Six Four

by Hideo Yokoyama

  But . . .

  There were no guarantees that Suwa’s image as a ‘young reporter’ was still held by the reporters who were holding a meeting in the next room. They were more than just young, they were different. That was Mikami’s impression, dealing with them now after a twenty-year hiatus. They were, perhaps in part due to an increase in women reporters, unlike any he had seen before. They were upstanding and straight-laced, almost eerily so. They preferred not to drink and, when they did, they never lost their composure. They were hesitant to spend time on Shogi and Go. He couldn’t imagine them sitting around a table in the Press Room, enjoying a game of Mahjong with the police. Some went so far as to speak out against the Press Club, denouncing it as a breeding ground for collusion with the police; this they did with a straight face, even as they reaped the benefits of their membership.

  This had caused Suwa – who had always been able to gauge the Press Room’s halfway line – to lose confidence. A contradiction had appeared between the image and the reality of the ‘young reporter’. The trap had been sprung just as he was coming to believe in himself as a successful Media Relations officer. We need to bargain with them if we can’t negotiate. This was something Suwa had recently told Mikami, perhaps revealing an encroaching anxiety, despite having occupied his position for so long.

  ‘Sir, I found them.’

  Mikumo walked over with a large book in her hands. It took Mikami a second, then he nodded. He had asked her in the car, on the way back, to find the press cuttings from Shoko’s kidnapping.

  He stubbed out his cigarette. Press policy could wait until the reporters made their move; what Mikami needed to do more urgently was to work on Amamiya. Partly, this came from his sense of duty, but he also wanted to know what the man was feeling inside. However, he needed to find answers to some questions he had first. His hunch was that, in doing so, he would come up with something that would help win Amamiya around.

  Why had he turned down the commissioner’s offer?

  Because the memory of the kidnapping had begun to fade.

  Ridiculous. No parent who had lost a daughter could ever rest without seeing the face of her killer.

  Because he was disillusioned with the police.

  Mikami supposed that was part of it. The police had dedicated vast amounts of time and resources to finding the kidnapper, yet they had been unable to bring Amamiya any results.

  Because he held a grudge?

  It was possible. The Prefectural HQ had investigated close to seven thousand people, including relatives of Amamiya. His younger brother in particular – Kenji Amamiya – had become a prime suspect and suffered days of rigorous interrogation.

  Mikami paged through the archive.

  Shoko Amamiya. A first-year student at Morikawa Nishi Primary School. In the photo, she looked young enough to be in nursery. She was wearing the traditional New Year’s dress. Her hair had been braided and held together with a pink hair clip; her mouth was pursed, with bright-red lipstick. The picture had been taken at a local photographer’s one and a half months before the kidnapping, and in celebration of the Shichigosan festival. Kenji Amamiya had not attended the festivities. Following the death of their father, he had been arguing with his elder brother, Yoshio, over their inheritance. He’d been having problems with money. His business, a motorbike dealership, had been suffering cash-flow difficulties, and he had run up debts of close to 10 million yen with a local loan shark.

  It was only natural that the Investigative HQ had made him a focus of their investigation. January the 5th, the day of the kidnapping. Shoko finished her lunch and left the house by herself. She had been planning to visit Kenji at his place, just a half-kilometre to the west. She had no way of knowing about his and her father’s battle over their inheritance. She had only wanted a children’s make-up kit. Uncle Kenji had always given her money as a New Year’s present, but that year he had failed to put in an appearance. Her mother, Toshiko, had warned her against going to see him, but Shoko had won her over with her smile. They lived in an area surrounded by rice paddies, but Shoko’s route had traced a path along woodland – a windbreak – which was largely obscured from view. One of the boys from her year had apparently seen her at a point halfway between her house and Kenji’s. It was the last sighting. No one saw her alive again.

  Later, during the official autopsy, they found the stew she’d had for lunch that day almost entirely undigested in her stomach. That meant she had been killed not long after leaving the house. Kenji had been alone, as his wife and daughter had been out visiting her parents. In his testimony he claimed that Shoko had never turned up and that he hadn’t seen her. Despite this, the police – mostly due to a lack of any other reports of suspicious people or cars in the area – continued to treat him as the prime suspect for a long time afterwards. That wasn’t Kenji, on the phone. They had continued to treat him that way even after Amamiya had assured them otherwise. The Investigative HQ had been leaning towards a theory of multiple kidnappers. As far as Mikami knew, Kenji still wasn’t in the clear. He suspected that a number of the detectives on the case still considered him the man behind the kidnapping.

  But all Mikami could do was speculate.

  The investigation had been ongoing for fourteen years; his knowledge of it barely scratched the surface. He had no access to the specific details of who the police had investigated, or how those people had been cleared; he didn’t even know the degree to which Kenji remained a suspect. And when it came to guessing Amamiya’s opinion of the police for treating his brother as a potential suspect, Mikami might as well have been grasping at straws.

  He leafed further through the archive.

  There wouldn’t be any articles about Kenji.

  Kenji’s interrogation, and the investigation surrounding him, had been limited to a select team from the Violent Crime Section. They had maintained strict confidentiality and the information had never made it into the press. What articles there had been covered only the general details of the kidnapping; no information about potential suspects – or anything key to the investigation – had ever made it into the papers. The police had, in line with the gravity of the case, imposed a gag order of the highest level. The kidnapping had also coincided with the flood of articles and reports covering the death of Emperor Showa; the result was an extreme paucity of articles, considering the seriousness of the case.

  Anyway, the probability was pretty low that any of the articles held the key to bringing Amamiya out of his shell.

  Mikami got up from his chair. The face of an old colleague had been hovering in his head for a while.

  ‘I’m going out for a bit.’

  Suwa looked up from his paper. ‘Where will you be?’

  ‘Private business. Call me if anything changes in there.’

  Suwa nodded deeply. Something to do with his daughter. His look conveyed this apparent understanding.

  Surely it would only complicate matters to bring Criminal Investigations into the fray?

  You are to treat this matter as confidential.

  It would be close to a violation of Akama’s orders. Mikami knew things would become difficult if Akama got wind of where he was going.

  Mikumo, perhaps also thinking of Ayumi, seemed unsure whether she should volunteer her services as a driver. Mikami waved to say it wasn’t necessary, then left the room with the press cuttings under his arm. Suwa ran into the corridor almost immediately afterwards. There was something awkward in it.

  ‘Sir, there was one other thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m planning to invite Akikawa out for drinks tonight, and . . .’ His already quiet voice fell another notch. ‘Would you mind if Mikumo joined us?’

  His eyes were serious. There was even a glint of desperation there. If it hadn’t been for that, Mikami would probably have raised his hand to the man’s dumpy cheeks.

  ‘You can take Kuramae.’

  Suwa’s gaze dropped to the floor. Mikami wasn’t sur
e if the curled grin at the side of the man’s mouth was a symbol of resistance or a mark of self-derision.

  10

  Mikami drove his car out of the station.

  He was on his way to visit Mochizuki, an old contemporary of his. Mochizuki had been part of the Close Pursuit Unit, as had Mikami himself, and had driven the second car during Six Four’s initial investigation. Afterwards, he had remained part of the Investigative HQ, working on the case as part of the team looking into suspects who had debts. When his father collapsed, three years ago, he had retired from the force and returned home to take over the family horticultural business. As was common with the regional police, his official record cited ‘personal reasons’. While his retirement did not free him of his oath to confidentiality, he was likely to talk more freely than someone still in the force.

  Mikami felt vaguely anxious. Perhaps it was Shoko’s name; it had cropped up so many times when he was reading through the press cuttings in the office. And even without that, there were too many things that acted as reminders of Six Four in the area. He was approaching the Aoi-machi junction. His eyes drifted naturally to the blue billboard next to the bookstore. The Aoi Café. It looked the same as it had fourteen years earlier. It had been the first stop in the pursuit of Amamiya’s car during the ransom handover.

  January the 5th. The Amamiya household.

  Mikami had spent the night unable to sleep. It was after 4 p.m. on the following day that the kidnapper’s third call had finally come in. The police had been caught off guard: instead of Amamiya’s home, the call had come in to the office next to the pickle factory. Having slipped through the net, bypassing the tracking and recording apparatus, the kidnapper had introduced himself as ‘Sato’ and asked to speak to the company president. Knowing he was at home all day, the female receptionist had simply told him he was out for the day. The kidnapper had asked her to give him a message. That he would collect the ransom at the Aoi Café in Aoi-machi. He would be there at four thirty.

  The caller’s voice had matched the description of the voice Amamiya had heard the previous day. A man in his thirties or forties, slightly hoarse, with no trace of an accent. Because she had happened to answer the call that day, Motoko Yoshida, Amamiya’s thirty-two-year-old receptionist, had later ended up having to listen to the voices of hundreds of suspects.

  Having no idea what was happening, Motoko had called the company president at home to relay the kidnapper’s message. Shoko’s parents, and the investigators with them, fell into a state of panic. They had less than twenty minutes until the designated time. They had already prepared a large suitcase and 20 million in cash. To track it, they had concealed a micro-transmitter inside. They had also fitted a pin-size microphone under the collar of Amamiya’s jacket, and had finished briefing him to repeat whatever the kidnapper said on the phone. But they didn’t have enough time. Even going as fast as they could, they knew it would take at least thirty minutes by car from Amamiya’s house to the café.

  Amamiya had staggered out of the house, rammed the suitcase into his Cedric and left for the city at a breakneck speed. Katsutoshi Matsuoka, the chief of the Pursuit Unit, had hidden in the back of the vehicle under a blanket between the front and back seats, prepared for whatever might happen.

  The four remaining members of the Pursuit Unit split up into two cars and tailed the Cedric, each keeping a distance of around ten metres. Mikami had been in the passenger seat of Pursuit 1. The signal from the pin-sized microphone in Amamiya’s jacket had been weak, transmission limited to a few dozen metres in a built-up area. Mikami’s job had been to stay close and listen in to the kidnapper’s instructions, as repeated by Amamiya, and relay the details to the Investigative HQ through the wireless set installed in his car.

  They had arrived at the Aoi Café just six minutes late, at 4.36. Amamiya had charged inside. The owner had been scanning the customers, holding a pink phone in his hand and calling Amamiya’s name. It’s for me! His voice was tight as he snatched the receiver. Minako had been there, too, seated at the window just metres away, paired with a detective. A few of the female officers, who had left work to marry within the force, had been summoned to assist with the investigation as part of the Undercover Unit, each masquerading as one half of a couple. Minako had been in a conference room inside the Prefectural HQ since first light that morning. When word had come in detailing the location of the exchange, she had rushed out of the station with the detective posing as her husband. They had installed themselves there just minutes before Amamiya’s arrival. In the end, he’d been in the corner of her eye for under ten seconds. The moment he’d hung up, Amamiya had sped back out of the café.

  As expected, the kidnapper had led Amamiya from one place to another. He told Amamiya a succession of times and places designed to keep him on the road. At first the kidnapper instructed him to take the state road north. Four Seasons Fruits. Atari Mahjong. With the next destination – the Cherry Café – Amamiya crossed into the municipal district of Yasugi. From there he took a right one kilometre on at a set of lights and followed the city road to the Ai’ai Hair Salon. After this, he’d taken a left to join the prefectural highway and continue north.

  After leaving Yasugi, he’d entered the rural district of Ozatomura, only to stop soon afterwards at the vegetable wholesaler Furusato Foods. Then, after another five kilometres, the Ozato Grill. Miyasaka Folding Crafts.

  By that point, they were already deep in the mountains. Amamiya kept driving, tracing the Futago river as it wound up a steep road, almost too narrow for cars to overtake. It was getting close to dusk. It was already after six. That was when the instruction came in for Pursuit 2, the second car in the Close Pursuit Unit, to break off its chase. The same instruction was relayed to a further five cars from the Intercept Unit, which had joined at various points along the state road and the prefectural highway.

  At that point, nobody had known if Shoko was still alive, or if the kidnapper was working alone or as part of a group. They couldn’t risk the kidnapper seeing a chain of seven or eight cars on a mountain road usually empty of traffic. Pursuit 1, with Mikami on the wireless, was the sole vehicle left to follow Amamiya’s Cedric. It hung back, opening up the space between them; Mikami pushed his seat all the way down to conceal himself from the outside.

  They followed the uneven road for a long time. The last place the kidnapper named was the Ikkyu, a fishing lodge close to the Neyuki mountain, which lay on the border of the prefecture. Amamiya had been at the end of his tether. His feet were unsteady as he approached the phone in the lodge. The kidnapper issued more instructions into the man’s ear.

  You crossed a bridge half a kilometre back. One of the lights there has a plastic cord on it. Throw the suitcase into the river from there. Do it in five minutes if you value your daughter’s life.

  That was when the kidnapper’s reason for asking for an oversized suitcase became clear. He was planning to use it as a raft. For that to work, the suitcase had to be reliably buoyant.

  As instructed, Amamiya had turned his car around in the car park and returned to the Kotohira bridge. As was common in depopulated areas, the bridge seemed too grand for its location. A plastic cord had been fastened to one of the mercury lamps, facing downstream on the right-hand side. Amamiya didn’t hesitate, and hurled the suitcase over the bridge towards the river, which lay some seven metres below. The momentum carried it under before it shot back to the surface and began to drift with the current. Within a few seconds, it had disappeared from sight. It was now after seven o’clock. Beyond the threshold of the lights, the uniform darkness made it impossible to distinguish between the river, the rocks or even the sky.

  The handover point was no longer fixed; now, it was anywhere along the line of the river. The line stretched across ten kilometres, through the pitch black, all the way to the dam at the river’s end. The Investigative HQ wasted no time in dispatching a large number of investigators to comb the riverbanks. They knew the kidnapper had to
be in hiding nearby, but where and how Shoko was remained unclear, so they couldn’t use floodlights or torches. And they had to avoid the noise that bringing vehicles and investigators to the road along the river would make.

  The search parties decided they would gather at the bottom of the river, near the southern flanks of Ozatomura, and work their way quietly north up the riverbank. In the darkness, and with only instinct to guide them, the search was erratic.

  The Investigative HQ had also been guilty of optimism. They had assumed that the kidnapper – like the search party – wouldn’t use a torch. That he wouldn’t be able to find or recover the suitcase as it floated downstream in the dark.

  They had also trusted in their technology. The micro-transmitter fitted to the suitcase was still functioning. The receiver in the mobile command vehicle displayed a constant green pulse that trailed gradually south.

  At that point, they had yet to realize their error.

  Just three hundred metres down from where the suitcase had entered the river, near the right bank, was a collection of rocks known locally as Dragon’s Hollow. They formed a three-metre cave under the water. You can get sucked under here, near the right bank. The locals knew it well as a danger spot, as did canoeists and rafting enthusiasts.

  The presence of Dragon’s Hollow was the reason the kidnapper had instructed Amamiya to throw the suitcase from the lamp on the right-hand side of the river. When the Investigative HQ later tested their theory in the same conditions, nine out of ten times, the suitcase had been sucked into the hollow.