The Moai Island Puzzle

by Alice Arisugawa

  First of all, there was no doubt we had indeed solved the moai puzzle. The initials of the person who created the puzzle had been written next to the small cavity we found, and the cavity itself was also large enough to hold the treasure. But, unfortunately, somebody else had got there first and taken the treasure with them. Our first topic was who that person could have been.

  ‘It could’ve been Hideto,’ I started. ‘We know he managed to solve the moai puzzle by himself.’

  ‘Hmm, I wonder.’ Egami voiced an objection. ‘There’s no doubt he’d been trying and had mapped the facing directions of the statues, but we can’t be sure he actually made it all the way to the hidden cavity in Candle Rock. Though Maria might not be happy with me saying that….’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ She shook her head. ‘In fact, when you told me the treasure might be hidden on Candle Rock this morning, I noticed something strange. Your explanation of the puzzle sounded convincing, but I thought that if you were right, then Hideto must’ve been wrong when he said he’d solved the puzzle.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Because we all assumed that Hideto had solved the puzzle correctly, gone out in the night to retrieve the treasure by himself and had then fallen in the sea. So it’d make sense if Hideto had died near Candle Rock, but we found him somewhere else: the Eboshi Rock. So, doesn’t that mean he hadn’t solved the puzzle?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said slowly. ‘Remember what we talked about yesterday. This might be unpleasant for you, but we speculated about whether Hideto might’ve been murdered by someone as the result of a quarrel about the treasure? Perhaps Hideto was killed here near Candle Rock, but moved by the murderer to the other side of the island, to the bay to the north.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Egami, too, acknowledged the possibility. ‘Hideto was found near Eboshi Rock, which might be completely in the opposite direction to Candle Rock, but the distance between them isn’t all that great. Suppose the murderer was with Hideto when he found the treasure. It might’ve been planned, it might’ve been done on the spur of the moment, but, blinded by greed, they pushed Hideto into the sea and let him drown. The murderer might’ve been stronger than Hideto, or there might’ve been multiple people involved, or perhaps the murderer might’ve caught him by surprise, but in any case, they succeeded in committing the crime. We can easily imagine that after the deed, the murderer—or murderers—didn’t want to leave the body there. They’d want to move it as far away as possible from where the treasure had been hidden. Eboshi Rock in the bay up north was a perfect spot. While it’s the spot furthest away from Candle Rock if you follow the coastline, it actually isn’t far at all if you cross the island overland. Maria, is it possible to get through that forest and reach the bay up north?’

  ‘Yes. Of course it’s never easy to get through a forest at night, but this one’s not all that dense. It’s definitely possible, and listening to your theory I think it’s very plausible that the murderer took that route. They crossed the forest carrying Hideto’s body…and dumped him in the bay.’

  Perhaps the scene had crystallised in her mind, because Maria shook her head two or three times as if to get rid of it.

  ‘This is all just a theory,’ Egami emphasised. ‘We have a strong suspicion that’s what happened, but we haven’t any solid proof. And we have no idea who might have murdered him.’

  ‘It’s definitely suspicious. And his death three years ago is connected to the murders that are happening now on the island. Because the person behind the murders now was in possession of the map Hideto made. I can come up with several ideas as to how the cases are connected.’ Maria mumbled to herself as she drew meaningless figures with her finger on the lauan table.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Egami. ‘Let’s try talking about whatever comes to mind as to how the two cases are connected. Hideto was young and energetic, so we can suppose that there were several people involved in his drowning. Perhaps they’ve fallen out now, three years after the fact. Maybe one of them wanted a bigger share for some reason, or the one who stood guard was blackmailing the one who did the deed. No, perhaps there was no guard, but a witness. It’s also possible one of the murderers couldn’t cope with their conscience any more and wanted to confess, but someone else decided otherwise.’

  ‘Mr. Egami, that’d mean that Kango Makihara, Sumako Makihara and Mr. Hirakawa were all three involved in Hideto’s death,’ I said. ‘That sounds a bit hard to believe. Whether they were standing guard or a witness, that’d still mean they were guilty of a crime.’

  ‘I know what I’m saying,’ replied Egami. ‘I’ve no idea what we’ll discover when we finally do manage to sort out all that’s happened here on the island, including what happened three years ago. But whoever the murderer is, the truth will be painful to everybody. Pain is all that’s awaiting us at the conclusion of this case. Of that I am convinced.’

  ‘Are you saying that because you have an idea who the murderer is?’

  Egami’s statement sounded like some kind of prophecy, so I had to ask the question.

  ‘I really don’t know. What? Don’t look so suspiciously at me. How am I supposed to solve everything based only on what we’ve discovered so far? Everyone’s had a chance to commit the murders, including you, Maria and myself. And only I know for sure that I’m not the murderer.’

  ‘That’s a blunt way of putting it,’ smiled Maria wryly. ‘Are you saying that Alice and I are also suspects?’

  ‘Of course I’m not seriously considering the two of you, but I’ve nothing to convince others that my juniors aren’t murderers.’

  ‘Blunt,’ said Maria again.

  ‘Let’s get back to the topic.’ I attempted to set us back on course. ‘We tried examining the link between what happened three years ago, and the murders now, but can’t we think of any other possible links?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Egami nonchalantly. ‘In the case of a fall-out between accomplices, then people not close to Hideto are suspicious, I think. It’s hard to imagine that members of his own family, like Ryūichi or Kazuto, or his fiancée Reiko would kill him for the treasure and then have a fall-out between themselves. But there’s another way to look at it, and that’s when the people closest to Hideto become suspicious. Suppose someone discovered Hideto had been killed and was now committing the murders as revenge.’

  ‘That’s just as horrible,’ said Maria sadly. ‘That’d mean that, whatever the case, my uncle, Sumako and Mr. Hirakawa were involved in the death of Hideto. Now I understand why you said that the truth will be painful for everybody. Everyone will get hurt, but we can’t avoid that….’

  ‘Any more ideas?’

  I pressed again, but Egami answered in the negative.

  ‘I can come up with a lot more, but it’d be nothing more than conjecture. Shall we talk about something else? When we find out who the murderer is, the motive and all of that will become clear. We can ask the murderer then.’

  Putting what happened three years ago to the side and focusing on the case that was still in progress was perhaps the quickest way to the solution.

  ‘Okay, let’s start.’

  7

  ‘With Mr. Hirakawa being killed after Mr. Makihara and Sumako, I have a feeling at least one question has been answered,’ Egami began. ‘I mean the question of why someone would commit murders on this isolated island, cut off from the outside world. If the murderer had a motive to kill the Makiharas and Mr. Hirakawa, then it was inevitable they would choose this time for their crime, when all three of their targets would be here to spend their summer. And there’d be more than ten people gathered here, who all knew each other well, so the murderer probably wanted to camouflage themself amongst all the other people, together with their motive. Anyway, I can definitely see why the murders were committed here. If it was all premeditated.’

  ‘Even though the murder weapon hadn’t been prepared beforehand? They did use the rifle that was here already.’

  Egami answered Maria’s ques
tion: ‘You could look at that the other way around. If the murderer already knew there was a rifle on the island, using it might’ve been part of the plan from the start.’

  ‘But the first murders were committed on a stormy night when the murderer saw we were all drunk, right? That doesn’t sound premeditated.’

  ‘They probably took advantage of the opportunity. But, Maria, surely the third murder had to have been planned? The killer took an hour to go by bicycle to and from Panorama Villa to Happy Fish Villa to kill Mr. Hirakawa.’

  Ah, that was true. I could understand why Maria might want to deny the cruel thought of a calculated murder, but the third one had now been shown categorically to have been premeditated.

  ‘And the first two murders. Everybody had an opportunity…that’s certain, but there’s nothing more we can say about it.’

  ‘I want to solve that locked room,’ Maria said with a serious expression. ‘We’re the Mystery Club, perhaps we can solve the case by focusing on the locked room?’

  Egami didn’t look interested. He seemed bored by the term.

  ‘The locked room, eh? Sure, it baffles me, but if you focus just on that, you’re sure to hit a wall. When I start thinking about what might’ve happened inside that room, I have the feeling there’s no way we’ll ever be absolutely sure about what occurred.’

  ‘An indecisive detective….’ Maria muttered.

  ‘There’s one thing that bothers me,’ I said. ‘Sumako was shot in the chest, but your uncle Kango was only shot once in his thigh. He did fall over because of that, hit his head, lose consciousness and eventually die of blood loss, but wouldn’t the murderer have wanted to make sure he was dead? Why did the killer leave the room, having merely wounded him? That seems very casual. Even if they’d seen Mr. Makihara lose consciousness, I doubt they would’ve felt relieved just at that. He might’ve regained consciousness shortly afterwards and crawled out into the hallway to cry for help. There has to be some reason for not finishing him off. Maybe the killer heard someone come up the staircase at the crucial moment.’

  The two others agreed there might be something to that idea. In any case, that was all I could come up with. If I’d been asked ‘’So?’ I wouldn’t have known how to reply.

  ‘We talked quite a lot about the first two murders on the night they happened and the day after, but we haven’t gone thoroughly through Mr. Hirakawa’s murder yet,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Let’s sort out the facts of that case now.’

  ‘We got a lot of testimonies on the spot. I have them all sorted out in my notebook.’

  From her waist pack Maria took out a cute notebook that could fit snugly into her palm. It was more a notepad than a notebook.

  ‘Oh, let me see that,’ said Egami, and Maria put the notebook open on the table. The neat letters were so small they were hardly legible. Egami and I knocked our heads together when we tried to read. All the testimonies had been organised and put in chronological order.

  The third murder (Day 4. 23:00 ~ Day 5 03:00)

  22:30 Alice, Maria topple boat.

  23:30 ~ 00:15 Alice, Maria sit down on two bicycles standing next to each other near French windows for chat. Third bicycle near entrance. All three bicycles of Panorama Villa present.

  Before 01:00 Sonobe, Maria go to bathroom, see each other in hallway. Both saw two bicycles next to each other downstairs.

  01:20 ~ 01:25 Egami, Junji talk in hallway. Junji sees moving light near Happy Fish Villa (Bicycle light of the murderer? Optical illusion? Lie?) Both see two bicycles next to each other downstairs (unknown whether the one near the entrance had been there or not).

  02:00 ~ 04:00 Egami, Kazuto have drink & talk in hall. Three bicycles.

  ‘After that—in other words after the time period of the murder—

  Reiko and Satomi met in the kitchen at five. At six, the doctor came down for a morning bath and Reiko started preparing breakfast. Presented in a time schedule like this it’s not that confusing, actually,’ observed Egami. ‘That mysterious light Mr. Makihara saw makes a lot more sense as well, if you keep this schedule in mind. All three bicycles were at the house before a quarter past midnight and after two, but in the period in between, one bicycle has no alibi. And the time Mr. Makihara said he saw the light, was right in the middle of that period.’

  We couldn’t simply take Junji at his word, of course. He had no alibi either. It was clear that the murderer had used a bicycle because of the tyre marks on the moai map. The murderer could only have used it after Maria and I had gone to our rooms, so after a quarter past midnight. Suppose the murderer had hopped on a bicycle and left for Happy Fish Villa right after we’d gone up. A round trip would’ve taken an hour, plus another five minutes for the murder, so the killer could’ve made it back to Panorama Villa by twenty past one. Egami met Junji in the hallway at twenty past one, so perhaps Junji had only just returned from Happy Fish Villa. Then he’d cried out when Egami wasn’t looking at the window. Pretending he’d seen something….

  ‘Hmmm, I guess my own alibi doesn’t hold either.’

  Unfortunately, Egami was right. He might’ve been a real nocturnal animal, talking with people in the hallway or drinking alcohol in the hall in the middle of the night, but he had no alibi. Just as in Junji’s case, it was possible that when the two met in the hallway, Egami had just returned from Happy Fish Villa.

  We couldn’t think of anything even as we looked at Maria’s notes. I tried to change the subject again.

  ‘Let’s look at that map again, with the facing directions of the moais, which turned out to be so useful in our treasure hunt. Why was it lying there at that particular spot in the first place? It hadn’t been there late that afternoon, but it was there the next morning. Earlier, we concluded the killer must’ve dropped it in the night, but why were they carrying it?’

  Maria picked up the thread. ‘What I don’t understand is why that map still exists today. It means the murderer had kept it safe for three years. They certainly took good care of their stuff. I think it’d be much more natural to have thrown it away once the treasure was found.’

  She was right. I didn’t understand either why that thing had suddenly popped up now. Perhaps the murderer had some reason for carrying it, one we hadn’t thought of yet.

  ‘Having found the treasure, the killer should’ve wanted to burn the map and pull all the moais off the island, shouldn’t they?’ said Egami. ‘The statues look like they’re buried so deeply and firmly in the ground, you can’t, in practice, pull them out or change the direction they’re looking in. But a map is something you can simply throw away. By the way, remember that on the surface of the rock where the treasure had been hidden, there were a lot of marks as if it had been hit by something hard? They were probably marks made by the killer hitting the rock with a hammer or something. I think they tried to erase any traces of the treasure having been there in the first place. They hit the rock, but it wouldn’t break, so they had to give up on that.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘but why did they take such care of the map then?’

  I didn’t understand anything about it.

  ‘There was something I don’t understand about the place where Mr. Hirakawa was murdered.’ This time it was Maria who had something to note. ‘Pieces of the jigsaw puzzle had been scattered on the floor, all around his chair and the table, but why? The puzzle had already been half-finished when we saw it the day before, so why did someone break it in pieces?’

  We’d already discussed that with Sonobe at the crime scene earlier. We told Maria that. The doctor had postulated the theory that Hirakawa had tried to leave a dying message written in blood on the jigsaw pieces (even though you couldn’t write with blood on them because of the vinyl coating). The murderer noticed Hirakawa’s attempt and quickly broke the puzzle into pieces. But there were some points that argued against that. Hirakawa’s fingers, for example, had no blood on them, and if the murderer had been in such a panic, it’s odd they hadn’t giv
en the victim a final blow to finish him off. In the end, we hadn’t managed to work out why the puzzle had been broken up.

  ‘I think the broken jigsaw puzzle was a dying message from Mr. Hirakawa.’

  ‘But I just told you, you couldn’t write in blood on either the front or the back of those pieces, and there were no traces of blood on any of Mr. Hirakawa’s fingers,’ I said.

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant. What I meant was that it was Mr. Hirakawa himself who broke up the jigsaw puzzle, and that the act of breaking it up is a dying message of its own.’

  I didn’t quite understand what she was trying to say. Maria caught my expression, and started to explain her theory in detail.

  ‘I just called it a dying message, but there are all kinds of messages, aren’t there? This won’t be like Dr. Fell’s Locked Room Lecture, but allow me to deliver Maria’s Dying Message Lecture. In short, I think we can categorise dying messages into four types. Okay if I organise the messages not by signifié but only by signifiant? So by the means of communication, not the actual contents of the message.

  ‘First is a message made up of letters or symbols. This is the one that appears most often in mystery fiction I think. It’s when a person on the verge of death writes down something like “MUM” or “King” and then dies. Number two is the spoken word. When, in their dying breath, they say things like “Home” or “Samurai.” Third is when objects are used, as when someone is holding sugar cubes or an hourglass in their hands. And number four is a message conveyed through an action. A good example would be Edward D. Hoch’s The Shattered Raven, where a man on the verge of death can’t speak, because he’s been hit in the mouth by a bullet, and shatters a statuette of a raven instead. There’s some overlap, but that’s my categorisation for now. So what I meant was that perhaps Mr. Hirakawa’s dying message was of the fourth category, a message conveyed by an action. Even if it’s impossible to write on the front or the back of the pieces, even if Mr. Hirakawa had no blood on his fingers, he still could’ve left a dying message. If so, we’ll need to figure out what that message was.’