Lending the Key to the Locked Room by Tokuya Higashigawa

Author:Tokuya Higashigawa [Higashigawa, Tokuya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-20T20:00:00+00:00

8

At this point it’s about time for our two police detectives to make their appearance once again.

Readers in general are often forgetful and get easily bored. That’s not just the case with readers of mystery fiction. The reading public in general is also very indifferent, so if a character doesn’t appear for a long time, they tend to think of these characters as “people of the past”, no matter how important their role in the story actually is. So now we have to spend a few pages with these detectives to make sure they don’t have to suffer from such a cold attitude from the readers.

Some of the following scenes have already been described from Ryūhei’s perspective, but please bear with me.

Previously, we saw how Chief Inspector Sunagawa and his subordinate Shiki discovered a bloodstain in the flat where Yuki Konno had been murdered. What happened next will be briefly summarised. For, whilst a police investigation might look flashy in television dramas, actual investigations are very boring and tedious. A detailed explanation hardly makes for an entertaining story.

It is a repetition of the same boring cycle: detectives finding a notebook in one of the drawers, but, on looking inside, all they discover is that the victim’s handwriting was really bad; detectives getting hopeful when they find some magazine clippings, only to discover they were just cuttings from a mail order catalogue; detectives thinking they finally have something when they stumble upon a photograph, only to find a Dachshund smiling at them when they turn it around .

It’s almost as if they are rummaging through a garbage can, checking what could still be eaten and what couldn’t. The starting point of the investigation that commenced after sunrise was based on the information they had gathered that “could still be eaten”.

The two detectives’ task for the moment was to check up on the ex-boyfriend of the victim and see what he had to tell them.

The name of the ex was Ryūhei Tomura. Yuki’s diary had revealed to the detectives how, early this year, Yuki and Ryūhei had an argument about his employment and how the two had an enormous fight in the college café in the middle of the day. Shiki and the others saw this as very vital information and soon their attention was focused on this Tomura.

‘Cherchez la femme, as they say.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Sunagawa.

‘If a woman is killed, there’s bound to be a man behind it.’

‘Really? I have a feeling your interpretation is rather creative.’

But that didn’t change the fact that their first goal was to locate Ryūhei Tomura.

They went to his flat first thing in the morning, but he was not there. Of course, it was only natural for them not to find the person they were looking for right away. Any detective knew that.

They asked a fellow college student who lived nearby and learnt that Ryūhei had probably not come home the previous night. If he had been home, he would have switched the television or stereo on loudly, and would have let out drunken howls.

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