Yoneko left shortly after this, but subsequently heard that Chikako had remained in this condition until the next morning, sitting in the same position staring fixedly ahead. If anyone touched her, she struck the offending hand away.
Haru Santu had slipped out of the room even before Yoneko, and she appeared to have gone at the same time that the lights were turned on.
Making her way back to her room, Yoneko wondered what it was that the medium had said which had had such an effect on Chikako. Could it have been the voice of her lover crying out that he was being buried? Yoneko did not think so. There was clearly some connection between the burial the medium had described and the poem in Chikako’s room. This had been the voice of another spirit, and Chikako’s reaction and the priest’s announcement made the fact doubly clear. The voice had been that of a child being buried, and Yoneko was ninety-nine per cent sure that the child had been George. The medium had been describing the burial of a child in concrete, in terms which rended the heart of Heaven, had used the language of a child describing in terror what was going on before his very eyes.
She realised that she must now tell Keiko Kawauchi the whole truth. She sat down there and then and wrote her a long letter describing in detail all that she had seen and heard, including the poem in Chikako’s room. She asked Keiko to think about it all and apply her own judgment as to what should be done next. She added that it might now be advisable to report the matter to the police.
As she addressed the envelope, Yoneko reflected that she still had some doubts as to whether the dead could really communicate with the living in this way. But there could be no doubting the effect of the words, purporting to come from the dead by way of the medium, upon Chikako Ueda.
It was the last Sunday in April. Yoneko was writing letters in her room when Keiko Kawauchi suddenly appeared at her door. Greeting her after a lapse of some twelve years, Yoneko could not help feeling that Keiko had become rather gaunt, although this may have been the effect of her wearing a Japanese kimono. It was too late to cry over spilt milk, but nonetheless Yoneko wished she had not written to tell Keiko so clearly that George was dead.
Keiko explained that she had been visiting Hiroshima when Yoneko’s last letters reached her home.
‘As George died at the end of March, it was exactly seven years since his murder. I went to Hiroshima because I heard of a mixed-blooded child of his age there, but of course it was a fruitless trip. And when I got home the day before yesterday, I found your letter waiting for me.’
Keiko wiped the tears from her eyes.
Yoneko did her best to console her, but could do so with little conviction.
There was no positive proof that Chikako Ueda had been involved in the kidnapping. It was by no means certain that the words which had issued from the medium’s mouth were George’s. What was undoubted fact was Chikako’s extraordinary reaction to them. And there was also nothing to suggest that the words did not relate to George. Regardless of whether or not the medium had supernatural powers, or had learned of the facts by other means, it remained obvious that a child had been buried and that Chikako was somehow involved.
And the evidence for this went further than Chikako’s behaviour at the seance, for there was also the evidence of the poem Yoneko had found in her room… To a child buried on 29 March… it was too much of a mere coincidence.
Of course, there was no year mentioned. It might have referred to 29 March last year, or ten years before for that matter. George had been kidnapped on 27 March, so there was a difference of two days in the dates. But if any evidence could be found that he had been buried on 29 March, then the poem would be conclusive proof of Chikako’s complicity.
‘If I could be positive that George was dead, then I could at least begin my life all over again.’
Keiko bent low, covering her face with her slim white hands. Looking at her, Yoneko for the first time saw her former pupil revealing her natural maternal instincts.
That night, Keiko stayed in Yoneko’s room. They talked until the small hours. Occasionally they spoke about the past, and what had become of Keiko’s schoolmates, but for most of the time George was the main topic of discussion. Yoneko felt keenly how Keiko had, for the seven years since the kidnapping, lived only in the hope of seeing her son again, and her heart bled for her. She could not but blame the father who had turned his back on the problem and on his wife and had gone home to America alone, but she could also sense how difficult it must have become to continue living with a wife whose only thoughts were for her vanished child.
‘While we were in the waiting room together, George was looking at a comic. When it became his turn to go in, he left it face down on the table, and he was going to finish it later. When he came out from his treatment, he looked for the comic, but a middle-aged American woman was reading it by then. I thought of telling her that my son had been reading it, but felt too shy to do so. Sometimes, when I look back on it, I feel that if he had had that comic to read, he would never have left the waiting room and gone back to the car, and my heart is full of hatred for that white woman.’
Keiko laughed bitterly as she said this, and suddenly Yoneko realised that if she could produce positive and final proof of George’s death it would in the end be for the good of her former pupil. Keiko’s whole life and personality had become distorted by the uncertainty about her child’s fate.
Since the seance, Chikako Ueda had become even more of a recluse, and there seemed no way that anyone could approach her. To get any further in her enquiries, Yoneko realised that she must invent some pretext for talking to Chikako. Even after Keiko went home the next morning, Yoneko spent the day thinking of nothing else.
That evening, when she was just going out to do some shopping, Miss Tojo called out to her from the front office: ‘You forgot to register your overnight visitor, you know.’ Her face was smiling, but behind the mask Yoneko could detect some suspicion about her relationship with Keiko.
‘Perhaps you’d care to fill in the book now?’ She pushed the register across the desk, pointing to a clean page. Yoneko could just discern the traces of writing on the other side.
‘I don’t want to be petty, but it’s always been the rule, you know… We’ve filled in without fail ever since the war ended, and I suppose we’ll go on doing so for another four or five years, even though society has changed.’
And she chatted on in this vein whilst Yoneko registered Keiko’s visit. Suddenly, she had a flash of inspiration. Having entered Keiko’s name and filled in the relationship column—‘friend’—she turned the pages back rapidly until she came to the year 1951. And, just as she had begun to inspect, there was an entry for Chikako Ueda. Ignoring Miss Tojo’s astonished and increasingly loud complaints at this breach of the rules, Yoneko gazed triumphantly at the evidence which lay before her, proof positive of Chikako’s involvement in the kidnapping.
Chikako Ueda was shown as having had a younger female cousin to stay with her between 29 March and 1 April 1951. The name was given as Yasuyo Aoki, aged thirty, unemployed. As George was kidnapped on 27 March, it seemed clear that this ‘female cousin’ was the kidnapper who had brought the child to the apartment block.
‘Oh, I remember,’ Yoneko interrupted Miss Tojo. ‘This was the cousin of Miss Ueda’s who came with a little boy of about four. He must be getting quite big now.’
Miss Tojo thought for a moment, and then replied, ‘No—she was quite alone—I’m sure of that.’ She looked Yoneko straight in the eye as she said this, taking the book back and putting it in the drawer. Yoneko felt that one leg of her hypothesis had been knocked from under her.