“When I put it that way? It’s obviously the message he left behind. And he tossed the leg into the bathroom because it was only the watch he needed to take away, and he wanted to emphasize that!” “…”
Ryuzaki fell silent, apparently thinking.
“Let me see that,” he said, taking the picture from Misora’s hand. As she watched him pore over it, turning his head at all sorts of strange angles, Misora began to feel like her theory was completely wrong after all. All of this was only useful if it led to a message, and if he said that it was a baseless coincidence it would all fall apart—her deduction had no proof, could never be proven. It had been produced by pure instinct. The battle decided by instinct—by her instinct she would be victorious, or fail.
“Misora.” “Yes? What?”
“Assuming your theory is correct... from this picture, there is no way to be sure that the victim’s clock is pointing at 12:45 and twenty seconds.”
“I mean, look,” Ryuzaki said, holding out the picture. Upside down.
“Hold it like this, and it’s 6:15 and fifty seconds. Or like this...” He turned the picture sideways.
“Three o clock and thirty-five seconds. And if you turn it 180 degrees again, 9:30 and five seconds.” “Oh.”
Of course. He was right. The picture was taken with the body vertically, so she had just assumed that the head... the hour hand was pointing directly upward, at twelve o’clock. But if you really looked at the victim as a clock, that was not necessarily the case. It might be, but it might not be. Just change the
angle of the picture and there could be infinite possibilities. Or at least 360. The hands might not move, but the numbers could be placed anywhere around them. There was no clue indicating how to place the numbers.
“If the victim represents the three hands, then this square room is presumably the numbers. The victim was lying in the center of the room, after all. And the victim was placed like this, parallel or perpendicular to the walls of the room, so I think we can assume it is one of the four patterns I mentioned- But four patterns is still too many. We need to at least get it down to two, or we can’t really say we’ve solved the killer’s message.”
“The room... is the numbers?”
“Now that I think about it, the first message involved Roman numerals... which are often used on clock faces. But there are no Roman numerals in here. If only there were some hint to tell us which wall goes with which number..
Which wall was which time...? But there was nothing out of the ordinary on any of the walls, nothing that might indicate a number. One wall had a door, and the opposite wall a window. Another had a walk-in closet... or was it directions? The compass again...
“Ryuzaki, do you know which way north is? If north is twelve...”
“I already thought of that, but there’s no logical reason to assume that north is twelve. This isn’t a map, after all. It might be east, or west, or south.”
“Logic... logic... yeah, yeah, we need proof, or at least something reasonable... but how can we tell
which wall? There’s nothing...”
“Indeed. It feels like there’s a wall blocking our path, too tall for us to climb over.” “A wall? Good metaphor. A wall... a wall...”
A wall? The Wara Ningyo were on the walls. There had been two of them in here. Did that connect? Did the dolls finally have meaning here? Misora half forced herself to decide she couldn’t see anything else that might be a hint, and pushed her thoughts into that channel. The Wara Ningyo. Wara. Ningyo. Straw dolls. Dolls. Stuffed animals? Stuffed animals... in the frilly room. Too many dolls for a twenty- eight-year-old woman...
The stuffed animals piled against the walls. “I got it, Ryuzaki,” Misora said.
This time she was calm.
This time she did not get worked up.
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