Nocturne of Remembrance (16 page)

For now, the sisters were young and making do, but it was hardly a lasting arrangement. Unless their mother, Akiko, won a release, they’d have to be taken in by their grandfather, Yozo. Mikoshiba wondered if Rinko had used the word “small” in terms of actually living instead of just staying there.

“Did Mommy look okay?”

“No change.”

He’d never seen Akiko at her best, so there was nothing else he could say. Rinko sat facing forward for a while, then looked at Mikoshiba as if she had just remembered something.

“Sensei, can you win?”

“Not without you and your Mommy’s cooperation.”

“Co-ope-ra-tion?”

“It means telling the truth to me, if no one else.”

“But Rinko hasn’t lied to sensei.”

“You haven’t. The problem is your mom.”

“Mommy is lying?”

“I don’t know if she is. But she’s hiding something from me.”

That was the problem that had flitted across his mind several times during the court debate. Even after reading her testimony and interviewing her, he was coming up short.

Once you took on a case, you gave it your all. That was one of Mikoshiba’s few virtues, but without a satisfactory grasp of his client’s thinking, he might wander off course. What was Akiko thinking, and what was she covering up?

They entered a quiet residential district in Setagaya and neared the Tsuda residence’s address, which Mikoshiba already knew. Most of the buildings were fairly new, and the neat blocks gave the neighborhood a relaxed atmosphere. The Tsuda residence was in a corner of the area. Its outside color was also bright, but its rather large parking lot was empty, and Mikoshiba, who was privy to the family’s circumstances, only received a forlorn impression. Despite living in a prime residential area, in truth the couple had argued continuously and been on the verge of financial collapse. No matter how magnificent the house looked, its innards had been devoured by a chilling reality.

Mikoshiba was just about to ring the doorbell when Rinko took a key out of her pocket and threw open the front door.

A sweet aroma instantly filled the air. It was that milky smell of households with little children, but Mikoshiba somehow didn’t find it unpleasant.

“I’m home. Rinko’s back!”

There was no reply, but Rinko took Mikoshiba by the hand and proceeded to the second floor.

At the top of the stairs was a narrow hallway, with one room on the left and two on the right. On each door hung a small sign: Miyuki, Rinko, Mommy.

“Hey, sis. We got a visitor. Okay to come in?”

“Wait a moment …” a muffled voice came from inside.

In a little while, the door opened.

“I’m Miyuki.”

The girl who emerged was wearing a cardigan over her pajamas.
She had long hair and a slender build that was apparent in spite of her attire. Thirteen years old meant that she was in middle school, but her well-proportioned face, fairly pretty unlike her mother’s, might allow her to pass for a high schooler.

“Excuse me for being dressed like this.”

“Were you not feeling well?”

“I have been a bit under the weather … since that day.”

She probably meant the day Shingo got killed. Her mother had stabbed her father. It was understandable for a thirteen-year-old girl to feel ill.

“I am the lawyer who’s taken over your mother’s case, Mikoshiba. I would like to look through the downstairs rooms.”

“Please do. Rinko, show him around.”

“Okay!”

“Bye …” Miyuki said vanishingly, withdrawing into her room.

“Is her illness serious?”

Rinko shook her head at Mikoshiba’s question. “She’s just scared, and can’t come outside. The doctor said that it was, um, psy-cho-somatic. Wimpy, don’t you think?!”

“And you aren’t afraid? You mother killed your father, you know.”

He regretted his words as soon as they left his mouth, but the girl didn’t seem to be the least bit fazed and answered, “Rinko isn’t afraid. No way Mommy would do something like that.”

Believe, and ye shall be saved
—Mikoshiba smiled wryly and understood. The power of belief could blind people. Doubt, on the other hand, sharpened the senses. The more familiar you were with the way of the world, the harsher it seemed. Thus the religious injunction—“Believe in me if you seek happiness”—in some ways hit the mark. If beholding the misfortunes of the world of men wasn’t your thing, you’d best frolic in the fairy-tale world of gods and ideals.

They descended to the first floor, where the kitchen faced the living room with a partition in between. The living room was about 300 square feet, and across the hallway on the other side was one room,
after which was the bathroom and toilet. Keeping the layout from the investigation documents in mind, Mikoshiba verified the respective locations and distances.

Careful consideration for Rinko’s safety was clear from first sight.

Everything there, the corners of the tables, the chairs, and various other furnishings, had rounded edges. Perhaps also in view to the very young Rinko, scissors and other pointed items were all stored in a box in a drawer in the TV stand.

There were notes all over the refrigerator door held on by magnets, and apparently having run out of room, class schedules and such were taped on the wall, too. Casually left around the living room table were what seemed like Rinko’s toys and probably Miyuki’s barrettes and scrunchies. On the wall above the sofa was a crappy portrait that Rinko must have drawn.

In short, it felt lived-in, and the sundry almost gave off a sad air.

Yet, for Mikoshiba, it was rather comforting. For a place he was standing in for the first time, it had an oddly nostalgic feel. He didn’t mind the clutter at all. The space was saturated with a mother and daughters’ love for one another.

And then he remembered. The home in which Mikoshiba was born and raised had looked just like this.

His parents, a sister who was three years younger. The living room was a tad smaller, but the ambiance was identical. Even though everyone took their meals separately, perhaps if the family composition was similar, the households looked similar.

In those days, when Mikoshiba came home, his mother and sister would always be watching TV and laughing a lot. He never found the program funny, but they’d be laughing merrily like a couple of sisters.

He couldn’t hear that laughter now.

Try as he might, it had fled beyond his memories and he couldn’t recall it. Back then, there had certainly been a happy circle in his home, but he’d refused to enter it. That was because he and the other ones who happened to be there were distinct breeds in his estimation.
Even if they looked the same, he believed that inside he was completely different, solitary and superior.

What nonsense
, Mikoshiba thought belatedly. He’d certainly been right about being a breed apart from his family. But he’d had it ass backwards. He wasn’t some solitary and superior being but rather one of those primeval organisms that lurked in deep subterranean shafts.

No, this isn’t the time to wallow in sentiment
.

Mikoshiba shook his head and came back to his senses. He walked into the kitchen and looked around. Next to the microwave was a manual slicer. A food-preparation tool cherished by women who weren’t adept with kitchen knives—Mikoshiba had heard that it could chop up just about anything. Perhaps Akiko had purchased it so that the girls could cook some simple dishes; however, he couldn’t find even one knife in the holder under the sink, so Akiko, too, must have relied on it.

Next, he moved towards the dressing area. The approach was a beeline from the kitchen and would support Mikoshiba’s story that Akiko had headed straight to the dressing area after picking up a knife in the kitchen.

The dressing area was large. You could certainly place a dead body on a blue tarp here.

Mikoshiba opened the bathroom door. The grisly event had occurred a good six months prior, and the place must have been cleaned thoroughly after the crime lab had gone over it. There was not a red smear to be seen, but Mikoshiba still smelled the raw odor of spurting blood. Visiting such places tended to revive his olfactory memories.

He gazed at the bathtub and tried to turn over Akiko’s crime in his mind:

Offering to wash Shingo’s back, she approaches him from behind. He is unsuspecting and does not turn to look. His defenseless, exposed neck. Akiko plunges into it the knife she’s been holding behind her.

Once. Twice. A third time.

The point of the knife accurately catches the jugular vein, exactly
as in the autopsy report. Each time the murder weapon is removed and reinserted, a large amount of blood spurts out and colors Akiko’s face and hands with red spots. In TV shows and movies the blood flies out copiously in a radial pattern, but in reality it is more like intermittent squirts from a very narrow hose. Even so, at point-blank range it’s forceful enough to get blood on your face.

Shingo’s life soon comes to an end. Though entirely covered in blood, Akiko isn’t fazed at all. Her body slick with blood and fat, she washes it off like it’s just makeup. Then she puts her clothes back on and goes out the back door to get the blue tarp from the shed. She returns to the bathroom and moves Shingo’s body to the dressing area, whereupon she begins to rinse off, with the shower hose, the blood splattered onto the bathroom walls—

Mikoshiba lightly clicked his tongue. He wasn’t finding any big contradiction in the picture drawn by the prosecution. To the contrary, the more he examined the crime scene, the more he felt that Misaki’s argument accurately described the facts.

Along the hallway outside the dressing area, there was one room on the other side of the living room. It was probably Shingo’s.

The sour smell that stung Mikoshiba’s nose as soon as he entered was entirely unlike the living room’s sweet scent.

On the desk alongside the wall were a desktop computer and several ballpoint pens, while on the wall itself three flowcharts were lined up side by side—vestiges, no doubt, of Shingo’s stint as an avid day-trader. Next to the PC were quarterly reports and company info, a paper knife stuck into them, and, like some excuse, a lone introductory book on stock investments.

Shingo must have believed that these sufficed for him. It was the typical load-out of fools who thought themselves clever. Eschewing experience and caution, they bleated that taking initiative based on intuition and guts led to victory. They scorned steady research and gritty effort as the way of losers, but in the end, couldn’t even recoup what little they’d spent on information.

Meanwhile, under the desk, chaos reigned supreme. There were scraps of paper all over, comic books, magazines, newspaper clippings, candy wrappings, instant noodle containers, ink cartridges, white-label discs, bundles of cords, and discarded clothing. The wastebasket was half-buried in its overflowing contents. If this what it was like after the crime-lab boys had found strands of hair and minute dust, it wasn’t hard to imagine how much worse it had been with Shingo there.

Mikoshiba had a rough idea of the weird smell’s breakup, too. It was the combination of the rotten odor of old food and dead bugs and an aromatic spray used to forcibly cover it all up.

There was neither purpose nor order to the room.

The rooms of people with a purpose had order; rooms that were in order spoke of a purpose. The owner of this one had been routed, resentful, deranged, and stagnant. Shingo Tsuda’s mental state must have resembled his room.

“Did you learn anything?”

Mikoshiba returned to himself at the sound of Rinko’s voice. “That your father was really the odd one out.”

“He wouldn’t let anybody into his room, saying it was his workplace.”

While under the same roof, Shingo’s room was completely independent from the rest of the house. No, “quarantined” was closer to the truth. Its remove mirrored a fatal distance in the family itself.

That a murder had occurred in this house was becoming palpable.

On the other hand, there still remained a disconnect that Mikoshiba couldn’t resolve.

Something that he couldn’t put his finger on—

“Sensei, is something wrong?”

“Shush!”

Something was not matching up. It was like a jigsaw puzzle where one piece just didn’t fit.

And that—

And that …

The answer came to him in a flash.

So that’s what doesn’t match up
.

Mikoshiba returned to the living room and traced the line he’d moved along at the outset. Confirming that Akiko’s room was open, he nodded as if he had finally found what he’d been looking for.

“Hey, sensei?”

Noticing Rinko, who was clinging to his waist, Mikoshiba lowered his gaze to her. “Has someone recently seen the doctor?”

“Just big sis.”

“Nobody else?”

“Nope.”

Maybe he’d been prey to a huge misunderstanding all along.

Mikoshiba pulled out his cell phone and called Yoko at the office.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“What’s the matter, sensei?”

“Sorry, but there’s some work that I want you to do first thing in the morning.”

“First thing? I need to send those invoices out to your clients.”

“Forget that, it can wait. Get me a copy of the attachment to Akiko Tsuda’s short form family register. This is urgent.”

“The … attachment?”

“Yup. I want to know where she lived and when. That’s your number-one priority now.”

When he arrived at his office the following morning, Yoko was waiting for him with the requested document.

“I went and got it.”

While she sometimes turned a critical eye on her employer, she certainly carried out his instructions without delay. For that attribute alone, he had been right to hire her.

Mikoshiba looked over the Tsuda family register attachment. She had moved from the place of her birth to Kobe. Having lived there until she was eighteen, she then moved to Tokyo—probably on account of a
job. Later, she got married and moved to a new residence, after which she moved again to her current address. Even this concise description yielded a faint trace of the path that Akiko Tsuda had traveled. The date they had moved to their present house roughly coincided with the birth of their second daughter, Rinko. The expansion of the family must have nudged them to step up from a rented place to a single home.