The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (8 page)

“Did the police find any chemicals in his studio?”

“No.”

“Yet they were willing to believe that Masako could collect all those chemicals and spike the juice?”

“Apparently, yes. Anyway, the killer followed the interpretation of alchemy in Heikichi’s note to the letter, thereby fulfilling his grotesque plan. But why?”

“Yes, why indeed? What did the public think of Masako?”

“They thought she was innocent.”

“So everyone but the police thought she was innocent? Hmm.” Kiyoshi was quiet for a moment. “Kazumi, was Heikichi
really
dead?” he asked, staring at me.

I burst into laughter. “Of course he was dead! I knew you’d come up with a crazy idea like that!”

Kiyoshi looked vaguely embarrassed. “Well, it’s just that from a different point of view…”

“What’s your theory, then?” I was hoping he’d have to admit he was lost, although I doubted he would.

“No, you go on first. Please finish the story,” he said, stalling. “I’ll tell you my theory after you’ve told me everything you know. Now, where did they find the bodies? Which one was found first? The one buried closest to Tokyo?”

“No. In fact, Tomoko’s body was found first, at the Hosokura mine in Miyagi Prefecture. It was wrapped in oilpaper and both legs had been cut off at the knees. It was found in the woods just off a walking path. It wasn’t buried. She was wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing at Yahiko. She was found on 15th April by someone who lived in the neighbourhood, so fifteen days had passed since she was last seen with her sisters on the morning of 31st March. The Hosokura mine produced zinc and lead, which was in keeping with Tomoko’s astrological sign, Aquarius. The police immediately began to suspect that Heikichi’s plan was being put into action and that the other girls might have met a similar fate.

“Now, if you remember, several metallic elements were specified in Heikichi’s note, but no locations. So the police started searching at mines around the country according to the metals he had mentioned. Needless to say, it took a great deal of time and resources. When the bodies finally turned up, they were all buried, wrapped in the same kind of oilpaper, and wearing the same clothes they had been last seen in.”

“Buried? So you mean Tomoko was the only one not buried?”

“That’s right. And that brings us to another very interesting point. Each girl was buried at a different depth. What would you say about that from an astrological point of view?”

“Hmm. How deep were they buried?”

“Well, Akiko was found at a depth of about 50 centimetres, Tokiko at 70 centimetres, Nobuyo at 1.4 metres, Yukiko at 1.05 metres and Reiko at 1.5 metres. Neither the police nor the brigades of would-be Sherlock Holmeses could come up with a reasonable explanation for that!”

“Aha!”

“Of course, it might have been entirely random. The killer may have had nothing particular in mind: if the ground was firm, he didn’t bother to dig deep; if it wasn’t, he dug deeper.”

“Maybe. But you can barely cover a body at 50 to 70 centimetres. There was actually a big difference in depth. The deepest burial was 150 centimetres—a short person could be buried standing up in a hole like that! Let’s see… Akiko was a Scorpio, and the depth was 50 centimetres… Tokiko was…”

“An Aries, buried at 70 centimetres; the Scorpio at 50 centimetres; the Virgo at 1.5 metres; the Sagittarius at 1.4 metres; and the Cancer at 1.05 metres. Here’s the chart with them all indicated.”

“I see. So only the Aquarius wasn’t buried. Hmm. To be honest, I can’t figure out any relationship to the astrological element. I can’t see any rhyme or reason to it.”

“What about the one 1.05 metres deep? Do you think that means anything?”

“The killer got tired? Anyway, after Tomoko, whose body was found next?”

“Akiko’s. It was found on 4th May by police dogs in the mountains near the Kamaishi iron mine. A part of her hip—about 20 to 30 centimetres long—was missing. Masako, who was being detained by the police, identified both bodies.

“After that, the police mobilized their canine units. Their search for Tokiko took them to Nakatoya in Hokkaido, Chichibu in Saitama Prefecture, Kamaishi again, and then the big iron mine in Gumma Prefecture. That’s where they found her body three days later, on 7th May. It was headless, so it was Tae—Tokiko’s real mother—who had to positively identify it. It had the legs of a ballet dancer and also a birthmark on the right side of the stomach—as described in Heikichi’s note.

“It took longer to find the other missing girls because they were buried much deeper. Police searched the Koh-no-mai and Toyoha silver mines in Hokkaido, the Kamioka mine in Gifu Prefecture, and the Kosaka mine in Akita Prefecture—Yukiko was found there on 2nd October. Her body was partly decomposed after the hot summer, and her chest had been cut out. It was a ghastly sight. She was the one buried at 1.05 metres. Masako identified her.

“Then Nobuyo’s body was found on 28th December. The metal elements for Sagittarius and Virgo are tin and mercury, which are only produced in a few areas. On Honshu, only the
Yamato mine in Nara Prefecture produces mercury, and only the Akenobe and Ikuno mines in Hyogo Prefecture produce tin. Without those clues, the last two bodies would probably never have been found, because of the depth at which they were buried. Nobuyo was discovered in the mountains near the Ikuno tin mine. Her body was missing both thighs, so the torso had been buried with the legs cut off at the knees. Nine months had passed since she was killed, so the corpse was partially skeletal.

“The last one found was the body of Nobuyo’s sister, Reiko. That was on 10th February 1937, almost a year after Heikichi’s murder. It was in a hole 1.5 metres deep in the mountains near the Yamato mine, where mercury is extracted. Her abdomen was missing. Her remains were almost skeletal as well, and in fact Ayako couldn’t positively identify either of her daughters.”

“Hmm. So, if their faces weren’t recognizable, and their clothes were the only clue, it was possible that they weren’t really Reiko and Nobuyo.”

“That’s possible, yes, but there were some irrefutable facts. The police relied on blood type and skeletal structure; they even reconstructed their faces with clay. But the most revealing factor was a distinctiveness in the leg musculature and toes that’s particular to ballet dancers. Something about dancing on pointe. Given that there were no other ballet dancers missing, it seemed safe to conclude that the bodies were indeed those of the Umezawa girls.”

“Accepted,” Kiyoshi said.

“However, none of their belongings were found, and that may be an important point. The calculated time of Tomoko’s
death was between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. on 31st March 1936. The rest of the girls were presumably killed at the same time. Some sleuths have thought they were killed in early April, but I don’t think so.”

“Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so. We can only guess what happened to Nobuyo and Reiko. The forensic medicine specialists couldn’t agree on the time of their deaths, especially as so much time had passed.”

“All right. Now I want to know about everyone’s alibi on the afternoon of 31st March. This was a genocide of the Umezawa family. The idea of Azoth could just have been camouflage for an act of revenge. And from that point of view, the first person to come to mind is Tae, Heikichi’s ex-wife.”

“But she couldn’t have been the killer. She sat in her cigarette shop all day, and her neighbours saw her sitting there as usual on 31st March. We don’t know where she was when Heikichi was killed, but she was certainly in her shop when the girls disappeared. There was a barbershop across the street, and the barber testified that Tae was sitting in the shop window all afternoon until she closed up at 7.30 that night. Her shop was open every day of the year. Also, would a forty-eight-year-old woman really have been able to carry six bodies to six different places all by herself? She didn’t drive, and Tokiko, her daughter, was among the victims. It seems to me highly unlikely she was the killer.”

“But are you sure that her alibi was good?” Kiyoshi asked, picking up his coffee cup. Seeing it was empty, he put it back down again.

“Yes.”

“On the other hand, Masako was detained because of her weak alibi. But that didn’t happen to Heitaro or his mother, did it?”

“I think all the suspects were held for a certain period. Police could detain any suspects without arrest warrants back then and keep them detained for just as long as they wanted. Detention was applied to everyone who was stopped and questioned. Yoshio was certainly held for several days.”

“Even a lousy shot will eventually hit the mark if he tries often enough!” Kiyoshi said sarcastically.

“Maybe so. Yasue and Heitaro were able to prove they were at De Médicis on 31st March. Customers, acquaintances and a waitress testified that the Tomitas were never out of sight for longer than thirty minutes until the gallery closed at 10 p.m. at night. Friends testified to being with them until midnight.

“As for Yoshio, he was able to prove he was meeting with his publisher in Gokokuji in Tokyo from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m., and he returned by train to his home in Meguro with Mr Toda, his editor. They drank together until a little after 1 p.m. We 1 don’t know what Ayako, his wife, was doing at 6 p.m., but she had a conversation with a neighbour at around 4.50. Her alibi wasn’t quite firm, but if she was the murderer she would have had to be in Yahiko early that day. She wouldn’t have had time to bury the bodies and get home that evening. Besides those five, there were no other suspects.”

“Masako had an alibi, too, didn’t she?”

“Unfortunately, she only had the family testimony. And since a bottle of arsenic was found in her house, the other five were presumed innocent.”

“Uh-huh. But suppose Masako and her daughters had conspired to kill Heikichi and they had worked together to pull his bed up to the skylight, I can’t believe that a month later she would suddenly decide to kill them all!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’ll explain later. Anyway, the murderer—an artist of quite epic lunacy—acquired the ingredients that he—or there’s a slight chance it might be a she—needed to make Azoth. So the next question is: did the lunatic succeed in creating the monster?”

“Well that is really the ultimate mystery of the case, isn’t it? Probably not. Certainly, Azoth has never been found. So no one knows whether he succeeded or not. Some people say that the body parts were made into a stuffed specimen—a piece of grotesque taxidermy—that is kept somewhere. While we look for the killer, we may also want to find Azoth. According to Heikichi’s note, it was to be placed in the ‘centre of 13”, the very centre of Japan—whatever that may mean. As the killer seems to have followed his plans precisely, all we have to do is figure out what the ‘centre of 13’ is—which is what Azoth hunters have been trying to do for the last forty years. Tae offered a lot of her inheritance as a reward to whoever found Azoth. I believe the reward is still available.”

“Let’s stick with finding the killer first.”

“You seem very confident, Kiyoshi. But let me repeat: everyone related to the Umezawas—including Masako, who was convicted, however unjustly—had an alibi. So either it was done by someone outside the family, or we have to find Azoth to get a clue.”

“Heikichi didn’t have an apprentice… but he did know people at De Médicis, right?”

“Yes. He associated with five or six people there and at Kakinoki, but they were not close friends. They didn’t even know where his studio was, except for one person who visited him. Another person was invited, but never went.

“I’m sure Heikichi would never have talked about Azoth to those people. And he mentions none of them in his note. It’s hard to imagine anyone committing the murders for him, unless there was a strong bond between them, or a brotherhood or something.”

“You’re right…”

“The only other possibility is that Heikichi got drunk and someone stole the key to his studio, sneaked in and read his note. Pretty far-fetched, but there’s not much else to go on.”

“Hmm. It’s certainly a mystery! Could you show me the dates when the bodies were found again? Maybe there’s some kind of pattern there.”

“All right, here’s the table.”