‘You come to pay the rent?’ Tagawa asked.
Yukiho looked down at the floor before shaking her head. Didn’t think so, Tagawa thought to himself. ‘So what’s this about?’
‘I was hoping you could open the door for me.’
‘What, the door to your apartment?’
‘I didn’t bring my key with me and I can’t get in.’
‘Oh.’ Finally Tagawa understood the reason for the girl’s visit. ‘So your mother locked the door and went out?’
Yukiho nodded. When she looked up at him, there was an allure to her face that made Tagawa forget for a moment that the girl was only in elementary school. He swallowed. ‘And you don’t know where she is?’
‘She didn’t say she’d be going out… that’s why I didn’t take my key with me.’
‘Right, I get you.’
Tagawa looked at the clock. It was still a little too early to close up shop. His father, who owned the estate agency, was off at a relative’s place since the day before, and wouldn’t be back until late tonight. Still, he couldn’t just stay here and give the master key to the girl. It was in the agreement with the property owner that someone from the estate agency would always be present when a master key was being used.
Normally he would have just told the girl to wait until her mother came home, but when he saw the forlorn look in her eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to turn her away.
‘Right, well, hold on, I’ll walk there with you.’ He stood and walked over to the safe with the keys for the rental properties.
Tagawa trailed Yukiho Nishimoto’s slender figure across the patched and cracked pavement on the ten-minute walk to Yoshida Heights. He noticed that she wasn’t wearing the usual school backpack. Instead she was carrying a red vinyl handbag.
When she walked, he heard a bell ringing from somewhere on her person. He wondered where the bell was, but couldn’t see it from behind her. Looking at her like this, he could tell now that she wasn’t particularly well off. The soles of her sneakers were worn thin, her cardigan was covered with pills, and a few holes were opening here and there. Even the fabric of her checked skirt looked spent.
And yet she gave off a kind of refined aura he was sure he’d never seen before, certainly not in these parts. It made him wonder where it came from. He knew Yukiho’s mother, an introverted, unremarkable woman, filled with the same vulgar desperation as everyone else who lived around here. It surprised him that a girl could grow up with a mother like that and still turn out the way she was.
‘Where’s your school?’ Tagawa asked from behind her.
‘Ōe Elementary,’ she said, turning her head slightly to answer while she walked.
‘You’re kidding.’
Ōe Elementary was the public school that nearly all the kids from the neighbourhood went to. Every year a couple of them would get picked up for shoplifting or simply disappear when their parents skipped town to escape loan sharks or the like. When you walked by the place in the afternoon it smelled like old lunch and when school finished the local hustlers would come out on their bicycles trying to sell the kids crap to part them from their allowances. It was that kind of school. Not that any of the kids that went to Ōe Elementary would get taken in by a street hustler.
He found it hard to believe that this girl went there. Of course, given what he knew about her household’s financial situation, sending her to private school would have been out of the question. He imagined she must be pretty popular in school.
They reached the building, and Tagawa knocked on the door to No 103, calling out, ‘Mrs Nishimoto?’ There was no answer. ‘Looks like she’s still out,’ he said, glancing in Yukiho’s direction.
The girl nodded. Again he heard the sound of a bell jingling.
Tagawa slid the master key into the lock and turned it clockwise. There was a click as the door unlocked. That was the instant he first had a premonition that something was wrong. It started in his gut and spread through his chest. Still he grabbed the knob and pulled the door open.
He’d only taken one step in before he saw the woman lying down in the far room. She was wearing a thin yellow sweater and jeans, asleep on the tatami mats. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew for certain it was Fumiyo Nishimoto.
So she was home, he thought, when he noticed a strange smell in the air.
‘Gas!’
He stopped Yukiho from coming in with one hand, and covered his mouth and nose with the other. His eyes went to the kitchen. A pot sat on the stove and the knob was turned on, but no flame came from the burner.
Holding his breath, Tagawa quickly turned off the gas and opened the window over the kitchen counter. Then he rushed into the back and opened the window in the far room, taking a sidelong glance at Fumiyo lying next to the tea table before sticking his head out and taking a deep breath. He felt a tingling sensation in the back of his skull.
He turned back to look at Fumiyo Nishimoto. Her face was a light blue and there was no warmth to her skin at all. We’re too late, was his first thought. He spotted a black telephone in the corner of the room, picked up the receiver, and put his finger on the dial when he hesitated, wondering if he should dial 119 for an ambulance or just 110 for the police to come and pick up the body.
He stood for a moment, unable to decide. The only dead person he’d seen until then was his grandfather.
He dialled 1, 1, then rested his finger on the 0.
Just then, Yukiho’s voice asked from the doorway, ‘Is she dead?’
He turned to look at her. The light from the door behind her meant he couldn’t see the expression on her face.
‘Is my mother dead?’ the girl asked again. There were tears in her voice.
‘I don’t know,’ Tagawa said, his finger shifting from the 0 to the 9 before giving the dial a final twist.
It was several minutes after the bell rang before he heard the sound of talking, giggling, and running feet.
Camera cradled in his right hand, Yuichi Akiyoshi crouched and watched. Students were just beginning to spill from the front gate of the Seika Girls Middle School. He held his camera up to his chest and stared at each of them in turn.
His hiding spot was in the back of a pickup truck parked along the side of the road about fifty metres away from the gate. It was a perfect location. Most of the students leaving the school would have to pass him on the way home and the tarp over the back of the truck provided good cover. Given his objective for the day, it was the best vantage point Yuichi could have hoped for. If he could get the shot he wanted it would be worth having skipped out on sixth period to come.
The girls at Seika Girls Middle School wore sailor uniforms. In the summer the uniforms had white tops with a light blue collar and their neatly pleated skirts were the same light blue. Yuichi watched those skirts flutter around the legs walking by. Some of the girls still looked as if they could be in elementary school, but others had already taken that first step into womanhood. Whenever one of the latter came near the truck he wanted to take a picture, but he resisted. He didn’t want to run out of film before the main event.
He’d been watching the girls pass by for about fifteen minutes before he spotted Yukiho Karasawa. Hurriedly he lifted his camera and began tracking her through the lens.
As always, Yukiho was walking with her friend, a lanky girl with wireframe glasses. She had a pointed jaw, a pimpled forehead, and her body was lumpy in all the wrong places.
Yukiho Karasawa, on the other hand, was a beauty with lustrous, chestnut brown hair down to her shoulders. She tossed it to one side with her fingers in an utterly natural motion. There was something luxuriously feline about her eyes and a winsome smile played across her slightly pouty lower lip. She was slender, too, except for the decidedly feminine curves of her chest and hips. This last aspect of her physique had been singled out by her many fans as a top selling point.