Apparently Ryo wasn’t one for exchanging small talk with middle-aged men.
‘Right,’ Sasagaki said, shifting on his cushion. ‘Were you home that day?’
‘That day?’
‘The day your father died.’
‘Oh, yeah. I was here.’
‘What were you doing between six and seven?’
‘In the evening?’
‘Yeah. Do you remember?’
The boy scratched his neck before saying, ‘Watching TV downstairs.’
‘By yourself?’
‘No, with my mom.’
Sasagaki nodded. He had been unable to detect any hesitation in the boy’s voice. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but would you mind facing me so we can talk?’
Ryo sighed and slowly turned his chair around. Sasagaki was half expecting a look of defiance from the boy but when he turned around he felt nothing of the sort. The boy’s eyes were blank, almost inorganic – the eyes of a scientist. Sasagaki felt as though he was being observed.
‘You remember what show you were watching?’ Sasagaki asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.
Ryo gave him the name of a television series popular with boys. Sasagaki asked him what the episode had been about. Ryo thought for a moment then gave him a perfect summary of that night’s action. Sasagaki had never even seen the show but he found he could picture it quite readily just from the boy’s description.
‘Until when were you watching TV?’
‘About seven-thirty.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘I had dinner with Mom.’
‘Right. You must’ve been worried when your father didn’t come home.’
‘Yeah,’ Ryo said in a small voice. Then he sighed and looked out of the window. Sasagaki found his eyes drawn outwards too. The sun was setting, casting a red glow across the sky.
‘Well,’ Sasagaki said at length, ‘sorry to bother you in the middle of your homework. Keep at it.’ He stood and gave the boy a clap on the shoulder.
Sasagaki and Koga went back to headquarters and compared notes with the two detectives who had questioned Yaeko. There weren’t any noticeable contradictions between what she had said and Matsuura’s statement. She too had claimed she was in the back with Ryo watching television when the customer came. She said she might have heard the buzzer ring, but she didn’t remember, and besides, she generally didn’t answer the door as it wasn’t her job to greet customers. She claimed she didn’t know what Matsuura had been up to while she was watching television. The description of the programme, too, matched Ryo’s. It would have been fairly simple for Yaeko and Matsuura to agree on a story in order to establish each other’s alibis, but with Ryo in the picture it changed everything. Nobody said it in as many words but the general feeling in the department was that the three of them were telling the truth.
Proof came soon afterwards. There was a record of the calls Matsuura had claimed came to the pawnshop at six and again at six-thirty. The man from the union had confirmed that it was Matsuura he talked to on the phone.
They were back to square one. The painstaking, methodical questioning of regulars to the pawnshop continued. The only progress made was that marked by the days on the calendar. In baseball, the Yomiuri Giants won nine games in a row, and Leo Esaki won the Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of electron tunnelling. As a direct result of the Yom Kippur War, oil prices were on the rise. Throughout the country, the feeling spread that something was about to happen.
Just as the investigation team was starting to get impatient, new information came in from the detectives looking into Fumiyo Nishimoto.
Kikuya was a nice little udon shop with a wooden lattice door, over which hung a navy-blue noren curtain with the name of the shop written in large white letters across it. It looked popular, with a good crowd for lunch and no sign of business tapering off even after one in the afternoon.
Around one-thirty, a white van parked on the street a short distance away from the shop. Large letters on the side of the van announced it as the property of Swallowtail Inc.
A man got out of the driver’s seat. He looked to be around forty years old, of a stocky build, with a shirt and tie on beneath a grey jacket. He walked quickly into Kikuya.
‘Like clockwork,’ Sasagaki said with a glance down at his wristwatch. ‘One-thirty on the dot.’ He was sitting in a café across the road from Kikuya looking out through the window.
Sitting next to him, Detective Kanemura said, ‘I can also tell you what he’s ordering right now: tempura udon.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I’d bet money on it. I’ve been in there with him a few times already. Terasaki always gets the same thing.’
‘You’d think he’d get tired of it.’ Sasagaki looked back over at the shop. All this talk about udon was making his stomach rumble.
Though Fumiyo’s alibi had been corroborated, she was not yet entirely free from suspicion. The team was fixated on the fact that she was the last person Kirihara seemed to have met before going to his death. If she was involved in his murder, that pointed towards a collaborator. So they had cast a net, looking for anyone who might fit the description of the pretty widow’s young lover, when they had found Tadao Terasaki.
Terasaki made his livelihood as a wholesaler of cosmetics, beauty supplies, shampoo and detergent. He made deliveries to other retailers but also took orders directly from customers, which he would fulfil by personally delivering the goods to their doorstep. His outfit, Swallowtail Inc., was a company in name alone. Terasaki was the owner and sole employee.
Terasaki had first come to the attention of the team through the questioning of Fumiyo Nishimoto’s neighbours. A housewife had seen a man in a white van pay several visits to Fumiyo’s apartment. She remembered seeing the name of some company on the van, something about butterflies, but hadn’t been able to remember the exact name.
They began a stakeout near Yoshida Heights but the van never showed up. When they did find it, it was in an entirely different location: Kikuya, the udon shop where Fumiyo worked. A white van paid the shop a daily visit.
From the company name on the van it was easy to track down the man’s identity.
‘He’s out,’ Koga announced. It had been his job to watch the door. All three detectives looked across the street. Terasaki had left the shop, but he wasn’t going back to his van. He was just standing there. This, too, they had expected from Kanemura’s report.
A few moments later Fumiyo came out of the shop wearing a white work apron. She talked a while with Terasaki then went back inside the shop, leaving Terasaki to return to his van alone. Neither of them seemed to be worrying too much about being seen.
‘Let’s move,’ Sasagaki said, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray on the table as he stood.
Terasaki was just opening the van door when Koga called out to him. He turned, a startled look on his face. When he noticed Sasagaki and Kanemura coming from behind, his expression hardened.
Terasaki was willing enough to talk to them. They asked if he’d like to go to the café, but he said he’d prefer to talk right there in the van, so all four of them piled in: Terasaki in the driver’s seat, Sasagaki in the passenger’s seat, and Koga and Kanemura in the back.
Sasagaki asked whether he had heard about the death of the pawnshop owner in Ōe.
‘I read about it in the paper, or maybe it was on TV,’ Terasaki said, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’
‘The last place Mr Kirihara visited before he died was the home of a Mrs Fumiyo Nishimoto. You do know Mrs Nishimoto, don’t you?’
Terasaki swallowed noticeably. ‘Nishimoto… the woman who works at that noodle shop right? Yeah, I know who she is.’