Journey Under the Midnight Sun

by Keigo Higashino

  So why had Ryo chosen that particular name as an alias? He would have to ask Ryo himself to know for sure, but Sasagaki’s pet theory was that Ryo saw himself living a life of betrayal. His choice of Akiyoshi’s name was a self-deprecating inside joke.

  Not that any of that mattered any more.

  Sasagaki was almost certain he knew why Ryo had set up Fumihiko. The photograph Fumihiko had showing Yaeko and Matsuura’s affair was a thorn in his side. If Fumihiko had shown the photograph to the police, it might have spurred a reopening of the entire case, making Ryo fear for his alibi. If Yaeko and Matsuura had been in mid-tryst, that would have left Ryo alone. Even if the police back then were unlikely to suspect an elementary school boy of murdering his own father, it was a piece of evidence he’d rather not have out there.

  It had been while he was drinking with Yaeko the night before that Sasagaki had finally reached clarity in his own conjectures. Ryo had been alone on the top floor that day, but he hadn’t stayed in the house. Just as it was easy for burglars to sneak in through the upper-storey windows in those crowded neighbourhoods, a boy could sneak out by the same route. Ryo had gone somewhere that day, stepping across the rooftops.

  And what had he done while he was away?

  An announcement began to play in the shop announcing closing time. The flow of people shifted as more started heading for the door.

  ‘No luck, I guess,’ the man said. His partner looked similarly disappointed.

  If they couldn’t find Ryo today, they intended to take Yukiho Shinozuka in for questioning. But Sasagaki was against that. He was certain she wouldn’t reveal anything of value. She would just give an utterly convincing expression of the purest surprise and say, ‘What? Bones found in my poor mother’s garden? I don’t believe it! It can’t be true!’ And once she said that, they would have nothing. They knew from Makoto Takamiya’s testimony that Reiko Karasawa had been visiting her daughter on New Year’s Eve seven years ago when Matsuura was thought to have been killed. But there was still no proof that there was any connection between Ryo and Yukiho.

  ‘Mr Sasagaki, over there,’ the female detective said, subtly gesturing with her finger.

  Sasagaki looked and saw Yukiho herself walking through the shop. She was wearing a white suit and a million-dollar smile. She was so beautiful she shone with a radiance that captured the eyes of every customer and even the floor staff around her. Wherever she walked, people turned to look, some whispering, some just staring.

  ‘The queen makes an appearance,’ the man whispered.

  Yet when Sasagaki looked at Queen Yukiho, an entirely different image was superimposed in his mind. The little girl he’d met in that rundown apartment so many years ago. The girl who let no one close, closed off to everyone.

  If only he’d heard about Yosuke Kirihara’s predilections earlier he might have figured it out.

  It had been five years ago when he’d first heard it from Yaeko. She was drunk, which was probably why she even talked about it to him at all.

  ‘I can only say this now that he’s gone, but my husband was never much in the sack. Well, not at first. He was fine at first, but gradually things got pretty quiet. See, he found something else, something better. Well, younger at least. Yeah, he liked little girls. He was always buying pictures of ’em. I threw them all away when he died, of course. Those things aren’t right.’

  In itself, this wasn’t particularly surprising to the old detective, but it was what she said next that set his mind spinning.

  ‘I heard something from Matsuura once. He said my husband was buying girls. When I asked him what that meant, he said he was paying money to sleep with them, really young ones, too. I asked if there was a shop that did that kind of thing, and why they didn’t shut it down, and he laughed, saying that the wife of the pawnbroker should know more about these things. You know what he said? He told me it was moms selling their daughters for food.’

  Her words set off a storm in Sasagaki’s head. But when it passed it felt like a thick mist before his eyes had lifted.

  Yaeko wasn’t finished, either.

  ‘You know, he even got it into his head that he wanted to adopt. He went so far as to ask a lawyer what it would take to formally adopt someone else’s kid. When I started asking about it, he got real mad and told me it had nothing to do with me. He said if I kept bugging him about it he’d leave. To be honest, I think he was starting to lose it.’

  Yet it was then that Sasagaki found the answers he had been looking for.

  Yosuke Kirihara hadn’t been visiting Fumiyo Nishimoto’s apartment to see her. He’d been going there to see her daughter. He’d probably been there several times, with money, paying to sleep with her. The old apartment took on an entirely different image in Sasagaki’s mind. It wasn’t a refuge from a hard world. It was a place of business, illicit and contemptible.

  This suggested another question to him. Was Yosuke Kirihara the only customer?

  What about Tadao Terasaki, who died in the car accident? The investigation team had had him pegged as Fumiyo’s lover, but wouldn’t it make more sense if he had just been another pervert of the same persuasion as Kirihara?

  There would be no way of knowing that now. There could have been any number of other customers and he would have no way of knowing.

  The only one he knew about for sure was Kirihara.

  Now the one million yen made sense. It was a final payment to Fumiyo so he could adopt her daughter. Paying for the privilege of being with the girl wasn’t enough. He wanted her for his very own. Kirihara had gone to the library to pick up the object of his obsession, leaving Fumiyo to wander down to the park where she sat on the swings. Sasagaki wondered what kind of thoughts must have been going through her head.

  He could paint a clear picture about what happened next. Kirihara had taken the girl into the abandoned building. He didn’t think she would have resisted much, especially not when Kirihara told her about the million yen he’d given her mom.

  Sasagaki didn’t particularly want to imagine what had taken place in that dusty little room, but he did know one thing – Ryo had been there too. After leaving his house he had headed for the library. He probably went there a lot to see Yukiho and show her his paper cut-outs. The library was their sanctuary from the madness of the world around them.

  But that day, near the library, Ryo saw something strange: his father, leading Yukiho by the hand. He followed them into the building. He might not have known what was going on, but he knew how to spy on them. Ryo had gone straight into the ducts. From his vantage point in the air duct near the ceiling he would have seen a nightmare unfold.

  What sadness and hatred must have filled him, guiding the hands that gripped his favourite pair of scissors. Sasagaki pictured the wounds in the body – wounds that surely lay just as deeply on Ryo’s heart.

  After killing his father, Ryo let Yukiho escape through the door before jamming it with the cinder block – a smart move to delay discovery of the body. When Sasagaki pictured how the boy must have felt as he crawled back out through the darkness of those air ducts, it made his chest ache.

  He couldn’t say what Ryo and Yukiho had decided on afterwards. Maybe they had never decided anything – they were just trying to keep what remained of their souls intact. Yukiho shut herself off from the world, never showing her true self to anyone, and Ryo… he was still crawling through the darkness all these years later.

  Ryo’s motive for killing Matsuura had been to protect his alibi. It was also possible that Matsuura had somehow realised the boy’s guilt and held it over him when he coerced Ryo into pirating software.

  But Sasagaki saw another motive there as well. Ryo would have seen a connection between his father’s predilection for young girls and his mother’s unfaithfulness. From his room on the upper storey of that old wooden building, he must have heard his mother with Matsuura on any number of occasions. To him, Matsuura could well have seemed like the thing that was driving his parents
mad.

  ‘Time to go,’ the young detective said, bringing Sasagaki back to the present. He looked around, seeing the café had nearly emptied out.

  A no-show.

  A kind of emptiness spread in the old detective’s chest. That morning he’d realised that if he didn’t catch Ryo today, he’d never catch him. But sitting here in this empty café wouldn’t help a thing.

  ‘Guess so,’ he said, slowly lifting himself to his feet.

  Outside the café, Sasagaki got on the escalator with the two other detectives. Most of the customers were on their way out. The store staff looked happy, pleased with a successful opening. The Santa Claus from the door was heading up the escalator as they went down. He was slumped in his costume, exhausted from a long day of handing out cards.

  Back on the first floor, Sasagaki glanced around the shop. Yukiho was nowhere to be seen. She was probably in a back office somewhere, tabulating the day’s takings.

  ‘Thanks for the help,’ the man whispered just before they left.

  Sasagaki nodded. The rest would be up to them, the younger generation. He wished them the best of luck.

  Sasagaki went out of the store with a few other customers. The other two detectives broke out from the crowd and went to another of their co-workers across the street. They would regroup, then head in to question Yukiho.

  Sasagaki pulled his coat tighter and started to walk. A mother who had just left the store before him was walking with her child.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ the girl’s mother was saying, looking at something in the little girl’s hand. ‘You’ll have to show it to Daddy when we get home.’

  The girl was about four years old. She was holding something up in her hand, a piece of paper fluttering in the wind.

  Sasagaki’s eyes went wide. The red paper in the girl’s hand had been expertly cut into the shape of a reindeer.

  ‘Wait, where did you get that?’ he asked, suddenly grabbing the girl’s arm from behind.

  The girl’s mother turned, shocked, her hands going to protect her daughter. ‘What are you doing!?’

  The little girl looked as if she was about to cry. A few passers-by stopped to watch.

  ‘I – I’m sorry. I just wanted to know where your daughter got that,’ Sasagaki asked, pointing at the reindeer.

  ‘She got it just now, at the store.’

  ‘From whom? Who gave that to you?’

  ‘Santa gave it to me,’ the girl said.

  Sasagaki spun around and ran at full speed, gritting his teeth against the ache in his knees.

  The doors to the shop were already closed. The few detectives standing outside looked surprised when they saw Sasagaki running toward them.

  ‘What is it?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Santa Claus!’ Sasagaki shouted. ‘He’s Santa Claus!’

  Immediately grasping the situation, the detectives lunged forward and forced open the closed automatic glass doors, spilling into the shop. Ignoring the floor staff trying to stop them, they ran up the stopped escalator.

  Sasagaki tried vainly to keep up with them, but then had another thought and instead turned back outside to head down the narrow alleyway that ran along the side of the shop.

  I’m an idiot. How long have I been chasing this guy? How long has he been lurking in the shadows where no one would see him, watching over Yukiho?

  Behind the building was a metal staircase with a railing that led up to a door. He ran up the stairs and yanked the door open to see a man standing in front of him, dressed all in black. He looked surprised to suddenly see someone appearing in front of him.

  It was a strange, lingering moment in time. Sasagaki knew the man standing in front of him was Ryo Kirihara. And yet he couldn’t move to grab him. He couldn’t even speak. Meanwhile another part of his mind realised that Ryo knew who he was, too.

  A second passed and the moment was gone. Ryo whirled around and began running in the opposite direction.

  ‘Stop!’ Sasagaki shouted, chasing after him.

  He ran through the corridor and out into the first floor of the store. The other detectives were there in force. Ryo was running, weaving between shelves piled high with expensive-looking bags. ‘It’s him!’ Sasagaki shouted.

  The detectives turned and ran. Ryo was making for the top of the elevator. We’ve got you now, Sasagaki thought.

  But just before Ryo reached the escalator he swerved, and without a moment’s hesitation he leapt off the balcony.

  A cry went up from the store clerks on the floor below. There was a loud crash of something breaking. The detectives raced down the steps of the escalator.

  Sasagaki reached the escalator a few seconds behind them. His heart was racing painfully. Hand to his chest, he took the steps slowly.

  Down on the ground floor, the giant Christmas tree was lying on its side. Ryo Kirihara was lying next to it, his arms and legs splayed out. He wasn’t moving.

  A detective ran closer and tried to pull him up, but then he stopped and turned toward Sasagaki.

  ‘What is it?’ Sasagaki asked. The detective just pointed down at Ryo. A pool of blood had started to spread on the floor beneath him.

  Sasagaki walked over and knelt down. He started to roll Ryo over when he heard another scream.

  There was something sticking out of Ryo’s chest. It was hard to see through the blood, but Sasagaki knew exactly what they were. His scissors.

  Someone shouted for an ambulance and he heard footsteps running, but Sasagaki had seen enough corpses in his life to know when it was too late for that. Sensing a presence, he looked up. Yukiho was standing nearby, her face as white as snow.

  ‘Who is this man?’ Sasagaki asked, looking her in the eye.

  Yukiho was as expressionless as a porcelain doll. ‘I don’t know him at all,’ she said quietly. ‘The manager hired him.’

  A young woman showed up, her face pale, and introduced herself as the manager.

  The detectives were starting to move. One began roping off the scene. Another began questioning the manager, and another put his hand on Sasagaki’s shoulder.

  The old detective let himself be led away. He was walking a little shakily. He looked up and saw Yukiho going up the escalator, looking like a white shadow from behind.

  Not once did she look around.