Kaga smiled gently.
“I believe that you’re telling the truth. Your account is extremely convincing. In fact, thanks to you, everything now fits into place.”
“Really?” Amid her relief, Reiko felt a slight shadow of anxiety. What exactly had she said that had been so “convincing”? What exactly “now fit into place”?
Kaga got to his feet and thanked her for her help.
He slipped his shoes back on just inside the front door then put a hand into his pocket.
“I forgot this. Give it to your son. He’ll be better off with this.”
Kaga was holding out a length of string. A little thinner than the string her father-in-law given them, it was twisted like rope.
“Tops need the right kind of string to work properly. You’ll have much better luck with your top if you use this string.”
Kaga opened the door, stepped into the hallway, then turned back to Reiko.
“There’s one thing I forgot to mention: the place and time that the murder was committed. The place was Kodenmacho in Nihonbashi, and we estimate the time as sometime between seven and eight that evening.”
“Nihonbashi between seven and eight?” Reiko repeated quietly to herself, then started. So her testimony about her father-in-law visiting them here at eight o’clock wasn’t an alibi after all.
What, then, had Kaga really come to check up on? She tried to ask him, but he said goodbye and pulled the door shut behind him.
5
It began drizzling. It was the kind of rain that soaks you through before you know it — and a sure sign that the rainy season was just around the corner. Tooru Sagawa stepped outside and pulled the awning out farther before pushing the articles on the display a little closer to the front of the shop. The items were mostly old-fashioned wooden toys: building blocks, cup-and-ball games, and stacked Daruma dolls. As the shop was quite close to the Suitengu Shrine, many parents of newborn babies walked this way. Sagawa made a point of displaying things outside that would appeal to them. At the same time, he never put things that might appeal to elementary and middle school children in the street, as they would just steal anything that caught their eye. He once put a line of cute toy sets out in the street, only to have the damn kids steal the most popular ones and leave him with lots of incomplete sets. It wasn’t a happy memory.
Sagawa was checking out the overcast sky, when he noticed someone approaching. It was a man in a white shirt. Sagawa had met him once before. The man’s name was Kaga, and he was a detective who’d recently been transferred to Nihonbashi Precinct.
“It’s started raining,” said Kaga, holding his hand out palm-upward.
“The rainy season will be upon us any day now. It’s a bad time for business; still, I suppose it brings us a step closer to the busiest season.”
These days you barely saw any children in Ningyocho. Once the schools broke up for summer vacation, however, children would pour in from somewhere and cluster outside Sagawa’s shop. He needed to get a move on and order fireworks in time for the summer rush. He’d been running his toy shop for twenty years, give or take, and had a pretty good idea of what sold when.
Kaga was examining the wooden toys. A group of spinning tops decorated with concentric green and yellow circles seemed to have caught his attention.
“That reminds me, did you sort out that business of the spinning tops you asked me about the other day?” inquired Sagawa.
Kaga smiled and nodded.
“I think I’m about to. You were right: they had tops at Hozukiya, too.”
“What did I tell you? Everything there is of very high quality. I pop around from time to time just to take a look.”
The last time Kaga came by, he’d asked Sagawa about his spinning tops. His first question: had he had sold any recently?
“Sold any? No. Lost any to pilfering? Yes,” Sagawa had replied. That aroused the detective’s interest. He asked when the shoplifting had occurred.
June tenth, Sagawa told him. Sagawa inventoried all the items in his shop on a daily basis. That’s how he knew that one of the tops outside the store had been lifted.
The detective had then bought a top and unwound the string from it right in front of him. After taking a good hard look, he’d muttered something about it being the twisted variety of string. Few people knew the terminology, so Sagawa was surprised.
Kaga then asked him if he knew any other local shops that sold wooden tops. The only place that occurred to him was Hozukiya. Kaga must have gone straight there after Sagawa told him about it.
“How come you don’t ask me any questions?”
“Questions about what?”
“About the investigation I’m working on,” Kaga replied. “It’s usually the first thing people ask me when I make inquiries. ‘What’s happened? What are you investigating?’”
Sagawa chuckled.
“What good would it do anyone to tell an amateur like me? If a detective’s on the case, something nasty must have happened. Learning more about it will just make me depressed.”
“I wish more people felt like you,” said Kaga.
Sagawa picked up a spinning top.
“A toy store is in the business of selling dreams, so I need to maintain a positive, fun frame of mind. I go out of my way not to hear any negative news. Still, I would like to ask you one thing. What connects the top that was stolen from here to your case? I’m not asking you to go into detail. Did it play a positive part in the case or not — that’s all I want to know.”
Kaga lapsed into a brief, thoughtful silence, then shook his head.
“Let’s not go there. It’s confidential.”
“Okay. No big surprise. Forget about it, then. Good luck with the case.”
“I’ll be seeing you,” said the detective as he wandered off into the rain.
9
The Detective of Nihonbashi
1
From his very first glimpse of the crime scene, Hiroshi Uesugi knew that this case wasn’t going to be easy. There was no specific reason for him to feel that way; if he’d had to put it into words, he’d have said something about the killer having luck on his side.
At eight p.m. on June 10 a woman’s body was found in a Kodenmacho apartment. The person who discovered it was a friend who’d dropped by for a visit.
Based on the state of the body, death was estimated to have occurred within the last two hours. The friend had originally planned to get there one hour earlier, at seven. Had she not rescheduled at the last minute, she might have walked in when the crime was under way, or at least caught sight of the perpetrator. That was what made Uesugi feel that the murderer was lucky.
An investigation task force was set up in Nihonbashi Precinct, in whose jurisdiction the murder had been committed. It was there that Uesugi met the detective who’d been first on the scene. His name was Kaga, and he’d just been transferred to Nihonbashi.
Uesugi was familiar with the name. Stories were making the rounds about the various homicides Kaga had solved. Rumor had it that he was also a onetime all-Japan kendo champion.
Something of the athlete was still visible in Kaga’s lean, hard physique, but the laid-back expression on his face hardly radiated professional competence. Uesugi also took an instant aversion to his sloppy way of dressing: a short-sleeved shirt worn over a T-shirt.
“Hey, Kaga, you always dress like that on the job?” was the first thing Uesugi said to him.
“Not always, but most of the time,” Kaga breezily replied. “Lately it’s been so damn hot.”