The Masuda Affair (21 page)

‘Possibly,’ Akitada said, grudgingly. ‘It looks empty. No smoke.’

They pounded on the gate. Nobody came. Tora kicked at the gate with his foot and it flew back, crashing against the fence inside. A couple of mourning doves flew up with a clatter of wings; otherwise all remained silent. They rode into a small courtyard that looked exactly as Hanae had described it.

Tora dismounted, gave a couple of lusty shouts for servants, then tried the door of the house. ‘It’s open, sir. Let’s have a look.’

The house was empty, and that meant they had lost the old woman, their only witness to Hanae’s story. She would have been likely to run when she found that her prisoner had escaped.

They checked all the rooms quickly. There were five and a kitchen. The house was small, but well appointed. Even the kitchen was equipped to furnish elaborate meals at a moment’s notice. It was exactly the sort of place a very rich nobleman would furnish for a treasured female who was not acceptable in his household. But this house had not been in use for a long time before Hanae’s abduction. A great deal of dust lay everywhere, and cobwebs hung from all the ceilings. Only the main room had been cleaned. And strangely, while the furnishings were not new, they
had seen little use, and that suggested that the house had stood empty for years. Was it Sadanori’s? Had he built it for the courtesan Peony, who had ended her life in another man’s secret hideaway in Otsu?

Akitada inspected the main room. The pieces of rope still lay next to a bundle of plain clothing, proof of Hanae’s tale and of the abrupt flight of the old woman. Tora pounced on the bundle and unrolled it. It consisted of a plain dark blue gown, a pair of matching trousers, and a white-and-blue figured sash. ‘Hanae’s,’ he said.

Akitada nodded and raised the heavy reed blinds, bound in green brocade and tied with silk. Then he threw open the wooden shutters, looking out on a small, overgrown garden. More birds flew up. He turned and, in the remaining daylight, he saw the beautiful screens. Shimmering with gold dust and brilliant colors, they were painted with landscape scenes: a pond with a pair of ducks, a mountain gorge under a full moon, a garden scene with a pair of rabbits, and an assortment of baskets and birdcages suspended from a veranda roof. There were peonies on all of them, and colored paper squares covered with calligraphy were pasted into the design. The peonies’ colors were white, pink, and deep red; there were doubles and singles, heavily fringed or plain; they grew from the ground, leaned over water, or filled baskets. The paper squares contained love poems.

‘Peony’s house,’ Akitada muttered and went to read the poems.

Tora came to look. ‘Oh, I see what you mean.’

‘Peonies and love poems,’ said Akitada.

‘That sick bastard didn’t look like a poet to me.’

‘Oh, they’re not Sadanori’s.’

They looked briefly at the musical instruments and feminine possessions – the trunks were filled with exquisite robes – then closed the shutters again and left the house.

‘Let’s talk to the neighbors,’ Akitada said.

They split up to knock on the gates of all the houses on this block. When they met again, they had little enough information. The property belonged to some noble family
and had been closed up for years. A caretaker checked it from time to time, but nobody lived there.

‘It’s a miracle thieves haven’t made off with everything the way they did in the villa in Otsu,’ Akitada said.

‘Sadanori keeps a watch on it.’

‘Nobody mentioned his name. Too bad that old woman took to her heels. She would have known. I wonder where she went.’

‘To report to him that another one got away,’ said Tora grimly.

‘Let’s go home. Tomorrow we’ll go back to Otsu to see if that Peony and this one are the same woman.’

T
he next day was one of those delightful early autumn days when the summer heat has broken and the world looks deceptively fresh and young again. They rode to Otsu with lighter hearts than perhaps they had any right to.

Tora, the memory of Hanae’s lovemaking vivid in his mind, whistled. If Akitada felt any regrets that his own bed had remained empty, he put them aside as he thought of the child. He still wished with all his heart that he could bring him home, but his conscience insisted that he at least try to uncover the child’s parentage.

Akitada did remember fleetingly, and with a pang of guilt, that he should be at work. A whole week had passed since his return from Hikone, and he had yet to report to the ministry. Of course, he had a free hand nowadays – daily tasks were in the capable hands of a large staff of clerks and scribes, and the minister was in office – but they would wonder sooner or later what kept him in Hikone. He must try to settle affairs in Otsu today so that he could take up his duties again.

They reached Otsu by midday. The lake stretched before them like an invitation to eternity, its far reaches melting into a blue horizon, and black-headed seagulls shrieked and spun in the air above. The brisk autumnal wind filled the sails of boats, moving them along swiftly. It was a day when it seemed easy and tempting to leave behind all one’s troubles.

They left their horses at the post stables and walked to the warden’s office. Tora was still a fugitive until his status could be cleared. They met Warden Takechi as he hurried out, his face grim and his mustache bristling with
excitement. Three constables trotted at his heels and shouted, ‘Make way.’

The warden stopped. ‘It’s you, sir,’ he cried. ‘The answer to a prayer. Would you mind coming along on a murder case?’

Akitada said cautiously, ‘I’m Sugawara, Warden Takechi. I brought my retainer to answer the charges against him.’

The warden waved an impatient hand. ‘I know.’ His eyes flicked over Tora. ‘He can come along too.’

Bemused, Akitada looked at Tora, who grinned, no doubt relieved that he was in no immediate danger of arrest. They followed the warden and his constables down the busy main street of Otsu and into a residential quarter.

The warden turned to speak to Akitada on the way. ‘I wouldn’t have troubled you, sir,’ he said, belatedly apologetic, ‘but it’s Dr Inabe who’s been murdered. He’s the only doctor in Otsu. I’m told he’s been bludgeoned to death in his home. I want to get my hands on the killers quick.’

Akitada hoped to settle his own affairs and return to the capital before dark, but he could not afford to alienate the warden. He said, ‘I’m not sure I can be of much use, but I’ll gladly take a look.’ Then he asked, ‘Is the boy well? Is he still with the widow Yozaemon and her son?’

‘No problems there. The Mimuras have made no trouble.’

‘I’ve decided to settle the matter with them.’

‘Much the best way, though they don’t deserve it.’

‘I’d like to see him.’

‘Go ahead. The judge is satisfied that you mean the child no harm.’

Tora gave a snort. ‘About time.’

Fortunately, Warden Takechi seemed to take this as an expression of loyalty and only nodded. Akitada was grateful; he suspected that the warden had put in a good word for him. ‘Tell me about your victim,’ he said.

The warden’s face fell. ‘He’s … he was a good man. Everybody loved him. Getting on in years – past fifty – but still strong and healthy. No family. Never had children, and after his wife died he lived alone, like a monk almost, with
only one old servant. He tended to the sick and served as our coroner. He’ll be sorely missed.’

‘I’m very sorry. Any idea who did this?’

‘None. It makes no sense at all.’

The doctor’s house was not far from that of the dead courtesan, though it was not on the lake. It lay hidden among thick, rustling trees. Birds chirped and chattered, and here and there a late cicada still sounded its shrill rasp. Outside the open gate a group of neighbors waited. To the side stood one of the itinerant monks. The neighbors greeted the warden with anxious questions, but he brushed off them off and left a constable at the gate to take their information.

The house had once been a fine one, but it was as sadly neglected as the Sugawara home. Shutters hung loose, and big wads of thatch were missing from the main roof; a kitchen building leaned crazily, and weeds grew everywhere. But the whole place was alive with birds. Swallows nested under the eaves, scattering bits of straw and thatch; doves cooed in the trees, suddenly swooping down in a swarm to fly across to a neighboring property and back again; somewhere finches chittered; and the courtyard’s gravel seemed covered with tiny chirping sparrows, pecking and fluttering up at their approach.

‘He loved the birds,’ muttered the warden.

A distraught and trembling old man in a dusty robe and with a small black cap on his white hair waited for them. The warden nodded to him. ‘Where is he?’

‘The studio.’ The old man led the way, shuffling in worn straw sandals through a derelict garden, where more birds fluttered and rustled in the shrubbery, to a small pavilion in better repair than the rest.

They took off their shoes at the door. ‘This is where he lived,’ Warden Takechi explained. ‘His study, library, pharmacy, and living quarters all in one.’

The pavilion was small. Odd, Akitada thought, how the man’s life had contracted to living in one room and with only one servant. Being childless, Inabe was alone in the world. He suddenly had a vision of himself, years from
now, dying alone in his study while the Sugawara mansion lay in ruins about him. The image depressed him.

Leaving the constables and the servant outside, they stepped into a dim, oppressive space. Sickly sweet odors of rotting fruit, stale wine, and of something stranger and more upsetting hung in the warm air: the cloying smell of blood and death. There was an odd sound, a faint sibilant hum. The room was crowded with dimly seen objects.

Skirting something on the floor, the warden crossed the space and pushed open the shutters to the rear garden. Sunlight poured in, slanting through the branches and falling across the body as if to focus attention on it. The dead man lay face down near the center of the room, his head towards the garden, his arms and legs flung out like those of the rice straw manikin in the peasants’ harvest rites. His black silk physician’s gown was neat and the white socks clean, but the back of his head was covered by a strange black cap that was horribly alive and buzzing.

Hundreds of flies, disturbed in their feeding frenzy, hovered and clung, fighting like tiny vultures over their carrion.

All around, the necessities of Inabe’s simple life cluttered up the modest space. Like most men, he had either not been a good house-keeper or had not really cared about such things. The walls were lined haphazardly with shelves, some crammed with books, others with a jumble of jars of ointments and boxes of powders. Bundles of drying herbs hung from ceiling beams. On a small, low desk, notes, papers, scrolls, used wine cups, dirty rice bowls, and, incongruously, a straw rain hat kept disorderly company. A bamboo stand in the corner held more cups, chopsticks, a wine flask, three overripe plums in a chipped bowl, a burnt-down candle in a holder, and a dirty brazier. Several old leather-covered trunks probably contained his clothes and bedding. The doctor’s case stood beside his walking staff at the door by which they had entered.

Tora growled, ‘Amida, his head’s a mess.’

They looked at the corpse. The warden brushed away the flies. They rose sluggishly, drunk and heavy from their
meal, and revealed the wound, a mass of congealed blood mixed with hair, bone splinters, and brain matter. More blood had puddled, dark and viscous, under the head. The doctor’s black silk cap lay nearby. Half under his upper body was a crushed bamboo birdcage.

The dead man had been tall and thin, his hair white until someone had turned it this unnatural shade of rust brown. The topknot had come undone under the force of the blow that shattered his skull. Death must have been instantaneous.

Warden Takechi muttered something, then became businesslike. He peered at the wound, touched the dead man’s skin, glanced about the room, and turned to the servant who cowered at the door, his face white and his body trembling. ‘Your master’s been dead a while. How is it that you just now report this?’

The man bowed. ‘Wasn’t here. Just got back. Cousin’s funeral. More death.’ He shook his head. ‘Found the master and went for help. A neighbor. My legs are no good.’ He wrung his hands and shivered.

The warden growled, ‘We’ll check your story. When did you last see the doctor?’

‘Two days ago. In the morning. Eating his gruel. Feeding the birds. He said not to worry. He could manage.’ The old man stopped as if exhausted by so many words.

‘Your cousin’s funeral was not in Otsu?’

‘In Ohara. I walked. Gone two days.’

‘I see. Did your master expect visitors while you were away?’

‘No.’

Akitada thought again of his own childless state. It seemed to be what lay in store for old men who had no families and only lived on to do their jobs. Or, like the old Masuda lord, they went quietly mad and left their affairs to women. The doctor had become a recluse. He had subsisted here, in this one room, served by another old man, puttering about among his books and medicines or in his overgrown garden unless he was called out on a case. A dreary, hopeless condition.

Tora went to peer at the body. ‘Nasty blow,’ he said.

The warden looked glum. ‘He’s been our coroner for thirty years or more. It’s a disaster. Now who’ll tell me when he died?’

‘Well,’ said Akitada, ‘I can give you my opinion for what it’s worth, but you’d better appoint some other medical man until you can hire a suitable replacement. If nobody is available, send to the capital for Dr Masayoshi.’ He bent to scrutinize the corpse, then felt the dead man’s neck. It was cold, dry, and a little stiff to the touch. The dead are no longer quite human.

Outside, a cicada struck up its strident song again and put him in mind of the Buddhist image of the empty cicada shell. Man shed his body to become reincarnated. That fly returning to the wound was another image of the shortness of human life and of rebirth. Soon that wound would crawl with maggots. In fact, he could see a scattering of their eggs and some slight movement in one of the clusters of pale grains. They had already begun their cycle of destruction and renewal, the bond that tied man to the smallest living creature. What karma would bring a man back as a maggot?