Author's note:

Author's note: Some people complained that there wasn't much action in the last two or three chapters (and Shinichi and Ran's relationship, what do you make of that?) You want action? I'll give you action. And probably enough clues to make a nice little theory of your own.

Chappie dedicated to Rani-chan, who pisses me the hell off with guessing everything.

Warning: I am not Japanese, much less a mangaka. Consequence? I don't own anything at all except a pretty good cookie recipe.

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Chapter 9 – In The Nighttime

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The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two…

Patricia E. Presutti

In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o' clock in the morning, day after day.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

-

The shrilling scream snapped Ran awake, and for half a second she lay senseless in her bed, blood beating hard and strong against her eardrums.

The sound, still echoing through the passages, was terrifyingly familiar – it was ten years old and the scream of someone being murdered. She flung her covers off in haste, not bothering about turning the lights on, not bothering about her slippers – in her run for the door, her senses instinctively taking in that it was still raining, her body tense like a stretched piece of string – she wrenched it open, dashed out into the corridor, tore down the corner and collided full force with someone.

She toppled over backwards, her momentum abruptly broken, and tried to cushion her fall best as she could. In the surrounding darkness, a masculine voice swore loudly and creatively; and her mind was still misty and confused from interrupted sleep because it groped in the dark for a few more seconds before it realized whose voice that was.

"Shinichi," she rasped, breathlessly.

"Ran?" he gasped, and a hand found her arm, slid down to her wrist, helped her stand up. "You okay?"

"I guess—" a second scream broke her off, clearer and louder and more terrifyingly real than the first, and they both started and broke in a run in the direction it came from. Lights were turned on in rooms as they passed, and voices and running noises echoed theirs in parallel passages, until they finally arrived to a closed door in front of which stood Asama-san and Ebihara-san.

"Does it come from in here?" Shinichi said, grasping for air. Ran grabbed his arm and clutched her heart, breathing heavily; she saw Asama-san and Ebihara-san brace themselves against whatever was going to come. Araide's and Sakagushi-san's voices shouted behind them – oh god, this had such an accent of déjà-vu… it was Ikenami-san's bedroom door.

It was also locked. They heard noises coming from the inside as Shinichi and Akira-san joined forces to break it down – things crashing and clattering as if there was a struggle, and the door finally wrenched open with a heavy crackle. Inside was Ikenami-san kneeling, who slowly crumpled down like a stone to the floor and lay motionless.

Shinichi ran in, Ran hot on his heels. The practitioner was white as marble, still as a statue.

Shinichi crouched by her side, scooped her up, checked her pulse – uncertain of what to do, Ran stopped cold, hearing behind her, by the door where were assembled the frightened guests, shouts of, "Call an ambulance – quick!" "And the police!" "No – not the police!" "This is murder!"

"She's breathing," Shinichi put in, as if on cue. "Faintly. She's drunk something."

Ran picked up a broken glass lying by the bedside table, its edges sharp and pointed. It was empty but for one or two drops of what very much looked like water. Obviously she'd drunk the whole glass just before collapsing and dropping it. Poison, then? There was a small bottle of white pills, still open, standing on the bedside table.

"She's been poisoned," shouted Shinichi from behind her, in an urgent, though steady voice. This was nothing new to him; he'd witnessed hundreds of scenes such as this one. His objective for now was to keep her alive. "We need to rinse her throat. Something with proteins."

Ran noticed a jug of milk on the bedside table and hastily brought it over to him; he snapped it from her hands and turned back to Ikenami-san's inert body. She rounded on the gathered guests, who were still fidgeting on the threshold, not daring coming in. "Has anyone called the police?"

"Ken-kun ran down to phone the nearest clinic," Akira-san prompted. He was white as a sheet, and did not seem able to move his eyes from the body. The others seemed to be in the same state, bar Sakagushi-san, who looked strangely calm and composed.

Ran nodded slowly, told them not to come in on any account, and went back to investigate. She glanced at Shinichi while passing by towards the window; his face was serious and frowning, concentrating on his task. The milk made a soft sound of dripping onto the floor.

The windowpane was closed from the inside, and so had been the door. Nobody could have gone out, unless there was some secret passageway between the rooms – knowing Sonoko, that wouldn't have surprised her.

But the thought of a murderer forcing poison down a practitioner's mouth and then escaping through a secret passageway he should not even have known about was ridiculous; besides, the shattered items whose breaking they had heard from outside were – had been china or glass vases on the chimneypiece. Ikenami-san had probably grasped at it for support, and they had fallen off.

Kenjin-san ran back up to them then, breathless. "I called an ambulance," he panted. "B-but the… the storm will probably retard them. They're on their way…"

"If I can do anything, miss," put in Briggs, who'd arrived in the meantime, dressed in a green-and-red dressing gown.

"You can," said Ran, and then thought about it. "Gather them all in the drawing room downstairs, and keep them there. We don't want them to run everywhere while we can still find clues. Pour out coffee, put them to sleep, whichever – keep them occupied and under supervision. Oh, and send Emily up here, too." She looked back at Shinichi, in case he wanted anything, but he didn't seem even to have heard. He was doing mouth to mouth now.

Emily, once arrived on location, turned out to be extremely nervous and constantly peering into the bedroom. "Oh, miss, is the lady dead, miss ?"

"No," Ran said. She closed the door. "She's not going to die. We'll save her – there's an ambulance on its way. I want to know, Emily…" she held up the bottle of medicate she'd found on Ikenami-san's beside table, "you're taking care of the bedrooms on this floor, so you're in charge of Ikenami-san's. Do you happen to recognize this?"

Emily's face went very pale, and she began to talk very quickly. "Oh, yes, miss – that's Ikenami-san's medicine. She said she had to take two of these little pills every evening because she had cardiac troubles—"

Cardiac troubles.

"And she asked me to remind her every evening to take them, miss, when I come to make the fire, because she is – was – a very forgetful person, and she had forgotten to order a new bottle of them since the former was almost finished so I had to run to the village one morning and order it for her but they didn't have it right away so we had to wait until three days ago and thankfully there was pills left in the first bottle, but I had to go and fetch the second—"

Out of this mess only one thing was clear: the second bottle of medicine had been brought in three days before, and she hadn't found any plastic opening clip on the beside table, nor in the dustbin, nor under the bed, where she had been looking for clues – which meant the bottle had been open upon arrival, or every evening since, but not tonight. And in the meantime, someone had borrowed it and put poison inside. Unless—

"Emily," she cut in the diatribe, "did Ikenami-san usually lock her door?"

"Well, no, miss – only in the nighttime. She didn't own any jewellery, she used to tell me – and her precious papers and researches she put them in the safe downstairs. Only she didn't like to be disturbed when she slept. Once I came up late for my service and I find the door locked, and when I knock—"

So virtually anyone could have gone in and done whatever they wanted with the medicine. Granted that they knew about the bottle, what it contained, and where it was kept. But whoever it was could easily have extracted this from Emily, like she was doing right now, or from Ikenami-san herself…

The ambulance arrived twenty minutes afterwards, under a pouring rain. It came from a private clinic, so there wouldn't be any publicity unless the police was called for – a scheme which, Ran found when she went to check on the guests, they were all resolutely opposed to.

As she walked back up to the second floor she met Shinichi in mid-staircase, watching as two medics in white transported Ikenami-san downstairs on a stretcher.

"I'd probably best go to the clinic with them," he told her. "That way, if – anything happens, I'll be able to call you up and tell you before I come back. Unless you'd rather go," he added uncertainly, "and I stay to survey the guests."

"No – go," Ran said. "It's okay here, I won't be alone. We won't leave this drawing-room. Briggs and Dr Araide can see to that with me. Go by all means. And don't forget to call."

They started down the stairs behind the medics. "I'll probably be a few hours," Shinichi said wearily. "What did Emily say?"

So he had been listening after all. "That Ikenami-san had cardiac troubles, and she had to take pills every evening to keep it going." She held up the bottle of medicine and he took it and studied it carefully. "I see," he said. "There's strychnine in this."

"Strychnine?" Ran looked at it. "You don't think—"

"I don't know," Shinichi said thoughtfully. "She may have taken too important a dose, of course – voluntarily or not." He pocketed the bottle. "I'll take it with me and have it analysed at the clinic, so we'll know exactly what's in it, and what dose Ikenami-san ingested." They reached the foot of the stairs and the brilliantly lit hall, into which the front door, its two panes wide open, cut a tall rectangle of dark-blue night.

"I'd best go quickly," Shinichi said. "I'll lose myself in the storm if I can't direct myself after their taillights. I'll be back as soon as I can." He went outside, Ran following suit, regardless of the buckets of water that dropped on her shoulders. "I'll call you up once I get there, and then again when I know the results of the operation."

The ambulance's doors clacked shut. Shinichi started down towards the parked cars, then turned back to Ran. Standing on top of the steps with her long drenched dark-green nightgown sticking to her limbs and her wet black entangling around her arms, she looked like a water nymph. Her dark eyes fixed on his seriously.

"Ran, I—"

The ambulance's engine started up in a roar, and he jumped and ran to his car. Ran saw him climb in hastily and slam the door; the vehicle pulled out of its park place, circled in a long gravelled slide, and started after the ambulance. She watched it till the taillights had disappeared past an abrupt turn of the road, and beyond it there was only rain.

-

It was a long, dreary night. In the drawing-room where the guests were assembled, there was no sound to be heard but the slow breathing of each, and the ticking by of seconds on the wall-clock. Five to one. Fifteen past one. Half-past one. From time to time Briggs would tour the room with a fresh pot of coffee. Asama-san suggested they should be supplied with pillows and blankets and rest, but there were only a few vague nods: nobody seemed very inclined to sleep.

The rain was beating violently against the windowpane. Ran had seated herself there when she had come back down after changing clothes, and was curled up with her arms around her knees, looking outside into the night. She was waiting for car lights to appear there, though she knew they would not blink through the darkness until many hours.

Shinichi had called, as promised, upon arriving at the clinic, but he'd had time only for a few words and the transmission had been badly damaged by the storm raging. Shinichi's voice had gone havoc in the middle of a sentence ("Take care not to—") and when she'd tried to call him back the line was occupied. She nonetheless sent Briggs to try again at regular intervals.

Twenty before two. Five to two. Five past two. This time seemed by more and more slowly. Ran's gaze wandered.

Asama-san, sitting closest to her in an armchair, eyes partly closed as though he was half-sleeping. Akira-san and Kenjin-san, seated side by side and looking tiredly uncertain. Sakagushi-san, opposite her, petting the cat with cool composure. Ebihara-san, in his hands a book whose pages he wasn't turning. Dr Araide and Hikaru-san, huddled together on a couch with his arms around her shoulders. Briggs, standing stiffly by the coffee table, one hand on a chair's back to support himself. The world was thundering to an end outside, and they were all sitting there, waiting for it.

And again, tonight more strongly and strikingly than all the times before, she couldn't help but wonder, Which? Which of them hid behind the apparent attitude the deranged mind that wrote the letters, had shot Sakagushi-san, tried to strangle Hikaru-san, tried to poison Ikenami-san? The anonymous-letters case of the beginning had expanded to a degree way too dangerous and alarming to be dealt all alone – if their culprit was ready to come to murder extremities to reach whatever his aim was…

If it was murder. If it wasn't simply a mistake in dosing, or even suicide. There was no way to know – at least until Shinichi came back. If Ikenami-san was saved, she'd be able to speak, and, failing that, the mere analysis of the medicine bottle would at least give them some information—

But Ikenami-san was a practitioner – a forensic expert, no less, and she would never have made a mistake in taking her pills, especially if she had been used to taking them for years. And there were simpler means to commit suicide; only an empty syringe would be an easy, much less painful way to kill oneself. Or sleeping pills. So it had to be murder.

Did it? Didn't she have a tendency to see murder everywhere, after so many cases she had witnessed and helped to solve? Both Shinichi and her father were corpse-magnets…

It's the atmosphere, she thought, sending Briggs to call the hospital once more. It's drawing on my nerves. It's trying to make me fall down. All of this is sordid. Ikenami-san poisoned… Shinichi gone off in the storm… as if to confirm her thoughts, the rain rattled more strongly than ever on the windowpane, and a bolt of lightening flashed in the darkness like a dragon of fire. The skies shook. Shinichi…

Briggs came back in. "The lines are cut, miss," he said, and walked back to the coffee table, his face similar to that of a poker player's.

Half-past two. Fifteen minutes to three. Five to three. She was glancing at the clock more and more frequently, and yet every eternity in between seemed to stretch its length to longer than the former. Her mind lost itself in calculations. It had been two hours. They had a twenty minutes drive over to the hospital – half an hour, allowing for the rain. The operation wouldn't have taken more than an hour. Then the drive back… Shinichi should have been back already.

A quarter past three.

Akira-san had nodded off. Kenjin-san had wrapped him up in a blanket. Sakagushi-san had stopped petting the cat, but it didn't complain; it was sound asleep. The book had fallen from Ebihara-san's hands, though his eyes were still wide open… once or twice she felt herself falling backwards, but each time she caught herself up with a jerk.

"Coffee?" Briggs said, arriving with a steaming mug.

"Thank you."

The hot drink revived her a little and she kept it warm between her palms, curled up on the windowseat with her knees drawn to her chest and her nightgown-covered feet on the velvet cushion. She went on looking out into the night, waiting for lights that still wouldn't appear. What was he doing…

Half past three, and Shinichi still wasn't back.

Shinichi… "What you really mean is, you don't want me at all, not even to solve this case. I'm only bringing back ugly memories – a nuisance, in your perfectly thought-out life. My simple presence here revolts you. … It's past. Can't you leave it all there?"

"When we are done and over with this case, I'll take you out to coffee and… back away from your life. For good."

"I'm tired." And so am I. So am I.

-

The storm didn't calm down even a little until four in the morning, and only then did Shinichi come back. He opened the drawing-room door, startling every one, and Ran chocked a yawn to come forward – then stopped. Shinichi kept silent for a second. His hair and jacket were still damp from running under the rain, and he looked exhausted. His features were drawn-out, his rare gestures slow and weary.

The room held its breath.

He accepted coffee from Briggs, smiled a tired smile and said, "She's okay. She's been saved. She'll live."

The sigh of relief was common and immense. Smiles broke onto the faces, tongues started up again, yawns were made more daring and affirmed. Ran wished she could go and speak to Shinichi, but he was monopolized by three of the guests, and when one left another took their place. Fatigue swooped down on her shoulder with a heavy weight, and it was only with a vague smile and a tired mind that she answered to Akira-san's gleeful conversation.

At length Shinichi relieved her by calling out, "Look, it's a quarter past four, and you must all be exhausted. You'd better all go to bed; things will get clearer in the morning. Ran, I'd like to speak to you."

He walked her back to her room. In the long corridors, the sound of their footsteps echoed gloomily. "The operation took more than an hour, and then I had to wait for the results of the analysis. It took some time, but I thought I might as well wait up for it. Besides, the storm was raging so hard I wouldn't even have been able to leave the village—"

Ran had to clutch at the staircase's railing not to fall over with fatigue. "What did the analyst say?" she asked wearily.

"The medicate itself does contain strychnine," Shinichi said. "Only she absorbed far too important a dose of it – about half a grain. The thing is, what little poison was put inside the bottle would not have been lethal, if the medicine's strychnine itself hadn't added up to it, thus threatening her life."

"What?" They reached the second floor and walked for a few minutes in silence. "What do you mean – that the drug was added to the pills in full knowledge that even a non-lethal dose would eventually be fatal, what with the strychnine in the medicine adding up and – in that case the culprit must have some medical knowledge," Ran added thoughtfully.

"Well, yes – that's a possibility. But I tend to think something else." They stopped in front of her door and she turned to face him. "Ran, I've noticed something – there've been three murder attempts until now and all three failed. At first I thought it was just random attempts, meant to frighten us off – but after tonight… I can't help thinking our man did not know about the presence of strychnine in the medicate and he did not mean to kill. He hadn't predicted those consequences – Ikenami-san wasn't meant to die, and she nearly did. And that follows in the continuation of those crimes which all backfired, one after the other – I should think he's trying to confuse us."

"The ABC murders," Ran murmured. "Hiding the real crime in a succession of them."

"Possibly," Shinichi said abstractedly. "Probably, in fact. Our man has read Agatha Christie." He smiled wryly down at her, and then appeared to notice the state of utmost fatigue she was in. Her hand gripped the doorknob so hard its knuckles had gone white. "God, you're exhausted – and I'm keeping you up with my babbling. I'm so sorry. Go to bed. You need sleep."

"Yeah," Ran said tiredly. "Things will get clearer in the morning, um?"

"Technically, it is morning," Shinichi said, with a faint grin. "Good-night, then – what's left of it."

"Good-night."

She closed the door behind her, turned off all the lights – the bedroom fell in blues and blacks and greys. She climbed blindly into bed, immediately sank sound asleep, and was not disturbed by a single dream thorough the rest of the night.

-

Now go on and think. Anyone's got ideas as to who's the criminal? (gosh, I enjoy myself here. A HUGE deal. –niark­–) If anybody guesses right they get a special cookie celebration! –grins and holds out plate for readers­–

Liked it? Hated it? Want cookies? Lemme know. x3