And what had he done while he was away?
An announcement began to play in the shop announcing closing time. The flow of people shifted as more started heading for the door.
‘No luck, I guess,’ the man said. His partner looked similarly disappointed.
If they couldn’t find Ryo today, they intended to take Yukiho Shinozuka in for questioning. But Sasagaki was against that. He was certain she wouldn’t reveal anything of value. She would just give an utterly convincing expression of the purest surprise and say, ‘What? Bones found in my poor mother’s garden? I don’t believe it! It can’t be true!’ And once she said that, they would have nothing. They knew from Makoto Takamiya’s testimony that Reiko Karasawa had been visiting her daughter on New Year’s Eve seven years ago when Matsuura was thought to have been killed. But there was still no proof that there was any connection between Ryo and Yukiho.
‘Mr Sasagaki, over there,’ the female detective said, subtly gesturing with her finger.
Sasagaki looked and saw Yukiho herself walking through the shop. She was wearing a white suit and a million-dollar smile. She was so beautiful she shone with a radiance that captured the eyes of every customer and even the floor staff around her. Wherever she walked, people turned to look, some whispering, some just staring.
‘The queen makes an appearance,’ the man whispered.
Yet when Sasagaki looked at Queen Yukiho, an entirely different image was superimposed in his mind. The little girl he’d met in that rundown apartment so many years ago. The girl who let no one close, closed off to everyone.
If only he’d heard about Yosuke Kirihara’s predilections earlier he might have figured it out.
It had been five years ago when he’d first heard it from Yaeko. She was drunk, which was probably why she even talked about it to him at all.
‘I can only say this now that he’s gone, but my husband was never much in the sack. Well, not at first. He was fine at first, but gradually things got pretty quiet. See, he found something else, something better. Well, younger at least. Yeah, he liked little girls. He was always buying pictures of ’em. I threw them all away when he died, of course. Those things aren’t right.’
In itself, this wasn’t particularly surprising to the old detective, but it was what she said next that set his mind spinning.
‘I heard something from Matsuura once. He said my husband was buying girls. When I asked him what that meant, he said he was paying money to sleep with them, really young ones, too. I asked if there was a shop that did that kind of thing, and why they didn’t shut it down, and he laughed, saying that the wife of the pawnbroker should know more about these things. You know what he said? He told me it was moms selling their daughters for food.’
Her words set off a storm in Sasagaki’s head. But when it passed it felt like a thick mist before his eyes had lifted.
Yaeko wasn’t finished, either.
‘You know, he even got it into his head that he wanted to adopt. He went so far as to ask a lawyer what it would take to formally adopt someone else’s kid. When I started asking about it, he got real mad and told me it had nothing to do with me. He said if I kept bugging him about it he’d leave. To be honest, I think he was starting to lose it.’
Yet it was then that Sasagaki found the answers he had been looking for.
Yosuke Kirihara hadn’t been visiting Fumiyo Nishimoto’s apartment to see her. He’d been going there to see her daughter. He’d probably been there several times, with money, paying to sleep with her. The old apartment took on an entirely different image in Sasagaki’s mind. It wasn’t a refuge from a hard world. It was a place of business, illicit and contemptible.
This suggested another question to him. Was Yosuke Kirihara the only customer?
What about Tadao Terasaki, who died in the car accident? The investigation team had had him pegged as Fumiyo’s lover, but wouldn’t it make more sense if he had just been another pervert of the same persuasion as Kirihara?
There would be no way of knowing that now. There could have been any number of other customers and he would have no way of knowing.
The only one he knew about for sure was Kirihara.
Now the one million yen made sense. It was a final payment to Fumiyo so he could adopt her daughter. Paying for the privilege of being with the girl wasn’t enough. He wanted her for his very own. Kirihara had gone to the library to pick up the object of his obsession, leaving Fumiyo to wander down to the park where she sat on the swings. Sasagaki wondered what kind of thoughts must have been going through her head.
He could paint a clear picture about what happened next. Kirihara had taken the girl into the abandoned building. He didn’t think she would have resisted much, especially not when Kirihara told her about the million yen he’d given her mom.
Sasagaki didn’t particularly want to imagine what had taken place in that dusty little room, but he did know one thing – Ryo had been there too. After leaving his house he had headed for the library. He probably went there a lot to see Yukiho and show her his paper cut-outs. The library was their sanctuary from the madness of the world around them.
But that day, near the library, Ryo saw something strange: his father, leading Yukiho by the hand. He followed them into the building. He might not have known what was going on, but he knew how to spy on them. Ryo had gone straight into the ducts. From his vantage point in the air duct near the ceiling he would have seen a nightmare unfold.
What sadness and hatred must have filled him, guiding the hands that gripped his favourite pair of scissors. Sasagaki pictured the wounds in the body – wounds that surely lay just as deeply on Ryo’s heart.
After killing his father, Ryo let Yukiho escape through the door before jamming it with the cinder block – a smart move to delay discovery of the body. When Sasagaki pictured how the boy must have felt as he crawled back out through the darkness of those air ducts, it made his chest ache.
He couldn’t say what Ryo and Yukiho had decided on afterwards. Maybe they had never decided anything – they were just trying to keep what remained of their souls intact. Yukiho shut herself off from the world, never showing her true self to anyone, and Ryo… he was still crawling through the darkness all these years later.
Ryo’s motive for killing Matsuura had been to protect his alibi. It was also possible that Matsuura had somehow realised the boy’s guilt and held it over him when he coerced Ryo into pirating software.
But Sasagaki saw another motive there as well. Ryo would have seen a connection between his father’s predilection for young girls and his mother’s unfaithfulness. From his room on the upper storey of that old wooden building, he must have heard his mother with Matsuura on any number of occasions. To him, Matsuura could well have seemed like the thing that was driving his parents mad.
‘Time to go,’ the young detective said, bringing Sasagaki back to the present. He looked around, seeing the café had nearly emptied out.
A no-show.
A kind of emptiness spread in the old detective’s chest. That morning he’d realised that if he didn’t catch Ryo today, he’d never catch him. But sitting here in this empty café wouldn’t help a thing.
‘Guess so,’ he said, slowly lifting himself to his feet.
Outside the café, Sasagaki got on the escalator with the two other detectives. Most of the customers were on their way out. The store staff looked happy, pleased with a successful opening. The Santa Claus from the door was heading up the escalator as they went down. He was slumped in his costume, exhausted from a long day of handing out cards.