“That said, the police do seem to be having a lot of trouble solving the crime, and we really do all hope for a swift conclusion to this awful matter. Is there no one here who has noticed something, or has some kind of wisdom that they can share with these detectives?”
Hearing this, the three detectives’ expressions turned sour and their body language became defensive. Perhaps it was the detectives’ behaviour, but nobody in the room took Kozaburo up on the idea. He decided a few more words might be appropriate.
“Sasaki, you’re usually very talented at solving this sort of riddle.”
“Well, I have come up with a few ideas.”
He’d clearly been waiting for this moment.
“How about it, gentlemen?” said Kozaburo.
“We’d like to hear them,” said Ushikoshi, without much enthusiasm.
“Well, first of all, the locked room in the murder of Kazuya Ueda, I think I can solve that mystery. It was the shot-put.”
There was no reaction from the detectives.
“That shot-put had string wrapped around it, with a wooden tag attached. The string had been extended, probably by the killer, and clearly for the purpose of creating that locked room. The latch—the type that moved up and down like a railway crossing gate—was propped up with that tag, stuck to the latch with Sellotape. Then the shot-put at the other end of the string was placed on the floor by the door, and when the killer closed the door behind him, because of the sloping floors in this mansion, the shot-put rolled away until the string was pulled tight and the wooden tag peeled away. And then of course the latch dropped and the door was locked.”
“Ah, of course!” said Kanai. Togai looked as if he had just swallowed something nasty. The detectives nodded wordlessly.
“Well, Sasaki, do you have anything else for us?” asked Kozaburo.
“I do have something, but I haven’t thought it all the way through yet. It’s the other locked room, Mr Kikuoka’s room. I don’t think it’s completely impossible to achieve, because it wasn’t really a completely locked room. There’s a hole for ventilation—small, but still an open space. The killer could have stabbed him with the knife, then balanced the coffee table on top of the sofa, securing it with a cord, and then attached it somehow to the en suite bathroom knob, and out through the vent hole. Then he’d have let it go from the corridor, and the table would fall off the sofa so that one of its legs pushed the button on the inside of the door—”
“Obviously, we’d already thought of that,” snapped Ozaki. “But there are no marks anywhere on the door frame or in the wall where a pin or staple or anything was used. And that method would require a huge amount of cord. There’s no kind of rope or cord like that anywhere in this house, or in anyone’s possession.
“What’s more, the suspect had absolutely no idea when the Hayakawas might come down to the basement. To set up a trick like that would take more than five minutes; probably ten. And anyway, the way you just described it includes setting three different locks. It would take even longer than that for sure.”
Sasaki didn’t respond. And this time the silence was much more uncomfortable than before. Kozaburo decided to try to break the tension.
“Eiko, let’s listen to some music. Put a record on.”
Eiko got up and soon the gloomy air of the salon was filled with the sound of Wagner’s Lohengrin.
SCENE 9
The Tengu Room
By the afternoon of the 29th of December, the residents of the Ice Floe Mansion were sprawled around the salon, listless. It felt like the waiting room for condemned prisoners. Today’s sense of fatigue had been created by the previous days’ excess of nervous tension and fear. But boredom too was setting in.
Seeing the atmosphere in the room, Kozaburo proposed showing the Kanais and Kumi his collection of mechanical dolls and automata that he’d brought back from Europe. He’d already shown them to Michio Kanai and Kikuoka back in the summer, but Hatsue and Kumi were yet to see them. He’d intended to invite them to view everything much earlier, but all the fuss had distracted him from his plan.
Kozaburo had a lot of Western dolls in his collection, and he imagined that they would interest Kumi. Eiko and Yoshihiko were tired of seeing everything, so they chose to stay behind in the salon. This meant that Togai also decided to stay. Sasaki was interested in antiques, so although he’d also seen everything several times already, he decided to tag along.
A few days previously when Kumi had been on her way to be interviewed in the library, she had glanced through the window of the Tengu Room. It had given her a bad vibe, but today she reluctantly agreed to go anyway, ignoring the vaguely bad premonition she had as they set out.
Kozaburo Hamamoto, along with Michio and Hatsue Kanai, Kumi Aikura and Sasaki took the west stairs up to the door of the Tengu Room. As she had done the previous time, Kumi looked in through the window, the only one in the house that overlooked an interior corridor rather than the exterior. It was a huge window, giving a view of the whole room.
The window stretched all the way from the south wall corner to about 1.5 metres shy of the doorway, a total width of about 2 metres. It could be slid open about 30 centimetres from either the left or right side, leaving either or both sides open. That’s how all the glass doors of the cabinets in this room were usually slid open too.
Kozaburo got out a key and opened the door, revealing that no matter how much of an impression you could get of the room by viewing it through the window, it wasn’t until you stood inside that you could really take in the spectacle. First of all, right by the doorway stood a life-sized clown. It had a cheerful smiling face, but a rather depressing, musty smell.
There were all kinds of other dolls in the room, both large and small, all a little threadbare. They had aged, and looked almost on the point of death, but their youthful expressions were still intact. Their grimy faces with their peeling paint seemed to Kumi to be concealing some kind of vague madness. Either standing or sprawling in a chair, each one smiled faintly with some kind of unfathomable emotion. They were suspiciously quiet, looking like something you’d see in the waiting room of a psychiatric hospital in your worst nightmare.
As if their flesh had gradually been stripped away over time, the paint of their faces had peeled and scabbed over, exposing a little of the craziness inside. The part that had decayed the most were the smiles on their red, peeling lips. By now they didn’t even seem to be smiling any longer—these dolls had the most enigmatic look of pure evil. Their smiles had the power to send an instant chill through anyone who looked at them. Decomposition—that was the perfect word for it. The smile that had been on the faces of these cherished dolls had transmuted, decomposed. There was no better way of putting it.
A deep-seated grudge. They’d been brought into the world by the whimsy of human beings, but then not permitted to die for a thousand years. If the same thing were inflicted on our bodies, the same look of madness would appear on our faces too. Ever in search of revenge, our madness would grow in intensity, fed by the grudge we harboured.
Kumi let out a small but genuine scream. However, it was nothing compared to the residents of this room whose mouths were permanently poised on the edge of a scream.
The south and east walls were completely red with Tengu masks, with their huge long noses and fiery eyes that glowered at the room’s doll occupants. It seemed to the guests that the Tengus’ job was to stifle the screams of the dolls.
Hearing Kumi scream seemed to put Kozaburo in a cheerful mood.
“Well, this place is as amazing as ever,” said Michio Kanai, and Hatsue nodded with great enthusiasm. But this kind of small talk felt out of place in the heavy atmosphere of the room.