The Isle of South Kamui and Other Stories (19 page)

Taguchi peered at his wristwatch in the dim light. It was nearly midnight.

“Does he know we're watching him?” Suzuki was beginning to get impatient.

“Most likely,” nodded Taguchi. “It probably will occur to him that we're tailing him. It'd be strange if it didn't.”

“He'll come out even so?”

“I'd bet on him coming out, myself. If I were him, that's what I'd do. Once it's occurred to him that there's something he has to do, he'll be a slave to that sense of duty of his. That's just the way he is. He's already killed Kazuko Watanabe—because he thought that if he didn't, his house of cards would come tumbling down. Now, if he doesn't kill Mineko, then he will have to admit that that the first murder was a mistake. I can't believe he'd do that. Sakakibara's biggest fear is not that the police will get him, but that his house of cards will collapse. If that happens, then he'll be nothing more than a hangover from a squalid life. He wouldn't be able to live with that. So he'll come out.”

It was past midnight, getting on for two in the morning when Suzuki suddenly whispered, “Ah! That's him. Sakakibara's on the move.”

Getting soaked in the rain, Sakakibara walked slowly past the two detectives. Seen from behind, with his shoulders drooping and dragging his left leg, he had nothing of the arrogant murderer about him. As Taguchi followed him, he felt a bleakness emanating from him.

Sakakibara never turned round once.

He stopped before Peace Villa apartments. The lights were out in all of the rooms, and it was wrapped in silence.

For some time, Sakakibara stared up at the second floor. Then he shrugged slightly, and went in. Taguchi and Suzuki followed him.

Everything that happened after that was just as Taguchi had imagined.

There was a woman's scream. Taguchi and Suzuki burst into Mineko's room just as Sakakibara had twisted a hand towel around her neck.

Suzuki sent Sakakibara's skinny body flying and held him down. Sakakibara offered little resistance. He watched his own hands being handcuffed, and then looked at Taguchi.

“I knew you were following me. This way, you'll be able to get a good night's sleep.”

“You too,” responded Taguchi, his voice gruff.

The Detective

T
he
call came on March third, the day of the Doll's Festival. With hindsight, this date—a festival dedicated to children— was indeed significant.

It had been a cold day. Incredibly, after the recent run of warm spring days, light, fluffy snow started falling in the morning and showed no sign of let-up by nightfall. Fifteen centimeters had settled even in the heart of the metropolis.

Akasaka police station was at the hub of a thriving entertainment district, thronged with round-the-clock hostess bars and high-class Japanese restaurants that came to life after sundown. That night, however, the traffic was subdued and the neon lights lacked their usual brilliance.

Detective Ono, gazing out of the window at the falling snowflakes, pictured his daughter, now age six, playing excitedly before the gorgeous display of traditional dolls set up in the living room. He turned to his colleague to talk about it, but Detective Tasaka was busy at his desk writing up the day's report.

Tasaka had transferred from the Ueno police station two years earlier, and Ono had heard he had divorced his wife before the move. However, that was all Ono knew, since whenever the subject came up, Tasaka's expression hardened and he lapsed into silence as if he were still suffering from an open wound.

Did Tasaka and his wife have any kids?
wondered Ono. Perhaps it was because of the date that his mind had turned to such matters. He was just thinking he would ask Tasaka about it sometime while they were out drinking, when the telephone rang.

Ono reached out a hand to pick up the receiver.

“Is that the police?” he heard a woman's voice inquire. It was a firm voice, belonging to a woman of indeterminate age. When he replied in the affirmative, there was a pause before she said, “Please come over right away. My son has committed suicide.”

“Suicide?” echoed Ono, thinking her voice was remarkably calm for someone whose child had just died. She spoke in a steady, flat tone, as if talking about something that did not concern her.

“May I have your name?”

“Igarashi. It's the house behind the fire station. Please come right away.” Having said this, the woman hung up. She had twice requested that they come right away, but somehow he felt no sense of urgency in her voice. How could she sound so indifferent? Perhaps she was the no-nonsense type of mother—or perhaps she was in a daze. Ono really could not tell which.

“A suicide?” asked Tasaka across from him

“So it seems,” nodded Ono. “A woman by the name of Igarashi said her son had—” Suddenly he realized he had heard the name before. “She said she lived behind the fire station. The actress Kyoko Igarashi lives somewhere around there, doesn't she? Perhaps it's her.”

“The actress?” Tasaka's face twisted in a grimace. Taken aback, Ono was just about to ask Tasaka whether he had anything against actresses, when he grinned. “If it's Kyoko Igarashi, then we'll have the chance of seeing her at close quarters. Can't be bad, huh?”

It was unlike Tasaka to say something like that. He was utterly serious, and rarely joked about a case. There was also something particularly unnatural about this joke.

Strange
, thought Ono, but he said nothing as the two of them headed out.

It was still snowing. Ono raised the collar of his raincoat and, screwing up his face against the snowflakes, looked up at the night sky.

“Surely it can't really be Kyoko Igarashi the actress, though.”

“Why's that?”

“She said it was her son that had killed himself.”

“So?”

“She's better known for the size of her bust and her scandalous lifestyle than for her acting. She can't be any older than twenty-five or twenty-six—which would make her son about five or six at most. There's no way a child of that age could commit suicide.”

Ono thought of his own six-year-old daughter. The idea that she would commit suicide was ludicrous.

Tasaka glanced briefly up at the night sky before murmuring, “I guess not.” His voice struck Ono as diaphanous. This man did not have kids, he thought, and was probably not the slightest bit interested in them.

They could tell which house it was right away. It was not large, but it was stylish and looked as though it had cost a good deal of money. It was styled after a Western medieval castle, cutting a pretty picture amidst the snowy landscape.

Ono pressed the bell, and they waited two or three minutes before a thin girl of about seventeen or eighteen stuck her head out. In the light of the entrance porch, they could see her face was very pale and fearful. When they showed their police badges, she said hoarsely, “Sensei is inside.”

“By Sensei, do you mean the actress Kyoko Igarashi?” queried Ono. The girl nodded silently, but she looked suspicious. She probably assumed they knew very well who this house belonged to.

A flicker of puzzlement ran over Ono's face. What on earth was the age of the child who had killed himself? He glanced at Tasaka, but he did not look in the slightest perplexed. The two of them brushed the snow off their coats in the porch before following the maid in. Ono caught Tasaka muttering under his breath, his voice thick with scorn, “The scandal actress, huh?” He worried that the maid might have heard, but her retreating figure did not reveal anything amiss.

Kyoko Igarashi was reclining on a sofa in the living room. Upon seeing the two detectives she rose sluggishly to her feet, bowed her head, and said, “Thank you for coming.”

She really was beautiful, with the sharp outlines of a modern beauty. But something deep within Tasaka refused to acknowledge her looks. Subconsciously, his eyes were picking out all of her faults. Her mouth was too big, as were her eyes. More than anything, this woman lacked the purity of youth. He could almost smell the whiff of decadence she exuded. And those dark circles under her eyes were surely not from the shock of losing her son, but the result of her habitual wild lifestyle.

Tasaka knew that he should not prejudge Kyoko Igarashi, yet he could not help being aware of the fact that, not only was she an actress, but one who was famous for her immoral behavior. And as long he was unable to come to terms with certain painful memories, he was unlikely to change his view of her.

The door opened and a middle-aged man came in. He introduced himself as a doctor from a nearby hospital. “I came as soon as I received the call, but I was too late,” he said matter-of-factly.

Tasaka and Ono were taken upstairs to the child's bedroom. What first struck them on entering the room was not the boy's dead body, but the sheer number of plastic models crowded in it, covering the shelves and the desk, and hanging from the ceiling. It felt like the entire room was buried in models. Strangely they were all of aircraft, nothing else. This kid must have really liked airplanes.

The boy was lying on the bed by the window, his face covered with a white cloth.

Expressionless, Tasaka lifted the cloth to reveal the face of a child of about five or six, frozen in a rictus of agony.

“The cause of death was poison. According to the mother, he ate pellets of rat poison provided by the public health authority,” explained the doctor calmly.

As he listened, Tasaka's thoughts were elsewhere. He was recalling the dead body of an even smaller child, one who had died an even more pitiful death than this—his two-year-old daughter, her tiny body curled up in a fetal position, her limbs rigid in the muddy water. Inevitably, he vividly recalled her agonized face as he looked at the one before him now.

Tasaka turned to Kyoko Igarashi, his face ashen.

She was crouched in the doorway, gazing with unfocused eyes at one of the models hanging from the ceiling.

“Why do you think it was suicide?”

Her shoulders quivering, Kyoko turned her gaze to Tasaka. “The boy killed himself.”

“I'm asking you why—the reason you think it was suicide.”

His tone had hardened, as if interrogating her, so Ono tried to soften it by changing the form of the question. “Your son must be about five or six years old, right?”

“He's six.” Her gaze swam over to the bed.

Ono calmly continued, “It's hard to imagine a child of that age committing suicide, isn't it? He might have eaten the poison pellets by mistake.”

“No,” she replied, shaking her head. “He knew he shouldn't eat them.”

“And so you decided it was suicide?” Tasaka spoke harshly, irritated at Ono's gentle questioning. Kyoko muttered something in a low voice. Unable to catch it, he said loudly, “Speak up a bit!” He could feel the apprehensiveness in Ono standing next to him, but he just could not control his own emotions. Ono probably had no idea how he was feeling, but then he had no desire to be understood.

Kyoko looked blankly at Tasaka. “He wrote a suicide note. That's why—”

“A suicide note?”

Ono and Tasaka exchanged a glance. A suicide note written by a six-year-old? Did such a thing ever exist? Was it possible?

Without a word she left the room and came back with a piece of paper.

On it was a picture of an airplane drawn in pastel crayons, a jetliner by the looks of it. “Daddy's jet” was written underneath. It looked like a pretty typical drawing by a six-year-old boy, nothing more.

“This is the suicide note?” asked Tasaka, frowning.

“Turn it over,” replied Kyoko in a low voice.

On the back there were a few words written in blue crayon. “I'm going to join Daddy.”

Unsure immediately of how to interpret these few words, Tasaka and Ono looked at each other. “What does it mean?”

Kyoko's large eyes filled with tears. Words suddenly started pouring out of her as though a dam had burst inside her. “My son has gone to join my husband. When I got home from work, he was already dead. And this was next to him. It's a suicide note he left to me. My husband was a pilot, but he died in a plane crash last year. When my boy asked me where he was, I told him he was in heaven. And so he must have believed that if he died he would go to heaven where his father was. And then he—those poison pellets, I'd warned him that he would die if he ate them…”

Kyoko burst into violent weeping. The pilot father who had died in a crash; the young mother who had told their child the father was in heaven; and the six-year-old son—all the ingredients for her tears were so conveniently in place, thought Tasaka.

The more she talked, the more Tasaka was convinced she was lying. He watched her coldly as she wept. This was probably a performance to hide something. An actress was an actress regardless of what she was best known for. Putting on a performance to move witless detectives to tears was no doubt child's play for her.

Tasaka realized he was being overly strict with her. But deep in his heart he felt an antagonism that he was powerless to remedy. It made him feel bleak and sluggish inside.

Unaware of the cold, dark emotions Tasaka was experiencing, the good-natured Ono appeared to thoroughly sympathize with the unfortunate actress, and started asking her for more details.

According to Kyoko, she had been involved in diverse scandals with various men, but her one true love had been the pilot who died in a plane crash the year before.

“Today was my boy's sixth birthday,” she told Ono, biting her lip, “so I knocked off work earlier than usual and came home, but…” Again she bowed her head and sobbed.

Blinking, Ono looked away. Tasaka, however, was apparently unimpressed by such melodrama and his expression grew even harder.

A woman like that doesn't even know the meaning of true love
, he thought. She probably did not even feel a mother's affection for her child. These were just crocodile tears.

For the time being, Tasaka and Ono decided to take the “suicide note” with them back to the police station.

It was still snowing when they left.

“I'm fed up with this weather,” shrugged Ono, glancing up at the night sky. Then he lightly patted his coat pocket. “You know, I'm not at all convinced about this suicide note. I mean, really, a six-year-old boy writes a suicide note before killing himself? What do you think?”

“Of course it isn't suicide!” declared Tasaka. He was certain of this, although less as a result of the interview with Kyoko Igarashi than from his own conviction.

“You think so too?” Ono smiled happily. “Of course it was an accident, right?”

“Wrong,” said Tasaka as if vomiting up something vile from the depths of his soul. He glared into the dark snowy night. “It was murder. That woman killed her son.”

“Murder?” Ono's eyes widened. The thought had apparently never even occurred to him. “Why do you think that?”

“That kind of woman is certainly capable of killing her own child,” said Tasaka. He knew it sounded outrageous, but he could think of no other way to put it. He could not bring himself to tell Ono that he was speaking from his own experience.

Ono was baffled. “What a shocking thing to say! I would never have thought you knew anything about actresses.”