A Quiet Place Read online

  “Could I have your name, please?”

  “Asai.”

  “Are you a relative of this other patient?”

  “Yes. She was my wife.”

  “How can we help you?”

  “I’d like to meet with the doctor in person, if possible.”

  “Do you have the patient’s card with you?”

  “The patient’s deceased.”

  The nurse looked at Asai for a few moments, then disappeared from the window.

  About ten minutes later, the fat, bespectacled doctor came out into the waiting room. He appeared to be in his forties, and his skin looked quite good for his age. He smelled faintly of whisky. He’d obviously grabbed his white coat in a hurry; the collar was still standing up. The coat made Asai think of Chiyoko Takahashi.

  The doctor looked wary. He probably thought a grieving husband had come to accuse him of killing his wife.

  Asai got out his business card. The doctor read his job title, but he didn’t relax his guard at all. He fetched a wooden chair and placed it across from the sofa where Asai was sitting.

  “Mr Asai, could you tell me when it was I saw this patient?” He was carefully polite.

  “About two weeks ago. But first I must explain that she wasn’t one of your patients. She suffered a heart attack when she was out walking, and ran into a shop – Takahashi Cosmetics – just down the street from here. The owner was kind enough to call you for help.”

  The doctor nodded in recognition.

  “I thought it might be about that lady. I couldn’t think of anyone else it might have been.”

  Asai supposed he meant that he couldn’t think of any other patients he’d killed recently. Meanwhile, Doctor Ohama’s expression relaxed slightly. It seemed that Ms Takahashi had been telling the truth. Ohama had been there when Eiko passed away.

  “When you arrived, Doctor, was my wife already gone? I was away on a business trip in Kansai at the time, so I don’t know the full details. I only heard about it third-hand, so to speak.”

  “You have my sympathies.” The doctor bowed his head, but it was a mere formality. “When I was called to Ms Takahashi’s place, an emergency case had just arrived here at the clinic, and I couldn’t leave immediately. It must have been about twenty minutes before I was able to get away. I’m afraid to say by that time your wife had already passed away. Her pupils were dilated and her heart had stopped beating. There was nothing I could do.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been possible to give her a camphor injection, or any other kind of emergency treatment?”

  “Camphor?”

  The doctor’s expression hardened. This was probably the one he used when dealing with complaints from the angry family members of a deceased patient.

  “Do you imagine that kind of treatment would be any good to a patient who’s no longer alive? When I arrived, she was lying in the tatami room at the back of the shop and she was already dead.”

  “What time did you arrive?”

  “I checked my watch. It’s very important to do that. It was 4.35 in the afternoon on the seventh of March. Actually, I checked my records just before I came out to see you. She wasn’t my patient, but I issued her death certificate anyway.”

  “I received the certificate, thank you. I’d like to ask you about the time of death shown. It says ‘around 4.05 p.m.’ You say you arrived at Takahashi Cosmetics at 4.35 p.m. and confirmed that she was dead. In that case, was it just your assumption that my wife had passed away thirty minutes earlier?”

  “I wasn’t actually witness to her moment of passing. According to Ms Takahashi, your wife had taken her last breath about thirty minutes before I arrived. So that is what I went by. That’s why I didn’t write ‘4.05 precisely’. I put ‘around 4.05’.”

  The doctor spoke vehemently, and the expression on his face was clearly meant to emphasize that there had been no error on his part.

  “I completely understand; I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel uncomfortable. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m simply asking whether my wife’s time of death was precisely 4.05 or not. For example… how shall I put it… when you examined my wife’s body, did it appear to you that she had died thirty minutes previously?”

  Doctor Ohama undid his white coat and produced a cigarette case from his shirt pocket.

  “As I said, I was not the attending physician at the time of your wife’s death. And therefore, even though I can say she had only just passed away, it’s impossible for me to tell you the exact hour, minute and second of her death.”

  He drew on his cigarette. Asai smiled slightly, hoping to make the doctor feel less threatened.

  “That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if there was anything strange or unnatural about her having died thirty minutes before you got there.”

  The doctor looked offended again.

  “No, there wasn’t anything strange about it at all.”

  “I mean, what if it hadn’t been thirty minutes earlier? If it had been, say, forty minutes, would you be able to make that distinction?”

  “Forty minutes earlier? Hmm. I’m not sure. All I could do was trust the word of Ms Takahashi, who had been with her at the time.”

  “Of course; that’s only natural. But in this case I’m asking if there could have been any discrepancy in what Ms Takahashi told you. In your professional opinion, that is.”

  “Was there anything suspicious about your wife’s death?” The doctor narrowed his eyes, and looked a little cagey.

  “No, nothing suspicious. My wife had a weak heart. However, it had been years since she’d suffered a heart attack. I was told that she’d had a sudden coronary walking up that hill, but I felt that her death seemed very quick.”

  “No, that would have been about right. Thirty minutes before I examined her; forty at the most. Probably not as long as an hour. If I had been able to get there a little quicker I might have been able to try and massage her heart. There have been cases with a heart attack where the patient’s heart was restarted by massage, but I’m sorry to say in your wife’s case there was no hope.”

  “So, doctor, what you’re saying is that there’s an outside chance that she died an hour before you arrived? That would only be thirty minutes earlier than the time of death you wrote on her death certificate.”

  “Thirty minutes earlier? Yes, well, I suppose it’s possible. Definitely within an hour of her death, anyway. But that’s the absolute maximum. After an hour, it becomes much easier to determine the exact time of death. The body begins to cool rapidly, and in some cases where rigor mortis sets in early, you can find it in the muscles around the jaw, but your wife wasn’t in that state. And so I based the time of death on what Ms Takahashi told me. You understand there was nothing else I could have done?”

  Asai nodded solemnly.

  “Of course. You couldn’t have done anything differently.”

  “If there had been anything at all suspicious, I’d have called the police and had an autopsy done. But she wasn’t a patient I normally treated, and her death appeared to be from natural causes. Though it was sudden, of course.” The doctor frowned, as if insulted that Asai was questioning his medical prowess.

  “And as Ms Takahashi pointed out, this was a lady, and she felt sorry for her having to undergo any further examination. So given that it clearly wasn’t an accidental death, I agreed, and wrote out the death certificate.”

  His tone was patronizing and suggested that Asai was somehow indebted to him.

  Asai bowed deeply. “Thank you for all you did for her.”

  Back out on the road, he lingered a while, deciding whether to go further up or back down. In his head he was going over the conversation he’d just had with the doctor. The idea that the time of death could have been thirty minutes off was nagging at his brain. In this case, the doctor had relied on Chiyoko Takahashi’s word when making his judgement. Asai couldn’t call it a mistake; it would be more accurate to think of it as a margin of error.

>   If he walked uphill, he’d be able to visit the hotel he hadn’t been to yesterday. However, his interest had been piqued by the fact that Takahashi Cosmetics had been closed when he’d passed by in the taxi, so he started off downhill instead.

  In less than five minutes he was in front of the boutique. The front door and the display window were blocked off with a heavy brown curtain. He understood why the shop might have been closed the previous evening, but he wondered why it was shut today. There was no notice in the window. And there was no sign of the proprietor. Maybe because she was on her own she was free to open or close the boutique at will.

  Nobody was on the street. It was a typical peaceful afternoon in a residential neighbourhood. He remembered what the young maid at Hotel Midori had said. It had been a quiet moment like this when she had passed Eiko in the street. In her story, it had been around two o’clock. It was just after one now.

  Asai approached the front door of the boutique and peered in through the gap between the curtains. The opening was very small, and all he could see was the dark interior and the faint glint of metal from something in the nearest showcase. It didn’t look as if Chiyoko Takahashi was there. He continued to spy, hoping to see a sign of movement inside.

  Then, feeling a presence behind him, he turned away from the window. About ten yards further up the hill there was someone watching him. It was a tall man, maybe in his thirties, wearing a grey sweater and pale-coloured trousers, with a German shepherd on a lead. The man, obviously a local resident out walking his dog, was staring at him suspiciously. The light was behind the man, so Asai couldn’t make out his features; all he could tell was that he had a long face and wore glasses.

  Afraid that he would be mistaken for a prowler or a thief checking out a target, Asai moved ever so casually away from the door.

  8

  All of Asai’s investigations after that came to nothing. He took Eiko’s photo to the Hotel Mori, but no one remembered having seen her. He even visited one other place, a small, Japanese-style inn a little further off the route, but again, no luck.

  On his way up and back down the hill he checked out Takahashi Cosmetics. This time the boutique was open. He could see Chiyoko Takahashi in her white coat, but he wasn’t brave enough to go inside. He didn’t have any excuse to talk to her; they weren’t on close enough terms for him to say he’d just dropped by because he happened to be in the neighbourhood. And he certainly couldn’t pretend he was there to buy make-up. The only reason he could possibly be there was that he was obsessively attached to any trace of his dead wife.

  As time passed, the story he’d heard from the maid began to seem less real to him. Taken out of context, it was no proof of anything. After all, the young woman didn’t know Eiko; the two had never even spoken. Having a good memory didn’t mean she couldn’t have been mistaken about the identity of the woman in the photograph. After all, that day was probably the first time Eiko had been on the premises of the cosmetics boutique.

  Although he hadn’t given up all hope, Asai decided for now to forget about the hill and everything that was on it. Maybe something would pop up again sometime in the future that offered a clue to what had happened to Eiko. He just had to be patient. There was no point in rushing things. Just like at work – sometimes if he simply waited and didn’t go chasing after solutions to the most challenging problems, they’d come to him of their own accord.

  And anyway, he had his job. He really didn’t have time to investigate all the circumstances of his wife’s death. And it was exhausting to keep going back to it a little bit at a time. It called for continuity, persistence. And so, promising himself that he would give it his full attention if there were any developments, he decided to concentrate on his work for the time being. He was the most experienced person in his section. Even the division chief depended on him completely.

  And then, five months after the trail had gone cold on the hill in Yoyogi, there was a development.

  It was August. Within his section, people were planning their summer holidays. Asai thought he’d ask for the last week in September. He didn’t like to take his leave during the hottest weather. He had no interest in going to the mountains or the sea. He’d never been much into sports, and he didn’t have any kids to pester him to take them.

  Asai had been deliberately vague about the time he wanted off, and had no specific plans. There was nowhere he really wanted to go. To tell the truth, he was busy at work and didn’t really mind giving up his holidays. He’d always been like that; he enjoyed working. Relaxing was for the idle. Asai supposed that from an outsider’s point of view he must have seemed like a very boring kind of husband.

  One day towards the end of August, Asai was on the underground. He wasn’t like the young people today, commuting by car. He hated the traffic – it made him irritable and wasted time. It was much cooler and quicker by train. He opened the weekly news publication that he’d just bought at the station. There was a special feature: How many people would perish if a massive earthquake were to hit Tokyo? That’s right, thought Asai, five days from now it’ll be 1 September – Disaster Prevention Day. Every year the newspapers and weeklies were full of these kinds of articles. Asai wasn’t old enough to have experienced the Great Kanto Earthquake.

  On 1 September 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake hit. In Tokyo its magnitude was 7.9 on the Richter scale; 6 on the Japanese scale. It took the lives of 600,000 residents; in fact, far more died in the ensuing fires than were crushed to death in the quake itself. The current population of Tokyo is twelve million, about three times what it was in 1923. Tokyo today has a high concentration of high-rise buildings, and densely packed residential areas in which multi-unit apartment blocks proliferate. And it is forever expanding. If, for example, an earthquake of the exact same magnitude as 1923 were to strike present-day Tokyo, just how many victims would it claim? We took the predictions of several eminent authorities and prepared…

  Because this was a disaster that could happen to anybody, the article was trying to stir up a mix of curiosity and unease in its readers. It also included lessons about what to do when the critical moment came.

  Asai rested the back of his head against the train window and kept reading. He was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and tie. He’d folded his jacket neatly and placed it on his lap. It was vital to have a jacket with you, even in the middle of summer, in case you had to meet an important client. And the tie was a mark of dignity among government officials at the ministry.

  The article went on to say that if an earthquake the size of the Great Kanto one were to hit today, at least 560,000 people would be killed. According to different data, the number might reach one million. Of these, only around two thousand would be crushed by falling structures; the rest would die in fires, a repeat of the past.

  In the worst possible scenario, the roads would become jammed with traffic, preventing people from escaping on foot. Because of huge crowds of people all trying simultaneously to escape, getting away by car would be an impossibility. There’d be jostling between pedestrians and drivers. Fights would break out. Everything would be overcome by fire and smoke, and there’d be nowhere left to run. Human beings would be burned alive.

  Cars would catch fire, too. All along the streets, vehicles would start exploding. It would be as if petrol tanks had been lined up along all the streets of Tokyo. And the petrol stations as well. Every five hundred yards or so throughout the city each petrol station would ignite, adding to the fires. It was possible that more people would die from these fires than from being trapped inside a burning building. This was something that hadn’t happened in 1923.

  Throughout the city there were designated evacuation points, in parks, schools and the grounds of shrines or temples, but they wouldn’t be able to accommodate the flood of people. Many would be burned before they even got there. The only thing this kind of evacuation plan was good for was to reassure people that there were measures in place. The underground gas lines that cr
isscrossed the city would be exposed by cracks in the ground and shoot flames into the air.

  This is not a fairy tale. There is a real chance that this kind of extreme disaster could occur. Almost half a century has passed since the Great Kanto Earthquake. Everyone lives in fear of what might happen. This year alone, there have already been twenty-three earthquakes that could be detected by humans. Eleven of these measured 2 on the Japanese scale, and three measured 3. Of these, the level 3 earthquake that hit on 7 March at 3.25 in the afternoon caused many objects to fall off shelves. A significant number of people ran out into the street. Even though top experts claim that this is not a sign that the big one is imminent, the citizens of Tokyo cannot be reassured by words alone. There is no such thing as an absolute guarantee.

  Asai went about his working day as usual. But that morning, something was bothering him and affecting his ability to concentrate: the newspaper article predicting the massive earthquake in Tokyo. Well, not the whole thing. It had been just one short phrase buried in the middle of the scaremongering article that had disturbed him: “… the level 3 earthquake that hit Tokyo on 7 March at 3.25 in the afternoon…”

  He’d been in Kobe on 7 March, so he hadn’t been aware there had been an earthquake in Tokyo. Doctor Ohama had estimated his wife’s time of death at around 4.05 p.m. that day. Was there some link between the earthquake and Eiko’s death?

  Asai pondered this possible connection. He wouldn’t have said that Eiko was particularly afraid of earthquakes. If you lived in Tokyo, you got used to them. Even with the heart trouble that she had, the shock of a tremor probably wasn’t enough to trigger a heart attack. He couldn’t recall her ever panicking before when an earthquake had hit.

  Asai went downstairs to get lunch at the staff canteen. As he ate his curry and rice, he decided to ask a question of the young man sitting across from him, sipping a glass of cream soda.

  “Have you read that article in the latest edition of R-Weekly predicting a huge earthquake in the Tokyo area?”