The body was safely moved out of the well and lay on the ground, with incontrovertible evidence, solid as iron.
There was no room for prevarication, Hiroichiro Tanaka was arrested on the spot, and after the shrine maiden's bones were photographed and documented, the police put them into a body bag and took them away. Kagura Hikaru was also invited to the police station as an important witness in the case.
But before that, Kagura Hikaru called the old policeman known as 'Shimizu' aside and said he had something to discuss.
"What brings me here, anything special you want to discuss, Mr. Kagura?" the old policeman looked at Kagura Hikaru with a puzzled expression.
He had initially thought he might be the one to initiate this meeting, that missing person case from thirty years ago; he was only in his teens at the time but for some reason, it had lingered in his memory, becoming an unresolved issue.
After graduating, he returned to the town as a policeman partly because of that case.