“Poison!” yelled Kobe. “How poison? Even an idiot can see he’s been clubbed to death. Why poison him, too? Are you mad?”
Grinning, Masayoshi folded his arms across his small paunch and rocked back and forth on his heels. “Not at all.” He chuckled. “I must say, you present me with the most interesting cases, Superintendent,” he said appreciatively. “But actually you got it backward. He was poisoned first and clubbed afterward. You notice that there is very little blood in the wound. Dead men don’t bleed, you see.”
Silence greeted his explanation.
Much as he detested Masayoshi’s manner, Akitada did not question his professional expertise. In fact, he should have seen the lack of blood himself. He asked brusquely, “Can you tell when he died? And how much later the head wounds were inflicted?”
Masayoshi became businesslike. He returned to the body, flexing its limbs and joints down to the fingers and toes, then pulled apart the clothing to study Nagaoka’s torso and poke his thin belly. Finally he pinched the skin in a few places. Straightening up, he said, “Hard to tell. Depends on whether he was left lying around outside or inside near a fire. He’s been frozen, of course, so he was outside at least part of the time and probably all of it. My guess would be several days. The head injury happened shortly after death, probably while the body was still slightly warm. There are some residual traces of bleeding in the wounds.”
“Several days! That’s not much help for the time of murder,” exploded Kobe. “What about the poison? How soon before he died did he take it?”
“Ah. That is even more difficult. Some poisons work quickly and some are quite slow. And we do not know how much he consumed. He may have lasted a few heartbeats, or taken a whole day and night to die, or even several days. I cannot be certain what he took until I dissect him and make certain tests. These, as you will hardly wish to spare any of your prisoners, will involve rats, whose tolerance for poison is different from that of humans. Still, we’ll know if it was quick, and may be able to guess at what it was. Though I have an idea about that.”
“Which is?” demanded Kobe.
“No, Superintendent! You must wait. I don’t enjoy making a fool of myself and avoid it at all costs.” His eyes slid to Akitada, and he smirked.
Akitada bit his lip. “Well,” he challenged Kobe, “either way, it eliminates highway robbery as a motive. Poisoning a man requires thought and selection. It is not random. Are you ready to admit that you made a mistake about Kojiro?”
“Certainly not. This does not clear him of the other charges.”
“Your people should not have moved the body. The killer may have left clues to his identity. Footprints, for example.”
“I know.” Kobe cursed. “It looked like a robbery. The money was gone, along with his horse. He was lying by the road. And my sergeant was so pleased with himself for identifying the missing Nagaoka that he decided to bring him back here for us to see. I’ll have his balls for this and fry them in oil. How’s Tora, by the way?”
Akitada suppressed a chuckle. “Seimei thinks he will do well.” Suddenly and perversely he felt a great deal better about the Nagaoka case. “Shall we go take a look at the scene while your capable coroner does his job?” he suggested, with a smile and bow toward Masayoshi, who looked at him in blank astonishment.
Kobe cursed again. “I suppose wed better. Before it gets dark.”
Dusk fell early, before they were well out of the city. It was bitterly cold. A sharp northerly wind pushed them onward and brought heavy dark clouds on their train. Kobe muttered something about the failing light, but Akitada would not turn back. The smell of snow was in the air, and he was afraid all tracks would disappear if they waited for the next day.
So they rushed on at a gallop, on horses requisitioned for government business, followed by the cowed sergeant and six mounted constables.
It was difficult to talk over the sound of the horses’ hooves and the gusts of wind, and for a while they simply covered ground. Soon the horses were steaming; flecks of foam from their muzzles flew back past the riders.
To the right and left of the raised highway, fallow rice fields and withered plantings of soybeans stretched into the murky distance. A few small farms huddled under dark groves of trees, like birds gone undercover from the freezing cold.
It began to snow when they were about halfway. The low dark clouds had steadily caught up with them, moving faster and lower, and when the first flakes materialized in the cold air, they stung their cold faces like pins and dusted their clothes and the horses’ manes.
The sergeant pulled up beside Akitada, perhaps to avoid catching more of Kobe’s wrath. He was eager to make up for his mistake and scanned the distance anxiously. “See that line of pine trees up ahead?” he shouted, pointing at a shadowy bank of darkness in the general murk. “That’s a canal. It crosses the road. About a mile after that is the turnoff.”
Minutes later they passed over the small bridge and turned down a narrower track.
“Where does this road lead, Sergeant?” Akitada asked.
“To a village called Fushimi.”
The name was familiar. “Isn’t that where Kojiro’s farm is?”
“Yes, sir. Though it’s a pretty large place, actually.”
Well, Nagaoka had said that his brother’s hard work had made his farm prosper. Akitada had a strong desire to see for himself. Since it was not far from where Nagaoka had been found, he thought Kobe might accept the need for a visit.
Eventually the narrow road cut through a forest of pines and leafless trees, and the sergeant called out to slow down. They came to a place where the ground was churned up by the hooves of horses and boots of men, and stopped. The sergeant pointed. “He was right over there! Against that rock!”
The sergeant, Kobe, and Akitada dismounted. Akitada cast a hopeless glance around. Those who had found the dead man, and those who had come later to get him, surely had destroyed any tracks left by his killers.
But when they reached the rock, the sergeant pointed out hoof marks in the soft ground. “They brought him on a horse,” he said. “We came on foot and carried him back to the highway.”
“ ‘They’?” Akitada crouched to stare at the indentations. His heart started beating rapidly. “A single horse! Perhaps his own? And whoever brought him took it away again. Could a single person manage? One man … or woman?”
The sergeant glanced back at the waiting constables on the road. “His companions may have stayed on the road.”
“Not likely under the circumstances, Sergeant,” snapped Kobe. “He was poisoned. I hardly think the murderer would bring along an escort while disposing of the body.”
The sergeant flushed. “The body was sort of flung down,” he said to Akitada, “not laid flat or sat up or anything. I suppose a strong woman, if she had a dead man draped over the saddle of a horse, could pull him off. A man, definitely. Getting him on is a bigger problem.”
They all crouched, studying the prints, but there were too many to make sense of. Akitada gave up first and followed the hoofprints away from the rock. The tracks slanted toward the road more or less along the same line on which they had arrived, and rejoined the tightly packed dirt track about fifty feet from the rock. The horse’s hooves had left clear marks in the moist earth of the grassy verge. To Akitada’s eye, the impressions looked the same both coming and going. “Come here, Sergeant,” he called. “Have a look at this. All the hoofprints are the same depth. Yet we know that, coming, the horse carried the body. That means the person who brought the body must have led the horse to the rock, and then ridden back to the road. Do you agree?”
The sergeant nodded eagerly. “You are right, sir. Let’s look for his footprints here.”