‘When’s the next boat scheduled to come?’
‘It’s already a new day, so…in another three days,’ replied Reiko to Hirakawa’s question.
‘Everyone on the island is gathered here.’ Egami was intent on proceeding with his job as the master of ceremonies.
‘That means the person behind the murders must be one of us eleven present here. Well then, who did it? We need to clarify this first. We can then ask the murderer in person why Kango and Sumako Makihara had to die. The first question we need to examine is…who had an opportunity to commit the murders?’
I was, to use a slightly exaggerated word, impressed by Egami’s calmness. He was completely clear in his head. How could someone as sharp, as clever and as tough as he was keep on repeating years at university? It was a question that was always in the back of my mind and now it only became more into focus.
It stands to reason to start with an examination of who had an opportunity to commit the crime. But would it be that simple? I turned my mind back to the extravagant drinking party we’d had some hours before, which didn’t make me hopeful.
‘The estimated time of death is in the two hours between ten thirty and twelve thirty. Anyone who couldn’t have gone upstairs in that period, has an alibi.’
‘Mr. Egami, can’t we shorten the period in which the crime could’ve been committed?’ asked Ryūichi. ‘I mean, ten thirty is still early in the night. Most of us were down here drinking, eating and having a talk. If at that time a rifle had been shot twice upstairs, I’m sure at least some people down here in the hall would’ve noticed.’
‘Dad, you’ve got it the wrong way round,’ Kazuto said. ‘We wouldn’t have noticed the shots while we were in the middle of all that boozing. On the other hand, by the time some of us had dropped out—I was one of them—by falling asleep, or going to their bedroom, that’s when we would’ve noticed a shot blasting through the house.’
‘Is there anybody who remembers hearing a shot, probably two shots, one right after the other?’ asked Egami.
‘I remember having heard something,’ Toshiyuki replied immediately. ‘I also drank myself to sleep, but I did hear something loud when I was still dozing. Unconsciously I took a look at my watch, and it was a quarter past twelve. I didn’t think anything of it, though, and fell asleep again.’
‘I also remember something curious.’ This time, it was Reiko. ‘After I’d returned to my room with Maria and gone to bed, I heard two loud bangs, one after another. But I don’t think it was past midnight yet.’
‘Oh, a discrepancy,’ said Kazuto.
‘Actually, I also have a memory of something that might’ve been the shots,’ said discussion leader Egami with a thoughtful expression. ‘That was around midnight.’
Hirakawa gave a wry smile. ‘Don’t know what to believe.’
‘What an incredible house! A rifle is shot twice in the middle of the night beneath this very roof and nobody notices it! I’m pretty sure we didn’t hold a drinking party during a live heavy metal concert!’
Kazuto looked nervous. But wasn’t this to be expected? That is because—.
‘It’s because we got used to hearing the door of the storage room outside at the back banging. Among all those bangs we heard, who knows which of them were actually rifle shots?’
Toshiyuki sighed loudly. Some of us nodded. That door had suddenly turned into a big problem.
‘That’s why I told you to shut the damn thing.’ Ryūichi was in a bad mood and scolded Kazuto. ‘Because you were too lazy—’
‘Oh, Dad, you knew someone would die if I didn’t close that door? Who’s the horrible one here? If it was that important, you could have kicked me until I’d closed the door, or you could’ve gone yourself….’
‘Enough of that!’
Hirakawa calmed the two of them down. This was no time to make false accusations or trip each other up.
‘How about the people who went up early to sleep? Mrs. Inukai? Mr. Hirakawa?’
Satomi Inukai cocked her head and looked as if she was quite distressed.
‘I…I’m sorry, but I took my sleeping pills just after ten and fell asleep just like that, so I don’t remember having heard anything at all. It was only when all of you were making that commotion that I woke up and asked you what was going on.’
I’d expected that answer. I looked at Hirakawa, but he also was wearing a pained expression.
‘Mr. Hirakawa, do you also take sleeping pills?’ asked Egami.
‘No, I don’t use anything like that. But even so, I didn’t hear anything. You see, the storage room door was distracting me so much from my sleep, I decided to use earplugs. I have them for swimming and I found I had them in my pocket, so that was lucky, or so I thought…. Which means I can’t offer you any information either.’
It wasn’t just the earplugs. It wasn’t only the storage room door that had been loud in the night; the gale had also been doing its job outside.
‘It appears it’s impossible for us to shorten the estimated period during which the crime was committed.’ Egami gave up on pursuing that line of thought. ‘Let’s go back to the earlier question, then. Was there anyone who could not have gone upstairs in the two hours the crime was committed?’
Everyone remained silent for a moment. They were thinking back about either themselves, or about the others.
‘My wife took her sleeping pills shortly after ten and went to bed. Do you agree that gives her an alibi?’
Toshiyuki tried to defend his wife, but there was no way that was going to pass muster. We only had her word that she’d taken the pills and gone to bed right after that. In fact, Satomi was the first to disappear from sight and, out of all of us, she was the one who had no alibi for the longest period of time. Naturally, protests were raised.
‘I also went to bed early, but that doesn’t clear me of suspicion, does it?’ Hirakawa admitted himself he had no alibi.
But it wasn’t only the people who had gone to bed early who had no alibi. It was possible that someone who’d remained in the hall had actually sneaked upstairs via the back stairs, with the excuse of going to the toilet. Having finished the job, they could have returned wearing an innocent expression—just as in the novels. Another possibility was that someone had remained in the main hall until only those who had drunk themselves to sleep were left, after which they had gone off to commit the crime. Having done that, they could have slipped back into the hall and pretended to be drunk as well.
‘And everyone had an opportunity to get hold of the rifle, I think?’ asked Egami, just to be sure. At five o’clock in the afternoon of the previous day, Kazuto had placed the rifle back against the wall of the attic room. There was nobody who admitted to having gone up there after that, but still....
‘There’s one more aspect we need to consider regarding the opportunity to commit the murders. Who wasn’t intoxicated last night?’
That was a very difficult question to answer. There was only one person who clearly had not been under the influence of alcohol: Satomi Inukai, who had gone to bed early. Reiko and Maria had only drunk a little. As for the others…I wonder. None of us had merely pretended to drink and secretly spilled their drink on the floor. Everything which had been poured had entered the mouth of someone, but only the consumers themselves would know how far gone they were. One could even imagine that this violent crime had only been committed because of the influence of alcohol. But once you started doubting, anything seemed possible.
‘This doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, either. One last thing, then. Who could’ve destroyed the wireless transceiver in Kazuto’s room? Kazuto, when was the last time you saw it intact?’
‘Before dinner. Before seven. I hadn’t gone back to the annex until just now.’
We were just repeating ourselves. Everybody had had a chance. If we were to pursue all possibilities diligently, we could also raise the possibility it was Kazuto himself who had destroyed the transceiver when he went to t
he annex.
‘I give up….’ Sonobe let out a deep sigh, blowing out all of his fatigue. He didn’t have his briar pipe with him, so he, too, asked Kazuto for a cigarette.
‘This really is a nightmare. If we get hit by the typhoon, too….’ Then Ryūichi remembered something. ‘Reiko, go get a radio. There should be something about the typhoon.’
‘Yes,’ replied Reiko. As she stood up she turned to Maria. ‘Maria, will you come with me?’
‘Of course.’ Maria was about to get up, but Kazuto stopped her.
‘Going alone must be scary. I’ll go with you.’
‘Nothing dangerous can happen to her if everybody on the island is gathered here in this room,’ said Ryūichi. ‘But I do feel uneasy. Kazuto, you go get it yourself. It’s near the cushion in my room.’
Kazuto scowled, but still followed his father’s orders. It appeared that Kazuto was yearning for attention from Reiko and Maria, his beautiful family members. While he and Reiko were not related by blood, she was still his older sister, and Maria actually was his cousin by blood. He was frankly creepy. Had he been left with so many psychological scars by women outside his own family?
Reiko poured some cold tea for all of us while we were waiting for Kazuto to return from his errand. Egami was the first to say ‘Thank you’ and reach out for a cup, probably because his throat was dry from having talked for so long.
The radio arrived. Kazuto placed it in the centre of the table and switched it on. A voice could be heard amongst all the static. Kazuto and I leaned forward to listen to this voice from the outer world. I hoped it wouldn’t be bad news.
‘So, Alice? What’s it saying?’
‘Don’t worry, Maria,’ Kazuto said, not giving me a chance to reply. ‘They say the typhoon went straight east after reaching the main island of Okinawa. It’ll pass about 100 kilometres south of us.’
‘Thank goodness.’ Maria’s shoulders dropped and her tension eased a bit.
‘So this wind and rain will also subside. That’s a relief,’ said Hirakawa.
I was glad we’d managed to avoid the typhoon, but we were not in a situation where we could feel any relief at all.
‘It’s four o’ clock now,’ Ryūichi said in his hoarse voice, after looking at the wall clock. ‘Here in the south the sun comes up late. Let’s all sleep for a while.’
With exhausted expressions, we all nodded.
Ryūichi suggested to Junji Makihara that he’d be better off sleeping in Kango’s room.
And thus the long night of the second day…finally ended.
CHAPTER THREE: BICYCLE PUZZLE
1
The third day on the island. By ten o’clock, everyone was out of bed and the wind and rain had started to abate. By the time we’d finished our breakfast-cum-lunch, it was already past eleven.
‘Did yesterday really happen?’
Those words Maria had accidentally blurted out during lunch had left an impression on me. We’d escaped the terror of the typhoon and, while it was still cloudy, the sky was clear at times. But, to my mind, the residue of yesterday’s intoxication still remained. I could very well understand the feeling of wishing it all to have been just a bad dream. But the brutal fact that Kango and Sumako Makihara weren’t present at the dining table with us reinforced the painful reality.
After the meal, Egami asked Maria and me to come upstairs with him to examine the crime scene once again. When I tried to reflect on how we’d discovered the bodies, I realised the whole scene had vanished from my memory for whatever reason. Today we would do an on-the-spot investigation of what in heaven had happened in that room last night.
We stood in front of the door, which had a gaping hole in it. Egami grabbed the door knob and easily pushed it open.
‘First is the latch.’ Egami stared at it. ‘I wonder why this stiff—or, as Reiko claimed—broken latch was activated last night in the first place?’
‘Mr. Egami,’ said Maria, ‘last night you all knocked on the door and called out for Sumako several times. There was no answer, so you thought something was amiss. Well, I hadn’t arrived then, but was the door really locked from the inside? It’s natural to assume a door is locked if it won’t open, but isn’t it possible something else was preventing it from opening? Perhaps something was leaning against it?’
‘Are you suspecting Kazuto?’ I asked her. Kazuto was the one who’d made a hole in the door with the hatchet and slid his arm inside to open it, but none of us had actually seen him open the latch. The door had simply opened after he’d put his hand through the hole and muttered things like ‘It’s so stiff,’ ‘Just a little bit more’ and ‘Got it.’ Maria didn’t put it in so many words, but she was hinting it may all have been a performance by Kazuto.
‘It’s not as if I suspect Kazuto of being the murderer, but it’s possible it wasn’t the latch which was preventing the door from opening.’
She was having difficulty expressing herself. Perhaps she suspected Kazuto was at least involved in the murders in some way.
‘That’s a very level-headed judgment,’ said Egami solemnly. ‘But there’s no reason to suspect something like that for now. When the door finally opened, there wasn’t anything close by that could have been used to prevent it and I didn’t notice anything strange about Kazuto’s behaviour while he was inserting the metal bookmark in the gap and trying to push the bar up. The very fact that he broke the bookmark shows there must have been something on the door that prevented it from opening. Yet when we finally got it open there was nothing to be seen.’
‘So…the door really was locked from inside?’
‘Yes,’ replied Egami.
We entered the room silently and placed our hands together out of respect for the bodies lying on the two beds.
‘Okay, time for us to pretend to be Sherlock Holmes and crawl around on the floor.’
The bloodstains on the floor had turned black. Kango’s cause of death had been loss of blood, so the stains near the window where the two had been lying were particularly large and horrible.
‘Some smaller bloodstains are spread around the room. They were probably made by Sumako as she moved about after being shot,’ Maria noted.
There were five or six spots on the floor where the blood led from the middle of the room to the door. Kango had been shot in the thigh and, as he had been hit in an artery, it’s unlikely he could have walked around in the room. There was also a very real possibility he’d lost consciousness after falling and hitting his head on the corner of the night stand after being shot. Sumako, on the other hand, had been shot in the chest, but, according to the doctor, she’d lost only a little blood and hadn’t died instantly, so she could have walked around the room in agony, spilling blood on the floor. But for what reason?
‘I wonder where Sumako was when she was shot?’ I voiced the question. ‘I was in such shock last night I didn’t even notice these bloodstains at the time, so I assumed that both of them had been shot by the window and fallen there. But that might be wrong. Maybe she was shot near the door and made her way painfully to the window, where she fell on top of her father, who’d been shot earlier?’
‘It does look like that,’ said Egami after giving it some thought. ‘That means Sumako was standing here when she was shot.’
He went over to the bloodstain closest to the door. It was less than a metre away from the door, and you could grab the door knob if you reached out for it.
‘That’s odd,’ said Maria with her finger to her lips, ‘Isn’t it strange she was shot so close by the door? Suppose Sumako was standing where Egami is now, then the door was open and the murderer shot into the room from the hallway. Sumako was shot from more than fifteen centimetres away and the rifle itself is almost one metre long, so the murderer couldn’t have put his back to the door and shot her from inside the room. But that’s also very curious. Even if the wind outside was howling loudly and the storage room door was banging about, why shoot from the hallway with the doo
r open?’
She continued: ‘If the door was closed and Sumako was standing where Egami is now, with her back to the door, then the murderer would have been standing in the middle of the room. No, that’s even more curious. If the two had been in those positions, there’s no way Sumako would’ve stumbled towards the window after being shot. She would’ve opened the door and fled into the hallway to cry out for help.’
‘You’re doing well, Patience.’
‘Quit joking, Alice. I’m only stating the obvious. It…bothers me that Sumako was shot there.’
‘Well then, that’s our first problem. Where was Sumako standing when she was shot?’ Egami continued: ‘And the second problem I was about to mention just now: Why was the latch, which was as good as broken, forcibly locked anyway?’
I hit upon a good idea.
‘I wonder whether my deduction is correct. This is my answer to the first problem: Sumako was shot near the window, or perhaps in the middle of the room. And the bloodstains leading to the door were made when she went over to the door after being shot and…locked it herself.’
‘Ah, the classic pattern in locked room mysteries,’ said Maria. ‘It wasn’t some trick of the murderer, but the victim herself who locked the door and then died inside. It does answer the mystery of why the room was locked from the inside. But I don’t like that idea either. Why would Sumako first lock the door and then go back to my uncle at the window to collapse there? Was she aware she was going to die anyway, so she wanted to die holding her father?
‘I don’t believe it. Wouldn’t it be more natural for her to open the door and call for help? My uncle was lying there bleeding heavily. What would be the point of clinging to her father? She would cry out for help. Your theory doesn’t answer the second problem of why the door was locked.’
‘Perhaps she was trying to defend herself from further attacks by the murderer? After the first shot, she could’ve pushed the killer outside into the hallway and locked the door….’
‘Hard to swallow. I can’t believe that Sumako, fatally wounded, could’ve pushed the murderer outside, nor that the murderer wouldn’t have pushed his way back into the room while Sumako was still struggling with the stiff latch.’
The Moai Island Puzzle Page 11