A Quiet Place Page 19

  Asai looked out at the landscape from the window of the agricultural cooperative’s building. It wasn’t at all frightening – after all, the man was dead, his face bloodied and surrounded by three small rocks. He remembered how the stones had gleamed faintly in the dark, while the face, smashed in and covered in blood, had been virtually invisible.

  “Come out, ghost of Konosuke Kubo! I dare you!” he silently shouted, his eyes fixed on a point in the distance. He wasn’t afraid of ghosts. He wasn’t bluffing like one of those abusive husbands who, following his poor wife’s suicide, went to stare defiantly at the place she died, daring her to return as a ghost. There was nothing to fear from the dead. And in his case, he had never meant to kill Kubo. It had just happened in the heat of the moment. Kubo had exacerbated the situation with his rage and his threats, so in a way he was responsible for his own death. Was there any reason to be afraid?

  Suddenly Asai realized that he’d been staring at the mountains for a while. Stop it. The others will think you’re weird, he thought, annoyed at himself. You have to ignore the mountains, just act normal. Don’t show you feel uneasy. Take your eyes off the mountains, now.

  This odd behaviour, this kind of obsession – maybe he was having a nervous breakdown after all. Careful, careful. Mustn’t open my mouth and blurt out something bizarre. Steady now. Act normally. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Just stay calm.

  During the whole time that he was travelling around Nagano giving his lectures, not once did he hear mention of Southeast Asia. It seemed that overseas trips were not all that unusual among agricultural cooperatives these days. Unfortunately, Japanese tour groups made up of their members had a bad reputation overseas. Still, the participants’ behaviour notwithstanding, it was clear that if there were so many international tours organized for such cooperatives, then it wasn’t all that special any more to be treated to a trip to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

  There really was nothing to trouble himself about. No one in this area cared whether Akiharu Kido or Jiro Haruta were originally supposed to be on the tour or not. As the topic of the trip never came up, there was no discussion of its participants either.

  After a very pleasant lecture tour, Asai returned on 6 April to Tokyo. His division chief thanked him for his work.

  “Well done, Asai. It seems your lectures were well-received everywhere. Great job. I got a call from the Nagano prefectural union president to say how much they appreciated your work. Thank you.”

  With that, Asai had fulfilled his obligations. If Nagano Prefecture called again to ask him to visit, he’d be able to turn them down with a clear conscience.

  The Kurosaki Machinery tour group was due to arrive back at Haneda Airport that night and return to Nagano in the morning. The schedules had worked out so that he had neatly avoided running into them.

  Everything went smoothly. Yagishita confirmed it when he came up to Tokyo three days later. He and Asai went to a nearby café to talk.

  “Mr Asai, I can report that the Kurosaki tour returned to Nagano on 7 April as scheduled.”

  “Thank you so much for arranging that.”

  Asai didn’t want to say Kido’s and Haruta’s names aloud.

  “The managing director, Yada, was glad to grant my request, so everything worked out fine. As I put in the letter, he managed to cover up the fact that they were added at the last minute, and I believe nobody suspected anything.”

  “Thank you. Thank you,” Asai repeated, bowing his head.

  “In the end, what he did was tell them they were replacements for someone who had to drop out.”

  “Replacements?”

  “Yes, well, the list had been finalized. There was no other way around it, it seems. Anyway, it was done so no one would know anything about it.”

  That had certainly been true back in Nagano, where there had been no talk of the two men. The important thing was that they had attracted no attention. Asai decided to emphasize once again that it hadn’t been his own plan.

  “I’m glad I could be of use too. The person who passed the request on to me is very satisfied with the result. Actually, he asked me to pay you the money for Kido and Haruta’s trip. How much is it altogether?”

  “No, no. That’s fine.” Yagishita waved a hand in dismissal.

  “I need to pay you back.”

  “Look, you can do that some other time.”

  “No, that’s not right. I’ll pay. I mean, not me. The money belongs to the person who asked me to sort it out.”

  Asai suspected that Yagishita intended to pay the full amount himself. At least that was what he seemed to be saying. Yagishita was first and foremost a businessman. He knew that the money would be an investment, bearing returns the next time he needed a favour from the ministry.

  The trip had cost a total of 356,000 yen for the two participants. Asai would have been grateful if Yagishita had paid the whole sum himself. He had been quite willing, in the face of danger, to part with 500,000 or even a million yen, but now that things were calm again he felt like a fool paying such a huge sum of money for two complete strangers. He’d admonished himself once before for feeling this way, but he hadn’t quite been out of the woods at that point. Now that he had nothing left to fear, it felt like a waste of money.

  “Are you sure?” asked Yagishita, leaning forward a little. “If you insist, then how about paying me half the money?”

  “Just half?”

  “One person’s travel expenses, if you like. 178,000 yen.”

  Yagishita was no longer offering to pay the whole thing. Asai wondered if it was the savvy negotiator in him coming out, or whether Asai himself had insisted too strongly on paying. Perhaps he should have played it more coolly, but he couldn’t go back now. Anyway, he had to make out that the money wasn’t his, that it had come from his mysterious client.

  “Are you okay with that?” Asai produced an envelope from his jacket pocket and discreetly counted the 10,000-yen bills inside.

  “Sure. If it was your money then I wouldn’t accept it, but as it came from someone else, I’ll just take half.” The broad grin on Yagishita’s face seemed to suggest that he’d be fine with Asai using the other half of the sum as pocket money.

  Asai handed him seventeen of the 10,000-yen notes, and then, having no smaller notes to make up the exact amount, he added one more 10,000 note. But Yagishita tried to return it.

  “Sorry, I don’t have any change either. Don’t worry, 170,000 is enough.”

  “No, I couldn’t… I mean —”

  “Come on, Mr Asai. What’s a little 10,000-yen bill between friends?”

  Akiharu Kido and Jiro Haruta were extremely grateful to have been chosen to participate in a tour of Southeast Asia sponsored by Kurosaki Machinery, even if they did only make the cut as replacements. Kido wasn’t exactly one of the more powerful officials at the Fujimi agricultural cooperative. He was just an ordinary member of the council. Haruta was no more than a junior clerk in the cooperative’s sales department. They were delighted to have the opportunity to travel abroad in the company of so many influential people from various districts throughout Japan. At the same time, they were puzzled at the imbalance in status between the others and themselves.

  That said, the men made no connection between the invitation and any criminal intent. On the contrary: they wanted to find out who had been thoughtful enough to offer them this preferential treatment so they could thank him properly. They were honest, dutiful types.

  As soon as they returned to Nagano, the two men wrote a letter to the managing director of Kurosaki Machinery, the most senior of the people who came to see the group off at Haneda Airport. The letter was handed to him in person by one of his staff members.

  In his reply, Mr Yada made it clear that it was Mr Yagishita, the president of Yagishita Ham in Kobe, who had been responsible for getting the two men on the tour, and that Yagishita had paid their costs personally. He felt obliged to admit that it hadn’t been his own company
that had paid for the two men, and to let them know of the other man’s generosity.

  Naturally, Kido and Haruta did the right thing. They set off immediately for Kobe, to thank Yagishita personally for his kindness and take him a souvenir they had purchased in Hong Kong. All the while, they couldn’t grasp why someone with whom they had absolutely no connection had taken it upon himself to pay for their overseas travel.

  Yagishita, for his part, was embarrassed when the two men entered his office and bowed so low to him. He’d only paid half of their travel expenses; in other words, only one of the two men was in debt to his kindness. Asai had paid for the other one, and it pained Yagishita to have both men thank him so wholeheartedly.

  And with that, Yagishita broke his promise to Asai. He explained that their real benefactor was Assistant Division Chief Tsuneo Asai at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. You couldn’t really blame Yagishita. It was too uncomfortable for him to accept the effusive thanks from the two men all by himself.

  “But you really don’t need to thank Mr Asai. He was asked to do the favour by someone else, who insists on remaining anonymous. I’ll contact Mr Asai myself to let him know how grateful you are.”

  But Kido and Haruta really were conscientious types. Even more so when they heard that their secret benefactor was an assistant division chief at the Ministry of Agriculture. On their way back from Kobe, they didn’t change trains at Nagoya to head up to Nagano. They stayed on board and travelled straight to Tokyo.

  Arriving in Kasumigaseki around three in the afternoon, they went up to the reception desk at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Presenting their business cards, they requested a meeting with Assistant Division Chief Tsuneo Asai. After being asked to wait a while, the reply came that Mr Asai was very busy and wouldn’t be able to meet with them.

  However, their sense of obligation was very strong. They thought it would be impolite just to leave a letter of thanks, and decided to wait in the reception area until Asai left the ministry at the end of the day. Country folks are incredibly patient. Asai had absolutely no idea that they would wait for him, and assumed the two men would have left long ago. So much so that he didn’t even bother to slip out of the back door but instead came walking out through the main foyer with all the other employees at the normal finishing time of 5.40 p.m.

  The receptionist, feeling sorry for the two men who had waited so long, pointed Asai out to them. They tried to approach him, but there was such a crowd of people leaving the ministry that they couldn’t get to him right away. In the confusion, Asai ended up outside. The two men rushed after him, and Akiharu Kido called out.

  “Mr Asai! Mr Asai!”

  Asai stopped abruptly and turned around.

  Kido approached Asai, who seemed frozen to the spot, his features petrified. Haruta came up and joined him. The two men bowed in unison.

  “Are you Assistant Division Chief Tsuneo Asai? I’m Akiharu Kido from the Fujimi agricultural cooperative. This is my colleague, Jiro Haruta. We enquired after you at the reception desk but heard you were very busy. However, we really wanted to meet you, so we decided to wait —”

  In the middle of Kido’s greeting a very odd thing happened. Asai suddenly let out a bizarre scream, as if he’d been physically assaulted, and set off running. He ran fast, his body leaning forward at such a sharp angle that he almost dropped his briefcase.

  Dumbfounded, the two men watched him take off. What was going on? What had they done? They hadn’t a clue, but out of the vague idea that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding between Asai and themselves, they took off after him, Kido yelling as he ran.

  “Mr Asai! Mr Asai! Wait! Just a minute!”

  But instead of stopping, Asai ran even faster. At this time of the evening, there were crowds of people coming out of the other ministries in Kasumigaseki, and heads were turning to look. It was mid-April, around six o’clock in the evening; the light had faded and night was setting in. As he continued to flee, the headlights of passing cars lit Asai from the rear.

  Giving up the chase, the two men stopped and watched him make his deranged getaway. But that figure in the headlights – they had a similar memory from not so long ago… The hurrying figure, backlit by their headlights, on the prefectural highway near Yatsugatake. That night on their way home from a meeting… Didn’t Mr Asai have the exact same curve to his back?

  “No! It couldn’t have been the assistant division chief, could it?”

  Kido and Haruta talked about the incident all the way home on the train, and even more once they were back in Nagano. They weren’t sure what to believe.

  The rumour quickly reached the Fujimi police, who made their move. Investigators came to Tokyo to question Tsuneo Asai as to where he had been on the night of Konosuke Kubo’s murder.

  There may not have been prints left on the hair oil bottle – in fact, there was a complete absence of material or physical evidence – but the police knew that investigating a suspect’s alibi was the way to break a case. They knew from experience that it never failed.