On the evening of the following day, Masaharu was sitting in the passenger seat of Naito’s Toyota Carina.
‘Sorry to put you through the trouble,’ Masaharu told him as they started rolling.
‘Hey, I don’t mind. It’s near home, anyway.’ Naito smiled.
Naito had been as good as his word about helping. When he called the estate agency the man there told him it wasn’t him but his son who’d discovered the victim of the gas poisoning five years before. His son was now running a new branch of the agency in Fukaebashi. Masaharu was holding a piece of paper with a simple map to the shop and a phone number.
‘So, you’re pretty serious about this tutoring thing, huh?’ Naito said. ‘I mean, that’s why you’re doing this, right? Finding out as much as you can about your kids?’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine ever going that far out of my way for a job.’
Masaharu didn’t say anything to dissuade him from his theory though, in truth, he wasn’t sure why he was doing this. Of course he understood the pull that Yukiho had on him. But that didn’t mean he needed to know everything about her. Masaharu was generally of the opinion that the past didn’t matter.
Maybe it was because he didn’t understand her in the present, he thought. They talked together like old friends and yet she seemed so distant. He didn’t understand why, and it aggravated him.
After a while they left the main road and went on to a side street where they found the local branch of Tagawa Real Estate right next to the freeway ramp.
Inside, a skinny man was sitting at a desk, filling in some forms. He looked at them as they walked in and asked if they were looking for an apartment.
Naito told him they were there to ask about the accident. ‘I talked to the guy at your branch in Ikuno and he said the boss here, Mr Tagawa, was the one who saw what happened.’
‘I’m Tagawa,’ the man said, looking at them a bit suspiciously. ‘That’s ancient history, though. What concern is it of yours?’
‘There was a girl with you when you found the body, right?’ Masaharu asked. ‘Yukiho Nishimoto?’
The man nodded warily. ‘Are you a relative?’
‘Actually, she’s my student. I’m tutoring her.’
‘Oh yeah?’ the man said. ‘Where is she these days? She was an orphan after her mother died, if I remember right.’
‘She was adopted by a relative. Her last name’s Karasawa now.’
The man nodded. ‘She doing OK? I haven’t seen her since then.’
‘She’s great. She’s a junior in high school now.’
‘Yeah, guess she would be. Time flies, huh?’
He took a cigarette out and put it in his mouth. Masaharu saw the box – they were Mild Sevens, one of the new, supposedly ‘lighter’ cigarettes. He was surprised a man this guy’s age would be so trendy.
‘She talk about what happened at all?’ Tagawa asked, blowing a puff of smoke.
‘Not much, just that you’d really helped her out,’ Masaharu lied.
‘Well, that’s true enough, but it sure was a surprise.’ Tagawa leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and began to tell them the story of how he discovered Fumiyo Nishimoto’s body.
‘Worse than finding the body was what came after,’ he said after finishing his story. ‘The police had all kinds of questions for me. They wanted to know how things looked when I entered the apartment. Did I touch anything other than the window and the stove, that kind of thing. They wanted to know if I touched the pot at all, or if the door really had been locked. It was a real pain.’
‘Was there something strange about the pot?’
‘Not that I saw. They were saying that if the soup had really boiled over it would’ve made more of a mess on the stove. Of course, it must have boiled over, because it put out the burner, right?’
Masaharu tried to picture the scene in his mind. He’d left a pot on the stove too long when he was making instant ramen once or twice and it had made quite a mess.
‘Still, it sounds like the girl’s doing well. If she lives in a home that can hire a private tutor and all. That’s good. She had it pretty rough with that mother of hers.’
‘Was there some kind of problem?’
‘Yeah, poverty. Mrs Nishimoto definitely didn’t have an easy life. She had a job working at some noodle place and it was pretty tough for her just to pay rent. They’d always be behind a few months.’
Compared to Masaharu’s own experience, this was like hearing about life on another planet.
‘Maybe that’s why that kid always seemed older than her years. More aware, you know? I don’t even think she cried when we found her mom lying there.’
‘Really?’ Masaharu looked at the man’s face, remembering what Reiko had said about Yukiho sobbing at the funeral.
‘What about the rumours?’ Naito asked. ‘Weren’t people saying it was a suicide?’
‘Yeah,’ Tagawa grunted. ‘There were some things that made it suspicious, I guess. I remember the detective talking about it.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, they said something about Mrs Nishimoto taking cold medicine – about five times the normal amount, based on the wrappers they found in the trash.’
‘Was that enough to kill her?’
‘No, but the cops said that she might’ve taken it to fall asleep. You know, turn on the gas, take some sleeping pills? But it can be hard to get sleeping pills, so she went for the cold medicine.’
‘Desperate times,’ Masaharu said, nodding.
‘She’d got into the alcohol, too. There were three open jars of sake in the garbage – the cheap stuff you get out of vending machines. And she supposedly wasn’t a big drinker.’
‘Right.’
‘That, and the window,’ Tagawa said, growing more talkative as the memories surfaced.‘Somebody thought it was strange that everything was locked up tight. There weren’t any ventilation fans in the kitchens in that building, so if people cooked something, they usually opened the windows.
‘But,’ Masaharu said, ‘it still could have just been an accident, right?’
‘Sure, which is why they didn’t investigate the suicide theory much. They didn’t have any smoking gun, and there were other ways to explain the cold medicine and the sake, like what the girl said.’
‘What did Yukiho say?’
‘Just that her mom had a cold that week and that she’d sometimes drink sake when she felt a chill. The detective still thought it was too much cold medicine to explain away, but there’s no way to really know without being able to ask her. And the big thing is, if it was a suicide, why would she bother putting soup on the stove? Anyway, they decided it was an accident, so that’s that.
‘The police said that if we’d found her thirty minutes earlier, she might have been saved. Think about it – thirty minutes. That’s just bad luck. Whether it was suicide or an accident, you got to think she was destined to die that day.’
Long, slightly chestnut-coloured hair fell down across Yukiho’s face. With her left hand, she brushed it back behind her ear, but a few strands remained. Masaharu wanted to kiss her pale white cheek. He’d wanted to since his first day with her.
She was working on a problem, trying to figure out the equation of a line formed by the intersection of two planes. Her mechanical pencil flew across the page.
‘Done,’ she said, well before time was up. Masaharu carefully checked the formulae. Her writing was precise, each number and symbol a work of art in miniature.
‘Good job,’ he said, looking back up at her. ‘Perfect, actually. I can’t find anything to complain about.’
‘Well,’ she said, smiling, ‘that’s a first!’
He chuckled. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it seems like you’ve got the general idea about dealing with coordinates in space. If you can do this one, everything else is just a variation on the same pattern.’