A Quiet Place (21 page)

The receptionist, feeling sorry for the two men who had waited so long, pointed Asai out to them. They tried to approach him, but there was such a crowd of people leaving the ministry that they couldn't get to him right away. In the confusion, Asai ended up outside. The two men rushed after him, and Akiharu Kido called out.

“Mr Asai! Mr Asai!”

Asai stopped abruptly and turned around.

Kido approached Asai, who seemed frozen to the spot, his features petrified. Haruta came up and joined him. The two men bowed in unison.

“Are you Assistant Division Chief Tsuneo Asai? I'm Akiharu Kido from the Fujimi agricultural cooperative.
This is my colleague, Jiro Haruta. We enquired after you at the reception desk but heard you were very busy. However, we really wanted to meet you, so we decided to wait —”

In the middle of Kido's greeting a very odd thing happened. Asai suddenly let out a bizarre scream, as if he'd been physically assaulted, and set off running. He ran fast, his body leaning forward at such a sharp angle that he almost dropped his briefcase.

Dumbfounded, the two men watched him take off. What was going on? What had they done? They hadn't a clue, but out of the vague idea that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding between Asai and themselves, they took off after him, Kido yelling as he ran.

“Mr Asai! Mr Asai! Wait! Just a minute!”

But instead of stopping, Asai ran even faster. At this time of the evening, there were crowds of people coming out of the other ministries in Kasumigaseki, and heads were turning to look. It was mid-April, around six o'clock in the evening; the light had faded and night was setting in. As he continued to flee, the headlights of passing cars lit Asai from the rear.

Giving up the chase, the two men stopped and watched him make his deranged getaway. But that figure in the headlights – they had a similar memory from not so long ago… The hurrying figure, backlit by their headlights, on the prefectural highway near Yatsugatake. That night on their way home from a meeting… Didn't Mr Asai have the exact same curve to his back?

“No! It couldn't have been the assistant division chief, could it?”

Kido and Haruta talked about the incident all the way home on the train, and even more once they were back in Nagano. They weren't sure what to believe.

The rumour quickly reached the Fujimi police, who made their move. Investigators came to Tokyo to question Tsuneo Asai as to where he had been on the night of Konosuke Kubo's murder.

There may not have been prints left on the hair oil bottle – in fact, there was a complete absence of material or physical evidence – but the police knew that investigating a suspect's alibi was the way to break a case. They knew from experience that it never failed.