Cold Kill by Rennie Airth

Author:Rennie Airth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448303816
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2019-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

Like a cellist drawing a chord from his instrument, Kimura ran the stone down the edge of the steel blade. The movement produced a high, keening note, not especially pleasing to the ear, but comforting nonetheless. He had been repeating the same action for nearly an hour, first on one side of the sword, then the other, and although it was well after midnight he was ready to continue for as long as necessary until the edge was razor-sharp.

The room where he sat cross-legged on the floor was furnished in the Japanese style, but with little imagination and with the kind of prints that might have come from a catalogue: Mt Fuji, inevitably, two paintings of birds on the wing, and one larger than the rest that showed a great blue wave about to break, a picture Kimura knew was famous and by an artist whose name he surely ought to know but had long since forgotten. The basin in the corner was hidden by a screen on which a geisha garbed in colourful costume was depicted. What was welcome, though, was the bed, a simple futon laid out on the matting-carpeted floor, on which for the first time in many days he had passed a long night’s sleep free of dreams.

The house where he’d found sanctuary – a modest two-storey dwelling – was less than ten minutes’ walk from the restaurant where he had eaten and on ringing the doorbell he had found the owner, a simply dressed man well into his seventies to judge by his appearance, awaiting his arrival. After a brief exchange of courtesies he had been shown to his room on the top floor by a woman he assumed was the man’s wife. Warned perhaps by the owner of the restaurant, they had not burdened him with enquiries, seeming to accept his shabby appearance and lack of any personal effects as perfectly normal and requiring no comment. But there was something more, and it had not escaped Kimura’s notice: a nervousness that translated into a desire to please. It wasn’t respect exactly; it was rather a fear of offending, which told him that exiles though they were – he knew from the restaurant owner that the couple had been resident in London for thirty years – they had recognized him for what he was. Either that or they had been forewarned by the restaurant owner, in which case it meant that none of them were deceived, they had not forgotten the position that men of his kind had once held in society. Men whose blood line went back centuries to the time of the samurai and who in spite of all the laws that had been passed in the interim outlawing their very existence still pursued their ancient profession in one guise or another: men to step aside from.

Rising early that morning, he had made his way to a small sporting goods store where he changed his uncomfortably large overcoat for a padded jacket well supplied with pockets and also bought a woollen cap of the kind favoured by skiers.

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