The Ginza Ghost Read online

  ‘It appears it wasn’t that big a deal.’

  Perhaps it hadn’t been a big deal to him at the time, as only one miner had been sealed up. But the real big deal happened shortly after the conversation. It was when the clerk who had just been sent to check up on the condition of the fire returned with the report that someone had murdered engineer Maruyama.

  2

  The engineer’s body lay in a corner of the side passage, not far from the iron door. It appeared he had been murdered while conducting an analysis of the smoke. At a nearby wall, the ventilation pipe which had been cut loose was hanging from iron wires from the pit props on the ceiling. Analysis tools had been scattered on a stand.

  The victim’s body was lying face down, and the dark liquid which dripped from his head glistened on the dirt floor. The big wound on the back of his head had ruffled his wet hair, in a manner reminiscent of a chestnut burr. His mouth was open. The murder weapon was discovered right away. A large round clump of coal, as big as a stone weight, was lying not far away from the victim’s feet, bathed in blood and glistening black. The moment the supervisor saw it, his eyes went straight up to the ceiling. The ceiling was still intact. But you didn’t need a cave-in to make a wound like that.

  The pressure at five hundred shaku below the ground was high. Above ground, a person could jump to their death from a thousand shaku, and most of the time, the body would still be largely intact. But if you fell five hundred shaku into a mine underground, there’d be nothing left of you. That’s why a cave-in was so frightening. Even the smallest fragment falling down could crack a person’s finger like a twig. Therefore it should come as no surprise that a clump of coal could serve as a murder weapon. The supervisor, who had picked the murder weapon up, threw it away and turned his pale face to the foreman.

  The workman, who had remained frozen on the spot until then, was the first to speak up.

  ‘After we got things under control, Mr. Asakawa went to do his rounds, while I went to return the trowel to the storage. It happened while we were gone.’

  Mr. Asakawa was the name of the foreman. The workman’s name was Furui. The two hadn’t fully recovered from the commotion of the fire when they had come across the murder, so they were quite agitated. But they weren’t the only ones to have lost their composure. The usually easygoing supervisor himself was also quite distressed.

  The fire had indeed been contained to one spot. But they didn’t yet know how much damage it had caused, and now one of their more precious resources, an engineer, had been killed by someone. The supervisor, who had been earning his living in mines for a long time now, was probably the first person to be truly alarmed by this murder, not just of anyone, but of an engineer.

  Eventually the supervisor made up his mind.

  ‘Who could have killed him? Do you have any idea?’ asked the hired police constable casually.

  ‘An idea? Of course I have!’ said the supervisor, in a tone of displeasure as he turned to the constable.

  ‘It was that fire. One of the miners was too late and was sealed inside the tunnel, which was on fire. A terrible tragedy of course, but we couldn’t open the door to save him. It was engineer Maruyama who led the group who sealed up the door. And now Maruyama has been killed, so of course I have an idea as to the murderer. Even if I don’t know who exactly, we only have a limited pool of suspects.’

  ‘That has to be it,’ agreed the foreman.

  The foreman had actually been secretly assigned to this function directly by the mining company, and was a faithful dog in search of profits. While he ostensibly worked under the supervisor, who was the boss of the whole mine, the foreman secretly held as much power as the supervisor, who had worked his way up from an engineer. The constable nodded. The foreman continued:

  ‘Nobody would do something as horrible as this for someone they didn’t know. I think his name was Minekichi? The miner who worked here.’

  The office clerk nodded and now the supervisor took over.

  ‘Bring his parents and the woman who made it out alive to my office. And that woman’s brother is also here, right? Bring him along too.’

  ‘The first thing we need to do is to investigate the people close to Minekichi,’ said the foreman.

  The constable and the clerk disappeared into the darkness immediately. The supervisor walked over to the closed iron door and stood still right in front of it.

  It appeared that sealing off the tunnel had been effective, and that the fire inside had almost died out now, as the glow from the iron door had almost gone. But if they were suddenly to open the door now, there was no doubt that the new supply of oxygen would give new life to the dying fire. The supervisor clicked his tongue and turned to the foreman.

  ‘Call engineer Kikuchi from the Tachiyama Mine and get him here. And come to my office as well, once you’re done with your rounds.’

  The Tachiyama Mine was a sister mine of the same company, located on the other side of the mountain, at the centre of Murou Cape. The mines each had their own engineers, but engineer Kikuchi, who had been at the Tachiyama Mine for a few days now, was basically a chief-level engineer who worked on both mines. The foreman jumped on a passing coal trolley and disappeared into the darkness.

  With the people gone, silence reclaimed its place. From beyond the darkness further down the level main tunnel, the supervisor thought he could hear the laughing of Minekichi’s mother. From between the screeching of coal trolleys, he could also hear some clamour. The sub-foreman of the left-wing side passage had arrived with a straw mat and, following the orders of the supervisor, he placed it over the body of the engineer and left again. The workman stood in front of the cut-off ventilation pipe and began the task left by the murdered engineer. But he suddenly turned to the supervisor.

  ‘Supervisor. It appears there’s some dangerous smoke build-up here.’

  ‘You know what you’re talking about?’ the supervisor smiled at the workman.

  ‘I don’t know about any difficult stuff, but you can tell from the smell. It seems like most of the fire is out now, but the smouldering has resulted in some bad smoke.’

  The supervisor walked over to the iron pipe and immediately grimaced.

  ‘Ugh, we’d better connect this pipe back to the main pipe of the side street and get all that smoke out of there. You’re right, the smell tells us enough. Okay, you come here from time to time to check up on the smoke. I’ll have to go question the miners now, but engineer Kikuchi should be here soon.’

  The workman started connecting the pipes again. The supervisor left the workman to his work.

  The four suspects were sitting inside the office in the main hall, watched by the constable and three sub-foremen.

  O-Shina had changed into her night dress and her hair was dishevelled. She was hiding her face against the wainscoting, her shoulders heaving up and down. Her brother Iwatarō, his face and chest still muddy, was breathing heavily like a pair of bellows. He glanced at the supervisor when the latter entered the office.

  Minekichi’s father did not move his eyes, but stared blankly in front of him like a dead fish. The mother was held by a sub-foreman, as she could not remain still and would at times laugh out in a terrifying manner.

  The supervisor stood in front of the four and silently took a look at all of the suspects in turn.

  ‘So these are all of the people close to Minekichi.’

  ‘Yes, the others have nothing to do with him,’ answered one of the foremen.

  The office held several rooms. The supervisor told the four foremen to bring the suspects one by one. The supervisor and the constable went in another room, and took their places in the chairs there.

  Iwatarō was the first to be called.

  The supervisor shot a glance at the constable, and leant towards Iwatarō. At first it appeared he would yell at him, but he bit his tongue and changed his approach, starting with a relatively friendly tone.

  ‘Where did you take your sister just
now?’

  Silence.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  On the other side of the table, Iwatarō’s lips remained sealed.

  ‘Why ask him? This man and the woman were brought here from the shed….’

  The constable was talking about the shed in the miner’s village outside the mine. The supervisor did not react to the constable and said to Iwatarō:

  ‘What I’m asking is whether you went straight to the shed.’

  Iwatarō finally raised his head.

  ‘Went straight to the shed,’ he answered bluntly.

  ‘You’re sure?’ There was tension in the supervisor’s voice. Iwatarō nodded gently without saying anything else.

  ‘All right.’ The supervisor turned to the sub-foreman next to him. ‘Take this man back to the other room. Then ask the guards precisely when this man left the mine with his sister.’

  The sub-foreman quickly directed Iwatarō out.

  O-Shina was next to be called. When she was seated, the constable said to the supervisor: ‘We need to ask this woman about how the fire started.’

  The supervisor nodded in silence and turned to the woman.

  ‘Was it a safety lamp that caused the fire?’

  Silence.

  ‘The cause of the fire was a lamp, was it not?’

  O-Shina nodded lifelessly.

  ‘Which was it? Your safety lamp, or your husband’s?’

  ‘It was mine.’

  ‘How did it cause the fire? Tell us exactly what happened.’

  O-Shina hesitated about answering the question. But after a while, tears started to fall, and with her eyes cast down, she started to talk in a subdued voice. Her testimony was exactly the same as was recorded at the beginning of this tale.

  When the woman had finished her confession, the supervisor repositioned himself on his seat and said:

  ‘We will have to investigate to see if what you said about the fire in that tunnel is true. But I have another question. It appears you were taken by your brother to the shed, but is that true?’

  The question, however, was quite futile. Pure despair had put O-Shina out of her mind at the time, and while she knew she had been carried out by Iwatarō, she herself could not remember whether they had gone straight to the shed or not. But in the eyes of the supervisor, both O-Shina and Iwatarō remained viable suspects, so he tried pressing the matter.

  But at that moment the door of the office opened and the sub-foreman brought a guard into the office.

  The guard studied both Iwatarō and O-Shina and turned to the supervisor.

  ‘These two people? Yes, I am sure. They took the cage lift and left the mine between twenty-five and half past ten.’

  ‘What! They were outside before half past ten?’

  ‘Yes, I am sure of it. They were the only two miners to leave at that time, so I remember them well.’

  ‘I see. And until they were brought here just now, they had not once returned to the mine?’

  ‘No, they did not come back. The other guard will also confirm that.’

  ‘Okay. That’s enough.’

  After the guard had left, the supervisor and the constable looked at each other.

  The tunnel that was on fire had been sealed off at exactly half past ten. At that time, engineer Maruyama was still alive and well, so how could Iwatarō and O-Shina, who had left the mine before half past ten, have killed the engineer? With this, two of the four suspects were eliminated. Only two remained.

  The supervisor had Iwatarō and O-Shina moved to the waiting room, and then called for Minekichi’s father.

  ‘The sub-foreman of the left-wing side passage took you away somewhere. Where did you go?’

  Every time the old miner spoke—his eyes like that of a dead fish—large folds formed on his stomach.

  ‘Please ask the sub-foreman,’ he said.

  The sub-foreman of the left-wing side passage was eating his lunch in the food hall, where he was called back per orders of the supervisor.

  ‘You led this man away from the tunnel, didn’t you? Where did you take him?’

  ‘This old man?’ The sub-foreman laughed as he answered the question. ‘He couldn’t stand on his own legs any more. So I brought him to the aid station. When I went to the aid station to pick up the straw mat we used right now, he had just started getting up again. The nurse had his hands full with the man.’

  ‘I see,’ the constable commented. ‘But you don’t know where he went after he was able to stand up again, or do you?’

  The constable then turned to the supervisor. ‘There’s something fishy about this. I found the man, together with his mad wife, wandering around near the entrance of the side passage. What could he have been doing after he left the aid station?’

  The supervisor had remained silent until then, but then said, surprisingly: ‘I think you might be under some misunderstanding. It’s true we don’t know where he went in the period after he could stand again.’

  The supervisor turned to the sub-foreman. ‘But he couldn’t even stand until you went to the aid station to get the straw mat to put over Maruyama’s body, isn’t that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The supervisor turned back to the constable. ‘Engineer Maruyama was murdered while this man was still unable to stand. He collapsed in front of the tunnel on fire, and was brought to the aid station. The engineer was killed after that, and the sub-foreman went to get a straw mat to cover the body with. It was only then that this old man managed to stand up again at the aid station. So at the time engineer Maruyama was killed, this man was still under the care of the nurse. If he couldn’t stand up, he most certainly couldn’t have gone out to the side passage and killed someone. Do you see? But now we know who the murderer is. Tie that crazy old woman up.’

  The hired police constable jumped up and went to the room next door. Under the eyes of Iwatarō and O-Shina, he started tying up Minekichi’s mother.

  Then an unexpected interruption occurred which completely invalidated the supervisor’s assumption.

  But first it must be mentioned that the murdered engineer Maruyama had always been a very disciplined worker. Because of that, the miners feared him, and the managers respected him but tried to keep him at a distance. But he was not normally the kind of person who would become the target of such bitterness that somebody would want to kill him. The incident where he sealed up the miner Minekichi was the first time he had done anything to incite such feelings. After questioning all the people who would have a reason to hate Maruyama for sealing in Minekichi, the supervisor believed he had identified the culprit and so finally achieved his goal. But, from the time the questioning had begun until the moment the interruption occurred, not one of the suspects had been allowed to leave, whether they had been cleared of suspicion or not. Thus they were all still in the office when it happened.

  The hired police constable was about to restrain the mother of Minekichi. Suddenly the sound of an agitated person could be heard approaching the office. The glass door burst open and foreman Asakawa rushed in. He took no notice of the happenings inside the room, but turned breathlessly to the supervisor.

  ‘Workman Furui has been murdered.’

  3

  Even men who do rough and tough work, like sailors and miners, have a frightened and overly worried side deep within them, unimaginable to the average person. Just as sailors have all kinds of strange beliefs about the sea, and it’s almost hilarious to see how they consider the sea a mystic place, miners too have their own curious stories to tell, such as how, if you whistle in a mine, the mountain gods will get angry and cause a cave-in. Or how the spirits of people who died inside a mine will linger at the spot and cause more calamities. Frequently, places inside a mine which had been tainted by blood would be sealed off by a shimenawa rope to purify the place[xxiii]. Even though there was no evidence as to whether such bizarre actions were effective or not, they had become widespread customs to calm the miners’ lingering
fears.

  A shimenawa rope had been stretched across the side passage of the Takiguchi Mine. But even though it was supposed to purify the area in front of the iron door, fresh blood had been spilled there not once, but twice. Illuminated by the dim electric lights, the miners who worked on this side of the mine gave the fire door of the sealed-off tunnel, where two bodies were lying, a wide berth. Unlike earlier, an eerie silence now reigned there.

  Next to engineer Maruyama’s body, which was covered by a straw mat, lay the workman’s body, bent double. It appeared he had been pushed to the ground while he was standing on tiptoe to check up on the smoke. The stand had been thrown over and next to it lay a bloody clump of coal, larger than the one used on the engineer. The clump had probably been thrown with a lot of force as the workman lay down with his face to the floor. A large wound had cracked the back of his head down to the neck, and there was almost nothing left of his left ear. The murder had happened between the time that the supervisor had left the workman alone in front of the tunnel to return to his office, and the time the foreman, after making a phone call to engineer Kikuchi at the Tachiyama Mine and had his lunch, had gone on his rounds. Just as in the attack on engineer Maruyama, the murderer had waited until no coal trolleys were passing and had approached the victim in the dark.

  The supervisor, as pale as a sheet, looked around and chased the miners away in an irritated manner.

  The workman had been killed with a weapon similar to the one used on the engineer. But the similarities didn’t stop there. Both the workman and the engineer had something in common which might have been the reason for their murder. While it had been on the orders of engineer Maruyama and the foreman, the one who actually sealed up Minekichi behind the iron door by smearing clay on it, had been none other than workman Furui. The murderer of both men was obviously the same person, motivated by hatred for the death of Minekichi.