Her last words seemed to have completely escaped Kirishima. He was writing in his notebook.
(8) Did the killer know Segawa was going to visit Ogino on the night of the murder?
(9) If he did, did he also expect Segawa to fall into Ogino’s trap and get kicked out of the house?
(10) Did the killer know Eiko and Toshiko would be out visiting that night?
If he didn’t, he must be a super-optimist, with limitless faith in his luck, Kirishima thought. He looked up from the notebook and gazed unseeingly at the wall for a while, considering the next point.
Disregarding Yumida’s complicity charge against Eiko, if she hadn’t had a perfect alibi, she could’ve become one of the strongest suspects. It might’ve been much easier for the killer to get rid of Eiko’s alibi than try to put the blame on Segawa in order to divert suspicion from himself. “Hmm, this is strange,” Kirishima muttered and started writing again.
(11) Did the killer have reason to try to ensure that Eiko didn’t come under suspicion?
He stopped there and folded his arms to read through all eleven questions once more.
Kyoko made the tea without a word, but when she saw him light a cigarette, she seized the opportunity. “Don’t you think it might be an idea if I visited the Ogino house once more tonight? As Toshiko’s friend, it’d be natural for me to run to her to express my sympathy, and I might pick up something new for you while I’m there.”
“Well,” he said absently, “I don’t suppose it’d hurt if you can manage it.”
For almost an hour after that Kirishima remained at his desk, staring at the wall, lighting one cigarette after another and only half-smoking them. Then suddenly he jumped to his feet and dashed to the bookshelf. He grabbed the Lawyers’ Register and impatiently began to turn the pages.
“Just as I expected,” he muttered to himself. He raised his eyes and looked through the window into the darkness. Now he felt for the first time he’d struck something that would lead him to the truth.
He went to the phone and dialled Inspector Ishida’s number.
“Inspector? Kirishima here. I’ve just come across something that may be very important.”
“I see. What is it?” Ishida spoke in a hollow voice. Kirishima’s obvious excitement suggested something extraordinary to him.
“I think I’ve got to the bottom of this case at last. If everything goes well, we should be able to come up with a solution tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest . . . Could you come over here straight away? I can’t give you details on the phone.”
15
Kyoko was visiting the Ogino house for the second time that day. Her heart was fluttering as she stepped out of the taxi and looked at this sinister building, the scene of a murder and a suicide.
Walking towards the front gate she had only covered a short distance when she was startled by her own name.
“Miss Tatsuta,” somebody called out, and she turned around nervously.
“You must be Mr. Kitano, Toshiko’s friend,” she said when she recognised the man with the bushy eyebrows.
“That’s right . . . It’s kind of you to come to pay your respects. I’m sure Toshiko will appreciate it.” He came closer to her, and to her astonishment began to whisper in her ear. “I’ve got something important to tell you. I’ve just been inside for the condolence and noticed something. It may be a clue to the identity of Ogino’s murderer, and I thought you might like to pass it on to Mr. Kirishima.”
“Are you talking about somebody inside the house right now?” Breathlessly she thought that even if she declined to listen to him further, the information would probably reach Saburo’s ears anyway. But then, if she herself took it to him, that’d make her call here really worth while.
“I don’t think I could give it to you in a couple of words. Would you let me drive you somewhere where we could have a cup of coffee and talk about it quietly?”
“Yes, all right, but since I’m already here, first I’d like to see Toshiko and offer her my sympathy. I won’t be long.”
“Thank you very much. I’ll be waiting for you in my car—that Bluebird over there. See the registration? NERI 5 NU 3068.” He pointed to a car parked a little distance ahead of them.
“Yes, I’ll recognise it. I hope you don’t mind waiting—I should be back in ten to fifteen minutes.
Kyoko walked up to the house and was met at the front door by a young girl who looked like one of the relatives.
She found Toshiko in the living room, sitting with four or five other people, her eyes red and swollen from crying. In contrast with her appearance in the afternoon, now she looked battered and shaken.
“This is a terrible thing to happen,” Kyoko muttered when she had a chance to talk to Toshiko. “My heart is full of sympathy for you.”
“Thank you. If I’d known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have left the house for a single moment.” She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief.
Other people were waiting to meet Toshiko, so Kyoko drifted away and made her offering of incense at the altar, and said a short prayer. She knew from Kirishima that the body had been taken away for the post mortem.
She was ready to get up and leave when a man she didn’t know said to her, “Are you Mr. Tatsuta’s daughter, by any chance?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“I’m Akito Kurahashi—I knew your late father well, and I’m also a long-time friend of Mr. Kirishima, your fiancé.”
“How d’you do.”
“Could I have a word with you somewhere?”
“Yes, all right—I’m going anyway.”
In the hallway Kurahashi said, “I’m sorry to grab you like this, but I understand you visited here this morning?”
“Yes.”
“And witnessed a rather unpleasant scene?”
“Yes, but I can’t go into details about it here.”
“I appreciate that. I heard of it from Toshiko, and it made me really mad—I’ve just about made up my mind to sever all my connections with the Shichiyo Chemical Company after this.”
“I don’t blame you.” Kyoko suddenly decided to take a chance and ask him a touchy question. “I hope I’m not offending you, but since you’ve taken this so much to heart, did you, by any chance, have a personal interest in Eiko?”
For a moment Kurahashi stared at her nonplussed, then his face broke into a smile. “Oh, no, it’s nothing like that—I only met her a couple of times. In fact, one of the very reasons for my annoyance is that she consistently refused to consult me, and I’m supposed to be the family’s legal adviser. But now that you mention it, I can think of another man who might’ve been secretly in love with her.”
“Who?”
“Well, I’m not a mind-reader, but see that man over there? He’s a Mr. Ogushi—he has known the Oginos since their childhood. I’ve been watching him there for a while. He looks so broken up, you’d think he’d lost his own wife.”
Kyoko could smell alcohol on Kurahashi’s breath and thought this might explain how a lawyer could speak so carelessly. But when she followed his glance and saw the man he was referring to, she was shocked.
Shozo Ogushi was sitting on his own with head hung, still as a statue, his lower lip beween his teeth. It could be just an expression of deep sorrow, Kyoko thought. She found it painful having to look at this grieving man with suspicion.
Then Fujita, the secretary, came over and asked her to have a cup of tea in the visitors’ room. Kyoko felt she’d had enough of this house—she just wanted to get out. She excused herself, saying that she had another urgent appointment, and then walked outside to Kitano’s car.
After about ten minutes’ drive Kitano pulled up near a coffee shop and helped Kyoko out of the car. The place was called Rokka, and Kyoko thought it looked rather run down.
“I’m sor
ry to bring you to such a terrible place,” Kitano said, “but these days it’s so difficult to find somewhere to park. If you’re not careful, you can collect a 5,000-yen parking ticket in no time.”
“This café looks all right to me. Anyway, you needn’t worry about such a trifle.” When they were seated, she said, “Well, what is it you want to tell me?”
“Could it wait till the girl has served the coffee?”
“All right.”
“By the way, have you seen Mr. Kirishima tonight?”
“Yes, I saw him at his home after he’d been out here to inspect the body.”
“Then he wouldn’t know of any subsequent development out here.” Kitano nodded a couple of times. “Well, in the afternoon Toshiko briefed me pretty thoroughly, and when I got home I immediately began thinking about a suitable strategy. Then I received the phone call concerning the suicide—I was staggered.”
“I can well imagine. I rang my own home from a public phone late in the afternoon, and was given Toshiko’s message. It was a terrible shock to me.”
The waitress served them the coffee. As soon as she was gone, Kitano sat up and knitted his eyebrows.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll come straight to the point. Shozo Ogushi is the killer, as far as I can see.”
“But wasn’t he in Fukuoka when Miss Yamaguchi was murdered?”
“That’s no problem at all. Have you seen the latest travel time map—the one with Tokyo in the centre, and widening circles showing all the places that can be reached from Tokyo in the same time by any form of transport? Well, if you look at this map, you find that Fukuoka in the south and Sapporo in the north are almost on the same circle as Kamakura, which is a satellite of Tokyo. And Hong Kong, for example, is closer to Tokyo than Aomori. All right—Ogushi was supposed to be in Fukuoka that night. But what if he got on a jet plane and flew back to Tokyo in the evening?”
“But is there any evidence he’s done that?”
“If I told you I happened to be on the same plane and recognised his face—would that do? Mind, I didn’t know his name at the time, so when I saw him at the wake service tonight, I was simply surprised he was the same man I’d noticed on the plane. But then I was told he was Shozo Ogushi—the one Toshiko had talked to me about this very afternoon. Well, I was jarred to the bone, I can tell you . . .”
Kyoko was too overawed to say anything. She wondered if this coincidence might’ve been the hand of Providence.
“You mustn’t think I’m proud of my discovery. No, it was just a chance happening—it has nothing to do with good guesswork or sound reasoning. The two of us could’ve easily attended the wake service—and the funeral as well—and never set eyes on each other . . . Sometimes I wonder if Eiko’s spirit might’ve guided me to him?”
“Perhaps that’s what happened—who knows?”
“Well, it all started accidentally, but once I began to think of him as a criminal, everything fell perfectly into place. First of all, Toshiko has told me that after his wife’s death Ogushi took Eiko out a number of times—secretly, of course. She’d yielded to his entreaties, not only because he was an old friend, but because at the time she was completely neglected by her husband. But it didn’t take long for Ogushi to realise that Eiko was still in love with Segawa, and that he himself had little chance of success with her unless he did something drastic. He thought he could win Eiko—and her inheritance—by murdering her husband and cleverly putting the blame for it on Segawa. It was a diabolical scheme, most skilfully planned, and it could’ve easily come off if Eiko hadn’t committed suicide. Her death has put an end to it, of course.”
“Yes, this sounds logical to me,” Kyoko said.
“It wasn’t very hard to sort this out. I’m sure Mr. Kirishima had thought of it ages ago, only he didn’t have the evidence.” Kitano smiled modestly and paused just long enough to light a cigarette. “Ogushi must’ve been on very friendly terms with both victims, Shoichi Ogino and Kazumi Yamaguchi. It would’ve been natural for them to invite him into their home without the slightest suspicion. Furthermore, it’s Ogushi who introduced Segawa to Sakai, manager of that fake trading company. According to Toshiko, Segawa was persuaded to take on an industrial espionage assignment and make contact with the Oginos. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there was a secret understanding between Ogushi and Sakai.”
Kitano’s reasoning was convincing and interesting, but Kyoko couldn’t help taking off on a flight of fancy of her own. She thought it was most important there was a witness who’d seen Ogushi fly back to Tokyo by jet on the night of the second murder. With hindsight, his alibi looked naive, but he might’ve thought nobody would suspect him anyway, so it’d do. Saburo shouldn’t have much trouble destroying it with the aid of Kitano’s testimony.
“Well,” Kitano said, “a lawyer in private practice has to leave any formal investigation to the police and the State Prosecutor—there’s no other way. If this happened after Segawa had been charged with murder, the police would’ve lost face. But fortunately, that stage hasn’t been reached yet, so they’ve nothing to worry about. As a matter of fact, I left the Ogino house tonight with the intention of going straight to police headquarters, and that’s when I met you. I thought it was an opportunity I shouldn’t pass up, since you’ve a direct channel to the investigating prosecutor in this case, quite apart from being a personal friend of Toshiko. And to be perfectly honest, I also thought that doing Mr. Kirishima a good turn now might come handy in the future.”
Kyoko rather liked Kitano’s straight-forwardness. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate your assistance,” she said, “but would you mind meeting him yourself? I’m quite prepared to relay this information to him, but I may not be able to do it properly, especially when it comes to details. It’ll be a great help to him if he can hear it from the person directly involved, who also happens to be a lawyer.”
“Yes, of course. It goes without saying I’ll have to see Mr. Kirishima, but he may not like to be disturbed tonight. I was going to see him in his office tomorrow.”
“If I take you to him, it should be all right. Would you like to go and see him now?”
“Yes, I certainly would. The less time we waste the better when dealing with a dangerous criminal.”
“All right then—I’ll just ring him and tell him we’re coming.”
“That’s a good idea,” Kitano said. “But I wouldn’t say too much on the phone, if I were you—it may be risky. Now that I’m going to see him straight away, I might as well tell him everything myself.”
“Yes, of course.” For the first time today, Kyoko felt like laughing. Until now she had no hope of seeing Saburo again tonight. And she was sure he’d be grateful to her and proud of her when he learnt of Kitano’s offer to help.
But Kirishima’s reaction on the phone wasn’t what she had expected. He sounded furious.
“Where are you speaking from? Are you at the Ogino house?”
“I’ve just had a cup of coffee with somebody on the way home from there.”
“Somebody? Who?”
“A man,” Kyoko said with a chuckle. “But you needn’t be jealous—I think he’s going to be very useful to you.”
“Kyoko! Will you stop this nonsense and tell me who he is?”
“Mr. Kitano, Toshiko’s boyfriend—the one I told you about.”
“Kitano? Did you meet him at the Ogino house?” Kirishima’s anger seemed to have evaporated in an instant. His voice became curiously hollow, and she could hear him breathing into the receiver.
“Yes, but what’s wrong with you? Suddenly you’ve—”
“What’s the name of the place you’re ringing from?”
“It’s a coffee shop called Rokka.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s about ten minutes’ drive from the Ogino house, but I’m not sure in which dir
ection.”
“What’s the phone number?”
“311-5846.”
“Rokka, 311-5846—is that right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Just listen, will you?”
“But what’s all the fuss? I really—”
“Shut up and listen—and do as I tell you! Stay in that café for at least another five minutes. Use some excuse. If you can’t think of anything better, go to the toilet.”
“But why?”
“Just do what I’ve told you—I’ll explain later.” He slammed the phone down in her ear.
She stood there bewildered for a while, still holding the receiver. She had never heard him speak to her like this before. Was he drunk? Or was he just irritable from the tensions of a long day? She was fighting back her tears now.
“Well, are we ready to go?” Kitano’s voice came from right behind her.
She thought he must’ve followed her to the phone because she’d been taking so long. She replaced the receiver. “Will you excuse me for a minute?” She headed for the women’s toilet without waiting for an answer.
Once inside the door, she leaned against it and took a deep breath. What was the meaning of all this? Why had she been told to spend another five minutes in the café? She couldn’t fathom it, but Kirishima’s words were a command to her.
She turned to the wall mirror and opened her handbag to touch up her face. Each minute seemed to take an age.
When she returned to the shop and looked at her watch she realised only three-and-a-half minutes had passed.
“Well, shall we go?” Kitano asked cheerfully.
She could think of no other excuse to use up the remaining minute. “Yes, I’m ready,” she said hesitantly.
They left the shop and walked towards the car. It was parked in front of an empty allotment a little distance from the café.
He opened and closed the passenger-side door for her, and then went around to his side. As soon as he got in he switched on the ignition, but the motor wouldn’t start. He tried it three or four times without success.
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