Masako Togawa - The Master Key

At least one thing was clear. There was now no doubt in Yoneko’s mind of Chikako’s connection with the kidnapping.

Chikako had pledged herself to a man, and waited for him ever since. The man, the kidnapper, had made a promise to Major Kraft, George’s father, and had failed to keep it. He had betrayed Chikako and the Major.

She pondered this a while, and then the germ of an idea grew in her mind. Suddenly she saw everything in a blinding flash of inspiration. The man had not betrayed Chikako and the Major—something, some unforeseen accident had prevented him from doing what he said he would. There was no way in which she could deduce precisely what had happened, but she felt that this explanation fitted all the circumstances.

She looked at her clock. It was two am. In the far distance, she heard the baleful whistle of a steam engine. Yes, beyond doubt, the kidnapper was the man Chikako had awaited so long.

All that remained to be discovered was where the child lay buried.

She got into bed and turned out the light. Gazing into the impenetrable darkness of her room, she puzzled over something else. How could the medium have come to know about Chikako’s secret? She did not believe in the claims of the supernatural power made by the Three Spirit Faith. For example, if the voice they had heard was truly that of George, it seemed unlikely that he would have used the standard Japanese word for Mother . Keiko had said that he addressed her by the English word ‘ Mummy ’.

This thought frightened her. It meant that, far from the Three Spirit Faith having supernatural capabilities, someone, and that someone closely connected to it, knew of what had happened and was plotting some deep scheme. But who? And why?

At last, her vision blurred in the dark and she fell asleep.

The mist which had begun to settle on the streets an hour before now enveloped the town; nonetheless, it was quite a warm evening and one could just see the naked bulbs, strung around the trench at four-metre intervals to prevent people from falling into the excavation under the apartment block.

The myriad lights of the amusement area below twinkled and died out one by one under the veil of the mist. Yoneko gazed at them in fascination. She was leaning out of the window in the rear corridor on the fifth floor. She had tried every trick she could think of during the last fortnight to get Chikako to let slip where the child was buried but it had all been a waste of time. She had even tried phoning from outside. She had chosen a telephone box in a lonely area and, having called the building, waited for a few minutes while Chikako was summoned from the fifth floor. She had stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth, and, being unused to practising deception, felt thoroughly ashamed of what she was doing. At last she heard the echoes of footsteps approaching the phone at the other end, the sound of the receiver being taken up, and Chikako’s breathing. She could visualise the scene at the other end, and felt as if somehow all her efforts to conceal her identity would fail. Disguising her voice and speaking through the handkerchief, she said, ‘I know you buried the child. Say where, at once! I know it’s in the apartment block.’

She tried to be as threatening as possible. But Chikako said nothing. Instead, Yoneko could hear, first of all, the sound of the phone being dropped, and then the voice of Miss Tojo calling out Chikako’s name.

Thereafter, she spent several days racking her brains to think of some other technique. Every day she went into the inner courtyard and looked at the latest diggings. The incinerator and the greenhouse had been removed and the earth all turned over, but there was no sign of any childish bones having been dug up, and no tales of such an event either. She examined the earth and clay which had been dug out from the foundations and dumped by the conveyor on the ground above. Sometimes, she thought she could sense the presence of a rotting corpse, and her stomach turned. Once the soil had been removed, the workmen tamped down the earth under the walls of the building and laid heavy girders and rails. At this point, Yoneko began to doubt if it really was true that a child was buried somewhere in the vicinity. At such times, the words of the medium, the poem in Chikako’s room, and all the other pieces of evidence she had so carefully assembled seemed to amount to no more than her wild fancies. But she could not drive out of her mind the conviction that there was a child buried somewhere around the building. The tale of the man who had spent the night in Chikako’s room disguised as a woman, and of Chikako who had waited for him all the long years since, now took a second place in her mind. She was possessed by the illusion of the child buried beneath the building and there was nothing she could do about it. Before falling asleep at night, she saw in her mind’s eye the site after the building had been moved, with a suitcase somewhere in the centre. But Keiko’s son, George, was alive and well and moving around inside the suitcase.

These imaginings were to stand her in good stead when she had all but given up hope of getting Chikako to talk. She made a plan based on them. As soon as the building had been moved, she would rush to Chikako’s door, knock loudly, and shout out ‘They’ve found the child’s body!’ This should at least produce some reaction which would be of use.

For this plan to work, it would be necessary to prepare Chikako’s mind with a few hints of what lay in store for her. So for the past several days she had written ‘A divine revelation’ on a half sheet of rice paper such as was used by oracles at shrines and pushed it under Chikako’s door. The ‘divine revelation’ that Yoneko wrote read as follows:

‘When the building is moved, then all the sinful events that lie buried beneath it shall be revealed. And lo! the child thou didst bury shall come back to life!’

At just about the same time, a rumour went the rounds that a miracle would occur when the building was moved. It was said that the Three Spirit Faith had revealed that a child, kidnapped seven years ago, would be discovered. This gave Yoneko the horrible feeling that someone knew what she was up to! She felt as if all the guilt she was trying to expose was turning around, piling on her. If the Three Spirit Faith made such an announcement, it was clearly part of a human and not a supernatural plan. She felt that this plot would come to fruition before her very eyes on the day that the building was moved. As the instant when the building was to be moved came closer and closer, Yoneko felt more and more like a gambler whose fate rests on one hand, lying face down on the table, which is about to be turned over and exposed. For good, or perhaps for ill…

Only two days remained until the building would be moved. All preparations were complete. The workers had nothing left to do, and peace and quiet had at last returned to the inner garden which lay hidden in the mists below.

Somewhere, she heard a clock strike eleven pm. Yoneko straightened up and made her way towards Chikako’s room in order to pass the folded rice paper under her door. As she turned the corner, she heard footsteps on the stairs. Someone was coming. As Yoneko was wearing the patrol armband, there was no need for her to hide or run away. She went to the stairwell and saw Suwa Yatabe coming up to the fifth floor. Suwa bowed slightly as she passed, but her face showed an expression of distaste. She hurried along the corridor and vanished up the stairs which led out onto the roof. She seemed to be carrying an unusually heavy load on her conscience for one who had experienced a miracle, thought Yoneko, and then paused to wonder what Suwa would be doing on the roof at such an hour. However, she stuck to her original plan and made her way to Chikako’s room with the ‘divine revelation’ in her hand. As on all previous occasions, she crept quietly so as not to be heard.