Non-Stop Till Tokyo (22 page)

Taka came in a few minutes later. I’d already got up and busied myself making more coffee, which it looked like he needed. He was wearing only a pair of tighty-whiteys—I averted my eyes—and he looked thin and pallid and, frankly, crappy.

“You’re killing yourself,” I told him, handing him a mug.

“Good morning to you too.”

Yoshi came down after him. He grunted, “
Os,
” to Taka and gave Chanko his best attempt at a stony glare. Apparently nobody had ever told Yoshi not to bring a knife to a gunfight.

“So what about the security tapes?” I asked, putting a bit of energy in my voice to try and lift the mood. “You guys have worked it out, Yoshi said?”

“And if the Mitsuyoshi-kai haven’t worked it out themselves, they’re morons,” said Yoshi. “But then, I don’t suppose they recruit from the cream of society, do they?”

There was a silence that felt nastier than it should have. I looked round at the faces: Yoshi exhausted and resentful, Taka bloodshot and drawn and furtive-looking, Chanko stone-still, stone-blank.

“Well, let’s all look at it together!” I said with the enthusiasm of a primary school teacher, and wondered if I could poison the coffee.

We wedged into the cluttered study, where the blinds were permanently down. There were two monitors set up, wires and boxes everywhere, bottles of tea and Coke and Calpis balanced on various expensive-looking devices. It smelled like a room two men had been working in all night.

Yoshi and Taka scrabbled for control of the keyboard while Chanko seated himself behind them on the folded futon. I perched on a spare chair next to him and wrapped my hands round my mug for warmth.

“Right,” said Taka, sounding a bit more lively. He’d had two cups of coffee, but mainly he seemed to draw energy from the electronics around him, or the fact of stolen data. “Are you watching closely? First off, this is what it looks like.” He clicked the mouse, and one screen showed a fuzzy black-and-white image of an indeterminate woman in a short, clingy dress, with a small handbag over one shoulder, shot from above.

“Is that Kelly?” I demanded, leaning forward.

“Could be anyone,” Chanko muttered.

“Until we cleaned it up. Yoshi ran a couple of filters, sharpened the images, and…” The picture changed, suddenly clearer and more focused.

“That’s…good,” I said cautiously. “It still only shows the top of her head, though. So?”

“So we first thought we’d see if we could ID her—” Yoshi began.

“Yeah, show it was Kerry, right?” Taka interrupted.

“Kelly,” I enunciated clearly. “Don’t you start.”

“But she was clever. Kept her head down coming in and going out, there’s never enough of her face to prove it’s her.”

“I mean, of course we can triangulate, work out her height—”

“She’s got to be pretty tall, somewhere around five foot ten counting the shoes, if you look at the height of the signs and posters around the door, right? And you’re five five? Well, there’s no way this woman’s wearing five-inch heels, not the way she’s walking,” Taka insisted. “She’d have a lot more wiggle in her walk, right?”

“Right,” I said, reluctantly impressed.

“Still, there’s not much to go on there. So we got busy with the visitors. Here’s Kerry coming in, 6:28 p.m.”

“Ke-
lly
.”

“The American bitch.” Taka waved a hand dismissively. “And—” he jumped to another bit of film, “—here’s the old man, right? It’s 7:04 now.”

The stooped figure shuffled through, holding a briefcase in one gnarled hand, eagerly proceeding to his own murder. I repressed a shudder.

“Then out we come at 7:32,” Taka said. A female figure, hurrying out, but this time she was wearing a long dark raincoat, hooded and tightly belted. “Twenty-eight minutes to kill him.”

“Where the hell did she get that coat?” muttered Chanko.

“Is it one of those very thin plastic ones you keep in your handbag?” I wondered. “No, it’s surely cloth. And she’s wearing higher heels, too. She had us both wearing a dress everyone would notice and remember; she went in wearing it so that anyone who saw her would just remember a blonde in a pink dress; then when she came out, she made sure she was wearing a mac in a drab colour that nobody would look at. That way she had a good chance the old man’s bodyguards wouldn’t spot her among the other customers, plus if people only noticed her going in, the yaks would look for a blonde in pink in the Primrose Path, and come up with me. Which is what they did.”

“Exactly.” Taka gave me a dancing grin. “Now, in she goes, out she comes, and she’s all alone both times.
But
—”

Images flickered on the screen, jumping from figure to figure. “This is from the start of the tape. Five o’clock onwards, so the rush is starting. Look at the people coming in. Salaryman and OL, salaryman and tart, tart on her own. Couple—hell, she looks about fourteen, nice. Single man, but Japanese. Western couple. Threesome—lucky bastard, the left-hand girl’s a bit fat, though—”

“Shut up, Taka.”

“Salaryman and jailbait. Oh, hey, two girls together—wooh, Mama!”

“Shut
up
, Taka.”

“Big black guy and Japanese girl. Salaryman with OL—and now look at this.” The film froze on a lone male. “Big. White. Very short hair, and going bald in that pointy way Minachan said.”

“Widow’s peak, it’s called.” I stared at the distinctive pattern of the dark hair.

“Big bag,” Chanko pointed out.

“He goes in at 5:56. And here, coming out, 7:46. Enough time they don’t look together, heading off in a different direction to her.”

“Still with the bag.”

“But check this.” Yoshi brought up two still images, closeups of the black cloth bag going in and coming out. “See, the first one, now there’s something sticking out here, a sharp point—”

“Might be a heel? Her spare shoes?”

“But otherwise it looks half full of something squashy, nothing rigid inside it. Yes? Now, when he comes out—you can’t see much here, but we ramped up the contrast—”

“Whoa.” Chanko leaned forward. “Is that a briefcase?”

I could see a rectangular shape outlined in the cloth, more or less. “Are we sure it’s not just folds, or distortion from whatever you just did?”

“Unlikely, that shape. Here’s the case in the old man’s hand. Images all right size.”

“We checked all the single males, and all the European men, but this is the only one where we can see a case anywhere,” Yoshi explained. “We’re pretty sure they took the case, not just the contents, because that’s what the family were asking for.”

“Can you work out how tall—” Chanko began.

“Six three, give or take an inch or so.” Taka was smirking at his own foresight. I could live with it.

“Any chance we can pull a usable picture of him off this?”

“Nope. Kept his head down too.”

“Still, it’s a great start. I mean, it’s confirmation, isn’t it?”

Chanko was frowning. “Sure, tells us you were right about the boyfriend. But where’s it take us?”

“Couldn’t we show the yakuza?” I asked.

“Show ’em what? We don’t have a name or an address or even a face.”

“Yeah, well, maybe Chanko-san can find something more?” demanded Yoshi angrily.

I cut in fast. “So what happened next? I mean, they planned this out pretty well—he’s carrying her coat and shoes, so she can leave inconspicuously and his bag looks half-full coming in and out, right? But then it all goes wrong. She leaves around half past, and the bodyguards go in when?”

“Not on the tape. It ends at eight.”

I tried to recall what Yukie had told me. “Say Mitsuyoshi-san expected to spend an hour in there, and the goons gave him an extra half hour? I mean, that’s minimum. They surely wouldn’t have gone in much before eight thirty or so. Even then, they have to hassle the clerk, get the room number, find the old man, get him to a doctor, get the CCTV tapes, go to Kelly’s place. They can’t possibly have got to her before nine or nine thirty. So why was she still sitting at home?”

“Because she was waiting for her boyfriend,” said Yoshi. “The question is, where was he?”

“Double cross?” Taka suggested. “Look, we can assume these dumb whiteys aren’t professional killers, right?”

“Taka!”

“And the bitch, whatsername, had agreed a price to screw the old guy, right, Kerry? How much was it?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t need help to talk money.”

“So they plan to smack the old guy on the head so the bitch doesn’t have to go through with it, and take the payoff anyway. Do we think that’s what happened?”

Chanko shrugged. “Can’t see what else they did it for.”

“So he takes the case, and maybe there’s more money than they’d thought, and he gets greedy. Or less, and he doesn’t want to share. Or none, because the old guy decides to stiff the bitch, and they kill him for that. Either way, the boyfriend decides to ditch the tart, let the yakuza say his goodbyes for him.”

I winced. Chanko shook his head.

“No, too risky. What if she talks to the yakuza? Better to knock her on the head in the love hotel and leave her with the old man.”

“Right,” Taka decreed. “It’d be too risky for him to let the yakuza take her alive, he couldn’t know she wouldn’t talk. Therefore, he didn’t mean to abandon her. Something screwed up.”

“Kelly got the arrangements wrong, didn’t realise she was supposed to take a cab to the airport,” I suggested.

“The boyfriend falls under a car,” Taka offered. “Spends the night in hospital.”

“Goes out for a celebratory drink and winds up with his face in the gutter at four in the morning.”

“Hassles a girl and gets picked up by the police.”

“How hard would it be to look into arrests and hospitalisations that night?” I wondered aloud.

“Across the whole of central Tokyo?” Yoshi rolled his eyes. “The police could do it. Does anyone on the force owe you a really huge favour, Taka?”

Taka made a noncommittal face. “Not that huge. Maybe I can talk to someone, but… What are you thinking, big man?”

Chanko was wearing a scowl that indicated serious cogitation. He paused before answering, then spoke slowly, thinking aloud.

“Dunno. Not an expert, but— Okay, so their plan was to fly out, right? By plane?”

“She’d hardly have left by bike,” Yoshi sniped.

“Or by Shinkansen, with five suitcases,” I added, glaring at him. “No, surely they’d have wanted to get out of Japan as fast as possible. First stop Narita International.”

“Yeah. So, did they plan to go to the airport, get the first flight to anywhere, or did they buy a seat in advance?”

“Advantages to both,” Taka mused. “You wouldn’t want to wait hours for a flight.”

“I’d buy a business-class flight to a very popular destination on a major airline in advance,” I offered. “So I could take another flight without waiting too long if I missed mine. But I’m not a tightwad like Kelly was. Is.”

“Yeah, and you’re pretty loaded,” Chanko pointed out. “You rob a yakuza boss because you need money.”

“That’s really helpful. Is this leading anywhere?” Yoshi gave an irritable shrug. Chanko exhaled heavily through his nose, reaching for patience, and I narrowed my eyes at Yoshi, who ignored me.

“Look, I don’t know shit about how this works, but when you buy a ticket, you have it in your name, and they put it on a computer. Right?”

“‘Put it on a computer.’ Yes, that’s
exactly
what they do.”

“And they keep track of people who don’t come. My sister’s flight to New York got delayed like six hours because some guy with an Arab name didn’t turn up and they got worried.”

“Oh, have you really got a sister?” I found myself asking.

“What I mean is, they have a list of passengers with tickets, and a list of the ones who don’t turn up, and they check they got the right number of people on the plane, count the bags, that sort of thing. So if Kelly and Boyfriend bought tickets, they’re going to be on a list of passengers and a list of people not arriving. Right? So how many flights were there that night that two people with American names didn’t go on?”

The grammar was all over the place. The idea was inspired.

“Clever. Oh, clever, big guy,” said Taka softly.

“Yes, but…” Yoshi was searching for an argument. “Lots of people miss flights—”

“How many Kelly Hollisters missed flights that night?” I snapped.

“Yes, well, okay. Maybe. Except that even if they bought tickets leaving from Narita, do you know how many planes fly out of there every day?”

“But not at that time of night.” Taka’s eyes danced. “They had to get there, that’s an hour at least, and do a two-hour check-in if they were going to the States. Even if they left at eight—I’ll check the schedules, but there won’t be that many possibilities.”

“If we can assume they were going to America,” Yoshi said. “Which we can’t.”

“But Kelly was only here for the money. She never talked about wanting to travel.” I wished I could stop talking about her in the past tense. “So you’d definitely start with flights to the States, and then the other late flights…but can you get these passenger lists? Is it even possible to find out?”