“You really shouldn’t have.”
“We are the ones dropping in on you out of the blue.”
“I really don’t mind. Anyway, thank you.” With a demure little bow, Sachie Sawauchi took the box.
“I’m going to make some tea. Won’t you have a seat?”
“There’s no need. This is a work visit.”
“To be honest, I’d like some for myself. It’s not often I get the chance to have a nice cup of tea with visitors.” Sachie Sawauchi smiled and left the room.
Kusanagi took a deep breath and turned to his female colleague. “Shall we sit down then?”
“Let’s,” Utsumi replied.
They sat down on the sofa next to each other. Kusanagi ran his eyes around the room. There were some heavy-looking bookshelves filled with hardbacks, including a number of English books, and some framed paintings of flowers on the walls. Were they the work of a well-known artist? he wondered.
“How does it feel, Chief?” Utsumi asked. “Is it different to when you were here all those years ago?”
“Yes,” Kusanagi replied, glancing around the room for a second time. “Completely different, frankly.”
“Oh yes?”
“Everything was different then. There’d been a family — a mother, a father, and a daughter. The daughter disappeared at the age of twelve. The mother took her own life soon after. Then, four years after that, the daughter’s remains were found in the mountains. That’s when I was here. Seiji Motohashi was living on his own, sure, but do you think he’d put away his wife’s things and his girl’s toys?”
Utsumi sighed sympathetically. “The opposite, I imagine. He probably wanted to keep their things around to remember them.”
“Exactly. Everything connected to Yuna was left exactly as it was when she disappeared.” Kusanagi pointed at the bookshelf. “There was an upright piano over there with a family portrait on top of it. The room still felt like the living room of a family with a young daughter. Time had stopped for Seiji Motohashi.”
Kusanagi remembered being ushered into this room nineteen years ago. He was with Mamiya; they had come to announce the arrest of Hasunuma to Motohashi. “We should be able to crush him with the full might of the law,” Mamiya had said confidently.
Kusanagi had never dreamed that he would be back, let alone under these circumstances. The whole experience of the Yuna case had been painful and frustrating, but — assuming that it was all in the past — he had done his best to let go.
He wasn’t surprised when Utsumi told him about going to see Professor Yukawa. The two of them were old friends, after all. Their shared interest in Hasunuma’s unnatural death was further motivation. Without Yukawa’s theories, figuring out how the murder was committed would have taken far more time and trouble.
If he was honest with himself, though, Kusanagi was puzzled when Utsumi had passed on Yukawa’s advice about looking into the people connected with what was a twenty-three-year-old case. No doubt, some of the people with links to Yuna Motohashi’s murder might still be nursing a grudge against Hasunuma. But why act on it now?
But Yukawa, Utsumi said, had been emphatic that the one missing piece of the puzzle was to be found in the past. When she followed up by asking him what sort of thing to look for, he’d simply said, “Relationships.”
“I don’t want to plant any preconceptions in your heads. I’ll just say this: There’s a link of some kind between that old case and the present case. And that link is a person.”
As perverse as Yukawa was, though, Kusanagi knew that his powers of deduction were quite extraordinary.
So what was Yukawa’s new hypothesis? Kusanagi was eager to know. Their investigation centered around the helium tank found in the clump of weeds was going nowhere fast.
There were multiple security cameras in and around Kikuno Park and they had yielded a considerable amount of footage, even for the fifteen-minute period that was their focus. The task of reviewing it had been divided between many investigators but they had failed to find anyone carrying a case, bag, or box big enough to accommodate the helium tank. The team’s current thinking was that the killer must have known where the cameras were located and exited the park via a blind spot.
They imagined that the perpetrator’s next move would have been to travel by vehicle from the park to the crime scene. They had, therefore, analyzed the N-System data for the area around the local main road. This, too, had failed to produce any results, despite the traffic restrictions having greatly reduced the number of cars on the road that day.
Another possibility was that the killer had used a bicycle, rather than a car. They started checking footage from the security cameras over an expanded area. They failed to find any suspicious bicycles.
The investigation hit a brick wall. That was when Kusanagi remembered the opinion that Detective Utsumi had so hesitantly proffered: that the helium tank they had found was nothing more than a decoy designed to throw the investigation off track. Yukawa felt the same way.
The main reason that Kusanagi had taken Yukawa’s advice and was talking to people associated with the twenty-three-year-old Yuna Motohashi case was that the investigation was flailing and he had no other options.
Sachie Sawauchi came in, pushing a trolley. On it was a hot water dispenser, a Japanese teapot, and three Japanese teacups. She had clearly meant what she said about enjoying teatime with her visitors.
Sachie Sawauchi sat down opposite the two detectives. She briskly poured some boiling water into the teapot, then filled the three cups with green tea.
“Here you go,” she said, placing a white teacup in front of Kusanagi.
“Thank you,” he said, and took a sip.
“I heard that he’s dead,” said Sachie Sawauchi, placing another teacup in front of Utsumi. “That Hasunuma fellow; the one they found not guilty in Yuna’s case.”
“You knew?” Kusanagi asked.
“Yes,” she replied softly. “I seldom watch television and I don’t do the internet, whatever that is. One of my neighbors told me the news. Even though it all happened twenty years ago, there are always good-natured people who are keen to help.” She put sarcastic emphasis on the word good-natured. “As soon as you said you were from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department on the phone this morning, I knew you’d be coming around to see me.”
“We’re very sorry for the inconvenience,” Utsumi said.
Hasunuma’s death had been a major news story over the past few days. The whole world and his dog seemed to know that he had been arrested several months earlier in a murder investigation, then released due to a lack of physical evidence.
“How did you feel when you heard that Hasunuma was dead?” Kusanagi asked.
Sachie Sawauchi looked at him blankly.
“I didn’t think or feel anything. Perhaps it’s because I never wanted to have to think about that man, ever. Whether he’s alive or dead, it makes no difference. All I wanted was never to have to think about him again. How many people suffered because of him? How many people’s lives destroyed?” Her face was reddening and her voice rising. She must have realized, because she looked down at the floor and apologized, her voice little more than a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
“Your brother... Seiji Motohashi... he passed away six years ago now?”
“That’s right,” the silver-haired lady replied. “Cancer of the esophagus. By the end of his life, he was like a chicken, just skin and bone... I think death was probably a release for him. He always said his life was empty of happiness.”
The phrase landed like a heavy blow to Kusanagi’s gut. “I see...”
Sachie Sawauchi ran her eyes briskly around the room.