Dying to Tell (24 page)

Understood?" "It's a deal."

Short of time or not, Yamazawa parked two streets south of the apartment block. We approached it on foot, from the rear, cutting down a back-alley and hopping over a low fence into a small compound used to store rubbish bins. "We should be doing this at night," Yamazawa complained, wrenching back the metal door of a service lift. "I am breaking all my own rules for you, Lance."

"How did you know this way in?" I asked, as we started our ascent.

"I didn't. But Japan is a crime-free country. There is always a way in."

We exited the lift into a bare, concrete stairwell, then pushed through a fire door into a carpeted corridor and followed it round to Loudon's flat.

Pop music was playing on a radio somewhere nearby, but there were no other signs of life. Yamazawa glanced cautiously around, then took out of his pocket a small, right-angled metal tool.

"What's that?"

"A door opener." He slid the blade in round the jamb next to the Yale keyhole and, after no more than a few seconds' manipulation, slipped the latch. (The fact that Loudon hadn't given me a key ironically made it easier to break in, since I hadn't been able to lock the door on the mortice.)

I made straight for Loudon's bedroom, Yamazawa keeping pace behind me. A dog-eared old paperback copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls stood on the bedside cabinet. As I picked it up, I noticed one page had been folded down at the top corner. I opened the book at that page. In the rows of print, only one thing stood out. A name, underlined in pencil -Maria. I showed it to Yamazawa. "Mean anything to you?"

"In the film, Gary Cooper is an American fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He falls in love with He broke off. "Ingrid Bergman plays a girl called Maria."

"Yeh? So?"

"There is a hotel called the Maria, in Arashiyama."

That's a big coincidence." But it was no coincidence at all. It couldn't be.

And Yamazawa didn't think so either. "We go," he said, turning towards the door.

Arashiyama lay out to the west of Kyoto, where the hills subsided to the plain on which the city was built. There was a pretty bridge across a river, a scatter of temples and a sprawl of trinket shops and rickshaw pick-up points. As tourist traps went, it was mightily effective, since half the Kansai region and his uncle from Hokkaido seemed to be clogging the pavements.

"Is it always like this here?" I asked as Yamazawa nudged the Range Rover through the mobs.

"No. But the gardens of Tenryu-ji and Okochi-san so are specially beautiful in the fall. And this is a public holiday."

"It is?"

"Yes. Bunka-no-hi. Culture Day."

"So there wouldn't be any teaching going on at Doshisha University today?"

"No. The students will be out with their lovers in the bamboo groves. Maybe their professors also. Why?"

"Nothing." I was thinking of one of the lies Ledgister had told me to lure me out of Loudon's flat. "I have to be back at Doshisha by ten." The irony was that he'd probably been as unaware as me of the glaring flaw in his story. "It doesn't matter now."

"Here's the Maria." Yamazawa pulled into a car park in front of a medium-sized modern building with whitewashed walls, their glaring plainness relieved by a dazzling abundance of chrysanthemums, in borders, rock eries and window boxes. "Looks like Maria, whoever she is, is a kiku lover," he added, pausing to flick on a pair of Ray-Bans. Too bright for me."

"Why did Loudon send Mayumi and Haruko here assuming he did?"

"Because, like you see, Arashiyama's crowded. Good choice, I think. A crowd is safe if you don't want to get noticed."

"Which they don't. But that also means they may well have booked in under false names."

"Yes. But they are not experts at the running game. They give themselves away."

"What do you mean?"

"See that Nissan?" He pointed to a small, mud-spattered red hatchback in a corner of the car park. "Tokyo number plate. And it looks like it's been down more farm tracks than any other car here."

"It could be theirs, I agree, but We'd surged into motion. "What are you doing?"

Yamazawa didn't answer. He threw the Range Rover round to the left, then reversed straight across the car park towards the Nissan.

"Hold on. You're going to We crunched solidly into its rear wing and stopped. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Wait here." Yamazawa opened his door. "I think I need to report this to the owner of the car." And with what, but for the Ray-Bans, I could have sworn was a wink, he climbed out.

After Yamazawa had vanished into the hotel, I got out too and wandered round the car park, struggling to prepare myself for the encounter that was surely about to happen. I was the best friend of the man who'd betrayed Haruko and I'd played a part Mayumi couldn't be expected to understand in her brother's death; a part also (more culpably) in a second death she didn't yet know about but soon would. What was I going to say to them? What were they going to say to me!

Five minutes passed, according to my watch, though it felt more like half an hour. The sun went in behind a cottonwool cloud. The glare from the facade of the Hotel Maria faded. Then the hotel door slid open and Yamazawa came out with a woman I recognized instantly as Mayumi. A small, trim, erect figure in a beige trouser-suit, she had her grey-black hair gathered in a bun, emphasizing a gauntness I didn't remember from Rupe's photograph of her and Haruko. She was frowning too and looked as worried as she had every right to be. But still in her face there was the shadow of her youthful beauty.

They'd reached the cars and were looking at the damage, discussing it in Japanese, when I came up behind them. I hesitated for a moment, then said, "Mayumi Hashimoto?"

I saw her flinch as she turned. Whatever name she was going under couldn't stop her responding to the sound of her own. There was fear written starkly on her face as she stared at me.

"I'm Lance Bradley," I said, looking her in the eye. "I'm here to help you."

She didn't respond. She just went on staring. Nothing in her expression suggested that she believed me. To be honest, I couldn't blame her. But I meant it. If it was the last thing I did which it easily could be I was going to help her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

According to the women in my life (who've all had a habit of leaving it), I don't understand at some fundamental level that they do what a close and loving relationship is really about. Even Ria, whose middle name certainly wasn't commitment, reckoned I was just too easy to be with. By which she meant (I think) that, when the chips were down, I'd always be inclined to walk away from the table. Why put myself through the angst of accepting responsibility for the happiness, or, God forbid, the material needs, of another? Why put myself through any of it? Because, of course, it's supposed to be worth it. But is it? I'd have liked to debate the point with Rupe that Culture Day afternoon in Kansai. I'd have liked to be able to ask some sympathetic listener, "Do I really need or deserve this anguish?" (Not to mention the considerable personal risk.) But sympathy for me was out of stock and season. I had, finally and illogically, accepted the responsibility I'd always tried to dodge responsibility, in this case, for the future of two women I'd never even met before. Yamazawa did most of the talking at first, explaining the grievous realities of the situation to Mayumi as swiftly and as sensitively as possible. (I had to take that on trust, of course, since they conversed in Japanese.) Mayumi scarcely said a word, glancing often and cryptically at me as he spoke. I couldn't have judged from her expression the moment at which she realized Loudon was dead. But, after she'd gone to fetch Haruko, Yamazawa told me he'd held nothing back.

"She is a proud woman, I think. But frightened also. More for her daughter than herself. She will not let you see how upset she is."

"At least they're not in any immediate danger, with Ledgister under arrest."

"But Ledgister may not be alone. She understands that. That is why she has accepted my offer of shelter."

"Where are you going to shelter them?"

"At my home."

"You're taking them in?"

"Yes. You also, Lance. They cannot stay here. Neither can you. And there is nowhere else to go." He shrugged. "It is best."

I didn't have any choice but to trust him, even if I'd not been inclined to. Nor did Mayumi and Haruko. We loaded their belongings into the Range Rover, leaving the dented Nissan where it was, and set off, crossing the river and heading south through the western outskirts of Kyoto.

"We will take the Meishin Expressway to Ashiya," Yamazawa said, translating for my benefit something he'd already told Mayumi in Japanese. "That is where I live. On the coast, between Osaka and Kobe."

Mayumi and Haruko sat in the back, saying nothing beyond the odd whispered exchange between themselves. I hadn't the nerve to speak to them at that stage. I glanced as often as I dared at their reflections in the mirror on the back of the sun-visor. Mayumi's composure never slipped, though her bloodshot eyes and the dark rings beneath them suggested it was being tested to its limit. Haruko was less self-controlled, clutching her mother's hand and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief to staunch the tears of grief and fear. She'd lost weight since the summer. Her face was paler and thinner than in Rupe's photographs. The smile she'd worn for him was just a memory. Her lover had betrayed her and, because of him, her uncle and her protector in Kyoto were both dead. The only people she and her mother had left to rely on were a cold-blooded, steely-nerved Yakuza .. . and me.

The coastal strip west of Osaka was an undistinguished urban sprawl of which Ashiya looked to be the most prosperous part. Yamazawa's house was in the foothills of the mountains above the town, where high walls, conspicuous security devices and a total absence of pedestrians suggested twitchy residents with a lot to be twitchy about. I spotted a couple of Rottweilers patrolling the adjacent garden as we waited for the automatic door leading to the garage to slide slowly up.

"You are thinking that crime pays well," Yamazawa said to me as we drove in. "And you are wondering how my neighbours feel about living next to a YakuzaJ

"It's none of my business."

The answer is that they pretend to believe I lost my finger in a taxi door and, in return, I do not ask where they got their money from."

"Get-tog ethers round the barbecue not the norm here, then?"

The point of living here, Lance, is not to get together." It was a point he pondered for a moment before adding, There is nowhere safer."

I was happy to believe him. The house was vast and bare, white-walled and strangely un-Japanese, the shortage of furniture somehow conjuring up emptiness rather than simplicity.

A housekeeper evidently hired for her inscrutability talked to Yamazawa in an oriental language that sounded more like Chinese than Japanese (it was actually, I later learned, Korean), then took Mayumi and Haruko off to their quarters. I was left alone, padding round a tatami-matted lounge big enough to hold a ball in (which you could have done without needing to move anything), a pair of fluffy cream guest slippers muffling my footsteps.

A soaring triangular window looked out on to a well-tended garden contained by high stone walls. I noticed the late afternoon sunlight glinting on broken glass concreted into their tops. Uninvited visitors were definitely not welcome. There didn't seem to be any Rottweilers on the premises, though -just a four-foot-high bronze panther bestriding the patio.

I'd been alone there for twenty minutes or so, wondering what was to happen next, when Yamazawa came in to join me, frowning ominously.

"I have spoken to my contact in the Kyoto Police. What he has said is not good."

"What is it?"

"For such a thing to happen ..."

' What?"

"Ledgister has escaped."

"You're joking."

"I do not joke." (Ever, I assumed he meant.) "It seems two men from the local station Keihoku got there first. After they had untied Ledgister.. ." Yamazawa snorted irritably. "He shot one of them and lost the other in the forest. I should not have relied on the police. They are .. . shiroto."

"Could he have followed us here?"

"Not possible. He has no car. He does not know the mountains. He is free. But he cannot know where we are."

"That's something."

"But not enough. The police will probably think he is you. He hired the car in your name. By now the German police will know you flew to Tokyo. It will look bad for you. Very bad."

"I don't remotely resemble Ledgister."

"Do you want to contact the police to explain that to them? I should have killed him, Lance. That is the truth. I should have finished him."

"You said yourself that would only have made things worse for me."

"Not much worse than this. You should leave the country. As soon as possible."

"What about Mayumi and Haruko?"

"They are safe here."

"For the moment. But you can't shelter them for ever. Besides, how can I leave? I'd be stopped at the airport."

"I could get you out."

"To go where? I don't even know what I'm really up against. I have to find out, Shintaro. Do you understand?"

He nodded solemnly. "Yes."

"I think Mayumi can tell me."

"Then ask her, Lance. Soon."

"Now's hardly a good time, is it?"

"No. But it is the only time you have." He looked out of the window and sighed. "I will tell her about Ledgister. Then I will ask her to speak to you. She is my guest, so ... I do not think she will refuse."

She did not refuse. The housekeeper brought tea and, a few minutes later, Mayumi came into the room, expressionless and outwardly calm. We sat down and she poured tea for both of us.

"Kiyofumi said you are a good man, Bradley-san."

"Not as good as he was. And, please, call me Lance."

"You are involved in this only because you are Rupe's friend?"

"Yes. I suppose it conics down to that."

"Haruko loved him greatly. She thought we thought he loved her too."