A Quiet Place Read online

  But Asai didn’t feel the cold; his whole body felt on fire. He was acutely aware of his own ragged breathing – his exhaled breath seemed to heat the air around him.

  In his mind, the thing he had just done was already disconnecting itself from reality. He hadn’t willed it to happen; it wasn’t premeditated, nor was it a dream he’d long held. He’d done it on impulse. His brain hadn’t engaged, and his hand had seemed to move all by itself. In that moment, all ties to his consciousness had been severed.

  The small bottle of acid had been hidden in his pocket the whole time, but he’d never really intended to use it as a weapon. Konosuke Kubo was younger than him and well-built. Asai had merely thought that if the conversation had deteriorated into a fight, he would be ready. If the physically stronger Kubo came at him, he planned to throw the contents of the bottle at him to make him back off. And that would give Asai the chance to run away. He’d put the acid into an empty bottle he’d found among Eiko’s things. It used to contain her favourite brand of hair oil. It was a small, elegant-looking bottle with a gold-coloured lid and silver label. He’d filled it with acid, pushed the stopper in tightly and then screwed the lid shut.

  When Kubo had threatened to sue Asai for blackmail, Asai had thought that his career as a civil servant was over. He’d never expected this turn of events. It had filled him with confusion and terror. He’d imagined Kubo prostrate before him, bowing his head to the dirt a thousand times and confessing his wrongdoing in a desperate, choking voice. His immediate goal was to be able to look down on his trembling adversary as he begged for Asai’s mercy and forgiveness. But he’d thought no further than this immediate objective – in other words, he hadn’t planned what to do next. Once he had Kubo down on his hands and knees he’d envisaged being free to humiliate the man at his leisure. Asai had never imagined any other outcome besides being able to watch Kubo become more and more pathetic. He’d expected to have been in a position to suggest more ways for Kubo to abase himself and he’d been looking forward to watching him do it.

  Kubo’s counterattack had been sudden and more brutal than Asai could ever have imagined. He had gone straight for the Achilles heel, and Asai was floored. The ministry was the one place where this affair could never be known about. Of course, Kubo could have been bluffing, but Asai couldn’t risk being exposed to the judgement of his superiors. It was vital to Asai that his colleagues never heard the voice of this wounded beast ranting and raging. The truth is that the explosion in Asai’s head was ignited by his instinct for self-preservation.

  It had been a great struggle to pass the entrance examination to become a civil servant. Then, once in, he had hoisted himself, rung by rung, up the ladder to where he was now. By the time he realized that it was completely pointless to rage against the absurdity and the inequality of the elitist system, he’d already made up his mind to compete against the elite by performing the work better than they ever could. He worked harder than anyone else and spent longer hours in the office. He’d spent the first ten or more years of his working life subjected to scorn and sarcasm. He studied all the rules and regulations down to the fine print, sacrificed any kind of private life to fact-finding investigations of all aspects of the manufacturing industry. The result of all this hard slog was that he was known as “The Demon” or “The Walking Encyclopaedia” of the staple foods division, and even his division chief and director respected and counted on him. He had great authority over the manufacturers – they considered him the éminence grise of the division and were intimidated by him. If he was your ally, you could ask him anything, but – rumour had it – make an enemy of him and he would be a fearsome opponent, not only of the manufacturers but within the ministry too. This hard-won reputation would crumble if Konosuke Kubo were to blab.

  And then it happened…

  His whole career flashed before his eyes – everything he’d done since entering the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. The faces of the superiors who terrified him when he was a new employee; the books of laws and regulations that he’d relentlessly read, and read again, until he had memorized every last page, and how it had felt when he could reveal to his bosses his vast knowledge of legislation; his pride when he saw the look on the face of his division chief the first time he had expressed an opinion on a complicated issue; the respect he got from the president of Yagishita Ham and the other veteran manufacturers; every event that had contributed to his increase in confidence and rise in rank to respected employee. A succession of images sped through his head, much in the way they say images from your childhood flash before your eyes right before you die.

  Asai took the bottle from his pocket. Under cover of darkness, he unscrewed the gold lid and carefully removed the stopper. Kubo, in his fury, had no idea what was happening. Asai waited until the tall figure of his adversary leaned in towards him, and then jerked the bottle upwards, drawing a semicircle in the air with his arm. In the dark, the stream of liquid that came flying out was invisible, but he heard the scream. The silhouette of the man before him clutched his hands to his face and collapsed to a crouching position.

  Squatting on the bare earth, Kubo fumbled madly in his pockets for a handkerchief and pressed it to his eyes. He didn’t get up again. Uncanny sounds came out of him, like the mewling of a newborn baby. His body spun around and around as he made to get up and then crumpled back down again. He looked like a dancer in a child’s music box, although he never once removed the handkerchief from his eyes.

  Then he began to yell.

  “Run to the sanatorium and get me an ambulance! My eyes are melting. They’re melting! My face is burning. That’s all I ask – get me an ambulance. I’m going blind. My eyes are melting – they’re running down my face! Please do something!”

  Kubo howled and sobbed, his voice no longer human.

  Asai realized some drops of the acid must have got in his eyes. He hadn’t mixed it with any water – it was neat sulphuric acid. He’d gone all the way to a chemist’s in Shinagawa, a part of Tokyo far enough from his home, claiming he needed it to unblock a toilet.

  But how could he just leave his enemy here like this? Kubo’s eyes might be destroyed, but his mouth still worked. He could still do a lot of damage to Asai.

  “All right. Just wait a minute while I fetch someone,” he said reassuringly. Checking there was no one coming, he began to feel around for a hefty stone.

  When the first rock came down on his head, Kubo’s shriek tore through the darkness, and he collapsed face down in the dirt. The white handkerchief slipped from his grasp and fluttered gently to the ground, but his hand didn’t move.

  Asai wasn’t foolish enough to pick up the same rock that he had just used to hit Kubo – it would be splattered all over with the man’s blood. It wouldn’t do to get it all over his sleeves or the front of his clothes. He went in search of a second stone. This time he didn’t need to tell Kubo to wait for him.

  Kubo lay on the ground, the rocks next to his head, a snake that had just been battered to death with three stones. Asai felt strangely calm. His principal emotion was that of relief: he’d managed to stop his enemy from talking. He gave Kubo’s leg a kick just to check. It moved a little way and then stopped – an inanimate object. Neither his head nor his body showed any signs of movement.

  Looking more closely at the man’s face, Asai was surprised to see that there was nothing visible of Kubo’s features. Darkened with blood, his face blended into the shadows. Only the three rocks, in their triangular formation around his head, gleamed faintly in the darkness.

  He turned and felt the oppressive presence of the Yatsugatake ridge looming over him. As he realized that he had done something irrevocable, a wave of intense heat spread through his whole body. He had become a killer, and it had taken only five minutes. He had never once imagined that this would be his destiny. It really didn’t suit him; the self he was familiar with would never be able to kill another person. It wasn’t in his nature; he must have accidentally
let an object fall from his hand…

  Asai set off along the main prefectural route in the direction of the station, or at least the direction he thought it was. He’d gone a dozen paces or so when he halted abruptly. All the hair on his body suddenly stood on end. He’d left the hair oil bottle lying there on the ground.

  Should he go back and pick it up? If he went back to where the corpse lay and happened to meet someone – even if he got the bottle and only happened to pass somebody on his way back – and they got a look at his face, a few days later his identikit picture might end up as an important clue in the investigation.

  He looked around him. No vehicles or pedestrians in sight. Even this prefectural highway (or at least that was what Asai assumed it was) was utterly deserted. So there was even less reason to think there might be anyone on one of the minor turn-offs into the mountains. Still, it really wasn’t safe to assume anything; the worst luck can hit you at the most unexpected of moments.

  In the end he decided to leave it. It was a pretty common brand of hair oil, made in Japan. Eiko had generally had expensive tastes, but this particular range, made by S-Pharmaceuticals, wasn’t one of the more exclusive imported brands. They must sell bottles of this product in the tens of thousands every day all over Japan. On top of that, the bottle he’d used was an old one that Eiko had already emptied. She must have bought it over a year ago, somewhere in Tokyo. He’d examined it closely before filling it with the acid; it had no distinguishing characteristics, and the label was quite worn.

  And anyway, this was Nagano Prefecture. If the police decided to use the bottle as a clue, they’d start by questioning people in the neighbourhood. Just because the victim was from Tokyo, there was no reason to assume that he had been followed here by someone with the intention of murdering him. He didn’t expect the investigating officers to ask S- Pharmaceuticals about their sales of hair oil right off the bat. And when they did, he was sure when they heard how many millions of bottles had been sold in the many thousands of shops all over the country, the officer in charge would have no option other than to thank them and take his leave.

  No, there was no point in letting the seeds of doubt put down roots in his mind. Better to dig them out right away.

  But he wasn’t completely out of danger yet; the unexpected could happen. If he ran into someone, for example, he’d be done for. Best to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.

  Asai was horrified to find himself thinking this way. Wasn’t this the way a murderer would think? Even without a plan, even though it hadn’t happened of his own free will, there was no doubt that he had committed a crime. A perfectly normal wave had suddenly upended him at the water’s edge, and before he knew it his whole body had been dragged out to the open sea. Had it been the result of carelessness, or a mistake? Whatever the case, he felt as if he had been swallowed up by a huge, dark wave of absurdity. He had been controlled by the exterior forces of nature.

  He was able to describe his feelings in this way, but Asai still hadn’t acknowledged to himself that he was guilty. He was dissatisfied by the outcome; it wasn’t at all what he had set out to achieve. For example, had his intention been to kill Kubo, he’d have felt some measure of satisfaction just from having tried, even if he’d failed. But is there any satisfaction to be gained from killing someone on impulse? Apparently not.

  This wasn’t about avenging Eiko after all. If he’d been after revenge for her death, there was no need to go that far. He realized he hadn’t been that deeply in love with her. There was no call to commit a grievous crime in the name of a woman you didn’t truly love. All he’d have needed to heal the wound of Eiko’s betrayal would have been the heartfelt apology of the man she had betrayed him with. If Kubo had just thrown himself to his knees in the middle of that country road and rubbed his forehead in the dirt, begging Asai’s pardon, then nothing bad would have happened. He’d hoped for no more than that. He would have been perfectly satisfied.

  Kubo should never have gone on the attack. Driven into a corner, he had suddenly leapt back up, his claws out. If there was anything that Asai regretted, it was having pushed Kubo too hard. He knew he had gone too far, but he had enjoyed it. He had persisted in trying to hurt Kubo out of pleasure at seeing his adversary hurt more deeply than himself. And he had let the feeling get out of control.

  Asai had longed to wound his rival more deeply than he’d been wounded by him, but not to the point of smashing his skull open with a rock. Not to the point of leaving his blood-smeared face lying on the ground inside a triangle of three white stones. Psychological revenge would have been enough. If only Kubo had begged forgiveness…

  Asai had been running along the prefectural highway for about twenty minutes, maybe. His knees were getting weak and his legs were wobbly. He still felt as if he were in one of those nightmares where he was trying to run but getting nowhere.

  Then there were lights approaching from behind him, and he heard the noise of an engine. Asai began to tremble. They were already after him! The two bright round eyeballs got steadily bigger and more intense. The arrival of the pursuers felt exactly like the continuation of his nightmare. Had his dream world and reality become one and the same?

  He gave up running and moved over to the side of the road, but didn’t turn around. The headlights would illuminate his face and give his pursuers a clear look at him. Asai grabbed his dark glasses from his pocket and slipped them on. He had just enough sense left to think of that.

  The car pulled up beside him. His heart felt as if it were going to explode. He heard the window roll down.

  “Excuse me.”

  Asai froze.

  “Are you headed to the station?” The man’s tone was surprisingly amicable.

  “Yep.”

  From behind his dark glasses, Asai could barely make out the speaker’s face; then again, he wasn’t really trying to look. He kept his head down.

  “Great. That’s on our way. Jump in!”

  He realized there were two men in the car – the driver and someone in the passenger seat. He wondered if it was a trap. But there was no escape. Out here, there was nowhere to run to.

  He climbed into the back seat and the car set off. Asai was seated behind the driver – a broad-shouldered man in a woollen jacket. The man in the passenger seat wore a leather jacket and was smoking a cigarette. His hair was long and quite messy, which gave him a feminine look. This reassured Asai a little – these men were obviously not police – but his heart rate only slowed very slightly.

  The driver and the young man in the leather jacket resumed their conversation, but Asai couldn’t hear what they were saying. His ears were ringing. Outside, the dark silhouettes of the mountains and fields flew past.

  “What time’s your train?”

  The loud voice of the driver in the woollen jacket made Asai jump. The question had come out of nowhere. In fact, he had no idea. He’d never consulted the return train timetable. He’d been planning to spend the night either here in Fujimi or in neighbouring Kamisuwa, depending on how things went with Kubo.

  “Hmm. At this time I’ll take whichever train I can get,” he replied.

  “Back to Tokyo?”

  “Yes.”

  Damn! He should have said he was going in the other direction. Now they knew he was from Tokyo. If he’d said he was headed the other way, once they’d dropped him off at the station they’d have had no way of knowing where he was going. But it was too late. If he changed his story now, it would seem bizarre. The younger man in the passenger seat looked at his watch, then said something in a low voice to the driver.

  “It’s 9.30 now. You’ll have to wait for the eleven o’clock. It’ll get you into Shinjuku at 4.30 in the morning.”

  Asai nodded in response.

  “Were you visiting someone up at the sanatorium?”

  The driver turned the wheel to the left. There was a sharp bend in the road, and then the sparse, distant lights of the town came into view.

/>   “Yeah.”

  “It would help if the buses round here ran a bit later.”

  Asai caught sight of the driver’s white gloves gripping the wheel, and almost cried out in horror. He must have left his fingerprints on the bottle of hair oil. He sat up. He was going to have to get them to stop the car and retrace his steps. He’d been right in the first place – he should have gone back to retrieve the bottle right away.

  “So how’s business up Tokyo way?”

  “Huh?” Asai was thrown for a moment.

  “We heard the economy’s not too good right now. Us too – we’re having a hard time of it with all these forced cuts in rice cultivation. I know the folks in the city think we have it good here in the country, they think we’re making a fortune from farming, and until recently we were doing okay. But tonight we’ve just been to a meeting of the agricultural cooperative about the cuts and the new quotas, and it felt more like a funeral wake, I can tell you. Not long ago there was a union president who killed himself over these quotas.”

  These men were members of the local agricultural cooperative? He’d better be even more on his guard, Asai thought, sinking back again in his seat.

  16

  The Tokyo newspapers were filled with articles about the death of Konosuke Kubo. One paper ran with the headline “The Yatsugatake Mountain Murder Case”. Another had “Fujimi Highlands Homicide”. But the content was more or less the same.

  At around 7 a.m. on Sunday morning, on a small rural road about a mile to the east of the prefectural highway in Fujimi, Nagano Prefecture, a local resident made the grisly discovery of a dead body. The man, estimated to be around forty, had been beaten to death with a rock. An examination of the contents of a suitcase found at the scene revealed that the murdered man was Konosuke Kubo, 38, of Keyaki Mansion, Higashi Nakano in Nakano Ward, Tokyo. Time of death was estimated to have been between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Saturday evening.