At the Sharpe End

by Ashton, Hugh

  “When did you last see Dr Masashi Katsuyama?”

  Better to tell the truth, if there was going to be any trouble, Sharpe thought to himself. “About 3:15.”

  “Where did you last see him?”

  “By the Sumida river embankment. Near Asakusa-bashi station. Can I ask why?” The policeman made a note in his notebook, slurped some tea and looked up.

  “He fell off the platform at Shinjuku station earlier this evening in front of a train. He died, and your business card was found in his pocket.”

  Sharpe sat a little straighter. A faint noise something like “Oh my God,” in English emerged. Tea went down his chin. “Shut your mouth, you look stupid,” Mieko mouthed to him silently. He hadn’t realised that his mouth was open.

  “What time did you come home tonight?”

  “I arrived here about 5:45, if I remember right.”

  “Did anyone see you, apart from your wife, of course?” Sharpe didn’t correct the mistake.

  Sharpe reflected. “Yes, I said hello to old Mrs Watanabe who lives on the fifth floor of the block. She was just coming back from the supermarket, and we came up in the lift together. I asked her how the neighbourhood trip to Yokohama had gone.”

  “Thank you. Dr Katsuyama’s accident was at 6:07, but I had to be sure that you weren’t involved. There was only your card in his pocket, you see. No other cards or identification, so you were the first person we wanted to talk to .”

  “You’re sure it was an accident?” Sharpe asked, biting off the words as the implications struck him.

  “What else would it be?” The policeman seemed to turn suspicious. “I think it would be a good idea in any case for you to come and talk to my chief tomorrow morning. Please don’t go to work tomorrow morning. We’ll phone you, and let you know when you should come round to the police station.” He stood up and was once again the charming young man with an aunt who sent him peaches. “Thank you very much for the tea and fruit,” he said, bowing to Mieko. “And thank you for answering my questions,” bowing to Sharpe. “Sorry to have troubled you,” bowing to both.

  Sharpe escorted him down the hallway, where he put on his boots. “Thank you once again,” he said, bowing. Sharpe returned to the living room, picked something up and raced back to the front door. “Mr Policeman!” he yelled (it’s not nearly as rude in Japanese as it sounds in English). “Your belt and pistol! You left them under the table!”

  He turned round, a look of horror on his face as he patted the place where his pistol should be. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he babbled. Sharpe handed the heavy belt to him as he kept muttering things to himself which sounded like the outpourings of pure relief. Pity the poor soul, Sharpe thought to himself, if he turned up at the police station and had to explain that he’d left his pistol somewhere in a foreigner’s flat while he was drinking tea.

  “Thank you very much.” This was accompanied by a deep bow and seemed to be the most sincere thing he’d said in a long while. “Good night. Good luck tomorrow,” somewhat mystifyingly.

  “And what was all that about?” asked Mieko as Sharpe returned to the living room again.

  Sharpe grinned. “Didn’t you see? He’d left his belt and pistol behind.”

  “That’s really odd,” Mieko frowned. “You’d think a policeman would have a little more sense than that, wouldn’t you?”

  Sharpe agreed. “And he seemed surprised that I wasn’t Japanese when I opened the door. Very strange.”

  “Anyway, that’s not what I meant. What were you and this dead man talking about? Who is he?”

  He shrugged in reply. “Someone I met today. I really don’t know who he was. We were talking business. I’m sure I’ll find out more about everything tomorrow.” He didn’t feel nearly as confident as his words, though. Why did he have to go to the police station? Why couldn’t they send someone more senior to question him?

  And with that, they opened two cans of beer, and started their nightly game of cribbage before turning in for the night. Mieko won, as usual, even though she’d only learned the game a few months before.

  -oOo-

  Chapter 2: Tokyo

  The next day arrived with the sound of the alarm clock. Sharpe woke, wondering why he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach which reminded him of similar feelings on exam mornings at school years ago, but he couldn’t place the reason until he remembered the appointment at the police station later that morning. He showered, going through the day’s tasks in his mind, and made a mental note to make a couple of calls to clients and invent an emergency dentist’s appointment. In Japan, it’s almost automatically assumed that if the police want to talk to you about anything you must be guilty of something – and it’s not a good idea for a consultant to advertise the fact that he’s been called by the police to assist them with their enquiries.

  He decided to improve the shining hour by putting a final polish on a couple of reports, and using the Web to do research for another report. The call came a little before 10 o’clock.

  “Mr Sharpe? Please come to the main city police station at 11 o’clock precisely,” the voice at the other end said in efficient Japanese. “Do you know where that is?” with a slight inflection of doubt, as if a foreigner couldn’t be expected to know these things.

  “Yes, I do, and I’ll be there at 11. Excuse me, but who am I talking to?”

  “Ask for Inspector Sugita.”

  “Thank you,” bowing as he replaced the receiver before he could catch himself – an irrational habit he’d noticed a lot of non-Japanese acquire very soon after starting to do business in Japan.

  Since he hadn’t shaved or dressed up in a suit when he got up, he padded off to the bathroom to shave and ask himself if Hello Kitty should go to the police station with him.

  He made the decision, while rinsing the last flecks of foam from behind his ears, that she should stay at home. When he’d dried his face, he moved the box into the cupboard among the toys that Kumi-chan played with when she came to visit. It looked quite at home there.

  If you’re going to be talking to the police, it’s important to look your best, he told himself, picking out his best lightweight suit and a white shirt. Maybe he couldn’t give the impression that he outranked them, but he could at least prevent them from seeing him as an uncouth barbarian.

  As he knotted his tie, Mieko came into the bedroom. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” she asked, continuing a discussion that had started last night in bed. Notwithstanding the horror stories of foreigners who’d reportedly been beaten by the Japanese police into signing confessions written in Japanese that they couldn’t even read, Sharpe decided he was reasonably safe.

  “No, but it’s not a bad idea if you call me on my mobile a little before 12 if I’m not back or I haven’t called you by then, and ask about lunch. At least the police will know that someone knows where I am. If it looks like I’m in trouble that I can’t handle, I’ll tell you I don’t want fish for lunch. If I say that, or if I’m not answering my phone at all, get hold of the Consulate at the British Embassy and tell them I’m in the police station, and something odd is going on. The embassy number’s in the Rolodex on my desk. It’s an Inspector Sugita that I’m meant to be seeing, by the way. But if I say I want fish, everything’s fine and you don’t need to worry.” Ridiculous, he thought. Stupid little code words.

  “No fish means trouble?” she confirmed, and smiled. “Take care. I’ve polished your best black shoes and put them out for you.”

  “Love you, darling,” Sharpe replied. And he really meant it.

  “Love you, too,” she said and kissed him goodbye as he opened the front door and slipped on his gleaming shoes.

  -o-

  It was another unpleasantly humid warm morning, but getting to the police station was an easy walk down a shallow slope, so he set off a little early and arrived about five minutes ahead of time without being his usual sweat-covered self. The receptionist at the
front desk asked him to take a seat, and Sharpe parked himself on a slippery plastic-covered bench. Since he’d brought nothing to read, he was forced to pick up a copy of the Asahi Shimbun which was lying around and read that as well as he could.

  He’d just finished deciphering something about the latest cabinet reshuffle, and was feeling quite pleased that his Japanese reading ability seemed to be improving (and so it should after all this time, he told himself), when his light was blocked by the policeman who’d drunk tea at the flat the previous night. He stood up and bowed.

  “Please come with me. Inspector Sugita is ready for you.” He smiled at Sharpe as they walked down the corridor together, and patted his pistol significantly. Sharpe had the feeling that he’d made a friend.

  “In here,” opening a grey steel door. It took a few seconds for Sharpe’s eyes to adjust. The first thing he saw was a metal table. A powerful desk lamp standing on the table shone into his eyes, making it difficult to see who or what was on the other side. The small room had no windows, and as far as Sharpe could make out, the concrete block walls were rough and unplastered. The only furniture visible apart from the table was a metal armless chair with its back to the door. There was an unpleasant chemical smell which Sharpe couldn’t quite place and which was almost overpowered by the smell of rough tobacco smoke filling the unconditioned air. Sharpe coughed, but he couldn’t work out whether it was because of the atmosphere or because of nervousness.

  “Please sit down,” came a soft voice in Japanese from the darkness.

  “And can we do something about the goddamned lighting?” added a plaintive-sounding American-accented voice in English.

  The desk lamp promptly went out, and there was darkness for a fraction of a second before a ceiling fluorescent light flickered into life. Sharpe sat in the chair and looked across the table at the two men facing him.

  The first was presumably the one in a police uniform that seemed a little too tight for him. The face matched the voice, being one of those childish faces that sometimes stay with Japanese men until late middle age.

  The second speaker looked like a caricature of himself. Lean Western face scarred by pockmarks, with crew-cut grizzled hair, a dark grey suit and white shirt with a plain dark narrow tie. Oversized gold ring with some kind of emblem, worn on the right hand. Had to be one of the American spook agencies. Sharpe sneaked a glance at his feet. Right. Black wingtips to match the cliché. He was the one smoking a small stinking cigar of some kind. Sharpe noticed his hand shaking as he stubbed out the end of one cigar and immediately lit another. “That’s better,” he remarked, looking up at the light. “Not a hell of a lot better, but better.” He looked at Sharpe, and then at the other man, who was presumably Inspector Sugita. “Why are we in here anyway, Inspector?” he asked the policeman in Japanese which sounded much better than Sharpe’s, although with a strong American accent. “Can’t we be somewhere with a window or something?” He started whistling “A Room With a View” to himself, but it seemed to go over Sugita’s head.

  “You told me you wanted an interrogation,” replied Sugita. “So I booked this room.”

  “Well, maybe I used the wrong Japanese word. Sorry.” He didn’t sound it. “All I meant was that I wanted to talk to Mr Sharpe on a semiformal basis.”

  He turned to Sharpe. “Sorry about this,” in Mid-Western English. It didn’t sound much more sincere than his Japanese apology. “Next time we’ll get the Imperial Suite reserved for you.”

  Sharpe gave up on the attempt to think of something witty to say in reply, and ended up saying nothing.

  “What did Katsuyama want to talk about?” asked Sugita abruptly, in Japanese.

  Sharpe replied in the same language. “He wanted me to write a research paper for him. I sometimes write market research papers for my clients which advertise and publicise the advances they have made in their fields.”

  “What was the subject of this one to be?” asked the American in English. He stretched out his arms, yawned and added, “Pardon me. Late night last night. Call me Ben if it helps you to have a name to give me. You do a lot of this? Is this your main line of work?” he threw out.

  “No, not a lot. And it’s not my main line of work.”

  “And your main line of work is …?” Sugita, in Japanese.

  “Consultancy.”

  “Covers a multitude of sins,” said Ben. “I guess you must be one of these techno-geeks.” It wasn’t a question. In fact, the way it was spoken, it sounded like an insult. Sharpe decided that even if it was meant that way, he wasn’t going to rise to the bait.

  “Can we speak one language only, please?” Sharpe asked in Japanese. “I’d prefer English, if possible, but maybe Inspector Sugita would prefer Japanese.”

  “One language sounds much more sensible,” said Sugita. Much to Sharpe’s surprise he started to speak very reasonable British English. “Thank you for your concern, Mr Sharpe, but I am happy with English as the language for this meeting. And even if I am not very happy, Ben here will be happy, and our translators will write down the recording we are making.”

  “So what was the subject of your conversation with Katsuyama?” asked Ben again.

  “Image processing. Computer recognition of faces so that you can spot a known face from a crowd photo.” Silence. Sharpe went on blindly. “Something to do with algorithms and deconstruction of facial features. And a way of doing all this in hardware using digital signal processors – a kind of special chip.” There was no way for Sharpe to see if any of this was making any sense to the others. They just sat there. He started floundering. “If you do this sort of thing in software, you need large and expensive computers to do this. If you can put it onto a chip, it makes life easier. Cheaper. You know.”

  He couldn’t tell if they knew or not. Ben sat waiting in the hideous fluorescent light, his scalp gleaming pinkly through his crew-cut, thin at the top. He seemed to be expecting more, so Sharpe obliged, turning to Katsuyama as a subject.

  “He told me he’d done research at Stanford and published a few things already. He claimed they were on the Web, and I found a few papers with his name as author.”

  “And?” Ben probed.

  “And what?” Sharpe was starting to sound annoyed, and not all of it was an act. “What has this got to do with his death?”

  It was Sugita who answered. “The problem is, Mr Sharpe, that Dr Katsuyama was in possession of intellectual property which was not, strictly speaking, his.”

  “In other words,” Ben interrupted before Sugita had quite finished speaking, “he stole his concepts from the research labs at Stanford where he was working, which were being funded by outside sources. Concepts, furthermore, that are crucial to the security of the United States.”

  “Oh, bollocks,” Sharpe said before he could stop himself. There was a puzzled look on Ben’s face. “Oh, never mind,” he added. “It’s a British slang expression, not worth translating.”

  “In any case,” continued Sugita (Sharpe could have sworn he saw a faint smile cross his lips for half a second in response to Sharpe’s explanation), “as Ben has explained, there are important matters involved. We would like to avoid an international scandal regarding the theft of intellectual property, if possible.”

  “Another scandal, you mean?” Sharpe asked, referring to a recent case in which Japanese researchers had walked out of American labs with biotech material to give Japan’s ailing pharmaceutical industry a shot in the arm.

  Sugita nodded sadly in reluctant agreement. “It’s possible, you see, that Dr Katsuyama did not die by accident,” he went on. “The police are attempting to investigate this possibility right now.” This seemed to be a rather strange and roundabout way for Sugita to express himself, seeing that he was wearing a police uniform himself, but Sharpe let it pass.

  “More specifically,” said Ben, who seemed to be chain-smoking his way through a whole tin of his vile little cigars, “we’re interested in recovering a prototype device
that we believe he may have brought with him from Stanford. He never showed you such a thing?”

  “No.” Sharpe shook his head. That much was strictly true, he rationalised to himself. Katsuyama had only given him a box and had never showed him what was inside. “What are we talking about, anyway? A box the size of a refrigerator? A small truck? A cigarette lighter?”

  “A circuit card to go into a personal computer.” About this big.” Ben sketched a shape and size in the air with his hands. “Sorry,” he added sarcastically, “you’re a technical consultant, aren’t you? You know all this already.”

  “Why do you think he would have shown it to me, anyway?” dodging the sarcasm. “Wouldn’t you expect it to be at his company? Or at his home?”

  “Believe me, we know it’s not at his home,” said Ben, and then bit his tongue, aware that he’d said too much. “Forget I said that,” he added, drawing further attention to his slip.

  “He didn’t give you the key to a coin locker or anything like that?” asked Sugita but, it seemed to Sharpe, without much hope that he would get an acceptable answer.

  Sharpe shook his head again.

  “Speak up for the record,” snapped Ben. “We can’t read that from the tape.”

  “No, he did not give me the key to a coin locker or anything like that,” Sharpe answered dutifully, taking the internal line that a Hello Kitty box containing goodness knows what counted as “anything like” the key to a coin locker.

  “Thank you.” He exchanged shrugs with Sugita. They sighed in near-perfect unison. Maybe they practised these things, thought Sharpe.

  Sugita leaned forward. “Did Dr Katsuyama mention any connections with North Korea?” Both men waited for the answer.

  “Yes.” It seemed safe to talk about this, at any rate. “He said that his wife’s family – her parents, I think, were sympathetic to the current regime.”