A handful of businessmen were strolling along the lamplit street. Work was over for the day, and they were probably heading out for a drink somewhere. Kaga was nowhere to be seen.
3
The next day was freakishly hot from early morning. When Naho got off the train after class that afternoon, the short climb up the station stairs to the street level was enough to make her break into a sweat.
Fumitaka was outside the shop putting up the awning. “Oh, you’re back,” he murmured, noticing his daughter.
“Hi, Dad. Any more detectives come around today?”
“To our place, no,” Fumitaka said in a quiet voice. “But it sounds like they’re talking to everyone around here.”
“I wonder why?”
“Rumor has it they’re still checking up on Mr. Takura. They’re asking every man and his dog if they saw him that day. Seems like the time that he was at our place is crucial.”
“Our testimony alone isn’t good enough for the police?”
“I guess not.” Fumitaka went back into the shop.
Naho looked around. She wondered if the police were busy making inquiries nearby right now.
Her gaze wandered to a café diagonally across the road. She caught her breath: there was a face she recognized behind the big plate glass window. The other person, realizing he’d been spotted, grinned awkwardly back.
Naho crossed the street, went into café, and strode over to a table overlooking the street.
“Who are you spying on?” she asked Kaga, who was sitting there.
“I’m not spying on anyone. Why don’t you sit down?” Kaga raised his hand to summon the waitress. “What’ll you have?”
“I’m fine.”
“No need to stand on ceremony.” Kaga pushed the menu toward her.
“Okay then, I’ll have the banana juice,” Naho told the waitress as she sat herself down. “Are you keeping our store under surveillance?”
“Come off it. Like I said, I’m not watching anyone.”
“What are you doing, then?”
“Nothing. Or if you insist, I’m just enjoying this iced coffee — slacking off, in other words.” Ignoring the straw, Kaga tipped his ice coffee down his throat.
“Is Mr. Takura a suspect in the Kodenmacho murder case?”
Kaga’s face tensed. He glanced around at the other tables.
“I’d be grateful if you could keep your voice down.”
“Give me an answer or I’ll turn the volume up to eleven.”
Kaga sighed and ran his fingers through his shaggy hair.
“Mr. Takura’s on our list of suspects, yes. He visited the victim’s apartment on the day of the crime, and we found his business card and an insurance pamphlet there. He, of course, claims that he was there on insurance-related business.”
“Is that all you’ve got?”
“It’s significant enough from a police point of view.”
The waitress brought Naho her banana juice. She drank it all in one swallow through a fat straw.
“Does it really matter what time Mr. Takura came to see us?” she asked, after a brief silence.
Kaga thought for a moment, then nodded curtly.
“Mr. Takura claims to have left the victim’s apartment at around five thirty p.m. The victim was still alive at that point. We know that for sure because we’ve confirmed that she went out shopping a little after that.”
“Really? Shopping for what?”
Kaga blinked and peered at Naho. “What does that matter to you?”
“It doesn’t. I’m just curious. I mean, it was right before she was killed, wasn’t it?”
“She probably had no idea that someone was going to kill her. Why shouldn’t she go shopping? She bought some kitchen scissors, if you really want to know. You may know the store, Kisamiya?”
“Oh yes.”
“Anyway, enough about that. Let’s get back to Mr. Takura. He claims that after leaving the victim’s apartment, he dropped in to your place and then went back to his office, where he handed all the documentation for your grandmother’s insurance claim to a female colleague and then went home for the day.”
“What’s the problem?”
“On his way home, he went out for a drink with a friend. Now, if we calculate backward from the time at which this friend told us they met, we end up with Takura leaving his office at six forty. Takura’s female colleague, however, says that he left the office at six ten. That leaves us with a gap of roughly thirty minutes unaccounted for. Thirty minutes is enough time for him to run over from his office to the victim’s apartment, commit the murder, and then set out for home. When we confronted Takura on this point, he stated that he did leave his office at six forty and did not stop off anywhere before meeting his friend. He thinks that his colleague at the office simply got her times wrong.”
“Maybe he’s right?”
“The trouble is, another witness came forward to say that they saw Takura returning to the office after six p.m. We cannot ignore that discrepancy. On the other hand, Mr. Takura’s testimony and that of his female colleague do agree in one particular: both of them peg the time he spent in the office at just ten minutes. That’s what makes the precise time he visited you so important. You can walk from here to New City Life Insurance’s head office in under ten minutes. Takura claims to have gone straight from your store back to his office; if we knew what time he left your place, we’d be able to verify his entire account.”
Kaga delivered this explanation at high speed, so Naho needed a little while to digest it all.
“Now I understand why you were so obsessed about the precise time.”
“Exactly. Since neither you nor your grandmother can recall the precise time Takura was with you, I’ve been visiting all the other stores along this street, asking if they saw Mr. Takura that afternoon. Unfortunately, no one saw him going into your shop. I asked the staff at this café. Drew a blank here, too.”
“What’s your next step?”
“Not sure.” Kaga stretched and leaned against the back of his seat. Naho noticed that his eyes were still focused on the street outside. “As we don’t have any other plausible suspects right now, the Metropolitan Police guys have the hots for Takura.”
“That’s ridiculous. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“That’s what murderers’ friends always say — even after they’re convicted.”
Naho didn’t like the detective’s tone.
“Come off it. Mr. Takura’s got no motive.”
“Hmm.”
“What’s ‘hmmm’ supposed to mean?”
“It means that we almost never know the motive until the perpetrator himself tells us. Maybe the Met guys will get it out of him any moment now.”
“You sound like you’re perfectly happy to leave everything up to them.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, sounds to me like you couldn’t care less.”
Kaga had finished his iced coffee. He picked up his glass of water instead.
“The Tokyo Metropolitan Police are the lead investigators on this case. We precinct cops provide support and show them around the neighborhood. Basically, we just do what we’re told.”
Naho frowned as she looked at Kaga’s lined face.
“What a letdown. There I was, thinking you were different from the normal run of cops. With your attitude, you’ll stagnate at the local police level and never get anywhere.”
“I’m not stagnating. The thing is, I just got transferred to this precinct and I honestly don’t know much about it yet. I’m just easing myself in, familiarizing myself with the place. It’s an interesting district. I was in the local watch store; they had this extraordinary clock. It was a prism with clock faces on all three sides and all three clocks moved together. I wonder what sort of mechanism it’s got.”