‘Erm, no, he called me.’
‘Around what time?’
‘Once at six. Then again about a half-hour later.’
‘He called twice?’
‘That’s right.’
Sasagaki arranged the timeline in his head. If Matsuura was telling the truth, that would give him an alibi between six and six-thirty, which made it unlikely he had been the murderer.
Sasagaki asked for the name and phone number of the union man who had called. Matsuura pulled out a box of business cards and had begun looking through them when the door to the stairs opened. A boy’s face appeared in the gap. His eyes met with Sasagaki’s and he quickly shut the door. The detectives could hear his footsteps hurrying back up the stairs.
‘It looks like the Kirihara boy is in.’
‘What? Oh, yeah, he just got home from school.’
‘Would you mind if I took a look?’ Sasagaki said, indicating the stairs.
‘You want to see upstairs?’
‘If you don’t mind.’
‘No, yeah, sure, no problem.’
Sasagaki told Koga to take down the number of the man who’d called, then take a look at the safe. He leaned down to take off his shoes and stepped up behind the counter.
Opening the door, he took a look up the stairs. They were dimly lit and smelled of plaster dust from the walls. Years of sock traffic had polished the wooden stairs to a shiny black. Placing a hand on the wall for balance, Sasagaki cautiously climbed the steps.
At the top he found a narrow hallway running between two rooms. One side was closed with a sliding door, the other with a shoji screen. There was a small door at the end of the hallway that was either a closet or a toilet, Sasagaki decided.
‘Ryo? It’s Detective Sasagaki. I was hoping to have a word.’ Sasagaki stepped into the hallway.
For a while no answer came. Sasagaki had just taken a breath to call out again when he heard something clatter from behind the sliding door. Moving quickly, he took a step forward and opened the door. Ryo was inside, sitting at his desk, his back facing the detective.
‘Mind if I come in?’
Sasagaki stepped into the small tatami-matted room. This was the south-west corner of the house and sunlight came streaming in through the windows.
‘I don’t know anything, OK?’ Ryo said, his back still turned.
‘That’s fine. It’s all helpful. Mind if I sit down?’ Sasagaki asked, pointing towards a cushion on the floor. Ryo looked over his shoulder and nodded.
Sasagaki sat and looked up at the boy. ‘Sorry about your dad.’
Ryo said nothing. He didn’t even turn around.
Sasagaki looked around the room. It was clean to the point where it felt a little barren for a kid’s room. There were no posters of girls in bathing suits on the walls, no model racing cars. There was no manga on the bookshelf, either, just an encyclopedia and two science books for kids: How Cars Work, and How Televisions Work.
Sasagaki’s eyes lit on a frame on the wall. It contained a piece of white paper cut in the shape of a sailboat. The paper had been cut so deftly that even the rigging was reproduced perfectly. Sasagaki had seen some cut-paper pictures at an art show once and this seemed far more intricate.
‘That’s pretty impressive. You make that?’
Ryo glanced at the frame and nodded his head slightly.
‘Wow,’ Sasagaki said. His surprise was genuine. ‘That takes some skill. You could sell those if you wanted to, you know.’
‘What did you want to ask me?’
Apparently Ryo wasn’t one for exchanging small talk with middle-aged men.
‘Right,’ Sasagaki said, shifting on his cushion. ‘Were you home that day?’
‘That day?’
‘The day your father died.’
‘Oh, yeah. I was here.’
‘What were you doing between six and seven?’
‘In the evening?’
‘Yeah. Do you remember?’
The boy scratched his neck before saying, ‘Watching TV downstairs.’
‘By yourself?’
‘No, with my mom.’
Sasagaki nodded. He had been unable to detect any hesitation in the boy’s voice. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but would you mind facing me so we can talk?’
Ryo sighed and slowly turned his chair around. Sasagaki was half expecting a look of defiance from the boy but when he turned around he felt nothing of the sort. The boy’s eyes were blank, almost inorganic – the eyes of a scientist. Sasagaki felt as though he was being observed.
‘You remember what show you were watching?’ Sasagaki asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.
Ryo gave him the name of a television series popular with boys. Sasagaki asked him what the episode had been about. Ryo thought for a moment then gave him a perfect summary of that night’s action. Sasagaki had never even seen the show but he found he could picture it quite readily just from the boy’s description.
‘Until when were you watching TV?’
‘About seven-thirty.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘I had dinner with Mom.’
‘Right. You must’ve been worried when your father didn’t come home.’
‘Yeah,’ Ryo said in a small voice. Then he sighed and looked out of the window. Sasagaki found his eyes drawn outwards too. The sun was setting, casting a red glow across the sky.
‘Well,’ Sasagaki said at length, ‘sorry to bother you in the middle of your homework. Keep at it.’ He stood and gave the boy a clap on the shoulder.
Sasagaki and Koga went back to headquarters and compared notes with the two detectives who had questioned Yaeko. There weren’t any noticeable contradictions between what she had said and Matsuura’s statement. She too had claimed she was in the back with Ryo watching television when the customer came. She said she might have heard the buzzer ring, but she didn’t remember, and besides, she generally didn’t answer the door as it wasn’t her job to greet customers. She claimed she didn’t know what Matsuura had been up to while she was watching television. The description of the programme, too, matched Ryo’s. It would have been fairly simple for Yaeko and Matsuura to agree on a story in order to establish each other’s alibis, but with Ryo in the picture it changed everything. Nobody said it in as many words but the general feeling in the department was that the three of them were telling the truth.
Proof came soon afterwards. There was a record of the calls Matsuura had claimed came to the pawnshop at six and again at six-thirty. The man from the union had confirmed that it was Matsuura he talked to on the phone.
They were back to square one. The painstaking, methodical questioning of regulars to the pawnshop continued. The only progress made was that marked by the days on the calendar. In baseball, the Yomiuri Giants won nine games in a row, and Leo Esaki won the Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of electron tunnelling. As a direct result of the Yom Kippur War, oil prices were on the rise. Throughout the country, the feeling spread that something was about to happen.
Just as the investigation team was starting to get impatient, new information came in from the detectives looking into Fumiyo Nishimoto.
Kikuya was a nice little udon shop with a wooden lattice door, over which hung a navy-blue noren curtain with the name of the shop written in large white letters across it. It looked popular, with a good crowd for lunch and no sign of business tapering off even after one in the afternoon.
Around one-thirty, a white van parked on the street a short distance away from the shop. Large letters on the side of the van announced it as the property of Swallowtail Inc.
A man got out of the driver’s seat. He looked to be around forty years old, of a stocky build, with a shirt and tie on beneath a grey jacket. He walked quickly into Kikuya.
‘Like clockwork,’ Sasagaki said with a glance down at his wristwatch. ‘One-thirty on the dot.’ He was sitting in a café across the road from Kikuya looking out through the window.
&nb
sp; Sitting next to him, Detective Kanemura said, ‘I can also tell you what he’s ordering right now: tempura udon.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I’d bet money on it. I’ve been in there with him a few times already. Terasaki always gets the same thing.’
‘You’d think he’d get tired of it.’ Sasagaki looked back over at the shop. All this talk about udon was making his stomach rumble.
Though Fumiyo’s alibi had been corroborated, she was not yet entirely free from suspicion. The team was fixated on the fact that she was the last person Kirihara seemed to have met before going to his death. If she was involved in his murder, that pointed towards a collaborator. So they had cast a net, looking for anyone who might fit the description of the pretty widow’s young lover, when they had found Tadao Terasaki.
Terasaki made his livelihood as a wholesaler of cosmetics, beauty supplies, shampoo and detergent. He made deliveries to other retailers but also took orders directly from customers, which he would fulfil by personally delivering the goods to their doorstep. His outfit, Swallowtail Inc., was a company in name alone. Terasaki was the owner and sole employee.
Terasaki had first come to the attention of the team through the questioning of Fumiyo Nishimoto’s neighbours. A housewife had seen a man in a white van pay several visits to Fumiyo’s apartment. She remembered seeing the name of some company on the van, something about butterflies, but hadn’t been able to remember the exact name.
They began a stakeout near Yoshida Heights but the van never showed up. When they did find it, it was in an entirely different location: Kikuya, the udon shop where Fumiyo worked. A white van paid the shop a daily visit.
From the company name on the van it was easy to track down the man’s identity.
‘He’s out,’ Koga announced. It had been his job to watch the door. All three detectives looked across the street. Terasaki had left the shop, but he wasn’t going back to his van. He was just standing there. This, too, they had expected from Kanemura’s report.
A few moments later Fumiyo came out of the shop wearing a white work apron. She talked a while with Terasaki then went back inside the shop, leaving Terasaki to return to his van alone. Neither of them seemed to be worrying too much about being seen.
‘Let’s move,’ Sasagaki said, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray on the table as he stood.
Terasaki was just opening the van door when Koga called out to him. He turned, a startled look on his face. When he noticed Sasagaki and Kanemura coming from behind, his expression hardened.
Terasaki was willing enough to talk to them. They asked if he’d like to go to the café, but he said he’d prefer to talk right there in the van, so all four of them piled in: Terasaki in the driver’s seat, Sasagaki in the passenger’s seat, and Koga and Kanemura in the back.
Sasagaki asked whether he had heard about the death of the pawnshop owner in Ōe.
‘I read about it in the paper, or maybe it was on TV,’ Terasaki said, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘The last place Mr Kirihara visited before he died was the home of a Mrs Fumiyo Nishimoto. You do know Mrs Nishimoto, don’t you?’
Terasaki swallowed noticeably. ‘Nishimoto… the woman who works at that noodle shop right? Yeah, I know who she is.’
‘Well, we think she might have something to do with what happened.’
‘Ridiculous,’ Terasaki snorted, the corners of his mouth curling up into a smile.
‘Is it?’ Sasagaki asked.
‘How could she have anything to do with that?’
‘Mr Terasaki, you say you only “know who she is”, so why go out of your way to protect her?’
‘I ain’t protecting nobody.’
‘A white van’s been spotted several times near Yoshida Heights, along with a man driving it who pays regular visits to Mrs Nishimoto’s apartment. That man is you, isn’t it, Mr Terasaki?’
Terasaki was clearly flustered. He wet his lips and said, ‘She’s a customer, so what?’
‘A customer?’
‘You know, cosmetics, detergent. I bring the things she orders. That’s all.’
‘You know, Terasaki, if you’re lying, we’ll uncover the truth soon enough. We have a witness who says you visit her apartment frequently. I can’t imagine she needs that many cosmetics.’
Terasaki crossed his arms and closed his eyes.
‘Start lying now, Mr Terasaki, and you’ll just have to keep lying. It’s hard to keep it up, you know. And we’ll be watching you every minute of the day. All we have to do is wait until you visit Fumiyo Nishimoto again. So what would you do? Just give up on ever seeing her again? I think that’d be pretty tough on both of you. Look, why don’t you just tell us the truth? You’re in a relationship with Mrs Nishimoto, aren’t you?’
Sasagaki waited patiently for Terasaki to make the next move.
After a long silence, he sighed and opened his eyes. ‘So what’s it to you? I’m single, and she’s a widow.’
‘So you’re confirming the relationship?’
‘Yeah, we’re seeing each other. And not some fling, either. It’s serious,’ Terasaki said.
‘Since when?’
‘I have to tell you all that?’
‘Humour me,’ Sasagaki said with a smile.
‘Since about six months ago,’ Terasaki told him, a reluctant look on his face.
‘What started it?’
‘Nothing special. We saw each other at Kikuya, and got friendly, you know.’
‘Did she ever talk to you about Mr Kirihara?’
‘All I know is he ran the pawnshop she visited.’
‘Had you heard about his visits to her apartment?’
‘Yeah, I heard about that.’
‘And how did that make you feel?’
Terasaki’s eyebrows drew together and he made an unpleasant face. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You didn’t think Mr Kirihara might have had an ulterior motive for seeing her?’
‘What would be the point of thinking that? For one thing, Fumiyo’s not that kind of girl.’
‘And yet she was indebted to Mr Kirihara by the sound of it. He might have even helped her financially. That would make it pretty hard for her to resist if he put the pressure on, wouldn’t you think?’
‘Well, I never heard about it if he did. What are you getting at, anyway?’
‘I’m just trying to imagine a very likely scenario. Here we have a man who’s frequenting the apartment of the woman you’re seeing. Because of her situation she can’t easily brush him off. He’s happy to help her, but he wants more and he lets her know it. I can’t imagine you’d feel too good about that, being her lover.’
‘So what – I lost my cool and killed him? Do I look that stupid?’ Terasaki’s voice echoed loudly in the van.
Sasagaki held up a hand. ‘I’m just imagining a possible scenario, that’s all. I’m sorry if I touched a nerve. Incidentally, do you remember where you were on the twelfth of this month from six to seven in the afternoon? It was a Friday.’