asagaki left the station and headed west along the tracks. Despite being October it was still dreadfully muggy, yet the ground was dry so when a truck sped by it sent up clouds of dust. He frowned and rubbed his eyes, his feet falling heavy on the pavement. By all rights, he should have been spending the day at home enjoying some leisurely reading – in fact he’d been holding off on a new thriller just for the occasion.

A park came into view on the right, large enough to accommodate two pick-up softball games side by side. There was a jungle gym, swings, a slide – all the standard equipment. This, Masumi Park, was the largest in the area by far. On its far side stood a seven-storey building. Nothing unusual about the exterior, but Sasagaki knew that inside it was almost entirely hollowed out. Before joining the metropolitan police he’d been stationed with the local force here in the eastern part of Osaka, and he remembered a thing or two about his old beat. A crowd of onlookers had already gathered in front of the building, which was ringed by several squad cars.

Sasagaki didn’t head straight for the building, but took a right on the street before the park. The fifth building from the corner was a tiny shop with a frontage of barely more than two metres. A sign out front proclaimed GRILLED SQUID. The squid in question were grilled on a stand set in the front of the shop, behind which a chunky woman of around fifty sat reading the newspaper. Sasagaki glanced beyond her to see shelves loaded with sweets. The place was a popular after-school hangout, but he didn’t see any children today.

‘One, please,’ Sasagaki called out.

The woman hastily folded her newspaper and stood. ‘I’ll have that right up.’

Sasagaki smoked Peace brand cigarettes. He stuck one between his lips now, lit it with a match, and glanced at the newspaper where she’d left it on the chair.

MINISTRY OF HEALTH ANNOUNCES SEAFOOD MERCURY RESULTS, read one headline. Beneath it in smaller text: Even large quantities produce levels below recommended limits.

Back in March, a judge had handed down a decision in the Minamata disease trial down in Kumamoto, clearing the way for the resolution of three other large public health trials in one blow: Minamata disease up in Niigata, one on extreme environmental pollution in Yotsukaichi, and Itai-itai disease. All of the cases had been decided in favour of the claimants. Now pollution was on everyone’s mind. In a nation that ate so much fish, worry spread fast that mercury and PCBs could be getting into the food supply.

I hope squid’s safe, Sasagaki thought.

The specialised griddle for baking the squid consisted of two hinged steel plates which pressed together, cooking the squid and its blanket of flour and egg between them. The aroma made his belly twitch with hunger.

The woman opened the griddle, revealing an oblong, flattened squid to which she applied sauce – just a light brushing – before cutting it in half. She wrapped the pieces in a single sheet of waxy brown paper and held it out.

Sasagaki glanced at the little sign that read SQUID: FORTY YEN and took out a few coins

‘Thanks,’ the woman grunted cheerily before sitting back down with her newspaper.

Sasagaki was walking away when another woman stopped to say hello to the squid lady. A housewife from the neighbourhood, a backward glance told him. He paused. She was carrying a shopping basket in one hand.

‘What do you think it is? Must be something big,’ the housewife said, pointing towards the abandoned building.

‘Never seen so many cop cars around here,’ the squid lady noted. ‘Maybe some kid got hurt.’

Sasagaki turned around. ‘Sorry, did you say “kid”?’

‘Oh, they were always playing in there. I said it a thousand times, sooner or later one of ’em’s going to get hurt, and it looks like I was right. Unless you heard different?’

Sasagaki ignored the question. ‘Why would kids be playing in a place like that?’

‘Why do kids play anywhere?’ The squid lady shrugged. ‘I always said someone should do something about it. It’s not safe.’

Sasagaki finished off his squid and started towards the building, just another guy going to join the crowd of onlookers. He ducked beneath the rope some uniformed officers had stretched across the front of the building. One of the officers glared at him, but backed down when Sasagaki patted his jacket over the pocket where every detective kept his badge.

Sasagaki went in to the foyer through a gap in the makeshift doors of plywood and scrap lumber. He’d expected it to be pretty dark inside and he was right; the air was heavy with mould and dust. He stood, blinking, hearing voices nearby. Eventually his eyes adjusted and Sasagaki realised he was standing in what would have been an elevator bank. Two elevator doors stood off to the right behind a pile of loose construction materials and tangled electrical wires. Straight ahead of him was a wall with a square, unfinished hole in it for a doorway. The blackness beyond was too dark to penetrate, but Sasagaki guessed he was looking at what would have been a car park.

There was a room to the left, set with another temporary plywood door, the words NO TRESPASSING scrawled on it in chalk. The door opened and two familiar faces emerged, both of them detectives in his unit.

‘Hey. Enjoying your day off?’ the older detective, a man by the name of Kobayashi, said. He was two years Sasagaki’s senior. The younger man, Detective Koga, had joined Homicide less than a year before.

‘I had a bad feeling when I woke up this morning,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Wish I’d been wrong for a change.’ He lowered his voice. ‘How’s the old man’s mood?’

Kobayashi frowned and shook his head. Koga gave a wry smile.

‘That’s what I figured,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Well, no rest for the wicked. What’s he up to in there?’

‘Dr Matsuno just got here.’

‘Right.’

Kobayashi cleared his throat. ‘We’re going to take a look around outside, OK?’

‘Have at it.’

Sasagaki watched the two leave. Sent out to do questioning, no doubt. Putting on his gloves, he slowly opened the door. The room was sizeable, a little over twenty square metres. Thanks to the sunlight slanting in through the windows it wasn’t as dim in here.

Detectives stood in a huddle in the shadow opposite the windows. There were a few faces he didn’t recognise, probably people from the local station. The others he knew all too well. Was tired of seeing them, to be honest. The first to acknowledge him was Captain Nakatsuka. He had a buzz cut and wire-frame glasses with the top half of each lens tinted light purple. The deep wrinkles between his eyebrows never went away, even when he smiled.

No greetings or jibes about being late. Nakatsuka just motioned him over with a jerk of his jaw. A sofa upholstered with black suede had been pushed up against the wall. It was big enough to seat three adults, if they were friendly.

The body was lying on the sofa. Male.

Dr Hideomi Matsuno of Kinki University was in the process of examining the body. He had been a medical examiner in Osaka for more than twenty years.

Sasagaki craned his neck to take a look at the corpse.

Age, he guessed, was about mid-forties, maybe fifty. Height, just shy of one seventy metres, and a little plump for that. He was wearing a brown jacket, but no tie. Designer clothes, top-of-the-line and impeccable save for the wine-red bloodstain on his chest that had spread to about ten centimetres in diameter. There were a few other stab wounds, but nothing else bleeding much.

It didn’t look as if there had been a struggle. His jacket was in order and his hair, drawn back into a knot behind his head, wasn’t dishevelled in the least.

The diminutive Dr Matsuno stood and turned to the huddle of detectives. ‘Well, it’s a homicide. Stab wounds in five places. Two on the chest, three on the shoulder. The only fatal one was here, on the lower left chest, several centimetres left of the sternum. The weapon passed between the ribs, straight into the heart. A single thrust.’

‘He died immediately?’ Nakatsuka had asked the question.

‘Within a minute, tops. Haemorrhaging from a coronary artery put pressure on the heart. Classic case of cardiac tamponade is my guess.’

‘Any blood splatter on the killer?’

‘I doubt there was much.’

‘And the murder weapon?’ The doctor stuck out his lower lip and shrugged. ‘Something thin and sharp – a blade. Maybe a little thinner than your average fruit knife. I can tell you right now it wasn’t a cleaver or any of your typical survival knives.’

‘Time of death?’ Sasagaki asked.

‘You’ve got rigor mortis over the entire body, lividity has settled nicely, corneas are opaque. I would say anywhere between seventeen hours to an entire day. You’ll have to wait for the autopsy to get any closer than that.’

Sasagaki looked down at his watch. It was two-forty, meaning the victim had been killed between three in the afternoon and ten at night on the previous day.

‘Well, let’s get the autopsy going,’ Nakatsuka said.

‘Works for me,’ Dr Matsuno agreed.

Koga came in and announced, ‘The wife’s here.’

‘Took her long enough,’ Nakatsuka grunted. ‘Let’s get her to ID him now, then. Bring her in.’ Koga nodded and went back outside.

Sasagaki leaned over to one of the other detectives in the huddle and whispered, ‘How’d they know who he was?’

‘He was carrying his driver’s licence and a business card. Runs – ran a local pawnshop.’

‘Pawnshop? They take anything from him?’

‘Don’t know. They can’t find a wallet, though.’

There was a noise by the door and Koga ushered in the widow. The detectives took a few steps back from the body on the sofa.

The woman’s checked black and burnt-orange dress made the room seem several shades darker. Her high heels must have been nearly ten centimetres and her long hair was set in a perfect perm, as though she had just stepped out of the beauty salon.

Large eyes, lined with thick eyeshadow, turned towards the sofa along the wall. She brought both hands to her mouth and made a noise like a hiccup. For a few seconds she didn’t move at all. Finally, she took a few hesitant steps towards the body. Stopping just in front of the sofa, she looked down at the man’s face. Sasagaki could see her chin tremble slightly.

‘Is that your husband, ma’am?’ Nakatsuka asked.

She didn’t answer, just cradled her cheeks in her hands, then gradually slid her hands up to cover her face before her knees buckled and she crumpled on the floor. A bit put on, Sasagaki thought. Then came the sobs, muffled through her long fingers.

Yosuke Kirihara was the deceased’s name, proprietor of the unsurprisingly named Kirihara Pawnshop. The shop, which also served as a home, was about a kilometre away from the building where his body had been found.

They carried the body out immediately after the widow, Yaeko, made the ID. Sasagaki was helping the Department of Criminal Identification guys get the body on the stretcher when something caught his eye. ‘Think our boy had been out eating?’

‘What makes you say that?’ Detective Koga raised one eyebrow.

Sasagaki pointed to the victim’s belt. ‘His belt’s fastened two holes wider than he usually fastens it.’

‘Hey, you’re right.’

Mr Kirihara had been wearing a brown Valentino belt with clear buckle marks near the fifth hole from the end, which was slightly widened from use. But now the belt had been loosened to the third hole from the end.

Sasagaki had one of the young Criminal Identification officers take a photo of the belt and, once the scene had been cleared, the detectives spread out to start questioning the neighbours, leaving only Criminal Identification, Sasagaki, and Captain Nakatsuka inside.

Nakatsuka stood in the centre of the room, taking another look around. He’d assumed his customary deep-thought posture: left hand on his waist, right hand to his forehead. ‘Sasagaki,’ he said. ‘What do you make of it? What kind of killer we looking at here?’

‘Haven’t the faintest idea,’ Sasagaki replied with a shrug. ‘Except, whoever it was, the victim knew him.’ The tidiness of the man’s clothes and hair, the lack of any signs of a struggle and the frontal stab wound told him that much.

‘So the question is: what were they doing in a place like this?’

Sasagaki went around the room again, scanning the floors and wall. It seemed like it had served as a temporary office while the building was under construction. The black sofa the body had been lying on was probably left over from that. There was also a steel desk, two folding chairs and a meeting table with folding legs left abandoned against the wall. The exposed metal was rusting, and a thick, floury layer of dust covered everything. Construction had stopped two and a half years ago.

Sasagaki’s gaze stopped on the wall above and to the side of the black sofa where a square hole for some kind of duct opened just below the ceiling. Normally the duct would have been covered with a grating, but that had been removed, if it had ever been put on in the first place.

If hadn’t been for the duct, they might not have discovered the body until much later. According to the local detectives, the kid who found the body was a third-grader from the neighbourhood elementary school. After Saturday classes ended at noon, the boy and four of his classmates had come to the building – not to play dodgeball or tag, but to explore the building’s labyrinthine ventilation ducts. Sasagaki had to agree that crawling on all fours through the narrow, twisting passages would probably seem like a grand adventure to a boy.

Apparently, at some point along the way, one of them had taken a wrong turn. Separated from the other boys, he had crawled blindly through the ducts, panicking, until he eventually reached the abandoned office. At first, the boy had thought the man on the sofa was sleeping. He’d crept out of the air duct as quietly as he could so as not to wake him and the man hadn’t moved at all. He’d gingerly stepped closer and that was when he saw the blood.

The boy had run home and told his family at about one in the afternoon. It took another twenty minutes or so until his mother actually believed him. The record showed that her phone call to the station came at 1.33 p.m.

‘A pawnbroker, huh?’ Nakatsuka said suddenly. ‘You think the job requires meeting someone in a place like this?’

‘If it was someone who didn’t want to be seen, or someone he didn’t want to be seen with.’

‘Could be, but why here? If he wanted to meet someone in secret, there are all sorts of places he could’ve gone. And if he was worried about prying eyes, why not pick a place farther from home?’

‘True.’ Sasagaki rubbed his chin. He could feel stubble against his palm. He had rushed out of the house this morning without time to shave.

‘His wife was something, though.’ Nakatsuka changed the subject. ‘He was fifty-two and she was… what? Just over thirty? Practically a girl when they would’ve met.’

‘A working girl,’ Sasagaki muttered quietly.

Nakatsuka shook his head. ‘She had the make-up for it. Done up to the nines, and this place is hardly a stone’s throw from her house. And how ’bout that performance?’

‘You saying her tears were as fake as her lashes?’

‘Your words, not mine,’ Nakatsuka smiled, then his face went hard. ‘They should be done questioning. Sasagaki, you mind seeing her home?’

‘Sure thing.’ Sasagaki gave a light bow of his head and headed for the door.

Most of the onlookers outside had gone, replaced by a gaggle of newspaper reporters. It looked like one of the television stations was there, too.

Sasagaki glanced over the parked police vehicles and spotted Yaeko Kirihara in the back seat of the second car from the front. Kobayashi was sitting next to her and Koga was in the passenger seat. Sasagaki walked over and rapped on the rear door window. Kobayashi opened the door and stepped out.

‘How’s it going?’

‘We’ve gone over pretty much everything. Honestly, she’s still a little ruffled,’ Kobayashi said, covering his mouth with his hand.

‘Did you have her check his belongings?’

‘I did. Wallet’s missing. And a lighter.’

‘She remembered a missing lighter?’

‘A Dunhill. They’re expensive.’

Sasagaki grunted. ‘When’s the last time she saw him?’

‘He left the house some time between two and three yesterday. Didn’t say where he was going. She got worried when he didn’t come back in the morning and was about to call the police when she got the call they’d found him.’

‘Anything about someone inviting him out?’

‘She doesn’t know. Says she can’t remember if there was a phone call before he left the house, either.’

‘Anything unusual about him when he left?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

Sasagaki scratched his chin. There was nothing here to go on. Nothing at all. ‘I figure she doesn’t have any guesses who it might be?’

Kobayashi frowned and shook his head.

‘She know anything about the building?’

‘Asked that. She knew it was here but had no idea what kind of place it was. She says this was her first time in it today, and she’d never heard her husband talk about it before.’

Sasagaki smiled wryly. ‘Well, we established a whole lot that didn’t happen.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Nothing to apologise about.’ Sasagaki rapped the younger detective on the chest with the back of his hand. ‘I’ll take her on home. You don’t mind if I borrow Koga to drive?’

‘No problem.’

Sasagaki got into the back of the car with the widow and told Koga to head for the Kirihara place. ‘Drive around for a little while first. Don’t want the press picking up on location.’

Koga nodded and took off.

Turning to Yaeko, Sasagaki introduced himself. Her only reply was to nod, apparently uninterested in learning the detective’s name.

‘So no one’s at your house now?’

‘Just someone watching the shop. And my son should be back from school,’ she said, looking down at the floor of the car.

‘You have a son? How old?’

‘He’s in fifth grade.’

That would make him ten or eleven. Sasagaki looked back at Yaeko. She had done her best to cover it up with make-up, but her skin was rough, and some wrinkles were noticeable. It wouldn’t be unusual for her to have a son that age.

‘I heard that your husband went out without saying anything yesterday? Was that a frequent occurrence?’

‘Sure. But just for drinks, most times. I assumed that’s what he was up to yesterday, and didn’t pay it much mind.’

‘And staying out all night? Did that happen sometimes?’

‘On the rare occasion.’

‘And he wouldn’t call, even when he stayed out?’

‘Hardly. Oh, I asked him to call plenty of times, but he’d just say “yeah yeah”. I guess I’d got used to it. Still, I never – I never thought…’ Yaeko pressed her hand to her mouth.

After they had driven around for a while, they stopped next to a telephone pole with a street sign that read ōE 3. It was a narrow street with terraced houses lining either side.

‘It’s right up there,’ Koga said, pointing ahead through the windscreen. About twenty metres in front of the car Sasagaki saw the sign for the Kirihara Pawnshop. The street was empty. The media obviously hadn’t figured out who the victim was yet.

‘I’ll take her in, you can head back,’ Sasagaki said as he stepped out of the car.

The corrugated shutter at the front of the shop was lowered down to the height of Sasagaki’s chin. He ducked under and went inside after Yaeko. The entrance was lined on either side with display cases. The name ‘Kirihara’ was written in gold brushstrokes across the frosted glass of the door.

Yaeko opened it and went inside. Sasagaki followed.

‘Hey there,’ the man at the front counter said when they walked in. He was around forty years old, slender build, with a pointed chin. His hair was black and perfectly combed into a parting on one side.

Yaeko gave a little sigh and sat down in what Sasagaki assumed was a chair for customers.

‘Well?’ The man looked between Sasagaki and Yaeko.

Yaeko put a hand to her forehead. ‘It was him.’

‘What?’ The man’s face darkened. ‘He was killed?’

She nodded her head and mumbled yes.

‘That’s crazy!’ The man shook his head in astonishment. He looked off to one side, blinking, collecting his thoughts.

‘Sasagaki, Osaka PD. I’m sorry for your loss.’ He showed the man his badge. ‘You work here?’

‘Yeah, um, here.’ The man opened the drawer and handed over a business card.

Sasagaki bowed his head and took the card. He noticed that the man was wearing a platinum ring on the pinky of his right hand. Flashy for a guy.

The card said the man’s name was Isamu Matsuura, the manager.

‘You been here long?’ Sasagaki asked.

‘Yeah. About five years, I guess.’

That didn’t seem like very long to Sasagaki. He wanted to ask the guy where he had worked before, how he’d got the job, but decided to leave that be for today at least. He would be back soon enough. Probably more than once.

‘I heard that Mr Kirihara went out yesterday afternoon?’

‘That’s right. Around two-thirty, I’d say.’

‘And he didn’t give any indication of where he was going?’

‘Nope. He likes to do things on his own, rarely talks to us about anything to do with work.’

‘And you didn’t notice anything unusual about him when he went out? Was he dressed differently, carrying anything out of the ordinary?’

‘Not that I noticed.’ Matsuura shrugged and gave the back of his neck a scratch. ‘Though he did seem to be concerned about the time.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, I thought I saw him check his watch. But maybe I’m just imagining that.’

Sasagaki took a cursory look around the shop. Behind where Matsuura stood was a sliding screen door, tightly closed. That would be the living room. There was a place to take off your shoes to the left of the counter, in front of a short hallway leading into the residential part of the building. There was a door on the left wall just inside the hallway, which struck Sasagaki as possibly a storage closet, though the placement was a bit odd.

‘How late were you open yesterday?’

‘Well,’ Matsuura took a look at the big round clock on the wall. ‘We usually close at six, but I think we didn’t really have everything done until seven or so.’

‘And you were the only one manning the shop?’

‘Yeah, that’s pretty typical when the boss is out.’

‘What did you do after closing?’

‘I went right home.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Over in Teradacho.’

‘That’s a bit of a hike. You come by car?’

‘No, I take the train.’

Even considering time for changing trains, it would take about thirty minutes to get from here to Teradacho. Leaving the shop by seven would get him home by eight, at the latest.

‘Any family, Mr Matsuura?’

‘No, it’s just me. Got divorced six years ago, so I’m going it alone. Got an apartment.’

‘And yesterday, after you got home, you were alone?’

‘Yeah.’

No alibi, Sasagaki noted, but he kept his face blank.

‘So, you’re not often watching the shop?’ Sasagaki asked, this time turning to Yaeko, who was still sitting, a hand pressed to her forehead.

‘I wouldn’t have the slightest clue what to do,’ she said in a thin voice.

‘Were you out yesterday?’

‘No, I was home all day.’

‘You didn’t step out for anything? Shopping, maybe?’

She shook her head. Then she stood, weakly. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to lie down for a bit. It’s hard even just sitting up.’

‘Of course. You go right ahead.’

Yaeko took off her shoes, nearly stumbling, and opened the door to the left. Sasagaki saw a staircase beyond it. One mystery solved, he thought. She closed the door and he heard her ascending the steps. When he could hear her footsteps no longer, Sasagaki took a step closer to Matsuura. ‘When you heard that Mr Kirihara hadn’t come home, was that this morning?’

‘Yeah. Me and his missus were worried. Then we got that call.’

‘That must’ve been quite a shock.’

‘Of course, yeah. Tell you the truth, I still don’t believe it. I mean, who would kill the boss? Maybe it was a mistake?’

‘Can’t think of anyone who might’ve wanted to do something like this?’

‘Not a one.’

‘In this line of business, you must get a lot of different kinds of customers. You’re sure there wasn’t anyone with a bone to pick? Maybe about money?’

‘Well, we have some strange customers, that’s true. People blame their troubles on us when we’re the ones loaning them money. But none of them strike me as the killing sort.’ Matsuura shook his head. ‘I can’t think of anyone who would do something like that.’

‘I understand you want to look out for your clients, but it’s important for our investigation that we look into any possibility, no matter how slight. I was hoping you could show me a list of your recent customers?’

The man gave a weak frown. ‘A list?’

‘You must have something. How else would you know who you’d loaned money to? Keep track of your collateral?’

‘Yeah, we got a ledger.’

‘Think you could let me take a look? I’ll take it back to the station, have them make a copy, and bring it right back. You have my word no one else will see it but us.’

‘I’m not sure I got the authority…’

‘I’ll be happy to wait while you get permission from Mrs Kirihara.’

Matsuura frowned for a little while before finally nodding. ‘All right. I’ll let you have it, but please, be careful with it, OK?’

‘Thank you. You sure you don’t need her permission?’

‘It’s fine. I’ll tell her later. It’s not like I’m going to get in trouble with the boss.’

Matsuura swivelled his chair ninety degrees and opened the door of the cabinet next to his knee. Sasagaki saw several thick files standing on end. He was leaning forward to take a closer look when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door to the stairs open. Sasagaki froze.

A boy of about ten years old was standing in the doorway. A skinny kid, in a sweatshirt and jeans.

Sasagaki hadn’t heard the boy on the stairs at all. When their eyes met, the darkness deep in the boy’s eyes made Sasagaki swallow.

‘You Mr Kirihara’s boy?’ he asked.

The boy didn’t respond. Instead, Matsuura looked around and said, ‘Yeah, that’s him.’

Still without a word, the boy stepped out into the shop and began putting on his sneakers. His face was expressionless.

‘Where you going, Ryo?’ Matsuura asked. ‘You should stay home.’

The boy ignored him and walked out.

‘Poor kid. I can’t imagine what he’s going through,’ Sasagaki said.

‘Yeah,’ the man agreed. ‘Even a kid like that, it’s gotta be tough.’

‘A kid like what?’

‘Er, it’s hard to explain,’ Matsuura pulled one of the files from the cabinet and placed it on the counter in front of Sasagaki. ‘Here you go. The latest ledger.’

‘Thanks.’ Sasagaki took it and flipped through the pages of men and women, skimming down through the list of names, but all he could see were the boy’s dark eyes.

The autopsy report arrived at Homicide the following afternoon.

The time and cause of death matched what Dr Matsuno had said at the scene, but the contents of the stomach gave Sasagaki pause. There were undigested remains of buckwheat, onions and herring, consumed two to two and a half hours prior to death.

‘If that’s true, what are we to make of the belt?’ Sasagaki asked Nakatsuka, who was sitting nearby with his arms crossed.

‘The belt?’

‘Yeah, it had been loosened two notches. Like you do after eating a big meal. But this was two hours later. Wouldn’t he have tightened it back up?’

Nakatsuka shrugged. ‘I don’t see what’s noteworthy about that. Maybe he just forgot.’

‘That’s the thing,’ Sasagaki said. ‘When we checked out his pants, it turned out they were big in the waist for a man his size. If he loosened his buckle two notches, they would’ve been slipping when he walked.’

Nakatsuka’s eyebrows knit together as he glanced at the autopsy report on the conference table. ‘So why do you think he loosened his belt?’

Sasagaki took a look around the room before leaning in closer. ‘Because the victim had some business there that required him loosening his belt. Then, when he tightened it back up, he missed the usual spot. Of course, we don’t know if it was him tightening it or his killer.’

‘What business would require him to loosen his belt, exactly?’ Nakatsuka looked up innocently.

‘C’mon. He was dropping his trousers.’ Sasagaki grinned.

Nakatsuka leaned back in his chair with the sound of squeaking metal.

‘You suggesting a grown man would go to some place that dirty and dusty just to squeeze some titties?’

‘I admit it wouldn’t be my first choice,’ Sasagaki said.

Nakatsuka waved a hand like he was swatting away a fly. ‘It’s an interesting story, but I think you’re letting your gut get ahead of your evidence. We need to find out where the victim was before he got killed. There was buckwheat in his stomach? I’d check the local soba places first.’

‘Yes sir,’ Sasagaki said, turning to leave the room.

It didn’t take long to find the soba shop Yosuke Kirihara had visited that day. According to Yaeko, he frequented a place by the name of Saganoya on the shopping street near the train station. A detective paid the shop a visit and was able to find a witness who could place Mr Kirihara there around four in the afternoon on Friday. He’d eaten the herring soba. Calculating back from the state of digestion put the time of death between six and seven in the evening. That meant they would be looking at the time period from five to eight for establishing alibis.

However, there was the statement from Matsuura and Yaeko that the deceased had left the pawnshop at two-thirty. That left the hour or so before he arrived at Saganoya unaccounted for. The walk from his house to the restaurant was only ten minutes, even at a leisurely pace.

The answer to that question came on Monday, with a single phone call to the police station from a female employee of the local Sankyo Bank branch. Apparently Yosuke Kirihara had visited the bank before closing hours on Friday.

Sasagaki and Koga went out to the bank, located across the street from the south side of the train station.

The woman who’d called was a cashier with a short fringe complementing a round, cheery face. She sat down with the detectives at a meeting table usually reserved for discussing customer accounts. It was separated from the rest of the bank floor by some free-standing dividers.

‘When I saw his name in the paper the other day I wondered if it was the same Kirihara I knew. So I checked the name again when I came in this morning and got permission from my boss to give you a call,’ she told the detectives, sitting with her back perfectly straight.

‘Around what time did Mr Kirihara come to the bank?’ Sasagaki asked.

‘A little before three.’

‘What did he come about?’

Here, she hesitated slightly before she was able to overcome her instinctive reluctance to reveal customer information. ‘He closed out a CD account and withdrew the money.’

‘How much?’

She hesitated again, wetting her lips. She glanced at her boss out of the corner of one eye and said in a quiet voice, ‘Exactly one million yen.’

Sasagaki’s eyes widened. It wasn’t the kind of money one typically walked around with.

‘And he didn’t say anything about how he was going to use the money?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Did you see what he did with the money? Did he put it away somewhere?’

‘Not exactly. I know I handed it to him inside a bank envelope, but other than that…’ She frowned, trying to remember.

‘Had Mr Kirihara done anything of the sort before? Closed accounts with a lot of money in them?’

‘No, not as far as I know. I’ve been in charge of his accounts since the end of last year.’

‘How did he seem to you when he took the money out? Was he unhappy about anything, or possibly excited?’

She frowned again. ‘He didn’t look too distraught, no. In fact, I think he said something about coming back to make a deposit soon.’

After reporting back to headquarters, Sasagaki and Koga paid a visit to the pawnshop to ask Yaeko and Matsuura whether they knew anything about the money Kirihara had withdrawn. But they were still a block away when they stopped. They could just see the front of the shop, and the long line of mourners gathered on the road outside.

‘Oh, right.’ Sasagaki sighed. ‘The funeral’s today.’

The two detectives watched the shop from a distance. Yaeko appeared at the door at the head of the procession that would carry the casket out to the waiting hearse. Her complexion didn’t look as good as it had the first time Sasagaki met her and she seemed smaller, physically, yet at the same time somehow even more alluring. The strange attraction of a woman in mourning, Sasagaki thought.

Yaeko was clearly accustomed to wearing kimonos. Even her footsteps seemed calculated to make her look good. If she’s trying to play the part of the beautiful young widow, she’s doing a knockout job. Their investigation had already revealed that she’d once worked as an escort over in the nightclub district in Kitashinchi.

From behind, her son appeared, carrying a framed photograph of his father. Ryo, that was his name. Sasagaki had yet to exchange words with the boy.

Ryo’s expression was as blank as the last time the detective had seen him. There was no trace of emotion in his dark, sunken eyes. They looked like eyes made of glass, vacantly following the motion of his mother’s feet.

The detectives waited until evening before trying the pawnshop again. As before, the metal shutter in front of the store was half-closed when they arrived. This time, however, the door behind it was locked. Sasagaki tried the doorbell. He could hear the sound of a buzzer from inside the shop.

‘Think they’re out?’ Koga asked.

‘If they were, wouldn’t they have put the shutter down all the way?’

Finally, they heard the sound of the door being unlocked. It opened slightly and Matsuura stuck his head out. ‘Detective!’

‘We had a few questions,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Is now a good time?’

‘Let me check with Mrs Kirihara. Be right back.’ He shut the door behind him.

The two detectives exchanged glances.

A few moments passed until the door opened again and Matsuura welcomed them inside. Sasagaki stepped in first. He could smell the scent of funeral incense in the air.

‘The funeral go OK?’ Sasagaki asked. He’d spotted Matsuura in the circle of casket-bearers.

‘Yeah, we got through it somehow. I’m pretty beat, though,’ he said, smoothing back his hair. He was still in a black suit, but he had removed his tie. The top two buttons of his shirt were undone.

The door behind the shop counter slid open and Yaeko emerged. She’d changed from her mourning clothes into a navy blue dress and let down her hair.

‘Sorry to trouble you after the day you’ve had,’ Sasagaki said.

She shook her head. ‘Have you found anything out?’

‘We’re still gathering information. Actually, we came across something I wanted to check with you. Although’ – Sasagaki pointed towards the door behind her – ‘if you don’t mind, I’d like to offer some incense. Always good to give the Buddha his due.’

Yaeko looked startled for a moment and glanced at Matsuura before saying, ‘Of course, I don’t mind at all.’

‘Thank you, I’ll only be a moment.’

Sasagaki took off his shoes and stepped up to the raised floor behind the counter. His eyes darted towards the door off to the side, the one that hid the stairs going up to the first floor. There was a small bolt lock on the door and it was pulled shut, making it impossible to open from the other side.

‘Excuse the odd question,’ Sasagaki said, ‘but what’s that locked for?’

‘Oh,’ Yaeko said, ‘that’s to stop thieves from coming in through the top floor at night.’

‘Pardon, the top floor?’

‘The houses in this part of town are so close together, they jump from roof to roof. A watch-seller nearby us had it happen to him not so long ago. My husband put the lock on.’

‘I take it there’s nothing of value upstairs, then?’

‘The safe is down here,’ Matsuura said from behind him. ‘And we keep everything from our customers down here, too.’

‘Does that mean no one is upstairs at night?’

‘No, we sleep downstairs,’ Yaeko said.

‘I see,’ Sasagaki said, scratching his chin. ‘And you always lock it this early in the evening?’

‘Oh, no,’ Yaeko said, coming up beside him and unlocking the door. ‘I just locked it out of habit earlier.’

Which means no one’s upstairs, Sasagaki thought.

He opened the sliding door in front of him to find a small room with a tatami-matted floor. There seemed to be another room behind that, hidden behind another sliding door. The downstairs bedroom, Sasagaki thought. He didn’t imagine much happened in there other than sleeping, especially with Ryo sharing the same room.

The family altar was up against the western wall. Yosuke Kirihara smiled out of a small frame set to one side. The photo was of him at a younger age, wearing a suit. Sasagaki lit a stick of incense and placed it in the tray on the altar. He pressed his hands together and sat with his eyes closed for a full ten seconds.

Yaeko came with tea. Still on his knees, Sasagaki bowed his head and thanked her for the tea. Next to him, Koga took his own cup.

Sasagaki asked Yaeko if anything had occurred to her about the case or the events of the day her husband died. She shook her head immediately. Seated out in the shop, Matsuura was quiet, too.

Gradually, Sasagaki swung the conversation around to the topic of the million yen Kirihara had taken out of the bank. Yaeko and Matsuura both looked surprised at this.

‘He didn’t say anything to me about one million yen,’ Yaeko said.

‘I didn’t hear anything about that either,’ Matsuura said. ‘The boss took care of most of the business side of things, but if he was dealing with something that big, I think he would’ve at least mentioned it.’

‘Did your husband spend any money on entertainment? Anything potentially expensive, like gambling?’

‘No,’ Yaeko said, ‘he never gambled. He didn’t really have any hobbies to speak of.’

‘Work was his hobby,’ Matsuura added from the side.

‘Right, well then…’ Sasagaki hesitated a moment before asking, ‘How about any… other kinds of… entertainment.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Yaeko frowned.

‘Basically, what I mean is, women. Did he go out to clubs, anything like that?’

Yaeko nodded, understanding. Sasagaki had feared he might be touching a nerve, but that didn’t seem to be the case at all.

‘I don’t think he had a woman on the side, if that’s what you mean. He wasn’t the kind to be able to do that sort of thing.’ She sounded very sure of herself.

‘So you trusted him, in other words?’

‘I wouldn’t call it that…’ Yaeko said, her words trailing off as she looked down at the floor.

Sasagaki asked a few other questions before standing to go. He hated to leave empty-handed, but there didn’t seem to be much else here for them at present.

As he was putting on his shoes, he noticed a pair of scuffed sneakers off to one side of the door. They must belong to Ryo, which means he’s home…

Sasagaki glanced at the door with its sliding lock, and wondered what the boy was doing upstairs, all alone.

The continuing investigation gradually revealed the path Yosuke Kirihara had taken on the afternoon of his death. Already established was his departure from home at two-thirty, followed by a trip to Sankyo Bank near the station to withdraw the one million yen, then a late lunch at Saganoya where he ate the herring noodles. He’d left Saganoya just after four.

At issue was what happened next. An employee at the shop was under the impression that Kirihara had walked, not towards, but away from the station when he left. If he hadn’t come to the vicinity of the station to get on a train, then his only other reason for being there would have been to get the money.

The investigation team began questioning people in two areas: around the station, and near the building where the body had been found. The station team was the first to find anything.

A customer matching Kirihara’s description had visited a local cake shop called Harmony. There he had asked for ‘that pudding with lots of fruit on it,’ the employee reported, by which he’d meant Pudding à la Mode, a speciality of the chain. However, as it happened, they were all out of Pudding à la Mode that day. The customer had asked if there were any other shops where he might get something similar nearby.

The employee had directed him to another branch of the same shop in town, showing him the location on a map.

‘That’s right next to where I’m headed,’ Kirihara was reported to have said. ‘I wish I’d asked sooner.’

The other Harmony in question was located in West Ōe 6. A visit confirmed that someone matching Kirihara’s description had come to the shop in the early evening on Friday. He’d purchased three Puddings à la Mode, but the employee wasn’t sure what for, or where he’d gone after that.

The purchase revealed two things to the investigation team: one, Kirihara was going to meet someone, and two, that someone was most likely a woman. Finally, a name surfaced: Fumiyo Nishimoto – the only female customer on the ledger at Kirihara Pawnshop with an address near the cake shop.

Sasagaki and Koga went to pay Fumiyo a visit.

Her apartment building, a squat two-storey affair with a sign that read YOSHIDA HEIGHTS, stood in a cluster of small houses that looked as if they had been thrown together from corrugated tin siding and whatever lumber happened to be lying around at the time. Black splotches marked the building’s sooty grey walls and serpentine lines of concrete had been plastered over the many cracks.

Fumiyo’s unit was listed in the ledger as No 103. The walkway leading down the line of ground floor apartments was dim and dank – open on one side to the air, but too close to the neighbours to get any sunlight. A rusted bicycle was parked at the corner of the building, half-blocking the entrance.

Avoiding the washing machines that squatted outside each doorway, Sasagaki looked for Fumiyo’s unit. He found a piece of paper tacked to the wall beside the third door down, on which ‘Nishimoto’ had been written in permanent marker. He knocked.

‘Yes,’ came a girl’s voice from inside. The door didn’t open. ‘Who is it?’

‘Is your mom home?’ Sasagaki asked through the door.

There was no answer until the voice said again, ‘Who is it?’

Sasagaki looked at Koga and smiled wryly. Clearly the girl had been told not to open the door to strangers – a practice he normally would have applauded, except right now it was interfering with his investigation.

Sasagaki kept his voice loud enough that the girl could hear, but hopefully not the neighbours. ‘We’re with the police. We have some questions for your mother.’

Silence.

By her voice, Sasagaki pegged her as a pre-teen, maybe in middle school or about to finish elementary school. He could imagine her freezing when she heard the word ‘police’.

Then came the sound of the door being unlocked. It opened, but the chain was still on. Through the narrow gap he saw a girl’s face with wide eyes. Her skin was remarkably white and as smooth as porcelain.

‘My mother’s not home yet,’ she said, a tone in her voice that put Sasagaki in mind of words like ‘resolute’.

‘Out shopping, maybe?’

‘No, she’s at work.’

‘What time does she usually come home?’ Sasagaki asked, glancing at his watch. It was just past five.

‘Any time now,’ the girl told him.

‘Right,’ Sasagaki said. ‘We’ll just wait outside, then.’

The girl nodded and shut the door. Sasagaki reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Kid’s got a good head on her shoulders,’ he said in a low voice.

‘I’d agree,’ Koga said. ‘That, and —’

He was about to say something else when the door opened again, this time without the chain.

‘Could you show me your police thingy?’ the girl asked.

Sasagaki blinked. ‘Sorry, my what?’

‘Your badge.’

‘Oh, right.’ He smiled. ‘Here,’ he said, holding out his badge displayed in his wallet, next to a photo ID.

The girl looked between the photograph and Sasagaki’s face for a moment before saying, ‘You can come in.’ She opened the door.

‘No, that’s OK,’ Sasagaki said, a little surprised. ‘We’re fine outside.’

The girl shook her head. ‘The neighbours will wonder.’

Sasagaki glanced at Koga. He resisted the urge to grin.

The detectives stepped inside. As Sasagaki had guessed it was a small apartment for a family. The room beyond the door was a tiny kitchen-diner with a wooden floor and a small sink. Behind that was another room, only slightly larger, floored with tatami mats.

The girl offered the detectives a seat at the simple table in the front room. There were only two chairs. The pink-and-white checked tablecloth was plastic, with cigarette burns near the edge.

After the detectives had sat down the girl went into the back room and sat up against a closed closet door, where she began reading a book. There was a white label on the cover, indicating it was from a library.

‘What’re you reading?’ Koga asked. She held the book up so he could see. He smiled. ‘That’s quite the book for someone your age.’

‘What is it?’ Sasagaki asked him.

‘Gone With the Wind.’

Sasagaki nodded, impressed. ‘I saw the movie.’

‘Me too,’ Koga said. ‘It was pretty good. Never even occurred to me to read the book.’

‘I don’t read much these days myself.’

‘You and me both. Not even manga, not since Ashita no Joe ended.’

‘What, Joe’s already done?’

‘Yeah, back in May. Now that Star of the Giants is done too I’m all out of reading material.’

‘It’s just as well. Grown men shouldn’t go around reading manga.’

‘I guess.’ Koga shrugged.

The girl didn’t even look up from her book while the detectives chatted. It was as if she’d sensed that they were just saying whatever came to mind in order to fill the silence.

The thought must have occurred to Koga, too, because he said nothing further. Presently he began rapping his fingers restlessly on the table but stopped at a withering glance from the girl.

Sasagaki busied himself looking around the house. Furniture and appliances had been kept to a bare minimum. There was nothing that could be considered a luxury item in the place. There wasn’t even a desk for studying or bookshelves. A small television sat by the window, but it was incredibly old, with a little bunny-ear antenna on top. He imagined it was probably a black-and-white set, one of the ones where, even after you turned on the switch, it took forever for the picture to come on. When it did, there were jagged lines across everything.

It wasn’t just the lack of material possessions. The place seemed unusually austere for a house with a little girl living in it. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling were old, but even that didn’t fully explain the bleak mood.

Two cardboard boxes were stacked right next to where Sasagaki was sitting. He pried open the lid of the top box with his fingertips, taking a peek inside. It was filled to the brim with rubber frogs. They were the kind that had a little tail you could squeeze to make the legs inflate, making the frog ‘jump’. He’d seen them for sale at stalls during street festivals.

‘What’s your name, miss?’ Sasagaki asked the girl. Normally he wouldn’t use ‘miss’ when talking to a schoolchild, but for her it seemed appropriate.

‘Yukiho Nishimoto,’ the girl said, her eyes never leaving her book.

‘Yukiho? How do you write that?’

‘The characters for snow and ear, like an ear of rice.’

‘Nice,’ Sasagaki said. ‘That’s a nice name, isn’t it?’ He looked over at his partner.

Koga nodded. The girl continued reading.

‘Have you ever heard of a shop called Kirihara?’ Sasagaki asked. ‘It’s a pawnshop.’

Yukiho didn’t answer right away. Then she licked her lips and said, ‘My mom goes there sometimes.’

‘Have you ever met the man who runs the shop?’

‘I have.’

‘Has he ever come here?’

Yukiho frowned. ‘I think so,’ she said.

‘But not when you were home, is that it?’

‘He might have. I don’t really remember.’

‘Any idea why he visited?’

‘No.’

Sasagaki reconsidered questioning the girl right now. He had a feeling this would be only the first of many opportunities he would have to talk to her. He resumed looking around the room. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but his eyes widened a little when he saw the waste basket next to the refrigerator. It was filled to the brim, and perched on top was some packaging paper with a mark on it from Harmony, the cake shop.

Sasagaki looked over at the girl. Their eyes met but she quickly went back to reading her book. He had the distinct impression that she’d been looking at the rubbish, too.

A short while later the girl looked up again. Then she closed her book and walked past them towards the door.

Sasagaki perked up his ears. He heard footsteps, sandals dragging across the ground. Koga’s mouth opened slightly.

The footsteps approached the door and stopped. There was the sound of a key in the lock.

‘It’s open,’ Yukiho called out.

‘Why didn’t you lock it? It’s not safe,’ said a voice as the door opened. A woman wearing a turquoise blouse came in. She looked in her mid-thirties, with her hair in a bun behind her head.

Fumiyo Nishimoto noticed the detectives immediately. She quickly looked between her daughter and the strange men in shock.

‘It’s OK, they’re police,’ the girl said.

‘Police?’ An unguarded look of fear washed over Fumiyo’s face.

‘Sasagaki, Osaka Police,’ Sasagaki said, standing. ‘This is my partner, Koga.’

Fumiyo was noticeably taken aback. Her face had gone pale, and she was clearly unsure what to do. She stood with a paper bag in her hand, the door still hanging open behind her.

‘We’re investigating a case and had some questions to ask you, Mrs Nishimoto. Sorry to drop in when you were out.’

‘What sort of case?’

‘It’s about the guy from the pawnshop,’ Yukiho said.

Fumiyo held her breath for a long moment. From the looks on their faces, Sasagaki ascertained that they both knew about Kirihara’s death and, furthermore, had discussed it together at some length.

‘Please, have a seat,’ Koga said, offering his chair to Fumiyo. Wringing her hands, she sat down at the table across from Sasagaki.

A fine-featured woman, Sasagaki thought. A little soft under the eyes, but with make-up she’d definitely qualify as a looker. But hers was a cold beauty. The resemblance to her daughter was striking. Sasagaki could imagine any number of middle-aged men falling for her. With Kirihara at fifty-two, there could well have been something between them.

‘Pardon the intrusion, but are you married?’

‘My husband died seven years ago. He was working at a construction site, there was an accident…’

‘I see, I’m sorry. Where are you working now?’

‘At an udon shop in Imazato.’

The name of the shop was Kikuya. Her hours there were from Monday to Saturday, eleven a.m. to four p.m.

‘The udon there any good?’ Koga asked with a smile, but Fumiyo’s face remained hard.

‘I suppose,’ was all she said.

‘I’m sure you’ve heard that Mr Yosuke Kirihara passed away?’ Sasagaki said, getting to the topic at hand.

‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice. ‘It was quite a shock.’

Yukiho went around behind her mother into the back room, where she sat against the closet like before. Sasagaki watched her go before looking back at Fumiyo.

‘The things is, it’s very likely that Mr Kirihara was involved in an incident. We were trying to track down exactly where he went last Friday afternoon and heard that he might have visited you here.’

‘What, my house? No I —’ Fumiyo began, haltingly, when her daughter chimed in, ‘Isn’t he the one who brought the pudding?’

Fumiyo’s bewilderment was almost painful to watch. She moved her thin lips for a moment before saying, ‘Yes, that’s right. Mr Kirihara did come here on Friday.’

‘Around what time?’

‘I think it was…’ Fumiyo looked past Sasagaki’s right shoulder to the small clock atop a two-door fridge. ‘A little before five, I think. Right after I got home.’

‘And what was the purpose of his visit?’

‘No reason in particular. He said he dropped in because he was in the area. He knows I’m a single mother and we’re having a rough time making ends meet. He always dropped by now and then to give advice.’

‘He said he was in the area? That’s a little odd,’ Sasagaki said, pointing at the wrapping paper from Harmony in the trash pail. ‘He brought that, didn’t he? Apparently he went all the way to the station to buy it. Not really in the area, is it?’

‘Well, that may be, but I’m just telling you what he told me. He said he was dropping in because he was in the area,’ Fumiyo said, her head drooping.

‘Right, well, let’s just leave that as that, then,’ Sasagaki offered. ‘Until when would you say he was here?’

‘He left just a little before six, I think.’

‘Just before six? Are you sure?’

‘I’m pretty sure.’

‘So that would mean he was here for about an hour? What did you discuss?’

‘Nothing in particular. Just life.’

‘That’s a fairly broad topic. Did you talk about the weather, money, anything specific?’

‘Well, he did mention the war…’

‘You mean the Pacific War?’

Sasagaki had read in the files that Kirihara had served in World War II. But Fumiyo shook her head.

‘No, some war going on now, overseas. He was saying it was sure to drive up the price of oil again.’

‘Oh, right, the Middle East.’ That would be the Yom Kippur War that had just kicked off at the beginning of the month.

‘He was saying it would wreck the economy. And we might not be able to get oil or anything made from it. The world would descend into a fight to see who had the most money and power – that’s what he said.’

Sasagaki nodded, watching Fumiyo’s downcast eyes as she spoke. It seemed to him that she was telling the truth. The question was why Kirihara had bothered to tell her that. Was he suggesting that he had money and power, so she should stick with him? According to the ledger at the pawnshop, Fumiyo Nishimoto had never once returned money to retrieve any collateral. She was destitute, and Sasagaki realised it was probably in the pawnshop’s best interests to keep her that way. There might have been an angle by which Kirihara benefited personally, too.

He glanced over at Yukiho. ‘And where was your daughter at that time?’

‘She was at the library. Weren’t you, honey?’

‘Yeah,’ Yukiho replied.

‘Is that when you borrowed that book?’ Sasagaki turned to ask the girl directly. ‘Do you go to the library often?’

‘Once or twice a week,’ she told him.

‘On your way home from school, maybe?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you have some set days you go, like, every Wednesday and Friday?’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I just go whenever I need something to read.’

‘And that doesn’t make you worry?’ he asked the mother. ‘I mean, don’t you want to know where she is when she comes home late from school?’

‘But she’s always home right after six,’ Fumiyo said.

‘Is that when you came home on Friday, too?’ Sasagaki asked Yukiho directly.

The girl nodded.

Sasagaki turned back to the mother. ‘And did you stay home after Mr Kirihara left?’

‘No, actually, I went out shopping. Marukaneya.’

Marukaneya was the name of a supermarket a couple of minutes away by foot.

‘Did you run into anyone you know there?’

Fumiyo thought for a moment before saying, ‘Yes, Mrs Kinoshita. She’s the mother of one of Yukiho’s classmates.’

‘Would you happen to have her number?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Fumiyo picked up the address book sitting next to the phone and put it on the table. Her finger went to an entry marked Kinoshita. ‘That’s her.’

Sasagaki watched Koga jot the number down in his notebook before continuing.

‘Was your daughter already home when you left for the supermarket?’

‘No, she hadn’t come back yet.’

‘And what time did you return?’

‘A little after seven-thirty, I think.’

‘By which time your daughter had come home, correct?’

‘Yes, she had.’

‘And you didn’t leave the house after that?’

‘No.’ Fumiyo shook her head.

Sasagaki looked over at Koga to see if he had any more questions. Koga shook his head.

‘Right, well, I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time. I’m afraid we might be back again later with more questions,’ Sasagaki said, standing.

Fumiyo saw the two detectives to the door. Seeing that the daughter had remained behind, Sasagaki had one more question for her. ‘Mrs Nishimoto, I have a rather delicate question to ask, if you don’t mind.’

‘Yes?’ she said, her earlier unease returning to her face.

‘Did Mr Kirihara ever invite you out to dinner? Or did you ever meet outside of your home?’

Fumiyo’s eyes widened, but she firmly shook her head. ‘No. Not even once.’

‘I see. I was just wondering why Mr Kirihara had taken an interest in you and your household.’

‘I think he was just a sympathetic man, that’s all. Detective, am I a suspect?’

‘We’re just establishing his whereabouts on the day he died, that’s all.’

Sasagaki thanked her for her time and the detectives left. They had walked until the apartment was out of sight when he turned to Koga and said, ‘Something stinks.’

‘Sure does,’ the younger detective agreed.

‘Why did she try to deny Kirihara had been there at first? And why didn’t Yukiho help her hide it? You think she realised that I’d seen the pudding wrappers and there was no point lying?’

‘I wouldn’t put it past the kid.’

‘What did she say? She finishes work at the udon place and gets home around five? And that’s when Kirihara comes, right? Meanwhile, Yukiho is at the library and she only comes home after Mr Kirihara’s already left. The timing is just a little too clean.’

‘You think Fumiyo was his lover and she had her daughter stay out until they were done?’

‘Could be. But if she was his lover, I’d imagine he’d have been supporting her somehow. You wouldn’t think she’d be reduced to making rubber frogs in her spare time.’

‘Maybe he was just in the process of winning her affections.’

‘Could be.’

The two detectives hurried back to the station.

‘It could’ve been an impulsive act,’ Sasagaki said after he finished giving his report to Nakatsuka. ‘I think it’s likely that Kirihara showed the million yen he had just got from the bank to Fumiyo.’

‘And she killed him because she wanted it? But if she’d killed him at the house there’s no way she could’ve got the body to where we found it,’ Nakatsuka pointed out.

‘True, so maybe she needed some reason why they had to meet there. I can imagine that they walked together.’

‘And forensics thinks a woman could’ve made those injuries.’

‘And I doubt Mr Kirihara would’ve been expecting it coming from her.’

‘Looks like we’ll have to check out Fumiyo’s alibi next,’ Nakatsuka said, his tone grave.

At that point Sasagaki was pretty sure that Fumiyo was guilty. The way she had been acting was far too suspicious. And with the time of death somewhere between five and eight o’clock, she would have had plenty of time to do the deed.

Which made the news that Fumiyo Nishimoto had an alibi come as a something of a shock.

The park in front of the Marukaneya supermarket had a swing set, a slide, and a sandbox. It wasn’t big enough to play catch, but it was just the right size for mothers to leave their children to play while they saw to the grocery shopping. This led to the park’s other main use, as a place for housewives to meet, swap gossip, and take turns babysitting.

Around six-thirty in the evening on the day Yosuke Kirihara was murdered, a Mrs Yumie Kinoshita had met Fumiyo Nishimoto inside the supermarket. Fumiyo had already finished her shopping and was heading for the cash register. Yumie Kinoshita had just come into the shop and her basket was still empty. They exchanged a few words and parted ways in the front of the store.

It was already past seven when Yumie Kinoshita finished her shopping and left the store, upon which she got on the bicycle she’d left out front in order to ride home. As she was getting on the bike, she’d noticed Fumiyo in the park. She was on the swing set, gently swinging, lost in thought.

When asked if she was sure the person she saw was Fumiyo Nishimoto, Yumie Kinoshita replied that she was absolutely confident it was.

There was one other person who’d seen Fumiyo on the swings that evening, an older man who ran the takoyaki stand in front of the supermarket. He said she had stayed there, swinging, until it was almost closing time at eight. His description matched Fumiyo’s age and appearance exactly.

Meanwhile, new information had come in concerning Kirihara’s whereabouts after his visit to Fumiyo. A pharmacy owner of the pawnbroker’s acquaintance had spotted him walking alone just after six. He had thought to call out to him but noticed that he seemed to be in a hurry. The location of the sighting was exactly midway between Fumiyo’s apartment and the building where the body had been discovered.

With the time of death falling somewhere between five and eight, it was theoretically possible for Fumiyo to leave the swings, make straight for the building, and commit the murder. However, most of the investigative team agreed it seemed highly unlikely. It was already pushing it to stretch the time of death to eight. The most likely time for Kirihara’s death had been placed between six and seven in the evening.

There was another piece of evidence that strongly suggested the murder hadn’t taken place after seven-thirty, this being the available light at the scene of the crime. There were no lights in the room where the body was found. Though sunlight crept in during the day, at night it would be pitch dark. If the lights in the building across the road were on it would be light enough in the room to make out someone’s face, at least once one’s eyes had adjusted. However, those lights had been turned off at seven-thirty that night. It still would have been physically possible for

Fumiyo to commit the murder had she brought a torch, yet, given the unusual circumstances that would entail, it was hard to imagine Kirihara being caught off his guard.

Though she was their main suspect at the time, the team was forced to admit that the probability that Fumiyo had murdered Kirihara was low.

While suspicion faded on Fumiyo Nishimoto, another investigator uncovered new information concerning Kirihara Pawnshop. His team had been going through the list of customers in the shop ledger, contacting each until they found someone who had visited the shop on the evening Kirihara was murdered.

The person in question was a middle-aged woman who lived by herself in Tatsumi, a neighbourhood several kilometres to the south of Ōe. Widowed when her husband had died two years earlier, she’d been making regular visits over the last several months, having chosen a pawnshop far from her home so friends wouldn’t see her going in. On that Friday she had brought a pair of watches to Kirihara Pawnshop at five-thirty in the afternoon.

According to her statement, though the shop had seemed open, the door was locked. She had rung the doorbell, but no one had answered. She had then gone to a nearby market to buy things for dinner, dropping back by the pawnshop on her way home. This was around six-thirty.

Again, the door was locked. This time she didn’t bother ringing the doorbell, but gave up and went home. She pawned the watches three days later at a different shop. As she wasn’t in the habit of reading the newspapers she hadn’t learned of Kirihara’s murder until hearing it from the detectives.

Suspicion then turned naturally towards Yaeko and Matsuura, who had both previously stated that the pawnshop had been open until seven. Once again Sasagaki and Koga paid a visit to Kirihara Pawnshop – this time with two other detectives in tow.

Matsuura’s eyes went wide when he saw the crowd at the door. ‘What’s this about?’

‘Is Mrs Kirihara in?’ Sasagaki asked.

‘Yeah, but —’

‘Would you mind calling her?’

Matsuura frowned and opened the sliding door behind him a little, calling in, ‘More detectives here to see you.’

There came a sound of someone moving and the door opened the rest of the way. Yaeko appeared, wearing jeans and a knitted top. Her eyebrows drew together when she saw the detectives in the shop. ‘Yes?’

‘Sorry to trouble you. But we have a few questions,’ Sasagaki said.

‘It’s no trouble, but I’m not sure what I can help you with.’

‘Maybe you could come with us,’ the detective behind Sasagaki said. ‘Just to the café around the corner. We won’t take much of your time.’

Yaeko frowned, but she put on her sandals. Sasagaki noted with interest the worried look she gave Matsuura before leaving with the other two detectives.

Once they were gone, Sasagaki walked up to the counter. ‘And I have a question for you, Mr Matsuura.’

‘Yes?’ he said, smiling pleasantly even as his back stiffened.

‘It’s about the day of the murder. In our investigation we found something that contradicted one of your earlier statements,’ Sasagaki said, his words deliberately measured.

‘What sort of a contradiction?’ Matsuura asked, the smile tightening on his face.

Sasagaki told them what they’d heard from the woman in Tatsumi. Matsuura’s smile faded as he spoke.

‘What are we to make of this? You said that the shop was open until seven that day. But now we have someone saying that the door was locked between five-thirty and six-thirty. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?’ Sasagaki stared the man in the eye.

Matsuura looked away, his gaze drifting up towards the ceiling. ‘Well now, let’s see…’ He moved as if to cross his arms, then clapped his hands together with sudden realisation. ‘I know! I was in the safe.’

‘The safe?’

‘Yeah, it’s at the back. We keep all the things from the customers there, anything of value. You can come take a look later if you want, but it’s quite large. Like a bank vault. Anyway, I had to check on some things, so I was in there. You can’t hear the door buzzer from inside, see.’

‘And no one was watching the store while you were inside?’

‘Well, usually the boss is here but since I was alone I’d locked the door.’

‘And what about the wife and son?’

‘They were both in the living room,’ Matsuura said.

‘Wouldn’t they have heard the doorbell ringing?’

‘Right, well,’ Matsuura’s mouth hung open for several seconds before he said, ‘they could’ve been watching television in the back and not heard it.’

Sasagaki looked at Matsuura’s bony-cheeked face for a moment before saying to Koga, ‘Try ringing the doorbell.’

‘Right,’ Koga said, stepping outside. The buzzer went off above Sasagaki’s head. The noise was almost painful.

‘That’s quite loud,’ Sasagaki said. ‘They would’ve had to be pretty engrossed in whatever show they were watching to have missed that.’

Matsuura’s face twisted, eventually ending up in a wry smile. ‘Well, Mrs Kirihara’s never been that interested in the business here. She usually doesn’t even greet customers when they come in. Ryo’s never been one for helping out, either. They probably heard the buzzer but just ignored it.’

‘Ignored it, right,’ Sasagaki said, but what Matsuura was saying did have a ring of truth to it; neither Yaeko nor her son seemed very enthusiastic about the business.

‘Am I a suspect, detective? I mean, do you think I killed the boss?’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ Sasagaki said, waving his hand. ‘We hit a contradiction in our investigation so we had to look into it. That’s standard procedure.’

‘I see, I guess. Not that being a suspect would bother me much,’ Matsuura added, showing yellowed teeth. ‘I got nothing to hide.’

‘Not that we suspect you, but it always helps us to have something a little more concrete for an alibi. I don’t suppose you have anything that can prove you were here on that day between six and seven?’

‘Well you could ask Mrs Kirihara or the kid… but that’s not enough, is it?’

‘A witness who has nothing to do with the case would be preferable.’

‘So now we’re conspirators, is that it?’ Matsuura said, his eyes narrowing.

‘We’re just considering all the possibilities here,’ Sasagaki said with a shrug.

‘Well, that’s messed up. What do I have to gain by killing the boss? He might have talked like he was a high roller, but I know there’s not much money here.’

Sasagaki didn’t answer. He was happy to have Matsuura get angry and maybe say more than he should. But the man had already calmed down. ‘Between six and seven, right?’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t suppose talking on the phone counts?’

‘You talked to someone on the phone? Who?’

‘Someone from the union, about our meeting coming up next month.’

‘Did you call him?’

‘Erm, no, he called me.’

‘Around what time?’

‘Once at six. Then again about a half-hour later.’

‘He called twice?’

‘That’s right.’

Sasagaki arranged the timeline in his head. If Matsuura was telling the truth, that would give him an alibi between six and six-thirty, which made it unlikely he had been the murderer.

Sasagaki asked for the name and phone number of the union man who had called. Matsuura pulled out a box of business cards and had begun looking through them when the door to the stairs opened. A boy’s face appeared in the gap. His eyes met with Sasagaki’s and he quickly shut the door. The detectives could hear his footsteps hurrying back up the stairs.

‘It looks like the Kirihara boy is in.’

‘What? Oh, yeah, he just got home from school.’

‘Would you mind if I took a look?’ Sasagaki said, indicating the stairs.

‘You want to see upstairs?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

‘No, yeah, sure, no problem.’

Sasagaki told Koga to take down the number of the man who’d called, then take a look at the safe. He leaned down to take off his shoes and stepped up behind the counter.

Opening the door, he took a look up the stairs. They were dimly lit and smelled of plaster dust from the walls. Years of sock traffic had polished the wooden stairs to a shiny black. Placing a hand on the wall for balance, Sasagaki cautiously climbed the steps.

At the top he found a narrow hallway running between two rooms. One side was closed with a sliding door, the other with a shoji screen. There was a small door at the end of the hallway that was either a closet or a toilet, Sasagaki decided.

‘Ryo? It’s Detective Sasagaki. I was hoping to have a word.’ Sasagaki stepped into the hallway.

For a while no answer came. Sasagaki had just taken a breath to call out again when he heard something clatter from behind the sliding door. Moving quickly, he took a step forward and opened the door. Ryo was inside, sitting at his desk, his back facing the detective.

‘Mind if I come in?’

Sasagaki stepped into the small tatami-matted room. This was the south-west corner of the house and sunlight came streaming in through the windows.

‘I don’t know anything, OK?’ Ryo said, his back still turned.

‘That’s fine. It’s all helpful. Mind if I sit down?’ Sasagaki asked, pointing towards a cushion on the floor. Ryo looked over his shoulder and nodded.

Sasagaki sat and looked up at the boy. ‘Sorry about your dad.’

Ryo said nothing. He didn’t even turn around.

Sasagaki looked around the room. It was clean to the point where it felt a little barren for a kid’s room. There were no posters of girls in bathing suits on the walls, no model racing cars. There was no manga on the bookshelf, either, just an encyclopedia and two science books for kids: How Cars Work, and How Televisions Work.

Sasagaki’s eyes lit on a frame on the wall. It contained a piece of white paper cut in the shape of a sailboat. The paper had been cut so deftly that even the rigging was reproduced perfectly. Sasagaki had seen some cut-paper pictures at an art show once and this seemed far more intricate.

‘That’s pretty impressive. You make that?’

Ryo glanced at the frame and nodded his head slightly.

‘Wow,’ Sasagaki said. His surprise was genuine. ‘That takes some skill. You could sell those if you wanted to, you know.’

‘What did you want to ask me?’

Apparently Ryo wasn’t one for exchanging small talk with middle-aged men.

‘Right,’ Sasagaki said, shifting on his cushion. ‘Were you home that day?’

‘That day?’

‘The day your father died.’

‘Oh, yeah. I was here.’

‘What were you doing between six and seven?’

‘In the evening?’

‘Yeah. Do you remember?’

The boy scratched his neck before saying, ‘Watching TV downstairs.’

‘By yourself?’

‘No, with my mom.’

Sasagaki nodded. He had been unable to detect any hesitation in the boy’s voice. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but would you mind facing me so we can talk?’

Ryo sighed and slowly turned his chair around. Sasagaki was half expecting a look of defiance from the boy but when he turned around he felt nothing of the sort. The boy’s eyes were blank, almost inorganic – the eyes of a scientist. Sasagaki felt as though he was being observed.

‘You remember what show you were watching?’ Sasagaki asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.

Ryo gave him the name of a television series popular with boys. Sasagaki asked him what the episode had been about. Ryo thought for a moment then gave him a perfect summary of that night’s action. Sasagaki had never even seen the show but he found he could picture it quite readily just from the boy’s description.

‘Until when were you watching TV?’

‘About seven-thirty.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘I had dinner with Mom.’

‘Right. You must’ve been worried when your father didn’t come home.’

‘Yeah,’ Ryo said in a small voice. Then he sighed and looked out of the window. Sasagaki found his eyes drawn outwards too. The sun was setting, casting a red glow across the sky.

‘Well,’ Sasagaki said at length, ‘sorry to bother you in the middle of your homework. Keep at it.’ He stood and gave the boy a clap on the shoulder.

Sasagaki and Koga went back to headquarters and compared notes with the two detectives who had questioned Yaeko. There weren’t any noticeable contradictions between what she had said and Matsuura’s statement. She too had claimed she was in the back with Ryo watching television when the customer came. She said she might have heard the buzzer ring, but she didn’t remember, and besides, she generally didn’t answer the door as it wasn’t her job to greet customers. She claimed she didn’t know what Matsuura had been up to while she was watching television. The description of the programme, too, matched Ryo’s. It would have been fairly simple for Yaeko and Matsuura to agree on a story in order to establish each other’s alibis, but with Ryo in the picture it changed everything. Nobody said it in as many words but the general feeling in the department was that the three of them were telling the truth.

Proof came soon afterwards. There was a record of the calls Matsuura had claimed came to the pawnshop at six and again at six-thirty. The man from the union had confirmed that it was Matsuura he talked to on the phone.

They were back to square one. The painstaking, methodical questioning of regulars to the pawnshop continued. The only progress made was that marked by the days on the calendar. In baseball, the Yomiuri Giants won nine games in a row, and Leo Esaki won the Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of electron tunnelling. As a direct result of the Yom Kippur War, oil prices were on the rise. Throughout the country, the feeling spread that something was about to happen.

Just as the investigation team was starting to get impatient, new information came in from the detectives looking into Fumiyo Nishimoto.

Kikuya was a nice little udon shop with a wooden lattice door, over which hung a navy-blue noren curtain with the name of the shop written in large white letters across it. It looked popular, with a good crowd for lunch and no sign of business tapering off even after one in the afternoon.

Around one-thirty, a white van parked on the street a short distance away from the shop. Large letters on the side of the van announced it as the property of Swallowtail Inc.

A man got out of the driver’s seat. He looked to be around forty years old, of a stocky build, with a shirt and tie on beneath a grey jacket. He walked quickly into Kikuya.

‘Like clockwork,’ Sasagaki said with a glance down at his wristwatch. ‘One-thirty on the dot.’ He was sitting in a café across the road from Kikuya looking out through the window.

Sitting next to him, Detective Kanemura said, ‘I can also tell you what he’s ordering right now: tempura udon.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘I’d bet money on it. I’ve been in there with him a few times already. Terasaki always gets the same thing.’

‘You’d think he’d get tired of it.’ Sasagaki looked back over at the shop. All this talk about udon was making his stomach rumble.

Though Fumiyo’s alibi had been corroborated, she was not yet entirely free from suspicion. The team was fixated on the fact that she was the last person Kirihara seemed to have met before going to his death. If she was involved in his murder, that pointed towards a collaborator. So they had cast a net, looking for anyone who might fit the description of the pretty widow’s young lover, when they had found Tadao Terasaki.

Terasaki made his livelihood as a wholesaler of cosmetics, beauty supplies, shampoo and detergent. He made deliveries to other retailers but also took orders directly from customers, which he would fulfil by personally delivering the goods to their doorstep. His outfit, Swallowtail Inc., was a company in name alone. Terasaki was the owner and sole employee.

Terasaki had first come to the attention of the team through the questioning of Fumiyo Nishimoto’s neighbours. A housewife had seen a man in a white van pay several visits to Fumiyo’s apartment. She remembered seeing the name of some company on the van, something about butterflies, but hadn’t been able to remember the exact name.

They began a stakeout near Yoshida Heights but the van never showed up. When they did find it, it was in an entirely different location: Kikuya, the udon shop where Fumiyo worked. A white van paid the shop a daily visit.

From the company name on the van it was easy to track down the man’s identity.

‘He’s out,’ Koga announced. It had been his job to watch the door. All three detectives looked across the street. Terasaki had left the shop, but he wasn’t going back to his van. He was just standing there. This, too, they had expected from Kanemura’s report.

A few moments later Fumiyo came out of the shop wearing a white work apron. She talked a while with Terasaki then went back inside the shop, leaving Terasaki to return to his van alone. Neither of them seemed to be worrying too much about being seen.

‘Let’s move,’ Sasagaki said, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray on the table as he stood.

Terasaki was just opening the van door when Koga called out to him. He turned, a startled look on his face. When he noticed Sasagaki and Kanemura coming from behind, his expression hardened.

Terasaki was willing enough to talk to them. They asked if he’d like to go to the café, but he said he’d prefer to talk right there in the van, so all four of them piled in: Terasaki in the driver’s seat, Sasagaki in the passenger’s seat, and Koga and Kanemura in the back.

Sasagaki asked whether he had heard about the death of the pawnshop owner in Ōe.

‘I read about it in the paper, or maybe it was on TV,’ Terasaki said, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

‘The last place Mr Kirihara visited before he died was the home of a Mrs Fumiyo Nishimoto. You do know Mrs Nishimoto, don’t you?’

Terasaki swallowed noticeably. ‘Nishimoto… the woman who works at that noodle shop right? Yeah, I know who she is.’

‘Well, we think she might have something to do with what happened.’

‘Ridiculous,’ Terasaki snorted, the corners of his mouth curling up into a smile.

‘Is it?’ Sasagaki asked.

‘How could she have anything to do with that?’

‘Mr Terasaki, you say you only “know who she is”, so why go out of your way to protect her?’

‘I ain’t protecting nobody.’

‘A white van’s been spotted several times near Yoshida Heights, along with a man driving it who pays regular visits to Mrs Nishimoto’s apartment. That man is you, isn’t it, Mr Terasaki?’

Terasaki was clearly flustered. He wet his lips and said, ‘She’s a customer, so what?’

‘A customer?’

‘You know, cosmetics, detergent. I bring the things she orders. That’s all.’

‘You know, Terasaki, if you’re lying, we’ll uncover the truth soon enough. We have a witness who says you visit her apartment frequently. I can’t imagine she needs that many cosmetics.’

Terasaki crossed his arms and closed his eyes.

‘Start lying now, Mr Terasaki, and you’ll just have to keep lying. It’s hard to keep it up, you know. And we’ll be watching you every minute of the day. All we have to do is wait until you visit Fumiyo Nishimoto again. So what would you do? Just give up on ever seeing her again? I think that’d be pretty tough on both of you. Look, why don’t you just tell us the truth? You’re in a relationship with Mrs Nishimoto, aren’t you?’

Sasagaki waited patiently for Terasaki to make the next move.

After a long silence, he sighed and opened his eyes. ‘So what’s it to you? I’m single, and she’s a widow.’

‘So you’re confirming the relationship?’

‘Yeah, we’re seeing each other. And not some fling, either. It’s serious,’ Terasaki said.

‘Since when?’

‘I have to tell you all that?’

‘Humour me,’ Sasagaki said with a smile.

‘Since about six months ago,’ Terasaki told him, a reluctant look on his face.

‘What started it?’

‘Nothing special. We saw each other at Kikuya, and got friendly, you know.’

‘Did she ever talk to you about Mr Kirihara?’

‘All I know is he ran the pawnshop she visited.’

‘Had you heard about his visits to her apartment?’

‘Yeah, I heard about that.’

‘And how did that make you feel?’

Terasaki’s eyebrows drew together and he made an unpleasant face. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You didn’t think Mr Kirihara might have had an ulterior motive for seeing her?’

‘What would be the point of thinking that? For one thing, Fumiyo’s not that kind of girl.’

‘And yet she was indebted to Mr Kirihara by the sound of it. He might have even helped her financially. That would make it pretty hard for her to resist if he put the pressure on, wouldn’t you think?’

‘Well, I never heard about it if he did. What are you getting at, anyway?’

‘I’m just trying to imagine a very likely scenario. Here we have a man who’s frequenting the apartment of the woman you’re seeing. Because of her situation she can’t easily brush him off. He’s happy to help her, but he wants more and he lets her know it. I can’t imagine you’d feel too good about that, being her lover.’

‘So what – I lost my cool and killed him? Do I look that stupid?’ Terasaki’s voice echoed loudly in the van.

Sasagaki held up a hand. ‘I’m just imagining a possible scenario, that’s all. I’m sorry if I touched a nerve. Incidentally, do you remember where you were on the twelfth of this month from six to seven in the afternoon? It was a Friday.’

‘What, you want an alibi now?’ Terasaki said, rolling his eyes.

‘Something like that,’ Sasagaki said with a smile. People were quick to mention alibis lately thanks to a popular detective show on TV.

Terasaki took out a small appointment book and flipped back through the pages.

‘Let’s see, on the evening of the twelfth I was in Toyonaka making a delivery.’

‘Around what time was this?’

‘I got to the customer’s house around six.’

Which would give him a perfect alibi, Sasagaki thought. Another miss.

‘And the delivery went smoothly?’

‘Actually, no. I guess there was a bit of a miscommunication,’ Terasaki said, slightly mumbling his words. ‘She was out when I got there. So I just left my business card at the door and went home.’

‘They weren’t expecting you?’

‘I thought I’d told her I was coming on the phone. I guess she didn’t hear me.’

‘So you went home without seeing anyone, is that correct?’

‘Yeah, but I did leave my card.’

Sasagaki nodded, thinking that there were any number of ways he could have got his card there.

Sasagaki took down the address and phone number of the house in Toyonaka and let him go.

Back at the station, Nakatsuka wanted to know if Sasagaki thought he was guilty.

‘Fifty-fifty,’ was Sasagaki’s honest reply. ‘He doesn’t have an alibi and he has a motive. I think, if he were in league with Fumiyo Nishimoto, he could’ve pulled it off pretty smoothly. The thing that bothers me is that, if they were the killers, then they were acting far too nonchalant about it afterwards. Normally you’d expect them to avoid seeing each other until things died down. But they didn’t change a thing. Terasaki was still going to eat lunch at her noodle shop every day. It doesn’t make sense.’

Nakatsuka listened in silence, but his sour frown alone was proof enough of his agreement.

The team launched into a full investigation on the proprietor of Swallowtail Inc. Terasaki lived by himself in an apartment building about a fifteen-minute drive to the south. He’d been married once, but it had ended five years earlier in an amicable divorce.

He was well thought of by his customers. He worked quickly, was happy to take difficult requests, and his prices were low. The small retailers he worked with loved him. None of this, of course, cleared his name of murder. On the contrary, the investigative team was interested in how, by all indications, he seemed to be running a shoestring operation, never rising into wealth through his efforts.

‘I could see him murdering Mr Kirihara because he was putting the moves on Fumiyo, but I can also see him lured in by the one million,’ the detective assigned to look into Terasaki’s financial situation said during a team meeting. Many of the other investigators agreed.

They had already confirmed Terasaki’s lack of an alibi. When they went to the house where he claimed to have left his business card they found that the woman who lived there had been at a relative’s that day and had not come home until eleven at night. She had found Terasaki’s business card under her door, but there was no way of telling when he had left it there. When they asked whether she had been expecting him to come that day, she told them, ‘He said he’d be coming around then, but I don’t think we agreed on that day in particular.’ Then she added, ‘Actually, I remember telling Mr Terasaki on the phone that the twelfth wasn’t good for me.’

This last part was particularly significant. If Terasaki had known she would be out that day, it would have made her house an excellent choice to visit in an attempt to create an alibi.

The prevailing opinion in the investigative team was gradually turning against Terasaki.

However they still lacked any substantial evidence. None of the hairs recovered at the scene of the crime matched Terasaki’s, nor did any of the fingerprints. There were no witnesses. If Fumiyo and Terasaki had been conspirators, they would have had to be in communication on the day of the murder, yet there were no signs of that either. Some of the older detectives thought they should just interrogate him until he confessed, but as it stood, they didn’t even have enough to get a warrant.

A month had passed without any progress. Whereas before the detectives had been spending their nights either on stakeouts or sleeping under desks, now they had started to go home, and Sasagaki went home for the first real bath he had taken in weeks. He was married, living in an apartment by Yao City Station, about an hour to the south-east of their current headquarters. His wife, Katsuko, was three years older than he was. They had no children.

Sasagaki was woken from sleep early the next morning by the sound of Katsuko hurriedly dressing. He looked at the clock. It was just after seven.

‘You going someplace?’ Sasagaki asked from the futon.

‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m just going to the supermarket.’

‘You’re going shopping? This early?’

‘You have to line up now or you won’t get anything.’

‘Won’t get any what? What are you going to buy?’

‘Toilet paper, of course.’

‘Huh? Toilet paper?’

‘I went yesterday too. They’re limiting it to one bag per person, you know. You’re lucky I don’t make you go with me.’

‘Why do we need so much toilet paper?’

‘If you don’t know about the oil shortage, I don’t have time to explain. I’ll see you later,’ Katsuko said, slipping into her cardigan and snatching up her wallet as she ran out of the door.

Sasagaki’s head was a confused swirl. He’d been so full of the investigation lately he had very little notion of what was going on in the world outside. He’d heard about the oil shortage, but he didn’t see what that had to do with toilet paper, or why people were queueing up this early in the morning to get it.

He decided he would ask Katsuko when she got home and tried closing his eyes again.

The phone rang moments later. He twisted under the cover and reached for the black rotary phone squatting by his pillow. His head hurt a little and he hadn’t quite got his eyes all the way open yet.

‘Yeah? Sasagaki speaking.’

About ten seconds later he leapt from the futon, all thoughts of sleep having fled his mind. The phone call had been to tell him that Tadao Terasaki was dead.

Terasaki had died on one of the main expressways through Osaka. He hadn’t quite made it around a curve and had slammed into the divider, a classic case of falling asleep at the wheel.

His van had been stocked with a large quantity of soap and detergent. People were hoarding supplies and it came out later that Terasaki had run himself ragged trying to get as much stashed away for his customers as he could.

Sasagaki and a few other detectives searched Terasaki’s apartment for anything that might link him to the murder of Yosuke Kirihara, but no one could deny the feeling of futility that had come over the operation. Even if they did find something, their prime suspect was beyond prosecution.

Finally, one of the detectives found something in the van’s glove compartment: a Dunhill lighter. It was a tall model, with pointed corners. Everyone on the team remembered a similar lighter having gone missing from Kirihara’s possessions when he was found.

However, Kirihara’s fingerprints were not found on the lighter. In fact, no prints were found at all. It appeared to have been wiped with a cloth.

They showed the lighter to Yaeko, but she only shook her head. She said it did resemble her husband’s, but she couldn’t be absolutely sure.

They brought in Fumiyo Nishimoto for more questioning. The detectives were growing increasingly agitated and impatient for a confession, no matter what it took. The detective doing the questioning went so far as to make it sound like the lighter they’d found had belonged to Kirihara.

‘So, what?’ the detective pressed Fumiyo, waving the lighter in her face. ‘Did you take it out of the victim’s pocket and give it to Terasaki? Or did Terasaki take it out of the dead man’s pocket himself? Well, which was it? Hmm?’

Yet Fumiyo continued to deny any involvement. Nor did she flinch or show any sign of breaking. Though a certain amount of shock would have been natural after Terasaki’s sudden death, there was nothing in her attitude that suggested any bewilderment at all.

We made a mistake, Sasagaki thought, sitting in a side room where he could listen to the interrogation. Somewhere along the line we took a wrong turn and it’s leading us nowhere.