“A choice?”
“Yes.” Yukawa nodded, looking straight at her.
Those eyes! Rumi got the impression they could see right through her.
She didn’t know what to do. The only reason she invited him into the house was to get away from the scrutiny of the police she knew were watching them.
Rumi ushered Yukawa into the living room, then made some tea in the kitchen. She chose Earl Grey, her favorite. She had the vague sense that this might be her last chance to enjoy a nice cup of tea for a while.
When she returned to the living room, carrying a tray with teacups and a little jug of milk, Yukawa was standing near the row of acoustic guitars hanging on the wall.
“Are you interested in guitars?” Rumi asked, as she put the tray down on the coffee table.
“I dabbled as a student. This one’s a Gibson; a vintage Gibson, if I’m not mistaken.”
“I don’t know much about guitars. My husband collects them.”
“Would you mind if I had a little play?”
Bemused at the academic’s request, Rumi agreed. “Sure, go ahead.”
Yukawa took the Gibson down off the wall, pulling out a nearby chair and sitting down. He picked out a few notes, then started to play a slow tune.
Rumi gave a start. It was a song Niikura had composed many years ago. It was one of her favorites. A pastiche of the folk songs of the 1970s, it had been a complete commercial flop.
Yukawa stopped in the middle of the song. “It’s a nice-sounding instrument,” he said as he put the guitar back on the wall.
“You’re good. Keep playing, if you want to.”
“No, I think that’s enough for today. Any more and my lack of practice will start shining through,” said Yukawa, grinning as he made his way back to the sofa.
Lack of practice? Had he been rehearsing for today’s little performance? Had her husband told him they had acoustic guitars in the house?
“Please, help yourself,” said Rumi, gesturing at the tea tray. Yukawa sat down on the sofa, thanked her, picked up one of the teacups, brought the cup to his nose to savor the aroma, then added a dash of milk from the jug.
“Did Saori Namiki used to practice in this room?”
“Oh, no. Never.” Rumi smiled. “The neighbors would complain. We have a soundproof room. She used to practice there.”
“You got complaints? But I heard that her voice was beautiful.”
“It was, when she was performing. When she was rehearsing, it was more like noise.”
“That’s a little harsh.” Yukawa sipped his tea. “I wish I could hear it — the voice of your brilliant diva. I did a search in YouTube, but I couldn’t find her.”
“Would you like to hear one of her songs?”
Yukawa blinked. “Can I?”
“Of course,” said Rumi. She pulled out a remote-control unit from a rack by her feet and switched on a high-tech sound system, which ran along one side of the room. She then picked up her phone and opened up a music app. She had hundreds of her favorite tracks on her phone.
From the speakers came the sound of the overture. Yukawa, who must have recognized the song, was nodding his head approvingly. It was “Time to Say Goodbye,” the song made famous by Sarah Brightman.
A voice slid in on top of the music. Although little above a whisper, it was by no means weak. It was extraordinary: It seemed not so much to enter through the ears as to resonate throughout one’s body. Yukawa’s eyes suddenly widened. The music was affecting him.
As the song neared its climax, Saori’s astonishing talents came even more strikingly to the fore. The sustained high notes seemed to penetrate the heart and the brain, while the heavier low notes lodged in the pit of the stomach. This wasn’t a talented teenage girl self-consciously performing an exercise; it was more like a gift straight from the laps of the music gods.
The song ended, leaving a sweet afterglow in its wake.
Yukawa shook his head appreciatively from side to side and clapped his hands. “That was magnificent. I wouldn’t have imagined.”
“Would you like to hear another?”
“Thank you. I think that’s enough for now. Much as I’d like to, it will only make it harder for me to broach the matter at hand.”
Rumi breathed in deeply, then took a sip of tea. “You said you wanted to talk about the case?”
“Yes,” said Yukawa, “but before I talk about the death of Kanichi Hasunuma, I’d like to go back to when this all began.”
“When is that?”
“About six months ago. When Kanichi Hasunuma was arrested on suspicion of Saori’s murder. Are you familiar with the details?”
“Shizuoka prefecture, wasn’t it?” Rumi put a hand to her cheek. “They discovered Saori’s body in an old house there... I think that’s how it started.”
“That’s right. To be precise, two bodies were found in the burned-out remains of a private residence that had degenerated into what’s popularly called a trash house. One of the bodies belonged to the occupant of the house — she’s believed to have died several years earlier — while DNA analysis showed the other body to be Saori Namiki. Among the female occupant’s family, friends, and associates, the name Kanichi Hasunuma jumped out at the investigators. Which brings me to my first question.” Yukawa raised one finger. “Why should this trash house, which had been abandoned for years, all of a sudden go up in flames? I asked someone I know in the police to look into this for me, but they have yet to pinpoint the cause of the fire. They suspect arson, but they can’t find any evidence of who the arsonist was.”
This wasn’t what Rumi had been expecting and she felt perplexed. She genuinely had no idea where Yukawa was going with this.
“The investigation team had its suspicions about Hasunuma, so they started looking for links between him and Saori Namiki. Those links didn’t take long to find. Hasunuma had been a regular customer at her family’s restaurant, Namiki-ya, three years earlier. They also heard that his feelings for Saori were less than wholesome. They concluded that there was a high probability of Saori having been murdered by Hasunuma. They needed to find physical evidence to back that up. They looked everywhere until they did. They found Hasunuma’s company overalls from his former employer. The overalls had bloodstains — very small bloodstains, admittedly — on them. Analysis showed the blood to be Saori’s. As far as the investigation team was concerned, this constituted decisive evidence and they proceeded to arrest Hasunuma.
“Now that brings me to my second question,” said Yukawa, unfurling a second finger.
“Something about this version of events puzzled me from the first time I heard it. Why should Kanichi Hasunuma have hung on to those old overalls so fanatically? Don’t you think that any normal person would have chucked them out after quitting their job and moving to a new part of town? Perhaps you could argue he forgot or just never got around to it, but I still don’t get it.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Professor?” Rumi interrupted. “I’m sure it all makes very good sense, but I’m not competent to answer questions like this.”
Yukawa leaned forward and looked at Rumi as if he could see right into her soul. “Are you quite sure about that?”
“Sure? Why should...?”
“Are you really sure? What if you really do know the answers but you just don’t know that you do?”
Rumi was thoroughly discombobulated. She had no idea what Yukawa was getting at.
“Let’s push on,” said Yukawa. He drew back so he was sitting normally again and raised a third finger.
“The third question. This is the most important one. After Kanichi Hasunuma was arrested for Saori’s murder, he never wavered. He resolutely maintained his silence, exactly as he had done nineteen years earlier. He’d pulled off something similar before so was probably confident that staying silent would be enough for him to avoid being charged. But the police and the prosecutor certainly weren’t going to give up without a fight. There was always the possibility of them coming up with some very powerful piece of evidence. So how did Hasunuma manage to be so laid-back the whole time he was in custody? We know that after his release he bragged to a friend of his that ‘a police confession was the king of evidence and that he’d be fine as long as the king wasn’t around.’ In other words, he was one hundred percent certain that no evidence would be found to prove his guilt. Why was that?”