Page 34 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Pringle, Pringle,’ he said, holding out his hand from much too far away. ‘Hajimemashite and so forth.’

Thaniel smiled and waited until he was near enough to take it comfortably. ‘Yeah, yoroshiku onegai. The Secretary?’

‘Yes, sir, of course, I’ll show you. He’s just through here,’ he said, walking Thaniel to the door even though it was in obvious view. Then he retreated back to the office. The second he was inside, just out of sight, he let all his breath out in a rush. ‘God, I thought he was someone’s servant!’

‘You absolute snotweasel, he can hear you,’ someone else laughed.

Thaniel pretended not to have heard and tapped on the Secretary’s door, then opened it when another cultured voice told him to come in.

The man behind the desk didn’t stand up. He was Thaniel’s age, but blond and handsome.

‘You’re Steepleton, are you? Didn’t I just see you get in a fistfight by the front door?’

‘Well,’ said Thaniel. ‘A quarter of one.’

‘What a good start.’

Thaniel waited. Things seemed to be going this way increasingly in the last couple of years when he met someone new at work. At first he’d thought it was his accent and that he didn’t sound educated enough, but eventually he’d realised it was just because, while he hadn’t really been paying attention, and through some alchemy to do with eating properly and Fanshaw chasing him down to the boxing club, he’d become a big man. Nobody wanted to feel loomed over by an immediate subordinate. It was annoying, he could see that, but he wasn’t going to apologise for having not been punched in the face by a nationalist.

‘I’m Tom Vaulker,’ the Secretary said at last. ‘Well, have a seat. I must say, it does seem hysterical for Francis Fanshaw to send someone just to sort out a ghost problem.’

Thaniel sat. He knew from dispatches that Vaulker was very paper-presentable, except that he hated Japan. He was doing his obligatory nine months before a nicer posting in Berlin. If someone was bullying the staff, he was a good candidate.

‘It’s more that we were worried that it isn’t a ghost problem,’ Thaniel said.

Vaulker ignored him. ‘Immaculate timing though. We’ve just had another man give his notice. Apparently saw the ghost of his late wife, again. In the kitchen, as usual. Very distressed. Apparently she went missing a while ago in … somewhere called …’ He checked a form. Thaniel wondered if he knew he’d said apparently twice. ‘Ow-kee-ga …?

‘Aokigahara,’ Thaniel offered. The sun was pouring in and he could see through the paper.

‘I won’t try,’ Vaulker decided. ‘Anyway, it’s near Mount Fuji. Now, he’s not wholly making sense, but I think we can excuse him that, given his wife is missing.’ He had bright blue eyes and they ticked unevenly over Thaniel to make sure he wasn’t going to make fun of the idea of shock. ‘But he seems to think her spirit is unquiet. They never found the body, apparently—’

Thaniel decided to kick the table leg every time another apparently came along.

‘—so she’s unburied – if she didn’t just do a bunk – and I think he’s angling for us to make the police investigate properly.’ He looked up again. ‘I wonder if you can wangle that? I can’t find a damn soul among the police who speaks English.’

‘I don’t think the police will investigate a disappearance in Aokigahara, sir,’ Thaniel said carefully.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s the suicide forest. People go there to hang themselves.’

Vaulker dropped his hands onto the edge of the desk, which made his cufflinks clink. ‘What a charming country this is.’

Thaniel smiled. He had never known, before he worked for the Foreign Office, that there was a hierarchy of countries according to Whitehall. If you did the standard diplomatic circuit, it usually began somewhere like Khartoum, and up a rung would be Peking, somewhere that was more war-nibbled than war-ravaged, but still wasn’t good enough to have a proper embassy instead of a legation. It was Germany and America everyone wanted, or Paris, where you could have glamorous tiffs with the other side about secret military plans. It looked, on the surface, like it was about acceptable weather and significant international clout, but Japan had English weather and fabulous amounts of money, and it was still lower down the whole thing than Khartoum.

His theory was that it was about how much translation you had to do before you could talk about anything interesting. The Sudan was horrible but people there spoke English.

‘I don’t know, it seems sensible to me,’ Thaniel said. ‘Polite really, not to do it on a railway.’

‘Polite …’ Vaulker touched his own temple and seemed to give up. ‘Look, he’s only spoken to Pringle, who’s probably poked himself in the eye with the wrong end of the stick. See what you make of it. Fellow’s name is Nakano, I think he’s still in the kitchens. His mother’s the head cook. You can catch him if you go now. Ridiculous as it all is and past the point of caring as I am.’

Thaniel nodded once.

Vaulker seemed to notice the absence of any sympathy. He shifted uncomfortably. ‘While you’re here – how do you say the forest name again?’

‘Aokigahara. “Aoi” means blue, “ki” is tree, “hara” is plain.’

‘Blue?’ Vaulker sounded almost interested. ‘Is it?’