Nine o'clock on a cold, rainy Saturday morning and everything changes. Breathing deeply in an attempt to calm himself, Koji washed his hands in the kitchen sink and watched the water turn a light pink, as he had done the day he tried to clean Katsumi's blood out of the living-room carpet. Blood. Out, damn spot. He'd catch himself compulsively washing his hands and sleepwalking if he wasn't careful. But for now… he had to wash them. The soap was covered in a thin webbing of bloody bubbles; the taps were smeared with it. Not my blood, Koji thought. Never my blood. Funny how they never fight back, not really. They let it happen. Like the minute they walk through the door of the flat it just becomes inevitable and they know it and never try to struggle. Katsumi had been caught off-guard, Kimie drunk, Hisaya and Eri totally oblivious, but they'd all seemed almost to welcome it, somehow. Koji would have raged against it. Why just let it happen?
Okay, so Katsumi and Kimie had been naïve, but they were hardly self-destructive. They simply hadn't spotted any malice in Koji because they wouldn't have seen it in anyone. Izumi had said that Kimie would probably have gone home with Jack the Ripper if he'd had a nice smile. Call it sweet if you like but it had still been dangerous - if nothing else, those boys had learnt caution. Eri had seen the danger and liked it, flirted with it. Hisaya definitely had but refused to acknowledge it. It didn't make any sense: why just submit to it?
Drying his hands on a towel, he walked back into the bathroom where Izumi was waiting for him, standing quiet and mildly shocked.
The smell of blood was almost unbearable and it made him want to gag. I did that. We did that. Izumi held the knife now, gripping it tightly. Now what do we do?
They'd killed Eri first; or rather Eri had died first. Like Kimie she'd been too drunk to put up much of a fight. Or maybe she just hadn't wanted to. They didn't know. Izumi had done it, wielding the knife like a scientist, treating her like an object lesson in the way it should be done. See, Koji? He'd remained coldly clinical, even when his hands and shirt were stained with blood.
Hisaya had struggled, angry with him, yelling his girlfriend's name. He'd tried to hit Izumi and Koji had reacted, lashing out blindly and breaking Hisaya's nose. Effective even in the midst of total rage and Izumi had smiled at him and told him he still had it even if he was totally hopeless a lot of the time and Koji had smiled back and kissed him whilst Hisaya lay on the floor a few feet away, bloodstained hands over his smashed face.
"Love hurts," Izumi had said prosaically, and twisted the knife. Koji regarded him with the air of a connoisseur, which in this respect he could well have been. Curious to see how Izumi went about it, what the differences were, and there were differences. Izumi was slower, deliberate, calculating. Didn't appear to suffer from the same rages Koji felt, or just kept them under control better.
But going by his shock, maybe he'd just remained totally detached and was having just as hard a time as Koji was in coming to terms with it. He'd felt guilt over his part in Shibuya's… well, what did you call it? Not death; assault was far too mild a term for what had happened to him. Attempted murder? Was that what you called it? And even that didn't cover it all. Izumi sometimes forgot that Koji had raped Shibuya as well as trying to kill him. Shibuya, who - for all that he hadn't really done anything to Izumi - had fallen in love with Koji, who Izumi had at least possessed some reason for feeling resentful towards.
Izumi looked around the bathroom again. He hadn't had any reason to do anything to this couple, though they had angered him for some reason. Why was it that even now he felt more upset over Shibuya and the Mori boy, who were both still alive after all? Why feel that this couple had somehow deserved this when neither had done anything more than be themselves in his presence?
Koji had killed Hisaya. Compared to her boyfriend, Eri's death had been easy, almost peaceful. Koji was, after all, a far more emotional creature than Izumi. Felt everything so much more strongly. When Koji was angry you knew it.
They were both quite dead, no denying that.
"What do we do now?" Izumi asked. He sounded frightened and if Izumi sounded frightened it had to be bad.
***
Elsewhere, life went on as normal.
In his own apartment a few miles away, Keisuke held the telephone to his shoulder and looked awkward. He really didn't like telephones. He didn't like being unable to see the face of the person he was talking to. Keisuke, despite his shyness, was very good at reading peoples' body language, and didn't like having to rely on voice alone to work out the subtleties of a conversation. It seemed to him that it was too easy to hide when speaking on the phone. Keisuke often came out with things like that and usually he meant it. A visible sign of what Takafumi had once called 'quiet high weirdness'.
"Katsumi? You've got another phone call."
Katsumi dumped the textbook he had been attempting to work up some kind of an interest in on the sofa, secretly rather grateful for the interruption. He wondered if there was any way of making these stupid textbooks a little more accessible to the average high-school graduate before relieving Keisuke of the telephone.
Keisuke was privately very grateful that the call wasn't for him, though at the same time he felt bad for thinking that. He had a bad feeling about it, there'd been something… but he couldn't quite say what. Frowning slightly he made his way into the kitchen where Takafumi was being domestic, to be joined a few minutes later by a rather puzzled Katsumi.
"Who was that on the phone?" Keisuke asked curiously.
There didn't seem to be much to say to that.
"I wonder what he's doing." Takafumi said. "But knowing those two they probably got held up somewhere and we all know what that means."
"There are none so blind, but then again I suppose my mother thought all my relationships were totally innocent, so maybe it's just a mother thing." Takafumi turned back to jis book and the cupboards. "Keisuke, what's paprika and do we have any or will I need to go shopping?"
***
Izumi had been shopping, though he hadn't enjoyed it. It had been a matter of necessity. But at the same time it got him out of the charnel house of his flat, so there had been that to say for it. He'd discussed it with Koji and come to the conclusion that they didn't have what they needed for the job. They'd had no choice.
He hadn't really wanted to buy a saw but they'd been unable to think of anything else that would have done the job. The kitchen knife certainly wouldn't have (Izumi had found himself keeping it apart from all the other knives they possessed; he couldn't bear the thought of preparing food with it any more). Bathroom cleaner, bleach and a new bath mat, practically identical to the old one: those were essential. Bin bags they already had. A spade: in an attempt to look slightly more like an amateur gardener Izumi had got a trowel, one or two plants and a bag of compost as well. Koji hadn't complained: he understood the motive.
Neither was looking forward to it, but you couldn't play dangerous games without cleaning up after yourself.
What now?" Koji asked, quite willingly letting Izumi take control. Izumi, who had been stood at the window, looked over one shoulder at Koji and shook his head. "We wait" He had got over his initial panic in the face of the practicalities of the situation. They didn't have any other option, had to do something about it; they couldn't keep bodies in their flat.
It had been far from a pleasant task. Koji had been nauseous and it was hardly surprising. He didn't like it, didn't like what they'd done. He doubted he'd sleep well tonight. Izumi had hidden it a little better but Koji knew him well enough to know he'd been disturbed by it as well. They'd had difficulties with the bin bags; they hadn't been big enough. Koji hadn't been able to bring himself to touch the saw: Izumi had to do it. Afterwards they'd cleaned the bathroom, burnt the old bath mat. Koji had suggested putting it in one of the bags but Izumi had told him bluntly not to be so bloody stupid.
It had been early Sunday morning when they, heavily dressed against the cold and possible recognition, got the bags into the boot of Koji's car and they'd driven round in silence for over an hour before Izumi had finally spotted a place to bury them. Maybe not quite six feet under but for a shallow grave it had been reasonably deep. Koji had tried very hard to forget what it was he was actually burying, tried to stay objective. Izumi had resorted to his usual icy detachment.
"Do you reckon there'll be an investigation?" Koji had asked on the way back. After discarding their coats and in Koji's case his hat, they easily passed for a couple on their way home from an evening out.
Koji shrugged. "I don't know. Probably getting on with his life somewhere and good luck to him."
***
Seven days.
Sunday morning. Nine hours after Koji and Izumi returned home, Eri's mother called the police to report her daughter's disappearance. By midday Hisaya's father had done the same after first calling Katsumi for a fourth time to ask if his son had been in touch. Izumi had been quite right, the suspicion amongst both families had at first been that the couple had eloped; the police had assumed the same thing.
Monday. Eri's mother had called the police again to ask if there was any news of her daughter. She stressed that Eri 'wasn't the type' to elope: if she had she surely would have called by now just to let her family know where she was. She was a 'considerate' girl, wouldn't dream of worrying her mother like that. She was assured that every possible attempt was being made to trace her daughter.
By Tuesday afternoon Katsumi, who had never seen himself as a paranoid person, went to the police himself and told them about Hisaya's failure to turn up for the meeting they had arranged. Despite his having the best of intentions, Katsumi's ignorance of the fact that Hisaya had showed up later at the bar had the unforeseen consequence of sending the investigation - decidedly small-scale, low key - down a blind alley. Late editions of a local newspaper carried an article about the disappearances.
The following morning, with the full knowledge of the police, Mrs. Ijima made a tearful plea on the front page of the same local newspaper, asking her daughter to get in touch. Four other papers picked up the story - the gorgeous young couple laughing in the photographs released and the suddeness of their disappearance gave the story a sex angle; sex sold. Hisaya's father berated the detective in charge of the police investigation for dragging his feet. A group of builders began digging the foundations for a new block of flats on a vacant lot on the outskirts of the city; work had been delayed by a few weeks due to problems with the planning permission. Keisuke fretted, Takafumi told himself it was probably nothing to worry about. Katsumi cried himself to sleep.
A large number of Thursday's papers carried some kind of story on Hisaya and Eri's disappearance. After the lunch hour, two builders working on site made what reporters the following morning would term 'a grisly discovery'. The police were summoned and roped off the site. The builder who made the find privately voiced his belief that the corpses he discovered were that of the couple who went missing. Reporters showed up at the site; the police were asked if they had prepared some kind of statement, photographs were taken of the scene. Eri and Hisaya's families were informed. Late on Thursday evening a TV news crew did a live broadcast from the site.
Friday. Media coverage reached saturation levels; the worst-case scenario would sell a lot of papers. Though neither body had been formally identified most agreed that they had to be those of Hisaya and Eri. Koji and Izumi, who were in the habit of listening to the radio during breakfast, argued for over four hours. Both Katsumi and Takafumi stayed home from college; Katsumi was marked down as absent through sickness in a morning tutorial. Keisuke skipped a lecture in order to go home early. Relatives of Hisaya and Eri went to the mortuary in order to identify the bodies. Mrs Ijima fainted.
Early on Saturday morning the police formally released the identities of the bodies retrieved from the building site; as suspected they were those of Kunihide Hisaya and Eri Ijima. Second editions of the day's papers carried this information. A press conference was held; Mrs Ijima did not attend as she was under sedation in hospital.
Just over a week later, Katsumi was back in hospital as well.
Part 8