Page 47 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Send for the coroner,’ was all he said.

Kuroda couldn’t move. ‘You let me do that,’ he said, quiet at first, but then the enormity of it pumped a bellows and the anger roared again. ‘You let me, you can’t say you didn’t see – you’re just as guilty as I am, so don’t get on your fucking high horse now and—’

‘I did let you,’ Mori interrupted. He had put a hardness in his voice that Kuroda had never heard before from anyone outside the Admiralty. ‘Now send for the coroner.’ He lifted her onto the couch and arranged her hands into a modest clasp against her belt, around the gold comb.

‘But – what will he find? There’s a – damn it, Keita, there’s the shape of a glass in her—’

‘He’ll find a haemorrhage,’ Mori said. He looked to the side as his steward, Suzuki, arrived with new clothes and a sack. ‘Get changed. Suzuki will get rid of what you’re wearing.’

‘You’re helping me,’ Kuroda said numbly. He heard the strength go out of his own voice.

‘Yes, now go and fetch the coroner. And tell those two in the office that your wife is dead. Say something sensible. Unrelated to brandy tumblers.’

Kuroda took a breath to ask him to just explain what to say, but Mori gave him the look that sergeants give especially slow seamen. ‘Either think properly and get through, or collapse and be executed. You’re no use to anyone if you can’t think. I’m going to sit here.’

The coroner, the auditors, and Kuroda had all gone. Everyone had seemed perfectly convinced the Countess had just fallen. Mori had told them so and that had been that. It had all happened before they had even touched the wretched ledgers, which lay unopened on a table still, someone’s teacup still cooling on one. Takiko hadn’t even seen bribes change hands; she didn’t think there had been any. People just believed Mori. Even though Suzuki had gone right past the window with a sack full of Kuroda’s bloody clothes and all the alcohol in the house, heading to the old sulphur well. She’d never thought she was naive, but it shocked her. She would have gone straight to the police station if she’d thought for a second that anyone there would pay her a blind bit of attention instead of just joking about Mori’s mad foreign wife.

Instead, she went to find Mori in his bedroom. On the way, fury and fear roiled together right in the pit of her stomach. God, all that rubbish he’d fed her before they were married, about needing her help: she had been such an idiot that she’d never even considered that help might just mean being murdered at the right moment. The Duke had told her; he’d told her, and she had barely listened for long enough to write him off as a superstitious berk. Half of her wanted to bolt and never come back. It was idiocy to confront a man who had done what she had just watched Mori do. The other half screamed it was better to die fighting than live hiding. Countess Kuroda had lived hiding.

Mori was walking up and down by the verandah door, waiting.

‘I know it was—’

She punched him in the head, a proper right hook. He went down hard on his knees on the floor. Knowing that he’d let her do it only made it worse. She’d never felt anger like it. There was madness in it, a raving howling need to go at him with whatever was to hand until his bones were powder. It was a colossal effort to lock her hands behind her back. She almost choked with it.

‘You let that happen because you thought she was an idiot, didn’t you?’ she said. Her voice came out low and tight. She didn’t sound like herself. ‘You understand that she wasn’t really like that? You know that no one is really like that? She was that way, she pretended to be stupid, because she’s read Sung Tzu. Seem weak where you are strong. She was conducting her marriage like a war.’

‘I know,’ he said softly. He was still on his knees. He sat back on his heels. ‘I know. I’m so sorry.’

‘Why did you let it happen?’ She snatched the back of his hair to force him to look up. ‘What, you thought she wasn’t worthwhile?’

‘Because I need Kuroda as he is now, with this hanging over him.’

‘That’s …’ She had to open her hands, because there were words, but they were bandied around too often to have kept all their power untarnished by idiots and exaggeration. ‘Evil. You’re evil.’

‘Yes.’ He shook his head slightly. She wished he would just be obnoxious, because then it would have been fair to kick him in the face, but he looked haunted, and sad, as though evil was a border he had crossed a long time ago and he was so deep into the country beyond that he could hardly remember anywhere else. He got up gradually. ‘Yes.’

‘What do you need him for? What’s so bloody important?’

He almost looked like he might explain, but then he seemed to put it all to one side. ‘Does it make any difference?’

Without really deciding to, she picked up the sake bottle from the table and fully meant to slam it into his teeth – a savage fury voice right at the front of her mind wanted his teeth in a jar – but before she’d even swung it, he clapped both hands over his mouth and half collapsed. He let himself down the rest of the way to the floor slowly, breathing as though she had already done it, coughing through pain that couldn’t possibly be real but looked entirely genuine all the same. She put the bottle down.

‘What?’ she said, confused.

Mori was shaking his head. He didn’t try to talk.

‘You feel it before it actually … happens.’

He nodded.

Caught between indignation and guilt and deep, nasty satisfaction, she sat down on the floor too. ‘But it wears off quickly?’

He sat back very, very slowly. He had gone white. He looked around without moving his head much, found a piece of paper and wrote, Psychosomatic. Takes a while.

‘You bloody deserved it,’ she said, uncomfortable now. His hand was shaking. She could see he would have liked to touch his own teeth, to prove to himself they were still there, but he couldn’t.

Yes.