Reminiscence 1: December, Three Years Ago
I looked at the pile of board games and thought about which one I wanted to play with Mitsumura that day, but when she never arrived, I got tired and decided to go home. The literature club room was small, but for some reason I always felt lonely being alone there.
That day, when I got home, I saw the news about the murder on TV. A man had been killed in Tokyo, and his daughter, a second year middle school student, was being questioned about the case. That alone was enough to get people talking, but there was an additional element. The man was killed in a room in his home, the door was found locked, and the only key to the door was also found inside the room. In other words, the scene was a locked room. As far as I could remember, there had never been a locked room murder in Japan. This was the first locked room murder in Japanese history, which made me very excited. I wanted to get back to school early and talk about it with Mitsumura.
But when I went back the next day, my class was occupied by a certain rumor. They said that Mitsumura had been arrested as a suspect in the murder case that was on the news yesterday. I thought it was a bad joke. But when I visited Mitsumura's class, she was nowhere to be found.
News of Mitsumura's case was broadcast day and night. It revealed information about her that I hadn't known. For example, that her parents were divorced. That she'd been taken in by her mother. That she lived separately from her father with a different last name. And that her younger sister, who'd been taken in by her father, had fallen to her death from the second floor of their house two weeks before the murder.
The outline of the case gradually became clear.
The scene was a house in Tokyo, a Western-style house that could almost be called a mansion. This was where Mitsumura had lived with her father before the divorce. On the day of the incident, Mitsumura had been seen on the security camera at the gate, so there was no doubt that she'd been at the crime scene on the day of the incident. There was also one more piece of evidence that led to her arrest. Her father's nails were found in his own stomach. Her father had bitten his own nails and swallowed the scraps, as nervous people often did. And pieces of Mitsumura's skin and stains from her blood were found on the nails. And in fact, there were marks on the back of her hand that looked like they'd been left by being scratched with fingernails.
The police determined that the wound was caused during a struggle between Mitsumura and her father. More accurately, they determined that the wound was caused by Mitsumura's father resisting when she killed him. In response, Mitsumura admitted that she'd gotten into a scuffle with her father, but she insisted she hadn't killed him. After she'd gotten into a fight with her father and left the scene, someone else had come and killed her father. There were about five servants, butlers, and maids employed at the mansion, but by coincidence, all five of them were away at the victim's time of death. The only gate to the mansion was monitored by a surveillance camera, so the only way one of the servants or a third party could have entered and left the premises was to climb the wall around the premises. The wall was about 10 meters high, which wasn't insurmountable, but the police seemed to have ignored the possibility from the beginning. Mitsumura hadn't visited the mansion once in the two years since her parents divorced. That is to say, the day of the incident was her first visit in two years. She went for the first time in two years, got in a fight with her father, got her hand scratched, and that same day, someone else climbed a 10 meter wall and killed her father. That was a very convenient argument, and if they took claims like that at face value, most criminal cases would be impossible to solve.
Besides, her father wasn't in the habit of biting his nails. Especially not when they were bloody. There was no way he would have bitten off and swallowed his fingernails by coincidence. In order to prevent Mitsumura from destroying the evidence of her murder, he'd bitten them off and “hid” them in his stomach – that was the only explanation.
Mitsumura countered that “Maybe my father had that sort of proclivity.” In other words, he was in the habit of swallowing his daughter's blood with his fingernails. Of course, the police and prosecutors laughed at the claim, and the defense didn't cite it as an argument at the trial, either.
In the end, Mitsumura never once admitted to being the culprit. So I don't know if she really was guilty or not, and if she was, I don't know her motive. According to a report in a weekly magazine, Mitsumura's younger sister, who'd fallen to her death two weeks before the incident, hadn't died in an accident, but may have been killed by her father. Mitsumura may have killed her own father in revenge. But since the police never said anything about that, many people wrote it off as a story dreamt up by the tabloids.
At the time of the crime, Mitsumura was only 14, a minor, but the family court ruled that criminal penalty was appropriate, and she was tried as an adult in criminal court, rather than in juvenile court. The first hearing was held in the Tokyo District Court, where the prosecution and the defense argued behind closed doors.
As reported by the media, the scene was a perfect locked room. Her father's body was found in his private study, which had only a single door with no gaps. They couldn't even fit a thread through it, let alone the key. The windows were all sealed, making it impossible to break in that way. There was no master key or any spares to the study, and the only key was found inside the room – in the drawer of the office desk next to the body. Furthermore, the drawer was also locked, and the key to the desk was in the corpse's pocket.
The key had a tag with the room number on it, but the key itself was blank, so if a different key was given the tag, it could have been possible to disguise the key to another room as the key to the crime scene. However, the butler and maid who'd discovered the body confirmed that it was the real key. They used the key to see if it could lock the door. Therefore, they knew the key found in the desk drawer was indeed real, and there was no possibility that it had been replaced with a fake.
Although the prosecution considered every possibility, in the end, they were unable to break the locked room at the scene. As a result, Mitsumura was acquitted at the first trial, and the second and third trials that followed it.
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