Masako Togawa - The Master Key

Her plan was somehow to distract the receptionist’s attention and switch the master key with her own key on the lavatory tag, with the writing face down. If the exchange was not noticed right away by the receptionist, she should be able to effect her purpose. For when the switch finally came to light, even if she was accused of it she could deny all knowledge of the matter. What mattered was to get hold of the key and investigate Chikako Ueda’s room; once that was accomplished, she could pretend that her room key had been swapped at some stage without her knowledge, probably by the very person who had stolen the master key before.

And now that key lay within her reach. She stealthily moved her hand towards it; suddenly, without warning, Miss Tojo turned around.

‘Is it in that drawer, do you think?’ said Yoneko, lifting her hand quickly off the desk and pointing it at the cabinet behind Miss Tojo. Her voice faltered under the stress.

‘The receipts should be in the same drawer as the daily reports, but there are so many documents in there…’ Miss Tojo peered confusedly at the open drawer.

‘Maybe I could help?’

‘Oh, please do. Please come in.’

That was just the reply Yoneko was hoping for. Now she could get behind the counter, which would considerably increase her chance of making the exchange. She went through the office door for the very first time in her life; the room, she noticed, was very tidy. A book lay opened face down on the swivel chair behind the desk; Miss Tojo had indeed been reading whilst pretending to be busily engaged in her work. Yoneko herself loved reading, and felt a sudden affinity for Miss Tojo. She tried to catch a glance of the book’s title, but it was concealed behind a plain brown wrapper.

‘It’s certainly somewhere in this drawer.’ Just at that moment, the office phone rang.

‘I’ll just take that call while you have a look.’ Miss Tojo pulled out the drawer and carried it bodily to the office desk and put it down just by the master key. She then went to answer the phone, leaving Yoneko to leaf through the piles of receipts. She soon came upon the receipt she was seeking, but pretended not to have found it.

‘Hold on a moment please,’ said Miss Tojo to the caller. ‘I’ll just go and check—you did say Miss Munekata on the second floor, didn’t you?’

Miss Tojo put down the receiver and, pausing only to glance for a second at the book, the master key and the files, hurried out of the office. What a heaven-sent chance, thought Yoneko, as she fished into her blouse pocket and brought out the tag with her own room key on it. She placed it beside the master key and compared the two carefully. The ribbon was a little fresher-looking, but the keys themselves appeared without close examination to be identical. It didn’t seem as if the exchange would be noticed.

She was just about to slip the genuine master key into her pocket when it suddenly occurred to her that she might switch the wooden labels. She had no idea if she had time to undo the ribbons and retie them, but if she could succeed in doing so, it would be quite some time before the exchange would be detected.

She decided to take the risk, and set to work on the ribbon of the real master key. The knot was a little tight, but by using her fingernails she soon had it undone. So far, so good; her hands were hardly even trembling.

But the knot she had tied on her own room key a day or two before was a different matter. She kept counselling herself not to panic, but it seemed as if the knot could not be undone. Just as she was about to give up and leave the key on the desk as she had originally planned, the knot loosened, and so she decided to carry on after all. She began to attach the tag to her own room key.

She heard footsteps on the stairs before she was half done; it was bound to be Miss Tojo making her way back. She slipped the key and tag into the drawer and pretended to be riffling through the receipts. Her hands began to shake, but after two or more attempts she managed to thread the ribbon through the head of the key.

The footsteps stopped outside the door, which then opened, and Miss Tojo came back in. Yoneko felt she could sense the receptionist’s gaze, even though her back was turned to her. She still had to fasten the ribbon; if she could quickly thread it through the key once more, that would do. She held the receipts in her right hand whilst her left hand worked on the key lying in the drawer. Using her thumb and index finger, she got the ribbon through the hole. One knot more, and it could not possibly work loose. Miss Tojo went to the telephone receiver just by Yoneko.

‘Hullo! Miss Munekata is a little busy and so cannot take your call. I’m sorry, but she says she’ll call you back.’

She turned to Yoneko. ‘“Inconvenient”, she says. Everything’s always inconvenient to Miss Munekata. I suppose she doesn’t worry about other people’s convenience.’

She was obviously annoyed at being put out for nothing. ‘Ah! I’ve found it at last,’ said Yoneko. ‘I’ll just take the drawer back over there.’

She picked the drawer up, and then let it fall with a crash to the ground. It landed face down, and all the receipts and documents were scattered over the floor. Miss Tojo got on her knees and began to pick them up again. Under cover of this distraction, Yoneko was able to put the key on the desk.

‘Oh! I’m so sorry! How silly of me!’ Whilst saying this, Yoneko picked up the book which was lying face down on the chair and glanced at the title. Words from the Spirit World —it meant nothing to her.

Miss Tojo turned round and saw what Yoneko was doing. Her features clouded with suspicion, and she quickly glanced over to where the master key, or, rather, its substitute, was lying on the desk.

Yoneko had no idea what the receptionist must be thinking. She felt embarrassed, and after making a few hasty apologies, withdrew without bothering to take that so important gas bill with her.

It was some days later, when Miss Munekata gassed herself, that the master key was discovered to have been switched. As this was just the latest such event, the receptionists (neither wishing to take any blame) professed total ignorance of how it had come about. Such, at least, was Yoneko’s interpretation of their silence.

About a week after Yoneko Kimura took the master key, a meeting of the residents’ committee was called. The loss of the key was high on the agenda.

During those seven days, Yoneko had been awaiting her chance to get into Chikako Ueda’s room but, just as normal, Chikako never seemed to go out at all. It appeared that the one exception to this rule was her weekly expedition to the grocer’s, where she would stock up with tinned foods and other durables. How she passed the remainder of her time alone in her room remained a mystery.

It had seemed unlikely that there would be any call for the master key to be used in that short period and so its loss would not have been discovered but for the accident on the second floor. A strong smell of gas was detected outside Miss Munekata’s room, and in the ensuing confusion the theft became known. Now Yoneko could only wait and let matters take their own course.

It appeared that Miss Munekata had gone to sleep leaving the gas stove on, and somehow the flame had been extinguished. One of her neighbours had got up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, and had noticed the smell of gas exuding from the fanlight window above Toyoko Munekata’s room. It was fortunate that the discovery was made so early, thus avoiding a fatal accident.

Miss Kimura was aroused from her bed in the front office and, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, tried repeatedly to open Miss Munekata’s door with the master key. Needless to say, it did not work, but it took some time for Miss Kimura to realise that this was not due to some failure on her own part, and she spent several minutes reinserting the key in the lock and rattling it to and fro. At last she gave up, and the fire brigade was called. An ambulance with two acrobatic firemen on board arrived in a twinkling; one of them climbed onto a chair and squirmed through the fanlight until he could reach and remove the key from the lock inside. They got into Toyoko Munekata’s room and removed her unconscious body into the open air. She was still breathing faintly and so her life was saved.