Disclaimer:

Let's just skip the giant disclaimer you can find in Chapter 1!


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FS

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x. ENCOUNTER in VENICE x.

(new version)

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He kills with total cruel efficiency

Leaves no traces

His evil past is still a mystery

So evasive

Behind his smiling face

There beats a heart of steel

As sharp as any blade

Don't let it touch you

("Moriarty", from Holmes Sweet Holmes, by John Debney (score) and Carol Mendelsohn (lyrics))

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The woman who…

(Saturday, November 3rd 20xx, from different points of view)

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The woman who has just opened the door for Shinichi and Commissario Carrara is instantly recognizable due to her iconic hair colour—a deep burgundy dye leaning more towards pink than red—her flawless cinnamon-coloured skin, and her perfectly round eyes. It has been years since he last saw her, but Shinichi remembers Gray like most other people who have seen her remember her: a wiry, long-legged, androgynous body and a shock of red hair that pass by in a flash, a pale blue track shirt retreating in the distance, a victorious but endearing smile...

She is Elza Gray (the misspelled Katakana transcription of the original "Elsa" has become her online handle and her nickname in athletic circles), Kaioh Michiru's old friend from Shirabaka Highschool—Gray introduces herself as she leads Shinichi and Carrara into the living room. (Meanwhile, Sergeant Alessi and Sergeant Rossi have left after unloading the painting and the two boxes containing Tenoh Haruka's belongings.) "Michiru is still in the bathroom. It will take her quite a while to dry her hair and apply all her essences, serums, and lotions," Elza Gray declares with a trace of sadistic satisfaction after catching Shinichi checking his watch. "It must be so hard to work in a profession which requires one to always wear a watch when time is so much better spent ignoring its inevitable passing."

"Who have you just quoted?" asks Shinichi. It's in her voice and her gaze, but Gray isn't aware of it.

"My coach, who abhors watches. She says they're indispensable but also distort so much. You should run as though your life depended on it—but they make you believe you only have to beat the latest record. When you're young, they remind you that you've yet to grow up—and once you're out of your teenage years, they convince you that you're getting older and slower with every passing day."

Or with every passing second—the second is the unit many groups of people are so accustomed to using that they can feel its passing even without consulting a watch—musicians and dancers are even better at this than most athletes. Shinichi used to hate the metronome's obnoxious clicking so much that his violin teacher asked him to imagine a clock instead. A second was the equivalent of sixty beats per minute, and the double pace of it was a hundred-and-twenty beats. The middle of these tempos would be ninety beats per minute. It's elementary, but it's extremely hard to keep up with since the minds loves wandering and the pulse will seldom stay even enough. But a serious musician must be able to keep this up for quite a while.

Shinichi, who was almost as bad at keeping the beat as he was at keeping the tune, was glad that he was only a hobby violinist and not a professional drummer, for instance. You know, no one can set a beat and hold it for as long as a drummer can...

Who said this? It wasn't the violin teacher… It must have been Akane-sensei, his mother's friend, who got to babysit him for a whole summer when he was barely older than a toddler and whose pitiless discipline made Shinichi realize that he very much preferred Professor Agasa's lax approach. Walking with a book on his head, learning to dance, learning table manners, listening to classical music and also singing… Hampered by his tonedeafness, Shinichi has been traumatized by Akane-sensei's daily music and dance lessons so much that he has, not even once, asked about her after that summer. He only knows that she is a gifted choreographer and aspiring director and that she has some "weird religious quirk", according to his father (whereas his mother insists that Akane-sama is a misunderstood, immensely inspiring person, who is also kind and wise).

"I've read you weren't only Miss Tenoh's greatest rival on the track but also Miss Kaioh's ex-girlfriend at Shirabaka," remarks Carrara as Elza Gray fills his glass with organic orange juice. "I didn't expect to meet you here since I thought you had lost contact to both of them long ago."

Gray laughs in genuine amusement, leaning back into the Victorian armchair to contemplate Carrara's insinuation. She looks anachronistic in Kaioh and Tenoh's lush, vast Victorian-style apartment—like a steampunk character who has ended up in an otherwise stylistically "proper" Sherlock Holmes pastiche by accident just because the writer was high.

"I've never been Haruka's 'rival'—the word 'rival' implies a fraction of a chance. She was always directly in front of me—just out of my reach... And just when I gave it my all and we were about to reach the goal, she'd speed up! She never broke out in a sweat, she was never out of breath... Sometimes I'm still dreaming of her retreating back."

"Has she been toying with you?" Shinichi asks.

"Haruka?" Gray chuckles. "Never! She didn't bother... I think she was just the type that was at their best whenever they fled or led. I'm still immensely grateful to her since I'd never have developed my potential without her perceived "harassment". When she quit, I considered quitting as well—I could only continue when I started imagining her running in front of me with the wind in her hair."

She turns to direct their attention to a small oil painting behind her, which depicts a sandy beach in front of a quaint green village. The sea is lively yet peaceful, and tiny surface waves are breaking on the shore, licking at the sun-dabbled courtyards dotted with tall trees swaying in the gentle summer wind...

"You know the nickname Haruka got after Michiru and she got together, right? They were as inseparable as the wind and the sea. Hence she was called—" Gray extends her arm in a dramatic, declamatory impulse.

"I know, I know," Carrara—as tired of hearing the old details he knows by heart like one gets tired of a longtime girlfriend one has seen too often—cuts her off. "The headlines always mention her wind nicknames. I'm more interested in how you've kept your connection to Miss Kaioh alive, being her ex-girlfriend—Miss Tenoh had the reputation of discouraging even the most harmless competition."

Gray grins; and Shinichi infers from her mischievous, victorious twinkling eyes that her past relationship with Kaioh was just a farce. She isn't in love with Kaioh, has never been. It was all just an elborate charade to conceal the truth—whatever the truth was.

"Oh, Michiru does whatever Michiru wants to," Gray claims, holding on to the lie, "and Haruka wasn't as fierce as she looked—she was a real softie when Michiru was concerned. Michiru wore the pants in their relationship—Haruka let her make all the important decisions."

"Tenoh simply did whatever she wanted to do as well," Shinichi remarks, adding that—apart from greed—jealousy and vengeance are the most common murder motives, and that, whenever a victim has been poisoned, the number-one suspect will be the romantic partner, for good reasons.

"I hope you'll have noticed by now how ridiculous your suspicions are," Gray, eager to defend her friend, rises to the bait. "I was the one who introduced them to each other back then, at Shirabaka. By then, Michiru had been watching Haruka for a whole year, sketching her whenever she was doing her rounds on the track. I found Michiru cute, of course—she was already beautiful back then—but I had always known who she was interested in. They had been inseparable ever since—I don't know of any real tiffs, none important enough for Michiru to admit to me."

She takes a moment to think in all seriousness, furrowing her brows demonstratively.

"I only know Haruka struggled with her speed. She was too fast for other people, both literally and figuratively, and it was hard for her to slow down. It was rare for her to meet people who could catch up to her and keep up with her—but Michiru could always do it. I think it was a great partnership. They had to compromise like all other couples whose personalities are too different from each other have to do, but I don't think it has ever been an issue."

Gray proceeds to talking about how well they adjusted to each other so as not to grow apart despite their differences, how Tenoh would even accompany Kaioh, a passionate swimmer, to the pool even though Tenoh disliked swimming: "Haruka—deadly afraid of water—would stretch out on a beach chair and hum some melodies she must have improvised or some obscure songs she had picked up on her drives while roaming the city on her bike. I think she was bored, but she wanted to be near Michiru so badly. It was always Michiru who needed to make space for her music whenever Haruka wasn't on the track. Michiru wasn't the jealous dramatic girlfriend she is depicted as on social media. Neither was Haruka disloyal. She often flirted, but within limits and more to tease Michiru than out of interest in the girls."

"It surprises me that Miss Tenoh didn't like swimming despite being known for excelling at any athletic discipline—at least according to the magazines," Carrara points out. "Didn't she get top grades in swimming as well?"

It was strange indeed that Tenoh feared water, according to Gray—Shinichi has learned from his father that people who are afraid of swimming to the point that they can't let themselves get wet in the sea or even in a bathtub often have severe limitations in other areas of their lives. They're scared of other "messes" to the extend that they wouldn't be able to handle children or even an intimate relationship. Tenoh, who adopted Professor Tomoe's daughter and was in a relationship for such a long time, doesn't seem to fit the description. But maybe one aspect does match: Kaioh, with her dependable, forgiving, accepting nature (if Ai's description of her character can be trusted), might seem to a person like Tenoh the ideal partner.

"Haruka did have good grades in swimming—even at Infinity where swimming was obligatory, so I've heard from Michiru," Gray admits. "But Haruka hated the water nevertheless. She could handle swimming in the pool, but she would never even dip her toe into the water whenever we were at the beach. The ocean terrified her. It's a childhood trauma, Michiru told me. But she didn't want to talk about it."

"Did she already carry books around at that time, or something else to keep herself occupied while Kaioh was swimming?" It would make sense for Tenoh to acquire this habit of bringing reading material with her to kill time in a more productive manner than humming melodies whenever Kaioh was in the pool.

"Books?" Gray bursts into laughter—the sort of throaty, hearty bellow of laughter only healthy and happy people unburdened by the past can give. "Haruka must have changed a lot! Well, maybe it's Michiru's influence, or it's the group of Juuban girls the two of them befriended later, after going to Infinity—I kept writing to Michiru, and she sometimes wrote to me although she prefers talking on the phone or in person… Haruka, as I knew her, would never read a book in public! She wasn't much of a reader—she preferred watching and listening to things. The only things she read were sheet music… She was always alert and minimalistic—she said carrying things only slowed you down. She would never carry anything which wasn't essential apart from Michiru's bag or the small gold cross she always wore around her neck. Even a watch would annoy her."

"She carried a few books in her bag to read in the intervals, and she kept Sherlock Holmes books and ballet books in her dressing room, Carrara informs Gray while Shinichi is rather interested in the gold cross Gray was talking about. Tenoh did wear a gold cross (always the same gold cross) on the photos he has seen in the magazines, and Gray confirms that it was a small cross of genuine gold on a thin, barely visible gold chain. "She still wore it when we met the last time I visited Michiru's seaside house… That was about two years ago. She wasn't religious, but the cross belonged to her late mother. It was the only thing she took with her when she left home."

Haruka wore it under her scarf or her shirts and sweatshirts even when she was on the track, Gray added. She only removed it when she was asked to do it, only in situations when there was no room for negotiation like during competitions, in which case she would give it to Michiru. It makes no sense to Shinichi why Tenoh didn't wear her necklace last night in La Fenice, in a situation in which wearing it made no difference. It wasn't uncommon for classical pianists to wear a piece of jewellery onstage. She didn't even carry her house keys—she carried books instead. She kept books and even a large oil painting in her painstakingly tidy and clean dressing room.

The Tenoh Haruka Elza Gray talked about was a minimalist who only allowed herself to wear a memento of her past, preferring to focus on her surroundings and her own body, her voice, and her music instead—while the Tenoh Haruka Shinichi has seen at La Fenice loved literature and dance and art so much that she had to surround herself with books even in her dressing room—a space she wouldn't occupy for more than a few hours a day over the course of a few weeks… But perhaps people are always like this—Shinichi thinks—a complex, ever-changing puzzle whose form can only be glimpsed from a single, flawed perspective. And Tenoh Haruka, even in death, is still more transparent and less mysterious than Miyano Shiho, whose hidden sides Shinichi will never know.

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