Nguồn gốc của thiên tài là nguồn gốc của nhiệt huyết.
Benjamin Disraeli
ePub
A4Chapter 14
A
hammer struck a bell inside her head: ding, ding, ding!Then she heard the faint sound of laughter. That got her eyes open. She saw a ray of sunlight striking the floral print on the wallpaper, the morning sun sneaking through a gap in the heavy curtains.
Mika Shinozuka twisted her neck to look at the clock by her pillow. Her father had bought it for her in London. She’d set it for seven-thirty, one minute away from now. If she just lay there a little more, a cheerful melody would play and figurines would emerge from the clock face to begin a dance. She reached out and turned off the alarm.
Mika got out of bed and opened the curtains. The sunlight poured in through the big window, illuminating every corner of her room. She saw herself in the mirror on the dresser – pyjamas all wrinkly, hair a tangled mess, face like a lump of coalesced grumpiness.
Ding, the bell sounded again. Then she heard voices talking, too faint to overhear. She had an idea what they would be talking about, though, and immediately lost interest.
Mika went over to the window and looked out over the lawn, still green, though its colour was fading. Just as she had thought, her dad was teaching Yukiho how to play golf.
Yukiho stood holding the club in both hands. Then her father wrapped his arms around her from behind, holding her hands in his. It was like that comedy routine where one person does the arms for another person. Her father whispered something in Yukiho’s ear and together they lifted the club. It swung up and slowly back down. It looked like her father’s lips might brush the back of Yukiho’s neck. He was so close. In fact, he probably had done that on purpose a few times already.
After they slowly swung the club together a few times he stepped back and watched while Yukiho tried to hit the ball. Ding. Sometimes she would hit it, but most of the time she would miss. Then she would get a sheepish look on her face and Mika’s father would give her some advice. Then they would start over from the beginning with the comedy routine. This would go on for half an hour.
The same scene had played out the same way almost every day for the past week. Mika wasn’t sure whether Yukiho had expressed an interest in starting golf, or whether her father had pushed her into it. Regardless, it looked like the two of them were doing their utmost to find something they could enjoy together as a couple.
Even though her father had flat-out refused when Mom once said she wanted to learn how to play.
Mika stepped away from the window and stood in front of her dresser, painfully aware of her fifteen-year-old reflection. She was skinny, without any womanly roundness. Her arms and legs seemed too long for the rest of her and her shoulder bones were pointy and stuck out at all the wrong angles.
In her mind’s eye she saw an image of Yukiho’s body superimposed over her own. She had seen Yukiho naked only once, when she had mistakenly opened the bathroom door, thinking no one was inside. Yukiho had just stepped out of the shower. She wasn’t wearing anything, not even a towel.
Her body was perfect, made up of curves so precise they looked like something computer-generated, yet with the simple warmth of something turned on a potter’s wheel. Her ample breasts were still firm, and tiny droplets of water hung on her pinkish white skin. What fat she had seemed to fit perfectly along the lines of her body, rounding out the curves. Mika had gasped. In the space of a few seconds the sight of Yukiho’s body was burned into her mind.
Yukiho had taken it with utmost grace. She hadn’t seemed flustered in the least or unhappy at all.
‘Hello, Mika,’ she’d said. ‘Getting into the bath?’ She had smiled, not even hurrying to cover herself.
It was Mika who’d lost it. She turned and ran without saying a word. Dashing into her room, she dove under the covers of her bed, her heart racing.
Mika frowned, remembering her embarrassment. The girl in the mirror made the same expression. Picking up her hairbrush, she started working at her hair until the brush became so entangled it stopped. She tried yanking it, and only succeeded in snapping off a few of her hairs.
She heard a knock at the door. ‘Mika? Are you awake? Good morning.’
She didn’t answer, and on the third knock, the door opened and Taeko gingerly peeked in. ‘Oh, you are awake,’ she said, stepping inside and immediately beginning to make the rumpled bed. Mika looked at her. She was the perfect image of a housemaid in an old movie: the dumpy body, the big apron around her waist, a sweater with the sleeves rolled up, her hair done up in a big bun on the top of her head.
‘I wanted to sleep more, but the noise woke me up.’
‘Noise?’ Taeko said with a curious frown. Then she nodded. ‘Ah, your father. Yes, he’s been getting up early these days.’
‘It’s stupid. Why does anyone get up so early?’
‘Well, they’re both very busy, you know, and this is the only time they have together. Besides, exercise is good thing, I think.’
‘He never would’ve been caught dead doing that when Mom was alive.’
‘People change as they get older, you know.’
‘Change how? Like they start marrying younger women? She’s ten years younger than Mom was.’
‘Mika, your father is still quite young himself. He can’t live the rest of his life alone, can he? You’ll go off and get married someday and your brother will leave, too.’
‘You’re not making much sense, Taeko. Talking about people getting old and then still being young.’
Taeko frowned a little. ‘Come down soon, breakfast is ready. Your father said he’s not going to give you any more rides in the morning, even if it looks like you’re going to be late.’
Mika snorted. ‘Bet I know whose idea that was.’
Taeko said nothing and started to leave, but Mika stopped her before she had fully closed the door.
‘You’re on my side, right?’ she asked.
Taeko looked taken aback for a moment before recovering with a chuckle. ‘I’m on everyone’s side, dear,’ she said, closing the door.
Mika got ready for school and went downstairs to find the other three already at breakfast. Her father and Yukiho were sitting facing her and Masahiro, her brother, was in the chair next to hers. He was in fifth grade.
‘I still don’t feel like I know what I’m doing,’ Yukiho was saying. ‘I have to get the hang of at least the driver, or I’m going to be a real menace out there on the course.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s always easier than it looks. Also, you say at least the driver, but the driver’s the toughest one. Use that well and you’re a pro. First step is to just get out there and try a round on the course.’
‘I don’t know, I’d be pretty worried,’ Yukiho said with a shrug. She looked over at Mika. ‘Hey there, good morning.’
Mika sat down without answering. Her father said ‘good morning,’ adding a stern look. She muttered a half-hearted ‘good morning’ back.
Ham, scrambled eggs, salad and croissants were spread out on the table.
‘Wait just a bit, Mika, and I’ll bring your soup,’ Taeko said from the kitchen. It sounded like she was in there busily preparing something.
Yukiho set down her fork and stood from the table. ‘That’s OK, Taeko. I’ll get it.’
‘I don’t want soup,’ Mika said, grabbing a croissant and tearing off a bite. Then she snatched the milk glass from in front of Masahiro and took a swig.
‘Hey, that’s mine.’
‘Don’t be stingy.’
Picking up her fork, Mika dug into her ham and eggs. A bowl of soup appeared in front of her plate, courtesy of Yukiho.
‘I said I didn’t want any,’ Mika said, not looking up.
‘That’s not how you talk to someone who does something for you,’ her dad said.
‘It’s OK,’ Yukiho said to her husband and an uncomfortable silence settled over the table.
Mika couldn’t taste the food at all. Not even Taeko’s ham and eggs, which was her favourite. And eating wasn’t any fun. Her chest hurt near the top of her stomach.
‘So, any plans tonight?’ her father said to Yukiho, taking a sip of his coffee.
‘Nothing in particular.’
‘Then we should go out for dinner, the four of us. A friend of mine just opened an Italian restaurant in Yotsuya, and he’s been asking me to come.’
‘Italian? That sounds lovely.’
‘You too, kids. If there’s a show you want to watch, you can set the VCR.’
‘Cool,’ Masahiro said. ‘I’ll go easy on the snacks.’
Mika took a sidelong glance at her brother and said, ‘I’m not going.’
She could feel the eyes on her from across the table.
‘Why not?’ her father asked. ‘You have something you need to do? There’s no piano lessons today and no tutor scheduled.’
‘I just don’t want to go. What, is this mandatory?’
‘Why don’t you want to go?’
‘Why does it matter?’
‘Because it matters. Look, if you have something you want to say, let’s hear it.’
‘Dear…’ Yukiho said. ‘Actually, maybe tonight isn’t the best idea. I’ve just remembered a few things that need doing.’
Her father glared at her, but fell silent. Yukiho’s coming to her defence annoyed Mika even more. Throwing down her fork, she stood. ‘I gotta go.’
‘Mika!’
Ignoring her father, Mika grabbed her bag and jacket and went out into the hall. She was slipping into her shoes when Yukiho and Taeko came up behind her.
‘Don’t be in such a hurry that you get run over by a car, now,’ Taeko fretted.
Yukiho reached down and picked her jacket up off the floor. Mika snatched it from her without a word. She was just putting her arms through the sleeves when Yukiho said with a smile to Taeko, ‘I like that navy sweater, it’s cute.’
‘Very cute,’ Taeko agreed.
‘They make school uniforms so stylish these days. Back when I was in school we only got one choice and that was it.’
Mika felt the anger rise in her chest, though she didn’t understand why. She took off the jacket. While Yukiho and Taeko watched, dumbfounded, she peeled off her Ralph Lauren sweater and tossed it on the floor.
‘Mika, what’re you doing?’ Taeko asked.
‘I don’t feel like wearing it anymore.’
‘You’ll be cold.’
‘I don’t care.’
Her father came out and asked, ‘What are you going on about now?’
‘Nothing. Bye.’
‘Wait, Miss Mika!’ Taeko said, but she could hear her father grunt ‘Let her go,’ behind her back as Mika ran for the front gate. The long, tree-lined path between their front door and the gate was one of her favourite spots in the whole world. Sometimes she lingered on it just so she could look at the trees, and the flowers, and note the changing of the seasons. But today, it seemed much too great a distance between her and freedom.
Mika couldn’t say what bothered her so much. Every time she lost her temper with Yukiho, another Mika inside her head would ask, coldly, Are you crazy? And she would always answer, No. I don’t know. I’m just angry.
She’d first met Yukiho that spring when her father had taken her and her brother to the boutique in South Aoyama. She remembered seeing a woman come to the door and thinking Wow, she’s pretty. Her father said he wanted to buy his children new clothes, and Yukiho immediately began ordering her helpers around, bringing outfit after outfit for them to try on. There were no other customers in the place. It was like having their own private fitting boutique.
Yukiho treated them like fashion models, giving them various outfits to wear and try on in front of the mirror. Masahiro lasted about thirty minutes before he gave up and said he was tired of trying on clothes.
For Mika it was a dream come true – or it would have been, if she hadn’t spent the entire time wondering who Yukiho was and exactly what kind of relationship she had with her father.
It was when they were picking out a party dress that she began to suspect that Yukiho might soon have a special relationship not just with her father but with all of them.
‘You go to family parties, right, Yasuharu?’ Yukiho said. ‘Take her in this dress and it will positively bowl the other families over.’
Mika didn’t like how Yukiho referred to her father as Yasuhiro, as though they were close friends. Nor did she like being thought of as an accessory to make other people look good. What bothered her most, however, was the sudden realisation
that Yukiho might be joining them at the next ‘family’ party.
The discussion turned to what they should buy. Mika couldn’t choose. Truth be told, she wanted it all.
‘You decide, Dad,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m good with anything.’
‘That’s not making it very easy on me,’ her father complained. Nevertheless, he picked out a few of the outfits. They were all fancy, good-little-girl dresses with long skirts that covered up the skin, the kind of things Mika’s mother liked. Mika’s mother had never really got over playing with dolls, and loved dressing her up in the most ridiculously frilly outfits. It made Mika happy to see that her father remembered.
After he was done, her father asked Yukiho what she thought.
Yukiho crossed her arms. ‘I think she could get away with something a little brighter, a little more vigorous.’
‘Really? Which would you choose?’
‘Well…’ Yukiho said, pointing to a few of the other outfits, all of them tighter-fitting, with shorter skirts. They bordered on racy.
‘She’s still in middle school,’ her father said. ‘Aren’t these a little grown-up for her?’
Yukiho smiled. ‘Oh, she’s more grown-up than you think.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ her father said, scratching his head. He asked Mika what she thought.
Mika left it up to him, so her father decided to buy all the ones Yukiho picked, warning her that he’d hold her responsible if they didn’t look good.
‘Not to worry,’ she told him, and smiled at Mika. ‘You don’t have to be a little doll any more, dear.’
The words felt like boots, stepping on something in Mika’s heart, trying to rub out the memory of her mother. Thinking back on it, she realised that was the moment she started to hate Yukiho.
Later, their father would occasionally take Mika and Masahiro out to eat with him and Yukiho, or go on long drives together. Mika always thought her father was unusually bright and cheerful when they were with her. On family trips with her mother, he had always been silent, an unwilling participant, but in front of Yukiho, it was like he couldn’t stop talking. He always wanted to ask Yukiho’s opinion, to do the things she wanted to do. To Mika, he looked like a wimp.
One day in July their father laid the news on them. It wasn’t a discussion or an opinion poll. It was an announcement: he was going to marry Yukiho.
Masahiro seemed a little spaced out by the news. He wasn’t particularly happy, or concerned. Maybe, Mika thought, it just wasn’t that big a deal to him. He had only been four years old when their mom died.
Mika had been honest. She said her only real mother was the one who had died seven years before.
‘That’s fine,’ her father told her. ‘I’m not telling you to forget your mother. I’m just telling you, a new person is coming to live with us. We’ll have more family now.’
Mika was silent, but in her heart she was screaming she’s not family!
Once that particular stone began to roll, there was no stopping it. Everything went the way Mika didn’t want it to go. Her father was beside himself with happiness and she despised him for it. He seemed lesser now in her eyes, a fallen man, and Yukiho was to blame.
If someone had asked her exactly what she didn’t like about Yukiho, Mika would have had a hard time naming it. It was just a feeling, a twisted lump in the pit of her stomach. There was no denying that Yukiho was beautiful, and smart, too. Mika respected that. She was a talented businesswoman. Mika didn’t know any other women her age who ran not just one, but two boutiques. But when she was around her, she could feel her body tense. Something inside her warned her that she needed to be on guard. There was something about Yukiho, an aura hanging around her, that was unlike anything she’d felt before. She was like the sun, with her father and her assistants orbiting around her, but her light brought no warmth, just unhappiness.
Mika admitted the possibility that these thoughts were nothing more than her imagination. But if she was delusional, at least she had one person keeping her company: her older cousin, Kazunari Shinozuka.
Ever since her father had announced his engagement to the family, Kazunari had started visiting them at home. Out of all of their relatives, he was the only one who had spoken out against the wedding.
‘You don’t know what she’s really like,’ Kazunari had said once when Mika overheard them talking. ‘At the very least, I can promise you she’s not the kind of woman who puts the happiness of her family first.’ He had sounded very serious.
But her father never listened, and, over time, he began avoiding Kazunari. She’d even seen him pretending not to be home once or twice when Kazunari came calling.
The wedding took place three months later. It wasn’t a very fancy ceremony, and the reception was very laid-back, but they looked happy, as did nearly everyone in attendance. Everyone except Mika, who was filled with the gloomy bleakness of someone seeing a tragedy in the making, a terrible mistake that couldn’t be undone.
They started their new life with a new mother in their house and, from the outside, it didn’t look like much had changed in the Shinozuka household. But Mika could feel things shifting under the surface every day. One by one her memories of her real mother were being smothered. Their daily lives were changing bit by bit. And worst of all, her father was becoming a different person.
Her real mother had loved flowers. She always put seasonal arrangements in the entranceway, the hallway, and the corners of the rooms. There were flowers there now, too, bigger, and even more beautiful – eye-opening displays of floral magnificence.
But they weren’t real. They were all expertly crafted from silk. Artificial flowers.
That’s what this family is becoming, Mika thought. An artificial flower.
Sasagaki got off the Tozai Subway Line at Urayasu and began walking back towards Tokyo along Kasaibashi Street, taking a left just before he reached the Old Edogawa River. Along the narrow road stood a nearly perfectly square, white building, with a sign on the gate that read SH RESINS. There didn’t seem to be a guard, so Sasagaki let himself in.
Cutting across a car park lined with trucks, he entered the building. Immediately on the right stood a small reception desk where a woman in her forties was busily writing something. She looked up and frowned suspiciously when she saw Sasagaki.
Sasagaki handed her his business card, and asked to meet Kazunari Shinozuka. The woman’s expression didn’t change when she saw the card. ‘You have an appointment to meet the director?’ she asked.
‘The director?’
‘Kazunari Shinozuka. He’s our director.’
‘Oh, right. Yes. I called before I came.’
‘Wait please.’
She picked up a phone on the desk and dialled some numbers. After a few words, she set the receiver down and looked back at Sasagaki. ‘He says please come straight to his office.’
‘OK. Where is that?’
‘Third floor,’ she said, returning to her writing. He looked and saw that she was writing New Year’s cards. From the personal address book on the desk next to her, it didn’t look like she was writing cards on behalf of the company, either.
‘Where on the third floor?’ Sasagaki asked.
The woman seemed aggravated by this, and jabbed towards the hall behind him with her felt-tip pen. ‘The elevator’s there. Just walk down the hall until you get to the door with a sign over it that says “Director’s Office”.’
‘Right, thanks,’ Sasagaki said, but the woman had already gone back to her cards.
Sasagaki went up to the third floor to find there was only one hallway on the floor, going in a square around the building, with doors along on either side. Sasagaki walked, checking the plates above the doors. He found it at the first corner and knocked.
‘Come in,’ he heard a voice say from inside. Sasagaki pushed open the door.
Kazunari was just standing from his chair, a large window to his back. He was wearing a brown double-breasted suit.
‘It’s good to see you. It’s been a while,’ Kazunari said with a warm smile.
‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch. Have you been well?’
‘I’m hanging in there.’
Kazunari guided him to a sofa in the middle of the room and sat across from him in an overstuffed armchair. ‘How long has it been since we actually met?’ he asked.
‘Since September of last year. At Shinozuka Pharmaceuticals, I recall?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Kazunari said. ‘I can’t believe it’s already been more than a year.’
‘I actually called the pharmaceutical company first, but they sent me here.’
‘Right, well, I left right after your visit,’ Kazunari said, a downward cast to his eyes. He looked as though he wanted to say something, but was refraining.
‘So you’re director now?’ Sasagaki said, as warmly as he could. ‘That’s quite the promotion. At your age, no less.’
Kazunari looked up at him, a dry smile on his face. ‘Is that what this looks like?’
‘Am I wrong?’
Kazunari stood without answering and went over to his desk. He picked up the phone and said, ‘Can I get two coffees? Yes, right away.’
He set the phone back down and turned to Sasagaki. ‘I believe I mentioned over the phone that my cousin got married.’
‘October, was it?’ Sasagaki said. ‘I’m sure that was quite the affair.’
‘It was rather subdued, actually. A small ceremony at a church, followed by a relatives-only reception at a restaurant in town. Considering it was the second time around for both of them, I think they wanted to keep it simple. That, and my cousin has children.’
‘You attended?’
‘I am a relative, so, yes. That said,’ he sat back down in the armchair and sighed before continuing, ‘I’ve no doubt they would rather not have invited me at all.’
‘You never withdrew your objections.’
Kazunari nodded.
Sasagaki had kept in close touch with Kazunari over the phone through the spring. Both sides had something to gain: Kazunari wanted to learn more about Yukiho, and Sasagaki wanted to learn more about Ryo Kirihara. So far, both sides remained disappointed.
‘You and I know more about her and what’s happened than anyone else I know and yet we still have nothing to go on,’ Kazunari said with a sigh. ‘I couldn’t open my cousin’s eyes.’
‘It was a tall order from the get-go. He’s not the first man she’s fooled,’ Sasagaki said, adding, ‘I was one of them.’
‘Nineteen years ago, was it?’
‘That’s right.’ Sasagaki took out a cigarette. ‘You mind?’
‘Go right ahead.’ Kazunari pushed a crystal glass ashtray in front of him. ‘Detective, I was hoping you could tell me everything today, the whole story. All two decades’ worth.’
‘That is why I’m here,’ Sasagaki said, lighting a cigarette. A knock came at the door – the coffee had arrived. Kazunari stood to get it.
Sasagaki took a sip out of his thick-rimmed mug and began to talk. He started with the body found in the abandoned building, then the ever-changing list of suspects, ending with Tadao Terasaki’s car accident that derailed the entire investigation. He filled in the details where necessary. Kazunari listened with his coffee cup in hand, but before long he put it down on the table and folded his arms across his chest. When Yukiho Nishimoto finally joined the story, he crossed his legs and took a deep breath.
‘That pretty much wraps up what happened with the murder of the pawnbroker,’ Sasagaki said, taking a drink of his coffee, which had by then gone lukewarm.
‘So the case was thrown out as unsolvable?’
‘Not right away, but without any new witnesses or information the general feeling was that it was only a matter of time before the case was put aside.’
‘But you didn’t give up, did you, detective?’
‘To tell the truth, I almost did.’
Setting down his mug, Sasagaki began the rest of his story.
Unable to find any clear evidence of Terasaki’s guilt, and unlikely to find any new suspects, the task force was drifting. There was talk of disbanding. Things on the streets had gone from bad to worse in the wake of the oil shock, and burglaries, arson and kidnappings were on the rise. Osaka police couldn’t afford to dedicate much manpower to tracking down one single murderer. Especially not when it was looking likely that the man who did it was already dead.
Sasagaki himself was starting to think he had reached the end of the road. It would be the third unsolved case of his career. Each one had a particular smell to it. There were cases so chaotic you didn’t know where to begin, which ended up being solved in a week. Then there were the cases that looked simple at first blush that ended up going nowhere. The Kirihara case was one of those.
So, a month after Terasaki’s death, when Sasagaki started rereading all of the notes they’d taken from the very beginning, it was more out of boredom than any real hope he’d find something. He mostly skimmed the vast pile of documents, pages upon pages without a clue in sight, but his fingers stopped when he found the report detailing the testimony given by the boy who found the body. His name was Michihiro Kikuchi, nine years old at the time of the discovery. The first person he told about it was his older brother, a fifth grader. The brother had gone to the building to make sure he was telling the truth, then told their mother, who had called the police. The report was mostly an outline of what she had told them.
Sasagaki was very familiar with the details surrounding the discovery. The kids had been playing a game they called ‘time tunnel’, crawling through the ducts in the abandoned building, when Michihiro had got separated from the rest. He’d circled around in the ducts for a while until he came to a darkly lit room where he found a man lying on a sofa. Suspicious, he looked closer and saw blood. The interesting part was what happened next.
‘He was scared,’ the report said, ‘and tried to leave, but there was a concrete block by the door that made it hard to open.’
Sasagaki found this strange. He thought back to the scene of the crime, remembering the door. It opened inwards, he recalled. It would have made sense for the murderer to place the block there to delay the discovery of the body, except that was impossible if you assumed he had then left the scene through the blocked door.
Sasagaki went to check it out. The name of the officer who’d taken the initial report was a captain named Kosaka from the local precinct.
Kosaka remembered the report in detail, but his explanation left something to be desired. ‘Actually, that part of the testimony was a little vague,’ he told Sasagaki with a frown. ‘The boy didn’t remember it very well. It was never clear whether the block was so close that the door didn’t open at all, or whether it was far enough away that someone could have opened the door enough to squeeze through. The kid was too flustered to remember. That said, since the murderer clearly exited through the door, we just figured it was the latter.’
Sasagaki checked the forensics report on the matter, but they hadn’t bothered mentioning exactly where the block was in relation to the door, except to note that it was hard to tell because the boy who discovered the body had moved it.
Sasagaki was forced to give up that particular line of inquiry until a year later when he began to suspect Yukiho’s involvement following her mother’s death. This made the position of the block more important because its distance from the closed door would determine the size of the person that could have passed through and Yukiho would have been able to squeeze through a very small gap.
Sasagaki decided to meet with the boy, Michihiro, and what he learned came as a considerable surprise.
For one thing, the boy claimed to remember what had happened the year before perfectly – even better than he had at the time. That made some sense, Sasagaki thought. It would have been challenging for a nine-year-old, flustered at the discovery of a corpse, to put together an accurate statement. But he would have matured quite a bit in the intervening year.
Sasagaki asked him to describe how he had gone through the door in as much detail as possible.
‘Well, I couldn’t get it open at all at first,’ the boy told him. ‘When I looked down, there was a big concrete block there, right up against the bottom of the door.’
‘You’re sure about that?’
The boy nodded firmly.
‘Why didn’t you ever say that until now? Is this something you remembered recently?’
‘No, I said it at first back then when they were asking all the questions. But the police officer said it didn’t sound right and then I started to wonder and I guess I got kinda confused. But when I thought about it later, yeah, I’m sure I couldn’t open the door at all.’
Sasagaki gritted his teeth. This would have been critical testimony one year earlier, if the questioning officer hadn’t talked the kid out of it. Sasagaki told his superior officer immediately. But his boss’s reaction was cold. The kid’s memory couldn’t be trusted; not to mention that it was crazy to take a year-old testimony without a big pinch of salt.
Sasagaki’s boss at the time the investigation began had been recently transferred away and his replacement was ambitious to a fault, the type who would rather make his name solving a new, flashier case than waste his time on the half-abandoned search for the murderer of a pawnbroker.
Sasagaki continued investigating on his own. He had a path to follow now. It would have been impossible for whoever killed Yosuke Kirihara to have left through the door, and all of the windows into the room had been locked from the inside. None of the windows were broken, nor were there any holes in the walls, which left only one possible explanation: the killer had left through the duct the boy had used to get in.
An adult probably wouldn’t be able to fit through the duct, nor would they risk getting stuck without an extremely good reason to not just use the door. A kid who had been playing in the ducts, on the other hand…
Sasagaki’s sights were increasingly focused on Yukiho. At first, he tried to get some proof that she had played in the ducts with the other kids, but none of the ones who played there, and none of her friends, remembered ever seeing her go near the place. ‘No girls would play in there,’ one of the boys said. ‘The place is super dirty and there’s like dead rats and bugs and stuff. And your clothes get all messed up.’
Sasagaki had to admit, from what he knew of Yukiho, that it didn’t seem likely she’d have spent much time in the abandoned building. Another of the kids who said he used to play in there all the time wondered if a girl could even handle the ducts. According to him, there were a lot of really steep slopes inside them and places where you had to crawl up just using your hands for several metres, which meant you had to be pretty strong and pretty confident in your own athleticism.
Sasagaki took the kid to the building and had him try to leave by the duct in the room where the body had been found. He went outside to wait and about fifteen minutes later the boy was standing by an exhaust duct on the rear side of the building.
‘Yeah, that was tough,’ the boy said. ‘There’s a place halfway through where you really gotta climb. I don’t know any girls with arms strong enough to handle that.’
Sasagaki was inclined to trust the kid’s judgment on this point. There were girls in elementary school as tough as some of the boys, no question. But Yukiho Nishimoto wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t picture her crawling around like a monkey through the building ducts.
In the end he had to admit that it was possible his fantasies about an eleven-year-old girl killer were just that, and the boy’s original testimony had just been incorrect.
‘I agree. There’s no way Yukiho Karasawa was playing games in air ducts,’ Kazunari said. Sasagaki wondered if he called Yukiho by her college-era maiden name out of habit, or because he was reluctant to call her by his own last name.
‘I hit a dead end.’
‘But you did find an answer, right?’
‘Of sorts,’ Sasagaki admitted. ‘I tried going back to square one, getting rid of all my preconceived notions about the case. That’s when I saw something I hadn’t seen up until that point.’
‘Which was?’
‘It’s pretty simple, really,’ Sasagaki said. ‘Once you know a girl couldn’t climb through those ducts, it means whoever did use them to escape the scene of the crime was a boy.’
‘A boy…’ Kazunari said, giving it a moment to sit before he asked, ‘You don’t mean Ryo Kirihara killed his own father?’
‘Yes,’ Sasagaki said. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Sasagaki hadn’t arrived at his conclusion immediately. It was a chance discovery on a visit to the Kirihara Pawnshop that first turned his suspicions towards Ryo.
He’d come back to the pawnshop to talk to Matsuura about Yosuke Kirihara’s life. He kept the questions light – Matsuura had clearly had it with the investigation by that point and wasn’t going out of his way to make Sasagaki’s job any easier. It was already more than a year into the investigation, which would strain anyone’s good humour.
‘Detective,’ Matsuura said at one point, ‘I think you’ve squeezed just about everything you can out of us. There’s nothing else.’
Sasagaki nodded, when a book sitting on the edge of the counter caught his eye. He picked it up. ‘What’s this?’
‘That’s Ryo’s,’ Matsuura said. ‘He must have left it there.’
‘Ryo read a lot?’
‘Quite a bit, yeah. He used to go to the library all the time.’
‘The library?’
Matsuura nodded, clearly wondering what the library had to do with anything.
Sasagaki put the book back on the counter, his heart pounding.
The book was Gone with the Wind – the same book Yukiho had been reading when he went to pay a visit to Fumiyo Nishimoto. If he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t much more than a coincidence. Two kids of similar ages reading the same book probably happened all the time. Nor were they reading it at the same time. Yukiho had read it a full year earlier.
But the discovery stuck in his mind. Sasagaki paid a visit to the library, a small, grey building about two hundred metres north of the abandoned building where Yosuke Kirihara’s body was found.
He showed a photograph of Yukiho to the librarian, a young woman with glasses who looked like she was only a few years past being a book-loving student herself. She nodded when she saw the photo.
‘Oh, she used to come here all the time. I only remember her because she borrowed so many books.’
‘Did she come alone?’
‘Yes, always.’ Then she frowned. ‘Wait, well, no, sometimes she would come with a boy. A classmate, maybe? They looked about the same age.’
Sasagaki quickly pulled out another photograph, this one of the Kiriharas. He pointed his finger at Ryo. ‘Was that the boy?’
The librarian squinted through her glasses. ‘Well, that looks a bit like him, sure. It’s hard to say for certain, though.’
‘Were they always together?’
‘Not always. Just sometimes. They would often come looking for the same book. And I remember they would play by cutting paper.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The boy would make these shapes out of paper with scissors and show them to her. I remember having to talk to them because I didn’t want little pieces of paper everywhere. But, I’m sorry, I really can’t say for sure whether it’s the boy in this picture.’
She’d given him proof enough. He remembered the paper cut-out he’d seen in Ryo’s room.
So Yukiho and Ryo were meeting at the library. They had known each other at the time of the murder. That was enough to turn everything on its head. Sasagaki made a complete about-face in his thinking on the investigation.
Ryo could have easily navigated the ducts, and he already had a witness in the same class who said Ryo often joined in their games. According to the witness, Ryo knew his way around the abandoned building better than any of them.
That left Ryo’s alibi. At the time of Yosuke Kirihara’s death, Ryo had purportedly been with his mother, Yaeko, and the shop manager, Matsuura. But there was good reason to suspect they might be protecting him – a possibility no one on the task force had yet explored.
The only problem was motive.
What could bring a son to murder his own father? It had happened before in the history of the world, of course, but it wasn’t commonplace. It would require a pretty compelling backstory and Sasagaki couldn’t think of any that applied to Yosuke Kirihara and his son. The investigation hadn’t uncovered any rift between the two. On the contrary, all the testimonies they had received made it seem like Yosuke Kirihara had genuinely cared for his son, and his son had loved him in return.
Sasagaki continued making the rounds and asking questions, but he had begun to seriously entertain the notion that it was all in his head. When you wander in the dark too long, you start to see things that aren’t really there.
‘I knew all too well that if I told anyone my Ryo theory, they’d think I was off my rocker and I would’ve got pulled off the case on the spot and probably given a nice long vacation,’ Sasagaki said with a chuckle. He sounded as if he was only half-joking.
‘So you couldn’t find a motive?’ Kazunari asked.
The detective shook his head. ‘Nothing at the time. It was too much of a reach to think that Ryo had killed his father just because he wanted the money.’
‘By “at the time” I take it you mean you found something later?’ Kazunari said, leaning forward, but Sasagaki waved him back with his hands.
‘Be patient, I’ll get there. Just let me tell it in order. Basically, my own little private investigation fell apart at that point, but I kept tabs on Ryo and Yukiho. Not that I was on stakeout, mind you, but I made a point of asking around every once in a while to see how they were coming along, what schools they were going to, trying to keep a general picture forming in my head. I was sure I’d find the two of them together at some point.’
‘Did you?’
Sasagaki gave a long sigh. ‘It took a long time. No matter which way you looked at it, they were complete strangers.’
‘But something happened?’
‘In their last year of middle school.’ Sasagaki stuck a finger into his box of cigarettes to find it empty. Kazunari opened the crystal case of cigarettes on the table. It was filled to the brim. Sasagaki nodded in thanks and took one.
‘Does this have anything to do with the attack on Yukiho’s classmate?’ Kazunari asked as he lit Sasagaki’s cigarette for him.
The detective looked at him. ‘You know about that?’
‘I heard about it from Mr Imaeda.’
Kazunari told the detective what Imaeda had told him, about the middle-school rape, and Yukiho being the one who discovered the victim. He added his own experience when he was in college and mentioned that Imaeda had suspected the connection might be Yukiho.
‘He was a good private eye, then. I’m surprised he went that deep. Yes, that was the incident in question. Of course, I was looking at it from a slightly different angle from Mr Imaeda. The perpetrator was never caught, you see, but there was a suspect – another kid in the same grade. Except, he had an alibi and was cleared of suspicion. The problem was who the suspect was and whose testimony gave him an alibi.’ Sasagaki breathed out a stream of silky smoke. The cigarettes were much more expensive-tasting than the ones he smoked. ‘The suspect’s name was Fumihiko Kikuchi, the older brother of the kid who found the pawnbroker’s body. And the person to give the testimony establishing his alibi was none other than Ryo Kirihara.’
Kazunari gaped.
‘Curious, right?’ Sasagaki said. ‘I found it hard to brush off as mere coincidence.’
‘But what does it mean?’
‘Well, I only heard about the rape a year after it happened, from Fumihiko Kikuchi himself. I had followed up with the family concerning the previous case a few times, so I knew both of the Kikuchi brothers pretty well. It was on one of those visits when we got to talking and he brought it up.
‘To sum it up, when the rape happened, Fumihiko had been watching a movie. He didn’t have any proof at first, but then Ryo Kirihara came to his rescue. There was a small bookshop across the street from the movie theatre and Ryo said he had been there with another friend and just happened to see Fumihiko going into the theatre. The officer taking the testimony checked it out with a friend, too, and decided it was true.’
‘So he was let go.’
‘He was. Fumihiko thought he just got lucky. But then, a little while later, he got a call from Ryo telling him he’d better be grateful and not to think about doing anything rash.’
‘What did he mean by that?’
‘Fumihiko had recently come into possession of a certain photograph that he thought showed Ryo’s mom and an employee at the pawnshop having an affair. He said he’d shown it to Ryo.’
‘So the wife and the assistant were a thing?’
‘Seems like it.’ Sasagaki tapped off his ash into the ashtray. ‘Ryo made Fumihiko give him the photograph and promise not to go sniffing around about his father’s murder anymore.’
‘They made a deal?’
‘So it seemed, but the more he thought about it, the less Fumihiko thought it was so simple. Which is why he told me about it.’
Sasagaki remembered the teenager’s face, covered with pimples.
‘What wasn’t simple about it?’
‘He started wondering if it hadn’t all been a set-up.’ The cigarette had burned short between Sasagaki’s fingers but he took another drag. ‘See, the reason Fumihiko was a suspect in the first place was they found a keychain that belonged to him at the scene of the crime. But according to him, he had never been there before and the keychain wasn’t one that could have easily fallen off his bag.’
‘So Ryo stole the keychain and left it at the scene?’
‘That’s what Fumihiko thought might have happened. Which would peg Ryo as our middle-school rapist. He could have spotted Fumihiko with his friend at the movie theatre, then gone straight to the scene and done the deed. Then all he had to do was plant the fake evidence.’
‘But did Kirihara know that Fumihiko was going to go to the movies that day?’ Kazunari asked the obvious question.
‘That’s the problem right there,’ Sasagaki said, lifting a finger. ‘Fumihiko says he never told Kirihara about his plans.’
‘Then the set-up would have been impossible.’
‘Agreed, and that’s where Fumihiko’s line of conjecture hit a dead end.’ But I still think he had something to do with it, Fumihiko had told him, a chagrined look on his face.
‘Still, it piqued my interest enough that I checked the records on the rape incident, which is when I found out about Yukiho’s involvement. That sent me back to Fumihiko with a few more questions.’
‘Like what?’
‘Mostly about how he came to go to the movies that day. It turns out the tickets were a gift – Fumihiko’s mother was working at a cake shop at the time and one of her customers gave them to her. But it gets better: the tickets were for Rocky, which Fumihiko had expressed interest in several times, and they were only good for that day. He would have to go to the movies that night, or miss his chance.’
Kazunari shook his head with disbelief. ‘Did you find out who the customer was who gave her the tickets?’
‘I didn’t get a name. But Fumihiko remembered his mom telling him it was a girl, around the same age as him, well-dressed.’
‘Yukiho.’
Sasagaki gave him a grim smile. ‘If we assume that Yukiho and Ryo pinned the rape incident on Fumihiko to keep his mouth shut about Ryo’s mother’s affair, everything falls into place. Though the collateral damage – Miss Fujimura in this case – seems exceedingly cruel.’
‘I agree it’s cruel, but the choice of the Fujimura girl might not have been entirely random.’
Sasagaki raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’
‘They may have had reason to target her – this is something Mr Imaeda told me.’
The private eye had told Kazunari that the girl who was attacked had been Yukiho’s rival in class, but that following the incident she had become a subservient member of Yukiho’s clique.
‘I hadn’t heard any of that,’ Sasagaki said with a grimace. ‘So they were killing two birds with one stone.’ He looked up at Kazunari. ‘I hate to even suggest this, but there’s a possibility that what happened to your friend in college wasn’t entirely coincidental either.’
‘You think Yukiho planned that one too.’
‘I wouldn’t rule it out.’
‘Neither did Mr Imaeda. But why?’
‘Probably because she believed that rape was the surest way to break someone’s spirit.’
Kazunari shook his head. ‘That’s really something to say about a person, even Yukiho.’
‘I know. But if I’m right, this all leads us back to the motive in the murder of Ryo’s father.’
Kazunari’s eyes widened and he was about to say something when the phone on his desk began to ring. He swore under his breath and stood from his chair to get the phone. He answered the call in a hushed voice and quickly returned to the armchair. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘You OK for time?’
‘Yes, fine. That wasn’t a work call, actually. It was regarding an issue I’ve been looking into,’ Kazunari said, then after a moment’s hesitation, he added, ‘When you came in, you congratulated me on my promotion. Actually, this is more like a demotion.Are you familiar with the pharmaceutical company Yunix?’
‘I’ve heard the name.’
‘Well, something very strange started happening last year. Our company and Yunix are competitors in several areas and it came to light that some internal information from Shinozuka Pharmaceuticals was leaking out to their teams.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Someone inside Yunix informed us. Of course, the company denied everything.’ A thin smile rose on Kazunari’s face.
‘I suppose these things happen in research,’ the detective said. ‘But how does that relate to you?’
‘According to the informant, I was the one who leaked the information.’
Sasagaki’s eyes widened. ‘That doesn’t sound very likely.’
‘It shouldn’t, because it didn’t happen,’ Kazunari replied, shaking his head. ‘I had no idea what to make of it. Nor was the identity of the informant ever revealed. They only communicated via phone calls and mail. But the information leak was verifiable enough. When the guys in the lab saw the materials the informant sent them, they went blue in the face.’
‘But you didn’t leak that information.’
‘Of course not. Unfortunately, someone has made it look like I did.’
‘Any idea who?’
‘No,’ Kazunari replied immediately.
‘I see. Still, getting demoted over something like that seems a little harsh.’
‘The board members didn’t believe it was me either. But the company had to take some kind of action. And there were some who thought that because the trap was clearly set for me, that was reason enough to move me out of headquarters before more damage was done.’
Sasagaki listened, dumbfounded.
‘That, and one other thing,’ Kazunari said. ‘There’s at least one board member who would prefer to keep me at a distance.’
Sasagaki raised an eyebrow.
‘My cousin, Yasuharu.’
‘Ah…’ Sasagaki said.
‘It was a good chance for him to get the one naysayer to his marriage out of the picture. This assignment was supposed to be temporary – but one wonders how long they intend “temporary” to last.’
‘And you’re looking into this?’
A hard look came over Kazunari’s face. ‘I need to find out how the information leaked.’
‘Have you found anything yet?’
‘A little,’ Kazunari replied. ‘Whoever did it accessed our computers. We have a pretty advanced system, with both the network connecting computers internally and an external network allowing us to share data with other research facilities outside the company. That’s how the hacker got into our system.’
This was already straining Sasagaki’s understanding of computers but he listened attentively.
Kazunari smiled, noticing the look on the detective’s face. ‘It’s really not that complicated. Basically, the hacker used a phone line to get on to one of our internal computers. So far, I’ve determined the access came through computers at the Imperial University Hospital. In other words, the hacker first accessed the pharmacy system at Imperial University, then went from there into our system. But it’s been very difficult trying to figure out where he accessed the Imperial University system from.’
The name of the hospital sounded familiar to Sasagaki, but he couldn’t place it at first, until he remembered his recent conversation with Eri Sugawara about how a client at Imaeda’s office had been a pharmacist at the Imperial University Hospital.
‘Would a pharmacist at the hospital have access to those computers?’ he asked.
‘Yes, they would all have access,’ Kazunari explained. ‘Except, even though our computers are connected to these external networks, not all of our information is available through those channels. There are some walls put up here and there in the system, to protect sensitive material from getting out. Which means that our criminal would have a considerable amount of know-how. A pro.’
‘A professional hacker?’ Something was tugging at the back of Sasagaki’s mind. He knew at least one professional when it came to computers. He also wondered if there was a connection between whoever set a trap for Kazunari Shinozuka and the pharmacist from the Imperial University Hotel who had gone to Imaeda’s office. But it could well be a coincidence.
‘Is something wrong?’ Kazunari asked, a suspicious look in his eyes.
‘No,’ Sasagaki said waving his hand. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘I’m sorry, that phone call really took us off track,’ Kazunari said, stretching in his seat. ‘Please, go on with your story.’
‘Right, where was I?’
‘You were talking about motives,’ Kazunari said.
‘Ah, right,’ Sasagaki said, sitting up straight and taking a deep breath.
Saturday afternoon was like an air pocket, a little bubble of tranquillity protected from the rest of the world. Mika was in her room listening to music and reading magazines as she always had before things changed. An empty teacup and a saucer with a bit of cookie left on it stood on the bedside table. Taeko had brought them in for her about twenty minutes earlier.
‘I’m heading out for a bit, Mika,’ Taeko had said. ‘You’re in charge.’
‘You’ll lock the door, right?’
‘Of course.’
‘Fine. Bring a key, ’cause I won’t answer even if you ring,’ Mika had said, snuggling under the covers of her bed and opening a fresh magazine.
Mika was all alone in the big house. Her father was out playing golf and Yukiho was at work. Masahiro had gone off to their grandparents’ for the night. After her mother died, Mika was often left to her own devices at home. It felt lonely a bit at first but these days she preferred it to company, especially if it involved being around Yukiho.
She was just getting up to swap in a fresh CD when she heard the phone ring in the hallway. Mika frowned. She welcomed calls from her friends but she doubted this was one of those. There were three lines in the house: one for her father, one for Yukiho, and the last one was for everyone to use. She’d been asking her father for her own line for some time now but hadn’t made much progress.
Mika went out into the hallway to pick up the cordless phone from its cradle on the wall. ‘Shinozuka residence.’
‘Hello? Is a Mika Shinozuka there?’ It was a man’s voice.
‘Speaking,’ she said.
‘I have an overnight delivery here from a Miss Tomoko Hishikawa? Would it be all right to bring that by now?’
That’s strange, Mika thought. The delivery people had never called in advance before, but then again, she’d never received an overnight delivery before. She didn’t wonder long, however, as her excitement over the prospect of something from her friend Tomoko drove all concern out of her mind. She hadn’t seen her since Tomoko’s father got transferred last spring and the family had moved down to Nagoya.
‘Sure,’ she said. The delivery man told her he’d be right over.
Several minutes later the doorbell rang. Waiting in the living room, Mika picked up the intercom. The security camera showed a man dressed in a delivery uniform. He was carrying a box about the size of an orange crate.
‘Yes?’ she spoke into the intercom.
‘Package for Miss Shinozuka?’
‘Come in,’ Mika said, pressing the button to undo the latch on the gate.
She went out to the entrance hall and opened the door. The man with the box was standing right outside.
‘Er, where should I put this?’ he asked. ‘It’s a little heavy.’
‘Right here is fine,’ Mika said, pointing down at the floor of the entrance hall.
The man put the box down. He was wearing dark glasses, and a hat with a brim that went low over his forehead. ‘Can I get your signature here?’ He handed her a pen and took out a small sheet of paper.
‘Where do I sign?’ she asked, leaning forward.
‘Right here,’ the man said, also taking a step forward.
Mika was about to put her pen to the paper when the slip suddenly disappeared.
‘Huh?’ she said as something soft pressed over her mouth. Mika gasped in surprise and felt the world slip away.
Time seemed to be slowing down and speeding up in fits and starts. There was a ringing in her ears but only when she was awake enough to hear it. She kept fading out, like a radio with bad reception. She couldn’t move at all. Her arms and legs didn’t feel like her own. Everything seemed dreamlike and unreal, except for the pain. That was real. It took her a while before she realised the pain was coming from a specific place inside her body. It was so strong her entire body felt numb with it.
There was a man immediately in front of her. She could see his face clearly. He was breathing on her. Hot, quick breaths.
I’m being raped.
Part of her understood this, yet another part of her felt as if she were watching the horror unfold from a great distance. And there was another part of herself, a higher level of consciousness, wondering why she was so spaced out, why she wasn’t reacting.
Then fear such as she’d never known before gripped her in its clutches. It was the fear of falling into a deep hole, of not being sure what was at the bottom. The fear of not knowing how long this hell would go on.
She wasn’t entirely sure when it ended. She’d fallen unconscious at some point.
It was her vision that came back first. She saw flowerpots in a line. Cactuses – the ones that Yukiho had brought from her home in Osaka.
Next her hearing returned. She heard a car somewhere nearby and the sound of the wind blowing. With a start, she realised she was outside, in the garden. She was lying on the grass. She could see the net that her father had set up for practising golf.
Mika sat up. She hurt all over. She was cut and bruised and there was another, dull pain near her lower belly. It felt like something had scooped out her insides. The air was cold on her skin. Only then did she realise she was mostly naked. What clothes remained on her had been torn to rags. Her other consciousness was still there too, coldly observing, upset that her favourite shirt had been ruined.
She was still wearing her skirt, but she didn’t have to look to know that someone had taken off her panties. She looked into the distance and saw the reddening sky.
‘Mika!’ a voice called out. She turned her head slowly to see Yukiho running toward her. Mika stared, lost in a dream.
Nothing seemed real. Nothing at all.
Noriko struggled to open the front door. The plastic handles of the convenience-store bag were digging into her fingers with the weight of a big bottle of mineral water and bag of rice. She stopped herself from saying, ‘I’m home.’
Noriko put her bag down in front of the fridge and opened the door to the back room. It was dark, the air still and cold. In the back corner, the white computer case seemed to float in the dim light. She missed the glow of the monitor, the slight whirr of the fans.
Noriko returned to the kitchen and started to put away her shopping: veggies in the fridge, frozen stuff in the freezer, everything else on the shelf. Before she closed the refrigerator door, she pulled out a can of beer.
Making her way to the living room, she turned on the television and switched on the electric heater. She picked up a throw rug that lay in a ball in the corner and draped it over her legs while she waited for the room to warm up. There was a game show on TV pitting various comedians against each other. The one with the worst score would be forced to bungee-jump off a bridge. It wasn’t the kind of show she would have been caught dead watching before but now she found she liked them because they were so ridiculous. She already had enough to think about, sitting alone in her cold, empty apartment.
She pulled back the tab on the beer and drank, feeling the coolness flow from her throat to her belly. It gave her goosebumps and she shivered. It felt good. She kept a supply of beer in the fridge in the winter. He liked to drink beer most when it was cold. He said it kept him sharp. Noriko hugged her knees to her chest. I should eat dinner, she thought. Nothing special. She could just warm up the stuff she’d bought at the convenience store. But even that seemed like far too much trouble. Inertia was working against her. She didn’t even feel hungry.
She turned up the volume. Too much quiet made the room feel colder. She ed
ged a little closer to the heater.
I know what my problem is. I’m lonely.
She had loved being alone before, taking a break from the pressure of human contact. She’d even breathed a sigh of relief when she cancelled her contract with the matchmaking service. But now that she knew what it felt like to be with someone she loved she couldn’t go back. It just wasn’t the same. She took another swig of her beer and tried not to think about him, but when she closed her eyes, there he was, sitting at his computer.
Her beer was finished. She crushed the empty can between her hands and put it on the table next to two others just like it – one from yesterday, and one from the day before. She’d recently given up trying to keep the house clean.
I’ll microwave something, she thought, it’s the least I can do. She was just standing up when the doorbell rang.
She opened the door to see an older man standing outside in a rumpled coat. He had broad shoulders and a sharp look in his eyes. Noriko immediately guessed his line of work and a bad feeling began to form in the pit of her stomach.
‘Noriko Kurihara?’ the man asked. He had an Osaka accent.
‘Yes?’
‘The name’s Sasagaki.’ He held out a business card, blank except for a phone number and his name. ‘I was a detective with Osaka police until last spring.’
Noriko nodded, unsurprised.
‘I was hoping I could ask you some questions, if you don’t mind?’
‘Right now?’
‘If you don’t mind. Maybe at the café down the street?’
Noriko frowned. She didn’t feel like going out, but she didn’t relish the idea of inviting a stranger in, either. ‘Can I ask what this is about?’ she asked.
‘A few things, including your visit to the Imaeda Detective Agency.’
Noriko gasped.
‘So you did go to Mr Imaeda’s office in Shinjuku? That’s the first thing I wanted to check on,’ the former detective said with a pleasant smile.
Her unease began to spread, but it came with a glimmer of hope. Maybe this man would know where Akiyoshi had gone. She hesitated for a few more seconds before opening the door wider. ‘Why don’t you just come in?’
‘You’re sure?’
‘It’s fine. Pardon the mess.’
The detective stepped in. He had an old man smell to him.
Noriko had gone to the Imaeda Detective Agency in September, roughly two weeks after Akiyoshi suddenly vanished from her life. There hadn’t been an accident, she knew that. He’d left his set of keys in an envelope in the mailbox. He’d also left most of his things behind, not that there was much to begin with.
The largest of his possessions was the computer, but Noriko had no idea how to use it. After debating with herself for some time, she finally invited over a journalist friend who was good with computers and had her check to see if there was anything on it. She found nothing. According to her, the hard drive had been wiped completely clean and all the floppy disks were blank.
Noriko racked her brains, trying to think of some way she could find out where Akiyoshi might have gone. The only thing she could remember was the empty file she had found in his duffel bag that night, the one with the name of the Imaeda Detective Agency on it. She looked in the phone book and found it right away. Noriko paid a visit to Shinjuku the following day.
Except the agency had been a dead end. The young woman there had told her there was no record of anyone named Akiyoshi, either as a client or a case. Which made the former detective finding her through the agency very curious indeed.
Sasagaki seemed a little surprised to hear that she had gone to check after a man who had been living with her and suddenly disappeared.
‘It’s odd that he’d have an empty file from the agency like that,’ Sasagaki said when she finished explaining. ‘And you have no idea where he might have gone? Did you contact his friends and family?’
She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t. I don’t know any of them. I don’t really know anything about him.’
‘Interesting,’ Sasagaki said, looking a little taken aback.
‘Um, can I ask what you’re investigating, Mr Sasagaki?’
He hesitated for a moment then said, ‘This may come as a surprise to you, but Mr Imaeda has also gone missing.’
‘What?’
‘Yes. It’s a bit of a long story. I’ve been trying to find out where he went, and haven’t had any luck. Which is why I’m here, grasping at straws as it were.’
‘I see. When did Mr Imaeda go missing?’
‘Last summer, August.’
Noriko thought back and almost gasped out loud. That was right around the time that Akiyoshi had gone out for a night, taking the cyanide with him – the same night he’d come back with the empty file from the Imaeda Detective Agency.
‘Something wrong?’ the former detective asked, his eyes squinting.
‘No, it’s nothing.’ Noriko shook her head.
‘Incidentally,’ Sasagaki said, pulling out a photograph, ‘have you ever seen this man?’
Noriko took the photograph and nearly shouted out loud. He looked younger than when she had met him, but it was Yuichi Akiyoshi, without a doubt.
‘Well?’ Sasagaki asked.
Noriko tried hard to keep her heart from beating out of her chest. Her mind was racing. Should she tell the truth? Why would a former detective be walking around with his picture? Was Akiyoshi a suspect in some crime? Had he killed Imaeda? No…
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know him,’ she said, returning the photo. Her fingertips were trembling and she could feel that her cheeks were red.
Sasagaki stared at her face for a long moment, looking through her. Noriko turned her head away.
‘I see. That’s unfortunate,’ Sasagaki said softly, putting away the photograph. ‘I suppose I should leave.’ He stood. ‘Actually,’ he said after a moment, ‘I wonder if you could show me anything that belonged to Mr Akiyoshi, anything that might help me find him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something he left behind, if you don’t mind?’
‘No, not at all.’
Noriko showed Sasagaki into the back room where Akiyoshi’s computer was still sitting.
‘This was his computer?’
‘Yes. He was using it to write a novel.’
‘A novel?’ Sasagaki said, looking over the computer and the desk. ‘You don’t have any photographs of him, do you?’
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t.’
‘Even a small one is fine. All I have to see is his face.’
‘No, I really don’t have a single photo. I never took one.’
It was the truth. Noriko had wanted to take a photo together several times but Akiyoshi always refused – another reason she had nothing left to remember him by.
Sasagaki nodded, but seemed clearly suspicious. Noriko swallowed.
‘Would you have anything he wrote by hand? A memo, or journal?’
‘I don’t think so. If he had anything like that, he didn’t leave it.’
‘I see,’ Sasagaki said, taking another look around the room. Then he smiled at Noriko. ‘Right. Sorry to bother you.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.’
As Sasagaki was putting his shoes on, Noriko stood, torn by indecision. The detective knew something about Akiyoshi and she wanted to know what it was. But if she told him who it really was in that photo he’d shown her, she worried she might be signing Akiyoshi’s ticket to prison herself. Even if she never saw him again, she didn’t want that for him.
Sasagaki finished putting on his shoes and looked up at her. ‘Thank you for your time,’ he said.
‘Not at all,’ Noriko said, her throat a little choked.
Just then Sasagaki’s eyes looked back out at the room behind her, fixing on something. ‘What’s that?’ He was pointing at a small shelf beside the refrigerator. ‘Is that a photo album there?’ he asked.
‘Oh, that?’ She looked back at the small plastic album sitting on the shelf. It was a cheap thing they had given her at the camera shop, free with her developed pictures.
‘There’s nothing in there,’ she said. ‘It’s from when I went to Osaka last year.’
‘Osaka?’ Sasagaki said, his expression perking up. ‘You mind if I take a look?’
‘Oh, go right ahead, but there aren’t any pictures of people,’ she added, handing him the album.
All of the photos were ones Noriko had taken by herself on her trip to Osaka: strange buildings and houses, nothing interesting. She’d felt mischievous taking them and had never shown them to anyone, not even Akiyoshi.
The photos got a clear reaction from Sasagaki. His eyes went wide and his mouth hung halfway open.
‘Is there something there?’ Noriko asked, half afraid there might have been a photo of Akiyoshi in there that she’d somehow missed.
Sasagaki didn’t answer right away but continued looking at the photos. Then he turned the album towards her, opened to a certain page.
‘Why did you take a picture of this pawnshop?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. No particular reason.’
‘And this building here. Any reason you thought to take a picture of that?’
‘Why do you ask?’ she asked, her voice trembling.
Sasagaki reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the photograph from before, the one of Akiyoshi. ‘Let me tell you something. The sign on your photo here reads “Kirihara Pawnshop”, right? Well, that’s this man’s real name: Ryo Kirihara.’
Mika’s toes and fingertips felt as cold as ice, and they weren’t getting any warmer, no matter how long she stayed in bed. Mika buried her head under the pillows and curled up like a cat. Her teeth were chattering; her whole body was trembling.
She closed her eyes and tried to sleep. But as soon as she began slipping away there he was, the man without a face, attacking her. Her eyes shot open in fright. A cold sweat drenched her body and her heart beat so fast she was afraid it would burst.
She wondered how many hours she’d been lying here. She wondered if she would ever sleep again. She didn’t want to believe that what had happened that day was real. She wanted it to be a normal day like the day before, or the day before that. But it wasn’t a dream. And the pain in her lower abdomen was proof of that.
Leave everything to me. You don’t have to think about anything, Mika. She could still hear Yukiho’s voice ringing in her ear.
Mika couldn’t remember where Yukiho had appeared from. She didn’t even remember what she had told her. She probably hadn’t said anything. But somehow Yukiho had understood and known exactly what to do. She had Mika dressed in moments and then they were riding in the BMW. Yukiho was making a phone call while she drove but Mika couldn’t understand what she was saying, either because she was speaking too fast or Mika’s brain was moving too slowly. The only thing she remembered was Yukiho repeatedly demanding that this ‘be kept an absolute secret’.
Yukiho took her inside the hospital, not through the front door, but in through the back. Mika didn’t think to wonder why at the time. Mika didn’t think about much of anything.
She wasn’t sure afterwards if they had examined her, or done anything to her. She just lay on her side, her eyes tightly closed.
An hour later they were driving home.
‘The doctor says you’re fine. You don’t have to worry about anything,’ Yukiho said gently as she drove. Mika couldn’t remember how she had replied, or even if she had replied at all.
Yukiho never mentioned telling the police. She didn’t even ask Mika for any details. The details weren’t important to her, it seemed. Mika was grateful for that. She didn’t feel as if she could talk about it and she was terrified that other people might find out.
At home, she saw her father’s car in the car park and her heart stopped. What would she tell him?
‘Tell your father you felt like you were coming down with a cold so I took you to the doctor,’ Yukiho told her, as though lying to her father was no big deal. Maybe, given the previous events of the day, it really wasn’t. ‘I’ll have Taeko bring you your dinner in bed.’
That was when Mika realised that what had happened could be – no, would be – their secret. A secret she’d share with the woman she hated most in the entire world.
Yukiho’s performance in front of her father was brilliant. No sooner did she mention the hospital trip than she defused Yasuharu’s worried look by telling him, ‘Don’t worry, we got some medicine.’ He didn’t seem suspicious about Mika’s unusual gloom either. On the contrary, he seemed almost pleased that she had relented enough to permit her arch-enemy take care of her.
That night, Mika stayed in her room. Taeko brought her dinner as promised and Mika feigned sleep while she laid the food out on the side table. After Taeko left, she tried a little bit of the soup and the casserole, but it only nauseated her. After that, she just lay in bed, curled into a ball.
As the night grew deeper, her fear grew worse. All the lights in the room were out. She was scared to be in the darkness, but she was more scared for her body to be revealed by the light. She felt like someone was watching her. She wanted to live under a little rock, like a minnow in the sea.
She wondered what time it was and how much pain she would have to endure until the sun rose. She wondered if every night would be like this, and the anxiety pressed down on her like a weight. She bit her thumb.
Just then, she heard the click of the doorknob turn.
Mika froze, looking out at the door from under her covers. Through the darkness she saw it swing slowly open. Someone was coming into the room. She saw the hem of a silvery gown drift across the floor.
‘Who is it?’ Mika asked in a hushed, hoarse voice.
‘I thought you might be up,’ Yukiho replied.
Mika turned away. She didn’t know how to act towards this person, the only other person who knew her secret.
She heard Yukiho step closer. Mika glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. She was standing by the foot of her bed.
‘Get out,’ Mika said. ‘Leave me alone.’
Yukiho didn’t answer. Wordlessly, she undid the cords on her gown. The silvery fabric dropped to the ground, revealing her white, naked body.
Before Mika could say anything, Yukiho crawled under the covers with her. Mika tried to escape, but Yukiho pressed her down. She was far stronger than she looked.
On top of the bed, she pushed Mika’s legs apart and pressed down on her. Her large breasts swayed over Mika’s chest.
‘Stop,’ Mika croaked.
‘Did he do this to you?’ Yukiho asked. ‘Did he push down on you like this?’
Mika looked away. She felt Yukiho’s fingers pressing into her cheeks, twisting her head back.
‘Don’t look away. Look here, into my face.’
Her mind screaming with fear, Mika looked at Yukiho. The large eyes staring down at her. The face was so close she could feel the warmth of her breath.
‘You remember what he did when you try to sleep, don’t you.’ Yukiho said. ‘You’re scared to close your eyes, scared to dream. Aren’t you.’
Mika nodded.
‘I want you to look at my face. If you ever feel like you might remember the man, I want you to think of me instead. I want you to remember me doing this.’ Yukiho straddled Mika’s body, pressing her shoulders down into the bed until Mika couldn’t budge an inch. ‘Or would you rather see his face than mine?’
Mika shook her head.
Yukiho smiled. ‘I thought not. It’s OK. You’ll be fine before you know it. I’ll protect you.’ Yukiho cupped her hands around Mika’s cheeks. She moved her palms, rubbing, as if she enjoyed the feel of her skin. ‘It happened to me too, you know. Only worse.’
Mika was so surprised she almost shouted. Yukiho put a finger to her lips. ‘I was younger than you are now. Still just a child. But sometimes, demons come for children too. Many, many demons.’
‘No…’ Mika whispered.
‘When I look at you now, I see me then.’ Yukiho lowered herself until she was lying on top of Mika, her warmth pressed against her, her hands cradling Mika’s head. ‘And it’s sad. So sad.’
Then, Mika felt something twitch deep inside her, as though a nerve that had lain severed until now had suddenly been reconnected. Through that nerve, sadness came welling up from her heart like a flood. She began to cry like a baby in Yukiho’s embrace.
It was on a Sunday midway through December when Sasagaki got in a car with Kazunari to pay a visit to his cousin Yasuharu. Sasagaki had come back up to Tokyo from Osaka for the occasion.
‘Are you sure he’ll see us?’ Sasagaki asked in the car.
‘I don’t think he’ll kick us out on the street, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘If he’s even home.’
‘No worries on that count. I get good intel from my informant.’
‘Your informant?’
‘The maid.’
It was a little after two in the afternoon when Kazunari’s Mercedes pulled into the parking spot to the side of the guest gate.
‘It’s hard to tell exactly how big the house is from the outside of these places,’ Sasagaki said, peering over the gate. Beyond the high walls, all he could see were trees.
Kazunari pressed the intercom button next to the gate. The answer came immediately.
‘Hello, Kazunari. Good to see you,’ said the voice of a middle-aged woman. She must be looking at them over a security camera.
‘Hello, Taeko. Is Yasuharu in?’
‘He’s here. Just a moment.’
A couple of minutes later, her voice crackled over the speaker again. ‘He says go around to the garden.’
‘Right.’
There was a clicking sound from the gate as the lock opened.
Sasagaki followed Kazunari through. The long approach to the house was lined with cobblestones. Sasagaki felt as though he had stepped into an old Hollywood movie.
Two women were just walking out of the front of the house. Sasagaki knew who they were without Kazunari having to tell him: Yasuharu Shinozuka’s daughter, Mika, and next to her, Yukiho.
‘How do you want to play this?’ Kazunari asked quietly.
‘Just tell them anything you need to about me,’ Sasagaki said.
They walked up the path slowly. The four of them stopped where they met on the path halfway to the house. Yukiho smiled and nodded to them.
‘Hello,’ Kazunari spoke first.
‘Long time no see, Kazunari. How have you been?’ Yukiho asked.
‘Can’t complain. You look well.’
She smiled and nodded again.
‘Your shop in Osaka’s opening soon, right? How’s that going?’
‘Not very well, but these things never do. I only wish there were a few more of me to go around. I’m heading to a meeting about that right now, in fact.’
‘Well, I wish you the best of luck,’ Kazunari said, turning to the girl. ‘How have you been, Mika?’
The girl smiled and nodded. She seemed a bit withdrawn to Sasagaki. He’d heard from Kazunari that she didn’t get along with Yukiho, but from what he could see there was no sign of that here.
‘And I thought it might be a good chance to pick up something for Mika for Christmas,’ Yukiho said.
‘An excellent idea,’ Kazunari agreed.
‘Is this your friend?’ Yukiho asked, her eyes turning to Sasagaki.
‘Oh, sorry, this is Mr Sasaki. He’s been helping us at the company for years,’ Kazunari said without hesitation.
Sasagaki bowed and said, ‘Hello.’ When he looked back up, his eyes met with Yukiho’s.
Sasagaki had seen her as an adult several times, but never face-to-face like this, not since that run-down apartment in Osaka. He could still see that little girl in the woman before him. She had the same eyes.
Remember me, Yukiho Nishimoto? I’ve been following you for nineteen years, so much that I see you in my dreams. But I doubt you remember an old man like me. Just another one of your many, many fools.
Yukiho smiled. ‘Are you from Osaka?’
‘Indeed,’ he said, a little flustered.
‘I thought so. My new shop is opening in Shinsaibashi. You have to come visit.’
She pulled a postcard out of her bag, an invitation to the opening.
‘Oh, thanks,’ Sasagaki said. ‘I’ll make sure one of my relatives down there gets this.’
‘It was your accent,’ Yukiho explained, looking the old detective in the eyes. ‘It’s funny how little things can bring back so many memories.’ Her lips parted in a smile. ‘If you’re looking for Yasuharu, he’s in the garden,’ she said to Kazunari. ‘He wasn’t satisfied with his scores on the course today, so practise, practise.’
‘We’ll try not to take up too much of his time.’
‘Please make yourself at home,’ Yukiho said, and with a nod to Mika the two set off. Sasagaki and Kazunari stood off to the side of the path until they had passed. Sasagaki watched her go, thinking maybe she did remember him after all.
They found Yasuharu in the garden hitting golf balls. When Kazunari walked over he put down his club and smiled – no trace of any guilt on his face over having sent his cousin to languish at a subsidiary.
But when Kazunari introduced Sasagaki, a wary look came into Yasuharu’s eyes. ‘A former detective from Osaka? OK,’ he said, staring at the new arrival.
‘He has something I need you to hear,’ Kazunari said.
The smile faded entirely from Yasuharu’s face. ‘Let’s talk inside.’
‘No, here is fine. It’s warm today, and we’ll be leaving soon.’
‘Really?’ Yasuharu looked between their faces. ‘Fine. I’ll have Taeko bring us something.’
A white table with four chairs was in the garden, a place for the family to enjoy afternoon tea in the British style on the warmer days. The maid brought milk tea, and they sat to drink.
The mood couldn’t have been farther from a pleasant afternoon tea. As soon as Kazunari started talking, Yasuharu’s mouth twisted into a scowl where it stayed while he, together with Sasagaki, began telling the story of Yukiho Nishimoto. They told it all, every little event they had managed to piece together. Ryo’s name came up several times.
Halfway through, Yasuharu slammed the table with his hands and stood. ‘Ridiculous,’ he scoffed. ‘I wondered what you were going to say, but this – this takes the cake, Kazunari.’
‘Please, hear us out.’
‘I’ve heard more than enough. Look, if you’ve got so much free time on your hands that you’re going digging for dirt that isn’t there, why don’t you spend it trying to fix that company of yours.’
‘Actually, I have information about that, too,’ Kazunari said to Yasuharu’s turned back. He stood. ‘I know who set the trap for me.’
Yasuharu looked around, a twisted smile on his face. ‘Don’t tell me Yukiho did that too?’
‘You heard about the hacker that accessed the Shinozuka Pharmaceuticals network? It turns out that the hacker used a computer at the Imperial University Hospital to do it. And one of the pharmacists there was living with none other than Ryo Kirihara.’
Yasuharu’s eyes opened a little wider at this. Then he said something the old detective didn’t quite catch, but it sounded like ‘so what’.
Sasagaki pulled a photograph out of his coat pocket. ‘Would you mind taking a look at this?’
‘What’s this? A building?’
‘This is the pawnshop where the murder happened twenty years ago in Osaka. The pharmacist took this picture when she went to Osaka with Ryo Kirihara.’
‘And?’
‘I asked when she made that trip. They went for three days, from eighteenth September of last year through to the twentieth. I believe those dates should be significant to you as well.’
It took Yasuharu a moment to remember, but he did. His light gasp indicated that.
‘That’s right,’ Sasagaki said. ‘On nineteenth September Reiko Karasawa passed away. The hospital was at a loss to explain why her breathing suddenly stopped. This provides one possible explanation…’
‘Ridiculous,’ Yasuharu said, tossing the photograph aside. ‘Kazunari, I want you to take this crazy old man and leave. Pull something like this again and you’ll never come back to our company, ever. You’d do well to remember that your father isn’t on the board anymore.’
He picked up a golf ball lying on the ground by his feet and flung it at the net. It hit one of the metal poles supporting the net and ricocheted back towards the house, where it struck a potted plant out on the terrace. There was a cracking noise like something had broken. Yasuharu didn’t even look. Stepping up on to the terrace, he opened the sliding glass doors and went inside.
Kazunari sighed. He glanced at Sasagaki and chuckled dryly. ‘That went well.’
‘He’s quite taken with the woman. That’s her greatest weapon.’
‘He’s too angry to think straight right now, but once he cools down, the things we said will start to make sense to him. We’ll just have to wait.’
‘If that time ever comes.’
The two had turned to leave when Taeko came running out to see them. ‘What happened? I heard a loud noise.’
Kazunari shrugged. ‘Yasuharu threw a golf ball and I think it hit something.’
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘Just a potted plant. No human casualties.’
The housemaid turned to inspect the plants on the terrace.
‘My, it’s one of her cactuses.’
‘Yukiho’s cactuses?’
‘She brought them from Osaka. Dear me, the pot’s completely destroyed.’
Kazunari went over to Taeko.
‘Does she have a thing for raising cactuses or something?’
‘No, I believe they belonged to her late mother.’
‘Oh, right. She did say something about that at the funeral.’
Kazunari had stepped away when he heard the maid say ‘What’s this?’ behind him. He turned to see her reach into the broken pot and pull something out.
‘Look what I found,’ she said.
Kazunari examined the contents of the woman’s hand. ‘Looks like a piece of glass.’
‘It was near the bottom of the pot. It must have been mixed in with the dirt,’ she said, shaking her head and placing the glass on top of the pieces of broken pot.
‘What’s going on?’ Sasagaki said, coming over to see.
‘Nothing much. There was a piece of glass inside the pot that broke.’ Kazunari pointed to the broken cactus pot.
asagaki looked, his eyes falling on the slightly curved piece of glass. It looked like a lens from a pair of sunglasses. It was broken midway across. He picked it up carefully. A moment later he felt his blood stir. Memories came flooding back, tangled in his mind. Gradually, they resolved into a clear picture.
‘You said she brought these cactuses from Osaka?’ he asked in a hushed voice.
‘That’s right. They were at her mother’s home.’
‘In the garden?’
‘That’s right. She had them lined up by the side of the house. Is something wrong?’ Kazunari asked, noticing the old detective’s unusual behaviour.
‘Maybe,’ Sasagaki said, holding the broken lens up to the sky. It had a faint greenish tint to it.
It was nearly eleven at night and they’d been preparing for the opening of R&Y Osaka all day. Natsumi followed along behind Yukiho, making a complete circuit of the shop for a final check. Both in floor space and inventory the shop was considerably larger than its counterparts in Tokyo. They had pushed their PR campaign to its limits and beyond. Now all they had to do was wait.
‘Well, I think we’re ninety-nine per cent of the way there,’ Yukiho said after they had finished.
‘Only ninety-nine?’ Natsumi asked. ‘You mean it’s not perfect?’
‘No, but that will give us something to strive for tomorrow,’ Yukiho said with a smile. ‘Time to rest our weary bones. We should both go light on the drinking tonight.’
‘The celebration’s tomorrow, right.’
‘Absolutely.’
It was already half past eleven when the two of them got into the red Jaguar.
Yukiho sat in the passenger seat, taking a deep breath. ‘All we can do is our best. I, for one, am sure you’ll be great.’
‘I hope so,’ Natsumi said, a little worried. She would be directly in charge of running the Osaka store.
‘Be confident. You’re number one. Got it?’ She gave Natsumi’s shoulder a shake.
‘Got it,’ Natsumi said, looking over at the other woman. ‘But, to be honest, I’m scared. I’m not sure I can do it like you do it, boss. Aren’t you ever frightened?’
Yukiho turned and looked at her directly. ‘Natsumi? You know how the sun rises and sets at a certain time each day? In the same way, all of our lives have a day and night. But it’s not set like it is with the sun. Some people walk forever in the sunlight, and some people have to walk through the darkest night their whole lives. When people talk about being afraid, what they’re afraid of is that their sun will set. That the light they love will fade. That’s why you’re frightened, isn’t it?’
Natsumi thought she understood. She nodded.
‘You know,’ Yukiho continued, ‘I’ve never lived in the sunlight.’
‘Hardly,’ Natsumi said with a laugh. ‘Boss, as far as I’m concerned, you are the sun.’
Yukiho shook her head. There was an earnest look in her eyes that wiped the smile off Natsumi’s face.
‘No, there never was a sun in the sky over me. It’s always night. But not dark. I had something in place of the sun. Maybe not as bright, but enough for me. Enough so I was able to live in the night like it was day. You understand? You can’t be afraid of losing something you never had.’
‘So what did you have in place of the sun?’
‘It’s hard to describe. Maybe you’ll understand someday,’ Yukiho said. Turning her eyes back on the road. ‘Let’s go.’
Natsumi turned the key.
Yukiho was staying at the Sky Osaka Hotel in Yodoyabashi. Natsumi was already renting an apartment in North Tenma.
‘The night’s just getting started down here, isn’t it,’ Yukiho said, looking out of the window.
‘There’s certainly no lack of nightclubs in town, that’s for sure. I used to go out a lot back in the day.’ Natsumi said, and heard Yukiho chuckle in the seat beside her. ‘What?’
‘I heard you slipping back into the local accent,’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, it’s just —’
‘No, it’s fine. You’re in Osaka; you should talk like a local. I should probably switch back myself when I’m in town.’
‘I think it would suit you, honestly.’
‘Really?’ Yukiho said with a smile.
She let Yukiho off in front of the entrance to the hotel.
‘See you tomorrow, boss.’
‘Sure thing. If anything comes up tonight, don’t hesitate to give me a call.’
‘It won’t, but I will.’
‘Natsumi?’ Yukiho extended her right hand. ‘Let’s do this thing right,’ she said, her voice a perfect Osaka drawl.
Natsumi shook her hand and smiled.
The hands on the clock had just passed midnight and Yaeko Kirihara decided it was time to close up when she heard the squeaking of the old wooden door opening and an older man in a dark grey coat stepped in.
When she saw who it was, the forced smile faded from her face and she gave a little sigh.
‘Well, if it isn’t Mr Sasagaki. Here I was thinking it was the God of Fortune come to give me a very belated blessing.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Sasagaki replied. ‘You know I’m your lucky charm.’
Sasagaki hung his scarf and coat on the wall and sat down at the counter. He was wearing a rumpled brown suit under his coat. He might not be a detective any more, but he still dressed the part.
Yaeko put a glass on the counter in front of him, opened a large bottle of beer and poured. It was all he ever drank at her shop.
Sasagaki took a sip, savouring it, and had a bite of the simple appetiser Yaeko put out for him.
‘How’s business? Getting to be time for those year-end parties, I should think.’
‘Business is just what you see. The bubble burst here years ago. Not that I ever saw any bubble.’
Yaeko took down a glass for herself and poured. She drank down half in one gulp.
‘I see the years haven’t slowed you down at all,’ Sasagaki said, reaching out for the bottle. He filled her glass to the top.
Yaeko nodded thanks. ‘It’s all I got.’
‘How many years have you been running this place again?’
‘Too long,’ she said, counting on her fingers. ‘Fourteen, I guess. Yeah, fourteen years this February.’
‘That’s a nice long run. Sounds like you found your calling after all.’
That made her laugh. ‘Maybe so. The café I ran before this only lasted three.’
‘Not helping with the pawnshop at all?’
‘No. I hated that work. It was never a good fit for me.’
And still she had been married to a pawnbroker for almost thirteen years. That was the biggest mistake in her life, she had decided. She should have kept working at that bar in North Shinchi. She’d probably be the owner by now if she had, and business was always hopping there.
After her husband was killed, Matsuura ran the store for a while. But pretty soon there was a family meeting and the shop was entrusted to Yosuke’s cousin. The Kirihara family had been in the pawnshop business for generations and a few of their relatives ran shops under the same name in different parts of town. Just because Yosuke had died didn’t mean his widow could do whatever she wanted with the store.
Matsuura soon quit. According to her cousin-in-law, he’d taken quite a bit of the shop’s cash with him when he left, but she never heard any hard figures. In all honesty, she couldn’t have cared less. She left the house and the shop to her in-laws and with the money they gave her opened a café in Uehonmachi. She hadn’t known until then that Yosuke had never even owned the land the pawnshop had been built on; they’d been leasing it from his older brother.
Things went fine right after her café opened but about six months later the customers dropped off until they hardly came at all. She was never sure exactly why. She tried offering new menus, and redecorating, but nothing seemed to work. Soon she had to cut staff, which meant the service got slower, which meant even fewer people came.
The café closed without making it even for three years. She always took it as a personal affront that the Space Invaders boom had come along right after she left, sending young kids in droves to neighbourhood cafés.
She had managed to land on her feet, though. One of her friends from her old hostessing days got in touch with her to tell her about a shop in Tennoji that was up for sale. The terms were good and she jumped on it immediately. That was her current bar and she had managed to keep it afloat. When she thought about what she would have done without it, it gave her goosebumps.
‘How about your son? Still no word?’ Sasagaki asked.
Yaeko smiled faintly and shook her head. ‘I gave up on Ryo a long time ago.’
‘How old would he be these days? About thirty?’
‘Something like that. To tell you the truth, I don’t really remember.’
Sasagaki had started showing up every once in a while, from around the fourth year after she started the bar. She knew he had been the lead investigator in her husband’s murder, but he rarely talked about that. He never failed, however, to mention Ryo.
Ryo had lived with her in-laws through middle school. It was a boon to her, busy as she was starting her café, that she didn’t have to take care of a kid at the same time.
Around the time that she started her current bar, Ryo left the Kiriharas and came to live with her. It didn’t mean much, however, she was soon to discover. She was always up late with the customers, after which she would sleep deeply, only waking up some time in the afternoon, after which she’d eat a simple meal, get in the bath, put on her face, and start opening the shop. Not once did she make breakfast for her son, and dinner was usually something from the bar. They barely saw each other for more than an hour a day, if that.
Ryo started spending more and more nights out. When she would ask where he was staying, he only gave vague replies. But she never heard anything from the school or the police, so she didn’t pay it too much mind. She was too tired just getting through each day to worry about him.
On the morning of his high school graduation Ryo got ready for the day just like any other. Yaeko was awake that day, still in her futon. Normally he left without saying a word, but that day he stopped in the doorway and looked around. ‘I’m leaving, Mom.’
‘Yep, see you later,’ she said, half asleep.
It was the last time they spoke. It was only several hours later that Yaeko found the note on her dresser that read, I’m not coming back. True to his word, Ryo never returned.
If she had wanted to, she might have been able to track him down, but she never really tried. She was lonely, true, but she felt like it was inevitable. She’d never been a real mother to him. And he’d certainly never thought of her as a mother.
Yaeko was fairly sure she had lacked any kind of motherly instinct from the very beginning. She gave birth not because she wanted a child, but because there wasn’t any good reason to get an abortion. She had got married to Yosuke in much the same way – because she thought it would save her from having to work. Yet the role of wife and mother had been far more confining in its tedium than she had imagined. She didn’t want to be either of those things. She wanted to be a woman.
About three months after Ryo left, she got into a serious relationship with a man in the import trade. He took away her loneliness. He let her be the woman she wanted to be.
They lived together for two years. When the split came, it was because he had to return to his other family. He was married, with a house in Sakai City to the south.
She saw other men after that but broke up with them. Now she was alone. It was easier this way, except for the lonely times. On those nights she would think of Ryo, except she forbade herself to want to see him. She knew she didn’t have the right.
Sasagaki put a Seven Stars in his mouth. Yaeko quickly produced a disposable lighter and lit it.
‘You know how many years it’s been since your husband was killed?’ Sasagaki asked, blowing out a stream of smoke.
‘About twenty, I guess.’
‘Nineteen to be exact. That’s quite some time.’
‘It is. I’m an old woman, and you’re retired.’
‘I was wondering if you might have anything you wanted to say, given how long ago it was.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something you couldn’t say back then, but you could say now.’
A faint smile came to Yaeko’s lips and she took a cigarette of her own. Lighting it, she blew smoke towards the dark stained ceiling.
‘Still the same, after all these years. I’m not hiding a thing, detective.’
‘Oh? That’s funny, because there’re so many things that don’t quite match up.’
‘You’re still on that case? You have the patience of a saint,’ Yaeko said, leaning on the shelves behind her, cigarette between her fingers. The faint sound of music drifted in from somewhere.
‘The day it happened, you said you were at the shop with Matsuura and Ryo. Was that the truth?’
‘It was,’ Yaeko said, flicking ash into her ashtray. ‘I thought you already looked into that one.’
‘I did. But the only testimony I was able to really corroborate was Matsuura’s alibi.’
‘You mean to say that I killed him?’ Yaeko blew smoke from her nose.
‘No, I think you were there too. What I suspect is that there weren’t three of you there. It was just you and Matsuura. Right?’
‘What are you getting at, detective?’
‘You and Matsuura had a thing,’ Sasagaki said, draining his glass. Yaeko tried to fill it again, but he stopped her and filled it himself. ‘You don’t have to hide that any more, it was so long ago. Nobody cares but me.’
‘Why do you care?’
‘I just want to know what happened. Right around when your husband was murdered, someone came to your shop and found the door locked. Matsuura says he was back in the storeroom, and you were watching television with Ryo. But that’s not the truth, is it. The truth is, you were in the back, in bed with Matsuura.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’ll call that a yes,’ Sasagaki said, grinning a little as he drank.
Yaeko sucked harder on her cigarette. She watched the smoke hang in the air and let her mind wander.
She hadn’t ever really loved Matsuura. It was just something to break the monotony. She had begun to get worried at one point that she might stop being a woman altogether. Which was why she’d readily agreed when Matsuura came on to her.
‘And your son was on the floor above?’ Sasagaki asked.
‘What?’
‘Ryo. You and Matsuura were in the back. He was on the floor above, right? That’s why you locked the door upstairs, so he wouldn’t barge in on you?’
‘The lock?’ Yaeko said vacantly, then she nodded. ‘Oh, right. There was a lock on those stairs. You really are a detective, aren’t you? Good memory.’
‘So, Ryo was upstairs. But in order to hide your thing with Matsuura, you said he was with you. Right?’
‘If that’s what you want to think happened, then fine. What do I care?’ She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Shall I open another bottle?’
‘By all means.’ Sasagaki drank the fresh beer with some peanuts. Yaeko joined him. For a while, the two drank in silence.
Yaeko’s mind was tracing back across the years. It was just as Sasagaki said. The day it happened, she and Matsuura were right in the middle of it. Ryo was upstairs. The door at the bottom of the staircase was locked.
It had been Matsuura’s idea to tell the police that Ryo was with them when they came asking after their alibis. He said that would head them off before they got their noses in any place they shouldn’t be. They agreed to say that Yaeko had been watching television with Ryo – a science fiction show for kids. Ryo had a magazine he was reading that explained all about the show, which Yaeko read, just in case the detectives asked her about it.
‘I wonder what’s going to happen to Miyazaki?’ Sasagaki said abruptly.
‘Sorry? Miyazaki?’
‘Tsutomu Miyazaki.’
‘Oh.’
Yaeko brushed back her long hair. She felt some clinging to her hand and looked to see one white hair caught around her middle finger. She brushed it off on to the floor so that Sasagaki wouldn’t see. ‘They’ll give him the death penalty, won’t they?’
‘I read an article about the case a few days ago in the newspaper. They say his grandpa died three months before he did what he did. Apparently, that’s what broke him.’
‘I’m not sure that excuses murder,’ Yaeko said, lighting a new cigarette.
Between 1988 and 1989, a serial killer had abducted and killed four young girls in Tokyo and Saitama prefecture. It was all over the news. The defence was trying to plead insanity, but Yaeko was pretty sure that wouldn’t hold.
‘I wish you’d told me sooner,’ Sasagaki muttered.
‘Told you about what?’
‘About your late husband’s predilections.’
‘Oh,’ Yaeko said, trying to smile, but only succeeding in making her face go tense in a weird way.
So that’s why he brought up Miyazaki.
‘What good would that have done you?’ she asked.
‘What good? If I’d heard about that at the time of the investigation, it would have turned things around completely.’
‘You don’t say,’ Yaeko said, blowing out smoke. ‘Well, that’s too bad, I guess.’
‘Not that you could’ve said anything at the time.’
‘No, I couldn’t have.’
‘Yeah.’ Sasagaki said, putting a hand to his forehead. ‘And now here we are, nineteen years later.’
Yaeko wanted to ask him what he meant, but she held back. Whatever the detective was thinking deep down inside, she didn’t want to know.
Another silence followed. They had got the second bottle of beer down to about one third full when Sasagaki stood. ‘Guess I’ll be heading home.’
‘Thanks for coming out in the cold. Don’t be a stranger.’
‘I won’t,’ Sasagaki said, paying the bill, putting on his coat, and wrapping his brown scarf around his neck. ‘Oh, and I’m a little early, but happy New Year.’
‘Happy New Year,’ Yaeko said, with a smile.
Sasagaki grabbed the handle on the old sliding door, but before he opened it, he turned. ‘Was he really upstairs?’
‘Who?’
‘Ryo. Was he really upstairs that day?’
‘What are you talking about?’
Sasagaki shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s nothing. Next time.’ He opened the door and stepped outside.
Yaeko stared at the door for a while before sitting down. She had goosebumps on the back of her neck, and not because of the cold air that had come streaming into the bar.
Sounds like Ryo’s heading out again. Matsuura’s words came back to her across the years. He was right there, on top of her, a bead of sweat running down his temple.
She had heard it too, the sound of footsteps on shingles. She’d known about Ryo’s habit of leaving through his window and walking across the roof to get outside. She’d never mentioned it to the boy, though. Having him out of the house made it easier for her to spend time with Matsuura.
He had left that day, too. She remembered hearing the sound again when he came back.
So he wasn’t there. But so what? What does that detective think Ryo did?
Santa Claus stood by the doorway, handing out cards. Speakers inside were playing classical arrangements of Christmas songs. The combination of Christmas, New Year, and the grand opening sale meant that the aisles were packed. Nearly all the customers were young women. Like insects drawn to a flower, Sasagaki thought.
It was opening day at Yukiho Shinozuka’s R&Y Osaka branch. Unlike the shops in Tokyo, this one took up an entire building. It was more than just clothes. There were accessories, bags, and a whole floor for shoes – all luxury brands, not that Sasagaki could tell the difference. Everything about the place seemed to contradict what he had heard about Japan’s economic bubble breaking.
There was a small café next to the escalator leading from the ground floor to the first. Sasagaki had been sitting there for about an hour, looking down on the floor below. Even when night fell outside, the customers kept coming. He’d had to line up for a while just to get into the café, and there was still a long line at the entrance. Sasagaki ordered a second cup of coffee to keep himself on the good side of the staff.
A young couple sat across the table from him. To a casual observer, they might have looked like a young man and wife out for a day with grandpa. ‘No show, huh?’ the younger man said quietly.
Sasagaki nodded. His eyes focused on the floor below them.
Both of the people sitting across from him were officers from Osaka Homicide.
Sasagaki looked at his watch. It was nearing closing time.
‘There’s still a chance,’ he said, half to himself.
If Ryo Kirihara showed up, the two officers were going to take him into custody. The retired Sasagaki was only there as a spotter. Koga had arranged everything.
Kirihara was wanted for murder.
The moment Sasagaki had seen the fragment of glass from the broken cactus pot, a light had gone off in his head. He remembered the descriptions he’d read in reports of Matsuura just before he disappeared, in particular the comments they’d had from several people that he often wore Ray-Bans with green-tinted lenses. Maybe he hadn’t been lying low after the pirated game bust after all. Maybe something worse had happened to him.
Sasagaki had Koga run a check on the glass. He was right. It was from a pair of Ray-Bans, and the slight fingerprint they found on it bore a strong resemblance to one they had taken in Matsuura’s apartment. Forensics said there was a greater than ninety per cent chance it was his.
So why was a fragment of Matsuura’s sunglasses in that pot? The most obvious explanation was that the glass had been in the dirt Reiko Karasawa used when she potted her cactus. So where did she get the dirt? Probably from her own garden.
They had needed a search warrant to start digging up the Karasawa garden. That was a difficult call to make, given the evidence they had, but Koga was willing to risk it. It helped that there were currently no residents at the Karasawa house. It also could have been grudging respect for an old detective’s persistence, Sasagaki thought.
They had performed the search the day before and found a patch of soil in the tightly planted yard with no trees in it. They began to dig there first.
Roughly two hours later, they found a single white bone. Then the others. There were no clothes. They estimated that seven or eight years had passed since the time of death.
Osaka police then sent the remains to a forensic laboratory in an attempt to determine their identity. There were several ways by which they could do this, but each would take time. The odds were good, though, that they would be able to tell whether the bones belonged to Matsuura or not.
For his part, Sasagaki was sure they were Matsuura’s once he heard that they’d found a small platinum ring on the right pinky finger of the skeleton. He could remember seeing it on the man’s hand like it was yesterday.
The right hand was holding a piece of evidence, too: several strands of human hair wrapped around the bleached finger bones. Like hair he might have pulled out during a struggle.
Now the question was whether they could identify those hairs as belonging to Ryo Kirihara. Typically hair was identified by its colour, lustre, hardness, thickness, medullary index, pigment distribution and blood type, allowing a near one-to-one match with an individual. But given that the hair in question had been buried for years, it was uncertain how much of that information remained intact. Koga had promised to send it to a DNA lab for testing if it came to that.
DNA testing was a relatively new method, but they’d had some success with it over the last couple of years. There were plans to share the technology with every police station in the country within the next four years, but right now there was only one lab running the tests.
Times had changed in the nineteen years since the pawnbroker died. Everything was different now, even the way the police ran investigations.
The problem, then, was finding Ryo. No matter how much evidence they had on him, if they couldn’t arrest him, none of it mattered.
It had been Sasagaki’s suggestion that they keep a close eye on Yukiho Shinozuka’s surroundings. Watch the shrimp and eventually you’ll find the goby, that was his belief.
‘He has to show up when she opens her new shop. Opening a place in Osaka has a special meaning for them. And Yukiho’s been too busy with her shops in Tokyo to come down to Osaka all the time, so they’re due for a reunion. Opening day is our day,’ Sasagaki had told Koga.
Koga agreed with the old detective. From the moment the shop opened, several officers had taken turns watching from various vantage points. Sasagaki, too, had been there since that morning in a coffee shop across the street. Eventually, after hours of fruitless watching, he’d come inside.
‘You think Kirihara is still going by Yuichi Akiyoshi?’ the male detective asked.
‘Hard to say. He might have switched to a different name by now.’
While he answered, Sasagaki’s mind was drifting off in another direction – wondering about Ryo’s choice of alias.
It had sounded familiar the first time he heard it, but it was only recently that he had put two and two together. He had heard the name ‘Akiyoshi’ from his informant Fumihiko Kikuchi. Yuichi Akiyoshi was the name of the kid who had tattled on him about the keychain, linking Fumihiko to the rape. Yuichi Akiyoshi, the traitor.
So why had Ryo chosen that particular name as an alias? He would have to ask Ryo himself to know for sure, but Sasagaki’s pet theory was that Ryo saw himself living a life of betrayal. His choice of Akiyoshi’s name was a self-deprecating inside joke.
Not that any of that mattered any more.
Sasagaki was almost certain he knew why Ryo had set up Fumihiko. The photograph Fumihiko had showing Yaeko and Matsuura’s affair was a thorn in his side. If Fumihiko had shown the photograph to the police, it might have spurred a reopening of the entire case, making Ryo fear for his alibi. If Yaeko and Matsuura had been in mid-tryst, that would have left Ryo alone. Even if the police back then were unlikely to suspect an elementary school boy of murdering his own father, it was a piece of evidence he’d rather not have out there.
It had been while he was drinking with Yaeko the night before that Sasagaki had finally reached clarity in his own conjectures. Ryo had been alone on the top floor that day, but he hadn’t stayed in the house. Just as it was easy for burglars to sneak in through the upper-storey windows in those crowded neighbourhoods, a boy could sneak out by the same route. Ryo had gone somewhere that day, stepping across the rooftops.
And what had he done while he was away?
An announcement began to play in the shop announcing closing time. The flow of people shifted as more started heading for the door.
‘No luck, I guess,’ the man said. His partner looked similarly disappointed.
If they couldn’t find Ryo today, they intended to take Yukiho Shinozuka in for questioning. But Sasagaki was against that. He was certain she wouldn’t reveal anything of value. She would just give an utterly convincing expression of the purest surprise and say, ‘What? Bones found in my poor mother’s garden? I don’t believe it! It can’t be true!’ And once she said that, they would have nothing. They knew from Makoto Takamiya’s testimony that Reiko Karasawa had been visiting her daughter on New Year’s Eve seven years ago when Matsuura was thought to have been killed. But there was still no proof that there was any connection between Ryo and Yukiho.
‘Mr Sasagaki, over there,’ the female detective said, subtly gesturing with her finger.
Sasagaki looked and saw Yukiho herself walking through the shop. She was wearing a white suit and a million-dollar smile. She was so beautiful she shone with a radiance that captured the eyes of every customer and even the floor staff around her. Wherever she walked, people turned to look, some whispering, some just staring.
‘The queen makes an appearance,’ the man whispered.
Yet when Sasagaki looked at Queen Yukiho, an entirely different image was superimposed in his mind. The little girl he’d met in that rundown apartment so many years ago. The girl who let no one close, closed off to everyone.
If only he’d heard about Yosuke Kirihara’s predilections earlier he might have figured it out.
It had been five years ago when he’d first heard it from Yaeko. She was drunk, which was probably why she even talked about it to him at all.
‘I can only say this now that he’s gone, but my husband was never much in the sack. Well, not at first. He was fine at first, but gradually things got pretty quiet. See, he found something else, something better. Well, younger at least. Yeah, he liked little girls. He was always buying pictures of ’em. I threw them all away when he died, of course. Those things aren’t right.’
In itself, this wasn’t particularly surprising to the old detective, but it was what she said next that set his mind spinning.
‘I heard something from Matsuura once. He said my husband was buying girls. When I asked him what that meant, he said he was paying money to sleep with them, really young ones, too. I asked if there was a shop that did that kind of thing, and why they didn’t shut it down, and he laughed, saying that the wife of the pawnbroker should know more about these things. You know what he said? He told me it was moms selling their daughters for food.’
Her words set off a storm in Sasagaki’s head. But when it passed it felt like a thick mist before his eyes had lifted.
Yaeko wasn’t finished, either.
‘You know, he even got it into his head that he wanted to adopt. He went so far as to ask a lawyer what it would take to formally adopt someone else’s kid. When I started asking about it, he got real mad and told me it had nothing to do with me. He said if I kept bugging him about it he’d leave. To be honest, I think he was starting to lose it.’
Yet it was then that Sasagaki found the answers he had been looking for.
Yosuke Kirihara hadn’t been visiting Fumiyo Nishimoto’s apartment to see her. He’d been going there to see her daughter. He’d probably been there several times, with money, paying to sleep with her. The old apartment took on an entirely different image in Sasagaki’s mind. It wasn’t a refuge from a hard world. It was a place of business, illicit and contemptible.
This suggested another question to him. Was Yosuke Kirihara the only customer?
What about Tadao Terasaki, who died in the car accident? The investigation team had had him pegged as Fumiyo’s lover, but wouldn’t it make more sense if he had just been another pervert of the same persuasion as Kirihara?
There would be no way of knowing that now. There could have been any number of other customers and he would have no way of knowing.
The only one he knew about for sure was Kirihara.
Now the one million yen made sense. It was a final payment to Fumiyo so he could adopt her daughter. Paying for the privilege of being with the girl wasn’t enough. He wanted her for his very own. Kirihara had gone to the library to pick up the object of his obsession, leaving Fumiyo to wander down to the park where she sat on the swings. Sasagaki wondered what kind of thoughts must have been going through her head.
He could paint a clear picture about what happened next. Kirihara had taken the girl into the abandoned building. He didn’t think she would have resisted much, especially not when Kirihara told her about the million yen he’d given her mom.
Sasagaki didn’t particularly want to imagine what had taken place in that dusty little room, but he did know one thing – Ryo had been there too. After leaving his house he had headed for the library. He probably went there a lot to see Yukiho and show her his paper cut-outs. The library was their sanctuary from the madness of the world around them.
But that day, near the library, Ryo saw something strange: his father, leading Yukiho by the hand. He followed them into the building. He might not have known what was going on, but he knew how to spy on them. Ryo had gone straight into the ducts. From his vantage point in the air duct near the ceiling he would have seen a nightmare unfold.
What sadness and hatred must have filled him, guiding the hands that gripped his favourite pair of scissors. Sasagaki pictured the wounds in the body – wounds that surely lay just as deeply on Ryo’s heart.
After killing his father, Ryo let Yukiho escape through the door before jamming it with the cinder block – a smart move to delay discovery of the body. When Sasagaki pictured how the boy must have felt as he crawled back out through the darkness of those air ducts, it made his chest ache.
He couldn’t say what Ryo and Yukiho had decided on afterwards. Maybe they had never decided anything – they were just trying to keep what remained of their souls intact. Yukiho shut herself off from the world, never showing her true self to anyone, and Ryo… he was still crawling through the darkness all these years later.
Ryo’s motive for killing Matsuura had been to protect his alibi. It was also possible that Matsuura had somehow realised the boy’s guilt and held it over him when he coerced Ryo into pirating software.
But Sasagaki saw another motive there as well. Ryo would have seen a connection between his father’s predilection for young girls and his mother’s unfaithfulness. From his room on the upper storey of that old wooden building, he must have heard his mother with Matsuura on any number of occasions. To him, Matsuura could well have seemed like the thing that was driving his parents
mad.
‘Time to go,’ the young detective said, bringing Sasagaki back to the present. He looked around, seeing the café had nearly emptied out.
A no-show.
A kind of emptiness spread in the old detective’s chest. That morning he’d realised that if he didn’t catch Ryo today, he’d never catch him. But sitting here in this empty café wouldn’t help a thing.
‘Guess so,’ he said, slowly lifting himself to his feet.
Outside the café, Sasagaki got on the escalator with the two other detectives. Most of the customers were on their way out. The store staff looked happy, pleased with a successful opening. The Santa Claus from the door was heading up the escalator as they went down. He was slumped in his costume, exhausted from a long day of handing out cards.
Back on the first floor, Sasagaki glanced around the shop. Yukiho was nowhere to be seen. She was probably in a back office somewhere, tabulating the day’s takings.
‘Thanks for the help,’ the man whispered just before they left.
Sasagaki nodded. The rest would be up to them, the younger generation. He wished them the best of luck.
Sasagaki went out of the store with a few other customers. The other two detectives broke out from the crowd and went to another of their co-workers across the street. They would regroup, then head in to question Yukiho.
Sasagaki pulled his coat tighter and started to walk. A mother who had just left the store before him was walking with her child.
‘That’s lovely,’ the girl’s mother was saying, looking at something in the little girl’s hand. ‘You’ll have to show it to Daddy when we get home.’
The girl was about four years old. She was holding something up in her hand, a piece of paper fluttering in the wind.
Sasagaki’s eyes went wide. The red paper in the girl’s hand had been expertly cut into the shape of a reindeer.
‘Wait, where did you get that?’ he asked, suddenly grabbing the girl’s arm from behind.
The girl’s mother turned, shocked, her hands going to protect her daughter. ‘What are you doing!?’
The little girl looked as if she was about to cry. A few passers-by stopped to watch.
‘I – I’m sorry. I just wanted to know where your daughter got that,’ Sasagaki asked, pointing at the reindeer.
‘She got it just now, at the store.’
‘From whom? Who gave that to you?’
‘Santa gave it to me,’ the girl said.
Sasagaki spun around and ran at full speed, gritting his teeth against the ache in his knees.
The doors to the shop were already closed. The few detectives standing outside looked surprised when they saw Sasagaki running toward them.
‘What is it?’ one of them asked.
‘Santa Claus!’ Sasagaki shouted. ‘He’s Santa Claus!’
Immediately grasping the situation, the detectives lunged forward and forced open the closed automatic glass doors, spilling into the shop. Ignoring the floor staff trying to stop them, they ran up the stopped escalator.
Sasagaki tried vainly to keep up with them, but then had another thought and instead turned back outside to head down the narrow alleyway that ran along the side of the shop.
I’m an idiot. How long have I been chasing this guy? How long has he been lurking in the shadows where no one would see him, watching over Yukiho?
Behind the building was a metal staircase with a railing that led up to a door. He ran up the stairs and yanked the door open to see a man standing in front of him, dressed all in black. He looked surprised to suddenly see someone appearing in front of him.
It was a strange, lingering moment in time. Sasagaki knew the man standing in front of him was Ryo Kirihara. And yet he couldn’t move to grab him. He couldn’t even speak. Meanwhile another part of his mind realised that Ryo knew who he was, too.
A second passed and the moment was gone. Ryo whirled around and began running in the opposite direction.
‘Stop!’ Sasagaki shouted, chasing after him.
He ran through the corridor and out into the first floor of the store. The other detectives were there in force. Ryo was running, weaving between shelves piled high with expensive-looking bags. ‘It’s him!’ Sasagaki shouted.
The detectives turned and ran. Ryo was making for the top of the elevator. We’ve got you now, Sasagaki thought.
But just before Ryo reached the escalator he swerved, and without a moment’s hesitation he leapt off the balcony.
A cry went up from the store clerks on the floor below. There was a loud crash of something breaking. The detectives raced down the steps of the escalator.
Sasagaki reached the escalator a few seconds behind them. His heart was racing painfully. Hand to his chest, he took the steps slowly.
Down on the ground floor, the giant Christmas tree was lying on its side. Ryo Kirihara was lying next to it, his arms and legs splayed out. He wasn’t moving.
A detective ran closer and tried to pull him up, but then he stopped and turned toward Sasagaki.
‘What is it?’ Sasagaki asked. The detective just pointed down at Ryo. A pool of blood had started to spread on the floor beneath him.
Sasagaki walked over and knelt down. He started to roll Ryo over when he heard another scream.
There was something sticking out of Ryo’s chest. It was hard to see through the blood, but Sasagaki knew exactly what they were. His scissors.
Someone shouted for an ambulance and he heard footsteps running, but Sasagaki had seen enough corpses in his life to know when it was too late for that. Sensing a presence, he looked up. Yukiho was standing nearby, her face as white as snow.
‘Who is this man?’ Sasagaki asked, looking her in the eye.
Yukiho was as expressionless as a porcelain doll. ‘I don’t know him at all,’ she said quietly. ‘The manager hired him.’
A young woman showed up, her face pale, and introduced herself as the manager.
The detectives were starting to move. One began roping off the scene. Another began questioning the manager, and another put his hand on Sasagaki’s shoulder.
The old detective let himself be led away. He was walking a little shakily. He looked up and saw Yukiho going up the escalator, looking like a white shadow from behind.
Not once did she look around.
THE END
