Page 58 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Never mind,’ Matsumoto said, still cheery. ‘How are you? You look ghastly.’ Now Thaniel was scrutinising it, the cheer had cracks in it. Something like hysteria winked through. No, not something like. It was. Matsumoto was scared out of his mind.

‘Do you want to come in for some tea?’ Thaniel said. ‘Tell me more about it?’

‘No, no, I’ll be on my way,’ Matsumoto said quickly. ‘Thank you. Didn’t mean to fret at you. I guarantee she’s gone to Colorado and I forgot to put it in the diary again.’

Thaniel moved towards the door to block the way without getting right up close to him, very aware of his own size. ‘I can start a missing persons file, that’s what we’re here for—’

‘God, no, she’d go spare,’ he laughed, looking like he might break in half.

‘No, you’re coming in,’ Thaniel insisted carefully. ‘Matsumoto – what’s going on?’

‘No, I …’ Matsumoto snatched up his gloves.

Thaniel caught his arms. He didn’t like doing it. Like Mori, Matsumoto was delicately made, but, unlike Mori, he had not been born into an era of sickening violence. ‘Please. This is my job. You came here for a reason.’

‘If anyone comes asking,’ Matsumoto said softly, ‘you can’t tell them I told you. This was just a social visit. We like each other, don’t we?’

‘Of course.’ It was true. He’d been glad when Grace and Matsumoto announced the banns in the newspaper. The two of them had gone to Oxford together; they were a damn sight better matched than Thaniel and Grace had ever been. ‘Who would come asking?’

Matsumoto shook his head. ‘Don’t know. A government man, he said, but he didn’t look one. I thought he was from the mafia at first, they all dress like demented actors. But he had a court injunction ordering me to speak to no one about Grace. He wouldn’t tell me where she was.’ He swallowed. He was speaking much too fast. ‘I ignored it, of course, it’s absurd. People can’t go round kidnapping a fellow’s wife, can they? I asked some people in the cabinet, you know, my father’s friends. Next day the same man came back with a baseball bat.’

‘Jesus Christ. Come in and sit down. I’ve got brandy.’

‘No. No, this was a bad idea. Look, you can’t open a missing person’s file. Her name’s been tagged, or something. I just wondered if you’d – heard anything.’

‘No,’ Thaniel said, and couldn’t quite believe it was true. There were so few British people in Japan that it seemed ridiculous they could lose one and not know. ‘But Matsumoto, I can open that file. I’m diplomatic staff, if someone comes after me with a baseball bat then it’s a major international incident.’

‘Yes,’ Matsumoto said, not sounding sure at all. ‘I see.’

‘Please stay.’

‘No, I think someone’s following me.’ He hesitated, and then set his teeth together. ‘Could you ask Keita Mori? It’s true about him, isn’t it, that he knows … things?’

Thaniel shook his head, feeling pointless. ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t seen him since before Christmas, he’s …’ Not coming back. Absurdly, even almost voicing that solidifying certainty growing like a cancer at the back of his mind made his eyes start to burn. Mortified, he coughed to hide it. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘No. No, of course,’ Matsumoto said, and left.

Thaniel stood in the doorway for a while, wondering what had just happened. He looked over the morgue reports for the last few weeks, but there were no unidentified white women in any of them.

He wired Tokyo University, just in case.

While he waited, he pulled across a few newspapers, meaning to do a quick translation of the headline articles so that Vaulker would have no excuse not to know what was going on. The Constitution parades tomorrow featured a lot, along with a good few little asides about the weather, and precautions about binding horses’ hooves, and brief cheery theories about the electromagnetic properties of Mount Fuji. The Russian fleet was now floating in plain view of Nagasaki.

He couldn’t concentrate. Seeing Matsumoto had spun him around.

He had known, when he left Yoruji, that whatever fragile bauble of a life he and Mori had in London was broken. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. But it was like Six’s lightbulbs. The filaments were delicate things, and if the electrical current surged by even a couple of volts, they snapped, and the feedback shorted the circuit. You couldn’t go round blaming the filament, or the electricity. They were just two things that any sensible person recognised might destroy each other if conditions were anything less than perfect. Thaniel liked to imagine he was a sensible person. God knew a sensible person would just get on with life, without sulking about broken lightbulbs.

He’d done quite well consciously. He’d been busy: even ordering dinner at a pub was a major intellectual exercise now if a person were to avoid cartilage in disguise as real food or a bartender who thought it would be funny to recommend raw whale. Finding out how bank accounts worked on diplomatic papers alone was mad; learning how the legation worked was even harder. He’d got into a new rhythm that, because Mori had never been part of it, didn’t feel the loss of him.

Otherwise, he hadn’t done so well. It was the oddest reaction to anything he’d ever had, but he’d stopped dreaming. Sleep took much longer to arrive than it ever had before. He’d lost the direction of it; he could lie down, but he couldn’t turn towards it anymore. There was a broken compass somewhere in him. He was so ashamed that he couldn’t come anywhere near speaking it.

If he sat still and let himself think, he could feel all the snapped filaments and cracked places.

The telegraph rattled. The overhead, which came through first in a brief clatter, was from Tokyo University.

Dr Grace Matsumoto on research sabbatical.

He snorted and answered straightaway. Back when?