Because he held a grudge?
It was possible. The Prefectural HQ had investigated close to seven thousand people, including relatives of Amamiya. His younger brother in particular – Kenji Amamiya – had become a prime suspect and suffered days of rigorous interrogation.
Mikami paged through the archive.
Shoko Amamiya. A first-year student at Morikawa Nishi Primary School. In the photo, she looked young enough to be in nursery. She was wearing the traditional New Year’s dress. Her hair had been braided and held together with a pink hair clip; her mouth was pursed, with bright-red lipstick. The picture had been taken at a local photographer’s one and a half months before the kidnapping, and in celebration of the Shichigosan festival. Kenji Amamiya had not attended the festivities. Following the death of their father, he had been arguing with his elder brother, Yoshio, over their inheritance. He’d been having problems with money. His business, a motorbike dealership, had been suffering cash-flow difficulties, and he had run up debts of close to 10 million yen with a local loan shark.
It was only natural that the Investigative HQ had made him a focus of their investigation. January the 5th, the day of the kidnapping. Shoko finished her lunch and left the house by herself. She had been planning to visit Kenji at his place, just a half-kilometre to the west. She had no way of knowing about his and her father’s battle over their inheritance. She had only wanted a children’s make-up kit. Uncle Kenji had always given her money as a New Year’s present, but that year he had failed to put in an appearance. Her mother, Toshiko, had warned her against going to see him, but Shoko had won her over with her smile. They lived in an area surrounded by rice paddies, but Shoko’s route had traced a path along woodland – a windbreak – which was largely obscured from view. One of the boys from her year had apparently seen her at a point halfway between her house and Kenji’s. It was the last sighting. No one saw her alive again.
Later, during the official autopsy, they found the stew she’d had for lunch that day almost entirely undigested in her stomach. That meant she had been killed not long after leaving the house. Kenji had been alone, as his wife and daughter had been out visiting her parents. In his testimony he claimed that Shoko had never turned up and that he hadn’t seen her. Despite this, the police – mostly due to a lack of any other reports of suspicious people or cars in the area – continued to treat him as the prime suspect for a long time afterwards. That wasn’t Kenji, on the phone. They had continued to treat him that way even after Amamiya had assured them otherwise. The Investigative HQ had been leaning towards a theory of multiple kidnappers. As far as Mikami knew, Kenji still wasn’t in the clear. He suspected that a number of the detectives on the case still considered him the man behind the kidnapping.
But all Mikami could do was speculate.
The investigation had been ongoing for fourteen years; his knowledge of it barely scratched the surface. He had no access to the specific details of who the police had investigated, or how those people had been cleared; he didn’t even know the degree to which Kenji remained a suspect. And when it came to guessing Amamiya’s opinion of the police for treating his brother as a potential suspect, Mikami might as well have been grasping at straws.
He leafed further through the archive.
There wouldn’t be any articles about Kenji.
Kenji’s interrogation, and the investigation surrounding him, had been limited to a select team from the Violent Crime Section. They had maintained strict confidentiality and the information had never made it into the press. What articles there had been covered only the general details of the kidnapping; no information about potential suspects – or anything key to the investigation – had ever made it into the papers. The police had, in line with the gravity of the case, imposed a gag order of the highest level. The kidnapping had also coincided with the flood of articles and reports covering the death of Emperor Showa; the result was an extreme paucity of articles, considering the seriousness of the case.
Anyway, the probability was pretty low that any of the articles held the key to bringing Amamiya out of his shell.
Mikami got up from his chair. The face of an old colleague had been hovering in his head for a while.
‘I’m going out for a bit.’
Suwa looked up from his paper. ‘Where will you be?’
‘Private business. Call me if anything changes in there.’
Suwa nodded deeply. Something to do with his daughter. His look conveyed this apparent understanding.
Surely it would only complicate matters to bring Criminal Investigations into the fray?
You are to treat this matter as confidential.
It would be close to a violation of Akama’s orders. Mikami knew things would become difficult if Akama got wind of where he was going.
Mikumo, perhaps also thinking of Ayumi, seemed unsure whether she should volunteer her services as a driver. Mikami waved to say it wasn’t necessary, then left the room with the press cuttings under his arm. Suwa ran into the corridor almost immediately afterwards. There was something awkward in it.
‘Sir, there was one other thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m planning to invite Akikawa out for drinks tonight, and . . .’ His already quiet voice fell another notch. ‘Would you mind if Mikumo joined us?’
His eyes were serious. There was even a glint of desperation there. If it hadn’t been for that, Mikami would probably have raised his hand to the man’s dumpy cheeks.
‘You can take Kuramae.’
Suwa’s gaze dropped to the floor. Mikami wasn’t sure if the curled grin at the side of the man’s mouth was a symbol of resistance or a mark of self-derision.
10
Mikami drove his car out of the station.