Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

He decided he needed to check further. “So there was no sarcoma in the coronary artery?”

“None that I could see.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Well. I’ll have to wait for the tissue sample to come back before I can say for sure.”

For the moment, the telltale tumor seemed to be missing from Mai’s artery.

“In that case, what killed her?”

“Probably the cold. She was in an extremely weakened state.”

“How about injuries?”

“Her left ankle was broken, and she had lacerations on both elbows. Most likely from when she fell. There were particles of concrete ground into the wounds.”

So she’d fallen in feet first, broken her ankle, and was unable to get out of there. The shaft was a yard wide and over three deep, too deep for her to escape on her own. She would have been stuck there, with only rainwater to quench her thirst. Even so, she would have survived for several days.

“I wonder how long she was alive in there.” It wasn’t really a question. He was merely thinking aloud as he imagined her fear and despair at being left all alone at the bottom of a hole on a rooftop.

“I’d estimate about ten days.” Her stomach and intestines were empty, and her subcutaneous fat was largely depleted.

“Ten days.” Ando took out his planner. Assuming she survived for ten days in the exhaust shaft, and assuming five more for her body to be discovered, she would have vanished on or about the 10th of November. Ando’s date with her had been scheduled for the ninth; the fact that she hadn’t answered the phone all day that day pushed the date of her disappearance back at least that far. Indeed, her mailbox had contained newspapers going back to the eighth. Which meant that something had happened to her on the eighth or ninth to make her leave her apartment.

Ando marked those two dates on his calendar.

Something had happened to her between the eighth and tenth of November.

He tried to imagine himself in her place. When she was found, she had on a skirt and a sweatshirt. Her attire suggested she’d just stepped out for a moment, maybe for a breath of fresh air. But, strangely, she hadn’t been wearing any panties.

He thought again about the things he’d felt when he visited her apartment. They were still vivid in his mind. That had been the 15th of November. If the results of the autopsy were to be believed, at that point she was already trapped on the roof, waiting to be rescued. In other words, she’d been gone from her apartment for several days. Yet, Ando was sure he’d sensed something in the apartment. It should have been empty, but he had definitely felt something that breathed.

“Oh, and…” said Nakayama, holding up an index finger as if he’d just remembered something important.

“What?”

“You were pretty close to her, weren’t you, Dr Ando?”

“I wouldn’t say close. I’d only met her twice.”

“Oh. When had you last seen her?”

“The end of last month, I guess.”

“That would be about three weeks before her death.” Nakayama looked as if he were holding back something important. Ando fixed his older colleague with a stare that said, Come on, say it.

“She was pregnant, wasn’t she?” Nakayama finally blurted out. For a moment, Ando wasn’t sure who he was talking about.

“Who was?” he said.

“Mai, of course.” Nakayama was keeping a close eye on Ando’s confused reaction. “Didn’t you know?”

Ando didn’t answer.

“You don’t mean to tell me you overlooked the obvious signs of a woman nearing term.”

“Nearing term?”

Ando could only parrot Nakayama’s words. He looked at the ceiling and tried to recall the exact lines of Mai’s figure. He’d seen her once in mourning clothes and once in a bright dress. Both outfits had been tight around her waist and hips, showing off her slim contours. Her wasp waist had been one of her most attractive features. But it wasn’t just that. Ando had sensed something virginal about her. And now Nakayama was trying to tell him she’d been pregnant? Nearing term, in fact?

Not that he’d ever observed her that closely. In fact, the more he thought about her the blur-rier his image of her became. His memory was hazy. But no, it couldn’t be. There was no way she’d been nine months pregnant. For one thing, he’d seen her corpse with his own eyes. Her belly had been so flat it almost touched her spine.

“She couldn’t have been nearing term.”

“Some women are like that, though. They don’t get very big even in the last trimester.”

“It’s not a question of degrees, though. I saw her dead body myself.”

“You misunderstand,” Nakayama said, waving his hands. Then he carefully arrayed the evidence before Ando.

“The uterus was greatly enlarged and she had wounds where the placenta had been torn away. The vagina was full of a brownish secretion. And inside the vagina I found tiny pieces of flesh that I believe are from an umbilical cord.”

You’re out of your mind, thought Ando. But he couldn’t imagine an experienced forensic surgeon like Nakayama making such an elementary mistake. Those three pieces of evidence presented by Mai’s body could only lead to one conclusion: she’d given birth shortly before falling into the shaft.

Assuming the delivery was fact, could it explain her movements? Perhaps, on or about the seventh, she had gone into labor, and had accordingly headed for an obstetrician. She’d given birth, spent five or six days in the hospital, and then checked out on the twelfth or thirteenth. Maybe the baby had been stillborn. In her grief, the mother had wandered about until she found herself on the roof of the building, where she’d fallen into the exhaust shaft. She’d survived for ten days. And then this morning, her body had been discovered.

It worked out, time-wise. The birth offered a plausible explanation for her disappearance. And naturally she would have kept it all secret from her mother.

But Ando didn’t buy it. Leaving aside the fact that, even allowing for individual variation, she just hadn’t looked pregnant, he couldn’t forget the impression their first encounter had made on him.

He’d first laid eyes on Mai right in the same office. Just before he was to dissect Ryuji, she’d been escorted in by a detective who wanted her to tell Ando all she knew about the circumstances of Ryuji’s death. She had tried to sit down, then lost balance and steadied herself with a hand on a nearby desk. Ando had known at a glance that she was anemic. He had picked up the faint scent of blood on her and deduced that her anemia was due to her menstruating. His conclusion had been bolstered by her embarrassed expression as she apologized: “Sorry, it’s just that…” Their eyes had met, and they’d had a moment of nonverbal communication.

Please don’t worry. It’s just the monthly thing.

Gotcha.

Mai had informed him only with her eyes, afraid to create a fuss given the location. The memory of how she’d made her meaning clear without words was still strangely vivid for Ando. He’d performed Ryuji’s autopsy on the twentieth of the previous month. That meant Mai had been menstruating less than a month before supposedly giving birth. It was impossible, of course.

Maybe I misunderstood the whole thing. All along I thought there’d been a silent exchange, but maybe I was fooling myself. Maybe I got it all wrong. But the more he thought about it, the less he was able to believe it. He was confident he’d taken her meaning.

However, the facts revealed by the autopsy flatly contradicted his view of the matter.

Ando stood up and said, pointing to the autopsy report, “Would you mind if I made a copy of this?” He wanted to take it home and read it carefully.