The Convict's Sword (10 page)

Back in the dead woman’s room, Akitada considered the destruction. It looked accidental rather than intentional, a direct result of the victim’s attempt to escape her attacker. Being blind, she had kept to the walls, trying to reach the door to the hallway, and in her struggle against the knife-wielding killer, she had knocked her trunk away from the wall and grabbed for the shelf and torn it off. And all the time, the killer had been slashing and stabbing at her, for there was her blood on three of the walls and finally on the interior door, where the marks of bloody fingers had left vertical smears all the way to the threshold. She had died at the foot of this door, her lifeblood soaking into the dirt.

Akitada looked with pity at the things that had fallen from the shelf. The woman’s life must have resembled that of a starving hermit. The single small earthenware bowl was in pieces but had been chipped long before, and her chopsticks were of plain rough wood. She did not own a large pot to cook rice in, but then she had no rice either. Evidently she purchased small amounts of food in the market and cooked them in a little iron pot on her hibachi. Her food stores were pitiful. A handful of dry millet had spilled from a twist of paper, and among the shards of the bowl lay a few leaves of cabbage and a tiny piece of dried fish.

He tried to remember her. She had been thin, yes, but had she actually looked starved? Surely she had had enough customers, even without adding prostitution to her labors, to live better than this.

The tangled bedding also was quite old and had been mended many times, the stitches and patches grossly uneven. It must have been difficult to work by touch alone. The more he considered her struggle to survive, the more he was filled with wonder. That same spirit had caused her to fight against her killer even when it was hopeless.

He turned his attention to the trunk. It had intrigued him from the start, because it was lacquered and had once been expensive. He opened it, expecting more surprises, but it was nearly empty. Only a few pieces of rough clothing, neatly folded, lay on the bottom. He had no wish to paw through a dead woman’s private possessions, but made himself do a cursory check. A few cheap cotton scarves, two pairs of cotton trousers, and two cotton jackets, the sorts of clothes worn by peasant women, scullery maids, and outcasts, were all that she had owned. If she had plied a trade as a streetwalker, she had certainly made no attempt to look attractive to men. The trunk apparently also held her bedding in the daytime. How very different were the arrangements in most houses. Each member of Akitada’s family had four trunks, one for the clothing of each season. And bedding had a separate storage place.

Tomoe had been very poor.

Akitada was about to drop the lid again, when he noticed a faint bulge under the bottom layer of clothes. He pulled out a small black lacquer box, a box most beautifully decorated with a design of fish cavorting among waves. The pictures were drawn in gold lacquer and the fish scales inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It was an altogether exquisite piece.

He opened the lid, and found that the inside of the box was painted with flowers of the four seasons and that it contained cosmetics. A twisted paper held powder to whiten the face, and small compartments were filled with kohl to outline the eyes and paint eyebrows, tweezers to pluck eyebrow hairs so the new ones could be painted above them, rouge for the lips, and a vial of tooth-blackening liquid. They were the sorts of cosmetics used by highborn ladies or elegant courtesans. What possible use were they to a blind street singer? There was no mirror in the room, any more than the windowless space had needed any lamps. Had she stolen the box for resale? If so, why had she not sold it long ago?

Among the twisted papers containing various powders he found another puzzle. One of the paper packages felt hard under his fingers. He undid it and saw that it contained three pieces of silver, an astonishing amount of money for someone who lived on the edge of starvation.

He showed his find to the lieutenant, who was first excited, then angry.

“Those lazy louts should have found it when they searched the room. You were right, sir. The pieces of dung cannot be trusted with an investigation. When they told me the dead woman had no money, I wondered if she’d been robbed. I suppose this proves she wasn’t. So we are still working with an unpremeditated act, with a crime of passion?”

“Hmm.” Akitada flattened out the paper and saw some faint characters written on it, not with ink and brush, but with something like charcoal. The characters had become smudged from handling, but he thought they were names: Nobunari and Nobuko—the first male, the second female. Was the money theirs? Or had she simply wrapped the coins in a discarded piece of paper she had found somewhere? Paper was not readily available to someone who could neither read nor write. He corrected himself. It was theoretically possible for a blind person to write, provided that person had once had sight and had been taught. But a street singer? He shook his head and put the money back in its paper and replaced it. He closed the box and handed it to the lieutenant. “You had better take care of this,” he said. “It may turn out to be evidence. It either proves that robbery was not the killer’s aim—or that he was interrupted before he could ransack the trunk.”

The lieutenant pondered this. “I get your drift. You think your Tora arrived and the killer ran? Yes, I suppose it could have happened that way.” But he sounded dubious and peered into the open trunk, tossing the folded garments around. “Not much else in here except her rags. I suppose she put her bedding on top every morning. What do you make of her having such a fine box and the silver?”

“I don’t know. It’s strange.”

“Stolen, I expect.”

Though Akitada had just had the same thought, the lieutenant’s easy conclusion bothered him. “Not necessarily,” he said. “We must learn as much as possible about the victim and her past and current life. Now I would like to ask the mason and his family a few questions.”

When they got back to the main room, they found that the couple had crept out of their blankets and was sitting beside the central fire pit. The mason, middle-aged before his time, still wore his dusty jacket and short pants, and his hands and feet were encrusted with stone powder. His wife did not look much cleaner. Poor people had no bathing facilities, and the public baths charged too much money, but the contrast to their lodger Tomoe was striking. She had made a great effort to be clean, perhaps because her work required it, but Akitada rather thought that cleanliness had been important to her, a matter of pride.

“We are sorry to be so much trouble.” Akitada squatted down near the mason, though the man’s simian features did not promise much in terms of intelligent responses. After a moment, the lieutenant did the same.

“No trouble, no trouble,” the mason muttered, avoiding eye contact and bobbing his head.

“The lieutenant tells me that you heard your lodger cry out and sent for help. Is that so?”

“She was screaming. It was terrible. It was like demons were tearing her to pieces. I sent my son for the constables.”

Akitada thought of the blind woman struggling for her life, trying to reach the door and help. And these people had sat there, paralyzed with fear. Superstitions were common, but so were cowardice and ill will. He constrained his anger and said encouragingly. “You must have been very frightened.”

“Yes. We ran outside and hid. After a long time I went to listen at the door. I heard nothing. But I figured the demon must have heard us, and we went back outside.”

What a repulsive little toad this man was! In fact, Akitada felt nothing but revulsion for the couple. He looked from one to the other. “Did you hear or see anyone leave?”

They shook their heads.

“Did your lodger receive visitors in her room?”

The mason hesitated and looked at his wife. She glared back at him. The mason fidgeted and said sullenly, “I’m a busy man. I have no time to watch her.”

His wife gave a snort.

Akitada said, “Yes, of course. But perhaps your wife, being in the house most of the day, may know something?”

The woman smirked. “She looked down her nose at people. Men think that makes a whore special.” She snorted again. “Men are fools.” She glared at her husband.

Aha, thought Akitada, so the wife was jealous of Tomoe. He considered her with interest. She was a short, dumpy female with the sharp nose and close-set eyes of a rat and a permanent scowl of bad temper. The street singer had been no beauty, but to the stonemason she must have seemed a fairy compared to the mother of his children. Had she caught her husband with Tomoe and gone after her rival with her kitchen knife? If so, the mason would be bound to cover up for her.

As if she guessed what he was thinking, she said suddenly, “That fellow they arrested. He was here before, and they argued. He said he’d be back, and she’d better do something or he’d kill her.”

CHAPTER FIVE

THE SHACKLES OF LIFE

 

 

 

Of course the lieutenant’s eyes lit up at this damning piece of evidence against Tora. Pressed by Akitada, she remained adamant, saying that she had been worried about her lodger and had put her ear to the door when she realized that Tomoe was arguing with a man. The lieutenant shot Akitada a triumphant glance and asked, “How can you be sure it was the same man who killed her?”

She was. Not only had she recognized the voice, but she had seen him leave right afterward.

Akitada did not for a moment believe that she had spied on Tomoe out of concern for her safety, but rather because she suspected that her husband was with the lodger. He regarded husband and wife thoughtfully and asked, “Had there been any other visitors? Or perhaps strangers who seemed interested in Tomoe?”

The mason glanced at his wife.

“Pah,” she said, “a woman like that always has men. Trash! I’m too busy to watch.”

Akitada took this to mean that they had not actually seen or heard other visitors, but suspected that there had been some. He said, “Tomoe complained of someone following her home from the market. Do you know anything about that?”

They shook their heads, and that ended the visit.

Outside, the constable attempted to give a belated impression of alertness. Akitada badly wanted to see Tora, but a new day was beginning and he was due in the ministry. He thanked Ihara.

The lieutenant bowed. “I’m in your debt for finding this, sir.” He held up the cosmetics box.

“Not at all. You would have found it yourself.” Since Akitada regretted leaving it with Ihara, he added, “Take good care of it. It may turn out to be important.”

He walked back alone to the Greater Palace, watching the sky clouding over even as the sun rose with a spectacular display of fiery hues. Perhaps some rain would cool down the unseasonably hot and dry weather. The smoky orange color of the clouds looked like a bank of smoldering fires, as if a major conflagration were under way in the city. He felt an involuntary chill, a sense of impending disaster.

When Akitada passed through the main gate of the Greater Palace, he worried about Tora in his miserable cell. Had they “interrogated” him already during the night? It was likely. Even if they had not, they would not wait much longer before taking the bamboo canes to Tora’s back or using other forms of torture to force an admission of guilt from him. And Tora was not about to confess to something he had not done.

Akitada decided he would report at the ministry and then go immediately to the prison. As he joined the stream of government officials, many like himself in robes and hats with rank insignia, he became nervous about his appearance, adjusting his hat and brushing at the wrinkles in his gown and full silk trousers. He had dressed too hurriedly after the night’s summons and had not had time to shave. No doubt Soga would hold this against him.

The morning was gloomy, becoming increasingly cloudy. The rising sun had no chance and the ministry compound lay in the shadow of large pines so that lights still glimmered inside. Akitada climbed the staircase and entered the main hall. He expected to see Nakatoshi at this early hour, but for once Sakae was also waiting. Even more puzzling was Sakae’s enthusiastic greeting. The junior clerk practically rubbed his hands as he announced that he would have his report ready by the time Minister Soga arrived.

“Very good,” said Akitada approvingly and turned to Nakatoshi. “So the minister is definitely coming?”

“Yes, sir. I expect him in an hour or so.”

Akitada thought. “An hour? Good. I have a brief call to make.” He turned on his heel to head down the steps again.

The Western Prison was outside the Greater Palace, but only a few blocks from the ministry. Because of his official robe and rank, the constables at the prison gate passed him through to the prison supervisor, where he identified himself and his errand. This official was also cooperative and Akitada was taken to Tora’s cell.