by Soji Shimada
“Again, the hard life of the lowly employee.”
“With Yoshie, the Hayakawas’ daughter, the same kind of thing happened. Here in front of her parents he didn’t show even a hint of interest, but when he got back to Tokyo, seems he kept showing up at her bar.
“Himiko is one of those places that young people like to hang out. Kind of modern but not too expensive. There are just two people working there—the mama-san and Yoshie. So it was this kind of place that the president of Kikuoka Bearings began to turn up at daily. Was a bit awkward, really.”
“Old lechers with money and status are the worst.”
“That one believed deeply in spending money on women, they say.”
“Quite a philosophy.”
“So it seems. He was kind of a reckless spender. That relationship with Yoshie went on for quite some time, until Kikuoka suddenly stopped coming to the bar.”
“Hmm.”
“By the way, according to the mama-san of Himiko, he’d promised to buy Yoshie an apartment and a sports car but he never did. She was pretty pissed off with him.”
“Very interesting.”
“The mama-san says that Yoshie used to get excited about all the presents he was going to buy her, and so after he disappeared she got very depressed. Anyway, Yoshie got dumped, and her phone calls to Kikuoka were never answered. If she ever did manage to get a hold of him, he claimed that he had never made her any promises.”
“So what did she do?”
“She attempted suicide.”
“What? She died?”
“No. She didn’t succeed. She took sleeping pills, but she was found and had her stomach pumped. I think there was a strong element of revenge against Kikuoka in it. And, according to the mama-san, she probably felt ashamed of having talked about everything so openly too.”
“Well, you could say they’re both at fault in their own way, I suppose. And how are things now?”
“She had recovered quite well, and was getting out and about again, but then at the beginning of last month she was killed in a traffic accident.”
“So she did die!”
“It really was just a traffic accident and had absolutely nothing to do with Eikichi Kikuoka, but the Hayakawas blame Kikuoka for it. They say he killed her.”
“Well, they would… She was their only child… And does Mr Hamamoto know about all this?”
“I’m pretty sure he does. Well, he must know that the Hayakawas’ only daughter died in a traffic accident, surely.”
“So, Kikuoka just nonchalantly decides to turn up at the house where Kohei and Chikako Hayakawa live?”
“He was personally invited by the esteemed president of Hama Diesel. He couldn’t refuse.”
“How terribly unfortunate for him!” said Ushikoshi with heavy sarcasm. “I get it. Kohei and Chikako Hayakawa had a motive for murdering Eikichi Kikuoka. Yesterday they kept it quiet, didn’t they? But what about Ueda?”
“Now that’s still as strange as ever. The Hayakawas had absolutely no reason to kill Kazuya Ueda. The only contact they ever had with him was the couple of times he came to the house.”
“Hmm. So they had a motive to kill Kikuoka, but none to kill Ueda. That is strange… And to make matters worse, the only two people with a motive to kill Kikuoka have an ironclad alibi.
“Well, never mind that for now. How about the next married couple? Is there any news about a possible motive for Michio and Hatsue Kanai to kill Kikuoka?”
“Actually there is. And it’s straight out of a gossip magazine.”
“Oh?”
“It seems to be true that Michio Kanai was a huge supporter and member of Kikuoka’s faction at work. He’s been sucking up to Kikuoka for just shy of the past twenty years. And it worked. He’s really come up in the world. It’s all exactly as Kanai said himself in his big speech just now. Everything’s pretty much confirmed to be true. The problem is his wife.”
“The wife?…”
Ozaki was enjoying leaving the others hanging on his words. He paused to take a cigarette and light it.
“It was Kikuoka who set Kanai up with Hatsue around twenty years ago. But before that, Hatsue Kanai used to be Kikuoka’s lover.”
“Again!”
“The playboy!” said Okuma, with a hint of grudging admiration.
“He’s just that type, I guess.”
“I take my hat off to him,” added Ushikoshi, rather sarcastically. “Well, did Kanai have any idea about this?”
“That’s still unclear. On the surface it seems that he knew nothing, but he might have had his suspicions.”
“But even if he did suspect something, would that be a strong enough reason to murder someone?”
“Difficult to say for sure, but probably not. As far as Kanai is concerned, losing his employer means he’s nothing any more. Company Executive Kanai only existed because of President Kikuoka. So I’m saying that even if Kanai had realized about his wife’s past with Kikuoka, it was something that happened a long time ago. If he’d ever attacked Kikuoka, it’d be fair to say he’d lose everything.
“If for some reason, he had been desperate to kill him, if there had been something festering in him that was forcing him to do it, how would he have gone about it? Well, it would be more sensible for him to have got in first with members of the opposing faction or factions at the company. He’d need to protect his position after the death of his patron. But there’s no evidence at all that he did anything like that.”
“So he was Kikuoka’s bootlicker right to the end?”
“Seems so.”
“I see.”
“To me it makes no sense to think of Kanai having a motive to kill Kikuoka.”
“How about his wife?”
“Ah, the wife… I don’t think she could have done something like that.”
“How about Kanai’s relationship with Ueda?”
“Just as we discovered from the earlier investigation, there was no particular relationship between the two. As for motive, I think it’s impossible to find one.”
“Then let’s take a look at Kumi Aikura.”
“It’s no secret at the company that she was Kikuoka’s lover. But as far as Kumi’s concerned, she relied on his being there… It really wouldn’t be a great idea to kill him. Even if she had some kind of motive that we don’t know about, it would make sense to squeeze as much out of him as she possibly could for now, then pick the moment right when he was about to leave her. But at the time he was murdered, Kikuoka was still totally infatuated with her.”
“So this thing with Yoshie Hayakawa, he was two-timing her with Kumi?”
“Yeah. It looks like it.”
“Nice behaviour.”
“What a charmer!”
“And yet, let’s imagine there were some particular circumstances that we don’t know about, and Kumi managed to get herself hired as Kikuoka’s secretary with the sole purpose of murdering him?”
“I don’t think it’s possible. She’s from Akita Prefecture. Growing up, neither she nor her parents ever left the area. Kikuoka never visited Akita in his life.”
“Huh. Got it. To sum up, the only people with a motive to kill Kikuoka seem to be Mr and Mrs Hayakawa. And there is absolutely no one with a motive to kill Kazuya Ueda. That’s it? And on top of that, we have another one of those cursed locked-room mysteries. Inspector Okuma, what’s your opinion of all this?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it. This case is downright bonkers. Some dirty old man gets murdered in a locked room with no way of it being done from the outside, and there’s no goddamn suspects with any motive. And the only ones who might have done it were in the salon with one of our officers at the very time!
“I reckon there’s only one thing for it—we’ll have to rip out all the wall and ceiling boards in Room 14. May be some sort of secret passageway behind them. That fireplace is fishy if you ask me. I’ll bet you’ll find a secret passage back there. Follow the passageway and there
’ll be a secret room, and that’ll be where you’ll find the twelfth person in this case—a little person or a dwarf or something—someone who’s been hiding very quietly this whole time… I’m not kidding. This has to be it. If he was a little person he could hide in narrow spaces—you know—and move around through secret passageways.”
“That fireplace is just decorative. You can’t light a real fire in there. There’s just a gas heater in it. So there’s no chimney or flue, no open hole above it. We’ve knocked on all the boards around it, we’ve tried all the seams and joints – there doesn’t seem to be anything suspicious at all about it.”
“So tell me what you’re thinking, Chief Inspector,” said Okuma.
Ushikoshi just gave his customary “Hmm…” He turned to his junior officer.
“Ozaki? What about you?”
“I think we have to look at everything logically.”
“I totally agree.”
“There have been two murders, in two separate locked rooms. Or to put it another way, the suspect set up the two rooms for the murders. In the case of Room 10, for reasons unknown, he tied a cord around the murdered Ueda’s wrist, and added string to the shot-put on the floor. In Room 14, he fought with Kikuoka, knocking over the sofa and the coffee table, so in both crime scenes there was clear evidence that the murderer had been inside the room. I think we have to take it that both crime scenes were constructed after the murder had been committed.”
“Fine, but is that really possible?”
“But both of the scenes had the doors properly locked. Room 14 in particular, had those bolts and a knob with a locking button—a very complicated and difficult locking system. There was no crack or gap anyway in the door—Room 14’s was very well constructed. There wasn’t the hint of an opening in the top, bottom or either side. There was that heavy door frame on all sides.
“Which leaves us with that twenty-centimetre-square ventilation hole, high up in the wall. I think the murderer must have somehow manipulated the scene via a piece of string or something run through that hole. But it’s pure conjecture. There were no signs that anything had been secured to the wall anywhere around the hole. No pins had been stuck in the wall or around the door and there was nothing that looked like a pin that had come loose and fallen on the floor. I searched pretty thoroughly. In other words, there’s no forensic evidence left behind that proves they used that method.”
“Huh.”
“I think it may be possible that the sofa and coffee table being knocked over had something to do with a locked-room trick.”
“I wonder. And then there’s the question: why use this locked room at all in the first place? There’s no one dumb enough to wonder whether a knife in the back might be suicide.”
“You’re right. But let’s imagine for now that the sofa and table were somehow instrumental in the locked-room trick. By knocking over both pieces of furniture, somehow a cord was pulled and the bolts on the door were unlocked. You’d need to use a really strong piece of cord to do that, and then the cord would have to be retrieved from the ventilation hole. You told us, didn’t you, Chief Inspector, that you knocked on the door of Room 14 last night?”
“Well, technically it was Mr Hamamoto who knocked.”
“What time was that?”
“Around 10.30.”
“At that time was there any string or anything hanging from the ventilation hole?”
“No. In fact, when there was no reply, I glanced up at the vent. There was nothing there.”
“No, probably not. At that point, Kikuoka was still alive and sleeping. And yet about thirty minutes later he was dead. And at 11.30 the three members of staff passed quite close by on their way to their rooms. None of them looked towards the air vent specifically, but it makes sense that by that time the cord had already been removed.
“We already found out that the ventilation hole is so high up in the wall that you can barely see into the room, even standing on a bedside table, so unless the killer used a step stool or a ladder, there must have been a long piece of cord hanging from the vent. And with people passing so close by, even if they didn’t go right by the door, it would have been impossible to leave it like that without it being noticed.”
“So what you’re saying is that the murder was committed very quickly and done by about 11.10 p.m.”
“Yes, that’s right, but it just happens that the household staff went down to the basement at 11.30. It doesn’t always happen that way—it was pure coincidence. Because normally they’d be going to bed much earlier than that. If the killer hadn’t been careful, he could easily have been seen pulling the string. That’s the flaw in that plan.
“If I were the killer I’d have done the deed much, much earlier. The later it became, the more likely the staff would have been coming down to the basement.”
“Right. It would make sense to have committed the murder and removed all traces by the time I was at the door of Room 14.”
“Yes, but the time of death can’t be moved from around 11 o’clock. So with that in mind, we can narrow it down to who could physically have been there. Who among our suspects could have visited Room 14 at that time, unseen by anyone? Only the occupants of Room 9.”
“That may be true… But I’m not convinced about the 11 o’clock time frame. It makes the whole plan much too risky. Don’t you think?”
“Well, I wouldn’t think of attempting it, but then again I’ve never thought about murdering anybody either.”
“There is an alternative possibility that we could consider. A clever trick that gets the knife in Kikuoka’s back by 11 o’clock. If the suspect can pull off a stunt like that, he’s free to play a leisurely game of billiards with a police constable, or relax over a drink with the head detective on the case.”
“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too,” said Okuma. “But it would be really difficult to set up a murder in a locked room with a piece of string. I mean if Room 14 was already set up ahead of time, well, you couldn’t even have walked into the room.”
Ozaki resumed his commentary.
“Room 14 itself had nothing particularly special about it. There’s nothing there that lends itself to setting up a murder from outside the room. On the writing desk in the corner there was nothing but a pot of ink, a pen and a paperweight; the bookcase didn’t seem to have been touched at all. Mr Hamamoto says that the books all seem to be in place. To the right of the fireplace there’s a built-in wardrobe, but there’s nothing strange inside it. The door was closed.
“If anything’s unusual about the room, it’s the number of chairs. There’s the desk chair, which was in its usual place, pushed under the desk. Then a rocking chair in front of the fire which was also more or less in its normal position. Then the set of sofa and two armchairs. Without even counting the bed, which is a kind of converted chair too, that makes a total of five different seats. I suppose some sort of trick could be set up by using all of them. But the two armchairs hadn’t been moved much either.
“Anyway, the important thing is that no one could get in there besides Kikuoka himself. There was no spare key for Room 14. I don’t know whether they’d lost it, never had one made in the first place, or that Hamamoto was too neurotic to allow there to be more than one key for his personal study, but it has been confirmed that there was definitely only the one. And last night, Kikuoka had it. This morning our men retrieved it from the pocket of his jacket which he’d thrown off.”
“So he left the key lying around in his room. What if he’d accidentally pushed the locking button on the inside of the doorknob and gone out, closing the door? That would’ve caused a bit of a problem, wouldn’t it?”
“No, that would have been okay. If you push the button in first and then close the door, it doesn’t work. The button pops back out and the door doesn’t lock.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, we were told that while Kikuoka was staying here, he always made sure to lock the door from the outside e
very time he left his room. It seems he left his money in there. The Hayakawas and several others have attested to that.”
“All right. So there’s no way that anyone could have got into the room before the murder?”
“No, no way. All the other rooms had two keys. The Hayakawas would show the guests to their room and hand them one of the keys. The duplicates are with Eiko Hamamoto. Room 14 was the exception, so I guess they decided to put the richest bloke in there.”
“Huh,” said Okuma, sounding deflated.
“It’s not something I’m going to admit to in front of all those folks in the salon, but I’m on the point of throwing in the towel on this whole thing. Just like you said yourself, Inspector Okuma, there is no killer. There is no murderer among those eleven people out there.”
“Hmm…”
“It’s the same as the last case,” said Ozaki. “There’s plenty about the Ueda killing that we’ve put on the back burner. We still haven’t worked out why there were no footprints in the snow. That locked room had the simplest of locks on it, it could have been manipulated somehow, but the snow outside the door was completely undisturbed. By any of the entrances or exits to and from the main building, or anywhere around the house, even on the steps up to Room 10, there was nothing. As long as everyone is telling the truth, and Sasaki isn’t lying either, the ground that they crossed to get to the scene of the crime was all covered in pure virgin snow. That’s the first problem.
“And then the two stakes in the ground that Sasaki had seen the night before. Not to mention that disgusting-looking Golem doll… And then…oh, yes, that’s right, Chief Inspector Ushikoshi, Ueda was murdered on the night of the 25th. How about the daytime of the 25th? We said we were going to check whether the doll was really in Room 3 earlier that day. Did we?”
“It was. Mr Hamamoto says he definitely saw it sitting there during the daytime.”
“I see. So the suspect took it from the room shortly before committing the crime… Hang on! Just wait a minute while I go next door to check on the doll.”
The doll had already been returned to its place in the Tengu Room. Ozaki leapt to his feet and ran out of the library. Okuma took the opportunity to offer a few words of his own.