said. “We’re falling out of the sky in a pod the size of a large table and we don’t seem to have an engine.” He looked at her. “We do have a Casimir coil, don’t we?”

“No,” said Lady Neku, shaking her head. She’d have shaken it whatever the answer, but for once the truth was on her side. The pods were strictly one use only and that was down.

“Oh fuck…” Luc’s voice was small.

Come on, Lady Neku wanted to say. How can you miss it? Surely Luc had spotted Schloss Omga by now. It was that enormous castle crawling up the side of a mountain.

“Luc,” she said, and when Luc stayed silent Lady Neku leaned over to touch his shoulder. It was rigid.

“Leave me alone.”

“Come on,” said Lady Neku. “You can tell me what’s really wrong.”

Faded blue eyes turned towards her. A sky magnified by sadness and something else, something darker. “I’m afraid.”

“Why?” asked Lady Neku, meaning, Why now, why here… God, she knew what she meant.

“Because I was born afraid,” said Luc. “And I didn’t think it would happen like this.”

“What?”

“Death.” Luc shrugged. “She told me you’d try to kill me.” For someone talking about his own fate the boy seemed almost resigned. Afraid, but resigned, there was probably a term for it.

“Who did?” Lady Neku demanded.

“My mother, that’s why she refused to come. She doesn’t trust your family.” Luc shrugged again. “She told my father it was all a trick.” His broken smile was heartbreaking, and the really weird thing was that Luc obviously had no idea how heartbreaking. Nico would have been milking it his entire life.

“We’re not going to die,” said Lady Neku. “And I’m certainly not here to kill you.”

“But we’re out of control.” He gestured at the altimeter’s spinning needles. “You said it yourself, we’ve got no power unit.”

“Luc!”

He wasn’t listening.

“It must be odd,” he said, a moment later. “You know, being able to back up and be more than one person. I find it tough enough just being myself.”

“I’m just me.”

“Yes,” said Luc. “But there’s another you back at High Strange. How did you agree which one should die?”

“We’re not going to die!” shouted Lady Neku.

“Of course we are. You can’t just fall out of the sky. Someone lied to you,” he said. “About not crashing.”

“Luc,” said Lady Neku, grabbing the boy’s hand. “There’s only one of me and we’re not going to crash.” When Luc stayed silent, she gripped his fingers so hard he tried to pull them away. “I’ve made this drop ten times,” she said fiercely. “It’s going to be fine. The castle will catch us.”

“What castle?”

“That one,” she said, pointing down.

It took seventeen minutes to fall from High Strange to earth. The pods had enough strength to survive the howling winds that turned Katchatka Segment’s lower atmosphere into a danger zone, after that it was simply a matter of sitting out the fall.

Each of the families had owned a land base and an overworld back in the early days. These talked to each other, even when the families themselves refused to communicate. Lady Neku had been so surprised by this that she made Schloss Omga provide proof. A history lesson followed. The land bases talked to each other and to individual nodes on the filter, which was what Schloss Omga called the overworld mesh of Nawa-no-ukiyo.

The glitch was not that the bases and nodes could talk to each other, it was that Lady Neku could talk directly to them, without needing to go through a major domo interface.

“Neku…”

“What?” she said, dragging her thoughts back to the pod.

“We’re slowing.”

“Of course we are.” Tapping the window Lady Neku woke it up again. “Look,” she said. “We’ve arrived.”

Spread out below was a massive spiral that twisted to a blunt point, while a leathery fringe around its base locked the castle to rock. A thousand people had lived in its upper levels. Eight members of the Katchatka family, a hundred military modifies, and eight hundred and ninety-two fugees who provided service in return for shelter.

“Wait,” Lady Neku instructed. “And watch.”

So Luc stared intently at the shell below him. “That’s a Viviparus malleatus,” he said finally.

“A what?”

“A trapdoor snail. We’ve got them in our koi pond.” He glanced from Schloss Omga to the mountains on both sides and then at the altimeter dials in front of him, which had slowed to a lazy twirl. “It’s vast.”

Lady Neku smiled. “Yes,” she said. “It is.” Looking across at Luc, she wondered if the boy realised she was still holding his hand.

CHAPTER 46 — Saturday, 30 June

Kit counted off the time by the bells from St. Dominic’s, a new church on the corner of Conde Street, in what had once been a carpet warehouse. After a single peal for quarter past two and a slightly longer peal for half past, the landlord of the Queen’s Head finally arrived to see what the stranger was doing at the back of his pub.

Since the after-lunch staff had been stepping out for cigarette breaks on a regular basis and most had scowled at the sight of a stranger this was not unexpected.

“Police business,” said Kit, barely bothering to take his eyes from a narrow passage back to the road. He must have sounded convincing because the landlord turned back, and whatever was said when he got inside, that was the end of the cigarette breaks.

Motorbikes, rickshaws, taxis, and more white vans than Kit could count rolled down the road. The third time he saw the same shiny black Volvo, Kit left his hiding place and waited for its return at a pavement table on Conde Street.

“Where have you been?”

“Watching,” said Kit, although what he really wanted to say was, Just who the fuck is this?

“Afternoon.” Flipping up her arm, an old woman angled it backwards to shake, while simultaneously pulling away from the curb.

Amy shut her eyes.

The driver’s grip was strong, though liver spots splattered her wrist like dung. Greying hair had been cut tight to her neck, and she wore heavy dark glasses to shade her eyes. “Brigadier Miles,” said the woman, introducing herself. “I gather someone thinks you’re Ben Flyte?”

Kit nodded, catching her gaze in the rearview mirror.

“You’re certain about that?”

“Yes,” said Kit, “I’m certain.”

“Interesting,” said the Brigadier, turning her attention back to the road. Hanging a quick left, the woman filtered right at the lights and checked her mirror; whatever she saw satisfied her.

“Got a lighter?” she asked Kit.

He shook his head.

“Use this one,” she said, passing him something cheap and disposable, then followed it with a packet of Lucky Strikes. “I need a cigarette,” she added, when he just looked at her.

By the time the Volvo had put Piccadilly behind them and the city’s open spaces had switched from Green Park on the left to Hyde Park on the right, the car was filled with smoke and Kit had worked out that the Suzuki up ahead and the Merc two vehicles behind were part of an escort.

As the Suzuki peeled off, to be replaced almost instantly by a different bike, and the Merc fell back a place to allow another car in, before peeling off itself, he realised that at least four vehicles were shadowing this one and that a traffic helicopter overhead seemed to be paying close attention to their route.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To have a quiet talk,” said Brigadier Miles, and left Kit wondering why Amy refused to meet his eye.

“Used to be bigger,” the old woman announced, a while later.

“What did?”

“Those.” She pointed at plastic cows on a distant roof. “Used to be life size, only they kept causing crashes and had to be changed. Pity really.” Sliding down a side road, she took a roundabout rather too fast and roared back the way she’d come, leaving the cows a vanishing memory on the far side of a divided highway. “It’s about half an hour from here,” she said.

“What is?”

“Boxbridge…”

A Lutyens copy of a small Elizabethan manor, Boxbridge House was built from red brick that had weathered to a shade of pink. Ivy softened its stark façade and its gravel had been raked to Zen-garden smoothness in front of the main door. It was the house that Seven Chimneys would love to be, and maybe would become if Kate O’Mally’s home survived long enough to avoid developers and find its own soul.

But before Kit, the old woman, or Amy could reach Boxbridge they had to clear the gate house. Also designed by Edwin Lutyens, this featured a pantiled roof and a central arch under which visitors must pass. The gun slit cut into the arch was definitely not in Lutyens’s original plan, nor was the steel hut hidden beneath camouflage netting a hundred paces beyond.

Dipping his head, a soldier with a sub-machine gun took a good look inside the Volvo, before nodding. “Madame,” he said.

Brigadier Miles nodded back.

Two more soldiers waited at the front door and both carried H& K assault weapons and wore body armour. Kit was beginning to understand why flack jackets had been such a topic of conversation.

“Welcome to HQ Organised and Serious,” the Brigadier said.

The entrance hall was panelled in oak and its floor was marble, not large slabs but tiny black and white tiles set into patterns that looked Greek. A corridor led off the hall and it was down this that Brigadier Miles led Kit, with Amy following behind.

“My office,” the Brigadier said.

A small library from the look of it. Cloth-bound books ringed all four walls in faded shades of red and blue. A dark and over-varnished Stag at Bay above the marble fireplace shed gilt like dandruff onto a mantelpiece below. A desk in the corner was buried under paperwork and old coffee cups. It looked too structured in its chaos to be entirely real.

“Please take a seat.”

Brigadier Miles indicated a wooden chair, so Kit chose a battered leather one instead, which was a mistake because it immediately put Kit lower than either of the others.

The old woman sighed.

“We have a problem,” she said. “One that you can help us solve.” Glancing towards a collection of files, Brigadier Miles considered something and then pulled a packet of cigarettes from her jacket pocket, lighting one with an ormolu desk lighter. “The police photographs are ugly,” she said, exhaling smoke at a nicotine-yellow ceiling. “So we’ll spare you those…”

Amy nodded.

“Let’s start at the top,” said the Brigadier. “Six months ago a corpse was found beside the M25. The body was male, aged somewhere between thirty and forty and had been badly mutilated. Its fingers were missing, someone had cut away the face and broken the lower jaw to make it easier to extract teeth. Scotland Yard tried for a DNA match but came up blank.”

“Ben Flyte,” said Kit.

“We think so. Actually,” said the Brigadier, “we know, because seven weeks ago Scotland Yard finally asked a member of Flyte’s family for DNA to help make a match. My problem is I thought he’d been killed by the man who telephoned you.”

Kit looked up. “You know who that is?”

“Oh yes,” said the Brigadier. “We know. And the fact he thinks Mr. Flyte is still alive is extremely convenient. Now, Inspector Avenden tells me this child is being held somewhere in South London, in a club—at least, so you believe. Do you want to tell me how you reached that conclusion?”

Kit scowled at Amy.

“What did you expect me to do?” she said.

Raising her eyebrows, the Brigadier asked, “Is there anything about you two I should know?” It probably didn’t help that Kit and Amy shook their heads at exactly the same time.

“Neku’s photograph was packed in pages from last week’s South London Gazette,” said Kit. “The Lambeth edition. The box in which it came originally contained Walkers Crisps, 144 packets. When I took the call I could hear music and the sound of crates being shifted…”

“He’s good,” said the Brigadier.

Amy’s smile was sour. “Yes, so I said.”

“We run a program,” said Brigadier Miles. “It identifies someone who knows someone who knows someone we need to contact. It works by weighting age, location, schooling, and background and then assigning a score. Amy came out on top. So we borrowed her…”

Kit blinked. “From the police?”

Amy bit her lip. “From Ceausescu Towers. I’m a recruiter on the university milk run. ‘Come and work for Mi6, it’s not dangerous and the perks are great. Olympic size swimming pool, gym, discount shopping mall. Join us and you’ll never need to leave the office again.’”

She didn’t sound too impressed by her job.

“Why not just call me yourself?” asked Kit, looking at the Brigadier, who ground out her cigarette and immediately lit another. Her smile made Amy’s look positively sweet.

“You’re a deserter,” she said. “A known link to the Yakuza. You returned to Britain alongside last season’s version of the Kray Twins. A woman the Sun has managed to turn into the UK’s most unlikely cultural icon. Just imagine your reaction if we’d called by Hogarth Mews suggesting a chat.”

“So you sent Sergeant Samson instead?”

“We’ll get to him in a minute. But first, would you like some tea or coffee?”

“No,” said Kit, “I’d like to know what you’re doing about Neku.”

“Nothing,” said the Brigadier.

Kit stared at her.

“We know your friend is still alive,” said Brigadier Miles. “And I’ve borrowed a pair of SBS to watch the club. If things look risky I’ll have them extract her.”

“What are their chances of getting Neku out alive?”

Beside him, Amy winced.

“They’re the best,” the Brigadier said. “Statistically, the SBS extract more hostages with fewer casualties than any other European force. You really want that child in danger, I’ll have them withdraw.”

He’d offended her.

Damn it. Kit sat back in his chair. Walk with a man a hundred paces and he’ll tell you at least seven lies. “You know who Neku is, of course?” His voice was sharp enough to make both Brigadier Miles and Amy glance up.

“Who?” demanded Amy.

“Kate O’Mally’s granddaughter.”

The Brigadier ground her cigarette against the bottom of a glass ashtray, until it was almost flat. “For real?”

“Oh yes,” said Kit. “I can just see it,” he said. “If it all goes wrong. Kate O’Mally on the news, raging about her injured granddaughter and talking about how today’s authorities aren’t up to the job.”

Amy looked slightly sick. “That’s why Mrs. O’Mally was in Tokyo?”

“Of course,” said Kit, meeting her gaze. “She wanted to meet Neku.” It was all he could do not to cross his fingers behind his back.

“But she’s…” Amy was about to say Japanese. Only she put one hand to her mouth instead. “Oh, fuck,” said Amy. “We all got it wrong, didn’t we? It wasn’t you at all. Neku is Josh’s kid.”

Kit smiled. He’d been dealt the weakest hand of cards possible, only to discover what actually counted was the pattern on the back.

CHAPTER 47 — Saturday, 30 June

Lighting a cigarette, Brigadier Miles threw her dead lighter and now-empty packet into a metal bin, ignoring the noise this made. A cup of Earl Grey tea sat on a desk in front of her, beside two biscuits so dry they might as well be made from cardboard. She seemed to be waiting for something.

After a while Kit realised it was his full attention.

The basic rule seemed to be that the Brigadier ran the operation and Kit did what he was told. Since this involved being fitted with a body mic and wheeling sixty kilograms of recently confiscated heroin into a lap dancing club owned by a murderous gangster, he was less than happy with the Brigadier’s take on this.

“It’s not going to happen,” Kit said.

“Why not?” The old woman sounded genuinely surprised.

“Because I won’t do it.”

Beyond the window a soldier mowed grass and beyond that a row of young oaks screened a high mesh fence, with rolls of razor wire along its top. A small Victorian folly behind the wire had been turned into a guard tower. Kit doubted very much if Boxbridge appeared on any of the official lists of government property or supported itself from a declared budget.

“You don’t have much choice,” said Amy. “Given that Brigadier Miles is all that stands between you and arrest for desertion. The Ministry of Defence isn’t wild about people who run away.”

“I didn’t run,” said Kit. “And they’ll be even less happy when I’ve talked to the press.”

“No.” Brigadier Miles shook her head. “Don’t do that. The court will just double your sentence. I’ve seen it happen,” she added. “Help me and we’ll arrange an honourable discharge.”

“And if I refuse?”

“I talked to Whitehall this morning,” said the Brigadier. “Desertion in war is a capital offence.”

Kit snorted. “That wasn’t a war,” he said. “It was three weeks of televised bullshit, followed by as many years of avoidable chaos. More of us got killed by our own side or accident than by Iraqis. The real casualties came after the conflict supposedly ended.”

The Brigadier looked surprised. “I didn’t have you pegged as a pacifist.”

“I’m not,” said Kit. “I just like my wars to have two sides and an adequate reason.” He was perched at the edge of his chair, fingers twisted so tight it felt like he might snap his own bones. Sit back, Kit told himself, but his body refused the command.

“Madame,” said Amy, “do you think this is a good idea?”

“No,” she said. “But he’s the only chance we’ve got, and short of blowing down the door, Kit’s our best way into the club. But if you want your doubts made formal, I’ll have them noted.”

Amy shook her head.

“We need the owner to admit he’s dealing drugs,” said Brigadier Miles, stubbing out her cigarette. “Without that we’re helpless. You have to get him on tape.”

“Why not just bug the place?” asked Kit.

“It’s swept, the phone lines tested for central station taps. He’s got fooler loops on every window and wall. Even if he didn’t, the bloody music is so loud we’d have trouble isolating speech to a standard acceptable in courts.” Brigadier Miles sounded more irritated than angry. “It’s got to be taped in situ.”

“All I want,” said Kit, “is Neku out of there.”

“You don’t care about someone dealing heroin?”

Kit shook his head.

“We’re still your best bet,” said Amy. “The Brigadier knows this man. He’s never left a witness alive in his life. That’s why he’s still jetting round Europe and she’s here talking to you.”

Shutting his eyes, Kit tried to work things through. Four dice, a hundred throws, surely he had to hit four sixes soon?

What should I do?

“If you don’t know,” said the Brigadier, “I can’t tell you.”

So Kit told her about his history of wrong calls. He really didn’t mean to, it just happened. He started with the difference between an M24 weapons system and the earlier M21; both being bolt action, five shots in the magazine and one in the chamber.

The M24 came with a choice of sights, a night scope, and the one he’d been issued, the basic 10x42 Leupold M3A, with adjustment dials for elevation, focus, and wind. Kit’s voice was so matter of fact he could have been discussing the man mowing the lawns outside.

“There are only a few things I’m good at,” said Kit, “and running a bar and hitting targets top the list. I can take out a man’s brain stem at five hundred paces, while he’s still scratching his balls. Take out a child’s too…”

“A child?”

Kit nodded, then described his tenth kill. Exactly half way down his second clip, ten hits in three days and not a shot wasted. A burning truck, with a boy at the wheel and the clown-faced corpse of a small girl beside him. Clown faced because fire does that, it pulls back the face into a rictus grin.

He talked about the flames, the acrid smoke that hugged itself to a dip in the dunes and closed his throat. How a two-man patrol had found him blackened and voiceless, trying to pull corpses from the truck. It wasn’t their fault they thought he was Iraqi.

“Were they British?” Amy asked.

Kit shook his head.

“American?” The Brigadier sounded worried.

“Not that either,” said Kit. “I don’t know what they were…” He shrugged. “Azeri, maybe; perhaps Georgian.” Kit felt ashamed, as if he should have known the nationality of the soldiers he killed.

Brigadier Miles sighed. “Could have been worse,” she said. “Much worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were Iraqi. In fact, I’m sure they were. Almost captured by Iraqis,” said the old woman, trying the words aloud. “Sent home, cracked up, went missing. Sounds convincing to me.”

Outside the window the mowing of the lawn had finally finished. Someone had brought fresh tea and biscuits and left them on the Brigadier’s desk. All of the cups had been used and one sat empty next to Kit’s hand, so he guessed he must have drunk it.

“We’ll get Neku back for you,” promised Amy.

“All you have to do,” said Brigadier Miles, “is trust us.”

The first photograph showed a thin man in his early thirties. Curling black hair fell over the high collar of a leather coat that was cut like the jacket of a suit. He looked vaguely Arab, maybe southern European. “This,” said Amy, “is Armand de Valois.”

“French?”

“Originally Russian,” the Brigadier said. “Well…half Russian. His father was Sergei Akhyrov, a Colonel in the Red Army. His mother came from Chechnya. She was the one who named him Armed.”

“I thought—”

“He changed it,” the Brigadier said. “And that wasn’t all.” Fanning out three photographs, she pushed them across the desk. “This is Armand in Bucharest, in Berlin, and in Paris…”

It was easy to see the progression, because it involved more than just clothes or the cost of Armand’s haircut, though these changed as well. His eyes got less wild, his smile more confident. Somewhere between Berlin and Paris he had rhinoplasty and his lips became fuller. The change was subtle, but it was definitely there.

“American surgeon,” said Brigadier Miles.

“De Valois flew to the US?”

“Too risky. The surgeon came to him. Armand switched nationalities around this time. He’s currently using a passport issued in Rome and we’ve checked, it’s genuine.”

“Really?” asked Amy.

“His notario had the right proofs. A Parisian birth certificate, marriage papers from Milan showing his mother was French and his father Sicilian. Also evidence of land holdings near Palermo, once owned by a great-grandfather. It’s easy enough, particularly in Italy.”

“I know drug smuggling was big business,” Kit said, “but this is still…” He swallowed the rest of that sentence because he’d just realised the obvious. “This isn’t about drugs, is it?”

The Lutyens mansion, with its rolls of discreetly coloured razor wire, all those soldiers wandering around in flack jackets. He’d been right about the size of the budget and wrong about where it was aimed. What commanded this kind of money? What was the world’s biggest growth industry on both sides of the fence…

“He’s a terrorist,” Kit said.

Amy looked up from a photograph.

“This isn’t about heroin,” said Kit. “At least, not directly.” Reaching for the folder, he fanned its contents across the untidy desk. At least fifty shots of Armand de Valois in a dozen different countries. Hair-style and clothes changed, but the man and the woman at his side remained the same. In some de Valois smoked and in others he held a brandy glass. In one, the woman was absent and de Valois wore an astrakhan hat and smoked a small cigar through a very long ivory holder. The office block behind him was ugly, half derelict, and brutal enough to speak of decades of Soviet planning.

“Grozny,” said Brigadier Miles, lighting up a cigarette of her own. “Before Russia flattened it for the second time. He was buying plastic explosives.”

“Why don’t you just arrest him?”

“We lack sufficient proof.”

“Then kill him.”

“It’s been tried,” said the Brigadier. “About eight months ago. On a section of the B1 between Tegel and Tempelhof…Airports in Berlin,” she added, seeing Kit’s face. “A motorcyclist and pillion, both Colombian. They killed his driver, his bodyguard, and his son. Armand let it be known that he was also dead.”

“Which was when Ben Flyte’s troubles began,” Amy said. “He failed to pay for a consignment of heroin, thinking Armand wouldn’t be around to collect the debt.”

“Only Armand was alive,” said Brigadier Miles. “Busily arranging the death of an entire Colombian drug family, right down to the family pets. Those are photographs you definitely don’t want to see.”

“Why not just do the job yourselves?”

“That’s been suggested,” said the Brigadier. “Unfortunately the Attorney General takes the view that as it’s been suggested we can’t do it. Apparently, had we just done it, that would be entirely different.”

“Then sub-contract the job to someone else.”

“Don’t think we haven’t considered it,” she said. “Unfortunately life is not that simple. Moscow have decided Mr. de Valois might make a good next President for Chechnya, and Russia is our friend.”

“And the Americans?”

“Reserving judgement,” said Brigadier Miles, sounding tired. “As are the French. Which still leaves us with today’s problem.”

“Why?” asked Kit, looking at the women opposite. One reminded him, in some weird way, of an older, better-dressed version of Kate O’Mally. The other had trouble meeting his eyes.

Amy scowled. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why would a man like de Valois waste time with this? I mean, what’s one missing consignment of drugs to a future President?”

“Ah,” said the Brigadier. She glanced at Amy, as if about to say something and then changed her mind. What she wanted to say, Kit reckoned, was this friend of yours is less stupid than I thought.

“You noticed the woman?” asked Brigadier Miles.

Kit nodded.

“Ivana de Valois. Ambitious, ruthless, and highly intelligent. Currently sulking in Bucharest. Armand and his wife share the first two of those qualities, but not the third.”

“I’m sorry?” Kit said.

“She’s the brains,” said the Brigadier. “Ivana is currently waiting for Armand to realise that.”

“Which is why she’s in Bucharest?”

“Plus the kid’s death caused a rift,” said Amy, shuffling papers until she found the sheet she wanted. “Mr. de Valois demanded that the boy accompany him to Berlin. Ivana warned her husband it was dangerous.”

“It’s been five months since they talked.” Sitting back, the Brigadier lit another cigarette and stared at the ceiling. When she glanced down again, Brigadier Miles was smiling. “Every fuck up he makes is worse than the previous one. Although few come close to flying into London to collect on a debt that Ivana would sub-contract to a local vor v zakonye without even bothering to think about it.”

“What are the drugs worth?” asked Kit.

“About a hundred thousand Kalashnikovs, three ex-Soviet tanks, or more plastic explosives than you could load into a long wheel base Cherokee Jeep.”

“A million five street value,” said Amy.

“Forget street value,” the Brigadier said. “You might as well multiply it by three and say that’s the amount of crime you’d need to commit to get that level of profit…it’s an old argument,” she added, seeing Kit’s expression. “I use wholesale only and that’s about £14,000 per kilo.”

“So little?”

The Brigadier’s grin was sour. “The weather’s good and our friends in Kandahar grow little else.”

“And bodyguards,” said Kit. “How many has de Valois got?”

Amy laughed. “None,” she said. “Immigration arrested two this morning on their way to work. The third was arrested when Mr. de Valois sent him to find out what happened to the first two. He’s reduced to using locals.”

CHAPTER 48 — Sunday, 1 July

Kit was given a suite to himself. It was beautiful, with high ceilings and long windows that looked out over immaculately trimmed and mowed lawns. The kind of lawns where ghosts probably still played croquet.

The bed was high and rickety and creaked when he rolled over in his sleep. Or what would have passed for sleep, had Kit been able to sink deeper behind his eyes. For the first time he could remember, he spent a night beneath sheets, blankets, and an old-fashioned eiderdown.

Peacocks woke him, which was when Kit realised he’d slept after all. Shrill and awkward and slightly insane, their cry cut through an open window and welcomed Kit to another Sunday, one unlike any other.

A bathroom to one side offered a tub deep enough to take a family, and taps that looked original. A mirror above the basin was foxed and speckled so badly that shaving was reduced to a chase to find his own reflection.

He pissed, shaved, bathed, and dressed.

Kit was tying his shoes when a soldier came to unlock his door.

The morning was spent going over the Brigadier’s plans, until the church bells struck thirteen, and Kit deducted one from the total to reach the real time. Lunch was sandwiches in the garden. Kit was given an hour or so to read the Sunday papers, while Amy and Brigadier Miles talked intently, then it was back to the Volvo and Amy refusing to meet Kit’s eye.

The call came when Kit was between Boxbridge and the outskirts of London. He sat in the back, next to Amy, who cradled a silver suitcase stuffed with something unspecified. Amy and Kit had been doing their best not to bang hips every time the Volvo changed lanes or jinked from one road onto another.

“Does she always drive like this?”

Amy said nothing and neither did the Brigadier, although the old woman’s smile got a little tighter.

“Phone,” said Amy, a mile or two later.

“Yeah.” His Nokia had been buzzing for a while. That was how Kit had it set, go straight to vibrate, ring after thirty seconds and skip video function unless otherwise told.

“It’s me,” he said.

“We’ve got someone who wants to talk to you.”

A burst of Japanese blasted from its tiny speaker, Neku’s words slung into one long howl as if trying to cram in as many words as possible before the inevitable happened and someone ripped the phone from her hands.

“You see,” said de Valois. “She’s unharmed, for the moment.”

“Put her back on,” demanded Kit.

“Say please.”

Kit took a deep breath. “Please let me talk to the kid.”

De Valois laughed. “Keep it short.”

“There’s only three of them,” said Neku in Japanese. “The others vanished yesterday. Bring me a gun…”

“Neku!”

“I’m serious,” she said.

The Brigadier had turned off her radio and both she and Amy were listening intently to Kit’s end of the conversation.

“Enough,” said the voice. “Now tell me what the girl was saying.”

“That she’s okay and I should do exactly what you say.”

“I’m delighted to hear that,” said Armand de Valois. “Now, which do I get? My money or the return of my merchandise?”

“Your goods,” said Kit.

“Excellent.” Armand de Valois’s praise came in a drawl that Kit hated, along with its owner. It went with the floppy haircut and expensive suits, the dark glasses and the chunky gold identity bracelet. “Although,” said de Valois, “I’m surprised I had to contact you. We’ve been expecting your call.”

“I’ve been busy…reclaiming your consignment,” Kit added, in case de Valois decided this was an insult. Nothing he’d heard about the Chechen suggested he took insults lightly.

“But you’ve got it?”

“Oh yes.”

“And where are you now?”

In an unmarked car with a geriatric ex-Army chief and a spook so memorable I can barely recall the first time we met, or forget the last. Where the fuck do you think I am?

“On a bus,” said Kit.

Armand chuckled. “On a bus,” he said. “With my missing consignment. How English.” The line went dead, leaving Kit to the rumbling echo of traffic on London’s South Circular.

“Where are we headed now?” Kit demanded.

Eyes met his in the rearview mirror. “To the club,” said Brigadier Miles.

“What, directly?”

She shook her head. “We need to stop on the way. Change cars and prep you for the meeting. Nothing difficult.”

Having swung the Volvo into a supermarket car park, next to a roundabout just off the South Circular, Brigadier Miles walked away without looking back or removing her keys from the ignition. And as Amy indicated that Kit should wheel the silver case towards a crosswalk, a young woman pushed a trolley up to the Volvo and began bundling shopping bags onto the backseat.

“Here we go,” said the Brigadier, as an old SUV pulled up by a crossing. “Meet Maxim, my deputy.”

A large Jewish man with a full beard and cap welcomed them into his car. In the back, right in the middle of the seat, sat a small boy playing Death Ice V on the in-car console. He moved up grudgingly to allow Kit, Amy, and her case into the car. The Brigadier sat up front, shuffling receipts she took from her purse.

“Expenses?” asked Maxim.

The old woman nodded.

“Do them every month,” he said. “It’s easier. Alternatively, save them up, but don’t expect sympathy.” Changing down a gear, Maxim chugged the SUV out into the evening traffic and wound towards a road block. The nod he gave the soldiers got the car through the check point with no problems.

“Where do you want me to drop you?”

“The Cut.”

It was one of those soft Sunday evenings that felt as if it belonged only in memory, when a settling sun puts the world very slightly out of focus. The children who crowded the street corners wore hoodies despite the heat and hunched around their own toughness, but they greeted each other with nods, and bobbed hidden heads to the music that flowed from open windows.

The kid in the car kept playing his game, Maxim smiling every time the boy twisted his handheld controller frantically, trying to make his sled corner faster.

“What are you thinking?” Amy asked Kit.

“About Neku.”

“Me too,” said Amy, then blushed. Kit was still trying to work out why, when he realised that both Maxim and the Brigadier were watching from their mirrors.

The Cut turned out to be behind the main station at Waterloo, and their destination a nondescript flat above an Indian newsagents, with walk-up stairs and bars over all the windows.

“See you in a minute,” Maxim told Brigadier Miles.

The kid said nothing. Just got back into the car.

A table in the main room held local maps for South London and a manila folder full of forms that the Brigadier spent at least fifteen minutes signing.

“What’s all that?” asked Kit.

“Paperwork,” Amy told him.

“Yes,” he said. “Obviously. What kind?”

Amy’s gaze slid to a shelf of cheap paperbacks and old magazines. A novel at the end seemed to hold particular fascination. She was wondering whether to tell him, or maybe she was just hoping he’d forget the question.

“Well?” he demanded.

“She’s taking responsibility if it goes wrong. You know, if the Brigadier’s plan fails and…”

“I get killed,” said Kit, finishing Amy’s sentence for her.

Amy nodded a little too fast.

Not just me, Kit decided. Neku too.

He spent the next few minutes looking at the paperbacks and magazines. Crime novels, thrillers, and romance. A couple of back issues of Cosmo and an American edition of Esquire. A handful of locally produced booklets about the area. Holding up a pamphlet, Kit showed Amy the title. Necropolis Railway.

“Great,” she said, and left Kit to his reading.

As the living crowded London to such an extent that speed limits were introduced for horse-drawn traffic, the dead began to take more space than the city could provide. In the winter of 1837 fever took victims so fast that families had to stand in line in London churchyards to wait for the funerals ahead to finish.

So, when it was suggested that corpses be freighted out of the city and buried at a purpose-built necropolis big enough to take London’s dead for a hundred years, funds were raised quickly, and work begun. Necropolis Station opened in 1854, allowing the dead to make their journey to the grave in three levels of comfort, first, second, and third class.

“Interesting?” Amy asked.

“In a sick sort of way,” said Kit, putting down his pamphlet and looking round the room. “Are we done here?”

“I reckon so.” She glanced to where Maxim and Brigadier Miles were folding up a huge map and talking into their phones, fingers in one ear and both obviously irritated by the noise they considered the other was making.

“Demarcation,” said Amy.

“Security forces and the local police?”

Amy looked at Kit. “God no,” she said. “We don’t involve them.”

“Five squabbling with six?” guessed Kit, naming both security and counter intelligence.

“It’s internal,” said Amy.

Kit scowled.

“What?” she demanded.

“You’re enjoying this,” said Kit, “aren’t you?” He watched Amy begin to deny it and then stop. That was Amy, honest to a fault even with herself.

“Well…” she said. “It beats the milk run. Is that bad?”

“No. Of course not.”

“But what?” Amy said, voice flat.

“Nothing,” said Kit. He checked his watch, worked out how long he had until de Valois’s deadline ran out, and remembered Charlie all in the same breath. “I need to make a call,” he said. “I left a friend of Neku’s at the flat…”

“Charles Olifard,” said Amy.

Kit looked at her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “He’s fine. The Brigadier sent him home last night.” She caught Kit’s expression. “Charlie’s on an Mi6 scholarship,” she said. “He’ll be working at GCHQ when he’s done at Imperial.”

“Sweet fuck,” said Kit, more loudly than he intended.

Across the room Maxim and the Brigadier, who’d just been flipping shut their phones and smiling grimly, stopped looking pleased with themselves and glanced across.

“That’s what Charlie was?” asked Kit, his words little more than a savage whisper. “Someone to shadow Neku? Still, at least he didn’t crawl into her bed.”

Amy slapped him.

“Feeling better?” Kit asked, watching her walk away.

“You want to tell me what that was about?” demanded Brigadier Miles, after Amy had slammed the bathroom door, leaving the entire flat ringing with silence.

“Charlie,” said Kit.

The old woman frowned. “I doubt,” she said, “Amy slapped you over Charlie Olifard. They’ve never even met.”

“You know Charlie?”

“No,” said Brigadier Miles.

“You didn’t put Charlie up to meeting Neku?”

Dragging on her cigarette, the old woman shook her head. “GCHQ and my lot don’t really talk,” she said. “Not these days. Still, he’s obviously a good boy.” Brigadier Miles spoke with the Olympian detachment of someone at least four times Charles Olifard’s age. “And he left you a message.”

Kit scowled at her.

“Keep rolling the dice, whatever that means. Charlie called the police, you know, yesterday afternoon. When you didn’t come back. Told them about the kidnap. Guess what they found?”

“Charlie?”

“Ten thousand dollars in used notes, wrapped in book covers, packed in the bottom of a kid’s rucksack. You want to explain that to me sometime?”

“I can’t,” said Kit.

“Of course not,” said the Brigadier, grinding out her cigarette. “I imagine it belongs to your little friend. Word is, she takes after her grandmother.”

CHAPTER 49 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

The problem with boys was that they were too easily impressed. The correct response on entering a cleft in the shell of Schloss Omga was interested boredom, where the interest was ice-thin and the boredom deep and obvious.

A casual comment from Luc that his family’s castle was bigger or smaller, simpler or more ornate, would also have been adequate: provided it was said in such a way as to turn any compliment inside out. Alternatively, he could just have mentioned the obvious, that Schloss Omga was dying, and having crawled up the side of a high mountain, the vast mollusk had nowhere left to climb.

So sad, he could have said. How awful. It must be terrible to watch.

And since shells existed to create ideal internal conditions, as much as for protection, he could have mentioned that hole at the tip of Schloss Omga, while undoubtedly making it easier for Lady Neku to land was not, in itself, a good thing.

Neku would have mentioned it. Casually, in passing.

“What are we doing here?” asked Luc.

“Arriving,” said Lady Neku, then smiled to show she was joking. “You’re about to meet my father.”

Luc’s mouth dropped open as fast as if someone had cut a wire on his jaw. “But he’s…”

“Dead,” said Lady Neku. “Yes, I know.” Waiting for the pod to open, she reached for a grab bar and hauled herself from her seat, landing lightly on a mother-of-pearl deck below.

“Don’t worry,” she added, when Luc slipped. “It’s always tricky at first.” She led him towards a leathery wall that opened as she approached, sealing itself behind the two of them, before opening again into a curving corridor beyond. In the handful of steps it took to enter Schloss Omga, the air grew less sour and the ambient temperature dropped by several degrees.

“Fuck,” said Luc. “How did you do that?”

“Not me,” said Lady Neku. “That was my father. Most probably. It might have been the castle. No one’s quite sure what happens to nervous-system state vector maps after they upload.”

Luc looked blank.

“Well,” Lady Neku said. “What do you do with people in your family when they die for real?”

“Bury them,” said Luc.

The corridor they were in curved round and down, circling from the tip of Schloss Omga to a level where the shell of the walls became less rotten and the floor less treacherous. On the way they passed a dozen other flaws in the wall but none as large as the one through which Lady Neku landed her pod.

It seemed unfair to Lady Neku that something as beautiful as the mother-of-pearl patches closing the gaps should be the result of the castle’s failure to heal itself properly. Although her mother would probably regard this as childishly naïve. All beauty, according to Lady Katchatka, had its origins in pain.

“Here we are,” said Lady Neku, opening a real door, the kind with hinges and a handle. “This is where my father used to work.”

Huge windows looked down onto the wastes of Katchatka Segment. It was this view that drove their father mad, in Nico’s opinion. This view that finally drove him to suicide.

The ground was yellow, with black rock spines. A mat of weed floated on top of the distant lake, a different kind of weed crawled from the depths towards the land, unless it was the other way round. The ruins of the old city looked very distant, and battered enough to pass as natural. A giant sand devil was sinking into itself in the distance. This was the world she knew, the one she saw inside her head when people talked about Katchatka Segment.

Lady Neku had been given lessons on radiation, cell mutation, suicide genes, splicing, and sickness. Splicing was what separated fugees from animals and her family from fugees. Those who stayed, her father said, were those who lacked the will, determination, or strength to go elsewhere.

Nico, Antonio, and Petro chose to assume he was talking about the fugees. Lady Neku was much less sure.

“Come on,” said Lady Neku. “Let’s get this over.”

It had been a gentle summons. A simple, Your father would be pleased if you were to drop by his study sometime. Of course, the main advantage of being dead was never having to raise one’s voice. Had he remembered she’d have to pod drop from High Strange, negotiate fifteen minutes of unsafe corridor, and risk whatever her mother would do if she found out?

Hard to tell. And all Lord Katchatka said when she and Luc entered the study was, “That was quick.”

“This is Luc d’Alambert,” said Lady Neku. She watched the boy look round the huge room, searching for the source of the voice. “It’s in your head,” she told Luc, when he started looking for a second time.

“How do you do,” Luc said.

“Well enough,” said the voice. “All things considered.” It sounded amused about something. “I’ve got a question for you…”

Luc waited.

“What did you see during the drop?”

What Luc can still see. It was all Lady Neku could do not to answer for him. She stopped shuffling her feet long enough to peer through a window in front of her. It was a very high window, arched and with little marble pillars to support the curves where they dipped in the middle and then soared away.

“Sand,” said Luc, having considered the question carefully. Sand was all anyone saw when they looked at Katchatka Segment. Sand, mud, cracked earth, and a rotting lake. There was life in the lake, so people told him. Mud skippers, maybe. Evolution was going backwards. At least life was being killed off in reverse order of appearing, or something. As he’d already told Lady Neku, that part of future history went straight over his head.

“What was there before the sand?”

“More sand?”

The room sighed. It seemed that before the sand had been mountains, formed when two continental plates collided. For a while, the lake had been a sea; not quite big enough to be an ocean, but perfectly able to support trade in a city that sprawled along its western edge: until one of the overhead wires making Nawa-no-ukiyo had snapped and the sky torn, letting in what High Strange and every node like it had been created to hold at bay, the solar-induced disaster of a planet in decline.

End days, Lord Katchatka called it.

“You know why this happened?”

Luc blushed.

“It was before your time,” said the voice. “Before even mine. The truth can be useful sometimes.”

“The sails,” said Luc. “They broke.” He meant the sky sheets high above Schloss Omga, the ones controlled by Lady Neku’s family. The 33.2 million square miles of mirrored gossamer that constituted Katchatka’s responsibility.

“All sails break,” the voice said. “Such is the nature of fragile things. Our failure was not to act until it was too late.”

“It’s not,” said Luc. “My father says the sails can still be mended.”

“Using what?” asked the voice.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“You know what else puzzles me?”

It was obvious that Luc didn’t, just as it was obvious that the voice had every intention of telling him. “Why you are marrying my daughter.”

Opening his mouth, Luc shut it again.

“Yes, I know,” said the voice. “You’re marrying her because that’s what you’ve been told to do. And that’s also why she’s marrying you…”

Lady Neku and Luc looked at each other. “But that doesn’t answer the question, does it? What would a family as cryozoic as the d’Alamberts want with one old woman, three boys, and a half-wit girl? Because that is what’s left of Katchatka’s rulers.”

A voice woke her in the darkness. As unexpected as it was unfamiliar, until gut-level instincts caught up with the obvious and Lady Neku realised it was Luc, sounding close enough to be in the same room.

“You awake?”

Pulling herself out of sleep, she sat up and glared around her, even as she realised how absurd that was. Alarms would have gone off long before Luc reached this far inside her private quarters.

Only she was still in the castle. A graphite silver night visible through the high windows of her father’s study. She seemed to be wrapped in a silver blanket and lying on leather cushions taken from three different chairs.

“You must be awake,” said Luc. “You’re sitting up.”

And then Lady Neku saw him, in the half darkness beside her, also wrapped in a silver blanket. Although she was glad to notice it was a separate blanket.

“Are you scared about tomorrow?” he asked.

No, thought Lady Neku, as she wondered what tomorrow was meant to bring and then remembered. Banquets, marriage, and a public bedding. Compared to most of her life, it would be simplicity itself.

“Of course not,” she said.

“I am.” Luc’s voice was thin, unashamedly lonely. “Tell me again,” he said. “How your family was first chosen…”

The idea to cut the moon into segments came from one of Lady Neku’s ancestors peeling an orange, either that or it came from the province of Satsuma itself. One was a family holding in pre-Meiji Japan, later folded into the Kagoshima prefecture, the other a citrus fruit with a high tolerance to cold.

Japan, Kagoshima, and cold Lady Neku knew only as concepts. She knew the whiteness of satsuma blossom and the smoothness of the leaves from personal experience. Almost all of the plantings in the Stroll Garden bore fruit; the few that didn’t were saved by the medicinal qualities of their sap, leaves, or bark. The original culling of plants had been carried out with a ruthlessness Lady Neku admired but wondered if she would be strong enough to imitate.

The Stroll Garden held sakura, plum, and satsuma. The willow only survived because of its ability to lower fever, and even kouyou, the flaming red foliage of autumn, so loved by Lady Neku’s grandfather, had not been enough to save the maple. She’d seen the pictures. Well, one of them. A woodblock print so ghostly that leaves fell across rice paper in a waterfall of fading ink.

It was possible that the idea to segment the moon came from Satsuma itself. A hard core of her family had taken to referring to the vanished province by its old name, which was their way of rejecting the original Meiji settlement and the abolition of the provinces.

The fact the destruction of the shogunate had happened in 1851, nearly seven hundred years before, they regarded as irrelevant. After all, the world was considering the first, and quite probably, the greatest exploration of time ever undertaken. What were a few centuries when millennia were about to be opened?

Lady Neku shook her head. So naïve. So ridiculously childish. Even a half-wit like her could see that opening up time was never going to work like that. All that shit about avoiding the Great White and sending humanity to explore its own future history. It was obvious what time shifting was really good for.

Where better to house every criminal and political refugee than here, the end of the world? As for exploring the future of human history, that might have been possible if whatever humanity became hadn’t already left by the time their visitors arrived.

CHAPTER 50 — Sunday, 1 July

The area of South London through which Maxim drove was not quite suburb and not really inner city. A sea of small white-faced villas, redbrick shops, and pubs filled the gaps between old Victorian houses, all of which had been converted to flats.

A handful of shops on a run-down estate were still in business and one of the pubs, but most of the ground floor flats stood empty, with studded steel plates sealing doors and windows against squatters. Signs warned that guard dogs patrolled the area and the estate was awaiting redevelopment. To judge from the faded state of the signs it had been waiting quite a while.

When Maxim turned up a narrow alley before exiting into a busy road, Kit felt obscurely relieved. As if the grey concrete of the estate behind him was one thing too many.

Time had not been kind to the local high street, or maybe it was town planners. The people who lived there, however, made do. East European kabaks had replaced most of the old kebab shops in the fifteen years since Kit had been anywhere near this part of the city, and newsagents had sprouted icons and window posters written in Cyrillic, although they still had the metal grilles. A Methodist church on the corner had been made over in Russian Orthodox style and a crowd of old women were spilling from its door.

Middle-aged men sat outside cafés, nursing tiny cups of coffee or shot glasses of vodka, which they seemed to be washing down with water, unless it was another clear spirit.

“Welcome to Little Russia,” said Maxim, opening the front door to another walk-up. “Everyone’s home away from home.”

The club behind the flat was called Bar Poland. A naked girl clung to a pole on the sign above its door just in case the pun was too subtle. Actually, she was three girls in silhouette and the neon was wired to twirl her endlessly round the pole as each silhouette lit in turn.

A young black man inside the walk-up seemed to be watching her with casual intensity. “Classy, eh?” he said, stepping back to let Kit clamber over a tiny generator on his way to the window. It was beginning to look as if British intelligence provided one of the biggest markets for crappy accommodation in the city.

“This is Alan,” said the Brigadier, but Kit’s attention was on the neon girl. She was retro kitsch, the kind of icon that had begun to spring up all over East Shinjuku and the bits of Roppongi not yet colonised by haute couture and impossibly expensive estate agents.

“What’s the latest?” asked Amy, sounding brightly professional. The one advantage of the SUV over the Volvo was that Kit and Amy had been able to sit with the suitcase flat between them. In the last hour Amy hadn’t spoken one word to Kit; hadn’t even looked at him, come to that.

“That CTV camera above the door is live,” said Alan. “We’ve jacked a feed. De Valois has a man at the top window watching the courtyard below. Since he’s been there for the last six hours we figure he’s shitting in a bag and peeing in a bottle…” Catching Amy’s eye, Alan raised one hand in apology. “That’s the truth and it works in our favour.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“He’ll be bored,” said Kit. “Also pissed off. That’s never good.” Turning to Alan, he asked, “How about sound?”

“The phone bug went down again, when Mr. de Valois ran a sweep. We’ve still got parabolics on his windows but the fooler loops are keeping us out. We can get it all back up by morning, if necessary.”

“Should we be worried?” said Brigadier Miles.

“I doubt if he even knows we’re here,” Alan said. “It’s all pretty low level.”

The Brigadier smiled, as if the technician was about twelve and not a professional in his early twenties. “And the Japanese kid?”

“Sat in one corner, drawing a weird-shit comic strip and talking to herself. At least she was last time we checked.”

“Which was how?”

“Man in suit.”

“We report noise to the local council,” Alan told Kit, “then wait for a local official to come out to inspect the club or bar or whatever we’re watching.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?” Amy asked.

“Not really,” said Alan. “We don’t tell them anything in advance. Just grab them when they get back and debrief them out of sight. You’d be surprised how much a bureaucrat with a clipboard notices—it’s their blind ignorance keeps them safe,” he added. “Even our best people can’t fake it.”

Kit began by refusing to wear the flack jacket. This was more a vest than a jacket, made from woven Kevlar and reinforced with callous-like pads over the heart and across the sides.

“Liver,” said Alan, producing the garment. “And kidneys. More of a target than you think.”

“No.” Kit shook his head.

“Come on,” said Alan. “It’s regulations.”

“Not my regulations,” said Kit; so Alan went to fetch the Brigadier, and to give Brigadier Miles her due the first thing she asked was, Why not?

“Because it will show.”

“Not if you wear a jacket over the top.”

“Think about it,” said Kit. “It’s hot, it’s muggy, we’re at the beginning of July. No way is anyone round here going to wear a jacket, unless it’s a hoodie.”

“Which would look absurd on you,” said the Brigadier.

“Exactly.”

They compromised on clothing, Kit agreeing to wear black jeans and a white cotton tee-shirt, one thin enough to make it obvious he wasn’t wearing a flack jacket, pocket recorder, or receiver.

“Here’s your gun,” said Maxim, producing a heavy-looking Colt automatic from his briefcase.

“What?”

“Ben Flyte always went armed. Stupid little prick. Besides—” Maxim grinned and dropped out the clip, jacking out the first five bullets. “We need you to take this inside for us.” Extracting what looked like the next five slugs, Maxim passed Kit a tiny tape recorder. “Old school,” he said happily, before reloading the clip and snapping it back into the gun.

“How does it work?”

“Noise activated,” said Maxim. “It’s already running.” When Brigadier Miles looked worried, the old man smiled. “We need to check it’s working. I’ll reset the chip when he leaves.”

“I want another gun,” insisted Kit, before the Brigadier could say anything else. “As back-up, and a knife in an ankle sheath. If you want me to carry then we do this properly.”

Arguing this out took five minutes, with another fifteen wasted while a motorcycle courier collected the items and delivered them to the walk-up. By the time Maxim signed for the items, the sky had darkened through three different shades of blue and the neon girl outside cast enough light to turn the net curtains purple.

Without even thinking about it, Kit dropped out the clip to check it was full. The Beretta was tiny, in better condition than the Colt, but so small it only took short-length .22s. Clicking the clip back into place, Kit spun the little automatic in his hand and then tucked it into a sock.

“You know how to use it?” Alan asked.

Kit nodded.

The blade was black, double edged, made from transformation-toughened zirconia—good for slicing, though not recommended for high-impact applications. It said so on a gold label that Alan peeled away, slipping the crumpled paper into his pocket.

“Sticky tape,” Kit demanded.

Even Amy was finally looking at him. And somehow Kit didn’t think it was because he was standing on a dusty floor in a crappy little flat with one leg still rolled up like an initiate to the Freemasons.

“The weapons are for show,” said Maxim. “Okay? Nothing else…”

As Maxim began to repack his briefcase and Brigadier Miles collected up her cigarette ends, decanting them into a small plastic bag, Amy took a call, glancing across at Kit before looking away.

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s ready.”

Kit shook his head, pulled the Colt from the back of his belt, and put it on a table in front of Alan, who was adjusting a parabolic mic with a tiny screwdriver. “I’ll be back in a few seconds.”

That got everyone’s attention.

“Nothing serious,” Kit said. “Just…” He nodded towards the bathroom. I want to roll the dice.

“Can’t it wait?” said Brigadier Miles.

Kit should already have left. At least that was the Brigadier’s plan. Out of this flat to a café on the corner, where he would wait for a passing uniform to ask the owner if she’d seen a missing teenager. His cue to move.

“No,” said Kit. “I don’t think it can.”

Armand de Valois answered his phone on the third ring.

“Mr. de Valois?”

“Oui. Who is this…”

Who did he think it was?

“It’s me,” said Kit. “We’re meant to be meeting.”

A moment of silence and then, “Meant?” In the club a man stopped talking, probably shocked by the fury in that single word.

“It’s a trap,” said Kit. “I’m being used by the police and I’ll be carrying a tape recorder.” Now was when Maxim, the Brigadier, and, quite possibly, Alan and Amy should start breaking down the door. All Kit got was silence at both ends of the phone.

“You there?” he asked.

“Yes,” said de Valois, “I’m still here, and I can tell you now, it’s a bad idea to try to fuck with Armand de Valois. You bring my consignment tonight or the girl dies. No tricks, no more extra time.”

“But…”

“Now,” said de Valois. “You bring it now. Because if you don’t, then we kill you.”

“Neku…”

“Oh yes,” said de Valois. “We kill her too. Only we rape her first.”

Kit splashed water on his face and rinsed out his mouth, then ran his hands through his hair and waited until the shaking stopped. He looked older than he remembered, hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked, a long way from the Englishman abroad he once was.

But he’d discovered something.

The safety glass between himself and his past had cracked. In its place was a sharp-edged clarity that had Kit adjusting his mind for angle, distance, and the wind drift of a life almost wasted.

Four sixes. Charlie would be proud of him.

“Are you all right?” Brigadier Miles looked worried.

“Oh yes,” said Kit. “I’m fine.”

It felt odd to wheel a fortune in heroin between East European kids in jeans and leather jackets. Odd, but interesting. One of the older boys looked as if he might be reluctant to move, but something about Kit’s certainty made him step aside. To save face the kid whistled, a staccato trill that announced he had drugs to offer.

Shaking his head, Kit kept walking.

“Someone should do something about them,” said a woman in the café.

“Someone will,” said Kit. Life expectancy among teenage drug dealers in South London was short. It had been that way for much longer than those kids had been alive.

Anywhere else, the café’s décor would be ironic. Pine tables and pottery mugs, leather place mats and a framed Bob Marley poster. A nod to the simplicities of the 1980s. A chrome espresso machine behind the counter was undoubtedly the most valuable thing in the place.

The West Indian woman who’d been complaining about drugs brought Kit a menu, having waited politely while he chose a table and parked his case. “We’re closing soon,” she said. “But I can do you soup or a grilled sandwich.”

Ackee, Red Bean, Pepper Pot…having dismissed the soups, Kit chose a jerked chicken sandwich and fries.

“Been somewhere nice?” the woman asked, after taking his order.

“Japan.”

She raised her eyebrows at this. “Strange place for a holiday.”

“I live there,” said Kit. Well, maybe…

“Bet London’s changed.”

He smiled.

“And not for the better,” she said, nodding beyond the window. When Kit said nothing, the woman sniffed. “What do you want to drink?”

“Tea,” said Kit. “I could really do with tea.”

“Coming up,” she said, unfreezing as quickly as she’d taken offence.

The tea was warm and weak and tasted as if it had been made from leaves swept off a factory floor, while the milk was so rich that fat skated like oily insects across its surface. All the same…

Sentiment, he told himself. He didn’t do sentiment.

And yet here he sat in some crumbling café in an area known for its high levels of unemployment, prostitution, and street crime, mourning the passing of a world he’d done his utmost to avoid. But which he might be about to leave, if that was what it took.

Kill me, so this thing I love keeps living. The words Kate O’Mally had quoted beside the little waterfall in Shinjuku Park crowded his head. It made no sense. And yet it was true.

He would die if that was what it took. Worse than that, he would kill. Why? Because Mary O’Mally once told him every debt must be repaid. It had just taken Kit longer than it should to realise debts could be carried over and repaid to someone else.

What he owed Neku, what he owed Mary, what he owed himself.

“Here,” said the café owner, slapping down a poster. “Take a look. He won’t know,” she added, talking to someone behind her. “He just got back from Japan.” The picture showed a young black girl. Missing was written across the top.

“Shit,” said Kit.

The West Indian woman frowned.

“You know her?” demanded the police officer.

Kit shook his head. He could feel their stares all the way from his table to the pavement.

CHAPTER 51 — Sunday Night, 1 July

Shut for renovation, the sign proclaimed. Open soon!

Three locks, a peep hole, and a camera above the door secured the entrance to Bar Poland. Kit wondered why, if the club was closed, the neon girl still swung in circles, and decided it really didn’t matter. There were bigger questions to answer, like how to retrieve Neku and talk his way out of there alive.

He’d been given three hours. After that it was out of the Brigadier’s hands and Neku took her chances with an extraction team. Kit didn’t believe the bit about it being out of the Brigadier’s hands, though it had been repeated several times.

Having knocked, Kit counted to ten and began to walk away. The door to Bar Poland opened before he’d taken five paces.

“Oi,” said a voice. “You Mr. Flyte?” A teenage boy with cropped skull, checked shirt, and tight jeans stood sneering in the doorway.

“What do you think?” said Kit.

“You got Mr. de Valois’s stuff?”

“All sixty kilos of it,” said Kit. “Vacuum packed, grade A…”

The boy scowled, then glanced round in case Kit’s comment had been overheard, which it undoubtedly was, and taped as well, not to mention filmed from between the slats of blind covering a window high on a wall behind his visitor.

“Better let me in,” said Kit.

The young man stepped aside, slowly.

As Kit walked into Bar Poland, he heard the door shut behind him and the click of one lock after another. As a final touch, a steel bolt was slammed into place.

“Scared of burglars?”

The boy hit Kit hard, from behind.

Red carpet, with a worn strip down the middle where endless feet had headed towards velvet curtains beyond. On the far side of the curtains was a sound system, turned way up. Kit knew this because its bass line was loud enough to shake the floor next to his ear.

“Up you come.” Hands dragged Kit to his feet. It was the boy, only now his sneer had become a smirk. He was rubbing his fist, although it was probably unnecessary, as the shot-weighted leather glove he wore looked designed to offer protection. “We’ve got your girlfriend dancing,” said the boy. “She’s pretty good.”

“You’ve got…”

“Hey,” he said. “Be grateful. For Mr. de Valois that’s mild. It could have been so much worse.”

Could it? “I’ll bear that in mind,” Kit said.

Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Matters of small concern should be treated seriously. So said the book Mr. Oniji gave Kit in the hospital. It said other things as well, but the most important of these he had worked out for himself. Regard yourself as dead already.

An old Killers track blared from hidden speakers. It was before Neku’s time and quite possibly before de Valois’s too, unless his youthfulness was just a trick of the light and a good surgeon.

“Ah, Ben…so you came.” Mr. de Valois smiled, his eyes visible behind lightly tinted shades.

“I wouldn’t miss it,” said Kit, reaching behind him.

“Kenka shinaide!”

“What?” demanded de Valois, then added, “Keep dancing.”

Neku did as she was told.

So did Kit, who stopped reaching for his gun and wheeled his case across to Mr. de Valois instead. “It’s all here,” Kit said.

“I certainly hope so.”

No way will I look at her, Kit told himself, then glanced anyway. Seeing a half-naked child draped in the glare of a cheap spotlight that lit every scowl on her face.

“Search him,” demanded de Valois.

The crop-haired man found the Colt the first time, only finding the ankle gun when de Valois told him to search properly.

“Anything else?”

Kit shook his head.

“You sure?”

He nodded. “I’m positive.”

“Good,” said de Valois. “So you won’t mind when Alfie breaks her arms if we find something, will you?” He raised his eyebrows at Kit, who shrugged.

De Valois laughed.

“Check the cases,” he told Alfie.

Sixty individual bags of heroin. More oblivion than Kit could imagine. Each one heat sealed along its edges and then wrapped again, in polyethylene so thick it looked like oiled paper.

“Well?”

“It’s all there,” said Alfie, in a South London accent obvious enough to remind Kit of black and white films he hadn’t even seen.

“Call Robbie down,” Armand ordered. “Tell him to test it.”

A few minutes later a dreadlocked Rasta ambled from the shadows, holstering a gun as he came. His hair was thinning and had turned to grey. His red shirt had sweat marks under the arms. He looked almost as unhappy with life as Kit felt. So Kit guessed he was the man who’d been shitting in a bag.

“Ah,” said Armand. “My friend…”

Producing a scalpel from his pocket, the Rasta chose a package from the middle and slit it open, carrying a little of the powder to his tongue. “Well,” he said. “It’s the real thing.”

Without needing to be told, Robbie slit open another five bags and carried them to a table near the stage. A small gas cooker, a glass beaker, and a handful of bottles appeared, along with a small pair of scales. Although, in the event, the only pieces of equipment Robbie used were a laptop, a glass of water, and a small white box with a glass lid.

“Residual alkaloids, some methaqualone, also traces of diazepam,” said Robbie, amending it to, “Afghani, sixty-five percent pure,” when Mr. de Valois looked irritated. “Also, sugars for bulk.”

“It’s been cut,” Kit said, “ready for market.” This was what he’d been told to say. “And I’m really sorry about the misunderstanding. I obviously had no idea…”

“That I was still alive?”

Kit nodded.

In the background Razorlight replaced Kaiser Chiefs and were replaced in turn by a dance track with a single looped vocal and an idiotically simple synth line. Golden oldies, what the patrons would expect; and behind Robbie’s table, apparently forgotten, Neku circling her pole in time to the music.

She’d lost weight again. Kit could see ribs beneath her skin and watch the muscles in her shoulders slide across each other as they propelled her round and round the same tight circle of misery.

“Pretty,” said de Valois. “Isn’t she?”

“She’s Kathryn O’Mally’s granddaughter. You know who that is?”

It was obvious he didn’t, and equally obvious that Robbie did. So Kit suggested the Rasta tell Mr. de Valois, who listened in silence to a bullet-point breakdown of Kate O’Mally’s life, while Alfie looked increasingly impressed in the background.

“This woman. She knows you’re here?”

“Of course,” said Kit.

Mr. de Valois shrugged. “Not my problem.”

Kit caught the exact moment Alfie looked at Robbie; crop-haired thug and grizzled Rasta, whatever passed between them, it passed in silence.

“All the same,” said de Valois, gesturing towards Neku. “The kid’s good. Where did she dance before this?”

“Dance…?”

“She has the moves, even has a couple that are new. I was just wondering where she’s been.”

“Tokyo.”

“Ahh,” said de Valois. “That would certainly help explain her lack of English.” He glanced at Neku, his gaze sliding over her naked breasts and tiny G-string. “I think it would be good if you asked her to join me for a drink.”

Perhaps Kit was wrong to treat this as an invitation, because Mr. de Valois’s smile froze at his counter-suggestion that perhaps Neku and he should think about getting home, now that Mr. de Valois had his consignment and Kit had made his apologies.

“Not yet,” said de Valois. “You see, we still need to agree on a price.”

“There is no price,” Kit said. “The consignment is yours. All I’m doing is returning it.”

Armand de Valois’s laugh was loud enough to make Neku flinch. “Not a price for me,” he said, with a grin. “For you, for causing me problems in the first place.” He nodded towards Neku. “Also her, if you want her back I will require a transfer fee.”

“She’s Kate O’Mally’s granddaughter.”

De Valois looked irritated. “Other people would kill you,” he said. “I am being generous, very generous. In future you will work for me. As will she. But first, we have business.”

When the music stopped it left Neku frozen in mid swing. “Tell her to come here,” de Valois said, looking at the girl.

Instead of climbing from the stage, Neku vanished through a door at the back and when she reappeared it was wearing a tatty silk dressing gown that reached her ankles and was tied tightly around her waist. Sweat dripped from her face and a pulse beat steadily in her neck. Kit could smell her from five paces away.

“I need a shower,” she told him.

“Later,” said Kit, keeping to Japanese.

“What did she say?”

“That she needs a shower.”

Mr. de Valois grunted. “There’ll be time for that later,” he said. “Tell the girl I have a job for her. A very suitable job.”

So Kit did.

Neku’s eyes were arctic, devoid of light and so cold they made Kit shiver. It would have been better if a sneer or scowl gave anger to her face, but instead she smiled, almost blandly. “Tell him I’m always willing to help.”

Things moved swiftly after that.

From somewhere a chopping board was produced, along with a stained Sabatier knife and a chrome bucket full of ice. Armand demanded rubber bands and when these failed to appear announced that string would have to do.

“You ever seen this done before?”

She had, Kit realised, having translated Armand de Valois’s question. Which was more than could be said for Kit, unless one counted films. Because he’d just worked out what was about to happen.

Kit only knew a gun had been pulled when he felt its muzzle touch the side of his ear, a cold kiss just behind the hair line. Alfie’s hand was shaking. A poor start for someone holding an automatic so cheap it lacked a safety catch.

“Taking my drugs, trying to trick me, and not showing sufficient respect. Three transgressions,” said de Valois, handing Neku the knife. “That means you cut three times, one joint after another.”

He smiled while he waited for Kit to translate.

“My finger,” said Kit, meaning, My finger, not that man’s throat.

Neku weighed the blade in her hand.

“Just do it,” Kit said. “And we’ll get ourselves out of here.”

She knew exactly where to make the first cut. Placing Kit’s left hand face down on the board and positioning her knife above the first joint of his little finger, Neku slammed her palm across the back of the blade.

Fuck.

The severed tip of a finger was rolling across the board before Kit even registered the pain, but by then Neku had his hand back on the board and her blade against the same finger, one joint lower.

A slam of her hand and two segments of finger rested beside each other.

“Take the last joint,” said Neku, “and I’ll have nothing to tie off.” Barely bothering to wait for Kit to translate, she held Kit’s hand to the board and repositioned her knife.

“She’s good,” said de Valois.

“The best,” Neku said, in fractured English.

Armand de Valois laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Tell her to have this one on me.”

Cutting a length of string, Neku bound the last section of finger and tied it off in a quick knot. “One section you can re-attach,” she whispered, “two is much more difficult.”

She was supporting him. Her single hand beneath Kit’s elbow to brace his entire weight, should he need time to compose himself.

“We’re done here,” Kit said.

“Almost,” promised de Valois. “But first, Ben…your finger, it hurts?”

Of course it fucking hurts.

“A little.”

What was he meant to say? A lot, hardly at all… it was, Kit suspected, a question to which there were only wrong answers.

“Luckily,” said de Valois, “I have just the cure. Sixty-five percent pure and freshly delivered. Here we go—” wiping the Sabatier on a beer mat, de Valois dipped the blade’s tip into an open bag of heroin.

“Lighter,” he demanded.

Robbie held a flame beneath the blade, until the metal tinged orange and dreams began to spiral from the oily mess.

“Come on, Ben,” said de Valois. “Let’s make friends.”

A million dreams twisted towards a nicotine-stained ceiling. A hundred thousand nightmares and every shade of longing in between. All Kit had to do was lean forward and inhale the smoke.

He made his decision without even realising there was a decision to make.

Twisting the hot blade from Robbie’s fingers, Kit moved before anyone had time to react. A sizzling slash to the throat, a smoky drag across both eyes, and Kit was almost done, his final strike hissing its way under de Valois’s chin and through his soft palate, braising his tongue.

A thing done with moderation may be judged insufficient.

A cold click told Kit that the slide had been pulled back on Alfie’s gun. So this is the way the world ends, he thought. With a Chechen gangster blinded and a bullet through my head.

When one thinks one has gone too far…One has probably gone far enough.

“Let it go,” ordered Robbie.

Alfie hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, Robbie leaned forward and tapped the heel of his palm under the knife, driving the blade clean through the roof of de Valois’s mouth and into his brain.

“Arsehole,” he said.

CHAPTER 52 — Sunday Night, 1 July

While Neku finished washing in the staff bathroom behind the stage, Kit ran through her parentage again, simplifying it, just to make things really clear. The more Kit iterated his points, the more convincing they sounded.

Walk with a man a hundred paces… Kit’s smile was sour. He was planning to walk far more than that in the company of Robbie and Alfie, assuming they all got lucky.

“Shit,” said Robbie. He’d been a foot soldier when he originally met Kate O’Mally, standing silent while she ripped strips from some local don. It was, admitted Robbie, unlikely Mrs. O’Mally had even known his name, for which he remained extremely grateful. As for Alfie, the boy was too young to have those kind of memories. He’d heard of her nephew though. You didn’t cross central London without getting Mike Smith’s permission first. At least people like Alfie didn’t.

“You mean,” said Alfie, “the girl is Mr. Smith’s cousin?” It was an interesting update in the lexicon of fear.

In unspoken agreement, Alfie and Robbie moved to the bar and got themselves a whisky chaser, washing the spirit down with a bottle of Beck’s. Robbie lit the teenager’s cigarette for him, because Alfie’s hand was shaking too badly to work the lighter. Neither would look at Neku when she returned from rinsing out her mouth, splashing water on her face, and whatever else she’d been doing in the staff bathroom.

“How many ways out of here?” asked Kit.

“Only one,” Robbie said. “Why?”

“Because it’s a trap,” said Kit. “Gunmen are out there, waiting…” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the corridor. “And we’ve got about half an hour before someone blows down that door.”

“Oh shit,” said Alfie. “You were telling Mr. de Valois the truth?”

“Yeah,” said Kit. “It’s a bad habit of mine.”

“But he had his own man in the drug squad.”

“I know,” said Kit. “But Sergeant Samson has been suspended. I bet he didn’t tell de Valois that.”

Alfie looked sicker still. “How many ways?” Kit insisted.

“Front door, side windows…”

“Both covered,” said Kit. “Anything else?” The two men shook their heads. “Over the roof? Across a back garden? Come on,” he said. “There must be another way.”

“Attic,” Alfie said. “Round here most houses have linked attics.”

“Probably walled up. Mortgage regulations,” Robbie added. “My brother used to be a builder.”

“Then you know how crap they’ll be,” said Alfie.

Having left on all the lights and restarted the music, Kit, Neku, Alfie, and Robbie went up the stairs two steps at a time. And unlikely as it sounded, the rubbish stacked on the club stairs got worse the higher they climbed. The first floor had changing rooms, if such a label could be given to a room stripped of everything but a mirror, overhead bulb, and a cracked lavatory in one corner.

“Those are mine,” said Neku, grabbing a handful of clothes in passing.

“Was mine,” Kit said, tossing segments of finger into the open bowl and pausing to check it flushed properly.

When Robbie and Alfie looked at each other, Kit wondered if it was the finger or discovering that Neku spoke proper English after all. So abandoned was the next level that its floors had been painted white with pigeon shit. A broken window showed where the birds got in. A short run of ladder led to the attic and a hole in the roof above revealed night sky.

“You go first,” Kit told the boy, who did as he was told. It didn’t actually matter to Kit in what order Alfie and Robbie climbed. But simple commands, easily obeyed, kept the two men under his control.

Robbie was right, a wall had been built; and Alfie was right, because the brickwork was crap. Cheap cinder blocks had been stacked clumsily on top of each other and glued into place with cowpats of dripping mortar.

“Amateurs.” Robbie sounded personally offended.

“Makes it easier,” said Alfie, producing a lock knife and grinding it into a crack between two blocks. “I’ll need some help,” he said.

So Robbie stepped forward and together the two men sawed at the crude mortar, reducing it to dust. “Buggered,” said Robbie, but he was talking about the blade.

“No matter,” Alfie said. “We’re done.” And he proceeded to kick down the wall with a quiet ferocity that spoke of current anger or a lifetime of unresolved issues.

The attic next door was also empty, in better condition than the one they’d just left, and, best of all, not bricked up on its far side. A partition had been built, but this was made from flame-proof board and Alfie tore it down without even having to be asked.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re above the Golden Balti.” Catching Neku’s glance, he added, “That’s the local take out.”

Which left the Japanese girl little wiser.

A flight of steps led down to a small landing stacked with empty ghee tins and a large wooden crate reading Rajah Spices. Someone had set up a canvas bed in a bathroom. A copy of a local Bengali paper lay open on the floor.

“Quietly now,” said Kit.

The floor below held a storeroom, customer lavatories, and a bemused-looking waiter who was obviously wondering about the noise. When Kit put his hand to his lips, the man nodded.

No one challenged Kit, Neku, and the other two as they filed through the crowded restaurant, squeezing between a large group waiting for take away near the door. And no one made a fuss when they reached the street outside, crossed the High Road, and cut under a railway arch into a passage that led to a car park beyond.

“We’re square, right?” asked Robbie.

Kit nodded.

“I mean, for real? It was a mistake, right? We didn’t know she was…” He glanced at Neku, who stared back. It was Robbie who looked away.

“I’m cool with you if she is,” said Kit.

After a moment, Neku nodded.

“That’s settled then,” he said, turning to include Alfie in the conversation. “None of us were here,” said Kit. “You didn’t see me and I didn’t see you. If anyone asks you, just stick to that.”

Somewhere away to his right a black helicopter came thudding low over the houses, a siren fired up three streets away, and a thunder flash could be heard, rattling shop windows like fireworks. Brigadier Miles had obviously just told her boys to go in.

CHAPTER 53 — Sunday Night, 1 July

Trying to ride a motorbike with an amputated finger was a bad idea. The actual practise was worse. Every gear change make Kit chew his lip and fight to keep his hand on the bars. He’d probably have been crying with frustration if the night wind hadn’t got to his eyes first.

The Suzuki belonged to Alfie and was the machine Kit would have expected. Cheap, flashy, and done up with after-market accessories. On the plus side, the tank was full, the machine was licenced, and Alfie had been pitifully willing to offer Kit its use.

It was the wrong side of midnight when Kit left the motorway. There was no need to kill the lights as he approached speed cameras but he did it anyway. Kit liked the way darkness turned the black top to an icy strip, lit by little more than the sodium glare of a village nearby.

At a service station south of the M25, he stopped to refill the bike and use the bathroom. As an afterthought, Kit asked Neku if she wanted a coffee. In return, she asked him a question of her own.

“Why did you kill him?”

So he told her.

Sitting next to a glass window, in a café deserted enough to have been ripped from an Edward Hopper painting, Kit explained about the debts he owed. How he’d never really fallen out of love with Mary and why he let Kate O’Mally drag him back from Tokyo.

Kit realised half way through his story that Neku knew none of this. And then he realised no one did, except No Neck, Micki, and that other girl the day Mary’s postcard arrived; and they didn’t count, because he’d been drunk and they’d been careful not to mention it again. Almost everything that mattered to Kit in the last fifteen years had happened inside his head.

Conversations with ghosts.

He’d kissed a girl and it was the wrong girl or the wrong time. He’d lived badly and lived well and neither felt more real than the other, because everything after Josh was counting bells. Like Mary, Kit had just been adding and subtracting to keep the devil at bay.

All those lives snuffed out in the cross-hairs of an M24 sniper rifle needed shifting up one, to make space for the truth. Josh killed himself but Kit had provided the reason.

“You’re sad.” Neku’s voice was matter of fact.

“I’m cold,” said Kit, taking the coffee she offered. It was sweet and still hot, bitter from having stewed in a glass flask on a ring for the previous hour.

“Losing a finger does that,” Neku said. “It’s the shock. My brother…” Whatever she was about to say got lost when Neku took herself to the restrooms. She was still wiping her mouth when she got back.

“How are you?” Neku asked Patrick Robbe-Duras, when Pat finally stopped fussing about the damp and cold and how Neku must feel after such a long ride in the middle of the night.

“I’m okay,” said Pat, sipping his whisky on the rocks.

Neku smiled. Their next discussion involved whether or not another coffee would keep Neku awake and her insistence that all Japanese girls hated hot milk, so that was out of the question.

“No tradition of keeping cows,” she said.

Pat nodded, doubtful.

After this, as the conversation turned to biscuits versus cake, Kate caught Kit’s eye and nodded towards the kitchen door.

“Good idea,” said Neku, hooking ice from Pat’s glass. “Chill your finger,” she told Kit. “Then cut back the knuckle and sew the flesh shut.”

Kit took the ice Neku offered. Smiling, when he realised Kate’s mouth had dropped open.

“I can do it later,” said Neku. “If you’d rather.”

Leading Kit along a corridor, Kate opened a heavy door to reveal a very traditional-looking study, lined with books Kit doubted she’d ever read and hung with a Gully Jimson nude probably chosen years before and barely looked at since. Cigarette smoke clung to a leather armchair, and a waste paper basket overflowed with newspapers. It looked like a room no one had bothered to clean in a very long time.

“You want me to do it?” Kate asked, nodding at Kit’s injured hand.

Kit nodded his head.

Kate O’Mally was surprisingly good with a knife. Well, surprising to Kit, who’d always assumed her nickname of butcher indicated clumsiness, not skill. All the same, it hurt like fuck and there was no other way of putting it. Slicing back flesh, Kate cut free gristle and bone, flicking the remains onto her desk. It looked like one of those chewy bits of chicken.

She let Kit sew the ends together.

“Pat arrived this afternoon,” said Kate. “Just turned up in a taxi, collected his cases, and told me to pay the driver. Said he’d come back for good if I’d accept that Mary was gone.”

“What about his own house?”

Shrugging, Kate said, “I hardly dare ask. You need a drink?”

Kit shook his head.

“Don’t suppose I should either.” Seating herself at the desk, Kate rummaged through a drawer until she found a Partegas box. “Want one of these instead?”

The cigars were dry and burned too quickly, but Kate and Kit still sat there and smoked them anyway, watching curls of smoke obscure the ceiling. Kit understood what Kate was doing. She was ensuring he understood this meeting was social. They were no longer enemies. In her own way, the rituals Kate O’Mally lived by were as rigid as those Yoshi had followed.

“People have been calling,” Kate said, finally coming to the point. Sucking in a final mouthful of smoke, she let it escape between her lips and ground her cigar stub into a glass ashtray. “A surprising number of people.” She smiled. “A man from the MOD, for a start.”

“What did you say?”

“Said I’d never heard of you. Anyway, you know Jimmy the Greek?”

Kit shook his head.

“That’s good,” said Kate. “You don’t want to know him. Anyway, Jimmy was also on the line. He runs an outfit in High Barnet. One of his boys is called Robbie. Nasty temper, but a good chemist. Anyway, Jimmy’s worried because he loaned Robbie to a Russian and now the Russian is dead and Robbie’s scared that he and I have unfinished business.”

“I told Robbie it was cool,” said Kit. “And the guy was Chechen.”

Kate reached for another cigar.

“Armand de Valois was Chechen,” said Kit. “Not Russian. Although he was pretending to be French…”

“You were there when he died?”

“I killed him.”

“You? A Chechen mafia leader. Feel like telling me why?”

He made the kid dance.

“Neku,” said Kit, and the old woman nodded. It was answer enough.

“The Greek wants a meeting.” Blowing fresh smoke towards the ceiling, Kate sat back in her chair. In anybody else this might be taken as a sign of relaxation, but Kit could tell Kate was worried about something.

“So send your nephew,” said Kit.

“That would make it business. I want you to go,” said Kate. “Sort out the problem…”

Maybe laughing wasn’t the right response. “Look,” said Kit, when Kate had stopped scowling. “I’ll call Jimmy.”

“Call him?”

“That’s my best offer.”

Kate pushed her mobile across the desk and waited while Kit punched in the number she gave him.

“Mr. Giangos?”

A sleepy grunt from the other end and a woman in the background, followed by a snapped instruction to be quiet. One didn’t need Greek to understand what was being said. “Yes?”

“I’m calling on behalf of Kate O’Mally.”

“What,” Jimmy Giangos said, “she can’t call me herself?”

“It’s about Robbie,” said Kit, ignoring the question. “Mrs. O’Mally wants you to know there is no problem. In fact, everything is fine. She will tell her nephew this.”

Kate raised her eyebrows.

“The problem was Mr. de Valois. This has now been solved.”

On the other side of the desk, Kate O’Mally actually began to smile. Although Kit’s next words knocked the smile from her face and reduced Kate to frozen silence.

“What problem? He kidnapped Kate O’Mally’s granddaughter.”

Jimmy Giangos actually gulped.

“Robbie didn’t tell you that?”

“No,” said Jimmy the Greek. “He forgot to mention that bit. We knew nothing about…”

“Mrs. O’Mally understands that,” Kit said. “She sends her regards.” Shutting off the phone, Kit looked up to see Kate staring at him.

“Look,” said Kit, “I had to say something.”

“So that’s why Pat came back,” said Kate, barely listening. Pushing away her chair, she walked to the window and stared out into the darkness, only coming back to her desk to rummage for another cigar. “He must have worked it out for himself,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me in Tokyo?”

“Tell you what?”

“The truth.” Kate O’Mally shook her head crossly. “Everything finally makes sense. Mary’s postcards to you. Her leaving you the flat and her gallery. The reason she’d never talk about being pregnant and what happened while she was away.”

Any objections Kit might make vanished as Kate’s phone began to buzz. Having listened, the woman nodded a couple of times and broke the connection without saying a single word. “The police,” said Kate. “It’s time we got you out of here. Come on.”

But Kit was remembering what she’d said about Mary writing to him. He wondered whether to tell Kate that he knew where Mary was, assuming she was anywhere. I always thought this is where we’d both end up.

It was the both that gave her away. Vita Brevis—bass/vocals/lyrics. Not one to waste words, ever…

CHAPTER 54 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

Her cloak stank of smoke and her knives were gone. High Strange was cold and empty and not at all as it should have been.

“Door,” said Lady Neku.

The door, however, said nothing. It just stood there, black lacquered and shining, in the middle of the wall, with great brass hinges and a handle cut from a single block of obsidian.

KATCHATKA STATION read a metal plate on the lintel. BUILT BY KITAGAWA INCORPORATED, SHINJUKU, IN ASSOCIATION WITH PEARL ISLAND ENTERPRISES.

Neku shook her head. That description was wrong. It wasn’t the wall that had brass hinges. Well, yes, but not in the way her words sounded. And anyway, the door might be black but it wasn’t urushi lacquer, being made from a single block of obsidian, which meant the handle had to be something else.

Details were hard to remember. Continuity glitches was the technical term and her life had been full of them. Crossing out three lines of hiragana script, Neku rewrote the door as obsidian and its handle as marble, changing this to diamond as being more likely. She made the hinges steel for the sake of it and because brass felt too predictable.

Sixty-four pages it said on the back of her notebook, which was also the front, depending on which script she used. So far Neku had written alternate pages, from front and back, using a mixture of kanji, romanji, katakana, and hiragana, being Han script, Roman script, man’s script, and woman’s hand. She regarded it as her duty not to make the truth too accessible, also safer…

“Come on,” said Lady Neku, giving the door a kick. “All you have to do is open.”

“You know,” said the door, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because,” said the door. “Once opened, I’m open. Returning to a time when I was locked becomes impossible.”

“I can re-lock you myself.”

“That’s not the same,” said the door. “And you know it.”

“I’m going to hate what’s inside,” Lady Neku said. “That’s what you’re saying, right?”

The door stayed silent.

Every other door in High Strange had opened as Lady Neku approached. Only the council chamber stayed locked. Six sided, to reflect the high stations, the chamber had six doors, one for each family; every segment had a council chamber and the layout was identical for each.

The door should have recognised Lady Neku instantly and opened itself. It was the grandest of the doors, because this was High Strange and that was how things worked. In the d’Alambert Sector, Luc’s family would have the grandest door, such things stood to reason.

“You know who I am?”

“Of course.”

“So why won’t you open?” Lady Neku demanded, resisting the urge to kick the door again.

“Because,” said the door. “You’re dead.” There were so many things wrong with that statement that Lady Neku barely knew where to begin, so she began with the most obvious.

“If I were dead,” she said, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The door considered that.

“Also,” said Lady Neku, “I can see my reflection.”

“Do you look like you?”

“Yes,” said Lady Neku, rather too fast. “At least, I look like the me I remember.” She stared hard at her reflection in the door’s black surface. Her face was coarser, her hips slightly thicker than she’d like and her hair had been dyed silver, but she still looked like her, despite the tattered lace of her cos-play dress. Lady Neku could definitely see herself in the other girl’s eyes.

“I am Neku Katchatka,” she said. “You will open.” So the door did and it was right, she didn’t like what was inside one little bit.

A spread of shingle was washed by waves. The water so cold that she could feel nothing, although that might have been memories draining from her head. A boy was on the beach behind her, half kneeling, he seemed to be looking for someone and Neku was afraid it might be her. He never saw the man who put a gun to the back of his head and…

“Wrong,” said Lady Neku, covering her ears. “All wrong.”

The audience chamber was colder than she expected and icy underfoot, but for all its frosty chill the air was tainted with corruption. None of the lights lit on command, and the windows remained shuttered against the sky beyond. Flakes of ice had drifted into patterns on the floor. Lady Neku could only see these because light from the corridor flooded a strip of tiles in front of her. The rest of the chamber was in darkness.

Lady Neku knew what answer there would be to her request for the shutters to open and the lights come on but she asked anyway, refusing to be shocked, surprised, or even disappointed when they stayed closed and the lights failed to work.

Instead she stopped at the nearest window, trying and failing to force its covering before moving to the next. High and lonely and arched into darkness above her, each shutter rejected her attempts. Their touch burned Lady Neku’s fingers and glued cold metal to her skin.

“Fuck,” said Lady Neku, ripping herself free.

Each window took her deeper into darkness, until the door by which she’d entered became a tiny smudge of light that vanished as she reached half way around the chamber and some object finally obscured the smudge from sight.

She kept up her litany of swearing until she approached a window. Only to begin again when each shutter refused to budge. After a while, the words lost their meaning and Lady Neku’s voice lost its fury and the hot sweat beneath frozen arms, and the pain in her fingers, told her to stop doing and begin planning instead.

Everything was linked…As surely as the solar system completed its orbit of the galaxy every 250 million years and fugees needed the floating rope world to protect them from being poisoned. Everything was linked. She could get somewhere with that thought, Lady Neku just knew she could.

Forcing torn fingers into the web of a fresh shutter, Lady Neku heard a click, echoed from eleven other windows. As she watched, each began to iris, preparing to reveal light through a wall of metal flowers. And though every single one glitched before it was even a quarter open, this was enough.

The obsidian door had been right; what was seen could not be unseen and doors could be re-shut but not unopened.

What? Lady Neku told herself. You’re going to cry now?

She made herself cross the tiles to the table where her family still sat, their food as frozen as those who’d been about to eat it. She did this by the simple expedient of refusing to give herself an option.

Lady Neku’s mother grinned at the world from a gash that opened her throat from ear to jewelled ear. She’d either been the first to die, or accepted her death without complaint, because the arms of her chair still touched the table and her glass of wine stood icy but undisturbed. Blood crusted the surface of her Maltese lace shawl like beads of jet, sewn into random patterns.

Her brother Nico had gone down fighting, his scabbard abandoned beside his half-seated body, his chair pushed back and twisted sideways. Antonio sat back and Petro slumped so far forward in his seat that his head rested on the table. Even his long black hair felt frozen.

Everyone wore their best clothes, black velvet and lace, jewelled cloaks. Only one member of the Katchatka family was missing. The one staring down at the table and its barely touched wedding banquet.

So this is what death looks like, thought Lady Neku. A massive smear of shit across the surface of the world. She should have known. All this, just to remember why she’d first run away.

CHAPTER 55 — Monday Morning, 2 July

So much of what Kit thought was right was wrong, starting with who killed Ben Flyte. The police had believed the killer was Armand de Valois, until Kit tripped up their conclusions, while Kit himself had decided it was Kate O’Mally, a woman he’d always believed capable of anything.

It had been someone else entirely.

“Ben Flyte?” demanded Pat, pulling off a muddy road. His question was meant to be throwaway. A sorry, what was that? Only Kit had watched his shoulders tense.

“Mary’s boyfriend.”

“Really?” Pat said. “I’m not sure we ever met. They kept changing…”

“Kate mentioned him in Tokyo.”

“He’s probably with someone else now,” said Pat. “Things are different these days.”

Kit sighed. “You know,” he said, “what your mistake was?”

Pat Robbe-Duras climbed out of the car. After a second Kit realised he was meant to follow. The sky was dark, the stars high, and the moon half hidden by a flat scrap of cloud. A flare of a match and the restless tip of a cigarette were the only clues that Pat was walking towards an open-fronted hangar, watched by sleepy cattle from a nearby field.

“Tell me my mistake,” he said, when Kit caught up.

“Never once mentioning him,” said Kit, then asked a question that had been troubling him, really troubling him. “No face, no fingers, no jaw, no teeth—how did you bring yourself to inflict that level of damage?”

“He used to hit her,” said Pat. “Did Katie tell you that? Mary wouldn’t let either of us interfere. We were just meant to live with it. And then she went missing.”

“The suicide?”

“Before that,” said Pat, disappearing into the hangar. When he returned it was to pick up his conversation where it left off. “Mary was due to have lunch with me about a week before she took the ferry. She never turned up, but Ben did in that wretched little car of his.”

“Did he say where Mary was?”

“No,” said Pat. “Hadn’t seen her in days apparently, and didn’t know where she’d gone, wanted my help getting her back.”

“So you killed him.”

“That was later,” Pat said. “When I realised he’d brought his shit into my life.”

“What?”

“He arrived with a Chinese lacquer trunk he’d found Mary for Christmas. Asked me to store it until they made up again, lying little fuck. I gave him about ten minutes, to make sure he wasn’t coming back, and then hacked the lock. You know what I found?”

“Heroin.”

Pat nodded. “So I called him up and said I knew where Mary was, but we needed to talk before I told him.” The old man’s face was a cold mask in the moonlight. “He came bouncing back, all smiles, promising to make everything right. And then he saw the open trunk…”

Two men were leading a small plane out of the hangar, one of them walking ahead. The plane had both its engines going and was inching forward, running without lights. As Kit watched, it angled itself along a darkened runway.

“You should go,” said Pat.

“Say goodbye to Neku for me. And tell her I’ll see her soon.”

“Of course.”

Looking away, Kit said, “You never told me how you made yourself mutilate Ben Flyte. What drove you, was it anger?”

“No one got tortured,” said Pat. “We had a whisky while Ben waited for me to tell him where to find Mary. Only his glass was loaded with my painkillers. I put him in the freezer and hacked him up later, when he’d frozen. It was meant to make his body hard to identify.”

“It worked,” Kit said. “And the drugs?”

“Into the river.” Pat looked sad. “That was my big mistake,” he said. “They killed the fish.”

The waters of the English Channel were dark beneath the plane. A sheet of oxidised lead hammered flat by moonlight and wind. A bank of tiny diodes on a console were the only lights in the cabin. Kit was pretty certain that flying dark was illegal but he kept his mouth shut and watched sullen lead turn into wild grass instead.

Dawn was an hour away. Which would give Kate’s pilot time to land in France, turn around, and be back over Kent before the sun clipped the horizon. A feat quite within the Beechcraft’s capabilities, according to a tatty leaflet Kit had been reading before take off.

The Air King E90 was a turbo prop, once popular with air charter companies. It could stay airborne for six hours and was designed to seat eight, two pilots, four passengers in club chairs, and two bodyguards, chauffeurs, or junior staff in seats at the back.

In the plane they used, someone had long since ripped out the leather seats and replaced the carpet with sheet steel, unless that was the original floor. Over the steel had been taped polyethylene, now badly scuffed and somewhat torn. Whatever this plane usually carried it was unlikely to be Business Class passengers, or their assorted hangers on.

The pilot was a young Asian called Tony. At least that was how he’d introduced himself at the small airfield, where Kit had been dropped by Pat, who turned out to drive almost as quickly as Brigadier Miles.

“Calais…right?” It was the first thing Tony had said since take off.

“Apparently.”

“Okay, I’m to give you this.”

The padded envelope contained euros, two credit cards, an EU driving licence, one of the new ID cards, and a passport, all made out in a name Kit didn’t recognise. Kate O’Mally had obviously spent the last half hour before Kit left pulling in favours. It said something for her reputation that the fakes were good.

“Computers,” said Tony, glancing across. “Just drop in the photograph and hit print.”

The licence and ID looked perfect. The back pages of the passport, when Kit examined them in the light, seemed slightly ruffled.

“If anyone queries you,” Tony said, “say you got caught in the rain.” He shrugged. “And remember, the credit cards are only for show. Your boss said use cash.”

My boss? Kit laughed.

The wild grass gave way to French fields and finally to a small airstrip trapped between empty railway lines and the edge of a vast farm, one of those industrial outfits with tractors the size of small houses and pig pens the size of railway stations.

“You known Kate O’Mally long?” Kit asked.

“Never heard of her,” said Tony, adjusting the joystick to slide the Air King E90 between a narrow strip of lights. “Never heard of you either. I’m not even here.”

There were slow trains to Paris from Calais, express trains, and even a Eurostar, which stopped to take on passengers at a dedicated station nearby. A plane ticket was already waiting for Kit at Aeroport Charles de Gaulle. All the same, Paris, the ticket, and Kit’s flight to Tokyo would have to wait. There was somewhere else Kit needed to go first. He got there by truck.

“Good for you I was passing.”

They’d been through this. It was good Philippe had been passing and even better that he stopped when Kit stuck out his thumb. So now Philippe wanted paying in English conversation and Kit was doing his best to oblige.

“It’s a clear morning.”

The driver peered intently through his windshield and then nodded agreement. “Very clear,” he said.

“And the sea is blue.”

“Very blue. Also grey.”

Kit sighed. It was 370 kilometres from Calais to Amsterdam and so far they’d managed 50 of them. If Philippe was to be believed, his cargo was going the whole way. Although Kit had a feeling his original question might have been misunderstood, he’d find out in a while.

“Your hand it is hurt?”

This was a fair guess, given Kit was wearing a finger shield and had tape holding what remained of his smallest finger to the ring finger next door. “An accident,” said Kit, folding his hand out of sight.

“Nasty,” Philippe said. “You walking?”

“No,” said Kit. “I’m in a truck with you.”

Philippe laughed. “I mean, are you holiday walking? Lots of the English visit Pas de Calais to walk. Also Amsterdam, where they hire bicycles.”

“Not walking, or planning to hire a bike in Amsterdam.”

“But you’re visiting the city on holiday?”

“Yes,” said Kit. “And I’m late.”

Philippe frowned. “How late?” he asked.

At least fifteen years, thought Kit, but he kept the words to himself.

There were cities where Kit barely knew one place from another outside the area in which he’d lived. The squalor of a ghetto in Istanbul, an arid little suq in a town Sudanese rebels called their capital. Even Tokyo—where Kit could have told Roppongi from Shinjuku blindfolded by street noise alone—largely remained a mystery to him.

And yet the city about which Kit knew most was the one he’d never visited. Empires had squabbled over it and Protestants besieged Catholics to claim its muddy, flood-threatened streets. Home to Rembrandt van Rijn, the place where Descartes linked identity indelibly to thought, the city had fought against the British, French, and Spanish, given England a king and been ruled by one of Napoleon’s brothers.

Its canals were famous, it had two of the most famous churches in Europe, and yet all most tourists knew it for was brothels, endless bicycles, and cafés where it was still legal to smoke dope.

Amsterdam had been Mary’s idea. Although it was Kit who bought the map and found the first guide book. Mary was the one who bought the postcards, five in total from a charity shop in Newbury. All black and white, and showing views of a city that probably didn’t exist even then. The Prinsengracht canal, Anne Frank’s house, and a solemn-looking Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, and last of all a typical Dutch square overlooking a narrow canal.

Tulips grew in wooden tubs, an old man in clogs sat smoking a pipe…a girl in a dark coat and a young man with a beret pushed a pram beneath a row of poplars.

That was going to be them.

It took Mary and Kit a whole weekend to identify Statholder Square from a map. The bridge helped and the church opposite. They were going to become famous, sell millions of Switchblade Lies CDs, and buy one of the narrow houses that stared from the square to the canal beyond. The dream lasted about seven weeks. Long enough to learn a handful of Dutch words, cut a demo, and decide they’d have a white cat and never see either of their families again.

All of this in the year before Kit stopped beside a hut above Middle Morton to crash a party to which he definitely hadn’t been invited, and everything in his life suggested he’d have done better to avoid.

Seven narrow houses lined one edge of Statholder Square, a museum dedicated to the Goldsmith’s Guild and a row of smaller houses stood opposite. The tulip tubs were gone and the poplars on the canal edge had sprouted wrought-iron cages to protect them from the world. And looking from the square’s open edge, Kit saw five more houses and a wide-windowed art gallery where the original postcard had shown a print shop.

A steel grille protected the gallery window and a sign on the door read, Gesloten.

Closed.

Taped to the window was a large poster of a semi-nude with wild blonde hair, a sour smile, and dark nipples. The words beneath read 33/33 @Thirty-three. A series of self portraits by Sophie Van Allen at Gallery 3+30. Whatever Kit expected, it wasn’t this.

It took five knocks to earn a shout and another five before footsteps could be heard on the stairs behind the door. When the last of the bolts shot back, a cropped-haired woman blocked his way.

“Gesloten,” she announced, pointing to the sign and reading it aloud in case he was a complete idiot.

“I’m a friend,” said Kit, nodding to the poster.

“Of Sophie?”

“Yes,” said Kit.

The woman looked doubtful.

“Call Sophie,” he suggested. “Say I’m here to see Mary.” When that failed to work, Kit added please, and somehow that was enough.

The conversation happened just out of earshot, with Kit on the doorstep. When the woman returned her eyes were hard. “This Mary of yours is dead. Sophie says you know that already.”

“Except she isn’t. Is she?”

It took another ten minutes and two more calls. The last call to Sophie sounded very much like an argument. “She’ll see you,” said the woman, not bothering to disguise her anger.

“Sophie?”

“The other one.”

I always thought this is where we’d both end up. So obvious, but only in retrospect. It made Kit want to punch himself.

“Which house?” he demanded.

The gallery owner looked puzzled.

“Where’s Mary staying?”

“At the hotel, obviously…”

Herberg Statholder was so hip it avoided signs and any clues that it might actually be a hotel. A simple black-painted door, with a dolphin door knocker, opened onto stairs leading up to reception. The air smelled of scented candles and expensive leather. The Warhols on the wall looked as if they might be original.

A brass lift carried Kit down to an almost-empty sitting room, which looked over Statholder Square or the canal, depending on which sofa one chose. It was here he found Sophie, who clipped a bell on the table in front of her and ordered two espressos from the man who materialised, without bothering to check if Kit wanted coffee.

She looked older than he remembered, her hair unwashed and her nails bitten. Worry, anger, or a migraine had closed down her face. “So…” Sophie said, when their cups arrived. “You’ve come to see Mary.”

“Yeah,” said Kit.

“How did you find out?”

“Mary told me where she was,” he said. “Only, I was just too fucking stupid to realise.”

“She told you.”

“I got a postcard before Christmas,” said Kit. “An old card I thought she’d long since thrown away. It said…” He hesitated. “It said things that should have been said long ago. And it said here was where Mary thought we’d both end up.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Nor did I,” said Kit. “Not at first.”

“I think this is a bad idea,” Sophie said. “Mary knows that. If Ben or the Russian follow you here…”

“They’re dead.”

Sophie put her cup down with a click.

“Ben Flyte died six months ago,” said Kit. “The other one died yesterday.”

“What happened?” asked Sophie.

“I killed him.”

Sophie blinked. “You killed Armand de Valois?” Her hands were shaking, Kit realised. Shaking so badly she halted on the edge of reaching for her cup. “What about the Sergeant?”

“What about him?”

“He was employed by de Valois. And Ben relied on the Sergeant for protection. They’d been working together for years.”

For years? Kit put down his own cup and looked round the elegant drawing room, rejecting a house phone that sat on a marble table near the door. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I need to make a call.”

CHAPTER 56 — Monday Morning, 2 July

The first phone booth was empty and working but took only credit cards, so Kit walked until he came to another, which was occupied. A quarter mile after that he found a third outside a café.

Everyone at a pavement table looked up, but this was probably because Kit had just entered a booth in a city where even tramps seemed to carry their own phones.

Feeding a 20-euro note into a slot, Kit fed in another and then a third, making sure he had sufficient credit. He wanted to avoid the slightest chance of losing his concentration while making this call.

“Amy.”

Stunned silence gave way to a gasp. “Shit,” she said. “I can’t believe you’d…” And then Amy said nothing, although her silence was thick with worry, anger, and unmade decisions.

“You could record this,” said Kit. “Or you could give me the Brigadier’s direct number.”

“I’m at Boxbridge,” Amy said. “We were just talking about you.”

A briefer silence became the voice of Brigadier Miles. “Mr. Newton,” she said, “I imagine you realise we’re tracing this call.”

“I’m in Amsterdam,” said Kit. “About ten minutes’ walk from Statholder Square, outside the Tolkien Café. Although I’ll be gone the moment I hear sirens or see anything resembling a police car. I want to do you a favour. Do you know someone called Alfie…Might have worked with Mr. de Valois?”

“Not as well as I’d like. He’s currently in South London, helping the Met with their enquiries. Apparently he was somewhere else when Mr. de Valois got murdered. Alfie just can’t quite decide where. You did hear about that unpleasantness, didn’t you?”

Kit ignored the comment.

“And for some reason,” said Brigadier Miles, “the Met are unhappy with us. They think we’ve been hiding things.”

“Which you have.”

It was Kit’s turn to get ignored.

“Talk to Alfie,” he said.

“And say what?” The Brigadier sounded interested.

“Ask him about Mr. de Valois’s relationship with Sergeant Samson. You’ll have to offer him immunity, but more to the point, tell Alfie it will make Kate O’Mally and Mike Smith very happy.”

“Will it?”

Kit shrugged, watching his money count down on a little digital window. “It probably won’t make them unhappy.”

“You know,” said the Brigadier, “I’m beginning to believe the rumours that you’re actually working for Mrs. O’Mally.”

“I’ve heard those rumours too,” Kit said. “All lies.”

“And if I did offer Alfie help, it would be immunity from what?”

“General wickedness, I imagine…Unless you know something I don’t.”

“So he didn’t knife de Valois?”

“No,” said Kit. “He didn’t.”

The Brigadier sighed. “I was afraid of that. You do realise, don’t you, that your prints are all over that blade?”

“Quite possibly,” said Kit.

“Anyway,” the old woman said, “let’s get back to Alfie. What can he give me?”

“Something to upset the Met…”

“Really?”

Kit grinned. It was a tired grin, one that barely made it onto his face but it was still a grin. He felt it catch the side of his mouth like a hook setting. “Thought that would interest you,” he said. “Armand de Valois was paying Sergeant Samson in women as well as cash for information…”

Brigadier Miles laughed.

“It gets better,” Kit added. “The Sergeant and Ben Flyte were a team. In fact, I’d bet it was Sergeant Samson who told Flyte that de Valois was dead, right after that shooting in Germany. I can see the attraction. All that heroin with no owner. What’s a crooked cop to do? Only, Armand wasn’t dead. A bit like Ben Flyte.”

“Flyte?”

“Last seen in South London, I believe…sometime yesterday.”

He had the Brigadier’s attention, the hook set as firmly into her mouth as it was set in his.

“What you’ve got,” said Kit, “is a murdered terrorist, and a society drug dealer as your chief suspect—and providing Alfie talks—a currently suspended officer from a South London drugs squad who’s the only known connection between the two. If I were you, I’d offer Alfie anything he wants.”

“I’m going to make some calls,” said the Brigadier. “Give me a number where I can call you back.”

“I need a favour in return.”

“A favour?”

“The name behind a construction company in Tokyo.”

Silence greeted this request. A handful of seconds of static and doubt. And then the Brigadier was back. “And how do I get that for you?”

“You must have friends,” said Kit.

“Not in Tokyo,” said Brigadier Miles.

“People like you,” Kit said, “have friends everywhere.”

CHAPTER 57 — Monday Morning, 2 July

All of the rooms at Herberg Statholder had double beds, their own glass-topped vanity tables, satellite television, discreet minibars, music systems, and wireless internet. Laptops were provided for guests who forgot to bring their own.

Meals could be served at any time of day or night and in any place, although the sky café apparently offered unrivalled views across the slate roofs of Amsterdam, and all guests got preferential booking at a Michelin-starred brasserie less than three minutes’ walk from the hotel.

The Herberg Statholder had money. It had money because its guests had money and matching expectations. Herberg Statholder pulled off that difficult trick of offering the expensively shabby and casually exclusive. Although a wooden panel in the lift was cracked, the brass fittings were hand-polished and the lift’s single picture was signed and numbered and came from one of Chagall’s shorter runs.

Kit took the lift alone because Sophie refused to accompany him, her anger so obvious that he began to wonder if it was with Mary rather than him.

Room 12.

Herberg Statholder avoided numbering its rooms according to floor. With only twelve bedrooms such fussiness was irrelevant. The narrow corridor onto which Kit’s lift opened led to the Sky Café in one direction, and to three bedrooms in the other: servants’ quarters, made fashionable by their rooftop view and the tectonic shifts of history.

“Come in…”

He would have known the voice anywhere. Kit was still wondering what to say when Mary pulled herself up and adjusted the pillows behind her head.

“Long time,” she said.

He nodded.

“I didn’t mean you to find me,” said Mary, then added, “Sophie called me, while you were on the way up. You read more into my card than was there.”

“No,” Kit said. “I didn’t.”

She looked at him.

“Why send it then?” demanded Kit. “At least, why that card and those words?”

“To hurt you,” Mary said. “So you knew what really happened. I was tying up my life’s loose ends and you were one of them.” Her window was open on the other side of the bed, a vase of orchids stood on the vanity table and an open copy of Vanity Fair lay discarded on the floor. It made no difference. The room reeked of illness.

“Sit down,” said Mary, and that was when Kit realised he was still standing in her doorway.

“What is it?” he asked.

“A mistake, we shared needles. Ben was in remission and I didn’t even know he was ill. I came apart in a matter of months.” She nodded towards a chair. “Sit,” she said.

A child could be heard outside, chattering excitedly about nothing very much. A bicycle went past in need of oiling. A woman talked to herself, or on the phone. “You hear all that?” said Mary, indicating her open window.

He nodded.

“It’s called life. That’s what I’m leaving behind.”

“I don’t suppose,” said Kit, when he’d listened some more to the noises outside and seen Mary smile, “there’s much point in my asking why you staged a fake suicide?”

“You don’t know?”

“How would I?”

“Because you always boasted you knew me better than I knew myself.”

Kit shrugged. “I must have been lying.”

Mary’s laugh was thin. “Take a guess,” she said.

“You were escaping Armand de Valois.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because the man wanted his heroin back.”

“My choice had nothing to do with Ben,” she said, sitting back. “Or that dealer of his. Anyway, I couldn’t have told de Valois where his drugs were because I didn’t bloody know.”

“If Ben wasn’t the reason?”

“Oh God,” said Mary, “work it out.”

Sitting on a chair, beside a bed in a room in the attic of an absurdly over-priced hotel in Amsterdam, Kit did. It was a very Mary reason.

“You couldn’t stand Pat and Kate watching you die.”

She nodded.

“You wanted to spare them the pain.”

Mary laughed, hard enough to set her coughing again. When Kit patted her back he felt mostly bone. “Oh God,” she said, catching her breath. “All that black leather and cynicism and fucked-up back history. And you’ve still got a heart of pure marshmallow. You’ve seen how my father is. You’ve seen how my mother fusses. I wanted to spare me the pain.”

They sat in silence, with a warm wind carrying sounds and a slight sourness from the canal through Mary’s open window. The orchids were new, the paper open on her bed was that day’s issue. Someone was obviously looking after her.

“Anyway,” said Mary, into the silence. “Enough about me. Tell me about you. Are you married? What’s Tokyo like as a place to live? Do you have kids?”

There was no easy answer to any of those. So Kit told her about Neku instead. About how cos-play dressed and how his bar had been a drinking club for bozozoku. And how he’d finally worked out the reason he liked Tokyo so much was that everyone spent most of their time pretending to be someone else.

“You met this child on the street?”

“In a Roppongi doorway. I gave her coffee. She cried.”

“And now you’ve got her at the flat in London?”

“It’s not like that,” said Kit, explaining what it was like, as Mary listened intently or asked the occasional question, until she had what she needed to know.

“So you’re using this girl to repay a debt you owe me?”

Kit nodded.

“I can live with that,” she said.

The metal tub in Mary’s bathroom had clawed feet and stood in the middle of the room, on boards that had been sanded back to bare wood and then painted white, very crudely. A single curtain-less window looked up at sky.

“Not too hot,” said Mary, smiling when Kit tested the water with his elbow, as he’d once seen Yoshi do before bathing her nephew. Mary was far thinner than he remembered, her vertebrae sharp beneath his fingers as he soaped her back.

“Wash me thoroughly,” she said, kneeling up.

Kit did his best.

By the time he finished, the bath water was tepid and every inch of Mary’s body had been soaped and scrubbed clean. As a final gesture, he let the water drain away and used a hand showerhead to rinse her body. After that, he dried her carefully.

“Thank you,” she said. “I can’t persuade Sophie to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Too invasive,” said Mary. “We’re lovers,” she added, when Kit looked puzzled. “Well, we’re meant to be. It’s been a while…”

After he’d helped Mary back to bed, Kit spoke more about Neku and then about Tokyo, and he found himself telling her about the stand off at the building site in Roppongi. Somehow that led to him telling her about Yoshi and the fire, not really being married, and the night Neku killed a man.

“No one fights like that,” said Mary. “Unless it’s what they know.” Her voice was tired and her lips trembled, but she spoke with the certainty of someone facing death and refusing to look away. “She comes from where I come from,” Mary said, before Kit could ask how she knew. It was the only time he could remember her mentioning Kate’s profession.

“Ask yourself who really gains,” said Mary. “Ask yourself how many of the things you believe to be true are lies. Find out what really happened that night…”

“I’m sorry,” said Kit.

“Yes,” said Mary. “Me too.”

Neither was talking about her family, Japan, or the fact Mary was dying. “About the bath,” she said. “Don’t tell Sophie.”

“I won’t,” Kit promised. It was the last thing he said to her.

CHAPTER 58 — Nawa-no-ukiyo

She had betrayed herself, her family, and Luc d’Alambert, every one of these by accident. So much for Lady Neku to remember, so much to forget…

“How does that work?” Luc had asked, finding himself standing in High Strange, beside a recently regrown pod. He meant the fact that he was standing there at all.

“Who knows?” said Lady Neku.

One second they were in Schloss Omga, the next Luc was asking his question and Lady Neku was doing her best not to look smug. “I mean,” she said, “how does High Strange stay up and what makes sky sails change colour if the sun flares?”

“They’re made that way,” said Luc. “And we’re high enough above the ground to stay here.”

“No we’re not,” she said. “I’ve checked. We’d need to be at least three times this height to stay in orbit, and then we’d have to circle the planet.”

Luc smiled. “You really are strange,” he said.

Lady Neku sighed.

“I should go,” he said.

“Yes,” agreed Lady Neku. “You should.” She watched him limp away, his yellow cloak tangling with his heels as he walked. His foot, his lopsided smile, that tic in his right eye—small problems. Lady Neku was pretty sure he’d have them fixed if she suggested it.

“It’s time you dressed,” said a voice in Lady Neku’s head.

“What’s the point?” she said. “I’m only going to take it all off again. I could always…”

“No,” said the voice. “You couldn’t.”

The cloak was black, the dress was black, as was her belt and the shoes decorated with tiny beads. A black-bladed dagger hid inside a black velvet scabbard, the leather of its retaining thongs being the obvious colour.

“And the others?” Lady Neku asked.

“Already dressed,” said the kami. “Going over the final arrangements. Do you want to see?”

Her brothers were in her mother’s study, at the southern tip of the spire. Amber walls like frozen honey, a steel throne and a trio of wooden stools set neatly around it. Lady Katchatka wore a dress cut from spiders’ silk, the light-swallowing kind she professed to despise.

The boys wore doublets and cloaks sewn with black pearls. Petro was alive, looking pale and unsteady on his seat, Nico and Antonio supporting him at each elbow, neither prepared to meet their mother’s eyes.

“You know what to do?” asked Lady Katchatka.

All three boys nodded.

“Nico moves first,” said Lady Katchatka. “Until then, everyone behaves.”

Petro got ready to protest.

“Nico does it,” she told him. “You’re weak as a baby and Antonio is too slow. We strike fast, and hard. With d’Alambert dead the cripple will be useless. Antonio can have him. After that, kill anyone you want.”

“And the ships?”

“Old men and children,” said Lady Katchatka. “We deny them air and food unless they surrender…” She smiled at Nico’s raised eyebrows. “All right,” she said. “We’ll deny it anyway.”

“What about Neku?” asked Petro, from a throat wet and barely formed.

“She’ll get over it,” Lady Katchatka said.

The marriage ceremony was simple, the bedding embarrassingly crude. Mostly in the thinness of the mattress, the hardness of the actual bed, and the wide-eyed enthusiasm of d’Alambert’s retainers. As a sop to Lady Neku’s modesty, Lord d’Alambert had allowed her a sheet. It came, almost inevitably, in a vile shade of yellow.

“We must talk,” said Lady Neku, as Luc slipped a robe from his shoulders and climbed self-consciously into bed beside her.

“Later,” he said. The boy was shaking, body taut as a karman wire.

“Now,” said Lady Neku, reaching up to wrap her arms around his neck and drag him close enough to bury her face in his hair. One of the retainers started clapping, and Lady Neku heard Nico groan.

“It’s a trap,” she whispered.

Luc pulled back. “What is?”

Grabbing his hair, Lady Neku yanked him down again, to general laughter from her brothers and a sigh from Luc’s father. Only family were allowed close, retainers being kept at a decent distance by silken ropes.

“All of this,” whispered Lady Neku. “Stay next to me at the banquet, I’ll protect you.”

Startled eyes stared down at her. Luc wanted to demand answers, he wanted to scramble away. It was all Lady Neku could do to hold the boy in place.

“Whisper,” she said.

Luc leaned close and someone started clapping again. “What’s a trap?” he asked, turning his head as Lady Neku’s hands twisted into his hair and dragged his ear to her mouth.

“Everything,” she said. “All of it.”

“Why?”

Lady Neku met his eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve only just found out. But you’re in danger.”

“My father…”

Shaking her head, Lady Neku felt her face against his. “Too late,” she said. “It’ll be all I can do to save you.” A half dozen members of each family stood watching, a hundred servitors waited behind a silken rope. The boy clung to her, his body protected only by the sheet. Anyone could have killed him with a single thrust; she should be grateful her brothers had spared her that.

“We have to go through with this,” said Lady Neku.

Luc’s eyes widened. “I can’t.”

“Everyone’s watching,” she said. “You must.” If you don’t, thought Lady Neku, then Nico at least will know something is wrong and it will be much harder for me to protect you.

His lovemaking was angry and brutal, as if it was her fault everything had already begun to go wrong. This was High Strange, once called Katchatka Segment. What did he expect?

Lady Neku whimpered and sighed, closed her eyes, and clung to her new husband, burying her head in his hair. It was a command performance. So unexpected that she impressed even herself. When it was over, the face she presented to her family was streaked with tears. And the tears, at least, were real.

You did this, she told them, inside herself. You took away my friendship with Luc. You made him hate me.

Tradition allowed her to miss the banquet. In fact, tradition allowed her to hide her face from public sight for three days. Time for a new bride to live down the trauma of her public bedding. It was a d’Alambert family tradition. Lady Neku wasn’t remotely impressed by what it said about them.

“You’re sure you want to attend?” Lord d’Alambert stood with a cloak, ready to hide Lady Neku’s nakedness. A moon-faced servitor, moist-eyed in sympathy for the tears drying on her new mistress’s face, stood ready to escort Lady Neku to a waiting ship. “It would give you time to…”

Lady Neku smiled her sweetest smile. “I want to be with Luc,” she said, and all of the old man’s resistance crumbled.

The cloak he offered her was a faded shade of red, with slivers of amber sewn in patterns around the hem. It was lined with yellow silk and weighed so heavily that Lady Neku’s knees buckled as Lord d’Alambert draped it around her bare shoulders.

Having shown her mistress how to fasten the collar, the moon-faced servitor led Lady Neku to an alcove, so she could dress properly and compose herself. Of course I’m shaking, Lady Neku wanted to snarl. You’d shake if you knew what was about to happen.

“Leave me,” she demanded.

The servitor looked doubtful, which was interesting. Had the woman been from High Strange she’d barely have dared lift her eyes from the floor.

“I need time.”

Confusion, sympathy, and apologies…Lady Neku looked around the empty alcove and sighed. Struggling into her wedding dress, Lady Neku wrapped the ridiculous cloak around her shoulders and looked for the dagger she’d left under her folded clothes. It was gone.

“Oh great,” she said, just as Luc appeared in the doorway.

He blinked. A second later, Luc’s father was standing behind him, concern on his face. “Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Lady Neku, squaring her shoulders. It was only as she walked from the alcove to the candle-lit grandeur of the banquet that Lady Neku began to wonder how Luc’s anxiety had produced his father in the door behind him, with no words being exchanged. She should have paid that thought more attention.

The major domo had excelled itself. A white tablecloth spread the length of a table. Silver candle sticks and oil lamps flickered and gutted smokily in the breeze from a recycling unit. Overhead lights could have been used, and food could have been pulled from the Drexie boxes, but this was a banquet so fresh meat had been killed and old bottles had been opened.

Katchatka and d’Alambert, on the surface it was a triumph of diplomatic negotiation. Two families who had barely talked to each other in the time that anyone in the room had been alive now sat at the same table, preparing to celebrate their new alliance.

At one end sat Lady Katchatka, with Lord d’Alambert at the end opposite, in a chair of exactly equal size. Luc and Lady Neku were on d’Alambert’s right. Antonio, Petro, and Nico on their mother’s right, with Petro in the middle, so his brothers could support him discreetly, should Petro’s new body prove too weak to cope with the meal.

It was the seating that protocol demanded.

“Lady Neku,” said Lord d’Alambert, raising his glass. “Who will always have a place in our family.”

Raising her own glass, Lady Katchatka readied herself to make some equally facile reply and Lady Neku tensed, but all that happened was that her mother toasted Luc’s strength and intelligence, and lowered her glass again. One course drifted into two and then three, bottles of old wine emptied and were replaced, until the room began to blur slightly and Lady Neku forced herself to drink only water.

Could she have misunderstood?

The image of her mother and brothers in the Amber Study felt so real that Lady Neku was still wondering when her mother nodded to Nico. “If you would,” she said. “We should give Lord d’Alambert his present.”

Lurching to his feet, Nico staggered to a side table and grabbed what looked like a cushion. Only, when he returned, Lady Neku could see that the cushion supported a tiny battered-looking bowl.

“I understand,” said Lady Katchatka, “that you are interested in antiquity. This is the oldest artifact we possess. It is now yours.”

Nico put Yoshi’s bowl on the table in front of Lord d’Alambert. And in that moment, as the old man’s eyes fixed on fragile clay and Lady Neku began to rise from her seat, Nico struck, burying his dagger deep into Lord d’Alambert’s heart.

At least, that was what was meant to happen. What Lady Neku thought had happened.

Only the old man took the blade through his wrist, wrenching the dagger from Nico’s grasp with a single twist of his injured arm. From the expression on Lord d’Alambert’s face he’d already moved beyond pain.

And as Antonio cried out and Petro tried to stand, Nico died, his chest opened in a single slash that sprayed d’Alambert with blood. It was a miracle the old man could see to reach for Nico’s heart.

Lord d’Alambert killed Antonio with a single throw, catching him below the jaw and returning him to his seat. Petro died at the hands of Luc, who simply leaned across the table to slit the throat of the man opposite. Petro being too weak, drunk, or both to defend himself.

Sex and killing sounded the same, Lady Neku realised. All wet sucking and the slurp of broken vacuum. It even smelled the same, salt and sweet and shitty enough to leave her queasy.

“Wait,” she shouted, when Luc moved towards the final chair.

“She betrayed you,” he said. “She traded you for a chance to kill my father. Why should she live?”

Because she’s still my mother.

“How did you find out?” asked Lady Katchatka, with the calm of someone already dead.

“Your daughter told us,” said Luc.

Maybe he meant to be cruel, or perhaps he simply meant to tell the truth. Lady Neku watched her mother’s composure falter. “Wonderful,” Lady Katchatka said. “Betrayed by the family idiot. How did she find out?”

“A kami told me,” said Lady Neku.

“AIs don’t…” Cold eyes fixed on the girl. “I should have drowned you at birth,” said Lady Katchatka. “Make it quick,” she told Luc, her daughter already forgotten. “Quick and clean.”

“Was that the death you intended to give us?” The voice behind Luc was thin with the pain of a skewered wrist.

“Yes,” said Lady Katchatka. “It was.”

The corridor was empty, the statues silent, dust drifted in tiny eddies across the floor. It was cooler than Lady Neku remembered, which had to be the cause of her constant shivering.

“Go on,” she said, as she spun a handle. “Open.” But the airlock door in front of her remained steadfastly closed. “Just open,” said Lady Neku. “How hard can that be?”

“It’ll kill you,” High Strange said.

“That’s fine with me.”

“And everyone else in the habitat.”

“Even better,” said Lady Neku, twisting the handle. When the great metal ring jammed in one direction, she reversed the spin, until it jammed in that direction as well. “Open,” she demanded, dashing tears from her eyes. “Stop fucking me around.”

The wound in her shoulder looked bad, but the truth was Luc had pulled his blow the moment Lady Neku threw herself in front of Lady Katchatka. Bleeding to death would take longer than Lady Neku was prepared to wait, assuming it was possible at all.

“Please,” she said. “Just open this door for me.”

“There are a hundred and thirty-five people on the habitat.”

“No there aren’t,” said Lady Neku.

The voice gave her a list. It was right, of course, provided you counted servitors and retainers. She stood in the duct below the audience chamber, reached by the helix of stairs behind the unicorn. No one had seen her pull aside the tapestry and hide herself; they were all too busy watching Lady Katchatka die.

“Open,” demanded Lady Neku, more to banish this thought than any real belief High Strange might listen.

“And if I do?” it said.

“We die,” said Lady Neku.

“That’s what you want?”

Lady Neku nodded her head.

“Say it,” the voice said. “Name the people you think should die.”

“I don’t know all their names,” said Lady Neku crossly, as she rubbed knuckles into her eyes and folded her cloak tight, to hide the sight of blood which was beginning to make her feel sick.

“So you’re saying you want people killed, but you don’t actually know their names?”

Yes, that is exactly…well. Lady Neku thought about it. Maybe not exactly.

“You want Luc dead?”

Of course I want… She hesitated. Killing Luc was her duty. Something to which she should dedicate the rest of her life. All the same. “This isn’t fair,” Lady Neku said.

“Nor is opening that door.”

For the rest of their conversation Lady Neku sat on the floor, her knees pulled up to her chin and her back against the door she’d been trying to open. She knew the discussion was mostly internal. High Strange just helping to pick through her thoughts.

“All right,” it said. “I’ve opened the door…Only a fraction,” it added, as Lady Neku scrambled to her feet. “The air is already thinner and your core temperature has begun to fall. That’s why the bleeding is less. In a few seconds Luc and his father will begin to search for you. A short while later, they’ll stop looking and make plans to abandon the habitat.”

“And me?” asked Lady Neku.

“Ah yes,” said High Strange. “I need to talk to you about that.”

Her life was saved by a bowl. Along with the life of Luc, his father, their retainers, other families, and people who clung to existence in parts of the world Lady Neku barely realised were inhabited.

The whole of humanity had been preserved because of a wafer-thin bowl barely larger than Lady Neku’s cupped hands. It was old, it was cracked beneath the rim, and it was the colour of burned earth. It was also, according to High Strange, proof that humanity was capable of more than it seemed. That they were worth protecting.

“We are the ghosts,” said High Strange.

“Of what?”

“Your machines.” It smiled, she could hear it in the voice. “We tied the knots for you and made the sails. We hold up your habitats. All you have to do is manage yourselves.”

“We’ve failed.”

“Katchatka failed. Lord d’Alambert will fold this station into his segment and grow new sails, with help from me. The weather will be stabilised. As your mother once said, everything comes at a price.”

“Her death,” said Lady Neku, eyes refilling. “My brothers.”

“No,” said High Strange. “You.”

Her cloak smelled of smoke and black ash formed moons beneath her fingernails, which were broken from having scrabbled through the rubble of a recently burned bar. The air in High Strange was thin and cold enough to make Lady Neku shiver, though that might have been the last of her memories falling into place.

Staring round the frozen chamber, Lady Neku saw the banquet table and her brothers where they sat. Lady Katchatka regal in a silver chair. Ice frosting the walls and the tiles and even the knives and forks on the plates laid out in front of the dead.

“Oh fuck,” she said. “I came back…”

She’d chosen exile. And offered her choice of time and place, had chosen where and when the bowl was made, because High Strange believed she would be happy there. Denied her own life, Lady Neku accepted a life that came frighteningly close.

Everything was possible in an infinite universe. That much was obvious. Less obvious, until one thought of it, was the fact that everything possible was possible twice, or three times, or as many times as anyone was prepared to throw the dice.

“I broke my memories,” said Lady Neku, wondering if this was excuse enough for her return.

“Neku,” said High Strange. “We’ve been through this. The beads only worked while you were here with me. There’s no me where you went, so no beads and no easy memories. Only you.”

“It’s weird there,” said Lady Neku. “No one is friendly and Kit’s bar has just burned down and the only normal person I’ve met so far is a cat.”

“Neku…”

“I have to go back,” she said.

“Yes,” said the voice. “You do.”