To: Police Headquarters, Yokohama
Immensely grateful for your attention to my inquiry. It is vital to discover whether any of the female children is at present missing and has been absent from school for the past six weeks. Please include special schools for the mentally handicapped. Your urgent attention to this matter will be deeply appreciated.
A woman detective who had recently come on duty told him he was looking pooped, and he couldn't deny it. She offered to check the incoming faxes regularly while he caught up with some sleep on one of the cots used by officers forced to take off-duty naps in the station house.
Police Headquarters, Yokohama
To: Detective Superintendent Diamond, NYPD
Further inquiries reveal that among the female children listed as 212 in photographers' records, none are reported as missing from school. Two were absent for periods of two weeks and ten days respectively with minor illnesses, but are now back at school. One left the city three months ago to live in Nagoya. All others accounted for.
He looked at his watch. 5:20 A.M. He ached in every muscle. 'Thanks.'
She said, 'You want coffee?'
'I must reply to this first.'
26th Precinct, NYPD
To: Police Headquarters, Yokohama
Many thanks. Kindly send details as soon as possible of the girl who moved to Nagoya. Could you double-check whether the family live there?
Maybe it was the time of day, but he was inclined to believe that the night had been wasted-a night he could have passed in a comfortable hotel instead of an iron and canvas cot He decided to go for an early breakfast.
Police Headquarters, Yokohama
To: Detective Superintendent Diamond, NYPD
A search made of Nagoya school computer records has been unsuccessful in the case of the child you asked us to trace. We therefore transmit information from previous school records:
Noriko Masuda, aged 9, born 20 December 1983. Last known address: care of Dr. Yuko Masuda, M.Sc, Ph.D., (mother), 4-7-9, Umeda-cho, Naka-ku, J227 Yokohama. Father, Jiro Masuda, occupational therapist, died in automobile accident, January 1985. Mother engaged in postgraduate research in Yokohama University Department of Biochemistry until 1985. Child attended Noge Special School, Yokohama, September 1987 until March of this year. Diagnosed autistic, 1987. School progress: slow, hampered by muteness. Above average skill in drawing. Temperament: good. Conduct good. IQ rating (nonverbal): 129.
He read it a second time, dazzled by this treasure hoard of information after the weeks of guesswork and despair. To have so much confirmed was beyond expectation, beyond anything he had dared to hope when the faxes had started coming. There were more than enough indications that the child was Naomi. Or, rather that the child he knew as Naomi was actually Noriko. For her to be anyone else would be stretching coincidence to a ridiculous degree.
Noriko.
A simple name for a Westerner to get his tongue around. Personally, however, he was going to find it impossible not to continue to think of her as Naomi, so he'd have to stay with it. He justified the decision by telling himself it would avoid confusion in dealing with the police in New York.
They weren't very adaptable.
The autism, then, was confirmed. As a corrective to the elation he was experiencing, he tightened inwardly upon seeing the word. Against all the evidence, he'd cherished the hope that something could be done to unlock the little girl's mind.
By fleshing out the report with a few reasonable assumptions, he pictured Yuko Masuda, the mother, a bright young woman who had given up her studies to marry, devastated by the death of her young husband, struggling to raise this difficult child who refused to respond in the way other women's children did. A problem she probably didn't understand until Naomi was three or four.
Was the poor mother under so much strain, Diamond pondered, that Mrs. Tanaka, who worked in the university, had offered to take the child on a visit to Europe and America? A temporary reprieve for Dr. Masuda from the stress of raising an autistic child?
How could such an act of kindness have led to murder and kidnap?
He shook his head, sighed and scribbled a note of thanks to Yokohama and, as a personal touch, added the one word of Japanese he knew:
26th Precinct, NYPD
To: Police Headquarters, Yokohama
Your cooperation is appreciated. The details tally with the missing child. Request that you trace the mother, Dr. Masuda, as a matter of urgency. We need to know the circumstances in which the child traveled to London prior to September this year. She was believed to be in the company of Mrs. Mirtori Tanaka, 36, former secretary in Yokohama University. Request fullest possible information about these two women.
When he'd fed this into the machine, he left the station house and walked to his new hotel to get a shower and a shave. He'd managed three hours' sleep at most, but this morning he felt like a billion
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The first person he spoke to in Columbia University Library said with a sense of discovery, 'You must be from England!'
He said tamely, 'How right you are!' Each time this happened- and here in New York it was commonplace-he felt that simply admitting his Englishness didn't come up to expectations. Something extra seemed to be expected of him: a burst of 'God Save the Queen,' or a hitch of the trousers to reveal Union Jack socks. He couldn't manage either.
He introduced himself, claiming that he was a detective attached to the New York Police Department, a slight distortion of the facts, but he'd never had a conscience about embroidering the truth in the cause of justice.
The senior librarian he was addressing, a strange, thin man with the peculiar fixed smile seen usually on the faces of politicians and the earliest Greek statues, said that he just adored the British police, and was he at the library on official business, or personal?
Diamond explained that he hoped to consult an international data bank of postgraduate research projects, if the library possessed one.
He already knew it did.
En route to the computer suite, the librarian confided that his knowledge of Scotland Yard owed much to the British film industry. 'Did you know mat the late Lord Olivier once played a lowly English bobby in a movie?'
Diamond undermined this promising conversation by saying,
