As Hasunuma went on, Rumi finally realized what he was after.
“Me... uh... what do you want me to do?”
Hasunuma snickered quietly. “Something ever so easy. For you, at least.”
Rumi had chosen Darjeeling for their second cup of tea. Its strong aroma would give her a psychological boost, she felt. She took it straight with no milk or lemon. She emptied her cup to the last drop and returned it to the saucer.
“He demanded a payment of one million yen,” Rumi said. “He instructed me to open a new account under my own name, transfer the money to it, then post him the ATM card and the PIN code.”
“One million yen,” echoed Yukawa. “It’s an odd sum to ask for. I feel bad saying this, but wasn’t it rather less than you’d expected?”
“Yes, it was. I’d been expecting a demand of ten or twenty million, perhaps even in the hundreds of millions.”
“If he’d come straight out and demanded one hundred million, what would you have done?”
Rumi cocked her head to one side. “I couldn’t have paid.”
“Would you have told your husband?”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I’d have just thrown in the towel and turned myself in to the police. No, that’s wrong. Most likely—” Rumi drew in a breath, then went on. “Most likely, I’d have killed myself.”
“I believe you. Either way, there was no advantage there for Hasunuma. A million yen was a different story, though. He probably thought that a million was the kind of sum that a woman who belonged to a wealthy family could raise with relative ease. He saw it as a sum you’d be happy to pay as a stopgap, even if the whole blackmail thing was unsettling.”
Yukawa had guessed right. Not knowing how to respond to him, Rumi just hung her head in silence.
“So you gave him what he wanted?”
“Yes.” Her voice was weak and hoarse.
“Did he make a second demand?”
“He did. About one month later. And for the same amount: one million yen.”
“And you paid that, too?”
“Yes. I was too much of a coward to go to the police or to talk to my husband. I just kept procrastinating, even though I knew I couldn’t keep that up indefinitely. I felt more dead than alive — particularly after Hasunuma moved back to Kikuno.”
“Did Hasunuma contact you by phone? Or did you sometimes meet face-to-face?”
Rumi hesitated. “Just the one time. When he asked me for something else. Not cash.”
“Something other than cash?” Her meaning dawned on Yukawa as he repeated what she had said. “Oh, I see. Well, we don’t need to go into that.”
“Thank you,” Rumi replied.
It had happened shortly before Hasunuma moved back to Kikuno. He told Rumi that he needed to talk to her in person, so they arranged a meeting in central Tokyo.
“You and me, we’re coconspirators. It’s a bond we have in common. I really think we should get to know each other better.” As Hasunuma said this, there was something vile and clammy not just in his voice but in his eyes, which ran over Rumi’s body as if licking her all over. “You’re not going to say no, are you?”
About one hour later, in a cheap hotel room, Rumi surrendered herself to the vilest man in the world. She did her utmost to keep her mind a blank and just waited for the experience to end.
When they finally parted, as she fled from Hasunuma as fast as she could, his words still rang in her ears: Not bad for a woman on the wrong side of forty. She seriously started thinking about killing herself again.
“I was desperate when — just as you described, Professor — my husband came to me with that unexpected proposal. I got goose bumps when he told me about Tojima’s plan. My whole life would be destroyed if Hasunuma ever told the truth. And it wasn’t just my life — my husband’s life would be wrecked, too. He must have noticed I was behaving strangely, because he asked me what was wrong. I was in two minds, but eventually I realized I couldn’t keep my secret to myself anymore. I told him everything.”
47
He’d found no mention of what he was looking for despite having read through the entire newspaper. The incident had taken place in Kikuno, an insignificant place that most people had never even heard of. The headline MURDER SUSPECT IS HIMSELF MURDERED had briefly trended on the internet, but public attention was fickle and quick to move on.
That’s something to be grateful for, thought Naoki Niikura. He didn’t want anyone to be interested in his case. Anyway, he could sum the whole thing up more succinctly: Musician manqué targets suspect in killing of protégée — and ends up killing him.
He neatly folded the newspaper he had finished reading and laid it on the carpeted floor. The free newspapers were one nice thing about the detention center.
He sat down, leaned his back against the wall, and reached for the digital music player beside him. It was a present from Rumi. He slipped on the headphones and switched the player on. He looked over toward the door. When he was sitting, he could avoid making eye contact with anyone else thanks to the opaque cover on the little window by the cell door. His room was eighty square feet in size, and, fortunately for him, he was the only detainee in it. He had expected to have to share his cell with several other people. Finding himself alone like this had been a great relief.
He knew the song he was listening to welclass="underline" “I Will Always Love You.” It had started as a country song and gone on to become a worldwide megahit for Whitney Houston.
But it was Rumi who was singing the version in Niikura’s headphones. She had recorded it when she was still in her twenties.
Her voice had a wonderful purity and she knew how to sustain a note. Even if Saori had been a musical genius, Rumi’s talents were hardly inferior. It was his lack of ability that had been the problem; he had failed to foster her talent to its full potential.
Closing his eyes, he tried to remember the days when he and Rumi had been battling to make their names in the music world. Instead, all that came back to him was that one episode on that one particular day: the time when Rumi told him the truth about Saori’s death.
As he listened to Rumi’s tearful account, Niikura experienced a strange sensation. He felt that somewhere off to one side, a second self was watching the scene — of an oblivious, carefree husband absorbing his wife’s shocking confession — with complete detachment. This must be what depersonalization disorder is all about, he was thinking in one corner of his mind.
Reflecting on it later, he understood that the whole situation had been so brutal that he had been psychologically incapable of accepting it.
Rumi’s story was hard to believe and hard to come to terms with. He could feel himself blinking incredulously throughout her account. He wanted to believe that the whole story was no more than a fantasy that his wife had invented to give him a nasty shock, but her racking sobs showed that she wasn’t playacting.
After she finished, he was unable to speak for a while. He had the sensation that the whole world had been turned on its head, pitching him into some deep, dark hole.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Rumi kept repeating, her voice weak through her tears. Niikura stared at her in blank amazement — while his second self calmly looked on.
“Why did you do it?”
That idiotic question was the first thing that came out of his mouth when he finally recovered the power of speech. But hadn’t Rumi just painstakingly explained the reason why? She had done it because she wanted to keep Saori on her current career path. Why did she want that? Because she believed that making a global singing sensation of Saori was their — no, was her beloved husband’s dearest wish and the whole goal of his life.