“But it was way up high in the wall.”
“Well, the only other explanation is that the bugger must have got in using some secret passageway, or some other trick like—”
“Chief!”
Ozaki was back.
“The doll’s right hand—there’s string wrapped around it.”
“What?”
“Come and see!”
The three detectives rushed out of the library and over to the interior-facing window of the Tengu Room. The Golem doll was sitting just under the window, leaning back against the wall, and as Ozaki had said, wrapped around its right wrist was a piece of white string.
“This stinks,” said Ushikoshi. “Let’s go back. I’m not falling for this kind of bullshit.”
“The suspect must have done this.”
“They must have. Right after forensics returned it to the house. Someone’s playing silly buggers with us.”
They went back to their seats in the library.
“Getting back to the matter of the footprints, if they were made to disappear by some sort of clever ruse, I don’t think it would mean very much. Since for Kikuoka’s murder it’s almost one hundred per cent certain that the killer is inside the house. If, back at the time of Ueda’s murder, the killer had already planned to kill Kikuoka next, he might as well have left the footprints to cast suspicion on an outsider for the crime.”
“Perhaps… Well, never mind. So in that case, where are we?”
“We’re back to assuming that there were never any footprints in the first place, and that the killer used some kind of trick to commit the murder from inside the house—”
“That’s what I’ve been saying all along!” said Okuma loudly.
“But how does that doll fit in with things? Did it fly through the air under its own power and land out there in the snow? It’s not possible. And even though we’re quite sure that someone in this house is responsible for these murders, there would still have been a surprising amount we could have learnt from footprints. For example, whether they were made by a man’s or a woman’s shoe. The stride can also tell us their height and their gender. If the length of the stride seems to indicate it’s a woman, but the shoes are definitely a man’s, then we could suspect a woman deliberately wearing a man’s shoes. It would still have been safer to get rid of the footprints. As much as possible, anyway.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Yes?”
Taken off guard, the three detectives all answered at once. The door opened very slowly to reveal a very nervous-looking Kohei Hayakawa.
“Um… Sorry to disturb you, but lunch is almost ready.”
“Ah. Is it? Thanks.”
Hayakawa started to close the door again.
“Mr Hayakawa? Did Kikuoka’s death bring you some relief?”
Ushikoshi was as blunt in tone as he was in words. Hayakawa’s eyes widened and his face turned ashen. His hand gripped the doorknob.
“Why are you asking me a question like that? You think I had any connection with—”
“Mr Hayakawa, please don’t underestimate the police. We’ve looked into the business with your daughter, Yoshie. Tokyo police know that you attended your daughter’s funeral in Tokyo.”
Hayakawa’s shoulders slumped.
“Please, take a seat.”
“No, thank you. I’d rather stay standing… I don’t have anything to tell you.”
“He told you to sit!” yelled Ozaki.
Hayakawa shuffled towards the detectives and sat down.
“Last time we spoke, you sat in that very chair and deliberately hid the truth from us. Now we can forgive that just the once, but if you try lying to us again, I have to tell you we won’t be able to let it go.”
“Inspector, I don’t mean to hide anything from you. I wasn’t hiding anything back then either. I wanted to tell you. The words were right there on the tip of my tongue. But even though Mr Kikuoka is dead now, at that time it was Mr Ueda who had been killed. I thought bringing up that story would have seemed suspicious…”
“And how about today? Now it’s Kikuoka who’s dead!”
“And you suspect me? How on earth could I have done it? It’s true that when my daughter died I hated Mr Kikuoka for it. My wife too—we lost our only child. I’m not denying it. But I couldn’t kill him, no matter how much I might have thought about it. I was in the entranceway between the salon and the kitchen. And besides I’m not permitted to go into the rooms.”
Ushikoshi stared Hayakawa straight in the eyes, as if he were trying to see through a keyhole into his mind. There was a long silence.
“So while Mr Kikuoka was still in the salon, you didn’t go into his room at all?”
“Certainly not! Ms Hamamoto has specifically told us not to go into the rooms when we have guests staying, but anyway, with that room, there isn’t even a key. There’s no way to get in.”
“Hmm. I have another question for you. This morning Mr Kajiwara went out to the storage shed to fetch an axe and a stepladder. Isn’t that storage shed kept locked?”
“It is kept locked.”
“But this morning I didn’t see him taking a key.”
“You have to put in the right numbers. It’s one of those whatchama—”
“You mean a combination padlock?”
“Right.”
“Does everyone know the combination?”
“Everyone who lives in this house does. Do you want to know it?”
“No, no. That’s fine. We’ll ask you if we need it. So you’re saying that the guests didn’t have the combination, but Mr and Ms Hamamoto, Mr Kajiwara, you and your wife did?”
“That’s right.”
“Nobody else at all would know it?”
“No. Nobody.”
“I understand. Thank you, that’s all for now. Please let our hosts know that we’ll be down for lunch in about thirty minutes.”
Hayakawa was out of the seat in an instant, a look of relief on his face. As the door closed behind him, Ozaki turned to his boss.
“That old man could have killed Ueda.”
“Yeah. The fact that he doesn’t have a motive is the fatal weakness in that theory.”
Ushikoshi sounded as if he were only half joking.
“But it would be physically possible. If the husband and wife had colluded, it would have been easier. Anyway, someone working as a butler probably knows the ins and outs of the house far better than the master of the house.”
“As for motive, how about this? They planned to kill Kikuoka, but Ueda was his bodyguard, so they had to get rid of him first.”
“That’s pretty feeble. If that was their motive, then the same night they did Ueda in was also the perfect opportunity to knock off Kikuoka too. If Ueda was a bodyguard, there was only one of him, and he was miles away from his employer, stuck in some sort of storeroom that could only be accessed from the outside. They had the perfect conditions to murder Kikuoka. The suspect wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Kikuoka, and only Kikuoka.
“After all, Ueda was still young, he had the physical strength of an ex-Self-Defence Forces soldier. Kikuoka was much older, and quite overweight. Even Hayakawa might have stood a chance against him. There was absolutely no need to kill Ueda.”
“But Ueda knew about the business with Yoshie Hayakawa. He could have caused trouble afterwards for the Hayakawas. Maybe they killed him to silence him.”
“I suppose it’s possible. But then wouldn’t the Kanais and Kumi Aikura be even more of a problem? For sure Kikuoka wasn’t particularly chatty with Ueda. He probably hadn’t ever brought up the topic of Yoshie Hayakawa with him.”
“Probably not.”
“Even if the Hayakawas did it, I still don’t understand the locked room situation in Room 14. And anyway, at the time of death the two of them were definitely still in the salon. There’s nothing we can do about that. So for now we just have to throw the whole problem of motive to the winds, and narrow it down to whoever could physically have been the murderer.”