Togakushi Legend Murders (Tuttle Classics)

by Yasuo Uchida

  "No, it's okay," said Kinoshita, with a look that meant it was too late to do anything about it now, anyway.

  "You did break some kind of date, didn't you?"

  "Yes, sort of."

  "On the phone, you looked like you were begging forgiveness with tears in your eyes."

  "I was not! I was only being polite."

  "Well, I'm glad of that, but you know, I rely on you so much that I'm afraid I sometimes make unreasonable demands on you."

  "Thank you, but I don't mind."

  "If I've messed up your marriage plans, I'll give you my own wife, Yoko."

  "I'd take her in a minute, Inspector. I've got a real crush on your wife!"

  "Idiot! What kind of joke is that? Don't talk silly!" said Takemura, embarrassed.

  "Aren't you the one who was talking silly, Inspector?" said Kinoshita, quite offended. The conversation was taking an unpleasant turn.

  "Hey, let's stop at the Middle Shrine for some buckwheat noodles," said Takemura. "My treat."

  Kinoshita looked away, ready to laugh.

  The police began their watch at 7 P.M. Takemura and Kinoshita waited in their car in the Segi villa driveway next door, watching for the Ishiharas to arrive. Yoshii and his partner waited in their car on the road beyond the Ishihara villa, ready, if necessary, to block any retreat.

  All of the Koshimizu Plateau was enveloped in darkness by around 7:30, and the Ishihara villa remained completely dark. They all waited anxiously, checking with each other occasionally by walkie-talkie whenever they happened to think of it. The cool air felt good, but they had to keep their mouths shut to keep out the mosquitos. There was no question that it would have been more comfortable to close the windows and turn on the cooler, but they couldn't leave the motor running the way they could have done in the city.

  "We should've bought some mosquito repellent," said Kinoshita, exasperated.

  "You're asking too much," said Takemura. "Just be glad we've got the car, at least." He was about to add something about how it was when he was young, but he stopped himself. He was only thirty-three. It must have been the title of Inspector that was making him feel old. "That'll never do," he admonished himself aloud inadvertently.

  "Okay, okay, I can take it," said Kinoshita, thinking Takemura was talking to him. His feelings were apparently hurt again.

  Strange, thought Takemura, they weren't getting along too well tonight. He hoped it wasn't a sign that something bad was going to happen.

  The time passed quickly. Kinoshita had fallen asleep with his chin on his arm resting on the window. Takemura was annoyed, but thought it a shame to wake him, so concentrated instead on not falling asleep himself.

  It was after ten, and still the Ishiharas had not appeared. Four cars had come by, but all of them had passed without stopping. Three of them had turned into the Fukumoto Machinery Company's villa. About now, thought Takemura, that cheerful Junko Murata would be all wound up entertaining guests. Come to think of it, it was she who had said that the poisoned body left that way on Poison Plain had to be the curse of the Demoness. If so, they were in for considerable trouble with their investigation. Such were the trivial thoughts passing one after another through Takemura's head.

  "Inspector, wake up!" The voice of Kinoshita broke into them.

  "Idiot! I wasn't sleeping!"

  "But, your eyes were closed."

  "I was only thinking. You're the one who was sleeping!"

  "I was not!"

  "Never mind. Has something happened?"

  "No."

  "Then what did you have to call me so loud for? What time is it?"

  "Almost eleven."

  "That's funny." Takemura looked out through the darkness, but there were still no lights on in the Ishihara villa. Even if they had stopped for supper somewhere along the way, they should have been here by now. He called the other car, but Yoshii and his partner had seen nothing either. Takemura became more and more uneasy by the minute.

  "Do you think they could have suspected we were waiting?" asked Kinoshita.

  "I shouldn't think so," said Takemura. "But they may have flown the coop anyway."

  "Which would make Ishihara our man, then?"

  "I guess so."

  Shortly thereafter, Takemura called off the stakeout. The singing that had been coming from somewhere until a short while earlier was no longer to be heard, and the only sound now audible on the plateau was the buzz of mosquitos. The silence was broken by the noise of Kinoshita starting the engine.

  "Hey, keep that down, will you?" snapped Takemura.

  "How am I supposed to do that?" replied Kinoshita.

  Superior and subordinate fell into an ill-humored, stony silence.

  Takemura awoke with a start. He had been dreaming, but he couldn't remember about what. He knew from experience that when he awoke like that, he could hardly ever get back to sleep.

  The dawn light was peeking through the window shutters. Beside him, Yoko was breathing regularly in her sleep, smiling slightly, as if having a good dream. Takemura remembered Kinoshita's face as he confessed to a crush on her. Well damned if Kinoshita could have her! He wanted her himself! Leaning over, he slipped a hand beneath her blanket. Just then, the telephone rang.

  Yoko opened her eyes and looked at him blankly. What could he do but take hold of her arm with the hand he had slipped under her blanket, shake it and say, "Hey, the phone's ringing!"

  "I'll get it," she said, jumping up on a relex and rushing into the living room, where, finally awake, she turned and gave him a dirty look that said, "If you were awake, why didn't you get it?" before picking up the receiver.

  "It's Inspector Katahira, from headquarters," she called.

  Takemura looked at the clock. It wasn't even six! That meant bad news.

  He got up and went to take the phone. "Takemura speaking."

  "Good morning. This is Katahira. I've just gotten this report, and I'm afraid I don't have any details yet, but it seems that a car has been discovered with the body of a man and a woman in it at a place called West Arrow in Togakushi."

  "What? Who are they?" asked Takemura, fearing he already knew.

  "We haven't identified them yet, but the car had Nagoya plates, so I'm afraid this may have something to do with the Ishiharas you're looking for, Inspector, which is why I'm letting you know right away."

  "Thanks. I'll be there shortly."

  "Uh, one more thing, and this bothers me. There was an arrow stuck in each body."

  "An arrow? Wait a minute! Didn't you say the place was called West Arrow or something?"

  "Yes. That's what bothers me."

  Takemura went cold.

  * * *

  The village of West Arrow was located just across the Susobana River to the north of National Highway 406 on its way to Kinasa, on the same road that went through Imai to Poison Plain.

  Getting out of the car, Takemura immediately felt something odd about the scene, and not only because of the police swarming all around. On either side of the narrow blacktop farm road was a small hillock. Barely twenty meters high, they were hardly worthy of the name, but in the midst of the surrounding bright pastoral scenery, they looked strangely dark. The one to the west of the road was covered with cedar, through which some sort of shrine was visible. The one to the east was somewhat smaller, with the shape of a triangular pyramid that made it look almost man-made. The trees on it were not very thick, and Takemura could see through them to the top, where a five-story pagoda stood. Of the two hillocks, this one was the more gloomy and mysterious.

  The car with the bodies was parked off the road, heading to the west hillock, at the bottom of a crumbling stone staircase which led steeply up into the trees.

  "That shrine up there seems to have two names," said Tsuneda, the chief of detectives at Nagano Central. "They call it either Arrowhead Shrine or Arrowstand Shrine." Tsuneda had gotten there a little ahead of Takemura and had already picked up some information. He looked quite unhap
py about one brutal murder occurring right after another.

  "Arrowstand, you say?" Takemura's foreboding became even stronger. First West Arrow, and now Arrowstand.

  "Pretty nasty coincidence, isn't it?" said Tsuneda, the names evidently bothering him too.

  "Then are these the Ishiharas?" asked Takemura.

  "I think they must be. We couldn't find a driver's license, so I can't say for sure, but the plates are registered to Ishihara. We've contacted Nagoya, and we should have someone here who can make a positive identification first thing this afternoon."

  Looking into the car through a small gap left by CID, Takemura saw that the bodies had apparently just been thrown into the back seat, where they had sprawled partly on the floor. They were dressed, but out of each of their backs protruded a white-feathered arrow.

  "I was told those are ceremonial arrows used at the Togakushi Shrines," said Tsuneda. "For some kind of exorcism, I guess. Somebody must have sharpened the tips and stuck them into the bodies. No sign of bleeding though, so it must have been done some time after they died."

  "What was the cause of death?"

  "Same as Takeda, the doctor says."

  "Poisoning? Looks like the same murderer, then, doesn't it?"

  "Looks like it."

  "Who found the bodies?"

  "An old woman. I don't know how much we can get from her, but I suppose you'd better talk to her anyway."

  The old woman, nearly seventy-eight, was named Iku Katoh. She was in the habit of getting up every morning before the other members of her household and going out to sweep the area in front of the shrine as a daily chore. She had gotten up around five this morning as usual, just as the dawn was breaking, and gone out with her broom to the worshippers' entrance of the shrine, practically next door to her house. This time, however, she had found the car enshrined there, right at the bottom of the stone staircase. Annoyed because it was in her way, she had taken a peek inside and seen the bodies.

  She tried her best to tell Takemura all about it, but her language was so thick with dialect that she was quite difficult to understand, and it took him some time even to get as much as he did from her.

  The car must have been parked there during the night. Several people questioned said they had heard it. The consensus seemed to be that it was around two in the morning. Although Iku Katoh's bedroom was closest to the spot, she said she had been sleeping and hadn't heard anything. Even had she been awake, she was hard of hearing and most likely wouldn't have heard it anyway.

  Takemura took great pains to hear everything she had to say. After he finished the more relevant questioning, he asked her about the strange triangular hillock on the east side of the road.

  "Hill? 'Tain't no hill. 'Tis a mound. Demon's Mound, they calls it hereabouts."

  "Demon's Mound?"

  "Ay, that's what they calls it. But that ain't what it is. Nope. It oughta be called Miss Maple's Mound. That there's Miss Maple's grave, it is."

  "Miss Maple? You mean the Demoness Maple?" Takemura was surprised to run into the Demoness Legend again, but more interested in the fact that the old woman had attached a polite "Miss" to Maple's name. From further inquiries, he learned that this place, West Arrow, had played an especially important part in the Demoness Legend, the story being that before his final attack, Taira no Koremochi had, after praying to the gods for assistance, shot an arrow from the top of Mount Shimoso on the south side of the Susobana River, trying to determine the best route to follow in attacking Mount Arakura, where Maple's band had entrenched itself. He aimed his arrow toward the sky, and it landed on a hillock on the opposite side of the Susobana, with its point stuck in a rock. At the place where it landed, a shrine was built to Arrowhead Hachiman, the god of war, and on Mount Shimoso, a shrine was built to Arrowshot Hachiman. The names still exist, giving some credence to the legend.

  The cause of death was determined to be poison, of the same kind that had killed Takeda. The arrows had been stuck into the bodies at least two hours after death. They had been stuck into people already dead for hours! Feeling the bile come up into his mouth, Takemura knew he was dealing with something abnormal. The act of murder would itself have to be called abnormal, but at least in impulsive cases of robbery-murder or grudge-murder, when the victim is dead, the job is finished. With the death, the murderer is either satisfied, or else comes to his senses, but in either case, he does not try to further desecrate the corpse. He may of course try to cover the traces of his crime by setting a fire or otherwise disposing of the body, but such actions testify to his normality rather than abnormality.

  For the bodies to have been thus violated, and that some time after the murders, would mean not only that the motive had been a grudge, but an extraordinarily deep one, and it would mean most of all that the murderer was suffering from some extreme psychosis.

  In addition, the bodies had been left at this place called Arrowstand with arrows standing in them. That made it even more obvious than it had been with the poisoned body left on Poison Plain that the murderer had some special intention. It also left no doubt that the two cases were related.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, a number of people connected with the Ishiharas arrived from Nagoya: their elderly housekeeper, Shizu Kasai; their married only daughter, Hisako, and her husband Koichi Hirai; a director of Ishihara's Chubu Advertising Agency named Iwata; and the agency's general affairs manager, a man named Sueyasu. They arrived in separate parties. The first to arrive, alone, was Shizu Kasai. Next came Mr. and Mrs. Hirai, and finally the two men from the company. It was understandable enough that the men from the company should have come separately, but less so that Shizu Kasai should have come by herself, especially since Mr. and Mrs. Hirai had come by car and could easily have saved her money and trouble by giving her a lift.

  Even stranger was the fact that when Shizu and Hisako came face to face, they both turned away without so much as a word of greeting. Such behavior at a time like this could only mean some extreme discord between them.

  When Shizu Kasai was shown the bodies, and Takemura asked if there was any mistake, she answered tearfully that there was not.

  Hisako Hirai, however, replied, "Yes, this is my father, but that woman is not my mother."

  "What do you mean?" asked Takemura, surprised, with a look at Hisako's husband. Koichi, however, looked at the floor and said nothing, apparently afraid of his wife. Shizu was called in once more, and she confirmed that the woman was indeed Mrs. Ishihara.

  In the midst of the confusion, Iwata and Sueyasu arrived, and both confirmed that the bodies were indeed those of their boss and his wife. They told Takemura that Hisako was unwilling to recognize Ishihara's wife, Kayo, as her mother. Kayo was Ryuji Ishihara's second wife, in other words, Hisako's stepmother, but there had been very bad feeling between the two women.

  Considering their relative ages—Ishihara was fifty-nine, Kayo thirty-eight, and Hisako thirty-three—the enmity that Hisako bore toward her stepmother was not incomprehensible. She would not likely have enjoyed calling someone only five years older than herself "mother," and it was also easy to imagine that she might be afraid Kayo would wheedle the family fortune out of her father.

  Shizu Kasai, who was nearly seventy, was a maid whom Kayo had brought with her when she married Ishihara. Although the fortunes of Kayo's own family had declined since the end of the war, it had once been a distinguished family of the Suwa region of Nagano Prefecture. Shizu was reduced to weeping and wailing about where the gods could have been to let such a thing happen to her mistress, but this did not deter Hisako from coldheartedly regarding the miserable old woman as an enemy.

  "This ends your connection with our family, so you can just take that woman's bones and go!" railed Hisako at Shizu, right in the middle of the police station.

  Even Hisako's husband was unable to let that pass. He admonished his wife that enough was enough, but she was on the verge of total, uncontrollable hysteria. There was nothing f
or Takemura to do but forget the couple and question instead the two men from Ishihara's company, who were no relation to the family.

  The Chubu Advertising Agency was based in Nagoya and did business mainly with clients in that area. Established in 1960, it was a leading local agency, with thirty-odd employees. Both Iwata and Sueyasu insisted they could think of no possible reason whatsoever for the murders, and since these two had been Ishihara's right-hand men, if they had no idea, it was hardly conceivable that any other employee would. The questioning did, however, turn up a connection between Ishihara and Kisuke Takeda.

  "Why yes," said Iwata, "as a matter of fact, Mr. Takeda was one of our stockholders. We also did some business through his firm. I've heard that Mr. Takeda and Mr. Ishihara were old friends."

  "I suppose you knew that Mr. Ishihara owned a villa in Togakushi?" said Takemura.

  "Yes, of course."

  "Well actually, we have reason to believe that Kisuke Takeda paid a visit there the night he was killed. Can you tell me whether Mr. Ishihara was at his villa that night?"

  "The night Mr. Takeda was killed? That was the 7th, right?"

  "No. The 7th is when his body was found. He was killed sometime during the night of Saturday the 3rd."

  "Oh. Well, if it was the 3rd, I can tell you for sure that the boss was not at his villa. On Sunday the 4th, we had to entertain clients at a golf tournament in Takarazuka, so all the important employees of our company stayed overnight there the night before, including the boss, of course. I saw him with my own eyes playing mahjong with guests until late that night." Iwata looked at Sueyasu for confirmation, and Sueyasu confirmed.

  "Well then, what about Mrs. Ishihara, or Mr. Ishihara's daughter and her husband? Could any of them have been there?"

  "Well, er, yes. That's a possibility, I suppose." The two men exchanged uneasy glances. Takemura had apparently touched on some sensitive spot.

  "Did anyone in the Ishihara family, including Mr. Ishihara himself, have any reason for hating Mr. Takeda?" asked Takemura.