Hidden Nexus (27 page)

‘I have – in the cupboard to the right.’

She cleared the table and returned to the kitchen. As she prepared the tea she thought about their mutual situation and gently scolded herself as she had by no means meant to pry. Sergeant Mori had told her that the Inspector was a private man and yet no sooner had she stepped into the apartment than she was poking around into his personal life. Still, he hadn’t seemed to have minded. She returned to the main room with a pot of green tea and two cups to find that the Inspector was fast asleep on the sofa.

It would be wrong to say that he looked peaceful – his injuries were too severe to say that, but she was pleased that he was able to rest. She threw a blanket over him, collected the few things that she had and investigated the rest of the apartment. She located what she presumed was a spare room, took out a futon from within the sliding built-in cupboard and ten minutes later she, too, was fast asleep.

Tuesday 4
^th
January 8:10am

The three investigators convened a meeting at 8:00 o’clock the next morning. All three looked tired and pale and with their heads locked together had enough dark circles under their eyes between them to make up a grey-scale version of the Olympic symbol. Inspector Saito was still
in a great deal of physical pain, particularly his back and ribs, but he had nonetheless managed to grab at least half a decent night’s sleep. It was not entirely unusual for him to spend the occasional night on the sofa and ironically, it seemed, he’d slept marginally better than the other two, perhaps courtesy of the pain killers which washed down with generous amounts of sake had been enough to anesthetise a blue whale. Mori continued to be
bothered by his cold which showed no sign of lifting, although it had moved from the runny stage into the blocked passage stage and meant that he’d spent most of the night gasping for air or inhaling Oil of Olbas fumes which he’d sprinkled too liberally over his pillow.

Junsa
Saito had also slept uneasily, although through no fault of either accommodation or ailments. For her, thoughts about her parents had swept troublingly into her dreams and before she'd realised it these dreams had morphed into thoughts and then after some time, during which she couldn’t convince herself that she wasn’t actually dreaming, at about four in the morning she'd suddenly found herself to be completely wide awake - tired and with a dull, aching and heavy head, but wide awake nevertheless.

She had few fond memories of her father as for most of her life he had been absent, seemingly desiring to be both physically and emotionally separated. Like many he’d had to set off early in the morning on the long, deadening commute to work and arrived home late at night to cold rice and pickles. He’d played golf on the weekend or gone to the races and had been typically mono-syllabic to his one and only child, abdicating himself entirely from the parental duty of setting the boundaries for his daughter’s upbringing. She regarded him as an indistinct, peripheral figure rather than one taking an active, loving role at the centre of her life. That role was left entirely to her mother. There were a few rays of sun that had glimpsed timidly from behind the lowering paternal clouds. She recalled one time when he’d taken her to a near-bye miniature zoo. She would have been about five at the time – at an age when animals of all sorts were a great curiosity. She particularly remembered the monkeys with their funny little faces, huge eyes and stubby noses.
‘
This one looks like you Mi-chan,’
he’d laughed, pushing apple through the railing despite the numerous red signs warning visitors not to. There were odd moments like that which stuck in her mind - little moments that sent the message that despite his orthodoxy in everything else he did, inside her father was a man who was desperate to swim against the tide. Perhaps that’s why he had left. Perhaps he had yearned for nonconformity, to push apple through the railing and to ignore the red signs, and it was not her fault that he had left them, as she had repeatedly blamed herself.

The culmination of all these thoughts ended up in no conclusion whatsoever and it had taken her another good hour before she’d been able to sense the welcoming cloak of sleep drifting over her once more allowing her to finally drop off again.

She’d then woken early, just after six, and had been instantly gripped by an eerie feeling that she was out of place, immediately stung by the lack of familiar objects around her. Unthinking actions like finding the light switch or a box of tissues had seemed to be completely beyond her. Nothing had been to hand as she preferred.
As she’d lain in the strange environment of Inspector Saito’s apartment, cold and staring into the dark, she'd suddenly felt that she was far from being in her usual state of having everything organised and orderly. For another thing it didn’t smell right. In fact there was no smell – no scent, no potpourri, no tatami. Just cold air!

Now, all huddled in the office they silently appraised each other – tired, bruised, beaten and drawn. The immediate prognosis was not good. But then as soon as they had reassembled around the office table, as if a switch had been magically flicked, the mood shifted. Inspector Saito appeared to be suddenly energised.
Junsa
Saito too, found her thoughts turning away from pessimistic introspection onto the themes surrounding the case. To compliment the change in atmosphere Inspector Saito then nipped outside before returning ten minutes later dumping a box of donuts and three cups of coffee on the table. Some habits never changed.

He passed round the cups of coffee and selected his favourite donut - a chocolate ring.

‘Okay, so where are we with everything? What are our thoughts?’ he said looking expectantly at the other two. He was now back in the zone, he’d woken up and his last bout of silence had been effectively tossed away.

'I see he still doesn't do a home breakfast,' whispered Mori behind his hand.

'On the contrary, we've already had a round of toast and tea.'

'So everything okay last night?'

'I'll tell you later,' she replied quickly.

Inspector Saito glanced irritatingly at the other two. He hadn’t heard what they were whispering but it had all the hallmarks of two naughty school kids interrupting the pronouncements of the teacher.

‘How’s your nose, by the way?’ asked Mori pointing to Saito’s all too obvious bandage.

‘Fine, fine,’ replied Saito not really wanting to dwell on himself. ‘But my own injuries are no matter. Let’s pay attention to the little address book that you found yesterday
Junsa,’
he
continued, nodding now in the direction of his young colleague and pushing large chunks of donut into his mouth
.

‘Does it make any sense to you, sir?’ queried Mori turning away from
Junsa
Saito. He looked into the box of donuts and picked out a humble honey ring.

‘A little,’ replied Inspector Saito licking his lips and the tips of his fingers. ‘They are undeniably meeting dates and times. That much is obvious, and I’m sure that these hiragana, here, refer to people. Don’t you agree?’ He passed the book back over to Mori.

------------------------------------------

Tuesday 7
^th
J
,
j
–
ˆ
–
w
1700
 

Wednesday 15
^th
u
–
r
1600

Thursday 30
^th
J
,

–
W
1830

---------------------------------------------

Tuesday 7
^th
O, Na –Yo –Pu 1700
 

Wednesday 15
^th
Fu –Hi 1600

Thursday 30
^th
O, Wa –Shi 1830

---------------------------------------------

‘For example we know that Yamada Eri left Niigata Kyubin on the 30
^th
for a secretive meeting, so secretive in fact that no-one seems to know anything about it and those that do are reluctant to reveal with whom that was with. I guess that ‘O’ refers to ‘Ozawa’ and the ‘Wa’ is our mystery man. You also mentioned that they met in Shinbashi - ‘Shi’, so that fits.’

‘So according to you on the 7
^th
she also had a meeting with Ozawa and someone called ‘Na’.’ Mori peered at the little book.

‘Nakasone?’ suggested
Junsa
Saito.

‘That leaves ‘Fu’ – any ideas,’ said Mori, still examining the book. For some reason he put it to his nose and smelt it. It was a futile act. He couldn’t smell a thing. Not that it would have told him anything even if he could have smelt anything.

‘No ideas at all,’ admitted Inspector Saito. ‘But… working on the fact that ‘Shi’ is Shinbashi I suppose ‘Hi’ must be a place, as must be ‘Yo’.’

‘Could be Yokohama,’ said
Junsa
Saito.

‘Or just as easily Yokosuka, but I don’t think that first date is significant now. That must be just a meeting between Ozawa and Nakasone, in fact Takeda mentioned one such meeting himself, I remember. No, I think the significant one is the last meeting on Thursday, if indeed these meetings have any significance at all.’

‘I’m still confused,’ volunteered
Junsa
Saito.

Mori glanced at Inspector Saito. He knew his boss would be unable to pass up an invitation to stretch his mental muscles.

‘Okay, this is how I see it,’ started Saito sitting forward in his seat. ‘I think this all centres on the dealings of the Yoshihara Yakuza. There is some suspicion that they were behind the death of Nakasone and the gas explosion at YBP headquarters. Not only that but they had a presence at the YBP shareholder meeting last night. Now I don’t know exactly what that was all about but I suspect
sokaiya
activity, possibly sponsored by Niigata Kyubin – which brings that company nicely into the picture.’

‘But how does all this link in with Yamada Eri?’ interrupted Mori feeling, if not displaying, a sense of exasperation.

‘Well, I’ve been thinking about that, too. It seems quite possible to me that with the breakdown in merger talks between Niigata Kyubin and YPB that Ozawa was so set on getting a deal with YBP that he was… is… determined to get his prize at any cost and so he sets out to threaten and cajole YBP towards his way of thinking, and to do this he needs the Yoshihara. He gets Yamada Eri to set up these meetings but then senses that she’s become a risk and needs to eliminate her. He either does this himself or enlists the Yoshihara.’

‘This all sounds quite fantastic. I don’t believe it, sir. Niigata Kyubin are a well respected company, aren’t they?’ exclaimed
Junsa
Saito.

‘Yes, maybe you are right,’ conceded Inspector Saito. ‘But it’s the only way I can think of linking the Yoshihara into the whole thing, although I admit I can’t think what they would stand to gain from all this unless they were acting under strict instructions as part of a business pact with Niigata Kyubin. We really need to find if there is anything that links them to Niigata Kyubin, I mean beyond my mere guess work.’ He sat back in his chair, his brief flurry of energy and activity having blown itself out.

‘You obviously stumbled into something sensitive last night, though,’ suggested Mori.

‘Well, I don’t know-’

‘Why else would they have laid into you and from what you’ve said it sounded like your attacker was trying to give you a warning.’

‘It may be significant, it may be not. It was painful, I can vouch for that.’ He gingerly touched his rib cage. ‘And I’d like to think that my injuries were worth getting, in terms of pay-back, should all this help solve the case, but at the minute I’m not too sure that they do.’ It was an all too common occurrence that Saito could easily lapse into periods of gloominess and he appeared to be on the edge of entering one now.

Mori stood up from behind his desk and walked over to the window. He looked up at the cold, hard sky – an unrelenting, grey mask that seemed, in its permanence, to suck the joy out of all below. It looked cheerless outside and it felt pretty cheerless inside, too.