The Death Ceremony

by James Melville

  Then Otani turned to Rosie. "We didn't say anything about what happened on Sunday when we arrived home, not wishing to trouble you. Of course my wife and I had no idea that your friend was at the tea ceremony." He sat back as Rosie and Patrick Casey spoke to each other in English, watching their faces.

  "I understand that you were assisting," he went on when the private exchange seemed to be over. "Handing round the cakes. I must admit I didn't notice you."

  Casey smiled. "Oh, I wasn't allowed to go into the actual room. I was outside the fusuma, just helping to carry cakes from the preparation room at the back."

  Otani nodded with a sense of relief. He would indeed have been slipping badly had he failed to notice a gaijin among the attendants, even in traditional Japanese dress. "This sad event must have interrupted your studies," he said, and Casey nodded.

  ' 'I had been staying at the school as the guest of the Iemoto, but of course I moved out." Otani saw that he and Rosie were holding hands again, and felt quite put out on behalf of Roger, the bus-conductor back in London.

  "Well, I mustn't intrude any longer," he said after finishing his coffee and picking up the bill, then added rather tentatively to Rosie, "Will you be back for supper this evening? It's getting rather late ..."

  Rosie shook her head and smiled. "No, I don't think so, thank you. Patrick and I have plans. Don't wait up . . . oh, thanks for the tea." Casey struggled to his feet and bowed as Otani stood up, conscious of having been dismissed, and not a little concerned over Rosie's moral welfare.

  Back in the street he hesitated, then decided to continue on to the Oriental Hotel. Inside the lobby he looked round, half expecting to see a uniformed policeman on duty there. Instead he spotted the hefty figure of Patrolman Migishima, one of the few junior members of his headquarters staff whom he had good reason to know very well. Migishima was in what looked like agitated conversation with a man in a black jacket and striped trousers, evidently a member of the managerial staff.

  Otani sauntered over. "Good evening," he said quietly, and Migishima turned, recognised him and immediately stood rigidly to attention. Although in civilian clothes he might just as well have been wearing a placard round his neck announcing his profession, and Otani sighed inwardly. "Everything in order, Migishima?" The young man's eyes rolled horribly while the hotel functionary looked on, a worried look on his face. It was fairly clear to Otani that something was amiss, so he began to move off, speaking as he did so to the man in the formal suit. "Excuse us for a moment. Step over here, would you, Migishima?'' Migishima hurriedly followed him to an unfrequented corner of the lobby, near a display of airline timetables in a wire rack. "And do relax. We don't want to make ourselves conspicuous. Now, what's the trouble?"

  Migishima looked as though he wished the ground would open up and swallow him.

  "Pull yourself together, man!" Otani was becoming quite alarmed. "Has something happened to the ambassador?"

  Migishima at last regained the power of speech. "No, sir. At least . . . that is, he's quite all right at the moment, sir."

  "What do you mean, at the moment? Migishima gulped, and removed from his inner pocket a plastic bag, which Otani could see contained one of the Oriental Hotel's own envelopes, with some typing on the front. He took out his glasses and peered at it.

  "It's correctly addressed to the British Ambassador, sir," Migishima said. "Sir Rodney Hurtling, KCMG, British Ambassador, care of Oriental Hotel, Kobe. Er, if you would look at the other side, sir." Otani turned the plastic bag over, and saw that a slip of paper had been placed so that what was written on it could be read without the necessity to touch it.

  It was the usual method—words and letters cut out of a newspaper, in this case an English language edition. "What does it say, Migishima?"

  "It's a threat, sir. I'm very sorry, sir." Catching the warning glint in Otani's eye, the young man cleared his throat. "It says in effect, 'You were lucky. Next time we'll make certain.' There's no signature, sir."

  "And this actually reached the ambassador?"

  "I'm afraid so, sir. It was slipped under his door, it seems. Some time about an hour ago, His Excellency thinks. The ambassador called the manager, and when you arrived I was just trying to find out how it was delivered."

  "Don't we have a man on duty in the corridor outside his door?"

  Migishima hung his head. "No, sir. I'm sorry, sir. There are three European ambassadors staying here, and we simply don't have the manpower to provide twenty-four-hour protection for them. We have someone here in the lobby at all times, and the hotel security staff have orders to patrol the corridors concerned at least every half-hour."

  "I see. I'll speak to the manager myself." Otani was profoundly concerned, but told himself that the security measures in force were not on the whole unreasonable. Only in the case of senior members of the Imperial Family and visiting Heads of State or Government was saturation coverage possible. That was because the Emperor himself and those closest to him travelled with a phalanx of Imperial Household Agency chamberlains and their own police guards, while guests of the Japanese Government were also provided with personal protection everywhere they went in Japan.

  What worried Otani most was not that he would be obliged to order a maximum alert for the following day's ceremony, but the fact that Patrick Casey had been in the vicinity of the Oriental Hotel at what was stated to have been the material time.

  And Rosie Winchmore had been with him.

  Chapter 12

  OTANI TURNED OVER RESTLESSLY AND PEERED IN THE darkness at the luminous hands of the small clock poised within reach at his side of the bedding which Hanae placed directly on the tatami matting every night and stowed away in the big built-in cupboard in the mornings. Two twenty-five. It was hopeless. Sleep was out of the question, with Rosie not having yet come back to the house. After lying on his back for a while, Otani rolled quietly out, shuddering as the chill of the room struck his nudity, and hurriedly finding and putting on the lined yukata he had flung down on going to bed at a little before eleven. Then he paused and listened to Hanae's even breathing before creeping stealthily out of the room and down the stairs.

  Left to herself, Hanae tried to decide what to do. She was, needless to say, wide-awake herself, but better able to disguise the fact than her husband. She was also worried to death about Rosie, but not for the same reasons as Otani. From the moment she had been told by their daughter Akiko during their visit to London that Rosie's parents were divorced and that Rosie lived, with or without their approval, openly with a lover called Roger, she had found it difficult to come to terms with such flagrant flouting of conventions. That Rosie was now out in the middle of the night somewhere in Kobe in the company of a completely different young man, according to her husband, was positively alarming.

  After two or three minutes of indecision, Hanae too got out of bed and went downstairs, first turning on the electric fan heater to take the chill off the upstairs room. The previous summer the Otanis had thought seriously about getting an air conditioner, but, being like most Japanese more concerned with keeping cool than with keeping warm, had never even considered the possibility of central heating. Hanae found her husband hovering in the kitchen, the refrigerator door open.

  "Are you hungry?" she enquired quietly, and Otani jumped.

  "I didn't hear you come down," he said accusingly. "No, not particularly. I couldn't sleep, though."

  "Nor can I. Would you like some tea?" Otani nodded and Hanae quickly made some green tea and took it with a packet of rice and seaweed crackers into the living-room. After crunching his way through one of the brittle crackers and sipping at his tea appreciatively, Otani sighed.

  "Nearly a quarter to three."

  Hanae sighed in turn. "Yes. What could she be doing?''

  Otani raised an eyebrow. "What do you think? I can only suggest one thing. She must be in a love hotel with that young man."

  Hanae frowned. She was not alarmed over Rosie's physical safety
in law-abiding Japan, where a woman may walk alone in any of the big cities at night without fear, and where violence is almost exclusively either domestic or confined to those involved in or on the fringes of organised crime. Hanae had only once visited one of the so-called "love" hotels which let rooms—often furnished and equipped in an exotic or bizarre way—by the hour to couples, and then in the company of her own husband; but she had learned through that experience how numerous and well-patronised they were. She had indeed read quite recently in one of the weekly magazines in the beauty shop that new hotels of this type were springing up everywhere, representing with Turkish baths and massage parlours one of the principal boom sectors in the otherwise sluggish Japanese economy.

  "You said he seemed quite pleasant," Hanae said rather despairingly. "And surely, Rosie-san has that nice young man in London ..." Her voice trailed off and she shook her head worriedly, not really persuading herself. Hanae had few illusions about sex, and was in a sense unshockable. She was, however, a conventional middle-aged lady in most ways, and had been imbued from childhood with the conviction mat nice girls don't; or at least that they shouldn't let it be known if they do. Rosie's apparent unconcern about maintaining before her hosts the appearance of respectability bothered Hanae much more than the idea that she was probably in bed with a comparatively casual friend at that moment.

  She was troubled, too, by her husband's behaviour. He had come home unusually late the previous evening in a heavy, uncommunicative mood, quite obviously worried about something, but rebuffing her tentative attempts to get him to talk to her. He had reported tersely that he had met Rosie in the company of a young foreigner in Kobe, that they had dropped into a coffee shop for a while, and that Rosie had indicated that she might be late back. It sounded like an interesting encounter to Hanae and she would have been glad to hear more, but Otani had been uncooperative. After picking at his evening meal he had hunched gloomily in front of the television except for making two telephone calls and receiving one, then taken himself off to bed with scarcely another word. Yet he had not seemed upset with her; just totally preoccupied.

  Nights were very quiet usually, since the street in which their old house stood was the last before the built-up area gave up the struggle against the shaggy, precipitous slopes of Mount Rokko, so the sound of the taxi was audible to them long before it reached the house and drew up outside. Hanae gazed at her husband in mingled relief and confusion, then quickly got up and made for the stairs. "You talk to her," she instructed Otani as the passenger door banging shut was heard, and had scuttled away before the taxi even moved off.

  For a moment Otani was strongly tempted to follow his wife's timid example, but then remembered that the front door was locked and that Rosie would be unable to get in without his assistance. He pulled himself together, tidied his yukata, and unscrewed the bolt on the sliding outer door just before it was rattled open and Rosie stepped in. She looked up at her host, standing as he was on the upper level like a figure of doom, and smiled nervously.

  "Oh," she said. "I thought you'd be in bed."

  "I was in bed," Otani said pointedly. "You are very late, Rosie-san."

  "Yes, I know. May I come in, please?" Otani stood to one side as Rosie took off her shoes and stepped up into the house, then re-locked the door and followed her into the living-room.

  "My wife was very worried about you," he said. "She would like you to be back by, say, ten or ten-thirty while you are staying with us." He was really just playing for time while wondering what line to take with the English girl, and was astonished by her reaction to what sounded to him like an entirely reasonable and straightforward stipulation. A look of incredulity spread over her face, and she gaped at him in stupefaction.

  "You must be joking! I . . . ten-thirty?'"

  "My wife feels responsible for you," he added lamely, keeping his voice low in the hope that Hanae would not overhear him so shamelessly attributing all the fuss to her, and not for the first time in his career was completely at a loss. After the bombshell of the threatening letter to the British Ambassador and the anxious expostulations of the manager of the hotel to the effect that he had arranged for a member of his own staff to keep continuous watch in the corridor outside the room for the remainder of the night, Otani had made no attempt to contact the ambassador himself, preferring to leave that inevitably disagreeable task to Kimura or to Ambassador Atsugi, both of whom he had alerted by telephone.

  Migishima insisted, and Otani could see from the brevity of the message, that the threat was unspecific. There was therefore no particular reason to assume that the next attempt on Sir Rodney Hunting's life would take place at the opening of the trade fair, beyond the fact that he would once more be in a specific place at a prescribed time. Manpower shortage or no manpower shortage, Otani had ordered that additional men from his own force should be assigned to the Oriental Hotel to supplement the hotel's efforts to boost security there overnight, and that from the moment the ambassador and his wife left the premises until their departure from Osaka Airport the next day they were to be fully protected by armed bodyguards.

  It had been impossible to do anything that evening about Casey, even if Otani had wanted to try. He had no idea where he and Rosie might be likely to have gone after he left them, and in any case had nothing objective to support the obvious suspicion that must fall upon Casey. The actual letter and envelope might conceivably yield fingerprints, but he doubted if they would. It was not difficult to come by one of the hotel's envelopes, nor to get access to a typewriter. Otani certainly intended to put some questions to Casey in due course, and would not hesitate to have him arrested if he were found anywhere in the ambassador's proximity the next day, but that did not help him in his present predicament, with Rosie glaring at him in his own living-room, her face flushed. He felt he had to go on as he had begun.

  "You see, before our daughter was married she used to come home by ten." Otani forbore to add that when Akiko had been involved in radical student politics—and almost certainly having an affair with the man she later married-she had frequently not come home at all. When Akiko did sleep at home, though, she had been scrupulous to be there by locking-up time.

  "I'm not your daughter," Rosie pointed out tersely. "And I'm not used to being treated like a child. I won't trouble you again. I'll leave first thing in the morning." Now her lip was quivering, and she looked more tearful than angry. Otani knew quite well that he was mishandling her hopelessly. Quite apart from anything else, if the girl had been enthusiastically making love for a couple of hours as he had suggested to Hanae and indeed thought quite likely, she probably needed some sleep. She certainly looked more than a little bedraggled, and when she took off the woolly waistcoat Otani noticed a red mark on her neck which looked to him as though it had been made by human teeth. It reassured him just a little. Better to think that the young Irish tea master had been inflicting love-bites than that he had been involved in the past few hours in setting up a political assassination.

  "Please don't do that," Otani said insincerely. In fact he wished more than ever he had not been so foolish as to invite the wretched girl to stay with them, and considered that it would be an excellent idea for her to go away. He knew that Hanae would never forgive him if she did, though, and realised that they would both lose face most horribly if Rosie were to leave prematurely and in an atmosphere of ill-will. Moreover, he dreaded to think what Akiko and her husband in London would have to say about it all when it got back to them. "It's very late, and I am sure there has been a misunderstanding. Er, has Casey-san gone back to Kyoto?"

  Rosie did not look in the least mollified. "What do you want to know for?" she demanded. Otani was not used to being challenged so peremptorily by anyone, let alone a young woman, and had to swallow his irritation.

  "I simply thought . . . well, there are no trains after midnight," he said, not achieving the matter-of-fact tone he was aiming at.

  "Look, I'm going to bed, OK?" Rosie had l
apsed into English, but Otani comprehended the significance of the word "bed" and the interrogative "OK?" and nodded silently, resigned to the fact that Casey's present whereabouts were going to remain unknown to him.

  "I am very sorry, Rosie-san," Otani said as she went out of the room, presumably on the way to the bathroom. "Forgive me. We were both anxious about you."

  Rosie turned and looked at him, still sullen and seemingly not far from tears. "It doesn't matter," she said, and disappeared.

  The old house was in no way soundproof, and when Otani slipped back into bed he breathed rather than whispered into Hanae's ear. "Did you hear all that?"

  "I heard," she breathed back, then turned ostentatiously away from him and firmly removed the hand he was trying to insinuate into the front of her yukata. Otani lay there unhappily, confirmed in his conviction that he had made a great mess of things, and wondering if, by some remote and almost unbelievable chance, Rosie had been in Kyoto on the fatal Sunday afternoon.

  Chapter 13

  You see, Chief, they really do come in all shapes and sizes, just like us," Kimura pointed out in an undertone as he and Otani stood on the edge of the small crowd of a hundred or so invited guests at the opening ceremony of the European Commission Trade Fair, otherwise known as EUREXPORT-TOWARDS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, as Kimura obligingly translated for Otani from the large streamer draped on the wall beneath a colourful multitude of national flags at the Trade Centre near Kobe Harbour.

  Otani nodded abstractedly. He felt depressed, headachy and on edge after his wretched night and watched without much interest. It was true enough that the ten foreigners who stood in an ill-disciplined line behind a long red and white ribbon, each holding a pair of scissors handed to him previously on a lacquer tray by his own personal Miss Kobe in her smart cherry-red suit, high-heeled shoes and white gloves, constituted a pretty mixed bag. Sir Rodney Hurtling was the tallest, but there was a cadaverous bean-pole of a man at one end of the line who towered almost as high, and looked particularly odd in relation to his* neighbour, who was tubby and short, and sweating profusely. All ten wore glasses, and all had affixed to their jackets large imitation chrysanthemum rosettes from which trailed ribbons with their designations written on them in Chinese characters with a felt-tip pen. Thin, fat, tall, short, bald, moustachioed and in one case even bearded, they gave the lie to Otani's firm conviction that all Westerners look alike, particularly about the eyes.