“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.”