Ellery placed his carefully shuffled deck of cards on the table.
“Now we’ll exchange decks. You’ll give me the blue, and I’ll give you the red. OK. Now take a card out of the deck and memorize it. I’ll take a card from your deck as well and memorize that.”
“Any card I want?”
“Yes. Finished? Now place the card back on top of the deck. And now cut the deck once, just like me. Now the bottom half of the deck has been swapped with the upper half. Yep, yep, like that. Now repeat two or three times.”
“Am I doing it right?”
“You’re doing perfectly. And now we exchange our decks once more.”
The blue deck returned to Agatha’s hands. Ellery stared straight into her eyes and asked: “All right? So, to summarize what we just did: we each took one card from a shuffled deck, memorized the card, returned it and shuffled the deck again.”
“Yes.”
“Now, Agatha, please take out the card you’ve memorized from your deck, and place it on the table face down. I’ll take out my card from this deck.”
Two cards, one red, one blue, appeared on top of the table. Ellery took a deep breath and then asked Agatha to turn both cards over.
“Ah!”
Agatha shrieked in surprise. The cards were of the same suit and number.
“The Four of Hearts! But how did you know?”
Ellery laughed contentedly.
“Neat trick, don’t you agree?”
After the sun had set, the antique oil lamp which stood in the middle of the decagonal table was lit. Van had brought it along, knowing there was no electricity in the house. He had also brought a number of thick candles for each of the guest rooms.
It was past seven when they finished their dinner.
“Ellery, why won’t you explain the magic trick you did just now?” said Agatha, with a hand on his shoulder. She had just brought coffee for everyone.
“It’s no use keeping on at me. It’s taboo to reveal magic tricks. That’s where magic differs from mystery fiction. No matter how mysterious the trick, you’ll just be disappointed when you hear how simple it is.”
“So Ellery showed you one of his tricks, did he?” chipped in Leroux.
“Ah, so you know about Ellery’s magic too!”
“Know? He’s been using me as a guinea pig this whole month. I had to keep it a secret until he got better at it. He can be rather childish at times.”
“Leroux!” complained Ellery.
“What did you show her?” Leroux asked.
“Just one or two simple ones.”
“So those were simple ones?” Agatha looked annoyed. “Then there’s no harm telling me how they’re done, right? Go on.”
“It’s precisely because they are so simple that I can’t tell you how they were done. The first one I showed you, in particular, is a very elementary one—even children can learn it. But magic isn’t just about the trick, it’s about performance and misdirection.”
“Performance?”
“Yes. For example…”
Ellery took his cup in his hand and took a sip of his black coffee.
“There’s a scene in the movie Magic where Anthony Hopkins, who plays a magician, performs practically the same trick for his former love. But in the film it isn’t presented as a normal magic trick, rather as an experiment in ESP. The magician seduced the girl by saying that if they were soulmates, they’d choose the same card.”
“Oh. And you had no intention of seducing me with the same trick?”
“I wouldn’t dare,” said Ellery with a shrug and an attempt at a smile. “Alas, at the moment I don’t have the courage to seduce our queen.”
“That’s a funny way of putting it.”
“Thanks. By the way”—Ellery raised the cup of coffee he was holding and stared at it intently—“to change the subject: regarding that Nakamura Seiji we were talking about this afternoon, did you know he had more than his fair share of obsessions? I got the shivers when I took a close look at this cup earlier.”
It was a fancy moss-green cup, part of the tableware which had been left in the kitchen. But it was its shape that was significant. Like the building, this cup, too, was decagonal.
“He probably had them specially made. This ashtray and the plates we used are all the same. Everything is a decagon. Any thoughts, Poe?”
“None.”
Poe placed his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray.
“Obviously, it’s eccentric, but you know what the rich are like. They love to play around.”
“Just the rich playing around, eh?”
Ellery clutched his cup with both hands and peered intently inside. Although it was a decagon, its small size made it appear almost round to the naked eye.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I feel it was worth coming all the way to this island, even if only for this Decagon House. I almost want to drink a toast to those who died here.”
“Ellery,” said Agatha, “the Decagon House might be a hit with everyone, but there’s nothing else on the island at all. Just a lot of dreary pine trees.”
“You’re mistaken there,” Poe said. “There’s a rocky stretch beneath the cliffs west of the ruins, and a staircase, so we can get all the way down to the sea. I might be able to do some fishing.”
“Now you mention it,” Leroux said, “I did notice you carrying some fishing gear earlier. With any luck we might be able to eat some freshly caught fish tomorrow.”
He licked his lips.
“Don’t expect too much of me,” chuckled Poe, stroking his beard.
“Did you see that there are a couple of cherry-blossom trees right behind this house?” he went on. “The buds are ripe, so they might bloom in a couple of days.”
“How wonderful!” cried Agatha. “Let’s hold a cherry-blossom viewing party then!”
“Sounds good,” agreed Leroux.
“Cherry blossoms, eh?” said Ellery. “What is it about cherry blossoms in the spring in Japan? Personally, I think peach and plum blossoms are much more pleasing to the eye.”
“That’s just because you never want to be like anyone else,” countered Leroux.
“Is that right? Did you know that our exalted ancestors all preferred the plum to the cherry, Leroux?”
“Really?”
“Of course. I think I’m correct here. Orczy?”
Orczy shuddered at the shock of finding herself suddenly addressed. Her face flushed and she nodded hesitantly.
“Well?” Ellery prompted. “Care to explain?”
“Yes… all right,” stammered Orczy. “In the poems of the Manyōshū, the plum and the Amur silver-grass are the plants mentioned the most often. There are more than a hundred poems about each of them, but only about forty about the cherry blossom.”
Both Orczy and Leroux were second-year literature students. Her major was English literature, but she was also knowledgeable about classical Japanese literature.
“Well, I never heard about that,” Agatha said, impressed. As a third-year pharmacy student, she knew nothing about the topic. “Tell us more, Orczy.”
“A-all right,” Orczy answered half-heartedly. “During the period the Manyōshū was compiled, the trend was to imitate the mainland—China—so it might have been a reflection of Chinese preferences. The number of poems on cherry blossoms only grew after the creation of the Kokin Wakashū… but many of them were about falling blossoms.”
“The Kokin Wakashū, so that means the Heian period, I think?” Ellery asked.
“It was during the rule of Emperor Daigo. Early tenth century…”
“Could it be because of the pessimistic world view back then that there were a lot of poems about falling flowers?”
“I wonder. T
he period when cherry blossoms start to fall is also the season when epidemics thrive. They say that cherry blossoms attract illness, so they used to hold the Hanashizume festival every spring to ward off illnesses. So it might have been related to that…” Orczy trailed off.
“I see.”
“What’s the matter with you, Van?” said Poe. “You’re so quiet.”
Van was sitting next to Poe, his head hanging down.
“Not feeling well?”
“No, my head hurts a little.”
“You don’t look so good either. And you have a fever.”
Van moved his shoulders around to loosen them up and took a deep breath.
“Sorry, but I think I’ll go to bed now.”
“Yes, that’s probably best.”
“OK. Well…”
Van placed both hands on the table and slowly rose from his seat.
“You can make as much noise as you want out here. I don’t mind.”
They said goodnight and Van retreated to his room. His door closed and, for a second, the dimly lit hall fell silent. They heard the metallic click of the lock being turned.
“Just like him,” Carr said. Up until that moment he had been nervously jigging his knees in silence. His eyes were wide, as if he were anxious about something. “What a scaredy-cat. Who bothers to lock his door when he’s staying with people he knows?”
“Tonight’s a bright night.”
Pretending not to hear Carr, Poe gazed up towards the decagonal skylight.
“I think it was full moon two days ago,” Leroux observed. At that moment a beam of light swiftly crossed the sky. It came from the lighthouse in J— Cape, which reached all the way there.
“Look,” said Agatha, “there’s a halo around the moon. That means it’s going to rain tomorrow.”
“That’s just superstition,” scoffed Ellery.
“Don’t be so rude, Ellery. Anyway, it’s not just superstition. It has to do with the water vapour in the air.”
“But the weather report said it would be clear the whole week,” Ellery insisted.
“Hmm. Well, anyway,” Agatha went on, “it’s more scientific than all those stories about a rabbit on the moon.”
“A rabbit!” Ellery snorted with laughter. “You know in the Miyako Islands they see a man carrying a bucket on the moon. Ever hear the story behind it?”
“Ah, I know that one.” Leroux’s youthful face brightened. “He was sent to the human world by God, carrying one bucket with the elixir of immortality and one with the elixir of death. But he mixed them up and he gave the snake the elixir of immortality and mankind the elixir of death. As a punishment, the man has to carry the bucket for all eternity.”
“Quite.”
“The Khoikhoi have a similar legend,” Poe said. “But in their story it was a hare who was sent to earth. The hare failed to relay the words of the Moon God and, in his anger, the god threw a stick at it. That’s when the hare ended up with a split lip.”
“People tell the same stories all over the world.” Ellery leant his long body on the blue backrest and crossed his arms. “The one about the rabbit on the moon is known in China, Central Asia, India…”
“As far away as India?” asked Poe.
“The Sanskrit word for ‘moon’ is śaśin, which translates as ‘having the markings of a hare’.”
“Wow.”
As he reached out for his cigarette case on the table, Poe looked up at the skylight once again. The bright-yellow moon floated in the sky.
Tsunojima, the Decagon House.
The shadows of those present were cast on the surrounding walls by the dim light of the lamp.
Slowly, the night advanced.
TWO
The First Day on the Mainland
1
My daughter Chiori was murdered by all of you.
Kawaminami Taka’aki frowned as he lay sprawled on the bed in the middle of his small room. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. He had found the letter in his mailbox just now on his return home.
He had stayed out all night playing mah-jong at a friend’s place and come home with a drowsy mind, the noise of the tiles still echoing in his ears as usual, but the letter had awoken him immediately.
“Wha-what’s this?”
Rubbing his eyes, he picked up the envelope that held the letter and took another good look at it. It was an ordinary brown envelope, postmarked yesterday—25th March. It had been posted from within O— City. The only thing peculiar about it was that everything on it had been written with a word processor.
There was no address for the sender. The back of the envelope only said “Nakamura Seiji”.
“Nakamura Seiji.”
He muttered the name. Never heard of him. No, wait, he had heard it somewhere.
He sat up, legs crossed, and looked again at the letter. It had also been written with a word processor. The paper was a high-grade B5.
“My daughter Chiori was murdered by all of you.”
He remembered the name Chiori. The letter probably referred to Nakamura Chiori. And this Nakamura Seiji would be her father.
It had happened over a year ago, at the New Year’s party of the K— University Mystery Club, of which Kawaminami had been a member at the time. Nakamura Chiori had been his junior, one year below him, so she was a first-year student. Kawaminami was a third-year now. He would become a fourth-year starting in April, but he had quit the Mystery Club in spring last year.
Because at the New Year’s after-party, Nakamura Chiori had died.
Kawaminami had left the party early because of an appointment. The “accident” had happened after his departure. Acute alcohol poisoning, coupled with a chronic disease, had led to a heart attack. It had been too late by the time the ambulance had brought her to the hospital.
Kawaminami had also attended the funeral.
Chiori had been living in O— City with her grandfather on her mother’s side. The ceremony was held there. But the name of the chief mourner wasn’t Seiji. It was a much more old-fashioned name. It wasn’t her father, but her grandfather. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t seen anybody that could have been Chiori’s father there.
But why had someone calling himself Chiori’s father sent him this letter—someone he had never seen or spoken to?
“Seiji” claimed in his letter that Chiori had been murdered. His daughter had died because of the alcohol she had been made to drink at the party. Kawaminami could understand that, in his eyes, his daughter had been killed. But what was he thinking, writing this letter over a year after it happened?
Kawaminami straightened up suddenly.
Nakamura Seiji… Aha!
He had found the correct thread among his memories.
He jumped up, went over to the steel rack leaning against the wall and pulled some folders out. They were full of interesting newspaper clippings he had collected.
I think it was around September last year…
After searching for a while he found the article.
the blue mansion on tsunojima in flames. a mysterious quadruple murder?
Kawaminami sat down on the floor and opened the folder. He tapped his fingers on the big characters of the headline.
“An accusation made by a dead man?”
“Excuse me, is this the Higashi residence? My name is Kawaminami of K— University. Is Hajime there?”
“Kawaminami, you say?”
The woman on the other end of the phone was probably
Hajime’s mother. “Hajime left on a trip this morning. With some friends in his club.”
“The Mystery Club?”
“Yes. He said he was going to an uninhabited island.”
“An uninhabited isl
and? Do you happen to know the name?”
“Err, I think it was Tsunojima. Somewhere near S—Town.”
“Tsunojima…”
Kawaminami felt his breathing cease and he grasped the receiver tightly.
“Did Hajime get a letter, by any chance?”
“A letter?”
“A letter from someone called Nakamura Seiji.”
“I don’t…”
She hesitated for a moment, but she seemed to sense the urgency in Kawaminami’s voice. She asked him to wait a minute and left the phone. The sound of organ music reached his ears. After a while she returned and said, somewhat anxiously:
“Yes, a letter from a Nakamura Seiji has been delivered. Is there something wrong?”
“It’s there? It’s really there?”
“Yes.”
He suddenly felt his strength draining out of him. His shoulders sagged and he was not sure what to do.
“Oh, yes, thank you—it’s nothing. Sorry for bothering you.”
Kawaminami replaced the receiver and leant against the wall. It was an old building and the walls would creak if you put too much weight on them. Through the badly made window he could hear the droning of an almost-broken washing machine.
A letter from Nakamura Seiji was also delivered to Higashi’s place.
He blinked his bloodshot eyes several times.
Could it be just a prank?
He looked up the club’s address list, made a note of all the members who had been at the after-party and made several calls. They had all gone away and, since most of them had been boarding students, he was unable to find out whether they had received letters too. Now they were all on a trip together. To Tsunojima of all places, the site of that horrific incident. Was it just a coincidence?
After a moment of reflection, he picked up the address list again and looked up the phone number of the deceased Nakamura Chiori.
2
O— City was a thirty-minute bus ride and another forty-minute train journey away from S— Town, from where the Mystery Club members had left for Tsunojima. The distance between the towns was less than forty kilometres as the crow flies. Kawaminami got out of the train at Kamegawa, four stations after O— City, and walked briskly up the road leading to the mountains.
The Decagon House Murders Page 4