by Nick Tanner
Inspector Saito returned to focussing on the road.
She had a pretty figure he had to admit. He too, was ashamed at his actions but he wasn’t going to admit it.
Thirty minutes later and twenty minutes later than they imagined Inspector Saito pulled his patrol car into a parking lot, which looked not dissimilar to a chess board where alternate cars had left their station revealing the black tarmac beneath, juxtapose the unthawed snow. They wandered slowly through the narrow back streets towards the building that housed the suicide. Inspector Saito was still in some pain and still found it difficult to walk and was understandably cautious given the icy conditions under foot.
He looked up at the dark, windowless building in front of him – The Millennium Amore Hotel. He’d never had the occasion to use such a place despite having been inside their kind on numerous occasions - on police business. He wondered whether Junsa Saito had and then quickly wished he hadn’t.
He wasn’t by nature a lewd man although when the red blood rose he could have his moments. He was though, sad, and while he would be reluctant to call himself lonely, it had been a long time since he’d enjoyed a close relationship of any kind. He’d regretted not furthering his liaison with Naoko Miyazawa, but the more they’d delved into the Yuki Takamura case and her brutal murder in Kamakura and Miyazawa’s unfortunate involvement, he’d uncovered more rocks and more worms lying underneath them than he cared for. Not long after the conclusion of the case he’d stopped returning her calls and a female shaped hole had once more positioned itself at the centre of his heart.
Then there was Kumiko the barmaid/hostess from his local drinking hole. She was lovely and she cared for him. There was no denying this fact. She entertained him well enough, was serious and light-hearted in equal measure but there was something too saccharine about her that tended to put him off. He regarded her more like he had regarded his mother and the word ‘lovely’ seemed to sum her up. But if Saito was honest he was looking for something a bit more hard-edged than ‘lovely’.
Then of course there was his wife! He could never fully give up on her in spite of the passage of time.
Of course concerning Junsa Saito the whole possibility of anything romantic happening was frankly absurd. He was old enough to be her father, in fact for one fantastic moment not three months ago he’d thought for a minute that he was her father – or at least that she may have been his daughter. It had been a quite crazy thought which had disappeared almost as immediately as it had occurred to him.
He looked at her now standing awkwardly outside the love hotel. She definitely had a shapely figure – not sexy as such, anyway it was difficult to look sexy in a police uniform whatever the purveyors of pornography might think, but none-the-less she had a shapely figure. He knew that quite well of course.
Thinking back to that morning he didn’t know what had come over him. He’d heard her taking a bath, heard her getting out of the bath and heard her slide back the door into the outer bathroom and yet he’d walked down the hallway quite deliberately. He could see the dark outline of her body through the frosted glass door that itself divided the hall from the outer bathroom and when she’d dried her hair, arching her back and tilting her head back he’d been afforded a perfect view. It was then that he’d turned away, utterly ashamed at his voyeurism.
He knew of course that she’d seen him and he’d battled with his conscience for most of the morning, arguing whether or not to apologise for his behaviour. He could see too, that she’d wanted to broach the subject and yet, strangely, she hadn’t - well, that wasn't quite true, was it? He'd snuffed out her one attempt. Perhaps the gap in seniority had been too large a gap to breach. She’d mumbled something about a towel, choosing instead the less controversial option. He hadn’t been pleased to trade off her embarrassment and his seniority.
He examined her again but this time simply came to the conclusion that whichever fellow was lucky enough to receive her love, would be a lucky man indeed.
‘Come on Junsa. Let’s see what we have here, shall we,’ he called across to her.
‘I’ve never been in one of these places before,’ she called back.
‘Well, there’s always a first time for everything.’ He swallowed as he invited her to go first, admiring now her shapely bottom. ‘Look,’ he said to her. ‘Can you give me a few moments. I just need to grab some air.’
‘Is anything the matter?’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine. I think I just need some air. You go on ahead.’
She looked back doubtfully.
‘Go on!’ he chided. ‘It’ll do you some good to be first on the scene. If anyone asks you, tell them you have my full authority. Anyway I’ll be with you in a minute.’
She disappeared inside leaving Inspector Saito to his fresh air. If it weren’t for his existing injuries he would have slapped himself around the face. He didn’t know what had got into him – or rather he was slowly beginning to suspect that he knew exactly what had got into him and that thing was making her way innocently into the love hotel. If he’d smoked he would no doubt have lit up and taken some long drags, but he didn’t and so for want of anything else to distract him he crossed the road and peered into the canal beneath. It was quite frozen and covered in at least a foot of snow. Gripped by a moment of boyish enthusiasm he then quickly made a snowball and flung it across the canal, aiming for a sign on the other side advertising a peep show. He howled in agony at his idiocy. He should have known better than to think his injuries could be so easily ignored and so quickly healed.
Perhaps what he needed was a lusty young Junsa to reinvigorate him?
He stared once more into the canal and then returned back across the road and entered the hotel.
He hadn’t known what to expect, but what he was confronted with was not top of his list. The usual in a love hotel was some elderly gent having had a heart attack after overly vigorous sex. It didn’t appear that the man hanging in front of him matched this type of description.
‘Okay?’ he asked Junsa Saito.
‘Fine, sir.’
‘Your first ‘live’ one?’
‘I don’t think ‘live’ is quite the word, sir.’
‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’
‘So, go on then, tell me what you think?’
‘Think?’
‘Tell me what this scene says to you – use your imagination.’
Junsa Saito looked once again around the room. When she’d entered two minutes before, manoeuvring around the scene of crime officers who’d been first to the room she’d tried to do everything by the book, as she’d been trained. She’d found it hard to look at the body, particularly the face and yet really there was nothing much else to see. Her eyes had quickly skirted over the sexual paraphernalia available in the room. She had noted the man’s bandaged hand and also his head wound – now partially healed.’
‘Well?’
‘It’s all a bit strange, sir,’ she confessed.
‘Go on.’
‘He’s probably Yakuza,’ she said pointing to his left little finger. ‘Then there’s the damage to his head, possibly some kind of fight which perhaps suggests that he’s been murdered, I don’t know, bashed over the head and then strung up, but that all seems a little bit elaborate. If it is a contract killing I would expect a simple bullet to the head. Aside from that it actually just looks like a suicide – like you said it was before we arrived.’
Inspector Saito nodded as she’d spoken and had listened carefully to Junsa Saito’s analysis. There wasn’t much that she had missed from what he could see but be that as it may his mind was working fast. He too, hadn’t spent long reaching similar conclusions. There was nothing much to see, that is if you were able to discount the dead body which was still hanging, grimly from the ceiling. He could detect no real mystery here in terms of the man’s death – it looked like a suicide, which he was certain the autopsy would confirm. He didn’t think there would be a mistake in the diagnosis
or any possibility that murder really lay at its heart. ‘I expect the pathologist will tell us more, particularly the time scale of all his various injuries but it does look like a suicide from where I’m standing. None-the-less if he’s Yakuza we should proceed more carefully.’
He looked closely at the bound finger of the victim. ‘This looks fairly recent – wouldn’t you say? Someone obviously messed up.’ He stood back to scan the victim once more wondering what indiscretion could have caused him to meet the wrath of his masters.
‘It doesn’t look like a sadomasochism scene, either,’ added Junsa Saito surprising herself at the admission of such knowledge. ‘And I’d have thought that if the intention had been sexual arousal through asphyxiation he’d have been naked, don’t you think?’
‘I tend to agree,’ coughed Inspector Saito. He scanned the room once more and then bent down beside the bed and with his little finger flicked back a piece of paper that was partially hidden underneath it. ‘It looks like a note,’ he announced. ‘A suicide note!’
‘What’s it say?’
‘”Without money I am nothing. Gomenasai!”’ replied the Inspector. He turned it around to see if there was anything written on the other side. There wasn’t. ‘Well… That seems to wrap it as a suicide, then. Was there any ID by the way?’
‘I’ve not checked. I didn’t want to touch-’
‘Fine, that’s fine. Let’s see what we can find.’
Inspector Saito gently slipped his hand inside the dead man’s jacket pocket and thankfully pulled out a wallet. ‘Kenta Fujiwara – Yoshihara Yakuza,’ he announced slowly.
52- In which a night-watchman acts and another body is discovered.
Wednesday 5th January 1:20pm
Kuroki san got up early that day at precisely twenty past one which for him was the equivalent of six in the morning. He was never typically a good riser and as usual his first waking minutes had him stumbling around his house with a thick and tired head wishing that he could have allowed himself at least another hour in his warm and cosy bed. It was always the same after his weekend – his weekend being Monday and Tuesday.
But with a plan in mind he knew that time was something he couldn’t afford to lose. He took a quick breakfast of shokupan topped with maple syrup, at least that was his intention, but to his chagrin he discovered that the maple syrup bottle was annoyingly empty. What appeared to be a centimetre of syrup at the bottom resulted in nothing more than a few depressing drips and anyway the bread was mouldy, and so it was with a growing irritation that he opted for his second favourite breakfast – blueberry yoghurt, a breakfast that he certainly didn’t consider to be of the right substantive kind to help him on his way.
He glanced up at the portrait picture of his wife that he still kept on the shelf above the TV and a salty wave of sadness washed over him. Back in the day she always set him up with a good breakfast. Not only that but she’d be there with pickles and rice when he arrived home late and the kitchen had always been well stocked – the bread never mouldy, the maple syrup bottle always full. Inwardly he cried a tear. Outwardly he appeared quite normal but he was still unshakably sad. To polish this increasingly negative frame of mind he poked his head behind the net curtain and stared anxiously at the sky. Dark clouds were already closing in and he now regretted not carrying out his investigations over the previous two days when the light would have helped him to check out, more thoroughly, the area where he thought he had seen… Well, that was precisely it. He wasn’t exactly sure what he had seen.
He’d allowed his thoughts to drift away from his suspicions over the previous five days, having being caught up in the new year celebrations with numerous trips to the temple being his main objective but with his mind now back on the job and his thoughts turning back to the factory and the warehouse, the road and the canal it was inevitable that he would once again begin to question himself about what he thought he had seen – and that was exactly what he was doing. However, if he delayed he knew he would be in exactly the same position as he had been in the small hours of Friday morning, where he would be reliant on his poor eyesight picking out imperfections in the snow within the faltering beam of his aging torch. Nevertheless he was determined to do what he could before his shift began and to exorcise the niggling feeling that he would be being lax in his duty not to check things out more thoroughly, at least for one final time.
He tossed the empty blueberry yoghurt carton into the bin, pulled on his scarf and hat – a rather natty trilby, or at least so he thought, selected a pair of sturdy boots, in contrast to the light shoes he had worn on shift six days before and set off, as ever, on his usual ‘reverse’ commute.
An hour later he stepped off the bus just outside the main building of Nippon Denki in an even fouler mood than he’d started. The red seats usually reserved for pensioners had been fully occupied forcing him to stand for most of the way. It was only when the bus pulled into the docklands proper that a place was finally relinquished and he could eventually rest his feet. The boots he’d selected were far too tight and he now regretted not putting on his usually comfy fitting shoes. It was a wholly negative start to his day and didn’t bode too well for his plans.
Before he started he made his way to his little office and had a brief chat with Kobayashi, who took the shift before him. He didn’t mention what he was up to preferring to avoid any detailed conversation about what he should have done before or fending off any comments about his stupidity. This was his own little secret and he was happy to keep it that way. Naturally Kobayashi was curious that his colleague had turned up a good three hours before his shift, but for a reason only known to himself he bought Kuroki’s rather dubious assertion that HR wanted to have a quick word with him about some overtime pay and it was the only time they could meet. Neither did Kobayashi blink when Kuroki took out his extra large flashlight.
With a strange tension gripping his stomach Kuroki ventured once more outside and recounted his steps across the crunching snow towards where he had gone to six nights before. This time however he was more calculating in his efforts and had worked out precisely which window he had been looking out of when he’d seen the strange car arrive. He stood with his back to the canal parapet, looked back to the building and counted the windows out loud until he was sure of the correct one. He then altered his position on the street to one that he was certain was correct.
He peered over the low wall and once more flashed his light. The canal was still iced up and the snow was still lying fairly thickly on its surface and as expected there had been only a limited thaw. With doubt now tingling all over him he moved his flashlight over the snow beneath him.
‘What a fool I am,’ he thought to himself as once again he saw nothing to arouse his suspicion. ‘What a stupid old fool I am to go looking for mystery. Am I that bored or that suspicious?’
Just when he was about to give in for a second time his eyes caught sight of a slight undulation in the way the snow was lying. Was it real or was it his imagination that the snow was slightly raised in this particular spot? He wished his torch had a wider beam as it prevented him from getting a full view of the area below. He could only see one small portion at a time. Time and time again he moved his torch back and fro over the snow and with every pass become more convinced that there was something lying underneath.
The question was what.
He returned once more to his small office, thankful this time that Kobayashi was absent and probably in the middle of doing his own rounds. He didn’t know why he was being so secretive. Perhaps he didn’t want Kobayashi to think him an idiot. He looked around the room but could find nothing suitable for the task he had in mind before he remembered the cleaning cupboard further down the hall. He looked inside but the only thing he could see was a dust mop. He wasn’t sure it was a suitable tool, but nonetheless it was the only thing he had to hand.
One final time he returned to the spot outside. He’d scraped off an area of snow from the low wall
so he knew where he was headed to and he peered over the parapet again, made a little mound of snow in which he secured his torch so that consistent light fell on the ground below him, and then with great difficulty he leaned over the side and did his best to prod the snow and to gently move it aside. His initial efforts were rather feeble and he regretted not hunting out a better piece of equipment. However, he dutifully stuck to his task, driven on by some inner force that he couldn’t explain, until eventually his furious scraping revealed something other than snow. He grabbed his torch and shone it directly on his new discovery.
There was something down there!
He still wasn’t sure, but this time with something concrete, other than his imagination, he called in reinforcements.
Twenty minutes later the hastily gathered team had uncovered the body of a woman and manoeuvred it from its resting place.
53 - In which Fujiwara is placed under the microscope
Wednesday 5th January 2:30pm
Inspector Saito looked down into the bottom of his coffee cup. ‘I’ve never liked Starbucks!’ he said.
