The Red Locked Room Page 5

  Having explained, Hoshikage started stuffing tobacco in his pipe.

  ‘So the reason Kimiko came to the house was…’

  ‘To see how the professor was doing. She must have been worried about him. But she probably saw through Mine’s lies the moment she saw the professor’s shoes in the entrance hall. Lies that protected her.’

  Tadokoro remained silent. He was thinking of something completely different at that moment. He had finally understood the mysterious comment Hoshikage had made the previous night. After they had finished the questioning at the Zama residence, Tadokoro had ordered a detective to take Kimiko Satō back home by jeep and had watched her as she left the house. He recalled what he had seen at that precise moment. The murderer had indeed left the Zama residence simply by walking across the snow, just as Hoshikage had told him. There never was any trickery!

  The culprit was arrested the following day and made a full confession. Her account of events proved Hoshikage’s deductions and Mizuhara’s investigation correct in every way.

  Whose Body?

  1

  It is commonly said that those with a fondness for liquor do not like sweets, but Atsushi Akutagawa, an art merchant in Ginza, was someone who was able to enjoy the best of both worlds. He loved Curaçao and mint cocktails, but also the sweet azuki bean porridge shiruko, and every New Year, he would put away two bottles of sweet toso spiced sake.

  It was the third of March, the Peach Festival, also known as Hinamatsuri, Doll’s Day or Girls’ Day, one of five seasonal festivals when mothers and daughters set out displays of ornamental dolls representing the Emperor, Empress and court staff from the Heian period.

  That year, the third of March fell on a Sunday, so Akutagawa let his employees run the shop. After breakfast, he started on the sake while admiring the hina doll display. One bottle was already empty, and he was working on the second, when his phone started to ring. He could sense his wife talking far away, but he dozed off and started to snore gently.

  ‘Wake up, dear.’

  It was his wife, who appeared agitated.

  ‘It’s a phone call.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mr. Ikeda from the Shūyō Group?’

  As the wife of an art merchant, she was quite knowledgeable about the various artists’ groups. Inosuke Ikeda had been in the same year as Akutagawa at art school. He had once specialised in Western-style paintings, but had recently gone through formalist, cubist and expressionist phases to arrive at a new style of his own. He had been a mainstay of the art scene for several years.

  ‘What does he want? An advance?’

  ‘Just answer the phone!’ urged his wife.

  Akutagawa was suddenly wide awake as he took the phone.

  ‘It’s me. What’s the matter?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you. What is this parcel all about?’

  The strange reply rendered Akutagawa speechless for a moment.

  ‘Wha—what parcel?’

  ‘Hey, no jokes now. You even sent it registered.’

  ‘Registered? I have no idea what you’re babbling about. Calm down and tell me what’s the matter.’

  ‘Have you been drinking? I can smell it even on this end of the line.’

  ‘Just had a small sip of sake. I’m not drunk at all. Describe the parcel to me.’

  From Akutagawa’s tone, the painter finally realised that he really wasn’t joking. The voice on the receiver suddenly turned serious.

  ‘You really don’t know anything?’

  ‘I don’t even know what I don’t know. You call me out of the blue with questions.’

  ‘Really? Then it must be a prank, but who did it?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  Ikeda seemed to be thinking hard as he answered.

  ‘A registered parcel was just delivered, with your name as the sender. I assumed you’d sent me a present, so I opened it... What do you think I found inside?’

  ‘Stop teasing and tell me!’ Akutagawa raised his voice.

  ‘An empty medicine bottle.’

  ‘An empty bottle?’

  ‘Yes. The label says H2SO4. I seem to remember that’s sulphuric acid?’

  ‘Beats me. I’m no good at chemistry. I only know that H2O is carbon monoxide.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. H2O isn’t carbon monoxide, it’s water.’

  The artist was probably grinning on the other end of the line.

  ‘So you really have nothing to do with this?’

  ‘I swear it wasn’t me.’

  ‘But who did it then?’

  ‘We’ll find out sooner or later. All our friends have a childish side to them.’

  The two discussed other matters before hanging up. At that point, Akutagawa could not have imagined the sinister meaning behind the curious parcel.

  But things repeated themselves shortly afterwards.

  ‘Dear, it’s another phone call.’

  ‘Again? Who is it this time?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a woman.’ His wife articulated each word loudly and clearly. She seemed suspicious.

  Akutagawa picked up the receiver under his wife’s watchful eye.

  ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting. Akutagawa speaking.’

  ‘Hello? Is that Atsushi Akutagawa? Why did you do it? I was all set to start on my new creation, but now I’m distracted. You knew that would happen. Why did you play this prank on me!’

  The woman sounded hysterical and his wife was listening in from the parlour. He felt surrounded by enemies.

  ‘E—excuse me, who are you!’

  ‘Utako Ui.’

  Utako Ui? Wasn’t there a sculptress among the members of the Independent Artists Association by that name? She had focused on terracotta for a period, making creations very similar to Tanagra figurines, but lately she had returned to her first passion and her torso sculpture had won an award at an exhibition last autumn.

  ‘What are you calling me about?’

  ‘The parcel you sent me. I’ll set the police on you!’

  ‘Just hold on. I know your name, but the two of us haven’t even met, so why would I be sending you a parcel?’

  Utako Ui didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘But you did do it? Denying it would be cowardly.’

  ‘Someone must have used my name. The same thing happened this morning. A friend called me, but fortunately the misunderstanding was soon cleared up.’

  ‘It happened to someone else too?’

  ‘Yes. Did you get an empty bottle with H2SO4 on the label?’

  ‘No.’ The sculptress raised her voice in a shriek. ‘It was a revolver!’

  2

  More than a whole day had passed. On the afternoon of the fifth of March, the section chief of the Investigative Division sat at his desk, examining two objects. One was a common Browning. It was not loaded, but a look inside the barrel showed that it had been fired recently. There was a smell of burnt metal and gunpowder. Utako Ui had filed a report with her local police box the day before, saying it had arrived in a parcel.

  The other object was a transparent, colourless 500cc glass bottle for strong poison, with a glass stopper and a yellow-stained label bearing the scientific formula for sulphuric acid. There was a thick colourless liquid at the bottom of the bottle, which the forensic report had confirmed as concentrated sulphuric acid. Inosuke Ikeda had brought the bottle to his local police box two nights ago, on the evening of the third.

  Once reported, both items had been transported to the Metropolitan Police Department at Sakuradamon.

  Later that afternoon a detective from the department visited the Akutagawa Gallery. After making his way through a crowd of people, he found Akutagawa sitting in a chair, talking to a man wearing a beret, probably an artist. The man left and the detective presented his business card to Akutagawa. The master of the gallery was in his mid-forties and looked like a Zen monk, with a double chin reminiscent of a Daruma doll (1).

  ‘Mr. Detective, you
can’t believe how frustrated I am,’ he said, offering the man a chair. ‘Ikeda comes here often, and is quite an understanding man, but Utako Ui is someone I basically don’t know at all. Why would I send someone I don’t know a gun? And if I did, I’d use former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida’s name. Hahaha!’

  The art dealer laughed heartily at his own joke.

  ‘Anyway, someone used my name to hide their own, and caused me a lot of trouble. You need to find out from the post office who sent the parcels before their memories fade. My face is easy enough to remember!’

  (1) A traditional round hollow doll modelled after Bodhidharma, founder of the Zen tradition of Buddhism.

  ‘Do you know anyone who might do such a thing?’

  ‘My wife asked me the same thing. I have some strange friends, but no one who would mail a revolver.’

  The detective left the gallery with little to show for his visit. He took a bus to the Central Post Office, where the mysterious sender had mailed his parcels. Looking at the sea of people waiting, he felt it quite unlikely that the clerks would have remembered the sender, but he went to the parcel counter and asked to see the clerk on duty. After asking some questions, he left the building twenty minutes later and took a bus to Ogikubo.

  His next stop was Kugayama, to visit the atelier of the painter Shunsuke Egi of the Kōyō Group. He calmly explained the case he was working on to the well-dressed artist, who seemed younger than his forty-four years.

  ‘I visited the Central Post Office, hoping they would know who sent the parcels. Fortunately they had been sent by registered mail, so there were copies of the forms. We thought that only two parcels had been sent, but to my surprise there were three, and the third parcel was addressed to you.’

  ‘Yes, I did receive a parcel on the afternoon of the third. I’d met Mr. Akutagawa once or twice, but we hardly knew each other well enough to be sending presents, so I thought that was strange. I opened the parcel and I must say I was quite disappointed.’

  The detective asked him what was inside. The artist stepped out of the room and returned with the parcel in question. ‘I guessed he would send me a letter explaining everything later, so I kept it in storage.’

  He unwrapped the paper to reveal a small wooden box, inside which was a white vinyl rope, curled around like a snake. He had only been sent a rope!

  A gun, sulphuric acid and a rope. They were like the three topics for a rakugo improvisation act (2). The rope looked quite clean, perhaps newly purchased.

  (2) Rakugo is a traditional verbal entertainment act, where one storyteller (the rakugoka) tells a long, comical story, using only a sitting cushion and a paper fan as props.

  The detective held it in his hands. It was about six or seven millimetres thick and two metres long.

  ‘You mentioned there were also a gun and a bottle with sulphuric acid. Given that the gun had been fired, was anyone shot?’

  ‘That’s definitely a possibility.’

  ‘And the sulphuric acid?’

  ‘It’s not a pretty thought. It could be used to make someone’s face unrecognizable, and the same for fingerprints.’

  ‘How horrible. Then this rope…’

  ‘There’s only one way to use such a rope.’

  ‘This is truly frightening. Just imagining someone was strangled with this makes my blood run cold.’

  The spring sun had already started setting in the west, and a cold darkness had begun to creep into the atelier.

  ‘At this point, I can’t tell you whether such a murder has already occurred, or whether this is all just a prank. Can you think of anyone who might have done this?’

  ‘Nobody comes to mind. No one at all.’

  The artist’s gentle eyes had clouded over. He was like a child in fear. When the detective asked to take the rope away, he immediately gave permission, as if he were getting rid of a cursed item.

  3

  Utako Ui’s atelier was located in Komagome Hayashichō, near the old residence of the poet Kōtarō Takamura, which had sadly been destroyed in the war.

  The sculptress was wearing a bright red sweater and black slacks, and the large golden rings hanging from her ears would sway and flicker each time she spoke. She was a not unattractive woman in her mid-thirties, heavily built and with distinctive facial features. On a stand near one wall were the abstract plaster sculptures the detective had seen earlier in an art magazine. She was said to have been influenced by Mondrian.

  Her face turned grim when the detective asked about the parcel, and it was clearly not a happy memory.

  ‘It was really creepy,’ said Utako as she turned to the young man sitting next to her. ‘It was Doll’s Day. My disciples and I were having tea. When the parcel arrived, I assumed it was a present because of Doll’s Day, but when I opened it there was a revolver lying there, its cold metal bare to the eye. Everyone gasped and the whole room turned silent.’

  Each time the woman looked at the young man, he nodded. He wasn’t much of a speaker.

  ‘My disciple here used to be in the Self Defence Force and has experience with guns. He took a look at the revolver, and scared us all when he told us it had been fired recently. We all could all feel our legs trembling.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to scare you. It was clear to the eye,’ the young man observed.

  ‘It was very upsetting, and I was under the impression it was the work of Mr. Akutagawa. I was furious, so I got him on the phone and gave him a piece of my mind. He denied it, of course.’

  The detective asked her whether she had any idea who else might have sent it, but she shook her head.

  ‘Would you happen to know Inosuke Ikeda?’

  ‘I’ve heard the name. Of the Shūyō Group, I believe?’

  ‘And Shunsuke Egi?’

  ‘No. Have you?’ she asked the young man sitting next to her, but the art-loving boy shook his head silently.

  When the detective left the Ui residence he found it was already dark outside. The evening had brought silence to the high-class residential area, and the streets were empty.

  His final stop was Inosuke Ikeda’s home in Kamimeguro, 6-chōme. He took the bus from Shibuya, got off at the top of a hill and found the place in a silent spot between two temples.

  Inosuke Ikeda was the same age as the owner of the Akutagawa Gallery, but he looked far younger, probably due to his slender build. He had a long face and small eyes, which gave him a sleepy look, and he always appeared to be grinning sardonically.

  ‘As I told you earlier when you called, I don’t know anything that could help you,’ he stated firmly.

  ‘I often swing by Akutagawa’s gallery, so I thought he was playing a prank on me. But when I called him, he said he knew nothing about it, so I tried every single one of my close friends. Nobody admitted to it. That’s when I heard that Ms. Ui had also received such a parcel. When I learned she had been sent a revolver, I thought the whole business was a bit too creepy, so that evening, I went to the closest police box to report it.’

  ‘Has anything out of the ordinary happened since then?’

  ‘No, nothing I can think of. But not knowing who sent the parcels and why is really eerie. So I try not to think about it.’

  ‘Do you know Shunsuke Egi?’

  ‘I’ve seen him at various events, but I am not interested in his style, so I’ve never talked to him.’ He paused and he gazed at his visitor. ‘Does Mr. Egi have anything to do with this?’

  ‘No, no. By the way, what about Ms. Ui?’

  ‘I don’t know her at all. I am only slightly interested by the fact she is a female artist. Not as a fellow artist, but as a man of course, hahaha.’

  His eyes looked even smaller when he laughed.

  Once again, the detective had failed to make a discovery. He assumed some incident must have happened, but until he could find out what it was, there was not much more that he could do. He was therefore not particularly disappointed when he left the artist’s home.

&nb
sp; 4

  The incident finally occurred shortly after ten o’clock on the evening of the tenth of March. An emergency call came in, reporting the discovery of a corpse in a cellar room in a burnt-down building in Kanda Sarugakuchō. When the operator had asked for details, the caller had hung up. Fortunately, MPD Patrol Car 35 was near the Kasugachō crossing, so it was dispatched to the scene at once.

  Sarugakuchō was an extended block located below the elevated Surugadai neighbourhood. It was something between a residential and a shopping area. The patrol car passed beneath Suidō Bridge and turned left from the main road with the train tracks. It was an unusually foggy night, and the fog had only turned thicker with each hour. The patrol car slowed down once it entered Sarugakuchō and started searching for its destination beneath the grey veil.

  ‘Isn’t the Kōryō Building the only one around here that’s been burnt down?’ asked one of the nervous young police officers.

  ‘I’ve never been here before. Where is it?’ replied the other.

  ‘I think it’s about a hundred metres down this road, to the right.’

  After the brief exchange they stopped talking and kept their eyes open.

  The Kōryō Building was a small, four-storey construction that had indeed been burnt down in the war, after which the New Kōryō Building had been built on the main street near the train tracks. The rent for the defunct plot had proved to be too high, so the remnants of the burnt-out building were still standing.

  ‘This is it, stop!’

  The two parked the car and stood on the cold, wet pavement. The houses in the neighbourhood were all dark, either because they were empty, or because the residents were asleep, the officers did not know which. There was total silence and the fog seemed even thicker.

  Like the antennae of an insect, the lights from the policemen’s torches illuminated the wet concrete remains, searching for the cellar.