A Quiet Place Page 11

  “I’m confident that we’ve put together a report that you’ll find very satisfying. Here it is.”

  He produced a similar large envelope to last time, the flap sealed with tape. It looked every bit like important, classified information. The envelope looked bulkier than last time.

  Asai ripped off the tape. Inside was traditional Japanese paper, printed with blue characters. CONFIDENTIAL had been stamped in red ink in the top right-hand corner of each sheet of paper.

  Testimony of Komako Hanai, 35 years old. According to Ms Hanai, she was dispatched by a maid service to the home of Konosuke Kubo in Sanya, Yoyogi between October of last year and March of this year, to work as a part-time housekeeper. This was not a live-in post – she would arrive at the said address around 7.30 a.m., and return to the maid service living quarters around 7 p.m. Below is her detailed account of Mr Kubo’s daily routine.

  Asai read up to this point, then returned the paper to the envelope.

  “I’ll pay right now. How much do I owe you?”

  After settling his account, Asai went to a nearby café to read the rest of the report.

  Komako Hanai had three days off a month, but these days weren’t specified in advance. They were made by arrangement between Ms Hanai and Mr Kubo. Her duties included preparing meals, cleaning, laundry, etc. According to Ms Hanai, as Mr Kubo lived alone, there wasn’t too much laundry. As he used to send most of his clothes to a dry cleaner’s, it was a very light load indeed. The toughest job was the cleaning. Both the house and garden were very big, and it would have been impossible to clean every corner. However, Mr Kubo gave instructions that she only need clean the areas he habitually used. She was only required to tidy up the part of the garden directly around the front entranceway. Mr Kubo looked after the German shepherd dog that he kept by the back door himself. He was fond of dogs, and told Ms Hanai that he used to have an Akita and a collie.

  Mr Kubo ate a light, western-style breakfast and took lunch at his office (on his days off he also ate bread for lunch) and fish or meat for dinner, but he wasn’t particular about his meals. If he was going to be late home from work, or had a work-related dinner, he would usually let Ms Hanai know in advance. If there was an unexpected change of plan, and he was coming home early, he would call her. On these occasions she was free to lock up and leave around four in the afternoon.

  Mr Kubo’s wife was in a sanatorium in Nagano Prefecture, so Ms Hanai barely ever went into her room to clean. It seemed Mr Kubo dealt with the cleaning of that part of the house himself. Ms Hanai guessed it was because there were some valuable items in her room. Anyway, Mr Kubo didn’t want her in there.

  With no children and a wife away in a sanatorium, Mr Kubo seemed to lead a rather lonely life. He wasn’t the type to play around, and didn’t seem to be having any affairs as far as Ms Hanai could tell. He didn’t play golf or mah-jong; his hobbies were reading and collecting traditional handcrafted toys. He had a collection that included examples of the most important and famous artefacts from around the country. All the display shelves in his drawing room, his study, his living room were filled with these toys. He had a particularly large collection of paper kites, many of them on display on the walls of his drawing and living rooms. There were even some hanging from the ceiling. Mr Kubo was very fond of handmade paper toys, and among them was a particularly beautiful theatre stage and lantern made of delicate paper. When Ms Hanai asked him about them, he told her that they were Yamaga lanterns from Higo.

  There was a blinding explosion of white light before Asai’s eyes.

  The blossoming light of the golden Yamaga lantern.

  It was at Konosuke Kubo’s house that Eiko had seen it.

  He’d had a sense of foreboding up to now, but this very precise proof took his breath away. The café’s low background music made a high-pitched assault on his ears and set his heart thumping. His eyes began to race rapidly across the remaining lines on the paper.

  According to Komako Hanai, Mr Kubo and his neighbour, Chiyoko Takahashi, had practically no contact at all. She was no more to him than the owner of the cosmetics shop next door. If they met on the street they exchanged a greeting, but that was about it. In all the time that Ms Hanai worked for Mr Kubo, she had not once seen Ms Takahashi set foot inside the house. Nor had Mr Kubo ever gone next door to visit Ms Takahashi. Of course, this was only during the hours that Ms Hanai was at the Kubo house. It was possible that the two had met after seven in the evening when Ms Hanai had gone home. And she had no idea what happened on her days off. However, if the two did have an intimate relationship, she believed there would have been something in their behaviour, and she certainly hadn’t noticed anything.

  As previously mentioned, Ms Hanai had three days off a month. Each time, the two would agree on the date, but mostly Mr Kubo was the one to approach her two or three days in advance and indicate a date that suited him. He never seemed to choose a Sunday. She believed that Mr Kubo went to work on the days in question. In addition, Mr Kubo would always go to visit his wife on the last Saturday of the month, staying overnight in Nagano. This was also a day off for Ms Hanai.

  The 7 March was a Friday. Mr Kubo had arranged with Ms Hanai two days in advance for her to have that day off. When she came in early the next morning, the house was not in its usual state.

  One of the tatami mats in the living room had been burnt and left outside the back door. One of the fusuma paper sliding doors had also been burnt from floor level up to about halfway. There were three recently used buckets scattered around the kitchen floor. A lot of the other tatami flooring and door partitions were soaking wet. The gas heater in the living room was also wet. It clearly looked like the aftermath of a fire.

  Ms Hanai was very surprised and asked Mr Kubo what had happened. Mr Kubo replied that while he had been in the toilet a lit cigarette had accidentally fallen onto his newspaper, which caught fire, spreading to the tatami and fusuma. He’d come back, and in a panic had fetched water from the kitchen and thrown it over the room to put out the fire. Luckily he’d caught it before it had turned into something serious. It seemed that on 7 March Mr Kubo had been at home all day.

  12

  Asai’s wife hadn’t died in Takahashi Cosmetics after all; she’d already been dead when she arrived. Or at least that was what Asai deduced from the report’s contents. He was led to conclude that from the points below.

  1.The maid, Komako Hanai, had not visited the Kubo house on 7 March, and Kubo had taken that day off work. It could be assumed that he spent the whole day at home.

  2.When Ms Hanai arrived at the house on the morning of the eighth, she discovered that a section of the tatami flooring and one partition of the paper doors had been burnt. Kubo told her that his cigarette had set fire to a newspaper while he’d been in the toilet, but he’d put the fire out before it got too big. There was also evidence that water had been thrown over the gas heater.

  3.There were three buckets in the kitchen which had presumably been used to put out the fire. None of the buckets was dry – they all had water in the bottom.

  4.There was a level 3 earthquake in Tokyo at 3.25 p.m. on 7 March. The newspaper had characterized it as strong enough to cause objects to fall off shelves, and wrote that “many people ran out into the street”.

  5.In another newspaper Asai had read the following: “From the evening of the 6th and lasting all day of the 7th, a cold front will pass through the Kanto area. Temperatures will be around three degrees cooler than average. There is a possibility of snow in mountainous areas.”

  6.Konosuke Kubo’s hobby was collecting traditional handcrafted toys. According to Ms Hanai, there were paper kites from all over the country decorating the walls and hanging from the ceiling of the drawing and living rooms.

  7.In his collection was a Yamaga lantern from Higo.

  8.There were no specialist shops or department stores in the Tokyo area that sold or displayed Yamaga lanterns. (Asai had researched this himself after reading
the report.) He had found department stores that had exhibited products from Kumamoto Prefecture or the Kyushu area, but none of them had ever displayed a Yamaga lantern.

  9.Eiko’s haiku had featured a Yamaga lantern. She must have seen it at Konosuke Kubo’s house. In a separate haiku she had written about a Somin Shorai amulet. Asai presumed this was also part of Kubo’s collection.

  10.Ms Hanai had observed that Konosuke Kubo and Chiyoko Takahashi were only on the most basic of neighbourly terms, exchanging no more than greetings when they happened to meet. Ms Takahashi had never been inside Kubo’s house.

  That was it. Combine these ten separate pieces of data, and what other conclusion could be drawn?

  According to her sister Miyako, Eiko had left home at one in the afternoon on 7 March. She must have gone to Kubo’s house.

  The maid, Ms Hanai, had told the investigator that she had three days off per month, but these were not on any set day of the week. Kubo mostly told her two or three days in advance when she wouldn’t be needed. Obviously he was making sure that she wasn’t around on the days when Eiko was visiting. Each time Kubo and Eiko met they probably made plans for their next meeting.

  Elsewhere in the report, it was written that Kubo sometimes returned home from work in the middle of the day and let Ms Hanai leave early. These must also have been days that he was expecting Eiko. Three times a month on the maid’s day off wasn’t very often for a clandestine affair.

  How had Eiko and Kubo met? He hadn’t figured out that part of the puzzle yet. He’d have to hear that directly from Kubo. But that was beside the point. The result was all he really needed to consider.

  In the beginning, Asai had believed his wife had gone to a couples’ hotel with another man, even going so far as to ask at all three of the hotels on the top of the hill in Yoyogi, but now that he realized that she had been meeting her lover at the house where he lived alone, he saw how much more secure an arrangement that was. Unlike a hotel, there were no employees to see their faces, and no danger of running into other guests on the way in. It was a huge house with a garden separating it from the buildings on either side. You could make a lot of noise without anyone hearing you.

  Ms Hanai had reported that there was one room in the house that she had not been permitted to clean. She’d thought it was the bedroom belonging to his wife up in the sanatorium in Nagano, but what if it had been the master bedroom? If that were the case, then it would contain either two single beds or one double bed. As Kubo’s wife was away, who was using the other bed, or the other half of the double? Kubo must have cleaned that room himself. Ms Hanai had wrongly suspected that it contained some kind of valuable item that her client didn’t want an employee to handle. But that wasn’t the case – Kubo obviously didn’t want the maid to discover what he’d been up to in there.

  At first, Asai found it very hard to imagine Eiko going to Kubo’s house. He knew her in the role of wife, but the Eiko who was intimate with Kubo was not Eiko the wife but Eiko the woman. A woman he didn’t know at all. A woman who had pleaded illness in order to refuse her husband’s sexual advances, then once he got used to their sexless marriage, had broken the rules that she herself had laid down. And she’d gone outside the marriage to break them.

  He tried to see her in this new light, but as she’d always been at home when he came back from work, it was impossible to imagine. His personal experience of living with his wife was in total contrast to the unsavoury image in his head.

  Was it his attempt to see things in a positive light? Or just the bravado of a man who didn’t want to play the role of cuckolded husband?

  As Asai now knew, at 3.25 p.m. on 7 March there had been an earthquake in Tokyo, one strong enough for objects to have fallen from shelves. A pre-war home such as Kubo’s must have been shaken to its foundations. It was easy to picture one of the paper kites coming loose and falling on the gas heater. Normally there wouldn’t have been any call for a heater in mid-afternoon in early March, but Asai had read a report that had mentioned a cold front passing through that day. The heater must have been on in order for the dislodged kite to have landed on the flame before falling.

  Where in the house had Kubo and Eiko been at the time? What had they been doing? He didn’t want to think about it. What he did know was the fire had been discovered relatively quickly and extinguished before it had done too much damage.

  But how could Asai know for sure that his wife and Kubo were together at the time? The key was in the detective agency’s report. The maid, Ms Hanai, had testified that she’d found three buckets, still wet, when she’d arrived the next day. For Asai, this was absolute proof.

  A single person trying to extinguish a fire would use one bucket, or, at the most, two. In a state of panic, it’s normal to fill one bucket and run towards the fire, emptying the water over the flames. But of course just one bucketful wouldn’t be enough to extinguish it completely. The flames would recede momentarily but then flare up again, jumping to any places that hadn’t been properly soaked. By yourself, you’d have to rush back to the water source, refill your bucket as quickly as possible, and then return to the fire. In your hurry you wouldn’t have time to fill a second bucket – maybe half fill one at most?

  But what if there were two people? While one person was throwing the water on the fire, the other could be filling a second bucket. And if they moved fast enough, it might even be possible to fill a third. A conveyor line with three buckets is impossible for only one person, but perfectly doable with two. Or maybe both people were throwing the water on the flames together. Only one tatami mat and part of one door partition had been burnt, so it seemed that two people working together had kept the fire from spreading.

  That had to be it. Eiko had been right there in Konosuke Kubo’s house when the fire broke out.

  The sudden discovery of a fire in your living room – well, it’d be a shock to anyone. You’d panic. You’d have a vision of flames shooting through the roof as the house burned to the ground. Witnesses to a house fire have frequently testified that they have no memory of filling buckets and throwing them on the flames – that they moved in some sort of trance. The heart begins to pound, sending extra blood shooting through your veins; your breathing gets heavier, as if you’re running up a steep hill.

  That was it, thought Asai. That was when Eiko had had the heart attack.

  Eiko’s heart had been fragile, so much so that the doctor had advised her to avoid any excitement or shock that might affect it. And what greater trauma could there be than discovering a fire? Enough to deliver a shock even to someone with a healthy heart.

  She’d done everything possible to protect her heart. She’d even asked for her husband’s cooperation in avoiding the sex that might have harmed it. And that was how she’d gradually got him used to a life of abstinence.

  But in the last few months she’d been in great health. She’d seemed no different from any normal, healthy person. In fact, it was as if she’d forgotten about her disease completely. Although she still had a weak heart, as long as nothing triggered an attack, it wasn’t likely to affect her too much.

  When she’d seen the fire her heart had been startled, and the resulting torrent of blood had flooded her coronary artery. But her blood vessels were fragile, and the flow had been blocked.

  Eiko’s reaction would also have had a psychological cause. She must have realized her predicament right away. Firefighters would arrive on the scene; there’d be crowds of onlookers. The police and firefighters would most probably question her after extinguishing the fire:

  “Where were you, madam, when you noticed the fire?”

  “And what were you doing at that time?”

  “What is the exact nature of your relationship with Mr Konosuke Kubo?”

  “When you say close friends, exactly how close do you mean?”

  “So, madam, you only visited Mr Kubo’s home on the housekeeper’s day off, is that correct? Why did you visit him so often at a time whi
ch could so easily lead to misunderstandings?”

  “Is your husband aware of the nature of your relationship?”

  It was quite possible that these kinds of questions had been ringing in Eiko’s ears.

  And what of the gossips? There would be plenty of neighbours ready to speculate on the sight of a woman running from the burning house.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It doesn’t look like his wife.”

  “Of course it isn’t – she’s in a sanatorium up in Nagano. He lives alone these days.”

  “Oh, then that must be…”

  As the flames had filled the living room and Eiko was hurriedly filling buckets with water from the kitchen tap, passing them to Kubo to throw on the fire, her head must have been spinning from these thoughts. Maybe she’d grabbed a bucket and run into the living room, raising it high in the air and hurling the water at the flames. Extreme physical exertion paired with extreme anxiety – could there have been anything more traumatic?

  Suddenly there’d been a crippling pain in her heart. She’d collapsed to her knees, her skin soaked in a cold sweat. She’d shuddered in terror and begun to vomit.

  He’d succeeded in putting out the fire, but what had Kubo’s reaction been when he saw Eiko collapsed on the floor?

  He’d been in no position to call a doctor. How would he explain the situation?

  And how could he possibly let Eiko’s family – in other words, her husband – know what had happened? Eiko had probably mentioned her husband to Kubo. Even if he’d never actually met him, he probably knew his name, his position at the ministry, maybe even their address and home telephone number. But even if he’d known all this, how on earth was he going to explain his reason for calling? How do you ask a man to come over to your house to pick up his wife’s dead body?

  Kubo also had to think of his own wife. She may have been in a sanatorium at the time, but she was likely to get wind of the events of that day at some point. No, she was bound to – after all, there had been a fire at her house and a strange woman in a state of distress. Kubo must have thought quickly. If he’d called a doctor, then the fire and the presence of his female companion would become known. The fire department would be alerted, and all the neighbours would hear about it. It would only have been a matter of time before someone told his wife.