Akira, I was delighted to learn, had returned to Shanghai not just for a visit, but for the foreseeable future, with plans to resume at his old school in the North Szechwan Road at the start of the summer term. I cannot remember if the two of us celebrated his return in any special way. I have the impression we simply picked up our friendship where we had left off the previous autumn with minimum fuss. I was quite curious to hear about Akira's experiences in Japan, but he persuaded me it would be childish – somehow beneath us – to discuss such matters, and so we made a show of continuing with our old routines as if nothing had ever interrupted them. I guessed of course that all had not gone well for him in Japan, but did not begin to suspect the half of it until that warm spring day he tore the sleeve of his kimono.

When we played outside, Akira usually dressed much as I did – in shirt, shorts and, on the hotter days, sun hat. But on that particular morning we were playing on the mound at the back of our garden, he was wearing a kimono – not anything special, just one of the garments he often wore around his house. We had been running up and down the mound enacting some drama when he suddenly stopped near the summit and sat down with a frown. I thought he had injured himself but, when I came up to him, saw he was examining a tear on the sleeve of the kimono. He was doing so with the utmost concern, and I believe I said to him something like:

‘What's wrong? Your maid or someone will sew that in no time.’

He did not respond – he seemed for the moment to have forgotten my presence entirely – and I realised he was sinking into a deep gloom before my eyes. He went on examining the tear for a few more seconds, then letting down his arm, stared blankly at the earth in front of him as though a great tragedy had just occurred.

‘This is third time,’ he muttered quietly. ‘Third time same week I do bad thing.’

Then as I continued to gaze at him somewhat baffled, he said: ‘Third bad thing. Now mother and father, they make me go back Japan.’

I could not, of course, see how a small tear in an old kimono could bring such consequences, but I was for the moment sufficiently alarmed by this prospect to crouch down beside him and urgently demand an explanation for his words. But I could get little more out of my friend that morning – he grew increasingly sulky and closed – and I seem to remember our parting not on the best of terms. Over the following weeks, however, I gradually discovered what had lain behind his odd behaviour.

From his very first day in Japan, Akira had been thoroughly miserable. Although he never admitted this explicitly, I surmised that he had been mercilessly ostracised for his ‘foreignness’; his manners, his attitudes, his speech, a hundred other things had marked him out as different, and he had been taunted not just by his fellow pupils, but by his teachers and even – he hinted at this more than once – by the relatives in whose house he was staying. In the end, so profound was his unhappiness, his parents had been obliged to bring him home in the middle of a school term.

The thought that he might have to return again to Japan was one that haunted my friend. The fact was his parents missed Japan badly and often talked of the family returning there. With his older sister, Etsuko, not at all averse to living in Japan, Akira realised he was alone in wishing the family to remain in Shanghai; that it was only his strong opposition to the idea that prevented his parents packing their things and sailing for Nagasaki, and he was not at all sure how much longer his preferences could expect to take precedence over those of his sister and parents. Things were very much in the balance, and any displeasure he incurred – any misdemeanour, any falling off of his schoolwork – could tip the scales against him. Hence his supposition that a small tear in a kimono sleeve might easily produce the gravest of consequences.

As it turned out, the torn kimono did not incur his parents’ wrath nearly to the extent feared, and certainly nothing momentous came of the matter. But throughout those months following his return, there would come along one little mishap after another to plunge my friend back into his pit of worry and despondency. The most significant of these, I suppose, was the affair concerning Ling Tien and our ‘robbery’ – the ‘crime from my past’ which so aroused Sarah's curiosity during our bus ride this afternoon.

Ling Tien had been with Akira's family for as long as they had been in Shanghai. Among my earliest memories of going next door to play are those of the old servant shuffling about the place with his broom. He looked very old, always wore a heavy dark gown even in the summer, a cap and a pigtail. Unlike the other Chinese servants in the neighbourhood, he rarely smiled at children, but then nor did he scowl or shout at us, and had it not been for Akira's attitude to him, it is unlikely I would ever have regarded him as an object of fear. Indeed, I remember I was initially more puzzled than anything by the alarm that would seize Akira whenever the servant came within our vicinity. If for instance Ling Tien was passing in the corridor, my friend would break off whatever we were doing to stand rigidly in a part of the room not visible to the old man and not move again until the danger had passed. In those early days of our friendship, I had yet to become infected by Akira's sense of dread, assuming that it derived from something specific that had occurred between him and Ling Tien. As I say, I was more puzzled than anything, but whenever I asked Akira to explain his behaviour, he simply ignored me. In time I came to appreciate how deeply embarrassed he was by his inability to control his dread of Ling Tien and learnt to say nothing whenever our games were disrupted in this manner.

But then as we grew older, I imagine Akira began to feel the need to justify his fear. By the time we were seven or eight, the sight of Ling Tien would no longer cause my friend to freeze; instead, he would break off whatever he was doing and look at me with a strange grin. Then putting his mouth close to my ear, he would recite in a curious monotone – not unlike that of the monks we sometimes heard chanting at the Boone Road market – the most terrifying revelations concerning the old servant.

I thus learnt of Ling Tien's fearful passion for hands. Akira had once happened to glance down the servants’ corridor towards Ling Tien's room on a rare occasion when the old man had left his door ajar, and had seen heaped upon the floor the severed hands of men, women, children, apes. Another time, late at night, Akira had spotted the servant carrying a basket into the house piled with the dismembered little arms of monkeys. We had always to be on our guard, Akira warned me. If we gave him the slightest opportunity, Ling Tien would not hesitate to cut off our hands.

When after a number of such briefings, I enquired as to why Ling Tien was so keen on hands, Akira looked at me carefully, then asked if I could be entrusted with his family's darkest secret. When I assured him I could, he thought a little longer before saying finally:

‘Then I tell you, old chap! Terrible reason! Why Ling cut off hands. I tell you!’

Ling Tien, evidently, had discovered a method by which he could turn severed hands into spiders. In his room were many bowls filled with various fluids in which he soaked for several months at a time the many hands he had collected. Slowly the fingers would start to move by themselves – just little twitches at first, then coiling motions; finally dark hairs would grow and Ling Tien would then take them out of the fluids and set them loose, as spiders, all around the neighbourhood. Akira had often heard the old servant creeping out in the dead of night to do just this. My friend had once even seen in the garden, moving through the undergrowth, a mutant Ling had taken prematurely from its solution which did not yet fully resemble a spider and could easily be identified as a severed hand.

Although even at that age I did not entirely believe these stories, they certainly upset me and for some time the mere sight of Ling Tien was enough to set off terrors within me. Indeed, as we grew older, we neither of us quite shook off our horror of Ling Tien. This was something that always nagged at Akira's pride, and around the time we were eight, he seemed to develop a need constantly to challenge these old fears. I often remember him dragging me off to some point in his house where we could spy on Ling Tien sweeping the path or whatever. I did not mind these spying sessions so much, but what I came to dread were those occasions Akira would persistently dare me to go near Ling Tien's room.

Until this point we had kept well clear of that room, especially since Akira had always maintained the fumes from Ling Tien's fluids were liable to hypnotise us and draw us in through the door. But now the notion of going near the room became for my friend something of an obsession. We might be having a conversation about something quite different, and then suddenly that strange grin would appear on his face and he would start to whisper: ‘Are you frighten? Christopher, are you frighten?’

He would then oblige me to follow him through his house, through those oddly furnished rooms, to the heavy-beamed arch that marked the start of the servants’ quarters. Going under the arch, we would find ourselves standing in a gloomy corridor of bare polished boards, at the far end of which, facing us, was the door of Ling Tien's room.

First, I would only be required to stand at the arch and watch as Akira pushed himself step by step along the corridor until he had covered perhaps half the distance to that awful room. I can still see my friend, his tubby figure stiff with tension, his face, whenever he glanced back at me, shining with perspiration, willing himself a few steps further before turning and running back with his triumphant grin. Then would come all his goading and bullying until I eventually found the nerve to match his feat. For quite a time, as I say, these tests of courage concerning Ling Tien's room came rather to obsess Akira, and took much out of the pleasure of going to play at his house.

For some time yet, though, it was to remain beyond either of us to walk right up to the door, let alone to go through it. By the time we finally entered Ling Tien's room, we were both ten, and it was – although of course I did not know it then – my last year in Shanghai. That was when Akira and I committed our little theft – an impulsive act whose wider repercussions, in our excitement, we failed entirely to anticipate.

We had always known Ling Tien would be going away for six days in early August to visit his home village near Hangchow, and we had talked often about how we would then take the opportunity finally to enter that room. And sure enough, on the first afternoon after Ling Tien's departure, I turned up at Akira's house to find my friend entirely preoccupied with the matter. By this time, I should say, I was in general a much more confident person than even a year earlier, and if I still felt a little of that old dread of Ling Tien, I would certainly not have shown it. In fact, I believe I was much the calmer about the prospect of entering the room – something I am sure my friend noticed and saw as an extra dimension to the challenge.

But as it turned out, throughout that afternoon, Akira's mother was making a dress, which for some reason required her constantly to move from room to room, and Akira declared it too risky even to contemplate our venture. I was certainly not displeased, but I am sure Akira was the one more grateful for the excuse.

The following day, however, was a Saturday and when I arrived at Akira's house towards mid-morning, both his parents had gone out. Akira did not have an amah, as I did, and when we were younger we had often argued over which of us was the more fortunate. He had always taken the position that Japanese children did not need an amah because they were ‘braver’ than Western children. I had once asked him during one such argument who would see to his needs if his mother was out and he wanted, say, some iced water, or if he cut himself. I remember his telling me Japanese mothers never went out unless the child specifically permitted them to do so – a claim I found hard to believe, since I knew for a fact Japanese ladies met in their circles, much as the European ladies did, at Astor House or Marcell's Tea Room in Szechwan Road. But when he pointed out that in his mother's absence there was the maid to see to his every need, while at the same time he was free to do whatever he pleased with no restrictions at all, I did begin to believe I was the one hard done by. Oddly, I continued to hold this view even though in practice, on those occasions we played at his house when his mother was out, one or another servant was always delegated to watch over our every move. Indeed, especially when we were younger, this would mean some unsmiling figure, no doubt fearing dire consequences should any misfortune befall us, standing within inhibiting proximity while we did our best to play.

Naturally, though, by that summer, we were allowed to move much more freely without supervision. On that morning we entered Ling Tien's room, we had been playing in one of Akira's sparse tatami-floored rooms up on the third floor while an elderly maid – the only other person in the house – occupied herself with some sewing in the room directly below. I remember at one point Akira breaking off from what we were doing, tip-toeing to the balcony and leaning right over the rail, so far I feared he might topple over. Then when he came hurrying back, I noticed the strange grin had appeared on his face. The maid, he reported in a whisper, had as expected fallen asleep.

‘Now we must go in! Are you frighten, Christopher? Are you frighten?’

Akira had suddenly become so tense that for a moment all my old fears concerning Ling Tien came flooding back. But by this point a retreat for either of us was out of the question, and we made our way as quietly as possible down to the servants’ quarters until we were once more standing together in that gloomy corridor with its bare polished boards.

What I recall is that we strode down the corridor with little hesitation until we were all but four or five yards from Ling Tien's door. Then something made us pause, and for a second neither of us appeared capable of continuing; if at that moment Akira had turned and run, I am sure I would have done the same. But then my friend seemed to find some extra resolve, and holding out his arm to me, said: ‘Come on, old chap! We go together!’

We linked arms and took the final few steps like that. Then Akira pulled back the door and we both peered in.

We saw a small, sparse, tidy room with a well-swept boarded floor. The window was covered by a sun-blind, but the light was leaking in brightly at the edges. There was a faint smell of incense in the air, a shrine in the far corner, a low narrow bed, and a surprisingly grand chest of drawers, beautifully lacquered, with ornate handles hanging on each little drawer.

We stepped inside, and for a few seconds remained still, barely breathing. Then Akira let out a sigh and turned to me with a huge smile, clearly delighted finally to have conquered his old fear. But the next moment his sense of triumph seemed quickly to be replaced by a concern that the room's lack of any obviously sinister features would make him look ridiculous. Before I could say anything, he pointed quickly to the chest of drawers and whispered urgently:

‘There! In there! Careful, careful, old chap! The spiders, they inside there!’

He was hardly convincing and he must have realised it. Nevertheless, for a second or two, an image went through my head of those small drawers opening before our eyes as creatures – at various stages between hand and spider – put out tentative limbs. But now Akira was indicating excitedly a small bottle standing on a low table beside Ling Tien's bed.

‘Lotion!’ he whispered. ‘The magic lotion he uses! There it is!’

I was tempted to pour ridicule over this desperate attempt to preserve a fantasy we had in truth long outgrown, but at that moment I had another sudden vision of the drawers opening, and a residue of my old fear kept me from saying anything. Moreover, I was beginning to grow anxious about a much more likely eventuality: namely, that we would be discovered in that room by the maid or some other unexpected adult. I could not begin to imagine the disgrace that would then follow, the punishments, the long discussions between my parents and Akira's. I could not even think how we might start to explain our behaviour.

Just then Akira quickly stepped forward, grabbed the bottle and clasped it to his chest.

‘Go! Go!’ he hissed, and suddenly we were both gripped by panic. Giggling under our breaths, we rushed out of the room and down the corridor.

Back in the safety of the upstairs room – the maid had remained asleep below – Akira reasserted his claim that the drawers had been filled with severed hands. I could see now he was seriously worried about my ridiculing our long-standing fantasy and somehow I too felt the need to preserve it. I thus said nothing to undermine his claim, nor gave any suggestion that Ling Tien's room had been a let-down or that our courage had been summoned on false pretences. We placed the bottle on a plate in the middle of the floor, then sat down to examine it.

Akira carefully removed the stopper. There was inside a pale liquid with a vague smell of aniseed. To this day I have no idea for what the old servant used this lotion; my guess is that it was some patent medicine he had purchased to combat some chronic condition. In any case, its nondescript appearance served our purpose well. Very carefully we dipped twigs into the bottle and let them drip on to some paper. Akira warned that we should not let even a drop touch our hands lest we wake up the next day with spiders at the end of our arms. Neither of us really believed this, but again, it seemed important for Akira's feelings that we pretend to do so, and thus we went about our task with exaggerated caution.

Finally, Akira replaced the stopper and put away the bottle in the box he kept for his special things, saying that he wished to conduct a few more experiments with the lotion before returning it. All in all, when we parted that morning, we were both well pleased with ourselves.

But when Akira came to my house the following afternoon, I saw immediately some difficulty had arisen; he was very preoccupied and unable to concentrate on anything. Dreading to hear that his parents had somehow found out about our previous day's deeds, I for some time avoided asking what was troubling him. In the end, though, I could bear it no longer and demanded he tell me the worst. Akira, however, denied that his parents suspected anything, then sank once more into his gloom. Only after much more pressure did he finally give in and tell me what had happened.

Finding it impossible to contain his sense of triumph, Akira had revealed to his sister Etsuko what we had done. To his surprise, Etsuko had reacted with horror. I say surprise because Etsuko – who was four years older than us – had never gone along with our view of Ling Tien's sinister nature. But now, on hearing Akira's story, she had glared at him as though she expected him to curl over and die before her eyes. Then she had told Akira we had had the luckiest of escapes; that she personally had known of servants previously employed in the house who had dared do what we had done, and who as a consequence had vanished – their remains discovered weeks later in some alley beyond the Settlement boundaries. Akira had told his sister she was simply trying to frighten him, that he did not for a moment believe her. But clearly he had been shaken, and I too felt a chill pass through me on hearing this ‘confirmation’ – and from no less an authority than Etsuko – of all our old fears concerning Ling Tien.

It was then I appreciated what was so troubling Akira: someone had to put back the bottle in Ling Tien's room before the old servant's return in three days’ time. Yet it was plain to see our bravado of the previous day had all but evaporated, and the prospect of going into that room again now seemed beyond us.

Unable to settle to any of our usual games, we decided to walk to our special spot beside the canal. All the way there, we talked over our problem from every angle. What would happen if we did not return the bottle? Perhaps the lotion was very precious and the police would be called in to investigate. Or perhaps Ling Tien would tell no one of its disappearance, but decide personally to wreak some terrible vengeance on us. I remember we became quite confused about how much we wished to maintain our fantasy about Ling Tien, and to what extent we wanted to consider logically how best to avoid getting into serious trouble. I remember, for instance, our considering at one point the possibility the lotion was a medicine Ling Tien had bought after months of saving his money, and that without it he would become horribly ill; but then in the next breath, without abandoning this last notion, we considered other hypotheses which assumed the lotion to be what we had always said it was.

Our spot by the canal, some fifteen minutes’ walk from our homes, was behind some storehouses belonging to the Jardine Matheson Company. We were never sure if we were actually trespassing; to reach it we would go through a gate that was always left open, and cross a concrete yard past some Chinese workers, who would watch us suspiciously, but never impede us. We would then go round the side of a rickety boathouse and along a length of jetty, before stepping down on to our patch of dark hard earth right on the bank of the canal. It was a space only large enough for the two of us to sit side by side facing the water, but even on the hottest days the storehouses behind us ensured we were in the shade, and each time a boat or junk went past, the waters would lap soothingly at our feet. On the opposite bank were more storehouses, but there was, I remember, almost directly across from us, a gap between two buildings through which we could see a road lined with trees. Akira and I often came to the spot, though we were careful never to tell our parents of it for fear they would not trust us to play so near the water's edge.

On that afternoon, once we had sat down, we tried for a while to forget our worries. I remember Akira starting to ask me, as he often did when we came to our spot, if in an emergency I would manage to swim to this or that vessel visible further up the water. But he could not keep it up, and suddenly, to my astonishment, he began to cry.

I had hardly ever seen my friend cry. In fact, today, this is the only recollection I have of him crying. Even when a large piece of mortar fell on to his leg when we were playing behind the American Mission, for all his turning a ghastly white, he did not cry. But that afternoon by the canal, Akira had clearly reached his wits’ end.

I remember he had in his hands some piece of damp flaking wood from which, as he sobbed, he broke off bits to hurl into the water. I wanted very much to comfort him, but being at a loss for anything to say, I recall getting up to find more such pieces of wood to break off into pieces and hand to him, as though this were some urgent remedy. Then there was no more wood left for him to throw, and Akira brought his tears under control.

‘When parents find out,’ he said eventually, ‘they be so angry. Then they not let me stay here. Then we all go to Japan.’

I still did not know what to say. Then, staring at a boat going by, he murmured: ‘I don't ever want to live in Japan.’

And because this was what I always said when he made this statement, I echoed: ‘And I don't ever want to go to England.’

With that, we both fell silent for a few more moments. But as we continued to stare at the water, the one obvious course of action to prevent all these awful repercussions loomed ever larger in my mind, and in the end I simply put it to him that all we had to do was to replace the bottle in time, then all would be well.

Akira did not appear to hear me, so I repeated the point. He continued to ignore me, and it was then I realised how very real his fear of Ling Tien had grown since our adventure the previous day; indeed, I could see it was as great now as it had ever been in our younger days, except of course that Akira was now unable to admit to it. I could see his difficulty and tried hard to think of a way out. In the end, I said quietly:

‘Akira-chan. We'll do it again together. Just like last time. We'll join arms again, go in, put the bottle where we found it. If we do it together like that, then we'll be safe, nothing bad can happen to us. Nothing at all. Then no one will ever find out anything about what we did.’

Akira thought about this. Then he turned and looked at me and I could see deep and solemn gratitude in his face.

‘Tomorrow, in afternoon, three o'clock,’ he said. ‘Mother will go out to park. If maid fall asleep again, then we have chance.’

I assured him the maid was bound to fall asleep again, and repeated that if we went into the room together, there was nothing at all to fear.

‘We do together, old chap!’ he said with a sudden smile and got to his feet.

On the walk back, we finalised our plans. I promised to come to Akira's house the next day well before his mother's departure, and as soon as she left, we would go upstairs and wait together, Ling Tien's bottle ready, for the maid to fall asleep. Akira's mood lightened considerably, but I remember, as we parted that afternoon, my friend turning to me with an unconvincing nonchalance and warning me not to be late the next day.

The following day was again hot and humid. I have down the years gone over many times everything I can remember of that day, trying to put the various details in some coherent order. I cannot remember a great deal about the first part of the morning. I have a picture of how I said goodbye to my father as he went off to work. I was already outside, loitering around the carriage track waiting for him to emerge. He eventually did so, in a white suit and hat, holding a briefcase and a stick. He squinted and glanced out towards our gateway. Then, as I waited for him to come further towards me, my mother appeared on the doorstep behind him and said something. My father walked back a few steps, exchanged some words with her, smiled, kissed her lightly on the cheek, then came striding out to where I was waiting. That is all I remember of how he left that day. I do not remember now if we shook hands, if he patted my shoulder, if he turned back at the gate for a last wave. My overall recollection is that there was nothing in the manner of his parting that morning to set it apart from the way he had left for work on every other day.

All I remember of the rest of the morning is that I played with my toy soldiers on the rug in my bedroom, my mind forever drifting to the daunting task awaiting us later in the day. I remember my mother going out at some point and that I ate lunch with Mei Li in the kitchen. After lunch, needing to kill time until three o'clock, I walked the short distance along our road to the spot where two large oak trees stood, set back from the road, yet well in front of the nearest garden wall.

Perhaps it was because I was already stoking up my courage, but I succeeded that day in climbing one of the oaks to a new height. Perched triumphantly in its branches, I found I had a view across the hedges and grounds of all the neighbouring houses. I remember I sat up there for some time, the wind on my face, growing ever more anxious about the task ahead. It occurred to me that, apprehensive as I was, Akira's fear of Ling Tien's room was now much the greater, and I would this time have to be the ‘leader’. I saw the responsibility this entailed, and resolved to appear as confident as possible when I presented myself at his house. But as I continued to sit there in the tree, there kept occurring to me any number of eventualities that could thwart us: the maid would fail to fall asleep; she might even choose this of all days to clean the corridor outside Ling Tien's room; or else Akira's mother would change her mind and not go out as expected. And then of course, there were the older, less rational fears which, try as I might, I could not quite dispel from my mind.

Eventually I climbed down the oak, wishing to go home for a glass of water and to check the time. As I came in through our gate, I saw two motor cars in the drive. I was mildly curious about these, but by this stage was far too preoccupied to give them much attention. Then as I was crossing the hallway I glanced through the open doors of the drawing room and saw the three men, standing with their hats in their hands, talking with my mother. There was nothing so untoward about this – it was perfectly possible they had come to discuss my mother's campaign – but something in the atmosphere made me pause a moment there in the hall. As I did so, the voices broke off and I saw their faces turn to me. I recognised one of the men to be Mr Simpson, my father's colleague at Byatt's; the other two were strangers. Then my mother came into view as she too leant forward and looked at me. I suppose I might have sensed then that something out of the ordinary was unfolding. In any case, the next moment, I was hurrying off in the direction of the kitchen.

No sooner had I reached the kitchen than I heard footsteps, and my mother came in. I have often tried to recall her face – the exact expression she was wearing – at that moment, but with no success. Perhaps some instinct told me not to look at it. What I do remember is her presence, which seemed looming and large, as though suddenly I were very young again, and the texture of the pale summer frock she was wearing. She said to me in a lowered, but perfectly composed voice:

‘Christopher, the gentlemen with Mr Simpson are from the police. I must finish talking with them. Then I want to talk to you straight afterwards. Will you wait for me in the library?’

I was about to protest, but my mother fixed me with a stare that silenced me.

‘In the library then,’ she said, turning away. ‘I'll come as soon as I've finished with the gentlemen.’

‘Has something happened to Father?’ I asked.

My mother turned back to me. ‘Your father never arrived at the office this morning. But I'm sure there's a perfectly simple explanation. Wait for me in the library. I won't be long.’

I followed her out of the kitchen and made my way to the library. There I sat down at my homework table and waited, thinking not about my father, but of Akira and how I was already going to be late for him. I wondered if he would have the courage to return the bottle on his own; even if he did, he would still be very angry with me. I felt at that moment such an urgency about Akira's situation, I actually contemplated disobeying my mother and simply going off. Meanwhile the discussion in the drawing room seemed to go on interminably. There was a clock on the library wall and I stared at its hands. At one point, I went out into the hall, hoping to catch my mother's attention and ask her permission to leave, but I found the doors to the drawing room had now been closed. Then, as I was hovering there in the hall, once more thinking about sneaking off, Mei Li appeared and pointed sternly towards the library. Once I had gone back in, she closed the door on me and I could hear her pacing about outside. I seated myself again and went on watching the clock. As the hands passed half past three, I fell into a gloom, full of anger at both my mother and Mei Li.

Then at last I heard the men being shown out. I heard one of them say:

‘We'll do everything we can, Mrs Banks. We must hope for the best and trust in God.’

I could not hear my mother's reply.

As soon as the men had gone, I rushed out and asked for permission to go to Akira's. But my mother, to my fury, completely ignored my request, saying: ‘Let's go back into the library.’

Frustrated though I was, I did as bidden, and it was there in the library that she sat me down, crouched before me and told me, very calmly, that my father had been missing since the morning. The police, alerted by his office, were carrying out a search, so far to no avail.

‘But he may well turn up by supper time,’ she said with a smile.

‘Of course he will,’ I said in a voice I hoped would convey my annoyance at this great fuss. Then I got off the chair and asked again for permission to leave. But this time I did so with less fervour, for I could see from the clock there was no longer any point in going to Akira's. His mother would have returned; his evening meal would be served before long. I felt a huge resentment that my mother should have kept me in simply to tell me something I had more or less gleaned in the kitchen an hour and a half earlier. When at last she told me I could go, I simply went up to my room, laid my soldiers out on my rug and did my best not to think about Akira or his feelings towards me at that moment. But I kept remembering all that had been said beside the canal, and the look of gratitude he had given me. Moreover, I did not wish Akira to return to Japan any more than he did.

My sullenness stayed with me well into the night, but of course this was interpreted as my reaction to the situation regarding my father. Throughout the evening my mother would say to me things like: ‘Let's not get gloomy. There's sure to be a very simple explanation.’ And Mei Li was uncharacteristically gentle with me when helping with my bath. But I remember too, as the evening went on, my mother having a number of those ‘distant’ moments I was to come to know well over the weeks that followed. In fact I believe it was that same night, as I lay in my bed still preoccupied about what to say to Akira when I next saw him, that my mother murmured, looking blankly across the room:

‘Whatever happens, you can be proud of him, Puffin. You can always be proud of what he's done.’