That was when the kidnapper’s reason for asking for an oversized suitcase became clear. He was planning to use it as a raft. For that to work, the suitcase had to be reliably buoyant.
As instructed, Amamiya had turned his car around in the car park and returned to the Kotohira bridge. As was common in depopulated areas, the bridge seemed too grand for its location. A plastic cord had been fastened to one of the mercury lamps, facing downstream on the right-hand side. Amamiya didn’t hesitate, and hurled the suitcase over the bridge towards the river, which lay some seven metres below. The momentum carried it under before it shot back to the surface and began to drift with the current. Within a few seconds, it had disappeared from sight. It was now after seven o’clock. Beyond the threshold of the lights, the uniform darkness made it impossible to distinguish between the river, the rocks or even the sky.
The handover point was no longer fixed; now, it was anywhere along the line of the river. The line stretched across ten kilometres, through the pitch black, all the way to the dam at the river’s end. The Investigative HQ wasted no time in dispatching a large number of investigators to comb the riverbanks. They knew the kidnapper had to be in hiding nearby, but where and how Shoko was remained unclear, so they couldn’t use floodlights or torches. And they had to avoid the noise that bringing vehicles and investigators to the road along the river would make.
The search parties decided they would gather at the bottom of the river, near the southern flanks of Ozatomura, and work their way quietly north up the riverbank. In the darkness, and with only instinct to guide them, the search was erratic.
The Investigative HQ had also been guilty of optimism. They had assumed that the kidnapper – like the search party – wouldn’t use a torch. That he wouldn’t be able to find or recover the suitcase as it floated downstream in the dark.
They had also trusted in their technology. The micro-transmitter fitted to the suitcase was still functioning. The receiver in the mobile command vehicle displayed a constant green pulse that trailed gradually south.
At that point, they had yet to realize their error.
Just three hundred metres down from where the suitcase had entered the river, near the right bank, was a collection of rocks known locally as Dragon’s Hollow. They formed a three-metre cave under the water. You can get sucked under here, near the right bank. The locals knew it well as a danger spot, as did canoeists and rafting enthusiasts.
The presence of Dragon’s Hollow was the reason the kidnapper had instructed Amamiya to throw the suitcase from the lamp on the right-hand side of the river. When the Investigative HQ later tested their theory in the same conditions, nine out of ten times, the suitcase had been sucked into the hollow.
The kidnapper had waited near the hollow in order to recover the suitcase. He pulled out the money, then returned the suitcase into the river a little further on. The micro-transmitters at the time weren’t accurate enough to register the brief pause as anything other than a blip.
Having secured the ransom, the kidnapper would have moved away from the river and retreated into the mountains before climbing down to a nearby village. Alternatively, it was possible he had scaled the mountain and escaped into the next prefecture. The empty suitcase, still floating down the river, had bought him all the time he needed to get away. The suitcase had continued past Ozatomura and Yasugi before finally getting caught in a fishing weir in the northern limits of City D, coming to a stop just before daybreak, at seven o’clock the next morning.
Even then, the police had been unable to act. For as long as there remained a greater than zero chance of the kidnapper showing up to retrieve the case, they couldn’t do anything more than maintain a safe distance and keep watch with binoculars; this had lasted until the weir’s owner, who had turned up a little after midday, retrieved the case himself. The sleepless game of cat and mouse had lasted twenty hours. Emperor Showa is dead. Many of the detectives, including Mikami, didn’t hear the news until late that afternoon.
The investigation ended with the worst possible result.
On 10 January, three days after the police had retrieved the suitcase, Shoko Amamiya’s dead body was found at a car dump in the city’s Satamachi district. A scrap merchant had opened the trunk of a rusty sedan after noticing some stray dogs making a noise nearby. The body was in a pitiful state. The girl’s hands had been forced behind her back, tied up with washing line; her mouth and eyes had been covered over with tape. Her throat was swollen and marked with dark purple lines, presumably from a rope.
The early days of Heisei were branded with humiliation. Alongside the rage the police felt against the kidnapper, there was for a long time the sense that Showa had been cheated of its closing days. They’d been unable to look Heisei straight on. The endless TV repeats of Emperor Showa’s funeral march seemed to symbolize the dejection of the officers involved in the Six Four kidnapping.
*
Mikami took a right.
A little further down the city road and the billboard for the Ai’ai Hair Salon would roll into view. An image flashed into Mikami’s mind – Amamiya’s face. The Kotohira bridge, pale, nebulous in the glare of the mercury lamps. The expression on Amamiya’s face hadn’t been one of despair. There was hope, bubbling to the surface. He’d handed over the ransom. His daughter would come home. He had looked like a man trying to convince himself this was true.
Earlier this afternoon, he had looked different.
His expression had been completely devoid of hope, no longer believing in anything. Amamiya hadn’t been robbed of a feeling or an idea. He had suffered the physical loss of the thing he treasured most. Distinctions such as Showa or Heisei meant nothing to him. His only fate was to drift through a world in which his daughter didn’t exist.
Mikami pressed down on the accelerator.
Ayumi is alive.
Amamiya faded a little into the distance.
Beyond a new-build housing area and an old farming village, Mikami saw the collection of plastic greenhouses glistening in the sun.
11
Mikami pulled up alongside the gravel road. The office was a shed-like building that doubled up as a flower shop. Four plastic greenhouses formed a line behind it. This was Mikami’s third visit. The last two times, he’d brought some flowers as a gift. He’d been in Second Division at the time, so they couldn’t have seen each other for close to a year.
Mikami caught sight of Mochizuki. He was just about to enter one of the greenhouses, pushing a wheelbarrow stacked high with fertilizer bags. He was still wearing the foreign-made, olive-brown jumper that had been his trademark as a detective, but with it he had on baggy trousers and wellington boots. It was a good look.
‘Mochizuki!’ Mikami called out to his back.
Having no doubt recognized his voice, Mochizuki was already grinning when his portly face turned towards him.