Dreaming Spies (31 page)

Over the past fifteen months, I had spent a mere handful of days in this house. During one of those rare days, last summer, I had sat with Miss Pidgeon here on my diminutive terrace and talked about the drawbacks of travel. I told her about the intense beauty of Japan, almost shyly confiding my intention to plant a Japanese cherry tree—perhaps in that corner, there. And, O blessed among women, she had heard my longing, and responded.

Japan was now blossoming in Oxford: a sapling no higher than my chin, showing a handful of rich near-white blossoms along its bare branches. Transient loveliness, they would be gone in days.

I walked across the stones and the small patch of lawn to the low rise that was now home to a
Prunus serrulata
. In twenty years, I could host a hanami picnic beneath my very own blossoming tree.

I was still looking at the tiny splashes of white against the weathered red bricks of the wall when I heard a sound behind me. Haruki’s face was a lot rosier than my tree; I hoped it was merely from the warm bed.

“Good morning,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long.”

“Why not? It’s the best medicine.”

“It is more difficult to leave a place by daylight.”

“All for the better, since you don’t need to be anywhere. No one knows you are here, no one comes in. And no one overlooks the garden.”

She glanced out, her eyes lingering on the skinny blossoming twig. “You have no servants?”

“What would I want servants for? Unless you stand in the front window, no one will see you. Now, what do you like for breakfast?”

I ignored her protestations and assembled the only meal I could cook
without having to chip the remains from the skillet and air out the kitchen. I beat eggs, sliced tomatoes, carved bread—and all the while, she talked. I would never have thought her so garrulous, and could not decide if it was a remnant of the opium or the beginnings of fever.

In either case, she talked. I heard about her older brother, who had taken over the running of the inn, and her younger brother, now studying business at Princeton. Then she told me of the much-anticipated birth of the Prince Regent’s first child, due in the winter, and Tokyo’s progress after the great Kanto quake, and the arrival of the first telephone at the Mojiro-joku onsen. All manner of things—except those that mattered.

Plates were emptied, then moved over to the sink, while she talked. I retrieved the first-aid box, changed the bandages (the skin was red and oozing, but not dangerously so), and fashioned a sling for her. She rambled on, and on.

Finally, I sat down in front of her, forcing her to meet my eyes.

“I was so very sorry about your father,” I told her.

At this, she fell silent.

“I’m sorry also that I didn’t have a chance to know him better. He was a good man.”

She nodded.

“Now, before I put you back to bed, tell me why you’re here.”

Proctor’s bulldogs stroll

Beneath the faded blue sky
,

Quick as a spring breeze
.

The year before, soon after the events at the Imperial Hotel, Holmes and I had slipped quietly away from Japan. Any news we had received of the country since then was both second-hand and in general terms. Of course, if we had chosen to bring Mycroft into matters, we could have had every iota of detail imaginable, but our return to England had been first delayed, then somewhat chaotic—and when that chaos subsided, a degree of mistrust had crept into my attitude towards my brother-in-law.
^*

We simply assumed that the Prince Regent’s book had gone safely back into its former hiding place, and all was well.

But, no.

Haruki did not enjoy voicing any faint criticism of her future Emperor, but in truth, the blame was his. Not the original problem—in 1921, the young Prince could hardly be blamed for not knowing that the
gift he carried to King George was anything but an innocent piece of Japanese history. What followed, however, was … less excusable.

“As you saw, His Highness received the book that very night. He took it into his own hands. He had bodyguards with him lest anyone think to steal it again. He knew its value, knew that the very future of the Son of Heaven touched upon its safety.”

“Oh, God. Who has stolen it now?”

“No one stole it. The book is where His Highness put it.”

“Then what?”

She sighed. “It is not the correct book.”

I sank my head into my hands at the table and repressed a groan. “I don’t suppose the Emperor had a second one he didn’t tell Prince Hirohito about,” I said after a time.

“Only the one. This is not it. This is a very fine forgery, but when His Highness … the Prince Regent … when—” She stopped. She cleared her throat. “His Majesty the Emperor has been unwell—more unwell, I mean.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“His—that is, His Highness the Prince Regent hesitated to bring anything before His Majesty the Emperor that could cause distress. Perhaps if he had brought the matter before His Majesty earlier—if he had not been so very occupied with his new marriage and—well. At any rate, he did not show it to the one Person in all of Japan who might have seen that it was … lacking.”

My heart dropped. “Lacking what?”

“The hidden … key.”

“The document? Oh, Lord.”

“Yes. His Highness the Prince Regent took the book that night, carried it back to the Residence, and placed it in his personal vault. He left it there. I suppose …” She drew a breath; let it out again. “He was fond of my father.”

Prince Hirohito was Japan’s Regent, but he was also a young man whose only friend had died at his feet. A young man schooled from birth
to hide away his emotions—or to hide away those things that provoked emotions. The book reminded him of Sato-san, and of how his own self-perceived carelessness had killed his loyal retainer.

Haruki cradled her arm in the sling, trying to find a comfortable rest for it. “In November, His Majesty the Emperor took ill—a cold, merely, but every minor illness is a threat. His Highness the Prince Regent has assumed more and more of His Majesty’s business over recent years, and at this illness, all of His Majesty’s correspondence came to him.

“One of the letters, which His Highness did not see until the third week of November, was from England. It was on stationery he had seen before. The letter was the request for a donation. An enormous donation. His secretaries saw no particular importance in it, merely passing it on for approval before they sent back their polite reply turning down the request. It was fortunate His Highness even saw it. And extremely fortunate that it reached him rather than his Honourable Father.

“Because it contained this.”

Her good hand dipped into the pocket of her robe, and held out a photograph. It showed a narrow book on top of a slip-case, with an object protruding from its pages—but no, not from its pages: the rectangle of paper was sticking out from the book’s front cover.

“When His Highness opened the safe to truly look at the book we had retrieved, he saw that its pages were not as worn as he remembered them, and the colours of Hokusai’s blue did not seem as vibrant. To be certain, he took a knife to the covers.

“There was no document. No letter. In fact, some of the filler matter used to add bulk to the covers was modern newsprint.
The Times of London
. From March and April, 1923.”

Well, at least that gave us a date for the forgery. “So the Prince came to you.”

“He sent for us. For my older brother. However, because our father had made me the family’s expert in the West, my brother brought me as well. His Highness gave us the letter, the photograph, and the remains of the book, and commanded us to set things right.”

“How big is ‘enormous’?”

“One hundred thousand pounds sterling.”

“Whoa!”

“Yes.”

“Does His Highness have £100,000?”

“His Highness has all the wealth of Japan. But only if he is willing to turn the matter over to his advisors.”

Which, I reflected, was precisely where we had come into this whole mess.

“So what did you do?”

“We began by replacing the response that the secretaries had composed to the ‘request’ with a reply that was—is the word ‘noncommittal’? Saying that His Majesty was unwell, but that His Highness would take the donation request under advisement, and would reply in some weeks. We posted the letter the first part of December.

“Immediately, we set about learning as much as we could, as well as restoring the covers of the forged copy of the book. When it was presentable, I sailed for England.”

I thought over the sequence of events, so far as we knew. “What was the date of Darley’s original letter? The one demanding £20,000?”

“October 14, 1923.”

“So: in 1921, Prince Hirohito gives the book to King George. At some point between then and the spring of 1923, some very good forger gets his hands on it long enough to make a remarkably good copy. In October, Lord Darley writes to the Emperor demanding £20,000 for the book’s return. In … November I think it was, Darley and his new wife and son leave on their world tour, planning to visit Tokyo on the way to pick up their money. The following April, they get to Japan. Darley dies. His wife and her stepson sail home. And six months later, in October, someone writes a second letter demanding five times the initial amount. Did it come from the House of Lords?”

“No. It was from the Darley house in London.”

Wouldn’t want some Parliamentarian secretary opening the thing by mistake, I reflected.

“One has to wonder if Darley himself knew of the hidden document.
We assumed that he did, but—do you remember the wording of that first letter?”

“ 
‘Your Royal Majesty, an item of yours has come into my possession, a book of illustrated poetry by Bashō that contains hidden truths. If you wish it back, I should be happy to exchange it for a reward when I am in Tokyo next April, and say no more about it. Yours, James Thomas Edward Darley,’
etcetera.”

“But no photograph.”

“No.”

It sounded increasingly probable that Darley knew nothing of the hidden document, but had merely caught a rumour that the Prince Regent was looking quietly to retrieve his gift to the English King.

But at some point, the secret document had come to light. And come to the hand of someone in the Darley household. The most likely person to have uncovered the document was the forger; however, forgers didn’t tend to be politically sophisticated, nor did they tend to branch out into blackmail. That would suggest—I was loath to even think the term—some kind of “Master Criminal” to link forgery and blackmail. Someone connected to Lord Darley.

I frowned a while, then shook my head and pushed it away: all investigations were a grey confusion at the start.

“And you’ve been sent to recover the original?” I asked Haruki.

“I brought the repaired forgery, to exchange for it.”

“Any idea where that original is?”

Her rueful smile made her look very young. “That is proving to be a more complex question than I anticipated. It seems that in 1923, the Palace staff were facing how best to preserve what was clearly a valuable and somewhat fragile piece of art. This book, along with several others, was quietly transferred from the Palace to a place accustomed to caring for old books.”

“Ah,” I said, breathing out my relief. “The Bodleian.”

“Yes,” she said. “Do you know it?” Library of libraries, resting place of the Magna Carta and Shakespeare’s first folio; Handel’s own score and Shelley’s personal letters; Tycho’s
Instrumentology
and Polo’s
Travels
. The Bodleian Library was the reason I was in Oxford.

“You could say that.”

“Good. Then you can help me break in.”

I had to smile. “I’m not sure that would help much. Unless the book’s in an open display case or something, you could search for weeks. The place is a labyrinth.” Light dawned. “Does breaking into the Bodleian have something to do with that gash on your arm?”

She went a bit pink around the ears. “It was stupidity. I arrived in England six days ago. I intended to ask for your assistance—yours and Mr Holmes’—since you had given me your addresses and telephone numbers. But when I spoke to your housekeeper in Sussex, she said you were away for another week or two. So I made my enquiries in London, and found that the book had come here. I arrived in Oxford yesterday afternoon, thinking that I would go to the library and find it.”

“The Bodleian is not a place one simply strolls into.” Indeed, those without links to recognised academic institutions found entrance a challenge.

“I discovered that. And since there was not much I could do in daylight, I walked around Oxford, and came to look over your gate, thinking that you might have come here. I saw a woman moving around inside, dusting and sweeping the front step—the sorts of things one might do when the occupant of the house was coming home.

“I returned to the Bodleian at dusk. As soon as it was dark, I went up the drain-pipes. What very helpful things drain-pipes are. Do all your buildings have them?”