Journey Under the Midnight Sun

by Keigo Higashino

  ‘Was there something strange about the pot?’

  ‘Not that I saw. They were saying that if the soup had really boiled over it would’ve made more of a mess on the stove. Of course, it must have boiled over, because it put out the burner, right?’

  Masaharu tried to picture the scene in his mind. He’d left a pot on the stove too long when he was making instant ramen once or twice and it had made quite a mess.

  ‘Still, it sounds like the girl’s doing well. If she lives in a home that can hire a private tutor and all. That’s good. She had it pretty rough with that mother of hers.’

  ‘Was there some kind of problem?’

  ‘Yeah, poverty. Mrs Nishimoto definitely didn’t have an easy life. She had a job working at some noodle place and it was pretty tough for her just to pay rent. They’d always be behind a few months.’

  Compared to Masaharu’s own experience, this was like hearing about life on another planet.

  ‘Maybe that’s why that kid always seemed older than her years. More aware, you know? I don’t even think she cried when we found her mom lying there.’

  ‘Really?’ Masaharu looked at the man’s face, remembering what Reiko had said about Yukiho sobbing at the funeral.

  ‘What about the rumours?’ Naito asked. ‘Weren’t people saying it was a suicide?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tagawa grunted. ‘There were some things that made it suspicious, I guess. I remember the detective talking about it.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Well, they said something about Mrs Nishimoto taking cold medicine – about five times the normal amount, based on the wrappers they found in the trash.’

  ‘Was that enough to kill her?’

  ‘No, but the cops said that she might’ve taken it to fall asleep. You know, turn on the gas, take some sleeping pills? But it can be hard to get sleeping pills, so she went for the cold medicine.’

  ‘Desperate times,’ Masaharu said, nodding.

  ‘She’d got into the alcohol, too. There were three open jars of sake in the garbage – the cheap stuff you get out of vending machines. And she supposedly wasn’t a big drinker.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That, and the window,’ Tagawa said, growing more talkative as the memories surfaced.‘Somebody thought it was strange that everything was locked up tight. There weren’t any ventilation fans in the kitchens in that building, so if people cooked something, they usually opened the windows.

  ‘But,’ Masaharu said, ‘it still could have just been an accident, right?’

  ‘Sure, which is why they didn’t investigate the suicide theory much. They didn’t have any smoking gun, and there were other ways to explain the cold medicine and the sake, like what the girl said.’

  ‘What did Yukiho say?’

  ‘Just that her mom had a cold that week and that she’d sometimes drink sake when she felt a chill. The detective still thought it was too much cold medicine to explain away, but there’s no way to really know without being able to ask her. And the big thing is, if it was a suicide, why would she bother putting soup on the stove? Anyway, they decided it was an accident, so that’s that.

  ‘The police said that if we’d found her thirty minutes earlier, she might have been saved. Think about it – thirty minutes. That’s just bad luck. Whether it was suicide or an accident, you got to think she was destined to die that day.’

  Long, slightly chestnut-coloured hair fell down across Yukiho’s face. With her left hand, she brushed it back behind her ear, but a few strands remained. Masaharu wanted to kiss her pale white cheek. He’d wanted to since his first day with her.

  She was working on a problem, trying to figure out the equation of a line formed by the intersection of two planes. Her mechanical pencil flew across the page.

  ‘Done,’ she said, well before time was up. Masaharu carefully checked the formulae. Her writing was precise, each number and symbol a work of art in miniature.

  ‘Good job,’ he said, looking back up at her. ‘Perfect, actually. I can’t find anything to complain about.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, smiling, ‘that’s a first!’

  He chuckled. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it seems like you’ve got the general idea about dealing with coordinates in space. If you can do this one, everything else is just a variation on the same pattern.’

  ‘Sounds like a fine time for a break! I just bought some tea.’

  She stood and left Masaharu to sit by her desk and look around the room. He was never really sure what to do with himself while he waited. What he wanted to do was poke around, open her little drawers, pore through the notebooks on her shelf. Even a minor discovery, like what brand of cosmetics she used, would be progress. Yet the thought that she might catch him stayed his hand. He didn’t want her to think badly of him.

  He’d actually brought a magazine for just this sort of moment – a fashion magazine he’d seen on the stand that morning at a shop by the station – but he’d left it down in his duffel bag on the floor below. He’d been using the bag since his first year in hockey club and the years were showing so it stayed near the entrance while he was tutoring.

  His eyes wandered to a small pink radio sitting in front of a bookshelf. A few cassette tapes had been stacked next to it. He scanned down the labels: Yumi Arai’s ‘Off Course’ – all pop music and pretty new. The sight of the cassettes reminded him of something else: the stolen Submarine.

  They still weren’t any closer to finding out how the game had got leaked. Minobe had even tried calling the company from the ad, but that hadn’t got him anywhere.

  ‘I asked them where they got the program from and they just said they couldn’t answer any questions. It was a woman on the phone, so I asked her to pass me to one of their tech guys, but he was no more help than she was. I’m guessing they were guilty and just didn’t want to admit it. I bet they stole their other games, too.’

  ‘What if we just showed up on their doorstep?’ Masaharu suggested.

  ‘Doubt that would help,’ Minobe said, shaking his head. ‘We start whining about stolen software, they won’t even let us in.’

  ‘What if you brought a copy of Submarine and showed it to them?’

  Minobe shook his head again. ‘What proof do we have that Submarine is the original? They could just say we copied their Marine-whatever game.’

  Masaharu wanted to pull his hair out. ‘But then there’s nothing to stop them from stealing more programs!’

  ‘Exactly,’ Minobe said. ‘We’re going to need copyrights for these things before long. That’s what my friend over in the law school said. I asked him how much money we could get if we could prove our program was stolen and he said nothing – not without any copyright laws on the books.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘I still want to find out who did it,’ said Minobe, then he added, in a cold voice, ‘and make them pay.’

  Minobe suggested that they write up a list of everyone they had shown Submarine to, or talked about Submarine with. ‘Someone would’ve had to know about Submarine in order to want to steal it,’ was his reasoning. Everyone came up with every name they could think of and before long they had a list several dozen names long. There were other people at the laboratory, friends from school clubs and teams, friends from high school, and others.

  ‘One of these people must be connected in some way to Unlimited Designs,’ Minobe said, sighing as he scanned the long list of names.

  Masaharu understood his sigh all too well. He was doubtful they’d find anything like a direct connection. The program could have been passed from person to person dozens of times before it reached the company selling it. Unless they got very lucky, it would be nearly impossible to trace.

  ‘Well, the place to start is for each of us to talk to the people we spoke about Submarine with. Someone’s bound to come up with a lead.’

  For his part, Masaharu had hardly mentioned Submarine to anyone, less out of security concerns and more because he never
imagined anyone outside his department would be interested in something that was essentially part of his research. Besides, without fancy graphics, the game wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as something like Space Invaders.

  In fact, the only time he’d ever shown the game to anyone was when he’d talked about it to Yukiho one afternoon when she asked him what he studied at the university. He’d begun by telling her about his thesis work but soon realised that image analysis and graph theory wasn’t that interesting to a junior high school student so he brought up the game. It worked well. Her eyes lit up the moment he mentioned it.

  ‘Making a game sounds like fun,’ she’d said. ‘What kind of game is it?’

  He wrote a picture of the Submarine screen on a piece of paper and explained the game to her. She listened very intently and said she was impressed he’d made something like that by himself.

  ‘Oh, it was a group effort,’ he’d told her, though not before feeling a rush of pride.

  ‘But you understand how it works, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure, mostly.’

  ‘See? Impressive.’

  Masaharu felt something stir in his chest, a reaction to her gaze on him and her praise. The feeling that came from someone like her respecting his achievements was intoxicating.

  ‘I’d love to try it some time,’ she’d said.

  This, he felt, had to happen, but as he explained to her, he didn’t have his own computer and couldn’t take her into the lab. She seemed disappointed.

  ‘What I need is a rich friend with a computer,’ he joked.

  ‘A computer’s all you need to play the game?’

  ‘And the tape with the program on it.’

  ‘The tape? What kind of tape?’

  ‘It’s just a regular cassette tape, except it holds data, not music.’

  She seemed fascinated and asked if he could show her one some time.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but it just looks like a regular cassette tape. Like the ones you have.’

  ‘I’d still like to see it some time.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Fully expecting to disappoint her, Masaharu brought the tape with him the next time he came.

  ‘Wow, it really is a regular cassette tape,’ she said, looking at the tape in her hand.

  ‘Like I said.’

  ‘I never knew you could use these tapes for something else like that,’ she said, handing it back to him. ‘You should put that in your bag right away. I’m sure it’s very important.’

  ‘Hardly that important,’ he said, though privately he thought it really was. He went back downstairs to put the tape in his duffel bag by the door.

  This was the extent of Yukiho’s contact with the program. Neither of them had mentioned it again. Nor had he mentioned their exchange to Minobe and the others. The idea that she’d stolen the program was laughable – in fact, he’d never even considered the possibility until now.

  Of course, had she been of a mind to, Yukiho could easily have taken the tape out of his duffel bag that day. All she would have had to do was pretend to go to the bathroom and sneak down to the ground floor. But what would she do with it then? Stealing the tape wouldn’t be enough. If she didn’t want him to notice, she would have to duplicate the tape within the two hours of their lesson and return the original to the bag. Possible, if she had the equipment, but he knew she didn’t own a personal computer and making a duplicate data tape wasn’t as simple as copying your friend’s tape of pop music.

  Though it was an amusing pastime to imagine her as the thief, Masaharu thought as the door opened.

  ‘What are you grinning about?’ Yukiho said as she walked in with two teacups on a tray.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Masaharu said. ‘That smells nice.’

  ‘It’s Darjeeling.’

  She put the teacups on the desk and he took one and took a sip a bit too fast, spilling a little on his jeans as he tried to set down the cup.

  ‘Well, that was dumb.’

  He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, dislodging a folded piece of paper, which fell out on the floor.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Yukiho asked.

  ‘I’m fine. It wasn’t much.’

  ‘You dropped something.’ She picked the paper off the floor, but when she looked at it, her almond eyes went wide. ‘What’s this?’

  She held the paper out to Masaharu. It had a hand-drawn map and a telephone number with the words ‘Tagawa Real Estate’ below.

  Oops.

  ‘Tagawa Real Estate? In Ikuno?’ she asked. Her earlier good humour seemed to have vanished.

  ‘No, not in Ikuno,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s in Higashinari ward. See here, it says “Fukaebashi”?’ Masaharu pointed at the map with his finger.

  ‘But that must be a branch of the one in Ikuno. I’ll bet the son of the owner opened that.’

  ‘Huh, no kidding.’ Masaharu tried not to let his bewilderment show on his face.

  ‘Are you looking for an apartment?’

  ‘No, I just went with a friend.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her eyes had a faraway look to them. ‘I’ve just remembered something strange.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Tagawa Real Estate, the original one in Ikuno, managed the apartment building I lived in as a child. I used to live there, you know, in Ōe.’

  ‘Really?’ Masaharu tried to focus on his teacup, not meeting her eyes.

  ‘Have you heard about when my mother died? My real mother, I mean,’ she said, her voice calm and somehow deeper than usual.

  ‘Uh, no, I haven’t,’ he said, shaking his head.

  She chuckled. ‘You’re a bad actor. I know you know. The other day, when you talked to my mom for a long time, she told you then, didn’t she.’

  ‘Well, OK, maybe a little,’ he said, setting down his cup and scratching his head.

  Yukiho took a couple of sips of her own tea and breathed a long sigh of steam.

  ‘May twenty-second,’ she said, ‘was the day my mother died.’

  Masaharu nodded silently.

  ‘It was a little cold that day. I wore a cardigan my mother had knitted for me to school. I still have it, you know – the cardigan.’

  She glanced over at the dresser in the corner. Masaharu could only imagine what painful memories it contained.

  ‘It must’ve been quite a shock,’ Masaharu said, immediately regretting saying something so bland.

  ‘It was like I was dreaming – a nightmare, of course,’ Yukiho said, an awkward smile flashing briefly across her lips. ‘I went to play with some friends after school that day. That’s why I was a little late getting home. If I hadn’t gone to play, I might have been home an hour earlier.’

  Masaharu understood what she was trying to say. That one hour had changed her life.

  Yukiho bit her lip before continuing. ‘When I think about that —’