The sunlight filtering through the gaps in the curtains awoke her, and as she realized it wasn't real sunlight, her consciousness gradually roused itself. It must be artificial light. The lights installed on the cave ceiling. Yozuki Asahina slowly got out of bed and opened the curtains to confirm her hypothesis.
An inn in a cold village in a cave in Okutama – Yatsuwako Village. Yozuki had gotten lost while searching for UMA and was now staying at the inn. Kasumi Kuzushiro, who had accompanied her, was missing. She'd heard that the bridge connecting the two villages was destroyed, so she guessed he'd spent the night at the Monokaki mansion. In that case, there was no reason to worry.
After getting ready, she went to the inn's dining room for breakfast , where Okamibara bowed her head and said “I am very sorry.”
“Breakfast isn't quite ready yet. Please wait a little longer.”
She took a look at her watch and saw that it was just before 8:00 A.M. Yozuki wasn't a morning person, but she'd gotten up pretty early today. She hadn't realized how on edge she was. Or maybe she'd actually slept too soundly and achieved the mythic status of “no longer tired”.
“Well, then, I'm gonna go for a walk.”
With that, Yozuki made her way to the inn's entrance, slipped on her sneakers, and went outside. The lights on the ceiling of the cave appeared to be adjusted depending on the time, and right now it was exactly as bright as an early summer morning. However, since the cave didn't get any genuine sun, it was much cooler than the outside. The roads in the village were paved with asphalt, and as she walked around and look here and there, she noticed that every house she saw had its front door wide open. Every single door on the box-shaped houses that symbolized Yatsuwako Village. As she tilted her head in confusion, she passed a police officer pushing a bicycle beside him. He looked pretty old, but since he hadn't retired yet, he must have been younger than he looked.
Yozuki gave a slight bow and said “Good morning.” The man replied “Good morning.” Then he stared at her for a spell before saying “Haven't seen you around here before.”
Yozuki shrugged.
“Is that so?”
“Yep, definitely haven't. You wouldn't forget a beauty like yourself.”
“I... guess that's true.”
Yozuki couldn't very well disagree with that.
“The truth is, I'm a traveler,” said Yozuki. “And also lost.”
“Yer lost?”
“Yes. Actually, I originally came to Okutama looking for New Nessie, but I got lost. Then I ran into Camembert, who was out looking for wild rabbits.”
Yozuki regaled the policeman with her entire life story leading up to her arrival in the village. After hearing it, the policeman said “I see, that must have been tough.” He sounded a bit congratulatory.
“Yeah, but, how should I put it...” Yozuki replied as she looked around the area. “This village has a really nice atmosphere, so I'm glad I came. I almost want to stay here forever.”
Yozuki said that to be polite, then chuckled at her own words.
“Not that I could go home even if I wanted to,” she mumbled to herself.
That was because the village was currently cut off from the outside world by the cure of Yatsuwako Myojin. Yozuki wasn't there to see, but apparently a young man who'd tried to leave the village was burned to death by the curse. He'd suddenly started suffering before spewing a pillar of fire from his mouth. It was a story that was hard to believe, but if it was true, it certainly didn't sound like something that a human could do. It wasn't surprising the villagers believed in the curse.
The Yatsuwako Myojin Festival. For the eight days that the festival was held, no one was to leave the village. After what had happened, no one in the village would violate that taboo, and even as an outsider, Yozuki felt the same way. Of course, Yozuki wasn't convinced there was actually a curse, but she also wasn't brave enough to say “Well, I'll go out and try it!” She was a “second mouse” kind of girl. It just wasn't worth the risk, especially if the risk was burning to death. So, like the other villagers, Yozuki was trapped by the village's curse, and the village became a closed circle from which nobody could escape.
Well, it would be a different story if someone from outside the village noticed something was wrong and called the police, but...
“That's pretty unlikely,” the policeman said with a sour face. “After all, people usually don't visit around here. Trucks with food and daily necessities come by twice a month, every fifteen days or so, but the last one was five days ago. In other words, the next truckload will come by in nine days.”
By then, the Yatsuwako Myojin Festival would be over, so the curse should have lifted and people could leave freely. In other words, rather than hoping for help, it would be better to quietly wait out the curse.
Then, as if he'd just remembered something, the police officer took off his cap, nodded to Yozuki, and said
“Ah, sorry, ma'am, I forgot to introduce myself. The name's Chusaita.”
“Mr. Chusaita is chusai (stationed).”
“Yep, that's right. I've been stationed in this village's police box for about five years now. It's usually such a peaceful place...”
It was definitely rare for serious crimes to take place in a rural area like this. But then, like some sort of cosmic prank, a murder and a case of human combustion that appeared to be the work of a curse occurred.
As Yozuki thought that, she decided to take the opportunity to ask something that had been bothering her for a while now.
“By the way, why do all the houses in the village leave their doors open?”
Looking around, she saw that the boxy houses all had their iron front doors left open. In response, Chusaita said “Because of the kazeitachi.” The kazeitachi... a wind monster from the region's folklore.
“Yes, the kazeitachi. Kazeitachi mostly appear at night, and they're able to sneak in through tiny gaps in a home and attack the people inside. So to keep them out, all the houses in the village have their walls plastered over until they're airtight. The front doors are also airtight and made of metal, and at night, they're kept shut tight while the inhabitants sleep. But there's a major drawback there. The houses have such poor ventilation that if the doors are left shut overnight, the residents sleeping inside will use up all the oxygen. So by leaving the doors open during the day, the air inside the house is replenished, and the people don't suffer from oxygen deprivation.”
Yozuki thought that made sense, but at the same time, it was a strange custom. They sacrificed the all important ventilation of their homes to protect themselves from wind youkai, which were mere superstition.
“Maybe it's just the nature of the area. The people of this village are very religious,” said Chusaita, “whether it's the kazeitachi or the curse of Yatsuwako Myojin. We're so devout that people from the neighboring villages mock us, calling us 'followers of the Church of Yatsuwako from Yatsuwako Village.' Well, there's no such thing as the Church of Yatsuwako, but that's how it looks to the neighbors.”
Even if he said that, from the outside, it did look a bit like one of those new religious movements. Well, people without religious motives wouldn't spend hundreds of years living in a limestone cave.
Then Yozuki remembered something that had been bothering her for a while now.
“How do the people of this village make a living?”
They couldn't grow crops in a cave. So how on Earth did they make money? That was a total mystery to her.
Chusaita nodded and said “You are a curious one, aren't you?” And he told Yozuki:
“We pick lots of mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?”
“Yes, from the mountains around the cave. Matsutake and maitake. We also pick other wild vegetables, and there are plenty of wild deer and boar. We shoot them with our hunting rifles – in other words, we're a village of hunter gatherers.”
“I see.” Yozuki was impressed. It was like it was still the Jomon period. So they made money selling what they'd hunted and gathered.
“Yes, we did. Until recently,” said Chusaita, piquing her interest. “But that isn't really sustainable. In a place like this, depopulation is inevitable, and if the weather is bad, there are years where we barely make any money. Just when it looked like things were really tough – like the village was doomed to be abandoned – a dashing savior appeared.”
“A savior?”
“Yes, Zerohiko Monokaki.”
It was a name she didn't recognize. Well, judging from his surname, he must have been a Monokaki, but aside from that... When Yozuki tilted her head in confusion, Chusaita explained “Oh? You don't know Mr. Zerohiko?” He was the father of Fuichirou Monokaki, an inventor, an investor, and a mystery novelist. He was apparently quite famous, though Yozuki had never heard of him.
“When Mr. Zerohiko came to this village ten years ago, he told the villagers 'From now on, I'll take care of you all. I'm going to provide for the living expenses of every single person in this village. Don't be shy! I have more than enough money to go around. It'd be much more meaningful using it for others rather than just letting it sit and gather dust, wouldn't it?'”
Chusaita said all that in an impression of Zerohiko. Well, Yozuki had never met Zerohiko, so she couldn't tell how accurate it was.
“However, there were some strings attached,” said Chusaita. “We had to keep living in the village. We could never allow the village to become abandoned. As long as we fulfill that condition, we can have as much as we like, ten or even twenty million a year.”
And that support had continued even after Zerohiko's death. His descendants hadn't seen a cent of inheritance, as it all went to a foundation of his creation, which to this day kept giving the villagers money.
That was a strange story. Why had Zerohiko Monokaki gone to such lengths to keep the village alive? It was true that the village, located inside of a limestone cavern and steeped in strange traditions, must have been of some interest to Zerohiko as a mystery writer. But it didn't make sense for someone who wasn't even from the village to go to such lengths to keep it from being abandoned.
As Yozuki stood thinking, a black cat swiftly crossed her path. The black cat sat diagonally in front of her to her right and stared up at her with golden eyes.
It was wearing a collar, so it must have been someone's pet. It must have gone out through the open front door of its house. As she thought that, Yozuki bent down, and the black cat purred. The black cat narrowed its eyes happily.
“...Cute.”
It was so cute that she couldn't take it. As expected of a black cat. It would have come first in any cute cat contest or competition (assuming the competition was being judged by Yozuki). Yozuki was engrossed in trading mews and purrs back and forth for a while, but then the black cat shot to its feet and took off as though Yozuki weren't there. Yozuki whined “Aww.”
The black cat used its natural athleticism to jump onto a wall and from there onto the window frame of a house. Then it stared intently through the window, wagging its pitch black tail.
“...Cute.”
Yozuki watched the black cat for a while, but after a few minutes, she suddenly felt something was off. Why had that black cat been staring at the window for so long? Was there something interesting inside?
“Mr. Chusaita, whose house is that?”
“I believe that's the Monokaki Family villa.”
“Hmm, a villa...”
Yozuki casually slipped through the villa's gate and approached the window. She joined the black cat in looking through the window. And she was shocked by what she saw.
“Wh-What's that!?”
Someone was lying inside the room.
It looked like the corpse of Funika Monokaki, one of the Monokaki triplets.
“What's the matter?”
Noticing Yozuki's reaction, Chusaita rushed over. Yozuki pointed into the room, unable to close her mouth. Chusaita looked into the room and became just as shocked.
“What's going on?” Chusaita asked. “This is serious.”
“That's Funika Monokaki in there, isn't it?”
Funika and her sister Fuika looked identical, as part of a set of identical triplets. The only difference between the two was their hair: Fuika had a ponytail, while Funika had twintails. The woman lying in the room had her hair in twintails, so logic dictated that it must be Funika.
Fuika, the girl's sister, was shot in the head and killed at the festival last night. By a person of unknown gender wearing a kazeitachi mask. The bullet hole had been clearly visible in her forehead.
However, the woman lying in the room now didn't have that gunshot wound on her head. That meant it really was Funika and not Fuika.
When Yozuki explained all that to Chusaita, he seemed quite impressed by her logical argument. Looking at her respectfully, he said “You're quite clever, Miss Yozuki.”
“Aw, shucks,” Yozuki said, scratching her head, “I only hear that all the time.”
That was a bald-faced lie. But Yozuki did think she was pretty smart. She was at least quicker on the uptake than Kuzushiro. That guy was a total dunce.
“Anyway, I'm calling for backup... Ah!” Chusaita looked like he'd just realized something. “Oh, the phone lines have been cut.”
Come to think of it, they were.
“In that case, you'll have to investigate on your own, Mr. Chusaita.”
That was only natural, seeing as how he was the only police officer in the village. A police box is a police box because it only holds a single officer. It was rare for a village of this size to have more than one police officer stationed.
But Chusaita looked completely at a loss, even after hearing Yozuki's words. Then, as though coming to a resolution, he declared:
“Sorry, but I can't.”
“Why not?”
“Because I'm actually pretty incompetent.”
He said that with the utmost confidence.
“Plus, I'm the sort who waits for instructions before acting.”
“Really?”
“You think a guy like me can investigate this on my own?”
Did she? When he so confidently announced his own incompetence, it did seem unreasonable to entrust the investigation to him.
However, with him being the only police officer in the village, he was the only one who could. It would be seven more days until the Yatsuwako Myojin Festival ended and they could leave the village, and it didn't seem like a good idea to leave the body unattended that long.
“Then, can we ask the other villagers to help with the investigation?”
She said that as a last resort, and Chusaita shook his head and, in a troubled voice, told Yozuki
“No, that would be trouble. The villagers looked pretty freaked out after everything that happened last night, especially when that poor boy spontaneously combusted.”
He must have been referring to the incident when the young man from the village burned to death. Yozuki hadn't seen it herself, but from what she'd heard, it sounded like a death that could only be called the result of a curse. It must have been a shocking sight even for the devout villagers, so it was only natural they'd want to avoid anything to do with it.
Yozuki “Hmm”ed to herself as she looked back into the room.
It wasn't clear what Funika was even doing in that house, the Monokaki Family's villa, but it was probably because the bridge connecting the two villages had been blown up last night. Funika had gone to the Western Village to participate in the festivities, but the bridge collapse meant that she couldn't return home to the Eastern Village afterwards.
That was why she'd had no choice but to stay in the villa last night, where she'd been attacked and killed by someone. And that someone was, without question, someone from the village. That was because the wire mesh hanging from the cave ceiling was blocking the only entrance to the village, and the tip of the spear attached to the bottom of the mesh was stuck in a piece of wood buried in the ground. That meant the mesh couldn't be raised, so the only way to get through the tunnel was to break it. In short, if the wire mesh wasn't broken, they could rule out the possibility of an outside culprit.
Somewhere, the black cat meowed. The sound dragged her back to reality, and she took a look around the room where Funika had collapsed. She saw what looked like a key lying next to the body. There was also a door and a window in the room. That meant there were two windows, including the one Yozuki was looking through. Both of them were fixed. So the only entrance to the room was the door she could see through the window. Judging by its location, it was behind the front door. So Yozuki circled around and opened the front door. Luckily, it wasn't locked. She entered the villa, and, just as she'd expected, there was another door before her. It was the same door she'd seen through the window earlier. Yozuki put her hand on the knob and tried to open the door. But it was locked from the inside and wouldn't open. That meant...
“It's a locked room?”
Yozuki's words sent Chusaita into a tizzy.
“A-A locked room?”
Yozuki nodded. It wasn't confirmed, but it was a strong possibility.
There was a small window next to the interior door, through which they could see the crime scene. It was the same window they'd seen through the window facing into the garden earlier. If they broke that window, they could enter the crime scene. Or they could break the window facing the garden. With the door locked, those were their only options to get inside.
“Hmm...”
Well, breaking the garden window would be safer. Since the room probably was a locked room, it would be easier to preserve evidence if they broke the window further from the door. When she suggested that, Chusaita agreed. The two of them went back to the window, picked up a suitably hefty rock from the garden, and tried to smash the window. The rock bounced off the window, and Yozuki's wrist was suddenly very sore. “Owww...” Yozuki moaned, and Chusaita spoke with a sudden insight “That's right, I forgot!”
“All the windows with access to the outside in the entire village are made of reinforced glass. That's why they won't budge, no matter how big a rock you throw at them.”
According to Chusaita, that was also done to protect against kazeitachi. A kazeitachi could easily break a normal window, so reinforced glass was used instead. But reinforced glass had only been invented pretty recently relative to the village's history – It wasn't installed in the village until after it became widespread in society, and amazingly, before that they just hadn't had windows at all.
Yozuki really wished he had told her about the reinforced glass sooner. Holding her injured wrist, Yozuki glared resentfully at the window. There wasn't a single scratch left behind.
Yozuki gave up on the window and went back around to the front door. She obediently went to enter via the other window, the one next to the door. She hit it with a rock – carefully – and this time, the glass shattered all at once.
The window was a small square, only about as wide as an adult's shoulders. So, to avoid injuring herself, Yozuki carefully swept the glass from the window frame with the rock. Then, she forced her way through the frame and into the room. Chusaita followed her.
When they approached the body, Funika did look to be dead. She lay on her back with her arms and legs extended, with no injuries visible at a glance.
“Hmm? What's this?”
Yozuki picked up some things that had fallen near the body. One was a small cube, like a die made of opaque black glass. It was about 3cm x 3cm x 3cm. It was shiny and beautiful, but what it actually was wasn't obvious. Yozuki put it in her pocket and looked at the other item she'd picked up from the floor. It was the silver key she'd seen through the window earlier. With key in hand, Yozuki turned back to the door to the room.
The door had no thumbturn, just a keyhole. In other words, you needed the key to lock the door even from the inside. There were about ten meters between the door and the body. It was quite the spacious room. The walls were each about fifteen meters. There didn't appear to be any rooms in the villa except for a bathroom, so there was plenty of space for the room.
Yozuki took the key in hand and approached the door. She inserted it into the keyhole and turned. She heard the sound of the door unlocking. She tried to turn the knob, and the door opened properly. So, the key she'd found by the body was the real thing.
“Hmm.”
Yozuki took the key out of the keyhole and looked around the room. There were only two windows in the room – the one she'd just broken, and the one she'd tried to break and failed. Both were locked. In other words, there was no way the culprit got out through them.
And the door to the room was also locked. That meant that, as she'd suspected, the room was a completely sealed space. Of course, that assumed there wasn't a second key anywhere. She would need to ask someone from the Monokaki Family about that later, but somehow, she had a pretty good idea that there wasn't.
Yozuki spent some time wandering the room in thought. Then, she took a casual look around the room and realized something new. The floor of the room was made of wood – and some of it was wet. It was as though someone had dipped a brush in water and run it across the entire floor in one go.
In short, there was a huge letter written in water across the entire length of the floor. And the letter was......
“Y?”
Yozuki asked, but nobody answered. A huge, fifteen meter long Y had been drawn on the floor of the villa. At the Y's three tips were puddles of water, as if they'd been left by a brush's tip, but they were almost dry now.
Yozuki frowned. What did the this letter drawn on the floor mean?
Yozuki stared at it, taking a moment to organize her thoughts. Then she saw Chusaita in the middle of the room, imitating her, hemming and hawing with his arms crossed.
“Nngh, what should I do?” Chusaita was completely at a loss dealing with the corpse. He kept reaching out for it, then pulling back. “What should I do?”, he repeated.
Yozuki tilted her head and asked.
“Shouldn't you do an autopsy or something?”
“An autopsy? Don't be ridiculous,” Chusaita said with a straight face. “I've been a police officer for nearly forty years now.”
“Oh, I see.” That was reassuring. “So you have lots of experience with autopsies, then?”
“No, just the opposite,” Chusaita said, shaking his head. “Think about it. I've been a police officer for nearly forty years. That means that it's been nearly forty years since I graduated from the police academy. I've completely forgotten everything I learned about autopsies back in school.”
Chusaita said that with total confidence. It was almost refreshing. It was true that if he hadn't performed an autopsy in almost forty years, he had probably forgotten all about performing autopsies.
“But didn't Fuichirou Monokaki die last month?”
“That was investigated by a detective from the Metropolitan Police Department,” Chusaita said. “It's obviously not the sort of thing a low-ranked policeman like me can handle, right?”
That was true, but...
“But then, what should we do?”
If they couldn't even perform an autopsy, the investigation would end then and there.
“Don't worry about it,” Chusaita said, tapping his chest. “We can leave that to the experts. There's a clinic in this village, and it has its own doctor.”
Yozuki locked the door to the crime scene and placed the key in her pocket. When they left the villa, Chusaita got on his bike, so Yozuki jumped behind him. They were together on the bike. Chusaita peddled hard, and the bike slowly made its way to the village clinic. Soon enough, they started moving downhill, and the bike sped up.
They went down as asphalt alleyway and rounded the corner to a house with pure white walls. Just then, something swerved out in front of them. It was another bicycle. The man on the bike swerved to avoid Yozuki and Chusaita, but lost his balance and fell hard to the ground.
“A-Are you okay?”
Yozuki got off the bike and ran over to him, flustered. The man stood up and patted the dust from his clothes. The man appeared to be about thirty and had an intelligent face. He wore a white lab coat over a starched shirt.
“There's nothing to worry about,” the man in the lab coat said.
“Really? You took a pretty nasty fall.”
“Really, don't worry,” the man said calmly, brushing off Yozuki's concern. “I'm not being considerate or trying to show off or anything like that. It really doesn't hurt at all. Because I don't feel pain.”
“You don't feel pain?” Was that even possible?
“It's true,” the man said. “It's called congenital analgesia. No matter how serious the injury, I don't feel the slightest pain. Of course, that's a problem in itself. Pain is an important signal the body uses to warn of danger.”
He sounded like a doctor. And he was wearing a lab coat, so he must have been a doctor. Then, as if to confirm her suspicions, Chusaita spoke to the man. “Ah, doctor, good to see you.” He introduced the man to Yozuki.
“This is Dr. Isaburou Monokaki. He's the doctor at the village clinic.”
“Isaburou Monokaki?”
Yozuki felt her eyes widen. His surname was Monokaki, so he must have been a member of the Monokaki Family. But why would someone from the Monokaki Family become a doctor? Shouldn't he have become a novelist?
But Chusaita kept talking without paying Yozuki's concerns any mind.
“Doctor, perfect timing. I was just about to find you. After all, a body was found...”
“Oh, you mean the body in the neighborhood association's storehouse?”
Chusaita started at Isaburou's words. Yozuki was also taken aback. The two of them looked at each other, then Chusaita asked, as if hesitantly probing a sleeping animal,
“Um, what are you talking about?”
“You know, the body in the storehouse,” Isaburou said calmly. “Apparently, just before eight this morning, a hanged body was found there. The body of my younger brother... Tabishirou Monokaki, the genius travel locked room mystery novelist.”
Accompanied by Isaburou, Yozuki and Chusaita headed to the neighborhood association's storehouse, where the body had been found. In front of the storehouse was the chairman of the neighborhood association, who told them he was the first to discover the body. A man in his fifties with gray hair, the chairman was obviously flustered as he pointed to the storehouse's entrance.
With Isaburou in front, the group entered the storehouse. Just as they'd been told, there was a hanged body in the storehouse. The body of the mystery novelist Tabishirou Monokaki. The body was hanging with its back facing the rear wall of the storehouse, so close they were almost touching, hanging from a rope long enough that both feet touched the floor. However, the legs were bent in a sharp arc. In other words, the rope wasn't short enough to keep the feet off the floor, but wasn't long enough for the knees to reach the floor. It was a bit awkward, as far as rope measurements went. A body hanging like this was a bit unusual. Well, Yozuki had never seen a real hanged corpse before, but in cop shows and mystery manga, the corpse's feet always dangled all the way off the floor. So a body like this, touching the ground with its legs bent, was strange.
But that wasn't the only strange thing. One was that there was another black glass die lying next to the body, just like the one that had been lying next to Funika's body earlier. Another was the amount of dry paper scattered around the body. Getting closer, she saw it was manuscript paper covered in handwriting. Hundreds of sheets of it had been scattered all over the floor of the storehouse, covering the entire floor like carpet.
“They look like Tabishirou's manuscripts,” Isaburou said. “Tabishirou was a rare person who still wrote his manuscripts by hand. Apparently, his editor found that a real pain.”
Isaburou spoke calmly. Or rather, he spoke coldly... Cold-heartedly. Even though his brother's corpse was hanging right in front of him.
As if he'd sensed Yozuki's feelings, Isaburou spoke matter-of-factly.
“I'll be straightforward, the relationship between us brothers was bad.”
“Eh? It was?” Yozuki said.
“Yes. Tabishirou once spoke ill of one of my novels. I think everyone who's ever spoken ill of one of my novels should die. Every single one, without exception. So all I feel seeing his corpse like this is joy.”
Yozuki felt her skin prickle. Anyone who felt joy over the death of his brother was bad news. Especially if it was just because he'd said something bad about a book.
“So, then,” Yozuki said, pulling Chusaita's sleeve and whispering as though sharing a secret, “is Mr. Isaburou also a novelist?”
“You didn't know? He's an extremely famous author!”
Oi, Chusaita, you're being too loud. She's trying to keep her voice down so Isaburou didn't hear. If he learned that Yozuki didn't know about “the great author, Isaburou Monokaki,” it would hurt his pride and he might hold a grudge.
So Yozuki lowered her voice even further until she was barely speaking. Chusaita seemed to finally understand her intention and, scratching his head in embarrassment, he told her about Isaburou.
Apparently, Isaburou was a genius medical locked room mystery novelist. Of course, Isaburou was also the doctor at the village clinic, so he was both a doctor and a novelist separately as well. Incidentally, since the clinic was in the Western Village near the inn, Isaburou didn't live in the Monokaki mansion in the Eastern Village with the rest of his family, but in his own home next to the clinic. That was more convenient in case there was an emergency, but Chusaita told her he thought it was really because he just didn't get along with his siblings.
“Are you two done gossiping?” Isaburou asked exasperatedly after Yozuki and Chusaita finished their talk. They both felt embarrassed and scratched their heads, laughing “Ehehe.” Isaburou gave a deep sigh.
“Anyway, I can't make myself like Tabishirou or any of my brothers. They're all so stubborn and childish, convinced they're the most talented in the family. It's really annoying. None of them can write worth a damn.”
Isaburou sounded pretty stubborn himself.
“At any rate, should we take the body down now?”
Finally, Chusaita suggested that, and Yozuki and Isaburou nodded. However, as Chusaita approached the body, he suddenly asked something.
“But why was Mr. Tabishirou even in the village?”
It turned out Tabishirou had gone to Ibaraki on a research trip about a week ago. Which raised the question of why he, who shouldn't have even been in the village, would have hanged himself in the village storehouse.
In response, Isaburou said this:
“There are two possibilities,” he recited in the logical tone of a doctor. “One is that Tabishirou returned to the village in secret, snuck into the storehouse, and committed suicide. The other is that he was attacked by someone on his trip and brought back to the storehouse.”
Chusaita responded to that with a loud gulp.
“So, there's a possibility this wasn't a suicide, but that he was murdered by someone?”
“Yes, in fact, I'd say this was almost certainly a murder. He wasn't the sort of person to commit suicide.”
So, Tabishirou had been killed in a way that looked like suicide? As Yozuki pondered the situation, Isaburou and Chusaita proceeded to lower Tabishirou's body. After laying it out on the floor, Isaburou immediately began the autopsy. It looked like it would take some time, so Yozuki, bored, decided to take a look around the storehouse.
There were various items in cardboard or wooden boxes placed inside the storehouse, but there were no blind spots, and no sign that anyone was currently hiding inside the storehouse. In other words, if it was a murder, the culprit must have already left the scene. And since there were no windows or other doors to be seen, the only way out was through the front door.
Convinced of her conclusion, Yozuki approached the entrance of the storehouse. There, she found something. A surveillance camera. She hadn't noticed it when she entered the storehouse, but there was a camera installed on the storehouse's inner wall – monitoring the entrance to the storehouse.
“Th-That's,” Yozuki gasped.
“It's a security camera,” said the president of the neighborhood association, who had somehow appeared near Yozuki.
Yozuki took another look around the storehouse. There were no places that looked like they could be used to enter or leave the storehouse other than the area covered by the camera's view. Did that mean the murderer who'd killed Tabishirou would appear there?
“Yes, I thought the same thing,” said the president, still sounding upset. “But nobody appeared. In fact...”
The president, having had the same thought as Yozuki, had checked the camera footage at 8:00 A.M., immediately after discovering the body. The computer used for checking the footage was located in a community center next to the storehouse, and it was set to save a week's worth of footage. However, when he'd checked it, the settings had been changed, and there was only one day's worth of footage. In other words, only one day worth of footage – 24 hours, from 8:00 A.M. yesterday to 8:00 A.M. today – remained. It was probably safe to assume that the culprit was the one to change the settings. Yatsuwako Village was out in the country, so the community center's doors weren't locked properly, and anyone could have snuck in and changed the camera's settings.
In other words, if it was a murder, the culprit had entered and left the storehouse over 24 hours ago. If it had been any later than that, they would have been seen entering and leaving on the camera footage. And, of course, the victim, Tabishirou, must have also entered the storehouse over 24 hours ago.
“By the way, didn't you notice the culprit entering and leaving the storehouse?” Yozuki asked. “I'd think you'd notice if you checked the camera every day.”
“But we don't check the camera every day. In fact, we hardly ever looked at it,” replied the president of the neighborhood association, looking embarrassed. “I didn't even notice that the settings had been changed. That camera has been there for over ten years, but we don't keep anything of note in the storehouse, so to be honest, nobody really cared. Lately, we hadn't even been locking the storehouse, let alone checking the camera footage.”
Yozuki understood. So practically speaking, that camera may as well have not existed before 24 hours ago.
“Did anyone know about how sloppy the camera's management was?” Yozuki asked. “Most of the villagers knew,” replied the president.
“It's been a running joke at neighborhood association drinking parties, so it must have spread throughout the village. Perhaps even people from outside the village knew about it. You see, the innkeeper, Ms. Okamibara, has quite loose lips. And the computer in the community center isn't password protected, so anyone could have changed the settings for the footage's storage.”
In other words, the easygoing nature of the country had ensured the culprit faced absolutely no obstacles. But that did raise a question. If the storehouse was so poorly managed, why had the president of the neighborhood association gone there first thing in the morning on the day the body was found?
“No, you see,” the president said in a low voice, “It's because there were bread crumbs on the ground.”
“Bread crumbs?”
“Yes, like in Hansel and Gretel. My house is right next door to the storehouse, and there was a trail of bread crumbs on the ground leading to the door of the storehouse. I followed them to the storehouse, and there it was...”
There was the hanged body.
Yozuki thought. “Hmm...” So the killer had wanted someone to find the body. Well, that was understandable. If it wasn't normal for people to come to the storehouse, the body could have gone undiscovered for a whole month for all they knew. Yozuki could think of plenty of reasons that would inconvenience the culprit.
When Yozuki returned to where Isaburou was performing the autopsy, Isaburou and Chusaita looked very confused. Yozuki, though she was nervous, had to ask.
“Wh-What happened?”
“Well, when we examined Mr. Tabishirou's body, we noticed something strange,” Chusaita said numbly, as though there were something stuck in his mouth. “Well, you see...”
“The body's legs were amputated,” Isaburou explained. “Both legs were completely severed at about the mid-thigh.”
“Both legs were amputated!?” Yozuki was shocked and immediately looked at the body on the floor. A bath towel was draped over the body from the waist down, so Yozuki couldn't tell if the legs really had been amputated. They must have gotten the towel from within the storehouse.
So Yozuki pulled off the bath towel. Then she gulped. They really were amputated. The jeans that had been on the corpse must have been removed during the autopsy, revealing a fresh cut in the middle of the thigh. Yozuki couldn't suppress a gasp. Both of the severed legs were lying on the floor. The sight was gruesome. Gruesome and bizarre.
“But,” Yozuki wondered, “when the body was discovered, the legs were still attached, right?”
She'd seen it clearly. There wasn't any doubt. After all, Tabishirou's feet had been touching the floor. It was memorably unusual for a hanged body.
“That's because the legs, after being amputated, were reattached,” Isaburou replied. “Not sewn back on, just roughly stuck back with tape. We can't say what the culprit meant by that. Whether it's just their sick, sadistic hobby, or if it's meant to imitate something.”
Isaburou's words, “imitate”, stirred something in Yozuki.
“Does this village have any legends like that? Like, a legend of a fallen warrior who lost his leg and forcibly reattached it, then attacked the villagers?”
“No, there is no such legend,” said Chusaita. “I've never heard anything like that.”
He'd never heard of it? That wasn't the same as it not existing.
“There's one other strange thing,” Isaburou said calmly. “Looking at the surfaces of the cuts on Tabishirou's legs, it looks like they were both amputated while he was still alive.”
“Amputated while he was still alive?”
“Yes, there were signs of vital reactions and live bleeding from both wounds. Of course, he was probably put to sleep with anesthesia first. If you cut off a person's legs while they were still alive, they'd thrash around in pain and bleed to death.”
I see, Yozuki thought. So the victim had died from the hanging... and the amputation wasn't the cause of death. But if that was the case, it was even stranger that the culprit had performed the amputation at all. There was no point in cutting off the legs. This was probably what they called a “whydunit”. Why did the culprit cut off the victim's legs? Was there a rational reason?
Everyone sat and thought on the question for a while. Then Yozuki remembered that there was something important that they'd forgotten to tell Isaburou.
“Come to think of it, what was the estimated time of death?”
“Between seven and eight hours ago,” Isaburou replied. “It's nine o'clock right now, so Tabishirou must have died between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M.”
“I see,” Yozuki responded, then she felt a sudden sense of unease. “Huh? What?”
Yozuki felt like she'd just realized something incredibly important, but she didn't know what. Puzzled, she looked around the inside of the storehouse, searching for some sort of clue. Then her eyes fell on the storehouse's only entrance and the security camera installed there.
“Ah, but!”
Yozuki finally realized the identity of her strange feeling. After thinking it over in her brain and organizing what she knew, she told the others her thoughts.
“That security camera has footage going back exactly 24 hours starting at 8:00 A.M. today...”
And that footage didn't show a single person entering or leaving the storehouse. In other words, no one had entered or left the storehouse for an entire day – from 8:00 A.M. yesterday to 8:00 A.M. today.
However, the victim's time of death was between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M. that morning. In other words, the culprit must have left the crime scene, the storehouse, sometime after that. But the surveillance camera hadn't captured the culprit leaving the storehouse. That meant the culprit had somehow slipped past the camera installed at the entrance unseen, like an invisible man.
Of course, since the victim's legs were amputated, there was no possibility that it was suicide. Furthermore, there was nowhere in the storehouse where the culprit could have hidden, so it was impossible that they hadn't left the storehouse at all. In short, it all added up to...
“Yes, that's exactly what it means,” Isaburou nodded, as though he'd read Yozuki's mind. “It adds up to this storehouse being a locked room.”
Timeline of the Second Locked Room (Locked Storehouse)
Yesterday at 8:00 A.M. – Start of security camera footage.
Today at 1:00 A.M. – Start of time of death range.
2:00 A.M. – End of estimated time of death range.
8:00 A.M. – End of security camera footage.
The villa where Funika Monokaki's body had been found earlier was also a locked room. That meant two locked room murders had taken place in Yatsuwako Village in one day.
Yozuki and the others decided to name the locked rooms “The Locked Villa” and “The Locked Storehouse”.
After completing their investigation of The Locked Storehouse, they decided to head back to the scene of the first locked room – The Locked Villa – to perform Funika's autopsy. That was the whole reason Yozuki and Chusaita had gone looking for Isaburou in the first place. But when they found him, he told them about Tabishirou's death, so Funika's autopsy was temporarily put on hold.
And so, team Yozuki made for the villa where Funika's body was. Yozuki took the key to the crime scene out of her pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped back in. Isaburou then proceeded with the autopsy. “Her limbs are completely rigid,” he remarked to himself as he examined the body. Indeed, the way Funika looked as she lay sprawled out, her limbs appeared as stiff as logs. The autopsy proceeded, and it soon became clear how she had died.
Funika had been stabbed. The wound was found on her chest. However, there weren't any bloodstains on the body. And the dress Funika had been wearing didn't have any holes visible to the naked eye. However, there were signs of vital reactions on the wound in her chest, so there was no doubt that it had been inflicted while she was still alive – and therefore, that it had killed her.
“In conclusion,” Isaburou explained, “after stabbing Funika to death, the killer must have removed her clothes, wiped up all the blood, and then put different clothes back on her body. There aren't any bloodstains in this room, so they must have cleaned those up as well. Either that, or they killed her somewhere else and brought the body to this villa.”
Then, Yozuki remembered something important she'd forgotten to ask.
“Just to be sure, are there any other keys to this room?”
It was the Monokaki Family's villa, so Yozuki figured Isaburou would know whether or not there were any spare keys.
In response to Yozuki's question, Isaburou shook his head.
“No, there aren't any spare keys, and that key is extremely special, so it can't be copied. Incidentally, that key is usually kept hidden behind a rock in the garden alongside the key to the villa's front door, and the rule is that anyone who wants to use the villa has to take it themself.”
In other words, Funika, who had stayed in the village last night, had taken out the key.
In any case, she had been able to confirm that there weren't any spare keys. The crime scene had been officially confirmed as a locked room.
After leaving The Locked Villa, Yozuki decided to return to the inn and get breakfast. When she sat down in the dining room, Okamibara served her a meal of salmon fillet, natto, miso soup, and a bowl of rice topped with a single raw egg – the quintessential rural inn breakfast. Yozuki shoved the salmon fillet into the bottom of her rice bowl, then used her chopsticks to mix up the natto before pouring it over the remaining rice.
There was one guest in the dining room besides Yozuki, who, like Yozuki, was putting her natto on her rice. She was a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties with dyed brown hair tied back in a ponytail, looking like an actress. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes in a way that failed to contain her overflowing beauty.
After Yozuki finished her rice, she called out to Okamibara and ordered a second helping.
“You have quite the appetite,” Okamibara said with a laugh.
“I've been using my brain nonstop since I got up.”
“Ah, you must be talking about the locked room murder.”
Apparently, word of the murder had already reached the proprietress's ears. As expected from the countryside, news traveled fast.
As she'd suspected earlier, Okamibara loved to gossip, and she immediately started asking about the incident. Yozuki wasn't sure how much she should say, but Okamibara was able to wear her down, and she wound up spilling quite a lot. “I see, I see,” she nodded solemnly, and then she asked Yozuki:
“So, is it likely the case will be solved?”
That was a hard question to answer. If she were being honest, Yozuki didn't expect the investigation to progress any time soon. The reason was because there was nobody to play the role of detective.
Yozuki certainly couldn't solve any locked room murder, and Isaburou looked like he was struggling as well. Chusaita wasn't even worth considering. So who could solve the case?
When Yozuki admitted all that, Okamibara nodded and said “I see, so that's how it is.” Then, after pondering for a moment, she made a suggestion as though it had just occurred to her.
“In that case, why not ask her?” Okamibara said, pointing to the other guest in the dining room – the beautiful woman who looked like an actress, still eating her natto on rice. Yozuki tilted her head to the side at the idea.
“That girl?”
“Yes, I heard she was involved in a murder case in the past and was able to solve it herself. Have you ever heard of the Five Locked Room Murders of Mt. Hatsukouda?”
“Never heard of it.”
Kuzushiro might have, but unfortunately, Yozuki had no idea. But if she really had managed to solve a case like that in the past, that would be very reassuring. Yozuki raised her index finger.
“So is she some sort of detective?” she asked.
Okamibara shook her head.
“No, she's a novelist by trade.”
Yozuki's eyes widened. As if she found the reaction amusing, Okamibara smiled.
“Have you ever heard of the novel The Catcher in the Locked Field of Rye? It was made into a movie last year.”
“Oh, I've heard of that!” It was a pretty popular movie, so even Yozuki had heard of it. Then, realizing the hostess's implication, she started and turned back to the beauty eating natto rice in the corner. “You mean, she's...?”
“Yes,” Okamibara nodded. “Her name is Teika Ojou. She is the greatest mystery novelist of the era.”
That was how the serial locked room murder case taking place in the Western Village was progressing, but of course, I, who was in the Monokaki mansion in the Eastern Village, didn't know anything about that. Or rather, I didn't even know that there was an incident in the Western Village. The two villages had been completely separated and had no way of contacting each other.
Of course, even if I had been able to contact them, I really didn't have time to be involving myself in events that had been taking place in the Western Village. That was because something a bit... okay, a lot difficult had been going on in the Eastern Village.
Let me go back in time a bit. It was 7:00 A.M. I, Kasumi Kuzushiro, had gotten out of bed and changed into clothes I'd borrowed from Camembert, then gone to the bathroom outside my room to wash my face. I was just thinking of going to get something to eat when I noticed a trail of bread crumbs in the garden outside my window. I tilted my head at that, then went out the front door to go see them up close. It was only after I went out in the garden that I realized just how many there were. There were dozens of crumbs, set out like guideposts.
“Hansel and Gretel?” I said aloud.
Then, from behind me came a carefree voice. “You're up early.” It was Camembert, and he looked as confused by me as I was by the bread crumbs.
“Kasumi, what's wrong? You look really dumb.”
That was rude. I sighed and explained the situation to Camembert.
“Anyway, let's see where they lead,” I suggested, and Camembert and I followed the trail of bread crumbs together.
After a while, the bread crumbs came to a stop at a black glass cube, like a die, and a folded piece of A4 paper. I tilted my head, picked up the cube, and put it in my pocket. Then I picked up the paper, unfolded it, and immediately felt my eyes widen.
“T-This is...”
“It's a floor plan of the mansion,” said Camembert.
It certainly looked like one. And on the plan, a certain room had been circled in red with a felt tip pen.
“That's an empty room nobody usually goes to,” Camembert said. “The mansion is so big, there are plenty of rooms like that.”
“An empty room, huh?” I said, frowning. “So basically, they want me to go to this room?”
I didn't know who “they” were, but I was annoyed that I had to follow their instructions. But I was curious about what they wanted, so in the end, we decided to go to the room.
Camembert led me down the mansion's halls, and we eventually arrived in front of a door. “This way,” Camembert said, opening the door, but there was nothing in the room. I tilted my head, but Camembert said “Hold on.”
“This is an empty room nobody uses, but it isn't the one we're looking for. The place shown on the map is over there.”
Saying that, he pointed to another door in the far wall of the room.
“I see,” I nodded. Then I approached the door Camembert had indicated. The doorknob was cylindrical, and when I grabbed it and twisted, I gave a pull, as the door opened outwards. But I felt the deadbolt catch, and the door didn't open. It was locked. The keyhole was in the center of the doorknob, but molten metal had been poured into the keyhole, completely sealing it off.
“This door has a basic pin tumbler lock,” Camembert said. “So it should be easy to make a duplicate key. But there's no way to insert a key like this. I wonder how long it's been like this.”
The metal poured into the keyhole already had a thin layer of rust on its surface. It must have been there a while. It just hadn't been noticed since nobody ever went in or out of the room.
“Anyway, we can't get in like this.”
With that utterance, I turned back to Camembert.
“Does this room have any windows?”
“Of course it does,” he replied. “Let's go around.”
We went back out into the garden and around to the window. From the window, we could see into the room. There was a room layered with tatami mats, and on the tatami mats – near the door – someone was lying down. It was a familiar woman in a yukata, with her hair in a ponytail. It appeared to be the body of Fuika Monokaki, who had been killed at the festival last night.
The window of the room had bars, making it impossible to enter or leave through. And we'd just confirmed that the door was locked. That meant this was a locked room, with the body of Fuika Monokaki inside. She had been shot to death, probably by the same culprit, at last night's festival, then brought to the Eastern Village where the mansion was before the bridge connecting the two villages was blown up.
When I told Camembert that, he frowned in conclusion, then said “For now, I'm going to go tell my siblings,” and ran for the front door. Ten minutes later, he returned with the rest of the Monokaki Family, just as he'd said.
There was the woman dressed as a maid: Mei, the fourth daughter of the family. And there was a person I didn't recognize. A cool, intellectual looking man in his thirties wearing glasses.
The man was quite thin, with eyes that habitually looked down on others, but I had to admit, he was handsome.
“You're certainly right that it looks like Fuika,” the man said, peering into the room. “I can't believe it, how could Fuika's body be in a locked room?”
“You're right, it's strange,” Camembert nodded. “So, what should we do, Ryouichirou? Should we break the window?”
Apparently, the man in the glasses was Ryouichirou. And I knew the name well, as Ryouichirou Monokaki was the eldest child of the Monokaki family, and famous as a genius social school locked room mystery novelist.
Although he was a best seller now, up until three years ago, he had just been an unremarkable author of social school mystery novels. Since his debut, he had been trying to combine locked room murders with the social school of mystery fiction, but, as intelligent people possessing knowledge of the different schools of Japanese mystery fiction and their historical and sociological contexts, you and I already know that “locked room + social school” is a worse combination than peanut butter and pickles. A locked room is the epitome of artificial, self-aware fictionality in mystery, while the social school is all about reality. When the two came together, they annihilated each other in a matter-antimatter reaction. In short, introducing a locked room into a social school mystery novel makes the story less realistic, and introducing social elements into a locked room novel worsens its focus. So Ryouichirou Monokaki, who tried to combine the locked room with social issues, had a noble ambition, but was treated as nothing but a failure, looked down upon by the public. But a major incident three years ago had caused his position to do a complete 180.
That incident was, of course, the first locked room murder in Japan – or to be precise, the Tokyo District Court's acquittal of the suspect. Because of that precedent, locked room murders became commonplace, and at the same time, the unrealistic feeling around locked rooms disappeared. In other words, locked rooms became real. At the same time, they became a major social issue, and there was a demand for novels that confronted them head on and questioned their role in society. No, it may have been less a “demand” and more an “obligation”. Since it was a serious social issue that shook Japan, social school mystery authors needed to write works about locked rooms and question the world that contained them. However, there was one major problem in the way. That was, of course, that social school mystery writers couldn't come up with new locked room tricks. Culprits were found not guilty because their locked rooms couldn't be solved, but if the locked room in the story was easy to solve, there would be no realism in the struggle. In other words, irony reigned supreme as the very same social school writers who had wielded the blade of realism against society found themselves writing poor works without a shred of realism as soon as they confronted the theme of “locked rooms”. That meant the positions of locked room authors and social school authors had been completely reversed, and Ryouichirou Monokaki was the first man to notice the change.
The Golden Age of Locked Rooms, where over a hundred locked room murders were committed each year, was a utopia for Ryouichirou, who endeavored to combined locked rooms with the social school. With his talent for creating unique tricks, powerfully evocative writing, and sharp perspectives on society and politics, he quickly rose to stardom in the literary world. In the past three years, he had published five books that sold over a million copies each, making him the best selling author of the Monokaki Family – now that his father, Fuichirou, was dead. He was the shining star of the Golden Age of Locked Rooms.
There were few people who didn't know his name as a famous author, but if someone who didn't know him met him in person, they'd probably recognize him more as Ryouichirou, the cool, bespectacled eldest son of a rich family. I had a feeling that was what Yozuki would think.
In response to what Camembert had said, Ryouichirou said “I suppose we'll have to. Let's break the window.”
“It will be at least seven more days until the police arrive. We can't just let the body sit there until then. We should prioritize preserving the body over preserving the crime scene.”
We all nodded at that. Acknowledging us, Ryouichirou picked up a rock off the garden ground. Then, after confirming with Mei that the windows here were made of normal glass, he used it to smash the window.
When I scrunched my face in confusion at their words, Camembert explained “In the village, all the windows facing the outside are made of reinforced glass. But because this mansion is located inside of a box, it's treated as an interior. That's why every window in the mansion is made of normal glass.”
While we were talking, Ryouichirou used the rock to widen the hole in the glass until there was space for a person to enter safely. We went through the hole one at a time and ran to the door, where Fuika's body had fallen. She was wearing the same yukata she had been last night, and more importantly, she had a gunshot wound in her forehead. I looked at the back of her head and saw that there was no exit wound, so the bullet must have still been in her skull.
The body was about two meters from the door, lying on its side, as though she'd just turned over in her sleep. Her face was turned to the door, but there was a thick pillar right next to it. So if you looked at her from the door side, most of her face would be blocked by the pillar. All you'd be able to see was the space above her eyebrows – in other words, her forehead, and the bullet wound therein. The body's mouth, hidden behind the pillar, was slightly open, and I could see her red tongue inside. It was stained with blue syrup.
Turning my head, I looked away from the body and faced the door. I was shocked by what I saw.
I'd already checked the doorknob from the outside earlier, and confirmed it was a cylindrical steel knob with the lock integrated within. The thumb turn, too, was integrated into the doorknob and not beneath it on the door. But when I saw the doorknob from the inside, I felt dizzy. A glass beer mug was covering the knob.
The doorknob was completely covered by the mug. That meant it was impossible to directly touch the doorknob, and, of course, that it was impossible to turn the lock. That meant no trick involving the application of physical force to the locking mechanism was on the table.
The beer mug was stuck to the door with glue, and then additionally secured with multiple layers of clear packing tape. It was all done by hand, without a doubt. I looked under the door and saw a gap of about five centimeters, but it would have been impossible to use a stick or something to attach the mug to the door through that gap. It might have just been possible to place the mug on the door with the glue placed on the rim in advance, but there was no way to stick the tape on afterwards. That complex layering of tape could only have been done by hand. Therefore, it was impossible that the culprit could have used the gap under the door to turn the lock from outside the room using string, and then used the gap under the door to place the mug under the doorknob.
But then, how could they have sealed the room? As I'd already confirmed from outside, the keyhole on the outside of the door was filled with molten metal and completely sealed. That meant it was impossible to insert the key from outside the room, so the door could only be locked from the inside. But if the door was locked from the inside, than the culprit couldn't have escaped. There was only one door in the room, and as far as I could see, all of the windows were barred. There was nowhere the culprit could have gone other than through the locked door.
I could say it with certainty: This was the most perfect locked room to ever exist.
The body of Fuika Monokaki was found in her family mansion. And with the bridge connecting the two villages destroyed, the Eastern Village was completely cut off from the rest of the world. That meant there were no police anywhere, and no detective who could solve this mystery. In short, it was a hopeless situation.
My mind suddenly turned to the black-haired girl, the only other member of the literature club.
But I couldn't rely on her. Because she wasn't here.
Yozuki, back in the Western Village, was also in a situation with no detective, but fortunately for her, her problem seemed to have been quickly solved.
Yozuki timidly approached Teika Ojou, the beautiful woman with the ponytail eating breakfast – the greatest mystery novelist of the modern era.
“Umm, can I ask you something?”
Teika, who was bringing some salmon fillet to her mouth, raised her head slightly and asked “Y'all talkin' to me?” She had a bit of a Kansai accent.
“Yes, I am,” Yozuki said. Then, she coughed lightly and put on her best serious face. “I overheard something earlier. Are you Teika Ojou?”
“Ah, yeah, that's me,” Teika said, looking a bit puzzled. Then her eyes widened as though she'd just realized something. “Oh, are y'all a fan of mine, perhaps? That ain't good. I'm in private mode right now.”
She said that, but Teika immediately retrieved a paperback and a felt tip pen from her tote bag. The paperback's cover read Locked Room Detective Pythagoras's Pythagorean Theorem of Murder.
“Yep, totally private,” she said with a shrug. “But I guess this is fate, so I'll sign somethin' for ya since y'all came all this way. But you gotta run along home right after you get it, a'ight? 'Cause I'm in private mode.”
Teika said all that as she flipped back the cover of the paperback and signed in the margin of the first page with a practiced hand. Then, as though she'd just stumbled upon a brilliant idea, she said
“Oh, I'll write your name, too. What's your name.”
“Yozuki.”
“Yozuki. What a nice name. 'Yozuki''s alright, then? Hold up. Here.”
Teika wrote “To Yozuki” next to her signature. And then, as though it was an afterthought, she added a cute little doodle of a cat.
“A'ight, that's enough for one day.”
Teika said that and handed over the signed copy of Locked Room Detective Pythagoras's Pythagorean Theorem of Murder. Yozuki took the paperback and stared at it blankly.
Then, summoning all her determination, she said
“Um, what is this?”
“Um, it's a signed copy I gave you, Yozuki.”
“Um, I don't really need it.”
Yozuki replied, and Teika's eyes shot wide open. She sounded baffled.
“Um, you don't want it? Even though I went and autographed it for y'all, Yozuki...”
“Yes, to begin with, I've never read any of your books. A signature from an author you've never read before is no different than graffiti.”
“...”
That was when Teika started crying.
“Waaaaaa, uuuuuhh, *sob sob*”
“W-What's the matter? Miss Teika!”
“What's the matter...? Oh, nothin'! What's with you? Who gets surprised by that? Yozuki, are you a psychopath? It's obvious why I'm crying!”
“Um, uh, well...”
She honestly didn't know. Yozuki thought about it for a while, then suddenly realized.
“Is it because I said I've never read any of your novels?”
“No! I mean, yes! I mean, that's part of it! If someone hands you a signed copy of a book, even if you don't want it, y'all just nod your head and smile and say 'Thank ya!' That's just common sense!”
“Y-You're right.”
She absolutely was! But Yozuki was under a lot of stress, so she'd wound up sharing her true feelings instead. She'd gone to ask for help solving murders and been handed a signed copy. It was a natural response under the circumstances, alongside “No, I don't need this.”
“That's fine, just hurry up and go home. Y'all're spoiling the taste of my miso.”
Teika hissed at Yozuki and got to sulking. Yozuki, on the verge of being chased away, stood her ground.
“Ah, no, wait a minute. I came here because I do have something to ask you, Miss Teika.”
Teika frowned and said “Yozuki, are you a psychopath?”
She'd been accused of psychopathy twice in one conversation. Teika sniffled and put the autographed copy of Locked Room Detective Pythagoras's Pythagorean Theorem of Murder back into her tote bag. There were several other paperbacks in the bag, likely also for handing out in case of autographs. That was sad. This was the greatest mystery novelist of the era?
“Um, maybe I will get a signed copy after all...?”
“Don't y'all say that while lookin' at me like I'm a pitiful existence! It pisses me right the hell off!”
Yozuki pulled out a chair and sat across from Teika. She crossed her arms and said
“Well, getting to the point.”
“You... You are a psychopath, aren'tcha?”
“I'm not a psychopath. I'm more of a psychometrer.”
“Really?”
“Well, when I was in middle school, I thought I was.”
Yozuki's words startled Teika.
“You're just like me...”
She was just like her! For real! And so, Yozuki and Teika hit it off, and instantly became the best of friends.
“So, what can I do for y'all?”
After finishing breakfast, Teika asked while drinking coffee brought by Okamibara. Yozuki also got coffee, which she immediately filled with sugar.
“Just to be sure, Miss Teika, do you know about the incidents that occurred last night?” Yozuki asked while she stirred the sugar into her coffee. “The incident where Fuika Monokaki was shot during the summer festival, and the incident where the young man from the village, Murawaka, died of spontaneous human combustion.”
“Oh, of course,” Teika said. “The whole reason I'm stayin' in this here inn is because of those incidents. I was originally staying in the Monokaki mansion as a guest.”
“Oh, that's right.”
“Well, to be precise, I was hidin' in the Monokaki mansion. My editor's crawlin' up my butt about some deadline.”
She wasn't a very good writer.
“That was about six months ago,” Teika said, looking off into the distance. “Ever since then, I've been staying with the Monokaki Family. I've actually been a regular visitor there for a few years now. Sad, what happened to Fuika. She was a girl who ya never knew what she was thinking, and it was hard to follow when them triplets all started talkin' at once, but it's still sad when someone ya know dies.”
Teika took a sip of her coffee. Then, she frowned and said “That's bitter.” Yozuki scooped up a handful of sugar cubes and dumped them in Teika's coffee.
“But why did you stay in this inn last night, even though you live in the Monokaki mansion?”
Yozuki asked, and Teika watched the sugar cubes melt into her drink and said “Ain't it obvious? Because the bridge collapsed yesterday.”
“The bridge?”
“Yep, the concrete bridge that connects the Western and Eastern Villages.”
Everything clicked into place.
“Could it be that the bridge collapsed and you couldn't get back to the Monokaki mansion?”
“Yeah, I was at the festival last night too, but I had no way of goin' back. So I had no choice but to stay at this inn.”
The summer festival was held in the Western Village, and the Monokaki mansion was in the Eastern Village. However, it seemed that the only ones living in the Eastern Village were the members of the Monokaki Family, so it was likely that only those related to the Monokaki were unable to return home after the bridge's collapse.
“So, what about last night?” Teika asked, leaning against one arm with her elbow on the table. Yozuki shook her head.
“No, last night's incident is irrelevant.” Or to be more precise, Yozuki didn't care. “Actually, there were more incidents this morning. Two locked room murders were committed.”
“Two locked room murders!?” Teika said in shock. “It's like the end of the world...”
“2012 has already come and gone, though.”
“So, who was killed?”
“Funika Monokaki and Tabishirou Monokaki.”
“Two more of the Monokaki Family. That's shady. I betcha they're after the inheritance.”
Come to think of it, there was a fight for the inheritance going on after the death of Fuichirou. Indeed, the more members of the Monokaki Family died, the greater the share of the inheritance those remaining would get.
“By the way, how many siblings are there in the Monokaki Family?”
“Nine in all. Fuichirou's wife died years ago, so his children are the only ones left to inherit. And there are nine people in the runnin'.”
“Um, so that means...” With Funika and Tabishirou dead, there were currently seven heirs remaining. No, Fuika had been shot at the festival last night, and Fumika went missing last month, so there were only five.
“Three of the nine have been killed, and one is missing...”
It was a pretty extreme situation. It was the sort of thing Yozuki thought they should solve as soon as possible.
“So, Miss Teika.”
“What is it?”
“I want to ask you to solve this case,” Yozuki said, clenching her fist. “After all, we're in a closed circle, so the police can't come in, which means someone here needs to play the role of detective. Miss Teika, you're the only one who looks like they can do it. This is just something I overheard, but apparently, you once got involved in a series of locked room murders and managed to solve them. Um, what were they called...”
“The Five Locked Room Murders of Mt. Hatsukouda.”
Teika instantly responded with the name of the case. She probably bragged about it all the time... That would explain how quick she was.
She nodded and started talking.
“Now that was a tough nut to crack. I was up to my eyes in twists and turns as I was faced with one locked room after another... It was spectacular. If I hadn't been there, the case definitely would have gone unsolved.”
The way she talked about it was kinda unpleasant, but she was definitely reliable!
“I really need your help!” Yozuki said, bowing forward. “Please, solve this case!”
For some reason, Teika answered Yozuki's passionate plea with a sulky look. Then, as she played with her hair and looked annoyed, she said
“Sorry, but I can't.”
“Eh? Why?”
“I'm a super popular writer, ya know. I've got a mountain of manuscripts I need to write.”
“But didn't you just say that you were living with the Monokaki Family because you were avoiding a deadline?”
Teika gasped. Then she tried to cover it up.
“That's... That's why. That's why I need to get serious about my manuscripts now.”
Oh. That was unfortunate.
“I understand, I guess it can't be helped.”
It seemed there was nothing to do but look elsewhere. Thinking that, Yozuki went to stand up, but Teika freaked out and shouted “Wait, wait a minute! Where are y'all going?”
Why was she the one asking?
“Well, you turned down the role of detective, so I thought I'd go ask someone else.”
“...I didn't turn it down yet.”
It sounded a lot like she turned it down.
Teika was confusing Yozuki. But for some reason, Teika was the one who was fidgeting. She looked like there was something that she really want to say. Something even Yozuki could (eventually) understand.
“Could it be... that you actually do want to be the detective?”
“...Yeah.”
“Then why did you turn it down?”
“Well, it ain't cool bein' all pushy as a detective,” Teika said, pursing her lips. “Usually at a time like this, you only take the case after the client begs you. I really admire people like that.”
She was an extremely troublesome woman. Well, not that Yozuki didn't understand.
With Teika at her side, Yozuki decided to start by investigating the Yatsuwako Village Neighborhood Association storehouse, the Locked Storehouse where Tabishirou Monokaki hanged body was found. The two of them made their way to the storehouse. Though Teika's long limbs produced the illusion of height, walking side by side like this, Yozuki realized she was only about 160 cm.
When they arrived at the storehouse, Yozuki first explained the situation to Teika in as much detail as possible. She then looked down at the floor of the storehouse, still covered in manuscript paper.
“The first thing I'm curious about is why they scattered the manuscript paper on the floor.”
It was what they called a whydunit. One possibility was...
“Did the culprit scatter it to use in some sort of trick?”
Teika thought about it for a moment, then answered, “No, it's probably the exact opposite.” Yozuki tilted her head in confusion and asked
“What do you mean?”
“The culprit scattered this manuscript paper around to prove that they didn't use a certain trick.”
Yozuki didn't understand what she meant. “Basically,” Teika continued.
“This might look like a perfect locked room, but if you use a certain trick, it's actually easy to replicate. First, there's the security camera installed at the entrance of the storehouse – and that camera has 24 hours worth a' footage saved from the time the body was discovered: 8:00 A.M. yesterday to 8:00 A.M. today. Not a single person appears in that footage, including the culprit. However, the victim's time of death is estimated to be between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M. today, so it's strange that the culprit doesn't appear on camera. That's why the Locked Storehouse is a locked room. However, there's a simple loophole in this locked room, with a simple way to pass through it.”
“What's that?”
“Remote murder,” Teika said. “The culprit entered and left the storehouse before the start of the footage we have, say, a day and a half before the body was discovered – 36 hours ago or thereabouts. Naturally, the victim went in at the same time. I don't know if he was lured there by somethin' or if the culprit put him to sleep. Either way, the culprit set up some sort of mechanism that would automatically hang Mr. Tabishirou after a certain amount of time – a remote murder – and left the storehouse. The footage of that was already set to be deleted, so now there's no evidence of the culprit's appearance. Then, after a certain amount of time passed, between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M., the remote murder trick goes off and the victim is hanged. So, the culprit is able to kill the victim without entering or leaving the storehouse during the estimated time of death, and we have a perfect locked room on our hands.”
“Oh, I see.” Yozuki was impressed by her explanation.
The storehouse was only “locked” for the 24 hour period that remained on the camera footage. Before then, anyone could have entered or exited the storehouse. If they set up a remote murder device at that time, they could have made the crime scene a locked room.
“But there's a big problem in this case,” said Teika, immediately retracting her own argument. “That bein', there's nothing in this storehouse that could be used for a remote murder. Of course, it's possible to commit a remote murder usin' tools you brought yourself from the outside, but then there'd be no way to retrieve them. After all, the scene was a locked room at the time of death. In other words, if you can't enter or leave the storehouse, you can't take the evidence from the scene.”
Yozuki groaned. Just when it looked like they'd finally found a way out... She felt like she'd climbed up to the rim of a pit, only to be pushed back in. But what Teika said was right. If a remote murder had been committed, there should have been evidence left at the scene, but with said scene a locked room, it was impossible to recover said evidence.
“But that doesn't mean it can't be done,” Teika said, raising her index finger. “If'n they couldn't recovered the evidence from the locked room, they just had to set the evidence to erase itself. In short: ice. For example, maybe they crucified the victim on a huge cross of ice. With the victim crucified, he would a' been fixed in place in a standing position, right? Then they could'a put the noose around his neck. Over time, the ice melts, and the victim's body comes closer to the ground. Eventually, the cross will no longer provide enough support and the victim will be hanged. To sum up, it's possible to use ice in a remote murder trick.”
Yozuki once again thought “I see” after hearing her explanation. So, a trick that automatically hanged the victim by supporting them with ice...
“But there is a problem with this trick. The ice used in the trick would have turned to water when it melted.”
“Ice turns into water when it melts?”
That much was obvious. What was the problem with that? Yozuki looked in confusion at the manuscript paper on the floor. Then her eyes shot open.
“You mean!”
“Yep, that's it,” Teika nodded. “If it was an ice trick, the manuscript paper on the floor would'a gotten wet. When paper gets wet, it wrinkles up and can never be straightened out again. But there isn't a single trace of dampness on any of these pieces a' paper, is there? That's proof an ice trick wasn't used. It couldn't have been dry ice, either. The cold air would have condensed water, so the manuscript paper would have gotten wet anyway. An' the culprit deliberately scattered this paper all over the floor to show us that that didn't happen.”
In other words, this was a locked room that could have easily been solved using a remote murder trick using ice or dry ice, so the culprit deliberately scattered the manuscript paper to rule out that possibility.
“So, the next mystery is 'Why did the culprit cut off the victim's legs while he was still alive, then reattach them?”
Yozuki said that. It could be called the biggest mystery in the whole case.
“Well ain't that the truth. It is a strange mystery,” Teika said, furrowing her brow. “It's bizarre.”
“So then is the culprit someone with a penchant for the bizarre? Or maybe they just hated the victim that much?”
“Well, it's possible. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess this village doesn't have any legends, songs, or poems matchin' this.”
“That's right.” Chusaita had told her there weren't any legends like that.
“In that case, the culprit's reason for amputating the legs wasn't to imitate anything. But they definitely had a reason...”
Teika scratched her head. Then, groaning, she began to wander the storehouse.
“I'm also curious about the location where he was found. Why did they hang 'im with his back to the wall like that?”
Teika took a closer look at the rope tied to the beam. It was hanging extremely close to the wall. As a result, the victim, Tabishirou, was hanging with his back right against the wall. That was definitely strange. If he was going to hang himself, he could have done it in the middle of the room.
“I'm also curious about how he was hanged,” Teika said. “He was hanged with his feet on the floor and his knees bent, right? Why was it done like that? If the rope was a bit shorter, his feet wouldn't a' touched the floor, and he'd a' looked like a normal hanged corpse.”
“Um, so what?”
“So, there's a reason the rope had to be so long. Or if'n you prefer: It was done with intent.”
I see, Yozuki thought, and decided to sort out the mysteries remaining at the scene.
There were three mysteries in total. Namely:
① Why were the victim's legs amputated and then reattached?
② Why was the victim hanged with his back to the wall?
③ Why was the rope used for the hanging unnecessarily long?
What answers did those questions lead to?
“I see, I got it!” Teika suddenly announced. “I am a genius, aren't I?”
“Huh? You solved it? Really?”
Yozuki was skeptical, but Teika responded in all cheer “Of course I did, Yozuki.” Then she raised her index finger and proclaimed
“Huh, did I deny that the culprit used a remote murder trick earlier? Well, they did. The culprit used a remote murder trick. Of course, it was one that didn't use any ice. And by usin' that trick, the culprit was able to kill the victim while still bein' outside the storehouse at the time of the crime.”
“Well then,” Teika said with a soft clearing of her throat. “Allow me to explain the trick the criminal used. The short version is that the trick took advantage of rigor mortis.”
“A trick with rigor mortis?”
Rigor mortis was the phenomenon where the muscles of a dead body gradually stiffened some time after death. Examining the degree to which the muscles had stiffened was one of the ways used to calculate time of death.
“But how could they have used rigor mortis to commit a remote murder?” Yozuki asked.
“The rigor mortis in a corpse has the property of releasin' after a certain amount of time,” Teika replied. “In the summer, it takes about two days for the body to go completely slack again. Well, this village is inside a limestone cave, so the ambient temperature's probably closer to what it is in fall. So it's probably closer to two and a half days, maybe even three, but anyway, if they took the body that was stiff due to rigor mortis and leaned it against the wall, it'd stay there, 'cause it'd be hard as a wooden board. Then, hook a loop of rope around the victim's neck. After a certain amount of time has passed, the rigor mortis'll wear off, and the victim's body will go limp and fall to the floor, at which point he'll be hanged.”
I see, Yozuki thought after hearing Teika's explanation. In other words, the culprit had entered the storehouse and set up the trap ahead of time. And during the time when the storehouse was a locked room – to be precise, between seven and eight hours before the autopsy was performed – the rigor mortis wore off, causing the victim to be hanged automatically. If that was the case, then it was certainly true that the culprit could have killed the victim without having to enter the locked room.
And that also solved some of the mysteries left behind at the scene.
② Why was the victim hanged with his back to the wall?
That was, of course, because the body, rigid with rigor mortis, was leaned against the wall.
③ Why was the rope used for the hanging unnecessarily long?
To prevent the victim from being hanged before he fell to the floor. When the victim was standing, the rope still had some slack to it, so the victim wasn't hanged, but when he fell to the floor, bringing his neck closer to the ground, he hanged himself.
“But,”
There was still the question of ① Why were the victim's legs amputated and then reattached? It felt like the trick Teika had explained didn't solve this question. And there was one other thing...
“Rigor mortis doesn't happen unless the person is dead, right?”
The trick Teika had explained was based on the premise that the victim was in a state of rigor mortis. But rigor mortis meant the person was dead, and, of course, a dead body wouldn't die no matter how much it was hanged. In other words, the victim didn't die when he was hanged, but was already dead when the remote murder trick was set up in the storehouse, which completely contradicted the estimated time of death from the autopsy. In other words, Teika's conclusion was wrong.
“Yes, you're right,” Teika nodded. “That is the reason for ①.”
“①?”
“① Why were the victim's legs amputated and then reattached?” Teika said, once again pointing up. “In other words, cuttin' off the legs was the key to the remote murder trick. So, a question for you, Yozuki: What do you think happened to the legs after the culprit cut them off?”
“What happened to the legs?”
Yozuki pondered the question, but found herself with nothing but confusion. Why had Teika asked the question? What happened to the legs? Just because they were severed from the body...
That was when everything snapped into place.
“The severed legs independently went into rigor mortis?”
By amputating the legs, they were completely separated from the rest of the body. Which raised a certain question. At that point, were the victim's legs alive or dead? That wasn't a question of philosophy, but of simple biology...
The conclusion was obvious. The answer was, of course, “dead”. Because if the severed legs were left alone, they would eventually decay. And if they were dead, then, of course, rigor mortis would set in. Even if the victim was alive, his severed legs were dead and would eventually undergo rigor mortis.
Then, the culprit used tape to reattached the rigor mortis-riddled legs to the rest of the body.
“The culprit leaned the victim against the wall of the storehouse while they were like that,” Teika said. “The victim's legs were stiff as two logs due to rigor mortis, so if he was balanced properly, he would remain stable and not fall over. And if the victim was given a strong anesthetic, the rest of his body wouldn't move, neither.”
As she listened to the explanation, Yozuki tried leaning against the wall of the storehouse. If she kept her feet shoulder-width apart, her posture was quite stable. It certainly did seem possible to lean the victim standing against the wall.
“Then, they put the rope around his neck,” said Teika, miming the action. “If they did that, then after a certain amount of time, the rigor mortis would wear off, and the body, unsupported, would fall to the ground. The key is that the knees bend when rigor mortis wears off, allowing the body to collapse. And the moment the body fell, the victim went and hanged himself. That's how the culprit was able to hang the victim from outside the storehouse.”
Yozuki nodded at the explanation. Now, the remote murder – and by extent, the locked room murder – was complete. Seeing the look on Yozuki's face, Teika scoffed.
“Well, let's move on. Next we have to solve the mystery of the Locked Villa when Funika was killed.”
After showing Teika to the villa where the crime occurred, Yozuki explained the situation as thoroughly as she could. Teika nodded, went “Hmm,” and checked the gap under the door.
“It doesn't look like there's any gap under the door.”
She was right, there was no gap under the door. So the key needed to lock the door couldn't have been returned to the room through the absence-of-a-gap. Of course, it was an interior door, so there probably was technically a gap large enough to permit airflow, but there wasn't any gap large enough to pass through the key or even a length of thread.
The distance between the door and the walls to the sides was about seven meters each way. There was almost nothing in the room; the only furniture was the heater and a bed in the southwest corner, making the already spacious room feel even larger.
There were two windows in the room, and both were fixed, so the culprit couldn't have entered or exited through them. So the only route the culprit could have taken was the door. However, the door didn't have a thumb turn, but a keyhole on the inside. In other words, you needed the key to lock the door, whether from the outside or the inside. And the key was lying next to Funika's body, about ten meters away from the door.
“What I'd like ta know,” said Teika, “is why the culprit bothered changin' the victim's clothes? I bet there's a clue there somewhere.”
Funika's body had been stabbed in the chest, but there were no holes in the clothes she was wearing, which was kind of unavoidable if a knife penetrated it. That meant that after stabbing Funika, the culprit took off her clothes and put on different ones. But that naturally raised the question of why the culprit changed Funika's clothes. It was another whydunit.
Yozuki suddenly had a brilliant idea. So brilliant that she immediately told it to Teika.
“What if the culprit attacked the victim, but she fought back and the culprit was injured? And the blood from that injury got on the victim's clothes?”
“So that's why they had to change her clothes and take the bloody clothes away from the scene,” Teika said with a nod. “It's an old-fashioned theory, but it's not impossible.”
Was it an old idea? Yozuki felt a bit embarrassed announcing it so confidently, then.
“Well, then, why did the culprit change her clothes?”
Yozuki asked, blushing a bit. Teika crossed her arms and replied “I might have an idea about that.”
“Actually, I just thought a' this. Maybe the culprit changed the victim's clothes to hide the wound on her chest. No, that ain't quite it. Oh, how do I put it? It's hard to explain.”
Hearing her say that, Yozuki wondered something.
“Miss Teika?” Yozuki hesitantly asked. “Could it be...?”
“Yep, that's right,” Teika nodded. “I've solved the mystery of this locked room.”
“Really?”
That was fast. Teika looked pleased by Yozuki's reaction and gave a demure cough. Then, with an expression of pride, she declared:
“If my theory is correct, the culprit created this locked room using a twin switch.”
“A twin switch?” Yozuki's eyes went wide at Teika's claim. “You mean a switch with twins?” she repeated without thinking.
“Yep,” said Teika. “A twin switch. In the world of mysteries, there are plenty of ways to make use of identical twins. Although in this case, the culprit didn't use twins, but triplets.”
“Not twins, but triplets?”
“Yeah. I think y'all know this already, but Funika, the victim in this case, has sisters named Fuika and Fumika. Fuika, Funika, and Fumika are triplets.”
She'd heard that from Okamibara earlier, so she did already know. But Fumika...
“She's currently missing, isn't she?”
She'd gone missing about a month ago, and was probably already dead – that's what Okamibara had told Yozuki and Kuzushiro.
“Yes, that's all true,” Teika said. “But what if Fumika isn't dead? What if the reason she 'went missin'' is because the culprit kidnapped her and has kept her imprisoned all this time?”
“Fumika's alive?”
In that case, the culprit would be able to use a twin switch.
“Well, actually, Fuika and Funika – if they were both here, they could be used in a twin switch,” Teika said, stroking the end of her ponytail. “But as you know, Fuika was shot in the head at the summer festival and had a bullet wound in her head. That bullet wound served as an identifying mark, so she couldn't be used in a twin switch. But the missing Fumika has no reason to have a bullet hole in her head. In other words, it's still possible to switch Funika and Fumika.”
Yozuki nodded in comprehension. Then she tilted her head and said “Okay...”
“I understand that much, but how did they use the twin switch? I don't think there's any way to recreate this locked room just by using twins.”
After all, the victim, Funika, was killed in a locked room. There's now way the door would lock just because you used a twin switch. That wasn't what twin switches were for.
“So says you, Yozukins.”
Who the heck was Yozukins?
“But if ya use a twin switch, ya can definitely recreate this locked room. Allow me to explain,” Teika began. “The first question is: how was the door locked. To cut straight to the end, the victim, Funika, was the one to lock it. When Funika entered the room last night, she locked the door herself. She inserted the key into the keyhole from within the room.”
Yozuki understood how that explained how the door was locked. But it just left them with another problem. That being, how they killed Funika in a locked room. Because for the killer to kill Funika, they needed Funika to unlock the door, at which point the door would no longer be locked.
“But there is a way,” Teika said. “To put it simply, they needed to kill Funika without entering the locked room. The crime scene became a locked room because Funika locked the door herself. So, if the culprit were to kill her without unlocking the door, wouldn't it remain as a locked room?”
That was true in the abstract... But...
“But how did they kill her?”
“Well,” Teika said with her finger raised, “Gas.”
“Gas?”
“Yeah, the culprit walked into the villa through the front door, set off some deadly gas, and flooded the inside of the villa. I don't know quite what gas it was, but it could have been as simple as droppin' a bunch 'a dry ice and filling the villa with CO2. The gas entered the room where Funika was through the small gap under the door, poisoning her to death. All the entrances to the buildings in this village have airtight iron doors, but an interior door should still have enough of a gap to let air pass through. That's how the culprit was able to kill Funika without taking a single step into the locked room.”
Yozuki's eyes went wide. It was certainly possible that Funika was killed that way. And that meant it was possible to create a locked room at the scene. It was perfect, no notes. Yozuki nodded in agreement, then caught herself and said “No, wait a minute.”
It wasn't perfect at all. There were lots of contradictions. Because...
“Miss Funika's cause of death wasn't gas poisoning, it was a stab wound in the chest.”
In other words, she'd been stabbed. There was a stab wound in her chest. And that wound showed signs of vital reactions, so there was no doubt about it. In short, Teika's theory was way off the mark.
When Yozuki looked at her disapprovingly, Teika burst out into a “Ehehehe!” laugh.
“You're so naive, Yozukers.”
And who the heck was Yozukers?
“Eh? What's so naive about that?”
“Think about it carefully, now,” Teika said. “There was unquestionably a stab wound in Funika's chest. But when did y'all confirm that wound was there?”
“Uh,”
When was it? Yozuki traced back her memory. Um... No, it wasn't when they found the body. Yozuki and Chusaita were both present at that time, but neither of them could perform an autopsy, so they'd gone to call the doctor, Isaburou. Then Isaburou had told them about Tabishirou's body being found in the storehouse, so they'd gone there first. After inspecting the storehouse, they'd returned to the villa. That was when the autopsy on Funika's body was performed and the stab wound in her chest was discovered.
Yozuki explained all that to Teika, who nodded and said “As I thought.”
“In other words, when the body was discovered, there was no evidence that Funika's body had any stab wounds. And right afterwards, everyone left the villa to look for Dr. Isaburou, right? So the villa was deserted.”
Which would make it easy for someone to break into the villa. That “someone” was, of course, the culprit, who was probably watching the villa from somewhere, waiting for a moment when they could sneak in.
“An' this is where the twin switch comes into play,” Teika said. “The culprit had previously kidnapped the third daughter, Fumika, and imprisoned her somewhere in the village. Then, they killed her at the same time as Funika. However, instead of gassing her, they stabbed her with a bladed weapon. Then, while Yozuki and Chusaita were away from the villa lookin' for Isaburou, they went into the villa an' switched Funika and Fumika's bodies, thus leaving a body with a stab wound in the chest in the room. Since they were triplets, they looked identical. When Yozuki and the others returned to the villa after finishing their investigation of the storehouse, they began the autopsy, not realizing they were performing it on a different body than the one they'd initially found. The stab wound in the chest led them to mistakenly believe that Funika's cause of death was stabbing. She had actually died from inhaling a gas, but because her body was switched, they misidentified the cause of death. In short, the culprit had used a twin switch to make them misidentify the cause of death.
I see, Yozuki thought. It was impossible to stab Funika in a locked room, but it was possible to kill her with gas. And by using the twin switch, they made it look like she'd been stabbed with a knife after the fact. The moment they developed that misconception, they'd already lost. Yozuki and the others believed that Funika was stabbed to death, so they naturally started thinking of ways to stab her in a locked room. But that was the culprit's trap. It was a puzzle with no answer that would leave the case forever unsolved.
Yozuki nodded in agreement. Then there was only one question remaining. Why had the culprit changed the victim's clothes?
“That's the simplest part,” Teika said with a laugh. “After all, Funika was killed by gas in a locked room. She wasn't stabbed with a blade, so there wasn't any hole in her clothes, obviously. But Fumika, the third daughter, was stabbed, so there was a hole in her clothes. So if Funika an' Fumika's bodies were switched, they would have switched a body with no hole in its clothes for one that had a hole in its clothes, exposing the switch at once. So the culprit needed to change Fumika into an outfit without any holes.”
I see, Yozuki thought. In other words, the hole in her clothes was proof that the two were killed with different weapons, so they needed to change Fumika's clothes to hide it.
“An' there you have it. Q.E.D.” Teika took a stretch. Then she triumphantly turned to Yozuki and said “How's about it, Yozukers? Do you respect me?”
Yozuki nodded. Seeing her act all smug was kind of annoying, but it was true that she was an admirable woman.
And so, thanks to Teika's efforts, the two locked room murders that had taken place in the Western Village of Yatsuwako Village were solved in an instant. Their next goal was to find the culprit. Either that, or to find a way to join Kuzushiro in the Eastern Village.
Yozuki's thoughts turned her childhood friend, Kuzushiro.
She wondered how Kasumi was doing.
I was, as it happened, but I was also at a total loss. We were in the midst of a detective shortage. There was no one present who could solve the locked room murder that had taken place in the Eastern Village, and the case was barreling towards a dead end.
So I had a thought. Maybe I should step up and claim the role of detective. I'd been involved in two separate serial locked room murder cases in my life, and I'd witnessed over a dozen locked room murder scenes. I had a lot of experience with locked rooms.
So I slowly raised my hand and said “Here...” as I looked around. I'm a detective, me, right here. What do you all think?
But my courage was instantly smothered when Mei the maid let out a loud voice right afterwards.
“Here!”
Her voice was ten times louder than mine, and all eyes instantly turned to her. I quickly lowered my hand, feeling my face turn red and my heart snap in two. Not even noticing me, Mei gave an opinion in a loud voice.
“I don't think we have any choice but to use our last resort.”
“Our last resort?” asked Camembert.
“To be blunt, we need to release Kyoujirou.”
Her words instantly filled the air with tension.
Kyoujirou? I thought to myself, tilting my head to one side. Does she mean the writer Kyoujirou Monokaki?
The name sounded familiar. Kyoujirou Monokaki was a genius hard-boiled locked room mystery novelist, and thus probably well known in that field. I'd never read any of his works, but I'd heard that everything he wrote was brilliant.
But what did she mean, “release” him? As I stood there with my head hanging sideways, Camembert explained “Well, the thing is, my brother, Kyoujirou, is mentally ill. Or rather, he's unstable; deranged. That's why, on the orders of Father before he passed, we keep him locked in the annex of the mansion.”
“You keep him locked in the annex?”
Come to think of it, the day I first met Camembert, he'd been brought back to the mansion by Fuika and Funika because it was his turn to cook for Kyoujirou. Which meant the siblings took turns caring for Kyoujirou.
But even if he was crazy, keeping a blood relative locked up in a detached building seems a bit much. It wasn't the Showa era anymore, guys. Because it was the Reiwa era.
“Well, I mean,” Camembert said as if making excuses for his family – or possibly just himself – “Kyoujirou is really violent. He often beats up Ryouichirou.”
“Ryouichirou?”
I turned to the man in question. Ryouichirou Monokaki averted his eyes with a bitter expression. He appeared to be a proud man. He probably didn't want others to know that he'd been beaten by his younger brother.
“Kyoujirou and Ryouichirou hate each other,” Camembert whispered to me. “They never got along, but it got really bad three years ago, when the Golden Age of Locked Rooms began and Ryouichirou became a best selling author.”
It was true that Ryouichirou Monokaki had managed to ride the trends of the time and quickly became a best seller.
“Kyoujirou really didn't like that,” Camembert said, lowering his voice even further. “Kyoujirou always looked down on Ryouichirou's writing. And it's a fact that Kyoujirou is a far better author than Ryouichirou. But for some reason, Kyoujirou's works don't sell at all. His novels always get rave reviews from the critics and rank highly in the charts, but for some reason, they just don't sell. Of course, good works get poor sales all the time, but Kyoujirou's case is just too extreme. It's like he made a deal with the devil: extreme talent for writing in exchange for being cursed to never sell.”
I didn't really get it, but come to think of it, I'd never read any of his books either. Since I'd heard he was a genius author, I thought about reading them all the time, but for whatever reason I wound up never buying any. I didn't think it was the devil's work, but it was a bit strange for someone who'd written so many masterpieces to sell so few.
“But Ryouichirou, who he looked down on, became a best seller,” Camembert shrugged. “Kyoujirou's pride was shattered, and he gradually lost his mind. He was a violent man to begin with, but that made him even more violent, until finally, Father locked him away in the annex.”
I see, so that's how it was. I'm not an author myself, so I can't fully understand Kyoujirou's feelings, but it must have been heartbreaking to see someone you didn't respect succeed while you languished in failure. At least if it was someone you respected, you could be happy for them.
“But,” I ended my secret talks with Camembert and addressed the group. “Why do you want to release Kyoujirou at a time like this? Why go out of your way to let such a dangerous person roam free?”
“Well, because Kyoujirou is both a writer and a great detective,” Camembert answered. “He's been involved in several cases in the past, and he's solved all of them.”
“Yes, he's by far the smartest of us siblings,” Mei said. “That's why I think Kyoujirou could solve this case easily.”
“I understand what you're saying, Mei,” Ryouichirou said, though the way he frowned showed he didn't want to. “But you know how rude and violent Kyoujirou is. It's too dangerous to let him out. That boy is like a lion, only with worse morals.”
Was he really that bad?
“But, but, that's our only choice,” Mei insisted. “There's no other way to solve the case. Or would you rather wait days for the police to get here, Ryouichirou?”
Ryouichirou coolly pushed up his glasses and said
“I think that is the wise thing to do. At the very least, it's a hundred times smarter than letting than man go.”
“Hmm, you're right,” Camembert agreed. “I understand what you're saying, Ryouichirou, and what Mei is saying is also right.”
Camembert was echoing everything he heard like a bat. Maybe he was a Camembert bat. Not that I'd ever heard of a bat like that.
“What do you think, Mr. Kuzushiro?”
Mei suddenly thrust the spotlight on me. I “Hmm”ed. First off, I had no idea what sort of person Kyoujirou actually was.
But I vaguely declared “I'd say I'm in favor of it.”
“If we wait for the police to arrive, there's a chance the evidence will be lost. So I think it's best to have someone investigate as soon as possible.”
Hearing that, Mei looked pleased and said “As I expected.” Then she looked triumphantly at Ryouichirou and declared “That's two against one.” He responded, looking even more bitter.
“This is an important issue. I don't think it's right to decide with a mere majority vote.”
“But that's democracy. If you decide against it on your own, that's dictatorship.”
“Democracy isn't always right. Sometimes it's mere mob rule. Sometimes a dictatorship is needed to lead the people to the correct conclusion.”
“Sounds like something a dictator would say to me.”
Mei and Ryouichirou were at each other's throats. The Camembert bat flew between them and said “Come on, you two.” Mei glared at him like he was bug to be swatted (even though bats aren't bugs) and said “Camembert, who do you agree with?”
“Eh me? Well... I.... Ummmm...........”
After thinking about it for quite a while, the Camembert bat squeaked that we should release Kyoujirou. And so, we all went to where he was being held.
When we arrived in the annex where Kyoujirou was being held, Camembert went straight to the door and unlocked it. A moment later, the door opened and a large man, about 180 cm tall, emerged. He had shaggy hair and a scruffy beard. He was wearing a plain white shirt with long sleeves under an also pure white sweatshirt. His eyes were sharp, like a hungry beast's.
So this was Kyoujirou? As I stood there, overwhelmed, he scratched his shaggy head and said
“Well?” The husky voice may have well have been a roar for how powerful it was. “What the hell do you all want? None of you would be here if you didn't want something from me.”
Though we were all a little intimidated, Ryouichirou pretended to be unaffected and said “I suppose you're right.”
“The truth is, something unexpected has happened.”
And Ryouichirou explained the case to Kyoujirou. Then he pushed up his glasses and said, haughty as can be,
“So it's time for you to act, little brother. This is your specialty, isn't it? Try doing something to earn your keep for once. Maybe that will improve your position a bit. Solve a few hundred more murders and maybe you'll have proven yourself able to leave this room and live a normal life.”
Kyoujirou gave a soft laugh and scratched his shaggy head again. “Oh, I see. Alright, then.” He flashed a grin.
“Alright, I'll cooperate with you.”
He was surprisingly friendly. Keeping on his smile, he said “By the way, brother, I have a favor to ask.”
“A favor?” Ryouichirou's head tilted to the side.
“Can you spread your legs a bit?”
“My legs?”
Ryouichirou's head tilted even further, but he did widen his legs a bit.
“No, no, more than that. About shoulder width.”
“Shoulder width?”
Ryouichirou looked confused, but he placed his feet shoulder width apart.
“Yeah, like that,” Kyoujirou said, grinning from ear to ear. Then he swung out his right leg and kicked Ryouichirou square in the groin.
“GYAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
Ryouichirou let out a horrific scream and collapsed on the spot. Bullets of sweat rolled down his forehead. Kyoujirou swung out his leg again, this time nailing the ball of Ryouichirou on the floor between the eyes. Then, as if delivering a finishing move, he began repeatedly stomping on the man.
We all watched in shock for a time. He was even worse than I'd been warned. It was understandable why Ryouichirou had been so reluctant to let him out.
“Well, shall we go?”
Eventually tiring of kicking Ryouichirou, Kyoujirou turned his eyes on me.
“O-Oh?”, I stumbled over my words. “G-G-Go? Go where?”
“Huh? What do you mean? Are you a fucking idiot?” Kyoujirou asked scornfully. “To solve the mystery of the locked room. That's the whole reason you came to me, dipshit.”
That was true enough. But after seeing the way he'd beaten on Ryouichirou, I'd though for sure he'd break that promise.
“Relax, I'm a man who keeps my promises,” Kyoujirou said with a grin. “Besides, I like solving locked rooms. Locked rooms are great. They always get by blood racing.”
After saying that, Kyoujirou stroked his beard and said
“But before that?”
“Before that?”
“I need a shave.”
After Kyoujirou finished his shave, we led him to the tatami floored room where Fuika's body had been found. Incidentally, Ryouichirou was still unconscious after being beaten up, for the time being, we decided to leave him behind.
It was 8:00 in the morning. We entered the room through the broken window, seeing as how the door was still sealed from both doorknobs and couldn't be opened. As a result, Kyoujirou could see the door locked exactly as it had been when the body was discovered. Of course, we could have opened the door by removing the beer mug, but we didn't in the interest of preserving the scene.
Kyoujirou looked at the mug covering the doorknob and clicked his tongue. Then he bent down and looked under the door.
“Oh, there's a gap under the door.”
He was right, there was a gap of about 5 cm.
“But that doesn't help us, does it?” Mei asked. “The beer mug has been secured in place with multiple layers of clear tape. That could only have been done by hand, right? There's no way a culprit outside the room could have placed the mug over the doorknob and placed all those layers of tape on it through a single 5 cm gap in the bottom of the door. In conclusion, that gap under the door is useless. It may as well not be there.”
“Mei, shut up. I knew everything you just said before you opened your stupid mouth.”
Kyoujirou's rudeness made Mei angry. But she responded by crying to me.
“Did you hear that? He just called my mouth stupid.”
It was an unreasonable reaction. Everything Mei had said was true, including the bit about the gap under the door being useless. The door's keyhole was filled with molten metal, so it was impossible to lock the door from the outside with the key. In short, the standard trick of returning the key to the room through the gap under the door was also impossible.
In that case, all we could conclude was that the culprit had locked the door by turning the thumb turn, by hand, from the inside. But of course, all that would accomplish was trapping the culprit in the locked room.
“Then how did the culprit manage to escape?”
“I wonder. Maybe there's a secret passage?”
Kyoujirou responded to Camembert's question by jokingly flipping one of the tatami mats in the room. Then his eyes shot open.
“Are you kidding me?”
Under the tatami mat Kyoujirou had lifted was a pair of concrete stairs leading down into the basement.
“Well I'll be damned. There is a secret passage. Thanks, kid.”
We all looked at each other, equally stunned by the discovery. A new way in and out of the room had been discovered under the tatami mats. Which meant this wasn't actually a locked room.
“This is a really freakin' stupid answer, but I don't hate it,” Kyoujirou said with a whistle as he descended the stairs to the basement. Then he popped back up, clicking his tongue. “It's no good, it's too dark to see anything. Oi, Camembert.”
“Yes, Kyoujirou?”
“Go get me a flashlight.”
Camembert gave an opportunistic smile and said “Okay” before leaving. Five minutes later, he returned with a flashlight. Kyoujirou snatched it out of his hands, turned it on, and headed back downstairs. We all followed him. The stairs ended soon enough at a wooden walkway, about a meter long and a meter below ground. The wood was the color of caramel and appeared to have been varnished, as it sparkled in the light.
Kyoujirou shined the flashlight down the passage and clicked his tongue again.
“No good, nobody's been through here. It's covered in spiderwebs.”
The secret passage was indeed completely lined with spiderwebs. There was no way the culprit could have gone through without breaking any. Which is to say, there's no way they could have entered or exited that room via this passage.
“But where does this secret passage lead?” Mei asked.
“Maybe to the next room?”
Kyoujirou narrowed his eyes at my words. Then he turned to me and asked
“What's your name?”
“Um, it's Kasumi Kuzushiro.”
“Right, dumbass, got it.” He'd called me a dumbass. “If this passage leads to the next room, there must be a similar staircase in that room. Go check it out.”
I was really annoyed by the way he put it, but I was too afraid to argue. Instead, I obediently declared “Yes, sir, Mr. Kyoujirou, sir!” and got right on it. Mei said “I'll go with you, Mr. Kuzushiro” and followed me. We went back out the window into the garden, then reentered the mansion via the front door and went to the room next to the scene. That room was also covered by tatami mats. Mei and I split up and started rolling them back one by one. As I'd expected, there was a staircase down to the basement.
Going downstairs, we descended about a meter, just like before. I called out to the end of the narrow passage.
“Mr. Kyoujirou! There is a secret passage!”
I saw a light waving at the other end of the passage. It was Kyoujirou's flashlight. As I'd expected, the secret passage in that room connected to the room where Fuika's body was found.
But in reality, this secret passage was covered in spiderwebs and couldn't be used. So we'd gone from a room locked with a beer mug to a room locked with spiderwebs. Just how would Kyoujirou try to break down this imposing locked room?
With that in mind, Mei and I returned to the crime scene. Kyoujirou was standing by the top of the basement stairs, hand on his chin, deep in thought. Then he looked up and spoke to Mei.
“Where is Fuika's body? Show me.”
To prevent Fuika's body from decaying, she had been moved to the wine cellar in the mansion's garden. So we led him there, where Kyoujirou bent down next to the body and took her right hand in his as if he'd been planning it from the start. He looked at the back of her elbow.
“There's an injection mark here.”
“And injection mark?”
Hearing that, my eyes snapped to the back of Fuika's elbow. There was definitely a red mark there that looked like it had been left by a needle. I frowned. How had that gotten there? No, more importantly...
Kyoujirou was acting like he'd predicted that mark would be there from the start. Was that possible? Only if...
Then Kyoujirou said exactly what I'd expected.
“Rejoice, commoners. I've figured out how the culprit locked that room.”
“Y-You figured out how the crime scene was locked?”
We were all taken aback by Kyoujirou's announcement. Seeing us, he spoke in surprise.
“Huh? What are you all so surprised about? That's why you brought me here, isn't it?”
That was true, but...
“Isn't this a bit too fast?” I muttered. Kyoujirou hadn't investigated 30 minutes. Kyoujirou responded with a snort.
“Well, I suppose that's how it looks from your perspective as a common nobody.”
I was annoyed by that, but I was still too scared to argue. Instead, I organized our information in my head again.
The window of the room where Fuika's body was found was fixed, so there were only two ways in or out of the room. One was the door. But that door was locked from the inside, and a beer mug was placed over the doorknob, where the thumb turn was located. The other was a secret passage hidden under one of the tatami mats. But that passage was full of spiderwebs, so if someone had tried to go through it, they would have left traces that weren't there.
In other words, although the crime scene had two entrances, they were both unusable. Therefore, it was a locked room. So, how had the culprit disappeared from that locked room?
Only a great detective could have found the answer. Kyoujirou Monokaki. Genius hard-boiled locked room mystery novelist, and genius great detective.
I asked him.
“How did the culprit leave the room?”
Kyoujirou snorted and said “That's obvious.”
“Through the underground secret passage. The door was useless with that beer mug in place.”
That was true, but wasn't the secret passage also useless? Because...
“There's no way they could have gone through there because of the spiderwebs, right?”
No matter how hard you tried, it was impossible. A mouse couldn't have fit through there. Kyoujirou responded by looking at me disdainfully. Then he said something incredibly rude:
“Will you think for one fucking second? Yeah, the spiderwebs were in the way, so they couldn't have passed through the passage. But think about it like this. When the culprit left the room, there weren't any spiderwebs in that passage. Those spiderwebs were put in place after the culprit left the room.”
“The spiderwebs were placed after the culprit left the room?”
Indeed, if that was the case, then the culprit could have easily escaped the room through the passage. But that was also an incredibly stupid answer. Summoning all my courage, I told him so.
“Mr. Kyoujirou... You might not know this, but it takes a really long time to make a spiderweb.”
After shooting Fuika on the night of the summer festival, the culprit carried her body into that room. Then, they locked the door, put the beer mug over the doorknob, and left through the secret passage... Let's assume all that for now. Even if they carried Fuika's body here straight after the murder, it still would have been delivered after 7:00. We discovered the spiderwebs in the secret passage just after 8:00 A.M. There's no way that many spiderwebs could have been made in just twelve or thirteen hours. Kyoujirou's reasoning was clearly flawed.
When he heard my point, Kyoujirou responded with a mocking smile. Then he said something rude again:
“You really are a total moron. Who said the culprit escaped from that room last night? They didn't leave that room yesterday, they left it last month.”
“Last month?”
“Yes, last month, the culprit released tons of spiders into that passageway. The spiders spent the month diligently building their webs, completely blocking off the passageway.”
Kyoujirou's explanation left me extremely confused. Last month? They escaped from the room a month ago? I didn't understand what he was saying. The murder was committed last night. There was no way they could have brought her body into that room a month ago.
Next to me, Mei said “No way.” She looked to be in total disbelief as she asked Kyoujirou
“Was it a twin switch trick?”
Kyoujirou nodded at her.
“Yes, the body you all found it that room wasn't Fuika, but Fumika, the third daughter who went missing a month ago. That means the culprit could have escaped that room a month ago. In short, this is a locked room trick created using a twin switch.”
A twin switch trick... The culprit was able to create the Locked Room of the Spiderwebs by switching Fuika and Fumika.
“I will now explain the specific steps the culprit took,” Kyoujirou announced. “First, one month ago, the culprit carried the sleeping Fumika into that room and inserted an IV into her right arm. The injection mark on the back of her elbow is proof of that. Then, they took the IV tube connected to the needle in her right arm and ran it out of the room under the door and connected it to an IV bag containing both nutrients and anesthetic. That way, Fumika would receive nutrition and stay alive, but not wake up due to the anesthetic. The IV bag and its stand were left in the room next door to the crime scene. That was a vacant room almost nobody went in or out of, so there was little risk of anyone finding the IV there. Nobody except the culprit, who regularly visited it to replace the IV bag.”
That resulted in Fumika sleeping in that room all that time. Camembert had said before that the mansion was so large that there were multiple vacant rooms that nobody ever went in or out of. So even if they left the IV bag and stand in the room, it was true that it probably wouldn't be found.
And, although it's a bit uncomfortable to discuss, the same goes for disposing of her urine. If they inserted an indwelling catheter into her urethra and pulled it out with a string under the door when they were done, they could dispose of it without setting foot in the room. And since Fumika had been surviving on an IV drip for the month, if they gave her a laxative and emptied her bowels ahead of time, they wouldn't have had to worry about solid waste.
As I thought of all that, Kyoujirou continued.
“So, after setting up the IV tube in Fumika, the culprit locked the door from the inside and placed the beer mug over the doorknob. They then escaped through the secret passageway. They released a ton of spiders behind them, and over the course of the next month, the spiders blocked off the entire passage with their webs. That made it impossible to enter or leave: a perfect locked room. Afterwards, on the night of the festival, the culprit shot and killed Fuika, then they returned to the mansion and aimed a silenced pistol through the gap under the door. The tip of the gun was pointed right at Fumika's forehead as she slept next to the door. Then, they pulled the trigger. The gap under the door is 5 cm, so the bullet passed through the gap without touching the door or the floor and hit Fumika in the forehead, killing her. All they had to do from there was to retrieve the IV tube from Fumika's arm through the gap in the door.”
And with that, the locked room murder was complete. We'd assumed that the body in the room was Fuika's, therefore we'd wondered how they brought Fuika's body into the room. From that moment, we were caught in the culprit's trap. Once we assumed that it was Fuika's body, the mystery of the Locked Room of the Spiderwebs could never be solved.
As soon as I heard his reasoning, I realized why the culprit had blown up the bridge connecting the two villages. By isolating the Eastern Village, the people from the Western Village could no longer enter or leave the village. Though I hadn't seen it, there must have been a clinic in the Western Village. There weren't many places in Japan where you couldn't find a clinic. However, by separating the two villages, the culprit had made it so that the doctor at that clinic couldn't come to the mansion. That meant that there was nobody there who could perform an autopsy, so the estimated time of death couldn't be narrowed down. The culprit had killed Fuika at the festival, then gone to the mansion and killed Fumika. There must have been a difference in their times of death. Therefore, if an autopsy had been performed, it might have exposed that difference, leading us to realize that the body we'd found was Fumika's, not Fuika's. The culprit had blown up the bridge just to prevent that from happening.
Also, probably because the murder weapon had been a small, low-caliber pistol equipped with a silencer, the bullet that hit Fumika hadn't penetrated all the way through, but lodged in her skull. Since the body had been taken away, we couldn't be sure, but it was likely that the bullet that hit Fuika hadn't penetrated either. And that was intentional. If the bullet that killed Fumika had penetrated her skull, it would have been found in the room. And that would have proved that she was killed in that room and not at the festival. To avoid that, the culprit had deliberately chosen a small caliber gun as the murder weapon.
“And with that, the entire mystery of this locked room murder is solved,” Kyoujirou said with a satisfied smile. “The question now is who the culprit is, but I'm sure I can find that out before long. Anyway, as long as I'm outside, I want a drink. Hey, Mei, go get me a beer-”
Kyoujirou wasn't able to finish his sentence. He collapsed to the floor like a puppet with his strings cut. We were all stunned. But none of us so much as Kyoujirou, who had just been hit with a stun gun by Ryouichirou, whose face was still swollen where Kyoujirou had kicked it earlier.
Mei was the first to return to her senses.
“Ryouichirou, what are you doing?”
“Shut up! This guy's dangerous!” Ryouichirou was hysterical. “Now that the mystery of the locked room's been solved, we're done with him! If we let him do what he wants, something terrible will happen!”
Ryouichirou screamed in a blind fury. Not that I didn't get it. Kyoujirou had beaten him to a pulp earlier.
“Come on, let's lock this guy up already! Camembert, help me!”
At that moment, Kyoujirou, who had been lying face down on the floor, shot to his feet. He glared at Ryouichirou with unfocused eyes. Ryouichirou looked frightened, but steeled himself and went to thrust the stun gun at him again. Kyoujirou chose that moment to turn tail and run for the hills.
“Ah, wait!”
Ryouichirou shouted after him, but didn't move to chase him. Deep down, he may have been relieved that he'd chosen to leave.
Thus, Kyoujirou disappeared somewhere we couldn't follow (or rather, decided not to follow), but at least the locked room was solved. I wanted to go back to the inn in the Western Village, but the bridge was still down, so there was no way back. So I spent another night at the Monokaki mansion. As long as I was there, I asked Camembert to show me the scene where the former head of the Monokaki Family, Monokaki Fuichirou, had died. Officially, Fuichirou had died of natural causes, but Okamibara had said there was a possibility he'd been murdered. But my investigation didn't uncover any new evidence.
The next morning, as I lay sleeping soundly, there was some sort of commotion outside my room, and soon enough, Camembert had running into the room with a pale face.
“Kasumi, this is bad. There are more bread crumbs.”
“Hansel and Gretel?”
Camembert said that there were breadcrumbs in the garden again. Soon Mei and Ryouichirou arrived, having heard the commotion. We all decided to follow the bread crumb trail, just like yesterday. We followed the trail through the garden and eventually came to a window. Looking inside through the window, we saw a Japanese room with tatami mats on the floor and sliding doors. Inside the room was a headless corpse.
The corpse was lying on a wooden table, with its legs and torso tied down with wire to keep it from moving. Just like Gulliver during his Travels. The room was covered in the blood spray from the neck, with a particularly large amount on the sliding doors, which the body's neck was facing.
The severed head was lying on the tatami mat floor, and for some reason, it was wearing a motorcycle helmet. At first, we'd mistaken it for just a helmet lying on the floor, but the cut surface of the neck was visible inside, making us realize something was in there. However, the helmet's visor was blacked out with black spray paint, so we couldn't identify the head's owner.
“Whose body is that?” I asked.
“It could be Isaburou's,” Camembert said. “Those are his clothes, and the build looks similar.”
“Isaburou? Do you mean Isaburou Monokaki?”
He was a famous genius medical locked room mystery novelist. But I hadn't seen him since my arrival in this village.
“Yes, Isaburou lives near the clinic in the Western Village.”
“The Western Village?”
That didn't add up. The bridge connecting the two villages had collapsed. So Isaburou had been in the Eastern Village all this time since the bridge fell, but he'd been hiding and hadn't showed himself to anyone?
“Anyway, let's go in.”
Camembert said that and went to go around to the sliding doors into the Japanese room. But I suddenly realized something and stopped him.
“No, you shouldn't open those sliding doors. This might be a locked room.”
“A locked room? What do you mean?” Mei asked with a confused expression. “There's no lock on a sliding door. So you can't use one to make a locked room.”
She was right, and yet I was certain I was, too.
“Look, if you want to get in, go through the window.”
I insisted and grabbed a rock off the ground. Aside from the sliding doors, the window before us was the only other way into the room, and it was fixed. I broke the window with the rock and entered the room.
The smell of blood was suffocating, and I nearly fell over when it hit me. Judging from the amount of blood spatter, it was beyond question that the victim had been alive before he was decapitated.
A black glass die had fallen on the tatami mat. It was identical to the one in Fuika's locked room. Then, trying to see who it was, I approached the severed head in the helmet, but still couldn't see through the blacked out visor. So I tried to lift the visor, but for some reason it wouldn't move. It seemed to have been fixed in place with glue.
“I need something sharp... A knife or something.”
As soon as I said that, Camembert handed me a butterfly knife, saying “Here you go.” I flinched.
“Why do you just have that with you?”
“A butterfly knife is a man's dream, isn't it?”
I had a lot to say about that, but I decided they could wait. I took the butterfly knife, inserted the tip of the blade into the gap in the visor, and employed the principle of leverage until it opened. We looked at the face inside the helmet.
“So it was Isaburou,” Camembert said. Then he tilted his head in confusion. “But why isn't he in the Western Village?”
It was certainly worth asking why he came to this village, and why he hadn't shown his face until now. But what really bothered me was...
I went to the sliding doors that served as the entrance to the room. And when I saw it, all I could say was “I knew it.”
“What is it?” Mei asked, stepping over. “This, right here,” I said, pointing to the sliding doors. There were two sliding doors to the room, and there was a massive amount of blood on the spot where they were joined. The fact that the blood had splattered on the doors meant that they were closed when the head was cut off, but if they'd been opened after the head was cut off, the sliding doors would have rubbed against each other, leaving marks of smudged blood. But there were no such marks to be found. That meant the sliding doors hadn't been opened until after the blood had dried.
But that created another contradiction. The blood on the spot where the doors touched had dried to the consistency of dry oil paint. If the sliding doors had been opened it that state, the dried blood would have cracked and broken, leaving a trace of the doors having been opened. But those traces weren't there either. That mean the sliding doors couldn't have been opened after the blood had dried.
That mean the sliding doors hadn't been opened before or after the blood had dried. But since the victim's head was cut off, the culprit must have been in the room to do the cutting. Then, they must have opened the sliding doors to leave the room. After all, those sliding doors were the only entrance to the room.
“But these doors weren't opened. Not once.”
Camembert's head leaned to the side once again.
“Which means?”
“That this Japanese room is a locked room. A room locked with blood.”
It was an extremely unique locked room, sealed in human blood like something out of a black magic ritual. No matter how you looked at it, it wasn't something any of us could solve. But Kyoujirou, the detective, was missing. In other words, we had no way of solving it.
So we decided to go to the living room to discuss our next move. But nobody had any good ideas. Eventually, we all stopped talking, and a heavy silence fell over us.
The silence was broken by a woman with a slight Kansai accent saying “What's with y'all? This is depressing.”
“Did somethin' happen?”
I turned my eyes towards the voice and felt them shoot open. There was a woman as beautiful as an actress, with her hair tied in a ponytail. And it was a woman I knew well.
“Teika Ojou?”
The Young Empress of Japanese Mystery: Teika Ojou, the greatest mystery novelist of the modern era. To a mystery fan like me, she was no less than a goddess. So, naturally, I was very confused.
“What is Teika Ojou doing in Yatsuwako Village?”
“You didn't know, Kasumi?” answered a familiar voice.
“Miss Teika is a guest of the Monokaki Family. Well, she says that, but she's really just avoiding her responsibilities.”
Seeing her appear as well, I was completely taken aback. There stood my childhood friend, Yozuki Asahina.
What was Yozuki, who should have been at the inn in the Western Village, doing in the Eastern Village? The bridge connecting the two villages was supposed to have been destroyed.
Yozuki, unaware of my thoughts, smiled at me and said:
“Kasumi, you would not believe the day I've had.”
Locked Room Draft No. 2 (By one of the Eight Locked Room Masters of the Showa Era: Inori Ushizaki)
The victim's body is discovered in a Japanese room. The victim's head has been severed at the neck by a blade, producing a violent spray of blood. The blood sprayed upon the sliding doors has dried, preventing the doors from being opened or closed.