“And then he ended up murdered by Kenzo,” said the inspector.
This was my cue. I coughed politely to get Kindaichi-san’s attention. He smiled at me.
“Not quite. I’d like to call on Doctor F—to explain the next part. In fact, that’s why I invited him to join us this evening. Doctor, could you give us the results of the autopsy?”
I nodded, understanding finally why he had asked me not to release the results until now. This young man was at first sight quite humble and modest, but in reality he enjoyed putting on a show. He’d wanted the information made public at the most dramatic moment possible.
“I’ll explain the results of the autopsy as simply as I can. This man was not murdered. He died of natural causes. I can’t ascertain the exact cause until there is a proper postmortem, but in my opinion his heart most likely failed due to extreme fatigue and exhaustion. As for the injury to his chest area, that was made at least twenty-four hours after the time of death.”
There were cries of surprise all around. Ryuji-san’s eyes lit up and he leaned forward in excitement.
“So you’re saying that my brother didn’t kill this man?”
“That’s right, he didn’t,” replied Kindaichi-san. “I always thought he hadn’t. First of all, Kenzo was obsessed with his suicide plan and this three-fingered man was not originally part of it, and second, he wouldn’t have committed the injustice of murdering a completely innocent bystander.”
“But that injury? The one in his chest…”
“Well, Inspector, those are the results of Kenzo’s practice run. Just like I did earlier this evening, Kenzo also performed an experiment. He devised the plan, but he had no idea whether it would work or not, and even if it did work, how much time he would need to complete it. So he practised. And he used that corpse for his dry run. Uncle, you mentioned that on the night before the murder Suzuko said she’d heard a sound like koto strings being plucked. That was Kenzo rehearsing.”
We exchanged looks. Ryuji-san had turned pale again. This wasn’t news of another murder, but it was just as dreadful—or rather, it was more dreadful—it was downright macabre. Shivers ran up and down my spine.
“To get back to the story of the three-fingered man—after he climbed up the cliff behind the annexe house, it wasn’t long before he breathed his last. It was Kenzo who found him. That was the night of the 23rd or the morning of the 24th, and Kenzo probably couldn’t believe his luck—here was a perfect guinea pig for his experiment. He secretly carried the body down to the annexe house and hid it away. As you may have guessed, he used that closet behind the tokonoma for a hiding place. That explains why the man’s fingerprints were in there.
“And that concludes the events of the night of the 23rd. Then the next night was the 24th, the day before the wedding. You may recall that there was a heated exchange in the sitting room of the main house that day. Kenzo and his mother quarrelled about the koto. In the middle of the argument, Ryosuke turned up with the coffin he’d made for the cat, and Saburo arrived back from the barber’s shop in the village. Saburo revealed that the three-fingered man had been asking the way to the Ichiyanagi house. When she heard about the man having three fingers, Suzuko was reminded of a koto. For Suzuko it was a very reasonable association, and she pretended to play. This all had a crucial connection to the case. What it did was to give Kenzo an important idea.”
We all looked confused.
“Kenzo had already laid down the details of his plan, but he still hadn’t worked out what kind of string to use. It had to be thin yet strong, and he needed a great length of it. While he was still puzzling over the question, Suzuko mimed a three-fingered man playing the koto. Now, I want you to remember that at this point in time, the three-fingered man was already dead and stashed in the closet at the annexe house. Kenzo must have been truly surprised when the very man he was planning to use in his practice run suddenly became the topic of conversation in his family’s sitting room. At the same time, watching Suzuko’s hand, he had a flash of inspiration. Three fingers and a koto… right there it came to him. Kenzo thought of using a length of koto string. It’s ironic that such an innocent, simple-minded young girl through such a harmless gesture could have had such a major influence on a murder. It’s really quite awful, but it’s true. Kenzo went straight to the storehouse and found a length of koto string. In this house, there are so many kotos that there’s a surplus of spare string. No one would notice if some of it went missing. While Kenzo was in the storehouse looking for the string, the koto bridges on the Lovebird caught his eye. I don’t believe Kenzo was originally going to use a koto bridge to make the vertex point on the lavatory roof. I imagine he planned to use a forked twig or something, but when he saw the arched shape of the koto bridges, he realized it was of course the perfect device to support the string, and he took one. And that is how the murder case ended up having such a deep connection to that musical instrument.”
The inspector murmured his acknowledgement.
“And then he rehearsed the trick that night?” said Ginzo-san.
“He did, and there were two results that he hadn’t expected. The first was that the string rubbed against lots of the branches in the bamboo thicket and made a pinging noise. He realized that if he didn’t cut down some of the bamboo, the same thing would happen the following evening. However, Kenzo didn’t feel like going out and cutting down trees, so he decided to let the sound be produced again, but this time to camouflage it. So between murdering Katsuko and killing himself, he plucked wildly at the koto in the room. The other members of the Ichiyanagi household were awakened by those sounds and remained oblivious to the other camouflaged sounds of the string running through the bamboo thicket.”
“Huh,” said the inspector.
“And what was the second unexpected result of the experiment?” asked Ginzo-san.
“That Saburo discovered it. Well, that’s my hypothesis—that at some point, Saburo got in on the plan.”
This came as a surprise to everyone. Ryuji-san’s face was ashen.
CHAPTER 17
The Accidental Locked Room
“And so, if I guessed rightly, what effect did Saburo’s discovery of the experiment have? Well, we won’t know for sure until we ask Saburo himself. However, I think the nature of some of the tricks demonstrates that he must have been involved. There were a lot of games played. I would go so far as to claim that Kenzo would have been satisfied to make it look like a double murder, but it hadn’t occurred to him to try to frame someone for the crime. Here, the aficionado of detective novels became involved. Saburo decided that a murder without a murderer didn’t cut it, and quickly devised a fake one. The deceased three-fingered man was the perfect scapegoat. Neither Kenzo nor Saburo had any idea who this man was, nor why he’d been asking directions to the Ichiyanagi house, but he was shady-looking and he had after all been asking about their home. Additionally, Saburo had guessed that the man’s three-fingered handprint had probably been left on the glass at Kawada’s tavern, and this awoke his creative urge. Any fan of mystery novels could come up with the idea of planting fingerprints. But that wasn’t enough for Saburo. The photograph in the album, the fragments of diary pages, all were to create the impression of some kind of bad blood between Kenzo and the three-fingered man. These are tricks straight out of the mind of a crime novel enthusiast. The murder–suicide plan was created from a melding of the brilliant scientific mind of Kenzo and the widely read Saburo’s, which is what made it such a complex case to figure out. In conclusion, the case was a collaborative project between these two.”
“So why was the photo there in the album?”
“Inspector, you cut the photo out along with the cardboard page. If you had tried to remove it from the page we would have spotted the trick right away. Look!…”
Kindaichi-san picked up the photo which he’d already removed from its cardboard backing.
“On the back of this photograph, you can see traces of where it
was peeled away from its previous location. Also, once I removed the backing, it became clear that a different picture used to be attached to that page of the album. Saburo had carefully removed the original photo from its spot in the album and replaced it with this one. In other words, Kenzo’s mortal enemy, whom he swore to hate all his life, existed but it wasn’t the man in this photo.”
“Where did Saburo get hold of this photograph?”
“The three-fingered man was carrying it of course.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Ryuji-san. “People don’t usually go around carrying their own photograph.”
“That’s true. Just as you say. Normally. But there are people in some lines of work who always have their own picture on them—bus and taxi drivers for example.”
Inspector Isokawa suddenly cried out.
“That’s right. I’d been thinking the same thing—that I’ve seen photos like this one all over. It’s the type of photo that drivers have on their licences.”
“That’s it. Exactly,” said Kindaichi-san delightedly, scratching at his bird’s-nest head. “And knowing that, it explains the terrible gash on that man’s face and his two missing fingers. Incidentally, I have discovered who he was. His name is Kyokichi Shimizu. He was born in Shitsuki-gun, and moved to Tokyo when he was a young boy. Later he took up work as a taxi driver. Fairly recently his car was involved in a serious accident, and that was how he got those injuries. Obviously he could no longer work as a driver, and wanting to spend some time convalescing, he wrote a letter to his aunt in H—village asking to stay with her for a while. She wrote back to say yes, but hadn’t heard anything from him since. She’d assumed he was on his way and had been expecting him to arrive yesterday or today. That’s what I heard from Sergeant Kimura after I sent him to make some door-to-door enquiries in H—. According to his aunt, Kyokichi Shimizu had never been to this part of the country before. And when Sergeant Kimura showed her this photo, she said that she hadn’t seen him since he was a young boy, so she couldn’t say for sure if it was him or not. But then she added that the man in the photo looked a lot like her brother—Kyokichi’s father—so that it was probably him after all. To sum up, the three-fingered man was Kyokichi Shimizu, professional taxi driver, who, on his way to his aunt’s home in H—village, suffered an unhappy end to his life on the cliff behind this house.”
“And then his death was used by my brother.”
Ryuji-san looked sorrowful but the inspector paid him no heed.
“And what about the burnt pages from the diaries? How do you explain those?”
“That was another one of Saburo’s tricks,” said Kindaichi-san with a chuckle. “For years on end Kenzo had kept a scrupulous record of everything he’d done. There was bound to be something among his many experiences worth using. Saburo pulled out bits from several places and made a kind of montage. Here’s the outline of the plot. Take a look.”
From between the pages of his notebook, Kindaichi-san produced the five fragments of burnt paper.
“Starting with the fragment labelled number one:
…on my way to the beach I went by the usual place. Ofuyu-san was playing the koto again. Lately I find the sound of that koto melancholy…
“And number three:
…Ofuyu-san’s funeral. A desolate, mournful day. It’s drizzling again here on the island. The funeral was…
“And if we follow that with number five:
…before I left the island, I paid one more visit to Ofuyu-san’s grave. I took some wild chrysanthemums and, as I was praying, I thought I could hear the sound of a koto. Abruptly I…
“From the condition of the pen and the colour of the ink, and as they all feature the same woman, Ofuyu-san, it’s clear that these three sections were all written at the same time. However, number two:
…that dog, that brute. I really despise him. I will despise that man for the rest of my life…
“And number four:
…I’m thinking of challenging him to a duel. This inexpressible fury. When I think of the lonely death that she met, I could tear him limb from limb. I consider him my mortal enemy and I hate him, hate him, hate h…
“These sections were written with a different pen, in a slightly different shade of ink. I believe that sections one, three and five were written by Kenzo during his travels, and none of them with a fountain pen. Sections two and four were written at a completely different time. From the penmanship and other features, I’m convinced that they were written a while before the other three. Probably from when Kenzo was still working at the university. Ryuji-san, do you have any memory of that time?”
Ryuji-san looked up suddenly. It was clear he had remembered something. But just as quickly he looked down again, unable to hold anyone’s gaze. After some hesitation, he began to tell a story:
“It was a very strange thing. While he was working at the university, there was some kind of an incident, and afterwards my brother felt extremely resentful towards one of his colleagues. In fact, he hated him. This man used to be a close friend of his, but they fell out over the daughter of a teacher that they both knew well. Kenzo was completely betrayed by his friend, double-crossed… or at least that’s what he believed. It resulted in my brother being left in a shameful position, and he was forced to leave his post at the university. The young woman fell sick, presumably as a result of this incident, and eventually died. I don’t know how much of that is true, I don’t have all the facts of the case, but Kenzo wholeheartedly believed that his former friend was entirely at fault. My brother was a person of such extreme moods that he loathed this man to the very core of his being. When the phrase ‘my mortal enemy’ came up in this case, I immediately thought of that person, but then we were told that this mortal enemy was someone he had met on an island, so I assumed it couldn’t be him after all. What’s more, this is a man whose name is immediately recognizable. These days he’s a famous scholar. I couldn’t believe that a man like that could have—Anyway, that’s why I didn’t say anything until now.”
“I see. And did you ever meet this man?”
“Never. I sometimes see his photo in the papers, but only in recent years. Honestly, I couldn’t tell whether the photo you showed us from the album was him in his younger years or not.”
“That’s completely understandable. Saburo was quite ingenious in the way he combined that incident with the later episode from Kenzo’s time on the island. Then by working in the photo of the three-fingered man, he created a clever piece of fiction for us. Quite a job.”
Kindaichi-san laughed.
“He even chose the piece from the island because it featured a koto. Kenzo was the kind of person who would never show his diary to another person. But he was no match for Saburo. Saburo had often amused himself by poking his nose into his brother’s private affairs. And he clearly had a good brain, being able to recall immediately what Kenzo had written about and when, where to find it, and how to rearrange it. Therefore, I believe that from the moment Saburo joined the planning, it was his mind that devised the scheme, and Kenzo became no more than a puppet following orders. Saburo was showing off his vast knowledge of detective fiction and Kenzo was no match for all that knowledge.”
I didn’t think Kindaichi-san’s theory too outlandish. With the exception of Ryuji-san, who had always seemed to me a fairly normal person, I knew that the whole Ichiyanagi clan was very eccentric.
“And then after the plan was concocted, they cut off the corpse’s hand and buried the rest of the body in the charcoal kiln. That was before sunrise on the 25th. But somehow later that evening, right before the wedding ceremony was due to start, the three-fingered man made an appearance at the kitchen door. I believe that was actually Kenzo dressed up to look like him. He and Saburo had set up the trick with the photo album, but if for some reason it escaped the notice of the police, then the misdirection wouldn’t work, so they devised this piece of theatre, which couldn’t fail to capture the attention of t
he investigators, and was intended to make everyone believe that the three-fingered man was still alive on the day of the murder. After leaving the kitchen, still dressed in the three-fingered man’s clothing, Kenzo took the path from the west side of the property, ran along the north side of the cliff, and then slid down the hillside just behind the annexe house. He slipped into the house, where he changed back into his usual clothes and waited for Akiko to turn up with the scrap of paper and hand it to him. He tore it into shreds in front of her, stuck the pieces into the pocket in the sleeve of his kimono, and then as he left the annexe, he made a point of asking Akiko to close all the rain shutters. When Akiko finally got back to the main house, Kenzo was nowhere to be seen. The reason no one could find him was that he had returned to the annexe house, and was making the fake footprints; cutting himself and taking some of his own blood to leave the three-fingered handprints on the pillar and the inside of the rain shutter; taking the shoes and the other clothes belonging to the three-fingered man and shoving them into the chimney of the charcoal kiln; and then finally pulling the end of the prepared koto string through the gap in the ranma transom.”
“Kindaichi-san,” said Inspector Isokawa, “you’re saying that the fingerprints were already there from early in the evening?”
The Honjin Murders Page 14