The Second Decapitation (Part 3)

"It was around two in the morning," Hikari-san said.

Dining room.

Round table.

But we were two fewer people than just two days ago.

The artist extraordinaire - Ibuki Kanami-san; and member of the Seven Fools - Sonoyama Akane-san.

The bickering duo was no more. They were no longer alive.

"I received a phone call in my room… From Sonoyama-san. She said she had forgotten a book in her room that she wanted me to bring her."

"And then?" Iria -san asked. "I presume you did as you were told?"

"Yes," Hikari-san nodded. "It was a kind of old-looking paperback of Bakaichi by Mushanokoji."

"That's not really important. So at that time, Akane-san was still alive, yes? And she had a head?"

"Yes, at that time she was alive," Hikari-san said distinctly.

This meant that Akane-san had been killed after 2 a.m. I had assumed I was the last person to see Akane-san alive, so I was a little surprised. But really, I don't suppose I had "seen" her, per se, since we had only spoken through the door.

Her body had apparently been discovered around nine o'clock that morning. She usually woke up and went for breakfast at a set time every day, so Hikari-san was concerned when no call came from Akane-san's room, and thus became the one to discover the body.

At first, she had suspected that Akane-san had merely overslept on account of being in a new environment. But the reality had something else in store. At any rate, assuming Hikari-san's testimony was true, the time of the murder was limited to a seven-and-a-half-hour window. The body didn't appear freshly killed at the time it was discovered, so it seemed that the murder probably occurred in the middle of the night.

"Well then," Iria-san said, looking over the people at the table. "Let's start looking at alibis like we did yesterday."

She sounded like she was playing some kind of game. I won't claim to be able to judge what was inside Iria-san's heart, but at the very least, she seemed to have no sense of sadness or grief.

No matter who it had all happened to or what happened, it didn't happen to her. That's all there was to it.

"This time, I don't have an alibi." I decided to get the ball rolling since nobody was talking. "Hikari-san came to visit our room around ten or eleven last night. I think. But then Kunagisa and I went to bed and fell asleep."

"You went to bed together?" Iria-san teased.

"Yeah, right. 'Went to bed' is just a figure of speech. I slept on the sofa."

"But if you both went to sleep, there's no way of confirming that one of you didn't slip out in the middle of the night."

"Oh, oh, but you can rule me out." Kunagisa slid her hand horizontally across her neck. "The storage room is on the first floor, right? I can't go downstairs alone."

"Eh?" Not only Iria-san, but everyone gawked at Kunagisa in surprise. Well, everyone except for Maki-san, who wore an utterly indifferent expression, as if to say, "I already knew that." But you can always count on her to be the exception.

"That's why I always make Ii-chan come with me."

Yup. I hadn't come to this island just because I was bored or interested. I had a bona fide reason for being here, and Kunagisa needed me.

Kunagisa had a wide array of unique quirks and characteristics that made everyday life a serious health risk, but among those were three major ones, and within those three was one of special note: she couldn't handle extreme vertical locomotion on her own.

That was a rule.

I suppose it's more fitting to call it a rigid, compulsive, subconscious rule that lay somewhere within her mind than a "quirk." If poorly enforced, it would be revealed, and she would scream and shout and you wouldn't be able to lay a finger on her. It was the same way years ago. I wondered if she might have been cured, but it seemed it wasn't such a simple condition.

"Is that right?" The look of surprise remained on Iria-san's face. "But this is the first time I've heard about this."

"Well, it's not really something you bring up all the time. But if you've been observing me, you'll note that I haven't gone up or down any stairs alone the whole time I've been on this island."

I was always with her during meals, or else she was locked up in her room.

Kunagisa Tomo.

"Now that you mention it, you do always get that guy to come to your room and get you. But we don't have any way to prove this."

"We do have a medical certificate," I said. "It's a mental disorder, so to speak. So I think we can confirm Kunagisa's alibi for now."

Not mine, though.

Iria-san seemed to be pondering this for a moment, but then she switched her train of thought. "Well, what about Himena-san?"

"I was in my room drinking all night." She looked over at Shinya-san. "Together with that wonderful gentleman over there."

"Is that right, Sakaki-san?"

"Well, I don't know about the gentleman part, but otherwise, yes." He gave Maki-san a little wink. "I only meant to go bother her for a little bit, but I ended up staying all night drinking."

That makes two nights in a row that they were up drinking. They must have had incredible endurance. Or maybe that wasn't the case for Shinya-san. Maybe he just couldn't bear being sober after the loss of Kanami-san.

I could imagine how important she was to him. He had taught her painting and even raised her to surpass him. She was special. Her existence had been important to him.

"Neither of us was particularly intoxicated, so I think we can vouch for each other," Shinya-san said. "Yeah, it was around one in the morning. I couldn't get to sleep… You know, because of what happened, so I went to the living room and there she was. Then she invited me to her room, and we ended up staying there until morning."

Yup. That's what he meant. But either way, he was in her room for a fact; so the two of them had solid alibis.

"I was sleeping the whole time," Yayoi-san said before even being asked as if we were going in some sort of order. "I've got no alibi at all. But I think Hikari-san can at least vouch that I got up at 6 a.m. and that she helped me prepare breakfast."

For some reason, she was sort of mumbling her words, and she looked up to see Iria-san's reaction. There was something off about her, and something about her bizarre disposition was bothering me. It's hard to explain, but something caught my attention. I just didn't know what it was.

"Hmm," Iria-san said. "How about you, Hikari?"

"Well, I delivered the book to Sonoyama-san at 2 a.m., then I went to bed. So I don't have an alibi until the time I woke up this morning."

"I see… Oh, I suppose I have to give my story as well. I was in my room talking with Rei all night. We were discussing what to do from here on and what to tell Aikawa-san. Isn't that right, Rei?"

Rei silently nodded.

"I had already slept that afternoon, so I couldn't get to sleep at night. By the time we finished talking, it was already morning, so I figured it was too late to try and sleep, so then… The usual things, and then finally breakfast. I think that's a solid alibi, isn't it?"

For some reason, Iria-san looked at me when she said it. It was a challenging gaze. I shrugged. "Yup, sure is. So when did Teruko-san and Akari-san get back?"

"At about nine o'clock." It was Akari-san, who had only a short while ago jumped me in Kunagisa's room. She had completely returned to normal by this point, but she didn't try to make eye contact with me.

"Nine o'clock?"

Speaking of which, she had said something kind of strange earlier - "I'm so tired of this happening," or something to that effect. But what was she so "tired" of? No matter how you looked at it, there was something strange about her whole manner at that time.

Something told me she wasn't just referring to Kanami-san's death.

"Well, I guess that means Akari and Teruko have an alibi, yes? Which means…" Iria-san said. "The people with alibis are Sakaki-san and Himena-san, followed by me and Rei, and Teruko and Akari. And most likely Kunagisa as well. That's seven."

On the other side, we had Sashirono Yayoi-san, Chiga Hikari-san, and me. The three of us had no alibis. But while the question of who had an alibi was an important one, there was one thing more important in this case.

"Um, Hikari-san?"

"Yes?" She looked in my direction.

"Maybe I'm being too trivial here, but could you tell me whether or not the window was open when you delivered the book to the storage room at two o'clock?"

She looked off into space as she thought about it for a moment. "I believe it was closed," she answered.

"I see. Is it something a person could easily open?"

"Yes. It's supposed to be for ventilation, so if you just use the lever — you have to crank it like this — it opens and closes normally. But that's only from the inside. It's completely sealed off from the outside."

"I see."

This was a troublesome development. A very troublesome development. The window was more than ten feet high. Without a ladder, it was virtually impossible for someone to climb out, and even more implausible that someone had climbed in.

In other words, we had another "locked room" mystery.

"Well, tell me then, how do you go about handling the key? Are there copies of it or anything?"

"I have the only key. There are no copies or master keys."

She seemed pretty worried. Which was only natural. The implications of this conversation were that she was the only one who could've possibly committed the murder. Just looking at it objectively, that was the most likely the case.

But I wasn't about to point that out. I didn't want to cause another Akane-san-style mishap.

"What type of lock is it?"

"Just a normal one. You twist the key like this and the bolt latches. I don't know the official name…"

"And you definitely locked the door at 2 a.m.?"

"Yes, I locked it. For sure. I even checked several times," she answered with a somewhat pained expression. "For sure."

"I see…"

She was an honest girl.

To the point that it must have made life difficult for her.

Seeing her like this, it seemed clear to me that she wasn't the killer. If she were the killer, she wouldn't have gone to all the trouble to report that she had been called to Akane-san's room in the middle of the night. Anyone could have deduced that much.

Of course, you couldn't throw out the possibility that she had strategized all this to fool everyone. That kind of argument could go on forever.

I continued my questioning.

"And nobody else was in her room when you went there? What about the possibility that someone was hiding in the dark or something like that?"

"Well, I didn't sense anybody else in the room, but—" she tilted her head as if she didn't quite get the point of my question—"I can't be certain. I didn't actually go into the room. I gave her the book at the door."

"Weren't you scared?" Yayoi-san suddenly asked, her voice faint. She wore an upset expression as she continued. "I mean, didn't we all think Sonoyama-san might be the killer? And you met with her alone, in the middle of the night? Weren't you scared?"

"No, not at all," Hikari-san answered after a moment's hesitation. "I didn't think Sonoyama-san was the killer."

"Why not?" For some reason, Yayoi-san was being strangely pushy with Hikari-san. "What makes you so sure?"

"Uh, well…" Hikari-san looked over at me with a worried expression. Ah, it was because of her conversation with Kunagisa yesterday. Indeed, after hearing that conversation, there was no reason to suspect Akane-san in particular.

I thought about things as I watched this conversation unfold between the two ladies. But I couldn't pin anything down. It had seemed to me that if something had happened, it probably happened around 2 a.m. when Hikari-san delivered the book, but then, after listening to her testimony, that didn't seem to be the case.

So what to do now?

How to continue?

"I don't suppose the room was completely sealed. The window was open, after all," Iria-san said to me. "In that sense, it's not exactly what you would define as 'sealed.'"

"But it's impossible to get in or out through that window."

"There's a chair in the room, right? Couldn't you reach the window if you stood on the chair?"

"I don't think so. Even if you stretched and jumped at the same time, I don't think you'd reach it. Shinya-san is the tallest person here, and I don't think even he could reach it."

"Is that so? So Ibuki-san's room was sealed off by a river of paint, and this time it's a room sealed off by a height problem…" Iria-san stretched out her arms with an irritated sigh. "And both women were decapitated."

Yeah, there was that issue as well.

The killer had cut off Kanami-san and Akane-san's heads.

That was still a mystery. There was no reason to suspect switched bodies, but what other reason was there to cut off the heads? Could we just write it off as a bizarre fluke?

What's more, the fact that the killer took the severed head didn't make much sense. Of course, there was also the possibility that the killer severed the head specifically for the sake of taking it somewhere, but what in the world do you do with a severed human head?

And that question just led to another question: why were these women killed in the first place? I had no idea. This case was full of things I didn't understand. It was all hopeless and meaningless.

Dammit.

Since when had I become so dumb?

"Hmm… Looking at things objectively, Hikari is the most suspicious one here," Iria-san said suddenly.

Hikari-san flinched for a moment. "Eh? Oh, um, I…"

"Hikari was the one with the key, and one of the three people with no alibi. If the window isn't a possible entrance or exit, the door is the only possibility, right? There are three people without alibis, but only one of those three has a key."

"Please hold on a second," I barged into Iria-san's monologue. "That's no good. That's not a fair assumption."

"Assumption? I believe the correct term is 'reasoning.'"

Hikari-san watched our interaction with a worried expression. She didn't know what to say.

"It's like Akane-san said yesterday. It's foolish to reach a conclusion based on the process of elimination and selective thinking. I won't go as far as to call it foolish, but I do think we're leaving things out."

"I wonder. Is that right? I don't think so, personally."

"It was that thinking that caused me to have Akane-san locked up as the prime suspect. And this is the result. This is the result of that, Iria-san. There's nothing I can say about what's already over and done, but I refuse to make the same mistake again. You understand, right? It's too dangerous for anyone to be left alone anymore."

"Now you tell me," she said with a smile. Under different circumstances, it might have even been pretty. "Wasn't it your idea to have Akane-san locked up—sorry, secluded—in the first place?"

"That's correct. I'm not here to debate that fact. It was I who suggested we lock her up in there, and so now it is my duty to counter that suggestion. If I have to take responsibility for what happened, making sure it doesn't happen again is how I'll take that responsibility. At this point, it's still too early to determine who the killer is. We're still not even thinking about the things we need to be thinking about."

Maki-san let out a big yawn. Possibly because she hadn't slept in two days, or possibly because she was bored by the conversation. Most likely it was for both of those things.

She was just a bystander.

"Well, I still think Hikari is the most suspicious."

There was absolutely no sense of compassion in her words for this maid with whom she had coexisted under the same roof for all these years.

She was completely devoid of sentimentality. She spoke with the icy-cold tone of someone simply reporting facts as facts, with no emotion inserted whatsoever.

I thought I knew.

The answer to Kunagisa's question from yesterday. The reason this woman had been exiled from the Akagami family.

Akagami Iria. This world was all the same to her, by and large. It all had the same lack of value. And so she was searching for something of value; unable to find it, she was able to rid her life of anything without any shred of hesitation.

I had been wondering what she had done.

I had assumed she had done something.

But in reality, maybe that was the wrong assumption. Maybe it wasn't that she had done anything wrong, but that she couldn't exist as part of the Akagami family. Furthermore, maybe it wasn't the family that had shunned her, but in fact the other way around. It wasn't out of the question.

And here I thought it was supposed to be her job to stick up for Hikari-san.

"Well, let's do this then," I suggested without looking up at Iria-san. "We can say for a fact that it's no longer safe for anyone to be alone. So let's divide into teams. No complaints about that, right, Iria-san? I don't think I need to bother explaining the purpose of making teams, right? It's just safer than moving around alone. And that way we can all watch one another's backs. Now, since I've been sticking up for Hikari-san, I'll be on her team. Her, Kunagisa, and I will be Team A. How's that sound?"

"Hmm, interesting." Iria-san seemed genuinely impressed. "You're smarter than you look, huh? Teams, eh? Well, naturally I'll be teamed up with Rei and Akari and Teruko. Then let's have Maki-san, Shinya-san, and Yayoi-san on Team C. Shinya-san and Maki-san have been confirmed as innocent twice in a row now, so Yayoi-san can put herself at ease. And even if Yayoi-san is the killer, it would be two against one. Does that sound okay?"

"What if we just had everyone stay in the dining room together? Until Aikawa-san gets here?" Hikari-san suggested, looking over at me with the same worried expression. "That way nobody has to be alone and the killer can't take any actions, either."

"We can't do that. You mean just stay put here? Don't be ridiculous."

I spoke not only to Hikari-san, but to the entire group.

"Kunagisa and I have some moving around to do."