Six Four (10 page)

You crossed a bridge half a kilometre back. One of the lights there has a plastic cord on it. Throw the suitcase into the river from there. Do it in five minutes if you value your daughter’s life.

That was when the kidnapper’s reason for asking for an oversized suitcase became clear. He was planning to use it as a raft. For that to work, the suitcase had to be reliably buoyant.

As instructed, Amamiya had turned his car around in the car park and returned to the Kotohira bridge. As was common in depopulated areas, the bridge seemed too grand for its location. A plastic cord had been fastened to one of the mercury lamps,
facing downstream on the right-hand side. Amamiya didn’t hesitate, and hurled the suitcase over the bridge towards the river, which lay some seven metres below. The momentum carried it under before it shot back to the surface and began to drift with the current. Within a few seconds, it had disappeared from sight. It was now after seven o’clock. Beyond the threshold of the lights, the uniform darkness made it impossible to distinguish between the river, the rocks or even the sky.

The handover point was no longer fixed; now, it was anywhere along the line of the river. The line stretched across ten kilometres, through the pitch black, all the way to the dam at the river’s end. The Investigative HQ wasted no time in dispatching a large number of investigators to comb the riverbanks. They knew the kidnapper had to be in hiding nearby, but where and how Shoko was remained unclear, so they couldn’t use floodlights or torches. And they had to avoid the noise that bringing vehicles and investigators to the road along the river would make.

The search parties decided they would gather at the bottom of the river, near the southern flanks of Ozatomura, and work their way quietly north up the riverbank. In the darkness, and with only instinct to guide them, the search was erratic.

The Investigative HQ had also been guilty of optimism. They had assumed that the kidnapper – like the search party – wouldn’t use a torch. That he wouldn’t be able to find or recover the suitcase as it floated downstream in the dark.

They had also trusted in their technology. The micro-transmitter fitted to the suitcase was still functioning. The receiver in the mobile command vehicle displayed a constant green pulse that trailed gradually south.

At that point, they had yet to realize their error.

Just three hundred metres down from where the suitcase had entered the river, near the right bank, was a collection of rocks known locally as Dragon’s Hollow. They formed a three-metre cave under the water.
You can get sucked under here, near the right
bank.
The locals knew it well as a danger spot, as did canoeists and rafting enthusiasts.

The presence of Dragon’s Hollow was the reason the kidnapper had instructed Amamiya to throw the suitcase from the lamp on the right-hand side of the river. When the Investigative HQ later tested their theory in the same conditions, nine out of ten times, the suitcase had been sucked into the hollow.

The kidnapper had waited near the hollow in order to recover the suitcase. He pulled out the money, then returned the suitcase into the river a little further on. The micro-transmitters at the time weren’t accurate enough to register the brief pause as anything other than a blip.

Having secured the ransom, the kidnapper would have moved away from the river and retreated into the mountains before climbing down to a nearby village. Alternatively, it was possible he had scaled the mountain and escaped into the next prefecture. The empty suitcase, still floating down the river, had bought him all the time he needed to get away. The suitcase had continued past Ozatomura and Yasugi before finally getting caught in a fishing weir in the northern limits of City D, coming to a stop just before daybreak, at seven o’clock the next morning.

Even then, the police had been unable to act. For as long as there remained a greater than zero chance of the kidnapper showing up to retrieve the case, they couldn’t do anything more than maintain a safe distance and keep watch with binoculars; this had lasted until the weir’s owner, who had turned up a little after midday, retrieved the case himself. The sleepless game of cat and mouse had lasted twenty hours.
Emperor Showa is dead
. Many of the detectives, including Mikami, didn’t hear the news until late that afternoon.

The investigation ended with the worst possible result.

On 10 January, three days after the police had retrieved the suitcase, Shoko Amamiya’s dead body was found at a car dump in the city’s Satamachi district. A scrap merchant had opened the trunk of a rusty sedan after noticing some stray dogs making a
noise nearby. The body was in a pitiful state. The girl’s hands had been forced behind her back, tied up with washing line; her mouth and eyes had been covered over with tape. Her throat was swollen and marked with dark purple lines, presumably from a rope.

The early days of Heisei were branded with humiliation. Alongside the rage the police felt against the kidnapper, there was for a long time the sense that Showa had been cheated of its closing days. They’d been unable to look Heisei straight on. The endless TV repeats of Emperor Showa’s funeral march seemed to symbolize the dejection of the officers involved in the Six Four kidnapping.

*

Mikami took a right.

A little further down the city road and the billboard for the Ai’ai Hair Salon would roll into view. An image flashed into Mikami’s mind – Amamiya’s face. The Kotohira bridge, pale, nebulous in the glare of the mercury lamps. The expression on Amamiya’s face hadn’t been one of despair. There was hope, bubbling to the surface.
He’d handed over the ransom. His daughter would come home.
He had looked like a man trying to convince himself this was true.

Earlier this afternoon, he had looked different.

His expression had been completely devoid of hope, no longer believing in anything. Amamiya hadn’t been robbed of a feeling or an idea. He had suffered the physical loss of the thing he treasured most. Distinctions such as Showa or Heisei meant nothing to him. His only fate was to drift through a world in which his daughter didn’t exist.

Mikami pressed down on the accelerator.

Ayumi is alive
.

Amamiya faded a little into the distance.

Beyond a new-build housing area and an old farming village, Mikami saw the collection of plastic greenhouses glistening in the sun.

Mikami pulled up alongside the gravel road. The office was a shed-like building that doubled up as a flower shop. Four plastic greenhouses formed a line behind it. This was Mikami’s third visit. The last two times, he’d brought some flowers as a gift. He’d been in Second Division at the time, so they couldn’t have seen each other for close to a year.

Mikami caught sight of Mochizuki. He was just about to enter one of the greenhouses, pushing a wheelbarrow stacked high with fertilizer bags. He was still wearing the foreign-made, olive-brown jumper that had been his trademark as a detective, but with it he had on baggy trousers and wellington boots. It was a good look.

‘Mochizuki!’ Mikami called out to his back.

Having no doubt recognized his voice, Mochizuki was already grinning when his portly face turned towards him.

‘Well, well. Stranger things have happened.’

‘Right, sure. Work does keep me busy, you know.’

The wind was cold outside, but it might as well have been spring inside the greenhouse. Mikami was taken aback by the length of the structure. It was imposing; great ranks of seedlings stretched out like a diagram illustrating the effects of perspective. They were all beginning to bud, but without the flowers Mikami had no idea what they were.

‘The reunion was today?’ Mochizuki chided. He put a wooden box at Mikami’s feet, for him to use in place of a chair.

‘I wish. Seriously, things are busy.’

‘Sure, in Media Relations?’

He was exactly the same as when he’d been a detective. He made no attempt to hide his aversion to and contempt for Administrative Affairs.

‘How’s Mina-chan keeping?’

‘The same, mostly.’

‘Damn – bet she’s as good-looking as ever.’ He was genuinely peeved. Never the exception, he was one of the many officers who still had a crush on Minako. ‘How about Ayumi? She’d be, let’s see, in high school now?’

‘That’s right.’ So he hadn’t heard yet. Mikami considered telling him what had happened, but he had come out to ask his own questions. He sat up and slid the box forwards. ‘Actually, I went to see Amamiya earlier today. Something to do with Six Four.’

Mochizuki looked him straight in the eye. ‘I guessed as much.’

Guessed as much?
But Mochizuki continued before Mikami had a chance to respond.

‘Why did you go to see him?’

‘Work.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘Press-related. An executive from Tokyo wants to come and pay his respects, offer incense. I went to ask Amamiya for his blessing.’

Mochizuki gave Mikami a dubious look. ‘That’s what you do these days? Light incense?’

‘Pretty much. I serve the top brass; I do all sorts of things.’

‘So, you went to see him. What happened?’

‘He turned me down right there, on the spot. Said a visit by a high-up wasn’t necessary.’

Mikami made a quick summary of the events at Amamiya’s house. Mochizuki listened, his expression flat.

‘He refused to budge. It looked as though he’d given up on the police. It was almost as though he was angry about something,’ Mikami said, probing.

Mochizuki only nodded.

‘How long has he been like that for?’

‘I can’t say really. I know he became increasingly withdrawn over the years.’

‘Did something happen – between us and him?’

Mochizuki chuckled, reacting to Mikami’s use of the word ‘us’. ‘Come on, Mikami,’ he said. ‘I left the force a long time ago.’

‘That’s exactly why I came to see you. You’ve got more freedom to talk.’

It was still rare for information on the continuing investigation into Six Four to get out, even after the Investigative HQ’s downgrade to Investigative Team.

‘Do you think he might hold a grudge because of the investigation into Kenji?’

‘Absolutely not. He isn’t fond of his brother.’

‘Right, the inheritance. What actually happened there?’

‘That bastard Kenji started pressuring Amamiya – said he’d give up his right to inherit if Amamiya made him managing director of his business. The man’s bike dealership was already dead in the water.’

‘But Amamiya refused . . .’

‘Yeah. I reckon he knew a good-for-nothing like that would drive the company into the ground.’

Mikami nodded, satisfied.

‘Okay, so you’re sure Amamiya isn’t angry because of the business with Kenji?’

‘Yeah. I guarantee it.’

‘Is he still a suspect?’

‘I think, at this point, we have to assume he’s innocent. We pushed him pretty hard . . . especially because he was mixed up with some low-level Yakuza.’ Mochizuki had started talking as if he were still on the case.

Mikami sighed briefly. ‘Hard to believe it’s been fourteen years. How’s the investigation going, anyway?’

Mochizuki snorted through his nose. ‘How should I know? Still, I’ll bet it’s the same old quagmire. That case was cursed from the outset.’

Quagmire.
Mikami had occasionally heard the desolate-sounding word being used in Second Division. It referred to the fact that the Investigative Team was still dealing with a vast number of ‘grey’ suspects, that it had become stuck. Unnerved in the beginning by the seriousness of the case, Investigative HQ had cast its net too wide. A list had been drafted of seven thousand people. One hundred officers had been assigned to work through it. The detectives didn’t have the time they needed to investigate any single individual properly and, as a result, had needed to move on before they could come to any decision. In addition, the detectives had different levels of expertise. Some of those from district had been below par; others, back-up from more remote areas, had been sent from Transport and had no prior investigative experience at all.

Each day saw the investigation becoming more and more slipshod, reports more hastily thrown together. By the time the management realized the problem, it was already too late.

They had a huge number of potential suspects whose status was undecided, accumulated like a mountain of sludge behind them. With the passage of time, the investigations were becoming harder to reopen. And, with each year, cutbacks were made to the number of detectives working the case.

‘If Osakabe had been there when the kidnapping happened . . .’ Mochizuki said with a sigh.

Mikami felt himself nod. ‘Yeah.’

Michio Osakabe had been their greatest general, and Mikami had held him in the highest regard. As a leader, he had been grounded and meticulous, displaying a virtually telepathic ability to communicate his instructions to the rank and file. While he
had only retired from his post as director of Criminal Investigations eight years ago, he had, to the misfortune of the Prefectural HQ, been in Tokyo on secondment to the Criminal Investigations Bureau during the year of the kidnapping.

The detectives had mourned their loss.
We would have had the kidnapper if Osakabe had still been directing Criminal Investigations, even First Division.

Backing them up was his almost legendary record of never having failed to close a case.

And Six Four was only the beginning.

After Fujimura’s appointment from Administrative Affairs, people immediately began to complain of a sharp drop in results. It hadn’t been until five years ago that Criminal Investigations finally managed to regain some of its vigour, when the post was taken over by Shozo Odate, one of Osakabe’s favourites, but he retired after only a year. From that point on it was fair to say that the post had suffered a run of bad harvests, right up to Arakida, the current director. The next reshuffle wouldn’t happen for four or five years; it was essentially a waiting game until Katsutoshi Matsuoka was promoted from his current roles as chief adviser and chief of First Division. The man who had hidden himself behind the passenger seat in Amamiya’s car during the Six Four kidnapping. At the time, he had been heading up Violent Crime in First Division.