Journey Under the Midnight Sun

by Keigo Higashino

  A waiter with southeast Asian features came to take his order. Many establishments had turned to hiring foreign help during the bubble years when it became too expensive to hire locally. Anything’s better than dealing with the preening Japanese kids these days, Imaeda thought. He ordered coffee.

  Lighting a Marlboro, he looked down at the street through the window. There seemed to be more people walking outside than there had been just a few minutes ago. He heard businesses were cutting back on entertainment expenses but maybe the frugality was less widespread than he’d imagined. Either that, or Ginza was witnessing the last bright flicker of a dying flame.

  Imaeda had only been watching for a minute before he picked a man out of the crowd who walked with long strides and had a beige suit jacket slung over one arm. It was five minutes to six. I guess the elite don’t believe in being late, either.

  Kazunari walked in and waved a hand in greeting as he approached the table, just as the waiter was bringing Imaeda his coffee. Kazunari sat and ordered an iced coffee for himself. ‘Hot outside, isn’t it,’ he said, fanning himself with his hand.

  ‘Very,’ Imaeda agreed.

  ‘Do you take summer vacations in your line of work?’

  ‘Not usually, no,’ Imaeda said with a smile. ‘I tend to take my breaks whenever work is slow. Besides, summer is an excellent time to do a certain kind of investigation.’

  ‘What kind would that be?’

  ‘Adultery. For instance, if a woman has asked me to find out whether her husband is having an affair I advise her to tell her husband she wants to go visit her parents during the summer. If her husband shows any reluctance to going, she offers to go by herself.’

  ‘I see. So if the husband does have a woman on the side —’

  ‘It’s too good an opportunity to pass up. While his wife frets away at her parents’ house I photograph the husband and his lover on an overnight trip somewhere. I would say the rate that cheating husbands fall for that one is about 100 per cent.’

  Kazunari laughed quietly. The stiffness Imaeda had seen in his face when he came into the café was fading.

  The waiter brought Kazunari’s iced coffee. He took a gulp.

  ‘So, did you find anything out?’ he asked. The way he said it made it clear he had been waiting to ask this question since the moment he walked in.

  ‘I looked into a few things,’ Imaeda told him. ‘Though I’m afraid my report might fall a little short of what you were expecting.’

  Imaeda pulled the file out of his briefcase and laid it on the table. Kazunari opened it at once.

  Imaeda was confident he’d managed to cover everything he could about Yukiho Karasawa’s upbringing, school history, and current life.

  After a while, Kazunari looked up from the report. ‘I had no idea her natural mother committed suicide.’

  ‘Actually, you’ll see I didn’t write suicide. Though that was a prevalent theory at the time, they never found any decisive evidence to support it.’

  ‘And yet given the conditions they were living under, suicide wasn’t unthinkable.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘This is all a little surprising,’ Kazunari said then. ‘Or, maybe not.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Everything about her gives the impression that she was brought up in luxury, but every once in a while you see something in her other than the refinement. An attitude she wears like armour. Have you ever had a cat as a pet?’

  Imaeda shook his head.

  ‘We had four when I was a kid,’ Kazunari explained. ‘They were all strays, nothing fancy. We tried to treat them all exactly the same, but their attitude towards us was different depending on how old they were when we took them in. A cat rescued as a kitten grows up never knowing life without human protection. They’re trusting and easily spoiled. But a cat picked up when it’s already grown – even though they might seem friendly, they never stop being wary. They’ll live with you because you feed them, but they’ll never completely let their guard down. I feel like that’s how she operates sometimes.’

  ‘Whatever Yukiho is, she’s no house cat.’

  ‘I’m sure if she heard me comparing her to a stray, her hair would bristle like one,’ Kazunari said, the corners of his mouth softening.

  ‘Of course,’ Imaeda said, thinking of Yukiho’s feline eyes, ‘that quality of hers might be attractive to some people.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely. Women can be scary that way, can’t they.’

  ‘You got that right,’ Imaeda agreed. ‘Incidentally, did you read the part about the stock trading?’

  ‘Briefly, yes. I’m surprised you found out who her broker was.’

  ‘She left some of her papers behind after the divorce.’

  ‘At Makoto’s place?’ Kazunari asked, a cloud coming over his face. ‘How did you explain the investigation to him?’

  ‘Only in very broad strokes. I told him that the family of a man considering marriage to Yukiho wanted me to look into her past. Should I not have told him?’

  ‘No, that’s fine. If they get married he’ll find out sooner or later anyway. How did he react to the news?’

  ‘He said he hoped she’d found the right man.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him the man was someone he knew?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him, but I think he might’ve guessed that you were behind the investigation. It would’ve been too big a coincidence for a complete stranger to have come to me – a friend of her ex-husband – requesting an investigation into Yukiho Karasawa.’

  ‘I’d better talk to him about it one of these days,’ Kazunari said, half to himself, as he looked back down at the file. ‘According to this, she did quite well for herself with the stocks?’

  ‘Yes. The broker she worked with retired from his firm last spring, so all I had to go on was what he remembered.’

  It had been a mixed blessing, Imaeda thought. If the broker had still worked at the firm, there was a chance he might have had access to more detailed information. Then again, he might have also been more reluctant to talk about a client.

  ‘I’ve heard that even amateur traders were doing quite well up until around last year. Did she really buy two million yen’s worth of Ricardo?’ Kazunari asked.

  ‘Her broker remembered that quite vividly.’

  Ricardo, Inc. was originally a semiconductor manufacturer. They announced that they had developed an alternative for chlorofluorocarbons, giving them a leg up on the competition when the UN announced a ban on the use of CFCs in September of 1987. The Helsinki Declaration in 1989, recommending that all chlorofluorocarbon use should be abandoned by the end of the century, only buoyed the stock further.

  What impressed the broker so much was that, at the time Yukiho purchased the stock, nothing had yet been made public about Ricardo’s research. Even in the industry, few people knew what Ricardo was doing. Only after the press release announcing their discovery of the substitute was it revealed that several of the technicians who had been working at one of the few Japanese companies producing chlorofluorocarbons, Pacific Glass, had been headhunted by Ricardo to turbocharge their research.

  ‘And Ricardo wasn’t the only one,’ Imaeda said. ‘It’s not clear what kind of information she was basing her purchases on but nearly every company whose stock Yukiho bought had a hit product of one kind or another just after her purchase. The broker said her success ratio was amazingly close to perfect.’

  ‘Insider trading?’ Kazunari asked, his voice dropping.

  ‘That’s what the broker suspected, too. He knew that Yukiho’s husband worked for a manufacturer, and thought perhaps he had a route by which he was getting information on other companies’ projects in development. Of course, he never confronted Yukiho with this.’

  ‘What department did Makoto work in again?’

  ‘The Patent Licensing Division at Tozai Automotive. Definitely a position that would give him a window into the research and development going on at other companies
. But only things that had been made public. He wouldn’t have had any easy or legal means of obtaining information on projects still under wraps.’

  ‘So we’re supposed to believe that she just had a knack for picking good stocks?’

  ‘Oh, she definitely had a knack. According to her broker, she was very good at knowing when to let go of stocks, too. Just when it looked like prices might inch a little higher, she would sell them off and move to the next investment. That sense of timing isn’t something most amateurs have, the broker said. And if it was blind luck – well, it’s hard to consistently make money in the market based on your gut.’

  ‘Which suggests that she did have access to privileged information – or someone working with her did.’

  ‘It does seem that way.’ Imaeda shrugged. ‘But then, that’s just my gut talking.’

  Kazunari looked down at the file again. His eyebrow twitched. ‘There was one other thing that bothered me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘According to this report, she was buying and selling stocks pretty frequently through last year. And she’s still trading now?’

  ‘Yes. Though I think her shop keeps her too busy to spend as much time on it as she used to. She still dabbles, though.’

  Kazunari shook his head. ‘That doesn’t fit with what I heard from Makoto.’

  ‘He said something about her investments?’

  ‘Just about how Yukiho had got deep into stocks back when they were still married. It got so bad that at one point they had an argument and she sold off everything. But maybe he didn’t check closely enough.’

  ‘It was the broker’s opinion that Yukiho never gave up trading for any significant period of time since she started. At any rate, I was able to get a good picture of her financial situation as it stands now,’ Imaeda said. ‘Only one major question remains.’

  ‘Where’d she get her seed money from in the first place?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s difficult to trace the money back without proper documentation, but according to the broker she started with a sizeable sum of cash. Not the kind of money you would expect a housewife to have.’

  ‘Several hundred thousand yen, maybe?’

  ‘Probably more.’

  Kazunari crossed his arms and let out a little groan. ‘Makoto said he had no idea how much she had stashed away.’

  Imaeda nodded. ‘You said her foster mother, Reiko Karasawa, didn’t have much in the way of money. Certainly it would be hard for her to come up with a few hundred thousand yen.’

  ‘Isn’t there some way you can look into that?’

  ‘I plan to. Just, it’s going to take me a little time.’

  ‘That’s not a problem. Do what you need to do. Can I have this file?’

  ‘Of course. I kept a copy for myself.’

  Kazunari slipped the file into the slim attaché case he’d brought with him.

  ‘I needed to give this back to you,’ Imaeda said, pulling a paper bag out of his briefcase. He took out the watch he had borrowed and put it on the table. ‘I’ve sent the suit back by courier. It should get there tomorrow.’

  ‘You could have sent the watch with it.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t want to be responsible if it’d got lost along the way. It’s a limited edition Cartier.’

  ‘Is it? It was a gift,’ Kazunari said, glancing at the watch face before putting it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘I wouldn’t have known myself,’ Imaeda said, ‘if Yukiho hadn’t pointed it out.’

  ‘Right,’ Kazunari said, rolling his eyes. ‘I suppose it’s important to know that sort of thing in her line of work.’

  ‘I think it’s a little bit more than that,’ Imaeda said, playing the words for effect.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Imaeda shifted forward and rested his hands on the table, his fingers crossed together. ‘You mentioned that Yukiho hadn’t responded enthusiastically to your cousin’s proposal?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have an idea of why that might be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s simple, really,’ Imaeda said, staring Kazunari in the eye. ‘She’s in love with someone else.’

  Kazunari nodded several times before saying, ‘I had a similar thought myself. But something tells me that you’re basing this on a bit more than that. Do you know who the other man is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, who is it? Someone I know? In fact, don’t tell me if you think it might cause problems.’

  ‘Whether it’s a problem or not depends largely on you,’ Imaeda said, taking a drink of water. ‘That is to say, it is you.’

  Kazunari furrowed his brows quizzically. Then he chuckled, his shoulders shaking. ‘That’s very funny.’

  Imaeda shook his head. ‘I’m serious.’

  Something in Imaeda’s voice made Kazunari’s face tighten.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose you’d laugh if I said it was a gut feeling.’

  ‘I wouldn’t laugh, no, but I also wouldn’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s more than that. First, we have the watch. Yukiho clearly remembered its owner. Even though her chance to see it was so brief you didn’t even remember it, she did. I believe it’s likely she remembered because of her interest in you. And another thing: when I went to pay her a visit, she asked me who had introduced me and I gave her the name of Shinozuka. Normally you would expect her to assume it had been your cousin – Yasuharu Shinozuka. He’s older than you, higher up in the company, and a frequent visitor to her store.’

  ‘Maybe she was shy about mentioning him, in the wake of his proposal.’

  ‘That doesn’t fit what I know of her character. How many times have you visited her boutique?’

  ‘Twice, I think.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  He didn’t answer, so Imaeda answered for him. ‘More than a year ago, I bet.’

  Kazunari nodded.

  ‘So, as far as her shop is concerned, the only Shinozuka who really matters is her frequent customer, Yasuharu Shinozuka, wouldn’t you say? If she had no special feelings towards you, I can’t see why your name would’ve come out first. You said you’ve known Yukiho since college, correct?’

  ‘Yes, from dance club practice.’

  ‘Try to think back on that time, see if you remember anything that sticks out. Anything you might be able to interpret as her having special feelings for you.’

  ‘You went to see her, didn’t you?’ said Kazunari, frowning. ‘Eriko Kawashima.’

  ‘I did, but I never mentioned your name and I made sure she wouldn’t suspect anything.’

  Kazunari sighed. ‘How was she doing?’

  ‘She seemed good. She’s been married two years now. Her husband works at an electrical engineering company. They were introduced by a marriage service.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear she’s well,’ Kazunari said. ‘Did she have anything to say?’