4. 意外坠楼

The mountain road to Yatsugatake unwound before Yajima like a gray ribbon stitched across the flank of the world. He had left the expressway at the town of Suwa, where the last convenience store stood at the edge of the flatlands, its fluorescent sign buzzing in the pre-dawn stillness. Beyond that, the road narrowed to a single lane that switchbacked through dense cedar forests and past frozen waterfalls suspended in mid-cascade, their white shapes ghostly against the dark rock.

He drove with both hands on the wheel, the notebook on the passenger seat wrapped in its evidence bag, the heater struggling against the December cold that seeped through the car's aging seals. The dashboard clock read 6:47 a.m. He had been driving for nearly three hours, stopping only once at a roadside vending machine for a can of coffee that had burned his tongue and done nothing for the exhaustion settling into his bones.

The forest opened briefly, and he saw the village below. Yatsugatake was a cluster of perhaps forty houses arranged along a single main street that followed the contour of a narrow valley. The roofs were heavy with snow, their eaves dripping slow tears into the frozen gutters. A single traffic light blinked yellow at the intersection of the main street and a road that led farther into the mountains. There was a post office, a small grocery store with a faded awning, and a Shinto shrine whose torii gate stood half-buried in drifts. Smoke rose from a few chimneys, thin white plumes that dissolved into the low gray sky. It was the kind of village that the modern world had forgotten, and that forgetfulness was a kind of mercy.

Yajima parked his car in the empty lot beside the post office and stepped out into air so cold it felt like a blade against his skin. The silence was almost absolute, broken only by the distant ring of an axe against wood and the caw of a crow circling above the shrine. He pulled his coat tighter and walked toward the grocery store, where a handwritten sign in the window advertised fresh eggs and firewood.

The store was small and dim, its shelves stocked with necessities: rice, miso paste, instant noodles, batteries, kerosene. An elderly woman sat behind the counter, her face seamed with wrinkles, her back curved into a permanent stoop. She looked up when the bell above the door chimed, her eyes curious but not unfriendly. Strangers were rare in Yatsugatake, but not unheard of. Hikers came through in the summer. Occasionally, a journalist or a researcher arrived to document the village's declining population. A police officer from the city was something else entirely.

Yajima showed his badge and asked about Yamane Toshiko. The old woman's expression did not change, but something behind her eyes flickered and went still.

"Yamane-san lives at the end of the valley road," she said, her voice cracked with age. "Past the shrine, up the hill. The house with the blue mailbox. But she doesn't see visitors. Hasn't for years."

"Does she have family?"

"None that ever came here." The old woman hesitated, her gnarled fingers worrying the edge of her apron. "She's been here since before I was married. Keeps to herself. Some of the villagers think she's a witch. Others think she's a nun who broke her vows. The children make up stories." She paused. "What do the police want with her?"

Yajima had prepared for this question. "She may have information about an old case. Nothing serious. Just routine."

The old woman looked at him for a long moment, her dark eyes unreadable. Then she nodded slowly, as if coming to a decision she did not fully understand. "The road is icy past the shrine. Be careful."

—

The valley road was a tunnel of bare branches and packed snow, the tire tracks of a single vehicle pressed into the white like sutures in skin. Yajima walked, his shoes slipping on the frozen ground, his breath forming clouds that hung in the still air before dissipating. The shrine had long since disappeared behind him, swallowed by the forest. Ahead, the road climbed steeply, curving around a rocky outcropping where a small wooden house stood silhouetted against the gray sky.

It was a traditional farmhouse, its thatched roof weighted with stones against the mountain winds, its wooden walls darkened by decades of weather. A blue mailbox stood at the edge of the property, its paint peeling, its flag permanently raised. No smoke rose from the chimney. No light glowed in the windows. For a moment, Yajima felt a cold certainty that he was too late, that the dark sedan had somehow reached the village before him, that Yamane Toshiko was already dead.

Then the door opened.

She was old, older than the woman in the grocery store, older than anyone Yajima had ever seen. Her body was small and bent beneath layers of wool and indigo cloth, her white hair pulled back into a severe bun. But her eyes were clear and sharp, the eyes of a much younger woman, and they regarded him with an expression that was neither welcoming nor hostile. It was the expression of someone who had been waiting.

"Come inside," she said, her voice surprisingly strong. "You've come a long way. And I know why you're here."

—

The interior of the farmhouse was a single room heated by an iron stove that glowed dull orange in the corner. The floor was tatami, old but well-maintained, and the walls were lined with shelves holding jars of preserved vegetables, bolts of cloth, and stacks of books whose spines had long since faded to illegibility. A single photograph hung in a wooden frame above the stove: a young woman with long black hair, her face serious but not unhappy, standing beside a cherry tree in full bloom. Yajima recognized the shape of the cheekbones, the angle of the jaw. Yamane Toshiko, sixty years ago.

She motioned him to sit at a low table and poured green tea from a cast-iron pot that had been warming on the stove. The tea was bitter, the kind that had been steeped too long, but it was warm and Yajima drank it gratefully. She sat across from him, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes never leaving his face.

"You're the detective who arrested Okabe Hayato," she said. It was not a question.

"How do you know about Okabe?"

"I read the newspapers. Even out here, the world still reaches us. A young man dead in detention, a drug case closed before it could begin. The article didn't name him, but I knew." She paused, her gaze drifting toward the window. "I knew because Tetsu had told me about him. About the boy at the convenience store who gave him expired rice balls and treated him like a human being. Tetsu wrote to me. Not often. Once or twice a year. He said the boy was kind, and kindness was so rare in his world that he couldn't help but trust him."

"Tetsu gave Okabe a notebook. I have it now."

Yamane nodded slowly. "I wondered when someone would find it. He told me he had written everything down, all the names, all the dates. He said it was his insurance policy. But insurance only works if someone reads the policy before the house burns down."

"The house burned down a long time ago. I'm just trying to understand the fire."

She looked at him then, really looked at him, and something in her expression shifted. The wariness receded slightly, replaced by a weariness that was older than grief. "Ask your questions."

Yajima pulled the notebook from his coat and placed it on the table between them. The evidence bag crinkled in the silence. Yamane's eyes flicked toward it, then away, as if the sight of it caused her physical pain.

"The Midnight Lecture Society," he said. "What was it really?"

Yamane closed her eyes. For a long moment, she did not speak, and the only sound in the room was the crackle of the stove and the distant moan of wind through the cedar trees. When she finally opened her eyes, she was no longer looking at Yajima. She was looking at something far away, something that existed only in memory.

"The Midnight Lecture Society was a group of children playing at being revolutionaries," she said. "We thought we were different. Special. Chosen by fate to see the truth that everyone else was blind to. We read Marx and Kropotkin and the anarchist poets. We believed that society was a prison and we were the only ones who had found the key." She smiled faintly, a ghost of bitterness at the corner of her mouth. "We were fools. But we were young, and foolishness is the privilege of the young."

She paused, gathering herself. "There were six of us. Yamashita Kenji, the oldest. He was a dockworker, strong as an ox and twice as stubborn. Nakamura Ryohei, a failed artist who painted beautiful things no one ever bought. Sakurai Minoru, a thief who could pick any lock and talk his way out of any trouble. Tanaka Yoko, the only girl besides me. She was in love with Spider, and that love destroyed her. And there was Tetsu. Dear, gentle Tetsu, who believed in the goodness of people even after everything that happened."

"And Spider?"

Yamane's face hardened. "Spider was the seventh. He wasn't part of the original group. He came later, brought in by Yamashita, who had met him at the docks. He was charming. Clever. He talked about Nietzsche and the will to power, about how morality was a cage built by the weak to trap the strong. We thought he was brilliant." Her voice dropped. "We didn't realize he meant every word."

She poured more tea, her hands steady despite her age. "The smuggling operation was Spider's idea from the start. He said it was about money, about funding the revolution. But for Spider, it was never about the revolution. It was about power. He wanted to control us, and the drug trade was his method. He gave us money, purpose, excitement. And in return, he demanded loyalty. Absolute, unquestioning loyalty."

"Why did you vote against it?"

"Because I saw what he was." Yamane met his gaze directly. "I saw the way he looked at Yoko, like she was a possession rather than a person. I saw the way he manipulated the group, playing us against each other, always positioning himself at the center. I knew that if we went through with the plan, we would never escape him. So I voted no. Tetsu voted no with me. But the others..." She shook her head. "The others were seduced. By the money, by the excitement, by Spider's beautiful lies."

"And then the raid happened."

"The raid was Spider's masterpiece." Her voice was flat now, drained of emotion. "He had already made his deal with the authorities. We didn't know that. We thought he was one of us, that he would go down with the ship. But Spider was never on the ship. He was the one who had called the iceberg."

She described the night of the raid in detail: the pounding on the door, the flashlights cutting through the dark, the screams of her friends as they were dragged away. Spider had not been at the house that night. He had claimed he was out securing their escape route. But when Yamane had fled the house through a back window, she had seen him. He was standing across the street, watching the raid unfold from the shadows. And he was smiling.

"I ran," she said. "I ran and I never stopped running. I ended up here, in a village where no one knew my name. I changed my identity, or at least I tried to. The police found me eventually, but by then Spider had already arranged for the case to be suspended. Three of our friends were in prison. Yoko had disappeared, and I knew in my bones that she was dead. And Spider was walking free, building a new life on the ruins of ours."

Yajima opened the notebook to the list of names. "The others started dying. One by one. Over the years."

"Spider is patient," Yamane said. "He waited until the case was forgotten, until no one would think to connect the deaths. Then he began to clean house. Every person who knew what he had been, what he had done, had to be erased. It wasn't enough to kill them. He had to make their deaths invisible. No patterns. No connections. No questions." She looked at the list, her eyes lingering on each name. "I've been waiting for forty years. Waiting for him to find me. Waiting for the knock on the door."

"Were you not afraid?"

"I was terrified," she said quietly. "I still am. But fear is not the same as surrender. I stayed alive because I knew that someday, someone would come asking the right questions. Someone who had found Tetsu's notebook. Someone who believed that the dead deserve justice as much as the living."

Yajima reached into his coat and pulled out the photograph he had printed from the microfilm. Kuroda Takanobu, silver-haired and distinguished, shaking hands with the mayor. "Is this him? Is this Spider?"

Yamane took the photograph in both hands. For a long moment, she simply stared at it, her expression unreadable. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely a whisper.

"Yes," she said. "That's him. Older, richer, wrapped in a thousand lies. But the eyes are the same. I would know those eyes anywhere." She set the photograph down gently, as if it was made of glass. "His real name was Kuroda Takanobu. We called him Spider because he was always weaving webs. We thought it was a joke. It wasn't."

Yajima felt the final piece click into place. "I need you to come back to Meishin with me. To make a formal statement. Without your testimony, the notebook is just the writings of a dead homeless man. With it, we might have enough to open an investigation."

Yamane was silent for a long time. Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the window frames and sending fine sprays of snow against the glass. The stove crackled and popped, consuming the last of its fuel.

"I can't leave," she said finally. "This village is my protection. The people here don't know who I am, but they know my face. If I go to Meishin, Spider will find me within hours. He has eyes everywhere."

"Then let me record your statement. A sworn deposition, taken under oath. That will give me enough to go to a prosecutor. A different prosecutor, one who isn't connected to Kuroda."

Yamane considered this. Then she nodded slowly. "Bring your recorder. I'll tell you everything. But once I do, there's no going back. For either of us."

—

They spent the next three hours in the farmhouse, Yajima's digital recorder running on the table between them. Yamane told her story from the beginning, starting with her childhood in the port district of Meishin, her recruitment into the Midnight Lecture Society, and her first encounter with the man who called himself Spider. She described the smuggling operation in detail, the names of ships and dates and quantities, the routes they had used to move product through the city's underground. She described the night of the raid and what she had seen afterward. She described the deaths of her friends, each one reported in the newspapers as an accident or a suicide, each one bearing the invisible fingerprints of a man who had spent forty years perfecting the art of murder from a distance.

Her voice never wavered. She spoke with the precision of someone who had spent decades preparing for this moment, organizing her memories into a coherent narrative that could be presented to a court of law. By the time she finished, the recorder held nearly three hours of testimony, and Yajima had filled half a notebook with his own observations and follow-up questions.

He switched off the recorder and sat back in his chair. The stove had gone cold, and the room was chillier now, the cold seeping through the walls. "Thank you," he said. "I know this wasn't easy."

"It was the easiest thing I've done in forty years," Yamane said. "The hard part was staying silent. That's over now." She looked at him, her eyes steady. "What will you do next?"

"I'll take this to the prosecutor's office. Not Tachibana—someone above him, someone who can't be compromised. And then I'll request an investigation. It won't be easy. Kuroda has friends everywhere. But with your testimony and the notebook, I might have enough to get a warrant."

"And if you don't?"

"Then I'll find another way. I'll go to the press. I'll make enough noise that they can't ignore me. But I need you to be safe while I do it. Is there anywhere you can go? Any place Spider doesn't know about?"

Yamane shook her head. "This is my place. I've been here for forty years. If Spider wants to find me, he will. But I don't think he wants to find me. I think he wants to forget I exist. As long as I stay here, silent and invisible, he can pretend I'm already dead."

"That's not good enough. Once I file this testimony, he'll know you're alive. He'll come for you."

"Then let him come." Yamane's voice was quiet but unyielding. "I've been running from him since I was seventeen years old. I'm tired of running."

—

The light was fading when Yajima finally left the farmhouse. The winter days were short in the mountains, the sun already sinking behind the western peaks, painting the snow in shades of amber and rose. He walked down the valley road toward the village, the recorder heavy in his pocket, the notebook in its evidence bag beneath his arm. He had what he had come for. He had the testimony of the last surviving witness, the final piece of the puzzle that Tetsu had spent forty years assembling.

But as he reached the shrine and turned onto the main street, he felt a familiar chill that had nothing to do with the mountain air. The village was too quiet. The traffic light at the intersection was dark, its yellow pulse extinguished. No smoke rose from the chimneys. No lights glowed in the windows of the grocery store.

He quickened his pace toward the parking lot where he had left his car. It was still there, a dark shape against the gathering dusk. But something was wrong. The driver's side window was smashed, glass glittering on the snow like scattered diamonds. The glove compartment hung open. The back seat had been torn apart, its cushions slashed, their stuffing spilling out in pale clumps.

And on the hood of the car, held in place by a smooth gray stone, was a single sheet of paper. Written on it, in neat black ink, were four words:

SHE CANNOT SAVE YOU.

Yajima stood very still, his breath forming clouds in the freezing air. The village was silent around him, a silence that felt less like peace and more like a held breath. He looked up and down the empty street, at the shuttered windows and the closed doors, at the shrine whose torii gate seemed to watch him with ancient, indifferent eyes.

The dark sedan was nowhere to be seen. But it had been here. And whoever had been inside it was sending a message, not just to Yajima, but to anyone who might think of helping him. The village was no longer a refuge. It was a trap, and he had led the hunter directly to his prey.

He pulled out his phone and dialed Shirogane. The line was dead, no signal reaching this far into the mountains. He was alone, cut off, with a dead man's notebook and an old woman's confession and the growing certainty that he had made a terrible mistake.

He turned back toward the valley road, toward the farmhouse on the hill. The snow was beginning to fall again, thick flakes that clung to his coat and blurred the world into white. He walked fast, then faster, his heart pounding against his ribs. The message on the car meant that Kuroda's people had been watching the village. They had seen him arrive. They had seen him visit Yamane. And if they had been bold enough to leave a warning, they would not hesitate to act on it.

The farmhouse came into view, its shape ghostly in the falling snow. The door was open, swinging slightly in the wind. Yajima drew his service pistol and approached slowly, his footsteps muffled by the fresh powder. He stepped through the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the dim interior.

The room was empty. The stove was cold. The photograph of the young woman beneath the cherry tree still hung on the wall, but the young woman was no longer in it. The frame had been shattered, the photograph torn in half.

And on the table, where the recorder and the notebook had been, there was nothing but a single dark blue fiber, identical to the one he had found under Okabe Hayato's fingernail. The hunter had been here.

Yamane Toshiko was gone.