The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino [105]
“You remember me?” Yukawa was the first to speak.
Involuntarily, Yasuko felt her gaze darting back and forth between the two men’s faces. After a moment she nodded.
“I’m sorry, were you on your way somewhere?”
“Well, actually…” She looked down at her watch, though she was too nervous to actually read the time. “I was supposed to meet someone.”
“I see. I was hoping that we could talk. Just for a half hour or so. It’s very important.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have that much time—” She shook her head.
“Then how about fifteen minutes? That’s all we need. Right here, on that bench.” Yukawa pointed toward a nearby strip of green, a tiny public park that had been built beneath the expressway.
Though his tone was gentle, something in his attitude conveyed how serious he was. Yasuko understood immediately that whatever he had to say was extremely important. This university man had talked to her like that before. His tone and words were light, but the weight behind them was almost suffocating.
She felt a powerful urge to run, to flee as fast as her legs would take her. But a strange fascination held her. She was curious to hear what he had to say. Whatever it was, she knew it was about Ishigami.
“Okay, ten minutes.”
“Thank you,” Yukawa said with a smile, leading the way toward the park.
Yasuko hesitated before following, but Kusanagi waved her on. “Go ahead,” he murmured. She nodded and followed after Yukawa. The detective’s dour presence was giving her the creeps.
Yukawa sat down on the bench. It was wide enough for two, and he left space for Yasuko.
“Stand over there, if you would,” the physicist directed Kusanagi with a wave of his hand. “I think we should talk by ourselves.”
Kusanagi looked less than pleased by this, but he stuck out his chin and strolled back to the entrance of the park, where he took out a cigarette and began to smoke.
Yasuko sat next Yukawa, glancing in Kusanagi’s direction. “Isn’t he a detective? Are you sure this is all right?”
“Don’t worry about him. I was originally going to come here by myself. And besides, he’s here more as a friend of mine than as a detective anyway.”
“A friend?”
“Since our college days, yes.” Yukawa smiled again, showing white teeth. “Which makes him a classmate of Ishigami, also. Though the two never met until all this happened.”
Finally Yasuko understood why Professor Yukawa had come to visit Ishigami only after the murder. Though Ishigami hadn’t said anything about it, she suspected that his whole plan had fallen apart because of Yukawa’s involvement. When the math teacher was calculating how to cover up her ex-husband’s murder, he certainly couldn’t have counted on the detective’s being an alumnus of his university or on the two of them even having a mutual friend.
But all that was done now. So what could Yukawa want to talk to her about?
“It’s extremely regrettable that Ishigami decided to turn himself in,” Yukawa said, abruptly getting to the point. “To think of a man with his talent wasting away inside a jail cell makes me, as a scientist, very sad indeed.”
Yasuko wasn’t sure how to respond. She clenched her fingers into fists on her knees.
“To be honest, I’m having trouble believing it. I just can’t believe he would do such a thing. To you. Spying like he says he did.”
Yukawa sensed that Yasuko was watching him out of the corners of her eyes; her body was visibly tensed.
“No, maybe believe isn’t the right word. I’m absolutely certain he wouldn’t. He … when he told us that story … Ishigami’s lying. Which raises the question: why would he lie? What’s the point of lying now that he’s soon to be a convicted murderer? And yet he is lying. I can think of only one reason for it. He’s not lying for himself. He’s lying for someone else, to hide the truth.”
Yasuko swallowed. It was taking all of her effort just to breathe at a steady rhythm. She didn’t know how, but this man had figured out the truth, even if he didn’t know the exact details. Ishigami