The Decagon House Murders (26 page)

Confronting the six men and women who had driven Chiori to her death was constantly on his mind. But he would not be content with just blaming them, shouting out that they had killed Chiori. He had been robbed of someone irreplaceable, someone he had needed in order to live. They had stolen her from him.

The only thing he wanted was revenge. But he was only able to channel his feeling into a concrete plan—for murder—when he learned that his uncle Tatsumi Masa’aki had purchased the island of Tsunojima.

The Blue Mansion on Tsunojima, where Chiori had been born. The tragedy with her parents. Six sinners who would go to the island just to satisfy their own curiosity. This mental image fuelled his urge to paint them with bright new colours and purge them.

He had first thought about killing all six of them on Tsunojima and then dying there as well. But that would have meant burying himself amongst those sinners, as though he were one of them.

He needed to pass judgment upon them. Revenge in the name of judgment.

After long contemplation, he settled on a plan.

A plan to kill all six of them on the island, but also a plan where he would stay safe and alive.

He fired the first shot in early March, certain his prey would walk into his trap.

‘My uncle just bought Tsunojima. If you’d like to visit there and stay in the Decagon House, I could ask him. How about it?’

Naturally, they swallowed the bait.

After it was all settled, he took responsibility for the preparations. He selected the days of their stay based on their schedules and the long-term weather forecast.

For his plans to succeed, he absolutely needed there to be days with clear weather and peaceful waves. Luckily, the forecast for late March didn’t show any bad weather. It was risky to bet on forecasts, but he could just cancel the trip on the day itself if circumstances turned out for the worst.

And so the trip was decided to be for one week, starting on March 26th.

He prepared bedding, food and other necessary supplies. He rented bedding
for six persons
. He was very careful to make
the six think he was going to the island with them, while leaving the impression with everyone else that only six people were going and he wasn’t one of them.

He wrote nine letters under the name Nakamura Seiji. The letters had two purposes.

The first was naturally “an accusation.” He wanted to let someone, anyone, know that those people had
murdered
a girl called Nakamura Chiori. As for the letters’ second purpose, the “letters from the dead” were the perfect bait to
get Kawaminami Taka’aki moving
.

Sending one of those letters with Nakamura Seiji’s name to Nakamura Kōjirō had been a strategic move on his part, anticipating that Kawaminami would eventually arrive there. He knew Kawaminami very well. Receiving the letter, he would go sniffing around and finally turn to him, Morisu, for advice. He was expecting him. Even if it turned out he would have to contact Kawaminami himself, the strange letters going around would prove to be the perfect excuse.

He used a word processor which was available for student use in a laboratory at the university. He also made two sets of the murder announcement plates with materials he bought at a supermarket.

Tuesday, March 25th, the day before their departure, he posted the nine letters in O—City, went to S—Town and transported the supplies in a fisherman’s boat he had reserved in advance. He then returned to S—Town, lied to his uncle that he was going to Kunisaki and borrowed his uncle’s car. In the back trunk, he had prepared a rubber boat with an outboard motor, a cylinder with compressed air, cans of gasoline and other items.

His uncle used the boat for fishing. He had secretly taken it out of the storage in the back of the garage, but as his uncle only used it in season, between summer and autumn, there was no fear of him finding out.

Few people make their way to the other side of the J—Cape, even during the day. After hiding the boat and cylinder in some bushes near the shore, he returned the car after enough time had passed. He lied about his plans to his uncle, saying he was going back to O—City that night and would go to Kunisaki again tomorrow. In truth he only went to O—City to get his motorbike and return to J—Cape in the middle of the night.

It takes about ninety minutes for a car to travel from O—City to J—Cape in the afternoon. But you can make it in less than an hour if you hurry on a 250cc motorbike during the night. And if you make good use of an off-road bike, you can also travel through the empty fields and thickets next to the roads. He laid the bike down in the thickets near the shore and covered it with a brown sheet, so there was no need to fear someone would find it.

Next, he set up the boat he had hidden and changed into a wetsuit. And so it was that, with the aid of the moonlight and the light from the unmanned J—Cape lighthouse, a lone figure made its way across the sea towards Tsunojima.

The wind wasn’t strong, but it was terribly cold. The visibility, also, was bad at night. He had borrowed the boat several times in the past and was used to handling it, but because of his bad state of health, the trip proved to be much harder than he had expected.

As for why he was in a bad state of health, he had not drunk any water since yesterday. His plan called for him to abstain from consuming water.

It took about thirty minutes from J—Cape to Tsunojima.

He landed on the rocky area. He needed to hide the boat here. He folded it up and used a rope to tie it, together with the air cylinder and the outboard motor, which he had first wrapped in a waterproof cloth and then sealed inside a plastic bag. He then placed the package under water between the rocks, where it would not be under direct attack from the waves, and weighed it down with a rock. He also tied the package to a rock. He had hidden reserve gasoline cans both there and on the other side in the thickets of J—Cape.

With a large flashlight hanging from his shoulder he made his way beneath the moonlight to the Decagon House. He took the room to the left of the entrance—the room with water damage and no furniture—as his own. He slept in a sleeping bag he had brought there in the afternoon.

And so the trap to catch the sinners was set.

3

The next day, March 26th,
 
the six arrived.

They didn’t suspect anything. There was no way to contact the mainland, no matter what happened on the island during the week. Even so, they showed no sign of anxiety and were all enjoying their adventure.

That night, he retreated to his room early, saying he wasn’t feeling well because of a cold. This was the reason he had not been drinking any water.

He knew that the symptoms of mild dehydration resembled that of a cold. He couldn’t have just faked an illness. He couldn’t have fooled Poe, who was studying to be a doctor. On the other hand, any suspicion about him would disappear if Poe examined him and declared him to be ill.

Leaving the cheerful chattering behind him, he changed into his wetsuit, put everything he needed in a knapsack and sneaked out of the window. He went down to the rocky area, set his boat up and went to J—Cape in the night. There he raced his motorbike back to O—City, returning to his own room around eleven.

He was exhausted of course, but the crucial part would only start now.

He made a phone call to Kawaminami. He needed him
as a witness to the fact he was in O—City
.

There was no reply, but if Kawaminami was going around as planned, then he was sure to call on Morisu eventually. He might have called here several times already, perhaps. If so, Kawaminami would probably ask where he had gone, but he had prepared an excuse for such an occasion.
The painting
.

He had prepared it
to prove what he was doing on the mainland, while the six were on the island
. The painting of the stone Buddhas. Or, to be precise,
paintings
, plural. He had made three paintings.

One was a charcoal sketch that he had only started to colour. In another, he had applied colour to the whole painting with a palette knife. And the third was a finished painting. The three paintings were all of the same scene, of course.

It was a scene he had come across last autumn, when he had been wandering around with his broken heart and happened to arrive in the mountains of the Kunisaki Peninsula.

From memory he prepared three paintings in different stages, changing the colours to early spring.

He put the painting in the first stage on the easel as he was looking at the letter he had sent to himself, waiting for Kawaminami’s call. If he didn’t manage to get in contact with Kawaminami, he would need to find a different “witness.” He tried to quell the restless anxiety lurking in his feverish mind.

Near midnight, the phone finally rang.

Kawaminami had taken the bait according to plan. He said he had gone to the home of Nakamura Kōjirō in Kannawa that day. Morisu had felt slightly uneasy about the appearance of Shimada Kiyoshi, however, the man Kawaminami had met in Kannawa.

He had thought that it would be better to have more witnesses. But he couldn’t have someone intervene too much. Having them ask Morisu to join their little detective game was just what he had hoped for.

Fortunately the attention of these two was not directed at the present, but at the past. At least, he didn’t have to worry about them following the six to the island. To leave as strong an impression of himself as possible on them, he used the phrase “armchair detective,” saying he would play that role in their group. After saying he would be going to Kunisaki the next day, he asked them to call again that night. The suggestion he made to visit Yoshikawa Masako in Ajimu was made
to keep their attention away from the present activities on Tsunojima
.

After the two had left, he slept for a while. Before dawn he rode his motorbike back to J—Cape again and hurried to Tsunojima in the boat he had left tied to the coast.

Returning to the Decagon House, he made sure nobody was out in the main hall and arranged the plates on the table.

What were those plates for?

Did he wish for them to reflect on what it meant to become “A Victim”? Was he bound to some sort of a weird sense of duty, thinking it was unfair if he did not announce their “punishments” in advance? Or perhaps he thought this to be an act of sharp irony aimed at them. The answer his twisted mind had come up with probably encompassed all of those.

*

The second night, he managed to retreat to his room even earlier than the night before. He had words with Carr just as he was making his way out of the hall, but he managed to get out of that.

His body was staggering because of dehydration. Before he put on his wetsuit, he drank all of the water in the jug Agatha had given him to take with the medicine, leaving not a single drop. He was not planning to go to the mainland anymore from the third day on. He needed to restore his water supplies and recover his health as quickly as possible.

The trip from Tsunojima to O—City was even harsher than the night before. How often had he thought about giving up halfway through? Looking back, it was a mystery how all that energy could have been stored inside that starving body.

After returning to his room on the mainland, his first thought had been to restore his reserves of water. Even after Kawaminami and Shimada had arrived and had started a discussion about the case, he still continued to drink several cups of tea.

He had no intention of going to O—City from the next day on, so, after performing his role of armchair detective, he acted dismissively towards their plans. He declared he was withdrawing from their investigation, thus making sure they would not try to reach him again.

The harsh words he had spewed against Shimada did, however, reflect his true feelings. He was truly angry when he discovered they were digging into the circumstances surrounding Chiori’s birth.

Just as on the previous day, he returned to the island before dawn. He went back to his room in the Decagon House, where he calmed his anger in the darkness.

4

There were several reasons for choosing Orczy as his first victim.

First of all, it was something like an act of mercy. If she died early, she would never need to know about the consequent fear and panic.

Orczy—she was good friends with Chiori. There was something about that girl, always looking away, that resembled Chiori. She had also probably not actively contributed to the
murder
of Chiori. She had been an onlooker. But even so, that didn’t mean he would exclude her from his revenge.

Another important reason was
the golden ring he had seen around the middle finger of Orczy’s left hand
.

He had never before seen Orczy wear a ring around her finger. That is why he noticed it.
It was the ring he had once given Chiori for her birthday
.