The Red Locked Room Page 3

  ‘At that hour?’

  ‘Yes. I was planning a ski trip to Akakura with friends later today, so I wanted to take care of it this evening,’ she started to reply, but then she realised what the chief inspector might be implying. She blushed and her large eyes flashed in anger.

  ‘I’ll have you know the professor was a gentleman. It’s one thing to talk like that about me, but your insinuation is nothing more than an uncouth insult to the poor professor!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ replied the policeman, with an awkward grin. Afterwards, I learned that that was his way of questioning witnesses. One step back, two steps forward. Provoking his targets emotionally first and noting their true colours when they lost their self-control. That skill was what had got him to his current position. But writing about the man is not the purpose of the article, which is to describe how the incident became an impossible crime.

  After the interrogation was over, a detective entered the room and whispered something to the chief inspector, who told us what the man had said, probably in an attempt to get a give-and-take deal with us.

  ‘The medical report is in.’

  ‘That was fast,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s because the cause of death was relatively clear. The professor had only one wound, which proved fatal. His right lung was pierced from behind and the murder weapon was probably a knife with a blade eight centimetres long. There was internal bleeding in one lung, which led to pressure on the organ.’

  The medical student Kimiko Satō listened with interest to the report, but I could only feel a shudder run down my spine.

  ‘The time of death is estimated to be around nine o’clock. But, judging by the internal bleeding, the murderer must have kept the professor alive for quite some time by leaving the weapon in the wound. For some reason, he only pulled it out later when, not unexpectedly, he took it with him.’

  He spoke quite freely, and while it may have been my imagination, it seemed to me his eyes were carefully following our reactions, especially mine. I had my own ideas about why the murderer would have left the weapon in the wound for a while to keep the professor alive, but I didn’t like the way the chief inspector looked at me, so I decided to keep my mouth shut.

  ‘The knife acted like a kind of plug, so the moment it was pulled out, the professor started to bleed profusely. According to the report, the victim must have died almost instantaneously. As for the overcoat found in the garden, it appears to have been used to cover the wound when the knife was pulled out, which is how the murderer avoided being covered by the blood spraying out of the wound.’

  He stopped and stared at me again.

  The murder weapon had been discovered that morning in the snow. It was a fruit knife with a blade eight centimetres long, exactly as the chief inspector had told us. We were shown it later. It was made of stainless steel, but instead of a normal blade it had a triangular tip to cut out fruit cores. Even the chief inspector seemed to have trouble explaining why the culprit had left the weapon just outside the crime scene.

  ‘Mine, you say you arrived here at the house just before Ms. Satō, but didn’t you actually get here much earlier? The Meteorological Agency reported to us that the snow stopped falling at eight-forty, and as your footprints were found in the snow, we know you didn’t arrive before that. But, supposing you did arrive at eight-forty, you’d still have plenty of time to get into a fight with the professor and commit the crime. What do you say to that?’

  ‘Wha—what are you saying! That’s nonsense. I arrived here only two or three minutes before Ms. Satō. That was at nine twenty-six or twenty-seven. You may think everyone you meet is a crook, but I don’t take lightly to being accused of murder. I’ve known Professor Zama since just after the war. How could I ever kill a man I respected so much? Try someone else.’

  I don’t remember my precise words, but it was something like that. A grin appeared on Chief Inspector Tadokoro’s ugly face.

  ‘Mine, do you have an alibi between eight-forty and nine o’clock?’ he asked as he patted his shoulder with a large fist. I had felt really cold after getting off the train at Takadanobaba, so I decided to have something to warm myself up at one of the oden food stalls lined up outside the station. That was probably within the time frame, but who was going to remember the name of a random food stall?

  ‘Now you mention it, I do remember your breath smelled of alcohol when I got here.’ Kimiko collaborated my story.

  ‘I see. While we’re at it, would you mind telling me your own alibi then?’

  ‘I was in my room all the time.’

  ‘Well, that’s a clear-cut answer.’

  The chief inspector called for two detectives to check out the food stall and the girl’s lodgings. I pitied them having to go out into the snow. They, as well as the two of us who had stumbled into the crime scene by accident, were having a very rough night.

  ‘Mine, you never know whether something like tonight will happen again, so the next time you’re out eating yakitori, you’d better take a good look at the name of the stand.’

  The chief inspector grinned as he spoke to me, but I looked the other way and pretended I hadn’t heard him.

  Ms. Satō’s alibi was soon confirmed, but mine could not be proved. The detectives had asked around the food stalls there, but bad luck always has company, and none of the servers at the oden food stalls remembered me as a customer. Subsequent investigation made it clear I had no motive to murder the professor, however, so the matter was not pursued further.

  With the Mine Hypothesis on hold for the moment, the chief inspector looked at both of us and that awkward smile appeared on his face again.

  ‘You two must be familiar with the people around the professor. Are you aware of anyone who may have had a motive? Don’t worry, we’re not going to arrest someone just because you’ve named them. It’s just normal procedure.’

  As a reflex I pointed to my manuscript about the discussion, which I had brought along.

  ‘Chief Inspector, you might want to take a look at this article. It may interest you.’

  4

  Having got nowhere on the case, Tadokoro asked Ryūzō Hoshikage for help, as usual. The latter was in the international trading business and had only returned the evening of the day before from a business trip to South-East Asia. It almost appeared that his white forehead had acquired a tan.

  ‘Well, what did the manuscript say?’ asked Hoshikage. He was blunt by nature and his tone was very arrogant, which invariably rubbed the police the wrong way. As a result, he wasn’t much liked.

  ‘I’ll bring you the magazine with the article later, but it was basically a round-table talk with a psychic and a spirit medium. Well, perhaps round-table talk isn’t the right way to describe it. Professor Zama was a very straightforward individual, so he began calling all spiritual experiments fakes, frauds and more. But a doctor specialising in ectoplasm wouldn’t have any of that, so the conversation became quite heated.’

  As the events had occurred while Mr. Hoshikage was abroad, he was completely unaware of the case, so the chief inspector had to explain all the details to him.

  ‘The psychic is Donryū Ōta, fifty years old, who owns a laboratory in Honjo. He has large eyes, thick eyebrows and a moustache. The spirit medium is Shikibu Takemoto, who behaves almost like an aristocrat. She’s approaching thirty and is very attractive, with fair skin. What’s odd about her is that she never seems to blink. She stares at you fixedly with her narrow eyes, like a snake eyeing its prey. She can make you feel as though you’re drowning in her eyes.’

  With no meaningful developments in the investigation, Tadokoro must have felt under pressure, which made him a lot more talkative. Hoshikage had a pipe in his mouth, but had not lit it and urged the chief inspector to continue.

  ‘You’ll see it for yourself when you read the article, but that Shikibu Takemoto was like still water, and hardly spoke during the talk. Donryū, on the other hand, was reportedly red
in the face and ready to explode. The professor maintained that simply mentioning thousands of experiments which had not provided real data was scarcely convincing, scientifically speaking. He started out with some harsh critiques, but then he simply sneered and laughed at them, so that Donryū became quieter and quieter as the talk continued. Being treated like that, I wouldn’t be surprised if either of them thought about killing the professor.’

  Tadokoro paused and took a swig of whisky. Hoshikage lit his pipe.

  ‘At the round-table talk, Donryū claimed that the spirit medium could manifest herself as ectoplasm outside her physical body and that he could control that ectoplasm, so he threatened the professor, saying that if they wanted, they could send an apparition to kill him. The talk ended with the professor laughing at the threat. I don’t believe in that spiritual mumbo-jumbo, but considering I have a real murder where the culprit left no footprints before me now, I’m starting to ask myself whether it really wasn’t ectoplasm that killed the man.’

  Hoshikage puffed calmly on his pipe and merely asked:

  ‘How are their alibis?’

  ‘Both have an alibi, being at the laboratory in Honjo at the time of the murder. At least, they should have an alibi, but…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s very unfortunate, but Donryū is proclaiming proudly that he’s the murderer. He claims to have controlled Shikibu’s ectoplasm and killed the professor. He couldn’t do nothing, having had his psychic powers insulted like that, so this was revenge. The professor himself had laughed and said that if their powers were real, they should try to kill him. So they showed him exactly what the true powers of the spirit were—at least, that’s his story. But suppose he really committed the murder with his spiritual powers, we can hardly go out and arrest a ghost, and I don’t think that it would be legally possible to punish the mastermind Donryū either.’

  ‘He knows that too, which is why he’s boasting about it.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Meanwhile, Mine, the editor-in-chief of the magazine New Century, had an idea that could explain why the murderer let the professor live a bit longer by leaving the knife in the wound. If Donryū really was the murderer, he might have used the extra time to communicate to the professor through the ectoplasm that it was revenge for his sneering remarks.’

  As a plain man, Tadokoro found dealing with such a strange case very difficult. But after taking another swig of whisky, he changed his manner.

  ‘There are theoretically two ways in which the murderer could have left the house without leaving footprints. I could recite them, but they’ve been examined already and don’t seem to withstand scrutiny.’

  The two men were not in Hoshikage’s office, located in the Maru Building, but in Hoshikage’s residence in Meguro. Just as in Professor Zama’s study, a gas heater was on, and its warmth seemed to soothe the chief inspector’s mind.

  ‘You see, the time of death of the victim hasn’t been determined precisely, so one theory is that the murder may have been committed while the snow was still falling.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘In which case the culprit’s footprints leaving the house would naturally be covered by the falling snow.’

  ‘But who pulled the knife out and threw it into the garden?’

  ‘That’s the problem. It seemed like a promising explanation, but it only led us to a dead end. If that had been the case, it must have been Nobuo Mine who pulled the knife out of the victim and threw it into the garden, because he arrived just before Kimiko Satō. But he has no reason for helping the murderer and hiding the weapon. Even if we suppose he did pull the knife from the back of the mortally wounded professor, the question remains why? That act on its own is completely meaningless. So the first idea seems to be a dud.’

  ‘I agree. And the other theory?’

  ‘If the murderer were someone with small feet—a woman like Shikibu Takemoto or Kimiko Satō, for example—that person could escape by simply walking across the snow. Then Mine, who arrived later, could erase their tracks by stepping on top of them one by one. But there again, there’s no motive for Mine to become an accomplice to the crime. So that idea doesn’t work either. And, in any case, Shikibu Takemoto has an alibi, since she didn’t set foot outside the whole night,’ Tadokoro concluded in some desperation.

  5

  ‘So what are your thoughts about the case, Mr. Hoshikage?’

  ‘Well, there’s one thing I want to ask you first: has it been confirmed that the footprints left in the snow belong to Mine and the female student?’

  ‘Yes. To be precise, there were two sets of prints going from the gate to the house entrance. The forensics people examined them closely and there was no trickery like walking backwards from the porch in their own footprints, or anything like that. Both sets of footprints were made by them walking forwards,’ the chief inspector declared confidently.

  ‘And there were no footprints of dogs, cats or other animals, or imprints left by some implement?’

  The policeman looked puzzled and shook his head.

  ‘Nothing at all like that,’ he replied. He had examined the garden himself, so he was absolutely sure.

  ‘Hmm.’

  Hoshikage turned his chiselled features towards the beautiful orchids outside as he contemplated the matter at hand. Lost in thought, his well-manicured slim fingers caressed his pencil moustache. Not wishing to disturb the amateur detective, Tadokoro remained seated, not making a sound or moving a muscle.

  ‘You said Mine has no motive, but that’s not strictly correct,’ said Hoshikage suddenly, after ten minutes of complete silence. ‘I’ve heard that his magazine New Century has been in the red for the last two or three years. According to news reports, as a result of the commotion he’s been making about the Zama murder, the first issue of this year has been selling extremely well. To put it another way, this case has been a genuine lifesaver for New Century.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘What I’m asking is whether Mine is really so patient as to wait for the heavens to provide him with such an opportunity? With those business results he might have been motivated not to wait.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, and it’s probably true that he respected the professor. But you shouldn’t forget he’s also feared as an editor-in-chief who’s willing to do anything.’

  Tadokoro was still not convinced. Would anyone commit murder for such a reason? But then Hoshikage grinned mischievously and he suddenly declared: ‘I’ve solved the mystery.’

  ‘You mean, Mine is really our man?’

  ‘Mine? Who ever said such a thing? I only told you he had a motive,’ he replied solemnly, but then loosened up again. ‘By the way, I have another question. Did Mine happen to have hurt his foot?’

  The chief inspector was a man who was not easily surprised, but he was taken aback by this question out of nowhere. His boorish face contorted and the Lucky Strike cigarette in his mouth fell to the floor.

  ‘Well, why are you staring at me? Answer the question.’

  ‘Yes, he did, he did!’ gasped the chief inspector in astonishment. ‘Bu—but how did you know? The night of the murder, when he was allowed to leave, he said he had slipped in front of his house and sprained his ankle.’

  Hoshikage did not answer his question, however.

  ‘And another question. On the night of the murder, was there any talk about a cat or dog being burnt in the neighbourhood?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ replied the chief inspector, with his eyes wide open. But now that Hoshikage was using his exceptional talents for making deductions, he could feel his spirits rising again.

  ‘But how could you possibly know that? It hasn’t even been mentioned in the newspapers or on the radio. A letter was sent to the Animal Protection League claiming that the writer had seen a cook throwing a live cat into a furnace and killing it. You know about the group, of course. A bunch of kooky ladies there who once sent a telegram to Kh
rushchev to protest sending a dog into space. They were not about to ignore such a letter, so they went to the Tozuka Police Station and demanded the cook be apprehended immediately. Of course, we couldn’t assign a detective to a cat case while we had our hands full with the Zama case. But to those ladies, the death of a stray cat was far more important than any professor being murdered. They looked like the bakeneko in ghost stories, the cat-like ghouls who lick the oil from oriental lamps.’

  The chief inspector didn’t seem to think highly of the Animal Protection League. He seemed relieved to have poured his heart out on the subject.

  ‘But how did you know about that?’

  ‘Oh, it spoke for itself. But how did it end up?’

  ‘Nothing much came out of it. The letter was sent anonymously, so we couldn’t learn more. But it doesn’t appear to have been a hoax. Several people did complain about an awful smell that evening. But how did you know about it?’

  ‘Just a hunch. The sprained ankle was also a one-in-three chance.’

  Hoshikage still spoke in riddles, but he wasn’t likely to talk even if Tadokoro pursued the matter, so he decided to change the subject.

  ‘You just said you solved the mystery. Do you mean the mystery of the footprints?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did the murderer set up a tightrope and—.’

  ‘No, no,’ Hoshikage immediately shot down the suggestion. ‘It was nothing so mechanical.’

  The chief inspector cocked his head in wonder. He simply couldn’t see it. The murderer had not used any mechanical trickery, but as no footprints had been left in the snow, it seemed as if the only solution left was that the murderer had been hiding inside the house. But he himself had led the investigation of the house, and not even a mouse had been found inside. So what had Hoshikage thought of?

  ‘But we searched the house extensively. There was no way we could have overlooked the murderer.’

  ‘Of course. I don’t remember ever saying he was inside the house,’ said Hoshikage nonchalantly.

  ‘But then I simply can’t comprehend what you are saying. If no mechanical trick was utilized, then the murderer must have walked across the snow, but as no footprints were left in the snow, then the only explanation is that the murderer must have been inside the house.’