Authors: Hideo Yokoyama
Mesaki’s expression became calm. His jaw and temples were motionless. In the next moment, his Adam’s apple rose and fell. Mikami could almost hear the sound of the gulp.
‘Damn it!’
Ogata drove his fist into the frame around the monitor. Minegishi punched the wall. The right-hand side of the monitor blurred a little, turning light brown. One of the onlookers had stepped in the way of the camera. Another figure, out of focus and faintly blue, emerged to fill the remaining space on the left. Mesaki’s shape tapered, thinning out until it was completely invisible.
‘That was it?’ Minegishi said, palms stretched wide. ‘Why leave it at that? He could have done so much more. He could have forced him to confess, threatened to kill Kasumi if he didn’t.’
‘Agreed. That was too easy,’ Ogata breathed.
‘All that intimidation, getting him to run, to burn the money – all he got from the bastard was that 20 million yen. There was that one time, in the car . . . But that’s hardly anything. And Mesaki ate the fucking note. He should have gone straight for it, on the phone. That would have got a proper fucking response.’
Mikami’s mouth was half open. His anger was rising; he felt that their comments were defiling something important.
Matsuoka cut in. ‘What more could we hope for?’ His gaze was divided equally between the two detectives. ‘Yoshio Amamiya delivered us a suspect. What happens next is up to us. All he had
was a voice on the phone. Whatever the message was, it wouldn’t have been anything we could use in an arrest. Amamiya deserves an award – he gave Mesaki something that
wasn’t
conclusive evidence and got him to swallow it. Don’t ever forget this.
That was Mesaki’s confession.
Now we know he’s the kind of guy who panics, confesses, even without definitive evidence.’
Ogata and Minegishi were standing upright and motionless, concentrating like third-year recruits still bringing tea to the real detectives. Shiratori was nodding at one of the walls. Taking a deep breath, Morita pulled the zoom back on the camera. A huge number of onlookers had gathered around the empty plot.
Mesaki was out of view. All they could see was the line of smoke, tapered now, and white. The wind had dropped off, letting it reach up in what was almost a straight line. Why make him burn the money? It was unlikely that Amamiya wanted revenge for the money he’d lost. It was a second message – it had to be. One Shoko and Toshiko could see from the heavens. He had entrusted the trail of smoke to carry his voice.
It’s done. I did everything I could.
‘Moving to extraction,’ Matsuoka said into the radio. ‘Bring Mesaki in. Say it’s to shield him from the press. I want him under guard and delivered to Central Station.’
Mikami nodded. Matsuoka had been right. The rest was up to them.
Sensing a parting of ways, Mikami flicked open his phone and pressed the button for Suwa’s speed dial.
‘Sir.’
‘Kasumi Mesaki is in police custody – she’s safe. Disband the coverage agreement, effective immediately.’
The glow of the phone box came into view, a point in the darkness.
Having asked his taxi to wait at the top of the hill, Mikami had started towards the riverside park. The path was a gradual downward incline. There was the faint sound of water. It wasn’t yet 6 p.m., but as he walked his feet became increasingly shrouded in the dark. The park’s mercury lamps were still off, making the bluish glow of the phone box the only artificial light in the area.
Mikami had left the Mobile Command Centre, returning to the Prefectural HQ by three o’clock. By that point, there were no longer any traces of the bizarre atmosphere that had prevailed on the fifth floor of the government building’s west wing. The conference room had been deserted, the state of the room shocking. Empty of its inhabitants, it had looked to Mikami like Wall Street during the Great Depression, or the aftermath of a parade celebrating the return of an astronaut. The reporters had taken flight, scattering like birds the moment they learned of the agreement’s termination. Knowing Kasumi was safe, half had returned to Tokyo. Those who had remained had either left for the empty plot of land behind the hair salon or Mesaki’s house in Genbu.
The schedule of press announcements was pulled back to once every three hours. The colour had returned to Ochiai’s face by the time the four o’clock announcement – which less than fifty reporters hurried back to – took place. With the coverage agreement no longer in effect, the police were under no obligation to
supply the press with real-time case updates. While they were careful to give out as much information as possible, the fact that Masato Mesaki had been taken into custody at Central Station was, needless to say, not mentioned. The locations of his wife and daughter – Mutsuko and Kasumi – were also concealed. Matsuoka had met them in person and taken them into protective custody, transferred anonymously – together with Kasumi’s younger sister – to a shelter in a neighbouring prefecture’s Mutual Welfare Society.
Some things must never be spoken.
Mikami finally understood what Matsuoka had meant. When Masato Mesaki was arrested, Mutsuko would become the wife of a kidnapper and murderer. Kasumi, the daughter. He would do what he could to prevent their first names from coming out, for their sake. That was the decision Matsuoka had made.
You need to get some sleep. Go home and get some rest. We’ve been taking turns catching up. We’ve had plenty.
Suwa and Mikumo had insisted. Kuramae had called the taxi even as they spoke. The idea to visit the park had come suddenly, Mikami giving the driver the new destination on the way home. Yoshio Amamiya’s house was dark. His car was gone, too. Where was he now? Where had he been when Masato Mesaki was burning the money? Mikami pushed on the door of the phone box. It was old, but it opened easily and without a sound. The phone inside was light green, faded and in poor repair. The push buttons were blackened from use but, towards the centre, where the finger made most contact, they were polished to a dull and silvery shine.
Not surprising, after so much use.
Mikami let out a deep sigh.
This is where Amamiya made his calls.
He would have used the phone to call Mikami’s number, too. Sometime after eight o’clock, that day on 4 November. A female voice had answered. He’d called again at nine thirty. Again, the female voice. He’d made a third attempt, calling close to midnight – that was when he’d finally heard a male voice. He’d
concentrated on the sound, then hung up, striking a line through the name
Moriyuki Mikami.
The name was that of Mikami’s father, who had still been alive at the time the directory was issued. If Amamiya had used a later edition, or if Mikami had moved into police accommodation, he’d never have received the calls.
No doubt he’d started making the calls from his phone at home. Then he’d heard about the introduction of caller display. As often happened with people living by themselves, he’d only had a partial understanding of the service, and hadn’t known about the option to withhold his number. That would have been when he’d started to use the phone box.
Perhaps there’d been other reasons, too.
The park was the nearest to his home. It had a children’s play area. It went without question that he would have visited it with Shoko, when she was a child; with Toshiko, too; the three of them. Families with small children tended to avoid it after Six Four, partly because the location of Shoko’s abduction was never determined. It was ironic that this very fact gave Amamiya a place where he could occupy a phone box for extended periods, day and night, without having to worry about people seeing him.
This is it, this is the place.
Mikami closed his eyes and listened. It was quiet. No sound reached inside the phone box. It had no doubt been different on the day of their call. That evening, the north of the prefecture had been deluged with an unseasonal torrent of rain. Many places had suffered landslides. Rivers had swollen, noisily tossing mud downstream. The noise hadn’t been the buzz of a city. It hadn’t been traffic. The phone box was in a riverside park, part of a flood plain. That was the truth behind the ‘continuous’ sound he’d heard.
Ayumi? I know it’s you, Ayumi.
That was what he’d said to the caller.
Ayumi! Where are you? Come home. Everything will be fine, just come home right away!
Amamiya had known the reason for Mikami’s tears in front of the Buddhist altar.
Are you better?
Amamiya’s words on the phone last night.
Not everything is bad. There’s good out there, too.
Where on earth was he now?
Mikami was starting to wonder if he’d been the one to set events into motion. His first visit to Amamiya had been seven days ago. But the silent call to Mesaki’s home had been ten days ago; Amamiya would have already tracked down the kidnapper’s voice by the time of Mikami’s visit. He would have been debating whether or not to report it. Although . . . the fact that he hadn’t reported it during the three-day gap, however short that seemed, already had to be a reflection of how deeply he mistrusted the force. Every detective he’d met had assured him they would catch his daughter’s killer, but it hadn’t happened, even after fourteen years. Single-handedly, he’d achieved something tens of thousands police officers taking the force as a whole – had failed to do. And why?
Because it wasn’t their business.
Doubtless, that would have been his conclusion. The police had sought to cover up their own recording error. A seven-year-old girl had been kidnapped, met with a tragic end, and yet they had taken action to protect their own interests. They had systematically wiped all record of the third call’s existence. It was no wonder he’d lost faith. Even if he did report Mesaki’s details, who could say whether they would have trusted his ability to distinguish the voice after fourteen years? Even if they had, it would have meant a loss of face, to have the victim’s father succeed where they had failed. They would have resented that; perhaps it would have dulled the edge of the investigation; maybe they would have told him he was wrong, after only a perfunctory investigation. Even so, Amamiya couldn’t bring Mesaki in by himself. He could go
and see him, try to pressure him, but telling Mesaki he thought his voice matched the kidnapper’s wouldn’t be enough to force him into a confession.
It would have been then that Mikami had turned up.
Amamiya would have recognized his voice. He’d heard so many on the phone, but Mikami’s response would have left an impression. And the name on his card started with
Mi
. With the call still fresh in his mind, Amamiya would have drawn only one conclusion.
His daughter’s run away. He’s anxious for her safety.
Perhaps he’d seen an opportunity to forge a real, emotional connection, become convinced that the man before him was one of only a handful of officers capable of understanding his plight – the pain of a parent who’d lost a daughter. If Mikami had been there to talk of anything else, Amamiya might have confided in him that he’d tracked down the voice of the Six Four kidnapper.
But . . .
What had Mikami said instead? It hurt to think about it. He’d asked Amamiya to accept a visit from the commissioner. Made a blatant attempt to involve him in a PR exercise. He’d pressed him for an answer, suggesting it might help, that the coverage might even unearth new leads. Amamiya’s suspicions would have been confirmed.
They haven’t changed.
Fourteen years, and the force continued to display no regard for the victim; far from it – they were hoping to take advantage of his suffering and shore up their own defences.
I appreciate the offer, but it won’t be necessary. There’s no need for someone as important as that to come all this way.
That was how it had started. Amamiya’s attitude had undergone a sudden transformation. Mikami was sure of it now.
He had decided he wanted to corner Mesaki himself. He reached out to Koda. Together, the two men, who had both suffered at the hands of the police, put their heads together and came up with a plan. They wanted revenge on Mesaki, but they also wanted to get back at the force. They decided to enact their plan
on the day of the commissioner’s visit, knowing that would deal the heaviest blow. In the end, the one variable they had no control over – Kasumi’s absence from home – had forced them to move it forward a day. The timing had never been down to chance. In what looked like a twist of fate, a copycat kidnapping took place just a day before the commissioner’s inspection into Six Four. It wasn’t the fury of Criminal Investigations that had finally forced the cancellation, nor was it fate – it was Koda and Amamiya’s unmerciful revenge. Mikami had pushed Amamiya when he’d been undecided. By notifying him of the commissioner’s visit, he’d ended up giving him a date they could use. The haircut had been a token of that resolve.
The words on their call the previous night . . . they probably hadn’t been for Mikami alone.
Not everything is bad. There’s good out there, too.
And yet . . .
Amamiya and Koda had crossed a line.
They had to shoulder the responsibility. Amamiya’s share of the burden was particularly weighty. Heresy is heresy; there are no graduations. Whatever his reasons, he’d staged the kidnapping of a young girl. He’d subjected her mother, Mutsuko Mesaki, to the terrors of losing her daughter. All this despite having witnessed first hand the suffering of his wife, Toshiko, when they’d learned of their daughter’s abduction; even though her feelings were indistinguishable from his own. Amamiya had abandoned morality. He had, in order to satisfy his personal desire for retribution, crushed underfoot a mother’s innocent heart.
He was fully aware that that was what he’d done, more than anyone. That was why he hadn’t come back. Was it possible he’d decided to . . .?
Mikami recognized the sound of a car horn.
It was coming from the top of the hill.
The taxi was independently owned, one the Prefectural HQ used constantly; it was unlikely that the driver suspected Mikami
of lying or trying to dodge the fare. Then again, Mikami had had the look of a man who hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours . . . he must have looked inescapably bleak – perhaps the driver was worried he might drown himself. Mikami could see him now, in the distance, already out of the car. He leaned out of the phone box and waved a hand in the air.