“You heard us, didn’t you?” Yasuko asked.
“Heard? Heard what?”
“Through the wall. You could hear us. That’s why you called.”
Ishigami turned to Yasuko, his face blank. “I couldn’t hear you talking, if that’s what you mean. For all its faults, this building’s quite soundproof. That was one of the reasons why I moved here, actually.”
“Then how did you—”
“Realize what happened?”
Yasuko nodded.
Ishigami pointed to a corner of the room. An empty can lay there on its side. Some ash had spilled from it onto the floor.
“When I knocked on your door a few minutes ago, I smelled cigarette smoke. Figuring you had a guest, I looked for shoes by the door, but I couldn’t see any. I glanced into the room, and noticed it looked like someone was under your kotatsu, and the cord was pulled. But if someone wanted to hide, they could’ve just gone into the back room. Which meant that the person under the kotatsu wasn’t hiding there, they had been hidden there. When I put that together with the thumping noises I’d heard, and the fact that your hair was unusually disheveled, it wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened. Oh, and one more thing: there aren’t any cockroaches in this building. I’ve lived here several years now and never seen one.”
Yasuko stared at Ishigami’s mouth as he talked. His voice was calm, never rising, his expression never changing. I’ll bet that’s exactly how he talks when he’s giving a lesson to his students, thought Yasuko, her mind wandering nervously.
Then she realized she was staring at him, and she averted her eyes. She felt that he had been watching her, too.
He’s terribly levelheaded, and smart, she thought. How else could he have accurately reconstructed such an elaborate scenario after only a glance through her front door? At the same time, Yasuko felt relieved. If he hadn’t heard her conversations, he didn’t know the details of what had happened.
“He was my ex-husband,” she said. “We’ve been divorced for several years, but he kept coming around. He wouldn’t leave unless I gave him money … that’s what he came for today, too. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I guess I just snapped…” Yasuko lowered her eyes. She wasn’t going to tell him everything that had happened. She had to keep Misato’s involvement out of this.
“Are you going to turn yourself in?”
“I think that’s the only way. I hate to do this to Misato, though. She doesn’t deserve this.” She would have said more, but she heard the sliding door of the back room fly open. Misato, furious, stepped into the room.
“No, Mom, you can’t! I won’t let you.”
“Misato, be quiet!”
“I won’t. I said I won’t. Listen, Mr. Ishigami? I’ll tell you who killed that man—”
“Misato!” Yasuko raised her voice.
Misato’s mouth snapped shut and she glared daggers at her mother. Her eyes were completely red.
“Ms. Hanaoka,” Ishigami said evenly, “you don’t have to hide it from me.”
“I’m not hiding anything—”
“I know you didn’t kill him by yourself. Your daughter must have helped you.”
Yasuko shook her head. “No, that’s not true. I did do it myself. She only just came home—she came home right after I killed him. She had nothing to do with it.”
It was clear Ishigami wasn’t believing a thing she said. He sighed and looked at Misato. “I think hiding it is only making it harder on your daughter.”
“I’m not lying. You have to believe me!” Yasuko laid her hand on Ishigami’s knee.
Ishigami stared at her hand for a moment, then looked back at the corpse. Then he tilted his head. “What matters is how the police see things. I’m afraid they’ll not be fooled so easily.”
“Why not?” Yasuko asked, before realizing that she had as good as admitted her lie.
Ishigami pointed to the corpse’s right hand. “There’s bruising on the wrist and the back of his hand. I think I can even make out finger marks. I’m guessing he was strangled from behind, and naturally tried to protect his throat. These marks came from someone stopping him from doing so. The evidence is plain to see.”
“It was me,” Yasuko insisted. “I did that, too.”
“Ms. Hanaoka, that’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“You strangled him from behind, right? How could you pull his hands forward at the same time? It’s impossible. You’d need four arms.”
Yasuko had nothing more to say. She felt trapped in a tunnel from which there was no exit. She lowered her head, her shoulders sagging. If Ishigami could tell all this with just a glance, the police would surely see even more.
“I just don’t want to get Misato involved. I have to help her…”
“I don’t want you to go to prison, either, Mom,” Misato said, her voice choked with tears.
Yasuko covered her face with her hands. “I just don’t know what to do.”
She felt the air growing heavier around her. It felt like she would be crushed where she sat.
“Mister,” Misato spoke. “You came here to tell Mom she should turn herself in, right?”
There was a beat before Ishigami replied. “I called thinking I could help you and your mother in some way. If you want to turn yourselves in, that’s fine, I won’t argue with you. But, if you weren’t going to turn yourselves in, I thought it might be hard managing with just the two of you.”
Yasuko let her hands fall away from her face. She remembered something odd Ishigami had said over the phone. How a woman couldn’t dispose of a body by herself—
“Is there some way we don’t have to turn ourselves in?” Misato asked.
Yasuko looked up. Ishigami tilted his head, thinking. His face betrayed no emotion.
“It seems to me that you have two options: hide the fact that anything happened, or hide the fact that you had anything to do with it. Either way, you have to get rid of the body.”
“Can we?”
“Misato,” Yasuko said sternly. “We’re not doing anything of the sort.”
“Please, Mom.” She turned back to Ishigami. “You really think we can?”
“It will be difficult, but not impossible,” Ishigami replied, his voice calmly mechanical. To Yasuko, this lack of emotion made everything he said sound somehow more logical than her own rattled thoughts.
“Mom,” Misato was saying, “let’s let him help us. It’s the only way!”
“But I couldn’t—” Yasuko looked at Ishigami.
His narrow eyes were fixed on the floor. He was waiting for them to decide.
Yasuko remembered what Sayoko had told her, that the math teacher had a crush on her. That he only came to buy lunch at the shop when she was there.
Now she was glad Sayoko had said so, or she would have seriously doubted Ishigami’s sanity. Why else would someone go so far out of his way to help a neighbor to whom he had barely even spoken? He had already risked arrest just by coming into the room.
“Wouldn’t somebody find the body? If we hid it, that is,” Yasuko asked.
“We haven’t decided whether we will hide the body yet or not,” Ishigami replied. “Sometimes it’s best not to conceal anything. We’ll decide what to do with the body once we have all the information at hand. The only thing we know now for certain is that we can’t leave him lying here like this.”
“What information?”
“Information about this man,” Ishigami explained, looking down at the corpse. “About his life. I need to know his full name, address, age, occupation. The reason he came here. Where he was planning to go afterward. Does he have family? Please tell me all that you know.”