A deep sense of disappointment suffused his body and mind.
He went to the window and looked out. The street below, with its stepping-stones set in the mud, looked commonplace and dirty by the light of day. But at night, in the dark, would it not become the theater of horror from which Ichiro Honda had stumbled?
The old man called him, and he turned and went over to the low Japanese table where Hatanaka was standing. The drawer was open, and the old man was pointing at a large notebook that lay within. Shinji’s body tensed with a thrill similar to vertigo.
“The Huntsman’s Log!” he breathed.
“Yes,” said the old man, turning the pages quickly, staring at them myopically through his thick glasses. “But the passage about Keiko Obana has been removed.” He showed Shinji where the pages had been violently torn out.
“Did you find something?” asked the manager.
“This,” said the old lawyer, quickly slipping it into his pocket. “And I’m going to keep it as evidence.” On such occasions, Hatanaka was adept at glossing over the boundary between the requirements of the law and of reality.
Impressing upon the manager the need to contact them immediately if Obana showed up, they left the Midori-so. In the car, Shinji broke the silence.
“Will she come back?”
The old man shook his head. “I don’t think so. The bird has flown, all right. She left the Huntsman’s Log deliberately, just for someone like us to find if we could.” He began to read the diary with care, Shinji peering over his shoulder.
He saw the passage referring to Michiko Ono, the librarian, and he felt a stabbing pain in his heart. He turned away and gazed out of the window.
The town lay in the dust of a summer’s afternoon. The air conditioner of the car was blowing on his neck, no matter how he moved. They passed Shinjuku Station; some construction work was going on in the forecourt, and there was a temporary wooden sidewalk laid, over which the crowds moved slowly through the summer heat. Dump trucks came and went, dropping piles of earth onto the road.
Of what avail had it been for him to visit men with Rh-negative blood and to track down the woman with the mole? Was he not, in spite of it all, no more than a bystander? The real protagonists—Ichiro Honda, Michiko Ono, the woman with the mole, the murdered women, even—they had gone to the edge and looked down into the depths of life, and in some cases had returned. He had been nowhere. He had watched from the outside.
The old man was still buried in the diary. He looked up, beaming. “He really has got a good memory!” he exclaimed. “His reconstruction was almost perfect, even down to the order of things!” He turned the pages again, and suddenly his face stiffened.
“But there’s a page missing at the very front—look, can you see where it has been torn out?” It was true.
“Who did he say his first victim was? Surely it was… Yes, it’s the woman who appears as number two in this book. But there was obviously somebody before her—who could it have been? And why is the page missing?”
The old man closed his heavy eyelids and began to think. Eventually he spoke, half to himself.
“If we are not careful, we are in danger of making a big mistake.”
He spoke with pain; had he suddenly realized some mistake that he had already made in his theorizing? Shinji tried to engage him in conversation as the car rolled through the town, but to no avail. When the car stopped at a red light at Hibiya, the old man broke his silence; leaning forward, he said to the driver, “Sugamo Prison, please.”
On the way to the jail, Shinji’s mind was in a turmoil. He longed to read the Huntsman’s Log, which was reposing on the old man’s knee, and yet he half dreaded the thought. What had Honda written about his affair with Michiko Ono? How fully did he describe his lovemaking? In what tones had Michiko spoken to him? He realized that he was jealous.
For him, curiosity about his old lover meant as much as the torn-out page in the diary meant to the old man.
The waiting room at the prison was hot and stuffy; Shinji’s face ran with sweat. The old man sat steady as a rock, his black bag, containing the diary, on his knee. At last their turn came, and they went into the interview room.
The condemned man naturally wore no necktie, and this added to his appearance of shabbiness and depression. Just as the old man had said, he looked as if all the fight was gone from him. He was in need of a shave, and his hair was dry and disheveled. And above all, the light was gone from his eyes.
Was this the man who had held Michiko Ono close to his breast? Shinji realized that he was glaring at Honda and quickly adjusted his countenance to one of total unconcern—unconcern toward Honda, toward the stone walls and the flagged floor.
“We have found the diary,” said the old man. Behind the wire netting, Ichiro Honda was momentarily speechless.
“Where?” he said at last, his lips twitching. His deep voice was somber.
“At the Midori-so, where Mitsuko Kosugi was murdered. Obana’s sister had an apartment on the second floor of the same building. We had advertised for her, and the manager of the apartment came to see us today. She moved in there in September, but hasn’t been near the place for the last two months.”
“I see,” said Honda, hanging his head low, his hands joined loosely between his knees. “Now I understand. When I went there, I noticed the name ‘Obana’ on a shoe box at the entrance, but I didn’t associate it with the key-punch operator.”
“If the criminal who entrapped you had a room there, your whole explanation becomes rational. No wonder your shoes disappeared; not surprising that the door was locked on you. Maybe she was hiding in the broom cupboard opposite the door.”
“But then why did the key turn up in my pocket?”
“You now say that you may have unconsciously removed the key when you stepped into the room, and put it into your pocket. But that isn’t what happened at all. I think the criminal put it into your pocket when the jacket was hanging in your apartment in Yotsuya. The woman with the mole had access to that room; we know that, because she stole the diary. Reading it, she could predict your activities and play her tricks upon you.”
“But how come the blood was my type?”
“She got the names of donors of your type from blood banks and must have collected from one of them—we know she made contact with at least four. Shinji, the man next to me, interviewed them all.” Honda glanced at Shinji and then looked back at the old man.
“There’s a lot I still don’t fully understand. Why was there no sign of a struggle in any of the cases?”
“Perhaps the criminal used an anesthetic—chloroform or something like that. That would explain the sweet smell you noticed in both Fusako Aikawa’s room and also Mitsuko Kosugi’s.”
“Chloroform. That fits.”
“And the semen. That was collected from the blood donors, too.”
“It’s mad!” exclaimed Honda, tugging at his hair nervously. “Why me?” Watching him vacantly, Shinji realized that he had no more than a walk-on part in this drama.
The old man took out the notebook. “Your memory was very good. However, the criminal tore out the pages referring to Keiko Obana. That I can understand. What I cannot understand is why he tore out this page—the first one. Who was the woman described here?” The old man displayed the book to Honda. Looking at it, the prisoner’s eyes gradually became hollow. It was as if his whole core had suddenly melted, leaving him no more than a soft doll. Watching the scene, Shinji felt even more of an outsider. Ichiro Honda knew whose name had appeared in that missing page… and so did the old man. The closeness of the room began to irritate him.
Honda opened his mouth for a few seconds, like a landed fish that finds the density of the air too much. “I can’t remember who it was,” he said at last. “Please give me time to think about it.” From the way he would not meet their eyes, Shinji realized that Honda knew the name of the woman very well but was not saying. The old man knew, too, he was certain. But the old man was silent. Without a word, he stood up, and gazed at the prisoner with sympathy before leaving the room.