This did not make her happy. She looked at the little hut, her garden, the trees enclosing it all, and shook her head sadly. “Needs must, I guess. Thank you, sir.”
“I won’t trouble you now, if the villa is open.”
“If you don’t mind going on ahead. The shutters in back aren’t latched,” she said with a glance at the pile of brush she had gathered.
Akitada got back on his horse and completed the climb to the top of the mountain. The villa was astonishingly rough and rustic.
Why would a member of the imperial family use such a modest wooden house in this desolate and inaccessible wilderness? The Prince Atsuhira he had known, while pleasant and amusing in company, had certainly not appeared the sort of man who relished solitude and an ascetic lifestyle.
He swung himself out of the saddle and tied his horse to post. There were several of these here; clearly the prince and his visitors had all come on horseback. No carriages, wagons, or even palanquins had ascended the steep track. Over to one side of the clearing stood an open shed. There a horse or two might have sheltered on the days when he and Lady Masako used to meet here. Otherwise, the mountaintop was untouched. Birds flew through the branches of tall cryptomerias and pines, a fox appeared from nowhere, stared and melted into the brush again, and overhead some squirrels chattered at Akitada’s intrusion of their territory.
It should have been remote, safe, and very private, yet a murderer had known about the secret meetings and lain in wait.
For the first time, Akitada considered whether the prince might have been the real target, and that Lady Masako, arriving early, had caught the assassin waiting. He might have been forced to kill her because she would have warned the prince. But why had he not waited for his real prey afterward?
Atsuhira had been very late. Perhaps, the murderer, shaken by what he had just done, had been too terrified to face a night in the place where he had killed the young woman. Most people believed an angry ghost could not only haunt but kill the person who had been guilty of their death.
Yes, it could have happened that way, but this did not make his job easier. It complicated it further.
He inspected the villa first. The main door was secured with a lock. He walked around the building to the back. Here the land dropped off, and a broad veranda jutted out. He climbed the steps and turned to take in a vast view of hills and mountains, blue and misty, all the way to the distant capital, which beckoned like a golden jewel far below. No doubt, this prospect was why the villa was here, that and its inaccessibility. Had the prince brought his other women here also?
Akitada turned to the shuttered doors that ran along the back of the house. These, he found, opened easily. He flung all the shutters back to get light into the interior and entered.
The space had been subdivided with partial walls to make four rooms. The largest of these contained thick grass mats, two lacquered trunks, a few silk cushions, and a small lacquer desk evidently used to eat from, for it still held some clean bowls and ivory chopsticks. He saw also a lantern, two oil lamps, and two candle sticks with candles. A large brazier stood near the fire pit. Yes, this humble wooden house had a fire pit like any small farm house. It would have kept the room comfortable for romantic meetings in the middle of winter. The fire pit still contained charred timbers.
A thin layer of dust covered everything.
There were no painted screens here, but on two of the walls hung scroll paintings depicting deer and a family of foxes.
Akitada went to the trunks and opened them. Both contained bedding of luxurious silks and thick padding. He did not see any clothes. Apparently, the lovers rarely spent more than a few hours here.
Except for that last night when the prince had been detained.
What must have gone through Lady Masako’s mind? Had she worried about being found out if she spent the night here? But perhaps it had no longer mattered. Her pregnancy could not have been hidden much longer.
Whatever Kosehira’s role had been in the delay, the prince was the more to blame. He could surely have left at the usual time, had he really wanted to. This again spoke to Atsuhira’s irresponsible behavior toward women he claimed to love.
Apart from the dust and a lot of faint footsteps, the room was quite tidy, except that the cushions were not stacked neatly. Instead they lay oddly scattered, as if someone had kicked them about. Perhaps Kosehira and Kobe had done this when they searched the villa. He would have to ask.
Next, he looked at the other three rooms. One must have served as a rarely used kitchen. It held supplies of lamp oil and some wood to make a fire. A barrel contained water, but dust and scum had settled on the surface. The other two rooms were uninhabited, their wooden floors bare and very dusty. Here there were also scuffed tracks. Again, perhaps Kosehira and Kobe had left these, or the caretakers, though there was not much evidence of caretaking. In one of the rooms, various wooden staffs called bo were stored. They were of differing lengths and had perhaps been used by the prince and his male guests for practice bouts. He was about to turn away when he saw a tiny bit of something blue moving against the white-washed plaster wall. He went closer and found a few threads of blue silk attached to a nail protruding from a support beam. A draft of air from outside had made them move. It seemed strange that someone should have walked just there where there was no door.
And then he saw a slightly darker spot on the dark wood floor a few feet away from the wall and the blue threads. He licked a finger and bent to rub at it. It came away faintly reddish brown and smelled of blood. There was very little, just a few drops and a faint smear. If he had not seen the movement of the blue silk threads, he would not have noticed them. Now he squatted beside them and glanced from them up to the threads. He wished he knew what Lady Masako had worn that night, because the image in his mind was of the young woman cowering against the wall, trying in vain to escape her attacker.
Eventually, he stood and looked once more around the room. He could not rid himself of the feeling that a violent encounter had taken place here. Perhaps it had started in the main room, where the cushions had been kicked aside. Whoever had come in had found the young woman and frightened her. She had fled, hotly pursued, and she had been cornered just here.
But, of course, it might have been altogether different. There was nothing to show when or how the blood had got there and the blue thread could have come from anything.
He left the house and walked the steep path to the promontory. It was not far and a very pretty walk among trees and boulders. He could hear the waterfall before he reached it. The rocky site gave him an excellent view of the cascade which originated in a cleft to his left and plunged down in a series of steps, each misty with white spray, until it reached a small, shallow pool at the bottom. From there the water made its way down the mountain as a burbling stream.
An ugly memory intruded, as he looked down. His pursuit of Morito, the killer of the lovely lady Kesa, had brought him to a waterfall like this one, a famous place for suicides. He had expected Morito to have killed himself in remorse and had climbed down to look for the body. Morito, too, had been involved an ill-advised romance. Only in his case, the man had killed the woman he loved.
Could the prince have killed Lady Masako? Had she become adamant about marriage, and had he foreseen the fury of Lady Kishi and the subsequent loss of protection he had enjoyed from the family of the regent? The more Akitada thought about it, the more feasible this scenario became. The caretaker couple had seen the prince arrive after Lady Masako. Perhaps there had been a quarrel, and he had lashed out. She had fallen and, thinking her dead, he had taken her to the promontory to suggest a suicide. Yes, it might have happened like that. He wished he could ask Kosehira what they had talked about before the prince had left for his tryst.