‘It’s how a detective’s brain works. A solitary offender. We’re no good at imagining offenders in groups.’
Minako looked thoughtful
Whether or not the kidnapping had been perpetrated by a single offender, it was clear it had been planned in great detail, and with extreme care. And brutal cold-bloodedness.
Worse than a monster . . .
Minako opened her mouth to speak. ‘He even knew about those rocks, in the river, the hollow. What happened to the investigation into canoeists, the rafting enthusiasts?’
‘They’re still pursuing it, as far as I know. But . . . well, remember it turned out that people from a surprisingly wide area knew about the hollows.’
This had been discovered some way into the investigation. The D Daily had, only a couple of weeks before the kidnapping, printed a large feature article on ‘The Enigma of Dragon’s Hollow’ in its lifestyle section.
‘But . . .’ Minako seemed a little agitated. ‘Even if he had got the idea from reading the paper, doesn’t that just confirm the fact that he was local? They’ve been chasing this for so long. Why haven’t they found him? I wonder.’
‘Yes, well . . .’
580,000 households. 1,820,000 citizens. Mikami hadn’t forgotten the demographics in the morning’s paper. The prefecture’s total population had changed little in the last fourteen years, the flow into local cities more or less equalling the flow out from the countryside. The police had narrowed the range of potential suspects to men in their thirties or forties but that had still left more than 300,000 to investigate.
At the same time, they had had few leads. If Kenji was genuinely innocent, that meant Shoko had been abducted on the single road between her house and Kenji’s. The Neighbourhood Unit had swept the area repeatedly but had still come away without a single witness able to confirm the presence of any suspicious people or vehicles. And there hadn’t been many people around to start with. As Mikami had reaffirmed earlier in the day, the area was agricultural, with very few private residences. The date of 5 January had also helped form the vacuum. The men who worked part-time on the farms had been in their offices or at the local agricultural cooperative, while the women had been cooped up indoors, busy clearing up after the New Year.
The kidnapper had left only three items. The plastic cord wrapped around the mercury lamps on the Kotohira bridge. The tape over the girl’s face. The washing line around her wrists. Each were standard items, sold nationwide, making it effectively impossible to pin down the location of purchase. They had expected to find footprints, but even these had proved evasive. The area around Dragon’s Hollow had been composed entirely of exposed rock, while the woods next to it had been carpeted with dry leaves from the beech trees.
All they had left was the kidnapper’s voice. Since no recordings of the calls existed, the police had had to depend on the ears of the few people who had spoken with the kidnapper. Yoshio Amamiya, his receptionist Motoko Yoshida and the nine business owners and staff members who had answered the calls for Amamiya at each of the businesses en route to the ransom exchange. None of the officers on the case had heard the kidnapper’s voice. And this held true of the members of the Home Unit. The second call had come in before their arrival at the house, while the following day’s call had come into Amamiya’s office and been answered by Motoko, with no police there to witness it.
They’d been unable to listen to the calls at the various businesses. The Aoi Café had been the only venue they’d been able to reach in advance of Amamiya, and even then they hadn’t had the time to modify the phones; they’d also been wary of there being an accomplice in the café, and felt unable to do anything more than keep watch. Mikami had heard that, for the two years that followed the kidnapping, the police had called Amamiya and the others in on a regular basis to take part in ‘voice’ line-ups. People with a record of disorderly behaviour. People in heavy debt. Known criminals. Canoeists. Locals of Ozatomura. Ex-employees of Amamiya Pickles. People from Morikawa Nishi, Shoko’s primary school. Contractors for and regulars of the nine businesses. Anyone reported to be acting suspiciously. The teams investigating the case picked up anyone on the list who they deemed to have even a minuscule possibility of being a suspect and recorded their voices over the phone. They then asked Amamiya and the ten others who had heard the kidnapper’s voice to listen to the recordings several times. The majority of the recordings had been made with the relevant person’s permission, and Mikami knew that methods not dissimilar to phone tapping had been resorted to for some.
The voice of a man in his thirties or forties, slightly hoarse, with no trace of an accent. I’ll recognize it if I hear it. Amamiya had been certain. Motoko and the others had sounded confident in their ability to do the same. Despite this, Mikami had not once in fourteen years heard word that the Investigative Team had come up with a hit.
‘It’ll be difficult if the voice on the phone doesn’t lead anywhere.’
As soon as he’d said it, Mikami cursed himself. It was taboo to mention the phone. The atmosphere in the room shifted. Minako said, ‘I hope they catch him, somehow . . .’ A short while later her eyes drifted to the phone on the low stand.
Another night without the phone ringing.
The room fell silent once Minako had left to go to bed. Mikami slid under the kotatsu until the duvet reached his chest. He let out a long breath then switched on the TV. He couldn’t handle watching it when Minako was there. Runaways. Disappearances. Silent calls. Suicides. There were so many words that could just come out of nowhere, and each time he worried they might break Minako’s heart.
Maybe it was the TV that had got to Ayumi. The idea would come to him now and again. All those variety and entertainment shows, all those commercials. All united in stressing the importance of appearances. Nothing else mattered: if you looked good, you got ahead in life. Men would adore you. Doors would slide open. Your life would be one big party, they said, luring you in, sounding plausible as they claimed it was simply how everybody lived.
Mikami would find himself trying to assign the blame to those behind the screen. Ayumi had been taken into a make-believe world. But she’d been crushed under the empty promises of the tabloids, lost sight of herself.