‘What, you want an alibi now?’ Terasaki said, rolling his eyes.
‘Something like that,’ Sasagaki said with a smile. People were quick to mention alibis lately thanks to a popular detective show on TV.
Terasaki took out a small appointment book and flipped back through the pages.
‘Let’s see, on the evening of the twelfth I was in Toyonaka making a delivery.’
‘Around what time was this?’
‘I got to the customer’s house around six.’
Which would give him a perfect alibi, Sasagaki thought. Another miss.
‘And the delivery went smoothly?’
‘Actually, no. I guess there was a bit of a miscommunication,’ Terasaki said, slightly mumbling his words. ‘She was out when I got there. So I just left my business card at the door and went home.’
‘They weren’t expecting you?’
‘I thought I’d told her I was coming on the phone. I guess she didn’t hear me.’
‘So you went home without seeing anyone, is that correct?’
‘Yeah, but I did leave my card.’
Sasagaki nodded, thinking that there were any number of ways he could have got his card there.
Sasagaki took down the address and phone number of the house in Toyonaka and let him go.
Back at the station, Nakatsuka wanted to know if Sasagaki thought he was guilty.
‘Fifty-fifty,’ was Sasagaki’s honest reply. ‘He doesn’t have an alibi and he has a motive. I think, if he were in league with Fumiyo Nishimoto, he could’ve pulled it off pretty smoothly. The thing that bothers me is that, if they were the killers, then they were acting far too nonchalant about it afterwards. Normally you’d expect them to avoid seeing each other until things died down. But they didn’t change a thing. Terasaki was still going to eat lunch at her noodle shop every day. It doesn’t make sense.’
Nakatsuka listened in silence, but his sour frown alone was proof enough of his agreement.
The team launched into a full investigation on the proprietor of Swallowtail Inc. Terasaki lived by himself in an apartment building about a fifteen-minute drive to the south. He’d been married once, but it had ended five years earlier in an amicable divorce.
He was well thought of by his customers. He worked quickly, was happy to take difficult requests, and his prices were low. The small retailers he worked with loved him. None of this, of course, cleared his name of murder. On the contrary, the investigative team was interested in how, by all indications, he seemed to be running a shoestring operation, never rising into wealth through his efforts.
‘I could see him murdering Mr Kirihara because he was putting the moves on Fumiyo, but I can also see him lured in by the one million,’ the detective assigned to look into Terasaki’s financial situation said during a team meeting. Many of the other investigators agreed.
They had already confirmed Terasaki’s lack of an alibi. When they went to the house where he claimed to have left his business card they found that the woman who lived there had been at a relative’s that day and had not come home until eleven at night. She had found Terasaki’s business card under her door, but there was no way of telling when he had left it there. When they asked whether she had been expecting him to come that day, she told them, ‘He said he’d be coming around then, but I don’t think we agreed on that day in particular.’ Then she added, ‘Actually, I remember telling Mr Terasaki on the phone that the twelfth wasn’t good for me.’
This last part was particularly significant. If Terasaki had known she would be out that day, it would have made her house an excellent choice to visit in an attempt to create an alibi.
The prevailing opinion in the investigative team was gradually turning against Terasaki.
However they still lacked any substantial evidence. None of the hairs recovered at the scene of the crime matched Terasaki’s, nor did any of the fingerprints. There were no witnesses. If Fumiyo and Terasaki had been conspirators, they would have had to be in communication on the day of the murder, yet there were no signs of that either. Some of the older detectives thought they should just interrogate him until he confessed, but as it stood, they didn’t even have enough to get a warrant.
A month had passed without any progress. Whereas before the detectives had been spending their nights either on stakeouts or sleeping under desks, now they had started to go home, and Sasagaki went home for the first real bath he had taken in weeks. He was married, living in an apartment by Yao City Station, about an hour to the south-east of their current headquarters. His wife, Katsuko, was three years older than he was. They had no children.
Sasagaki was woken from sleep early the next morning by the sound of Katsuko hurriedly dressing. He looked at the clock. It was just after seven.
‘You going someplace?’ Sasagaki asked from the futon.
‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m just going to the supermarket.’
‘You’re going shopping? This early?’
‘You have to line up now or you won’t get anything.’
‘Won’t get any what? What are you going to buy?’
‘Toilet paper, of course.’
‘Huh? Toilet paper?’
‘I went yesterday too. They’re limiting it to one bag per person, you know. You’re lucky I don’t make you go with me.’
‘Why do we need so much toilet paper?’
‘If you don’t know about the oil shortage, I don’t have time to explain. I’ll see you later,’ Katsuko said, slipping into her cardigan and snatching up her wallet as she ran out of the door.
Sasagaki’s head was a confused swirl. He’d been so full of the investigation lately he had very little notion of what was going on in the world outside. He’d heard about the oil shortage, but he didn’t see what that had to do with toilet paper, or why people were queueing up this early in the morning to get it.
He decided he would ask Katsuko when she got home and tried closing his eyes again.
The phone rang moments later. He twisted under the cover and reached for the black rotary phone squatting by his pillow. His head hurt a little and he hadn’t quite got his eyes all the way open yet.
‘Yeah? Sasagaki speaking.’
About ten seconds later he leapt from the futon, all thoughts of sleep having fled his mind. The phone call had been to tell him that Tadao Terasaki was dead.
Terasaki had died on one of the main expressways through Osaka. He hadn’t quite made it around a curve and had slammed into the divider, a classic case of falling asleep at the wheel.
His van had been stocked with a large quantity of soap and detergent. People were hoarding supplies and it came out later that Terasaki had run himself ragged trying to get as much stashed away for his customers as he could.
Sasagaki and a few other detectives searched Terasaki’s apartment for anything that might link him to the murder of Yosuke Kirihara, but no one could deny the feeling of futility that had come over the operation. Even if they did find something, their prime suspect was beyond prosecution.
Finally, one of the detectives found something in the van’s glove compartment: a Dunhill lighter. It was a tall model, with pointed corners. Everyone on the team remembered a similar lighter having gone missing from Kirihara’s possessions when he was found.
However, Kirihara’s fingerprints were not found on the lighter. In fact, no prints were found at all. It appeared to have been wiped with a cloth.
They showed the lighter to Yaeko, but she only shook her head. She said it did resemble her husband’s, but she couldn’t be absolutely sure.
They brought in Fumiyo Nishimoto for more questioning. The detectives were growing increasingly agitated and impatient for a confession, no matter what it took. The detective doing the questioning went so far as to make it sound like the lighter they’d found had belonged to Kirihara.
‘So, what?’ the detective pressed Fumiyo, waving the lighter in her face. ‘Did you take it out of the victim’s po
cket and give it to Terasaki? Or did Terasaki take it out of the dead man’s pocket himself? Well, which was it? Hmm?’
Yet Fumiyo continued to deny any involvement. Nor did she flinch or show any sign of breaking. Though a certain amount of shock would have been natural after Terasaki’s sudden death, there was nothing in her attitude that suggested any bewilderment at all.
We made a mistake, Sasagaki thought, sitting in a side room where he could listen to the interrogation. Somewhere along the line we took a wrong turn and it’s leading us nowhere.
TWO
Toshio Tagawa took a look at the sports page and thought about the game, his foul mood of the night before coming back over him.
The Yomiuri Giants had lost; there was nothing he could do about that. What bugged him was how it had gone down.
At the critical moment, Nagashima had just choked. This was the hitter that had taken the Giants to victory so many times before, and now his batting was so weak it hurt to watch. It was always Shigeo Nagashima who came through in a pinch, always the man they called ‘Mister Giants’ who gave a swing the fans could get behind, even when he was struck out.
But something had clearly gone wrong. To be honest, the warning signs had already been there two or three years back. But Tagawa, a Nagashima fan since childhood, had just looked away, unable to accept the harsh reality of what he was seeing. Everybody gets older. The day comes when even the best players have to leave the field. He looked at the photo in the newspaper of Nagashima having just been struck out and realised he might be at a critical juncture this year. The season was just getting started, but there would be rumours of retirement by summer. If the Giants stopped winning, it was almost certain. Tagawa wasn’t too hopeful about their prospects, either. They had charged through nine years at the top of the Central League, but he couldn’t help thinking that the cracks were beginning to show in the team – cracks epitomised by Nagashima.
He glanced sideways at an article about the Chunichi Dragon’s latest win and closed the paper. The clock on the wall showed it was four. He doubted anyone else would come today. Not many people paid rent on the day before payday, anyway.
Tagawa was mid-yawn when he noticed someone standing outside the office. He could just see glimpses through the spaces between the apartment flyers he’d taped up on the window. He couldn’t see a face, but he could see their shoes – sneakers, a child. Maybe some kid on his way home from elementary school killing time by checking out the apartment listings, Tagawa thought.
However, several seconds later, the door opened. A girl wearing a cardigan over a blouse peeked in, almost fearfully. Her eyes were large, like a cat’s. Tagawa guessed she was in her last years of elementary school, maybe sixth grade.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked. His voice sounded soft even to his own ears. If this had been one of the typical area brats, the kind with scuffed-up knees and worn faces, he doubted he would have sounded half as nice.
‘My name’s Nishimoto,’ the girl said.
‘Nishimoto? Where from?’
‘Yoshida Heights.’
The girl’s crisp diction and bright voice was remarkably refreshing to Tagawa’s ears. All the kids he knew talked as brutishly as you’d expect from their muddled heads and bad upbringing.
‘Yoshida Heights…’ Tagawa pulled a file off the shelf.
Eight families lived in Yoshida Heights. The Nishimoto unit was in the middle on the ground floor, No 103. Tagawa noted that they were two months behind on the rent. It had been about time for him to give them a call, in fact.
‘So, um.’ He turned back to the girl. ‘You’re Mrs Nishimoto’s daughter?’
‘Yes,’ the girl said.
Tagawa glanced back down at the file. The Nishimotos’ unit only listed two residents: Fumiyo Nishimoto and her daughter, Yukiho. When they had moved in ten years earlier, Fumiyo’s husband, Hideo, had been on the rental agreement, but he had died soon afterwards.
‘You come to pay the rent?’ Tagawa asked.
Yukiho looked down at the floor before shaking her head. Didn’t think so, Tagawa thought to himself. ‘So what’s this about?’
‘I was hoping you could open the door for me.’
‘What, the door to your apartment?’
‘I didn’t bring my key with me and I can’t get in.’
‘Oh.’ Finally Tagawa understood the reason for the girl’s visit. ‘So your mother locked the door and went out?’
Yukiho nodded. When she looked up at him, there was an allure to her face that made Tagawa forget for a moment that the girl was only in elementary school. He swallowed. ‘And you don’t know where she is?’
‘She didn’t say she’d be going out… that’s why I didn’t take my key with me.’
‘Right, I get you.’
Tagawa looked at the clock. It was still a little too early to close up shop. His father, who owned the estate agency, was off at a relative’s place since the day before, and wouldn’t be back until late tonight. Still, he couldn’t just stay here and give the master key to the girl. It was in the agreement with the property owner that someone from the estate agency would always be present when a master key was being used.
Normally he would have just told the girl to wait until her mother came home, but when he saw the forlorn look in her eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to turn her away.
‘Right, well, hold on, I’ll walk there with you.’ He stood and walked over to the safe with the keys for the rental properties.
Tagawa trailed Yukiho Nishimoto’s slender figure across the patched and cracked pavement on the ten-minute walk to Yoshida Heights. He noticed that she wasn’t wearing the usual school backpack. Instead she was carrying a red vinyl handbag.
When she walked, he heard a bell ringing from somewhere on her person. He wondered where the bell was, but couldn’t see it from behind her. Looking at her like this, he could tell now that she wasn’t particularly well off. The soles of her sneakers were worn thin, her cardigan was covered with pills, and a few holes were opening here and there. Even the fabric of her checked skirt looked spent.
And yet she gave off a kind of refined aura he was sure he’d never seen before, certainly not in these parts. It made him wonder where it came from. He knew Yukiho’s mother, an introverted, unremarkable woman, filled with the same vulgar desperation as everyone else who lived around here. It surprised him that a girl could grow up with a mother like that and still turn out the way she was.
‘Where’s your school?’ Tagawa asked from behind her.
‘Ōe Elementary,’ she said, turning her head slightly to answer while she walked.
‘You’re kidding.’
Ōe Elementary was the public school that nearly all the kids from the neighbourhood went to. Every year a couple of them would get picked up for shoplifting or simply disappear when their parents skipped town to escape loan sharks or the like. When you walked by the place in the afternoon it smelled like old lunch and when school finished the local hustlers would come out on their bicycles trying to sell the kids crap to part them from their allowances. It was that kind of school. Not that any of the kids that went to Ōe Elementary would get taken in by a street hustler.
He found it hard to believe that this girl went there. Of course, given what he knew about her household’s financial situation, sending her to private school would have been out of the question. He imagined she must be pretty popular in school.