I said earlier that the couple could have taken any train to Kyushu but it was clear now that it had to be the Asakaze, leaving at 6:30. Yasuda had to get them aboard the Asakaze. Other trains bound for Kyushu could not be seen from platform 13. It was brilliant of Yasuda to have discovered this four-minute interval. There can be few, if any, railroad men at Tokyo Station aware of this brief interval.
Thus it became clear that Yasuda had planned the departure of Sayama and Otoki. But this did not solve the greater mystery: the double suicide on Kashii Beach six days later, the undeniable fact that Sayama and Otoki drank fruit juice containing cyanide and died, almost in each other's arms. Both the medical report and the photographs of the scene pointed unmistakably to a case of double suicide.
Here was something I could not understand. Why should these two, who were not lovers, commit suicide together? Surely Sayama and Otoki, who were barely acquainted, would not be so insane as to obey Yasuda's order (if his order it was) to kill themselves. Yet the stark fact of the double suicide destroyed the assumption that they were not lovers, no matter how convinced one was to the contrary. You were obliged to believe that they were intimate since they committed suicide together. I could find no answer to this contradiction.
However, since it was Yasuda's plan to have the two depart together, I could not fail to be suspicious of those suicides on Kashii Beach. Yet there was no denying that they had died there together. No matter how much I thought about it, I could not get past that obvious fact.
But since the beginning had been plotted by Yasuda, I thought I could discern Yasuda's presence at the end also, the tragic end in suicide. I could not dismiss this suspicion from my mind. All the while I was in Hokkaido investigating I could almost see Yasuda standing like a ghost on Kashii Beach the night of the tragedy. I had no idea what part he played. He could not have used hypnotism to make them commit suicide. Yet, as normal human beings, they would not have taken their own lives simply because he ordered them to do so. I didn't understand; nevertheless, I had to have Yasuda on that spot and on that night.
Fortunately, we broke Yasuda's Hokkaido alibi, and we proved that he had left Tokyo by Japan Airlines for Hakata at 3 P.M. on January 20, arriving at Itazuke Airport in Fukuoka at 7:20. Thus, he could have been on Kashii Beach at 9:00, about the time the deaths took place. But when it came to trying to connect Yasuda with the actual suicides, I soon reached a dead end, as if confronted by a wall. I could think of no solution. I was completely baffled and I held my head in my hands.
It was on one of the days when I was feeling desperate that I happened to enter a coffee shop. I like coffee. My boss often makes fun of this, but I was deeply depressed and I wanted to get away from the office. Usually, I go to my favorite shop in Yūraku-chō, but it was raining that day so I stopped in at an unfamiliar place near Hibiya Park.
The shop had a second floor. As I was about to open the front door a young girl approached from the side and we almost collided. She was quite lovely. She was wearing a bright-colored raincoat. I was polite and let her enter first. She smiled at me, went in, and gave her umbrella to the waitress standing near the stairs. I followed and handed over my umbrella also. The waitress, taking us for a couple, quickly tied the two umbrellas together and offered me the check. The girl flushed slightly and I hastened to explain. "No, not together; we're strangers." The waitress apologized, untied the umbrellas and gave us separate checks.
You may think I relate the incident because it flattered me to be taken for the companion of an attractive young girl. Actually, something very different flashed through my mind at the time, something that astounded me. I went upstairs, sat down at one of the tables and for a while didn't even notice the cup of coffee in front of me, which I must have ordered.
The waitress had greeted us as a couple because we happened to enter the shop together. That was natural; almost anyone would have thought so. She drew this hasty inference from the way we had come in the door together. For me, however, the incident started a whole new train of thought.
We-including yourself and the men at your station-had concluded it was a double suicide because Sayama and Otoki were found dead, side by side. Now I understood! They had died separately and at different places. Only after they were dead were the two bodies brought together. Someone gave Sayama the cyanide and he died, and someone gave Otoki the same poison and she died; only then were the two bodies brought to the beach and placed side by side. The two deaths should never have been connected. Since they were similar, we believed it was a single case, but we were wrong.
Don't chide us for immediately concluding it was a case of double suicide when we discovered a man and a woman dead, almost in each other's arms. Love suicides are not uncommon; this is the way the bodies are always found. No one would think of doubting it. And when termed a love suicide, the inquest is never as strict as in the case of a murder. The investigation is generally perfunctory. Tatsuo Yasuda knew this.
I remember something you wrote to me once in a letter: "Sometimes a preconceived opinion will make us overlook the obvious. This is a frightening thing. We call it common sense but it often leaves us with a blind spot." Here was a case in point. A man and a woman are found dead side by side. It is all quite clear. The obvious assumption that it is a love suicide puts an end to any further investigation of the case. And so everyone is deceived. A clever murderer knows this; he will take advantage of this so-called common sense.
This time, the criminal fooled us completely. But he still had reason to feel uneasy. Sayama and Otoki were only slightly connected yet he had to make the double suicide look convincing, he had to give the impression that they were lovers. This is the reason for having the waitresses of the Koyuki witness their departure together from Tokyo Station. He arranged the scene carefully. Nevertheless, a criminal never ceases to worry. In this case, he planned exceptionally welclass="underline" he used the four-minute interval.
As I look back on it, I see the case built around train and plane schedules, from start to finish. It is buried in timetables. Did Yasuda have any personal knowledge of those things? Doubtful. It looks, rather, as if the crime had been planned by someone with a lively interest in such details.
Let's leave aside for the moment the matter of the deaths of Sayama and Otoki and turn our attention to these timetables.
The figure of a woman comes immediately to mind. She had a special interest in timetables. She even wrote an essay on the subject for some magazine. The piece was full of poetry and sentiment. What may look to us like very boring lists of names and numbers to her were more absorbing than the most exciting novel. From the tall columns of figures she drew inspiration for her poems and travel articles. She had been confined to her bed for a long time with tuberculosis and for her these timetables were a sort of bible, a constant companion in her loneliness. She never tired of them, turning to them as one would to a classic novel, a best seller or the scriptures. She was Yasuda's wife, then convalescing in Kamakura. Her name is Ryōko.
A person suffering from tuberculosis is often said to have a morbidly clear mind. I wonder what was behind that pale mask; what was Ryōko Yasuda thinking? No, not thinking; it would be more accurate perhaps to say plotting. She must have kept playing with those columns of figures, drawing lines up and down and across to form some sort of pattern. I came to the conclusion that the plot was not originally Yasuda's but Ryō-ko's.