The Informer

by Akimitsu Takagi

  “Hey, what’s up with you?” he said and tried again, but still no good. “I’m sorry about this—I’ll have to have a look.”

  Kitano got out again and opened the bonnet. He fiddled around with the motor for a while, then walked to the rear of the car and opened the boot. “Miss Tatsuta,” he said, “I wonder if you’d hold the torch for me for a second?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I hope you don’t mind—it’s a damned nuisance, I know.”

  “It’s no trouble.” She got out of the car. He switched on the torch and handed it to her. “Where shall I shine it?” she asked.

  “Just around here, I think. Where is that screwdriver? Right—I’ve got it. Now, let me see . . .”

  Suddenly a voice like a sharp-edged blade cut through the night. “Hold it!”

  Kyoko turned with a start and saw something flash past her face, and then saw Kitano trying to regain his balance. She didn’t know what had happened. The blood was pounding close behind her ears, and she felt the torch go sticky in her hand.

  Then she saw a man running through the darkness towards her, and Kitano racing away from her, his head held low be­tween his shoulders.

  “Are you okay, miss?” the man asked when he got to her, catching his breath.

  She realised he was a uniformed policeman. “Yes, I’m all right, thanks. What happened, anyway?”

  “I rushed out from that police hut over there, after getting the call from Inspector Ishida. The patrol car’ll be here any minute now . . . That was a close shave, wasn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The man was trying to hit you on the head with a spanner from behind. My yell made you spin around, and he just missed you by a whisker. You were lucky!”

  If it hadn’t been a uniformed policeman, she wouldn’t have believed him. Had Kitano been really trying to kill her? It seemed altogether too fantastic . . . Then she began to feel dizzy. There was a sharp pain in the back of her head, as if she’d been actually hit with a spanner. She groped for the door­handle of the car—she felt she had to sit down somewhere—and heard the sharp horn of the patrol car.

  Holding on to the phone, Inspector Ishida turned to Kirishima and said, “She’s all right.” He listened some more, and gave a few instructions.

  Kirishima pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. Those unnerving ten minutes were just beginning to tell on him. His hand was trembling a little, and his face was very pale.

  “He seems to have escaped on foot, abandoning his car,” Ishida said. “We already have a police cordon around the area, so it’s only a matter of time before we get him.”

  “You’ve done a marvellous job, inspector. I’m really grateful to you.” Kirishima took a deep breath and blew out the air noisily, as if to get rid of his private emotions. “Are we ready to go to Suginami police station?”

  “Yes. I’ve made all the arrangements.” Ishida bowed politely.

  “What’s the idea of bringing me here at a time like this—even before you returned my sister’s body for the funeral? Are you supposed to be human beings?” Toshiko glared at Kirishima and the others, her eyes narrowing with hatred.

  “Since you’re suspected of murder, we had no alterna­tive,” Kirishima said, his words cold and pointed like so many daggers.

  “And whom am I supposed to have murdered?”

  “We won’t say you’ve murdered your sister, but we do say you were a partner in the murder of Shoichi Ogino and Kazumi Yamaguchi.”

  “Where’s your evidence?”

  “We’ve none at present, but don’t worry, we’ll get it. Mean­while, I arrest you on suspicion of being an accomplice in the attempted murder of Kyoko Tatsuta. This was a crime commit­ted right in front of a policeman.”

  Toshiko became speechless. Her agitated eyes moved from one officer to the other.

  Kirishima said, “You know a lawyer called Kitano, don’t you? Can you tell me his phone number?”

  “I couldn’t without looking it up in the book.”

  “Kyoko Tatsuta told me you rang him this morning in front of her, dialling his number without looking at anything.”

  Fear flashed in her eyes, but she didn’t answer.

  “All right,” Kirishima said, “perhaps you’ll tell me this. Did you think Kitano was really a lawyer?”

  Toshiko began to tremble. Her lips twitched a couple of times but no sound came from them.

  Kirishima looked into those fear-haunted eyes. “When I looked up the Lawyers’ Register this evening, I found two Kitanos listed in Tokyo. I know both of them well. One is seventy years old. The other is a former prosecutor—he resigned from the Criminal Affairs Division and is now in private practice. He’s fifty-five.”

  “But Kitano definitely told me he was a lawyer.”

  “You can stop your clumsy play now. D’you still think I don’t know who this phoney lawyer is? I had a pretty good idea all along, but when I saw the number plate on the car he’d aban­doned, I had the concrete evidence. Would you like me to spell it out for you? He’s none other than Mikio Sakai, manager of Shinwa Trading Company.”

  She looked up, breathing rapidly, sipping at the air. “Then he had deceived even me about the spy agency?”

  Kirishima knew this woman was going to hang, but right now he felt like bursting into laughter. “There never was any spy agency. It only existed in his own imagination. This was the cleverest of all his tricks—it fooled not only Segawa, but me as well.”

  16

  Mikio Sakai, alias Shinji Kitano, self-styled spy agency manager, self-styled lawyer, was arrested late that night.

  For the next two days he and Toshiko Murozaki were put through an intensive police interrogation. On the third day, State Prosecutor Saburo Kirishima charged them with murder.

  The same evening Kirishima was toying with his brandy glass at his fiancée’s home. He lifted the glass against the light and seemed to be absorbed in studying the colour of the liquor in it, slowly moving it between his fingers.

  “You had a narrow escape,” he said absently. “Why didn’t you stay in that shop for another minute or two? When I learnt of it, I broke out in cold sweat.”

  Kyoko averted her eyes. “You didn’t tell me what it was all about.”

  “That’s because I couldn’t assess the situation on the phone. I thought if I told you of my suspicion, your attitude would change, and Sakai might notice it. I was going to arrest him on suspicion of fraudulent practices. Since he told you he was a lawyer, and he wasn’t, this was sufficient to arrest him on. I was going to take it from there—I was ready for a long tussle with him. Luckily, he made an unexpected blunder.”

  “Then it looks as if I did achieve something after all, even if only by a fluke?”

  Kirishima ignored her question. “If I could’ve foreseen what was to come while you were at my place, I would’ve never let you go on such a dangerous mission. But by the time it dawned on me, an hour had passed. I rang the Ogino house immedi­ately, but was told you’d just left there. It was very fortunate In­spector Ishida was with me that night. The moment I received your phone call, he got the police force moving, taking no chances.”

  “But how did all this come about? I still can’t understand it.”

  “I think you’ll understand it better if I go back a distance in my guessing process. When I had Segawa’s admission of spying in my hand, the thing that bothered me most was that socalled informer. If Segawa was telling the truth, then immedi­ately three questions arose. First, was the informer also the killer? Second, why did the informer tip off Ogino? And third, how did the informer find out about Segawa’s spying?”

  Kyoko was hanging on her fiancé’s words, her face radiant with admiration and love.

  “Now, dealing with the first question, if the informer wa
s the killer, he must’ve known Segawa was going to visit Ogino that night. Furthermore, he had to create an opportunity to deal with the victim. While Segawa and Ogino were having a friendly drink together, he had no chance to strike. Once men start drinking in the absence of their wives, they’re not likely to stop in a hurry—that’s only common sense.”

  “Since I’m going to marry a man who loves drinking, I’d bet­ter remember that.”

  “Therefore the killer must’ve been able to calculate, cor­rectly, that Ogino would set a trap for Segawa, and he must’ve been in a position to sneak into the house shortly after that. To do this, he had to be a close friend of Ogino, or get assistance from inside the house. Once I got this far, the idea that the in­former was also the killer began to make sense.”

  “And then?”

  “The second question. This I could answer easily, once I re­alised the killer wanted to lay the blame on Segawa. Had Ogino passed on the information about Segawa to someone else, the suspicion against Segawa would’ve become much stronger.”

  Kirishima emptied his glass and held it out to Kyoko for a refill. “And now the third question. This was the hardest. There were only three obvious indications of Segawa’s spying activities—the fact that he warmed up his old friendship with Ogino, the fact that he asked Ogino to let him inspect the fac­tory, and the fact that he tried to win over Setsuko Kondo, the research assistant. Now, how could anybody deduce from these three facts that Segawa was a spy? The first two moves were perfectly natural. As for the third, if he’d been a man of doubt­ful background, somebody might’ve become suspicious. But everybody knew he was a close friend of the executive director, and the girl didn’t reveal his advances to anyone except Ogino himself. Even Dr. Nishiwaki wasn’t aware of it. It follows that a third person couldn’t have possibly guessed on the basis of these three facts that Segawa was a spy. This is where my suspi­cion shifted to Sakai for the first time.”

  Kyoko poured the brandy and said, “Even when Segawa ad­mitted his spying, nobody in his right mind would’ve thought that Sakai—the one who had ordered him to do it—might’ve tipped off Ogino about it. This would’ve looked like throwing money out the window.”

  “Exactly. This was the most difficult mental hurdle I had to clear. No matter how much I thought about it, I just couldn’t see any reason for Sakai to murder Ogino. They didn’t even know each other! I can understand now why he was so confi­dent that so long as he managed to do it without leaving a trace, he’d never get caught.”

  “When you first questioned him, all he had to do was claim privilege in the matter of the spy operation.”

  “That’s just what he did. When I asked him to tell me the name of his client, he simply refused, and I couldn’t do anything about it. But once he became a murder suspect, it wouldn’t have done him any good trying to take the same line. If he was the manager of a spy agency, he would’ve had to re­veal everything about it to help save his own skin. When it all boils down, industrial spying is a business, and it’s most un­likely an operator would choose to hang rather than betray his client. But Sakai could never produce the name of his client. From this I gathered his spy agency existed only in his own imagination.”

  “Then Sakai must’ve engaged Segawa for the sole purpose of building him up as a murder suspect? It was like fattening a calf for the slaughter?”

  “You hit the nail right on the head. Sakai had no intention of engaging anybody but him right from the start. He ensnared Segawa step by step. First he flattered him by the hint of a partnership and offered him the bait of a 50,000-yen salary. Then he let Segawa sweat it out with the massaging machine for a month. This was all part of his elaborate plan. By the end of that month Segawa was down in the dumps and really hungry for money. He’d been psychologically prepared to take the plunge into industrial spying as a short cut to financial recovery.”

  “At the same time Toshiko succeeded in reviving Segawa’s friendship with Eiko. That was also part of the scheme, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course. And she could do her part without running much risk. She wouldn’t have derived any visible benefit from Ogino’s death. According to the law, two-thirds of his estate would’ve gone to Eiko and one-third to Sadako Nishiwaki. But by looking one step ahead, you can see that in the event of Eiko’s death, her share of the inheritance would’ve passed to Toshiko. Winning a game of chess depends on the ability to think one jump ahead, and this can apply to crime, too, and sometimes to its successful solution.”

  “These two lovely people seem to have been able to think at least three jumps ahead! They could see that if they murdered Ogino, and then managed to lay the blame on Segawa, Eiko would commit suicide. Am I right?”

  “Quite. If someone other than Segawa had murdered Ogino, or if he’d died for some other reason, Eiko would’ve probably put on a show of tears while being secretly pleased. She wanted to marry Segawa by hook or by crook. I think she would’ve even been prepared to sacrifice her inheritance if she had to. She had no personal interest in money, though she probably would’ve liked to use it to build up the ego of her lover who was obsessed with it. Well, up to this point there would’ve been no profit out of the deal for the two you described as lovely people. And if after that Toshiko had murdered Eiko, she would’ve au­tomatically become the strongest suspect. But in the scheme they had devised, Eiko was to be disposed of by psychological means—by being pushed over the edge with the shock of los­ing Segawa physically, on the one hand, and losing faith in him, on the other.”

  “What a diabolical scheme . . . But shall we return to reality, Mr. Prosecutor?” Kyoko’s lips twitched into a small ironic smile. She shifted closer to him on the sofa and put a hand on his thigh. “Tell me this. How did Sakai actually carry out the first murder?”

  “He parked his car a little distance from the Ogino house and waited. He watched Segawa leave in a state of confusion. Toshiko rushed back from Haneda Airport. The two of them went into the house. Toshiko introduced Sakai to Ogino as her boyfriend—name Kitano, occupation lawyer. Ogino might’ve been in a vile mood after the scene with Segawa, but he had no reason to be unpleasant with these two. They probably had a drink together, and it wouldn’t have been very difficult for Sakai to hit Ogino on the head from the back when he was leaving the room for some reason. They cleared out immedi­ately after the murder. All they had to do was wait for Eiko to discover the body.”

  “But they didn’t count on Miss Yamaguchi helping Segawa to make up an alibi, did they?”

  “This is where their calculation went wrong, but they couldn’t be blamed for not anticipating Miss Yamaguchi’s interference—it was most unusual for a woman. They also made a mistake, in my opinion, by not planting any evidence to incriminate Segawa, though it’s not unthinkable that Eiko would’ve got rid of any such evidence after discovering the body. This is something we’ll never know.”

  Kyoko screwed up her face. “So far so good. But why did they have to murder Miss Yamaguchi as well? Segawa’s false alibi was likely to be destroyed sooner or later anyway. Wouldn’t it have been safer for them to leave Miss Yamaguchi alone?”

  “You’re quite right. But killers tend to become insensitive to taking other people’s lives. This is an inevitable trend. As a rule, after the first murder there’s no mental resistance to committing one more. The saying, blood calls for more blood, may be quite true. That’s why I think Sakai wouldn’t have had much trouble making up his mind to dispose of Miss Yam­aguchi. Perhaps he calculated it’d help to tighten the noose around Segawa’s neck—and he was almost right. Even crimi­nals are subject to the whims of Lady Luck, and in the first two murders she was certainly on their side. But then the point was reached where their run of good fortune came to a halt, and then went into reverse. And anyone unable to recognise that point is heading for destruction—this applies to criminals as much as to anyone else.”

  “But how coul
d Sakai get into Miss Yamaguchi’s flat?”

  “Immediately after the first murder, Segawa told Sakai everything he knew, including the false alibi. This was a natural thing for him to do in the circumstances. And he also revealed his spy assignment to Kazumi Yamaguchi. She was wor­ried about the man she loved and decided to contact Sakai to try to sort things out. The reason why she told Segawa she wouldn’t be home till after nine o’clock that night was that she wanted to meet Sakai somewhere and have a talk with him. At that meeting Sakai could’ve suggested they should bring Segawa into the discussion. This would’ve given Sakai the opportunity to go to her flat with her without arousing her suspicion. The twenty minutes he had at his disposal before Segawa’s expected arrival was more than enough for him to carry out the murder.”

  Kyoko shook her head in wonder. “Now it doesn’t seem at all improbable that Miss Yamaguchi would’ve allowed an almost complete stranger to enter her flat . . . And then Sakai just stayed somewhere nearby and watched Segawa go into the flat and lose his head?”

  “Exactly. And to express it in theatrical terms, Segawa obliged by putting on an act that even Sakai, the producer of the play, couldn’t have hoped for. It’s quite common for offenders—not including habitual criminals, of course—to attempt an un­planned escape immediately after the act. That’s why at that time I was almost convinced Segawa was the killer. But now that I think back, he had sufficient reason to feel like a killer, even if he wasn’t. He was already carrying the double guilt of an immoral love affair with his friend’s wife and the betrayal of his friend with his spying. On top of this, his nerves had been strained to the limit by his worry over his false alibi and the in­tensive police interrogation he’d been through. So when he discovered Miss Yamaguchi’s body, it wouldn’t have been very hard for him to convince himself he was the cause of her death. She certainly wouldn’t have been murdered if she hadn’t got herself involved with him.”

  “Toshiko must’ve done her bit to assist Segawa’s progress towards a mental breakdown. She would’ve also worked assidu­ously on her sister, using sweet words and pretending kindness, but actually keeping her fingers in Eiko’s wound and giving it a wrench every now and then.”