Masako Togawa - The Lady Killer

Should he call the police? Or the manager of the apartment? To be involved in such a case would mean social ruin. But if he just ran away, what about the tie of his, knotted about her neck? Whatever else he did he must recover that tie first.

It was hanging in my wardrobe in Yotsuya. Who brought it here? Who tied it around her throat ? he thought, anger welling up within him. And then: It’s deliberate. It’s another trap . How could he escape the jaws of this trap?

He did not stop to think that, the more he tried to escape it, the tighter it would grip him.

He went back to the wardrobe and opened the door. This time, Mitsuko Kosugi’s body did not roll out. Her head hung loosely on her neck. Her hands were limp by her side. Her hair was in disarray. It was exactly as it had been when he had pushed her back inside the wardrobe.

Fighting back his nausea, he reached down and loosened the tie, which was biting into her throat. It had been knotted very tightly; as he removed it, he could clearly see the livid marks of strangulation. He folded the tie, put it in his pocket, and shut the wardrobe door on the corpse.

He went over to the door. Before passing through the curtain, he looked back to see that he had forgotten nothing, stepped out, and his hand on the doorknob, looked back again. He could see nothing; he touched his hand to his head, verifying that he was wearing his hat, and, satisfied, turned to open the door.

It wouldn’t open!

The blood rushed to his head, and he nearly fainted. But of course it would open; he had walked through that selfsame door a few minutes earlier, had he not? It must be stiff. He gripped the handle firmly, twisted it and pushed against the door with all his might. Apart from the creak of a budging screw, there was no reaction.

The door was locked.

He stooped and peered through the keyhole. The naked bulb outside shone on the wall and the door opposite—nothing else. Nobody. He gave up and went back into the room.

“Why is it locked? Why is it locked?” he kept asking himself. He crouched on the floor like a trapped animal overcome by the exhaustion of its struggles. He looked up and saw the window.

That was his route of escape.

Outside, the horn of an automobile sounded, jarring on his nerves. The squeal of brakes, the footsteps upstairs, the drone of the television set, the faint sound of music—all of these seemed to grate upon his nerves. Remote as these sounds were, they seemed to be coming closer. The walls and floor of the room seemed to be closing in on him, and everything all of a sudden became colorless. He must escape!

He moved over to the window and touched the curtain before he realized that he might be seen. He went back and switched off the light, noticing irrelevantly the dust upon its shade. Creeping through the darkness, he opened the window.

There was nobody outside.

He climbed out in his stocking feet and carefully closed the window, taking care to make no noise. He felt the damp and slippery ground chilling the soles of his feet.

He went around to the entrance, peeped inside and opened the door stealthily. He made sure that he was unobserved and then opened the shoe box marked “Kosugi.” He reached inside.

His shoes were gone!

He was absolutely certain that he had put them in that box. What on earth could have happened? He fumbled inside; the pumps were still there, but not his shoes. Fear ran up and down his spine as he feverishly opened the boxes above and below and on either side. But his shoes were nowhere to be found.

He heard a door open suddenly somewhere on the ground floor and leaped backward. The duckboard slid under his feet, emitting a scratching sound. He forgot about his shoes and ran out into the alleyway, stubbing his toe hard on a stepping-stone as he ran. The pain was agonizing, but he hobbled on as fast as he could, got to the main road and stopped a taxi. Fortunately the driver did not seem to notice that he was shoeless.

He told the man to drive to Yotsuya Sanchome and lay in the back, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of the window. He was overcome with despair. Somewhere in the dark he heard a siren; had they discovered the body already? Had the police been called?

He felt as if he was being pursued and slumped down in the seat. The driver slowed down; the siren came closer and closer, overtaking them with a burst of headlights into the taxi.

“Fire somewhere,” said the driver, and Honda looked up and was relieved to see a fire engine and not a police car.

He got off some distance before the Meikei-so. It would not do to have the driver remember his destination; he was becoming cautious.

As a result, he had to walk the hundred yards or so of asphalt road to his apartment in his socks, which became soaking wet. Also, his big toe was throbbing, and the pain made it hard to walk. When he got into his room, he took off the muddy socks, one of them bloodstained, and discovered that he had broken the nail of his toe halfway down. He wrapped his foot in a handkerchief and massaged his toe.

He had to check his tie in the wardrobe. He pulled the tie out of his pocket, looked at it, and hurled it to the ground as if it had turned into a poisonous snake. For there were initials sewn into it, and they were his.

Hoping for the one-in-a-million chance that would prove him wrong, he went to the wardrobe and opened it. Perhaps his tie was there and this one belonged to someone else with the same initials… He felt a searing pain in his left cheek and sprang back. It felt as if a red-hot skewer had struck him. For a moment he had a blackout, and then he touched his cheek; it was covered with blood. He looked down on the ground; at his feet was a thin blade attached to a length of bamboo. The wardrobe had been booby-trapped.

Ten or so ties swung mockingly on the rail inside the door, but his maroon tie was not amongst them. His eyes filled with tears; the pain and the torment had made a crybaby out of Don Juan. Pressing his hand to his cheek, he staggered over to the desk. His hunter’s diary, which he always kept under a paperweight on the top, was gone!

He lay face down on the bed. When, after a few minutes, he rolled over, for an awful instant he could not see.

Early in the morning of January 25, ten days after he had fled Mitsuko Kosugi’s room, Ichiro Honda was arrested for murder. The police came to room 305 in the Toyo Hotel and took him away.

The police had been able to trace the man calling himself Sobra through the handmade Italian shoes that had been left at the scene of the crime. They had been a special order, so tracing their owner was a simple matter. This had never occurred to him, nor had he thought in the meantime of going to the police and explaining what had happened.

Since the murder, he had taken no initiative but had just waited to see what would happen. He was like an insect that has lost its wings. About the only thing he did was visit the Meikei-so three days after the murder. He was worried that the taxi driver might have remembered the Meikei-so, but this turned out to be the least of his worries. For when he entered his room, he noticed that someone had taken away the bamboo with the blade in it, which he had put in the corner. This not unnaturally stunned him. But he carried on as he had intended; he packed all his belongings into a bag and informed the manager that he was moving out and wished to settle the balance of the rent.

He roped up the bag, addressed it to his father’s house in Kagoshima, and sent it by rail.

Each day on his way to work, he would follow the case in the papers. The police were hunting for Sobra; well and good—they could never identify him as being Sobra. His main fear was that he might somehow come to be embroiled in the case; he feared the resulting scandal. However, he reassured himself that this could not possibly happen.