Free Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) by Patrick Sherriff

woman talk in Japanese. They look at my socks and slippers. She puts on a sad face. “No, no. Thank you.”
    “No problem, thanks for your time,” I say, then walk past Firefly and nod at him to follow. He seems as eager as me to get away.
    “Thank you,” I say to him.
    I type:
    “Now we can get into the concert.”
    Firefly looks at the screen like it’s broken. While they were busy deciding whether to film us I lifted her ID card from around her neck and took the press pass clipped to the cameraman’s belt.
    We run around the outside of the building. Queues of people are flooding in. T-shirt sellers and some tough-looking security men. I check what I took from the woman. It has a blurry picture of the woman, the letters NHK and the words “PRESS PASS” in English. I can’t make out anything else. The cameraman’s looks nothing like Firefly, but it is at least a photo of a Japanese man.
    I give Firefly his pass and put mine around my neck. I flash my pass at the security guard and he waves me through. Firefly hangs back and seems reluctant to come in. I shout at him. “Come on, cameraman,” and he follows me, showing his pass. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t look the part, doesn’t even have a camera: he has paperwork.
    We are under the stage. I can hear muffled chants, stamping and claps. But it’s safe here. There are checkpoints. There’s no way a man with a sword can just walk in.
    There’s a bench beside an ashtray stand. I sit down and gesture to Firefly to sit next to me. His eyes are darting around but he doesn’t lift his head. He looks so out of place I’m worried we might get thrown out. I have to distract him.
    “Hey, what does A.O.I. mean?” He looks at me blankly. I type the letters into the phone without the full stops.
    “AOI IS BLUE,” he types back. “AND…”
    “And?”
    “GIRL.”
    “A girl?”  
    Some official-looking people start shouting. A man with ID and a woman with immaculate make-up are beckoning to us. I gather something important is about to happen. A girl? We walk over to them, and I remember we are supposed to be professionals. I pick up the pace and Firefly does his best to keep up with me. Firefly nods his head to the two as they say something to us both. I just duck my head and hold out my press pass, but keep moving. The two look at each other but I don’t catch the meaning. The band might be on stage and we are supposed to do something? Film them? We run breathlessly along smooth, cold, concrete floors. The whole building is throbbing with the dull thuds of stamping and clapping from above. The occasional teenage scream pierces our bunker, but the beige, the concrete floors and the unheated chill make me think of only one thing, the room where they put my mother’s body. We were in elevator three, a back route near the service doors. I’d waited there with her body as we had waited for my Dad to show up to finish the paperwork, which, without my mother to interpret for us, became my job.
    The house lights are still up. A raised runway projects out from the main stage towards a smaller stage in the middle of the arena.
    There is a hip-hop soundtrack, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a show going on. Instead, it looks like a fashion shoot. Some very tall, snooty woman is wearing grey and black clothes. She strides down the runway to the little stage and sneers at the audience. She puts one hand on her hip, turns and marches back. She must not like her dress. I don’t blame her. It has a whole chunk cut out of one side and the material is so thin, you can see her white bra through her red knitted top. No wonder she’s in such a bad mood. She flounces back to the other wing and then when she isn’t in view of the audience, she hurries down the stairs. Then more models. Each is wearing something not quite right. There is a wad of material missing from the chest or belly or the skirt has a great big hole in the front or side or back. They all look