Six Four (15 page)

Even so, a young girl in a doctor’s mask would stand out. It wasn’t as if there’d been a spate of summer colds. Somebody must have seen her. If nothing else, she would have caught the attention of the station staff.

Such hopes led to nothing. Visiting the station during rush-hour, the people had flowed through the automated gates with alarming speed, and the majority waiting for buses or trains had had their eyes trained on mobile phones or magazines. The police
officer who manned the
koban
outside the station also claimed not to have seen her. Ayumi had slipped through, completely unnoticed. Either that, or she’d headed away from the station after leaving her bike there.

What evidence did you have to tell us she’d calmed down?
Mikami had interrogated the therapist. He’d been unable not to. It was only because of the therapist’s advice to try going back to work that Mikami had seen fit to leave Minako and Ayumi alone that afternoon.
You need to avoid provoking her, act as though everything is normal.
Mikami had swallowed the advice and left the house; yet this had been the result. The therapist hadn’t shown any signs of remorse. ‘
I won’t cause them any trouble, not any more.
’
I decided she would be fine when she said that.
He went on to tell Mikami that, in retrospect, the words might of course have signalled an intention to run away.

In Mikami’s mind, the sentence had intimated more than a plan to leave home. A number of interpretations had entered his thoughts. She’d said it so they would lower their guard. To say goodbye. Had she perhaps hinted that she would commit suicide? No. Ayumi would never kill herself. She’d definitely said it to get them to lower their guard. She’d known they’d relax their watch if she told them she wouldn’t cause any more trouble. There’d been that element of calculation: she hadn’t run out of the house in the heat of the moment. Didn’t the fact that she hadn’t forgotten to take her wallet and a change of clothes prove that?

I want to die! I want to die! I want to die!

High-risk missing person
. That was what the ‘special arrangements’ Akama had spoken of actually boiled down to. Someone vulnerable, with a high chance of becoming involved in an incident or an accident of some kind. Someone likely to attempt self-harm or suicide. Mikami had no argument with Ayumi being classified in this way. He understood that the investigation would become cursory in nature if the threat of suicide was removed completely, whether Ayumi was the child of a police
officer or not. As it was, the regional stations had spared no effort in conducting the search. As well as officers on the beat, personnel from Criminal Investigations and Community Safety had also been assigned to the search. Even then, they had yet to pick up any significant leads. He had politely refused when, a month ago, they had suggested that he let them take the search public, which would mean exposing her face to every passerby in the street. Mikami had refused because he’d known that, for Ayumi, there could be no greater hell.

His eyes stung from the glare of the TV set. Five or six girls not too far from Ayumi’s age were singing and dancing, looking half naked in their outfits. Each vying to stand out. Staring right into the camera, as if to say,
Look at me, just me.

If she had only meant to run away . . .

If he’d been one hundred per cent certain that Ayumi wouldn’t try to take her own life, that she’d only wanted plastic surgery so that boys would notice her, only shouted abuse at them and charged out of the house because they’d turned down her request, then, even though she was in the middle of adolescence, he felt confident that his anger would have outweighed his concern. At sixteen, she was not yet fully mature, but neither was she a child. There was no reason to let her trample over her parents’ dignity.
All daughters leave home eventually. Society’s full of families that don’t get on. I’ve seen too many cases of parents killing their children, children killing their parents.
Lining up angry sentence after angry sentence, it was possible he’d convinced himself and Minako into thinking her behaviour was acceptable.

What did Minako think . . .

Of him, for having refused to deal with their daughter’s condition?

Of her husband, for having raised his hand to their suffering child?

Minako hadn’t tried to blame the therapist. Nor had she tried to blame herself for having fallen asleep. She had searched for
Ayumi with the energy of someone possessed. She’d separated herself, then, from the Minako who had always consulted him before making a decision. He would try talking to her, but she hardly reacted. Her eyes wouldn’t meet his, even when he was standing in front of her. It was as though she’d been searching for Ayumi by herself. Once she’d exhausted the possibility of the train station or Ayumi’s friends helping, she started buying women’s magazines and making calls to the plastic surgeons and beauty clinics that had put out advertisements.
Have you had a young girl come in, wearing a mask? She has a red sports bag
.
Please call me back if you see her.
She then said, ‘I can’t get my message across on the phone, I need to ask them in person,’ and began to head out every day. To Tokyo. Saitama. Kanagawa. Chiba. If the silent calls hadn’t come in, she would have probably extended her investigations to the black-market surgeons.

Mikami could have approached Akama for his help. You couldn’t do much with one ten-thousand-yen note. And Ayumi couldn’t even approach a plastic surgeon’s office without signed parental consent. Yet the fact remained that it was one of the very few leads they had to pursue. And if fingerprints and dental records were means of identifying the dead, then perhaps Mikami should have requested that the focus of the search be shifted to businesses dealing in cosmetic surgery – if nothing else, as a way of searching for an Ayumi who still lived. But he hadn’t. Ayumi despised the face she’d inherited. It was the one thing he didn’t want anyone else to know. The family’s suffering would be too great if the knowledge got out. And he’d wanted to preserve his daughter’s dignity. He had pledged to himself that no word of Ayumi’s condition, or the things it had made her say, would ever leave the walls of their home.

But . . .

What did Minako think?

A tension like a faint electric current had grown between them. They were aware of each other, but their eyes were firmly
shut. Ayumi’s absence had brought into relief the parts of their relationship that lacked solidity; at the same time, it formed an unbreakable bond that held them together. She had provided them with a single goal, compelled them to take care of each other, forced them into praying that their relationship would hold out.

Mikami wondered how long that would last.

Midnight. Mikami used the remote control to turn off the TV before he crawled out from under the
kotatsu.
He took the phone from its stand and switched off the room’s lights.

He walked down the dark corridor.

Yoshio Amamiya, old and wrinkled. Shoko Amamiya, innocent and sweet, a decorative band in her hair. It was just one of the cases he’d had to work on as a detective. It wasn’t until Ayumi ran away from home that he’d really known how the parents must feel, losing their only child like that.

Mikami tiptoed quietly into the bedroom. He put the phone next to his pillow and climbed on his futon. He found the electric foot warmer with his feet and pulled it up until it rested next to his calves.

He thought he heard Minako turn in her sleep.

He glanced across to her futon. Lying inside was a mystery he couldn’t solve. Whenever he thought of Ayumi, the way she hated her parents’ looks, he couldn’t help but recall the question everyone had no doubt asked themselves so long ago.

Why had Minako chosen him?

He was no longer sure about what he thought he’d come to understand. Listening to the ticking of the clock, he fumbled, as though he were squinting in darkness, to trace the genesis of their relationship.

Mikami had left the house prepared for a busy day.

The first thing he did on entering the office was check on Mikumo. She was all but allergic to alcohol. Her face became bloated if she’d been drinking the night before. He knew immediately that she hadn’t joined the others. This observation also meant he could anticipate the content of Suwa’s report as he approached Mikami’s desk.

‘We don’t stand a chance,’ Suwa said, his voice croaky.

From the sound of things, he’d spent a good portion of the night singing and having to raise his voice. Next to him, Kuramae looked to be suffering, too. His eyes were bloodshot, half hidden under puffy lids.

‘So it’s a lost cause?’

Suwa let out an exasperated, alcohol-tinged breath.

‘They’re still insisting on submitting it to the captain. They’re definitely not going to settle for leaving it with us. It seems his editor, Azusa, an old-fashioned reporter with a background in police reporting, is really pressuring Akikawa on this.’

The last part sounded more like intelligence than it did a simple report. Akikawa was getting caught in the middle.

Revealing the woman’s identity by thinking out loud. Mikami was leaning more and more towards the idea, but he had yet to hear from Ishii, who was supposed to be confirming Akama’s position on the matter.

‘Okay, we can forget about the
Toyo
. I want you two to split
up – see if you can work on some of the others before the evening. Sound them out about leaving the protest with us; if they’re not receptive, make the suggestion that they leave it with Chief Ishii.’

As long as they remained in the dark as to Akama’s response, they needed to continue with their attempts to arbitrate peace. If a few of the papers relaxed their positions, that could be used as fodder to bring the
Toyo
around.

The Press Club was a fluid entity. Allegiances shifted in line with the complex interactions of its members, who reacted to each reporter’s strategies as well as to the overall balance of power.

When issues like the one they were facing arose, it became even harder to predict the outcome of this type of chemical reaction. The
FM Kenmin
, one of the Press Club’s associate members, was perhaps the only one whose stance they could predict. The station received its budget in full from the prefectural government; as such, it had no ability to speak out against anywhere deemed a public office. That left twelve of them. How many would Suwa be able to convert?

Mikami pulled his notebook from his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages.

Toyo. Branch D. Senior Editor. Azusa Mikio. University T. Forty-six. Cheerful. Brags. Well disposed to the police.

Mikami remembered the man’s dark face, his narrow forehead. The executive, round-table meeting held once a month between the media executives and the Prefectural HQ. Azusa had shown up once in lieu of his branch head, who had gone down with a cold.

It was worth trying him.

Mikami made a mental note as he reached for the phone. He dialled the number for Ishii’s desk. The situation was too pressing to sit back and wait for him to get in touch. The deadline for their official response to the Press Club was four o’clock. He also needed to fix matters with Yoshio Amamiya urgently.

Aiko Toda answered the phone. She told him Ishii was in Akama’s office. Mikami asked her to get Ishii to call when he was back, then hung up. Restless, he got to his feet and paced over to the whiteboard near the wall. He ran his eyes over the press reports. Three road accidents between the previous night and the morning. A fire in someone’s kitchen. The arrest of a man who had tried to skip out on paying his food bill. All things considered, a quiet night for the prefecture. His phone started to ring just as he turned around. He hurried over and took the receiver in his hand.

‘Mikami, could you go and see Akama in his office?’

Ishii hung up without offering an explanation. His voice had sounded heavy. Akama’s office, not Ishii’s desk. Perhaps it meant Akama wanted to give his response in person.

Three minutes later, Mikami knocked on Akama’s door. The director was in there by himself. He moved from his desk to one of the couches without offering Mikami a seat.

‘You seem to be particularly bad at managing the press, Mikami. Why did you leave this until it got out of hand?’

He started harshly. A written protest was going to be submitted to the station captain. Mikami understood his urge to get angry, knowing Akama had been told only at the last minute. Even so . . .

‘I refused their request to give them the woman’s identity, as per your request; unfortunately, this only strengthened their resolve, even more than we could have expected. We are doing our best to remedy the situation, but negotiations are proving difficult. They have a lot of aggravation left to blow off.’ He had given his answer standing. Akama still hadn’t offered him a seat. It wasn’t that it had slipped his mind. He was doling out a reprimand.

‘I’m not interested in excuses. They’re a waste of my time.’

Mikami felt himself bristle.
You think I have the time to stand here and listen to your sarcasm?

‘They did say they would be willing to withdraw their protest, if we were to give them the woman’s identity.’

‘I heard from Ishii, you know. About your little expediency, that nonsense about “thinking out loud”.’

Expediency?

Mikami looked Akama squarely in the eye. ‘There’s no risk to us. The exchange would leave no traces in the press, and there wouldn’t be any official documents.’

‘Rejected,’ Akama said coldly. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Under no circumstances are we to release her name to the public.’

There was something odd about his tone. It brought to mind a con artist Mikami had investigated some years earlier. The con artist had refused to divulge information regarding a number of his crimes despite clearly wanting to brag, considering it below him to confess to a rookie detective.