7

Nozomu's eyelids twitched.

“...Why do you think I'm the culprit?” 

“I thought you were suspicious from the start. I guess you could call it a gyaru's intuition?” she said. I had no idea if she was being serious or not. “Didn't you notice the strange thing he said? When Keisuke testified about the weird placement of the pipes on the body, you objected, saying 'maybe it blended in with the color of her clothes'. When I heard that, I thought it was strange. Because the ropes attached to those pipes are white, but Yoshida was wearing a black sweater in the cafeteria this morning. There's no way those colors could have blended together. That just wouldn't be possible.” 

That was right, I'd completely forgotten. Just as Ohashi said, Yoshida had been dressed in black that morning.

“Wait, but when I saw her at the scene, she was wearing a pure white dress. So it was hard to see the ropes.” 

“Yeah, I thought that was probably the case when I saw your reaction. In other words, Yoshida changed clothes right after her meal. I bet the coffee I spilled got on her clothes, though none of us saw it at the time.” 

“The question, Nozomu, is how did you know Yoshida had changed into white clothes? You told us you hadn't seen her since the cafeteria this morning. I think that, because he was about to say something unfavorable to the 'Yoshida killed herself' theory, you panicked and blurted out something you shouldn't have known.”

“Oh?” Nozomu interrupted Ohashi. “Well then, how did I kill Yoshida? It was a locked room.”

I swallowed hard. Nozomu hadn't denied it or explained himself. He was reacting exactly like a culprit would have.

...But there was still the locked room. I couldn't believe in Nozomu's guilt until I found out how he created the locked room.

“Well, to be honest, I'm not super interested in locked rooms. But how about this? First, he called Yoshida into the meeting room to be alone with her.” 

“Hey, hold on a minute,” Yuto interrupted. “That's already pretty hard to believe. Calling Yoshida, I mean.” 

“That just means Nozomu and Yoshida were closer than we thought,” Ohashi asserted. “Then, he stood in front of the door to the meeting room and said something like 'Let's die together'. Then he lied and said he had poison gas and sprayed something that had a bit of a pungent smell. He's a chemist, he could figure something out. Yoshida believed him and tried to run away. I mean, obviously, right? She didn't want to die. But no one could hear her cry for help because the meeting room is so far from everything else, and there's no way a scrawny shut-in like her could overpower him.” 

Ohashi spoke as though she had seen it herself. It was an unexpected story, but we had no choice but to sit and listen to her eloquent speech, which flowed as smoothly as water from a pipe.

“Then, Yoshida remembered the duct tape kept in the storeroom. She rushed into the storeroom and completely sealed both doors with the tape. That was both to stop him from chasing her, and to stop the poison gas from getting in. She improvised and turned the storeroom into a makeshift gas-proof shelter. Meanwhile, he stood in front of the door and kept threatening her, telling her there was no point trying to escape.” 

“And so, Yoshida found a moment's safety – or so she thought. But that was the trap set by Nozomu. He'd anticipated Yoshida's reaction and lit the small grill and hid it somewhere in the storeroom ahead of time. If he put it under a chair, nobody would notice it unless they crouched down and looked. In short, Yoshida willingly sealed the room herself for her protection. So, the charcoal eventually started burning incompletely, producing carbon monoxide, which silently stole her life.” 

“However, he made one miscalculation. Maybe Yoshida got impatient when Nozomu took too long to die from the 'poison gas', so she tried escaping through the skylight. She opened the tent bag, picked up the two pipes, and leaned them against the wall. She climbed up them and unlocked the skylight from the inside... but that was her limit. Carbon monoxide is lighter than air, so it must have concentrated at the top of the room, right? She became dizzy and fell back to the carpet. The two pipes she'd been standing on fell in such a way that she landed between them. She fell into a coma, and eventually died. The scene wound up looking almost exactly as though she'd committed suicide by charcoal. Isn't that right?” 

It was like watching a great detective from a fictional story. She had brilliantly solved the mystery of the locked room and explained the strangeness of the tent bag. Come to think of it, the air freshener scent I'd noticed in the meeting room was probably to smother the lingering scent of the fake poison gas.

The plot was to manipulate Yoshida into sealing herself in the locked room until she died – within the nested structure of the rooms, the 'inside' of the conference room was still 'outside' of the storeroom. Enlisting the victim's own help to disguise the scene as a suicide... it was a diabolical scheme.

And then, in the corner of my mind, a memory stirred. Something about this reminded me of something I'd heard recently... N-No way!

“Yeah, I thought it was pretty clever,” Nozomu said, the corner of his lip twitching upwards. There was nothing left for him to do but confess. “This plan actually came to me the day I had that terrible loss in the third dan league. That game was settled when I moved to complete the Anaguma defense surrounding my king, and ended up with no escape from a checkmate. I realized the same principle could be used for a murder trick, and thought it would be a perfectly ironic end for someone who thought she could control others.” 

The king was “killed” by the knight because it had shut itself in the “locked room” of the Anaguma formation. So it was foreshadowing, after all.

But...

“Nozomu. So you really killed Yoshida...” Yuto said in a husky voice before grabbing Nozomu by the collar. “Why? Why did you kill her!?” 

That was right. I still didn't understand the motive. And when had Nozomu and Yoshida gotten so close, anyway? Nozomu didn't resist as Yuto violently shook him. His head rattled up and down, but his expression remained the same.

“Could it be...? Nozomu, did she treat you the same as Yuto's younger brother?” 

“That's not it,” Nozomu finally responded to my question. “I didn't have any special feelings or personal relationship to her. None at all. But you all have already realized, haven't you? That woman was human garbage. She thought this world was nothing but a novel where she was the main character, and other people were nothing but props to make her look better. That's why she was able to hurt someone just for the sake of her self-righteous 'observations'. She was a monster who used her talent as a shield as she brandished cruelty. I couldn't let someone like that get away. Someone had to kill her.” 

“What's with that... You know? I hated that woman so much, I wanted to beat her to a pulp. But... you had no reason to kill her, did you? Because you had nothing to do with it.” 

Yuto pushed Nozomu away, overwhelmed by the feeling of helplessness. Nozomu stumbled and slowly regained his balance, then turned his determined eyes towards me.

“No, I had no choice but to kill her. I came up with this murder trick because I lost so pathetically. And more than anything, I was able to get close enough to her because I was the perfect prey, having given up on the dream of becoming a professional shogi player I'd been chasing since I was a child. When I confessed my suffering to her, she licked her lips and pounced, as I'd expected. She asked me to tell her everything about how I felt.” 

“In short, it was because I wasn't able to make it as a professional shogi player that I was able to kill Haruka Yoshida so brilliantly. I thought it was destiny. All the suffering I'd accumulated up until now was solely for the sake of erasing that scum from the world. Yes, that's why I played shogi so desperately for the past fifteen years!” 

He's insane, I thought to myself. Was it okay for a motive like this to exist? 

I didn't know Nozomu was so worried that his hopes of becoming a professional shogi player were fading, and I don't claim to understand the pain of having to give up on a dream that he'd pursued with all his heart since childhood. But even if that was what set the stage for the murder, it was nothing more than a coincidence. It's not like he wanted to make use of that failure or anything. To insist that it was the reason he'd played from the beginning was the historical revisionism of a lunatic.

“For a reason like that – Don't you understand that you can't take back the murder you've committed?” 

“It's because I can't take it back that it's alright, isn't it?” Nozomu answered with firm confidence in his own words. “Have you ever experienced it? I've spent most of my waking hours obsessing over it like a fool, studying the details so thoroughly my head spun. I've had the tables turned on me after a single wrong move, and the frustration made my entire body burn like magma boiling inside me! But that's what it means to aim to become a professional. More than anything, I loved shogi. So I never once doubted that my efforts would bear fruit, that I would be able to become someone.”

“But then, that day, the time limit hit. That day I made that unbelievable, terrible move, I realized. I couldn't concentrate on shogi anymore, and I would never get any stronger than I was. And the moment I decided to let go of my dream of becoming a professional shogi player, which had meant everything to me, I was overcome by emptiness and despair. You understand, don't you? All the effort I'd gone to, all the time I'd spent, it was all meaningless! I couldn't just change my life. My future would be completely disconnected from all I'd done in my past, and I'd have to start anew as a completely different person. That was something I just couldn't accept. I wanted it to mean something. I wanted my life as a shogi player to make a difference in this world, even if it was only a little. And that was when the plan to kill Haruka Yoshida came to me. I'd spent fifteen years planning to erase that good-for-nothing from society. It was only by thinking that I was saved. You all could never understand how I feel!” 

I was about to spit at him “No, I wouldn't,” but my lips froze in place. In my mind's eye, the sight of the self-analysis cards I'd left on my desk appeared. I finally realized it. Perhaps what had been tormenting me wasn't anxiety about whether I could pick my own future, but fear that my life would take on a direction unrelated to my history.

If that was the case... then Nozomu and I were the same. You don't want to waste all the time you've invested, so you take up a job that lets you make use of it. You want to turn your failures to your advantage, so you kill someone. What is the difference between these two feelings? There may have been only a fine line between my suffering and his madness. The reality that everything you've worked so hard on in the past can have no effect on yourself or the world at large is horrifying. That's why people can't make the ideal choice in any given circumstance like an AI. They stick to their plan, searching for a way to make use of the effort they've already put in, and as a result...

Sometimes they make terrible moves.

So I had no choice but to swallow my reproachful words.

“...You idiot!” 

It was Ohashi who was left to cry out in dismay.

She fidgeted her fingers together, glaring sharply up at Nozomu.

“In the end, you're making the same mistake as Keisuke! Nozomu, you tried too hard to tie off all the lose ends in your life. We all have a tendency to want to use our special talents or the things we've put lots of time and effort into. But trying to force consistency into your life and getting hung up on giving meaning to the things that have happened to the point where you forget even obvious things like 'you should never kill anyone, no matter who they are' is wrong.” 

“I think the same thing, you know? If every single one of your experiences had meaning, wouldn't that be wonderful? How nice would it be if every single experience you'd acquired up until now came together, in a beautiful harmony, all in perfect proportion to shape your future self?” 

“But that's just an illusion. In real life, there's no guarantee that all the foreshadowing will be resolved. It's all too common for the things you've worked so hard on and made countless sacrifices for and poured your entire soul into to contribute nothing to the person you are now, or for the person you had a manga-like miraculous encounter with to drift apart from you without you ever coming to understand them. It's gross and painful and just awful when a big piece that was handed to you with such gravity doesn't fit into your puzzle. It makes you want to just burst into tears. But that's how it is. This isn't a mystery novel where there's a reason for every scene. So you just... have to accept that. If you try to force it, all you'll be left with is a distorted, messy picture.” 

Every word Ohashi spoke bore the weight of reality, and there was an undeniable truth to them. As I stared at her, I thought to myself that, behind the dyed hair and the heavy makeup and the unrelenting, noisy personality, she was more mature than any of us.

“So what should I have done? Even if you tell me all that, I can't take it. It still hurts so much...” 

Nozomu cried, his face twisting violently. Ohashi gave him a gentle smile.

“I'm not saying that your past is completely meaningless. It just didn't resolve in a way you can understand right now. You might realize what it means some day in the distant future. Like the testimony of Yoshida burning the papers. Even if it had no effect on solving the case, it helped us understand what sort of person she was. The solar eclipse may have been some sort of metaphor for the case that we just haven't realized yet. I don't know.” 

“Of course, it might also be that there was no meaning behind it, and it was something we'll never understand. In that case, why don't you just relax a bit and live your life, without worrying about meanings and driving yourself crazy making up ones where you couldn't find them? You're all overthinking things. You'll be happier if you live your life casually. Like me!” 

“...I could never be like you.” 

“You think so? I might have secretly been struggling a whole lot, you know? You never know how a person can change,” Ohashi said with a wave of her hand. “I'll let you in on a secret. Foreshadowing is most satisfying when it gets paid off right after you forget it was there. So, even though your life is going to be pretty tough from now on, I at least want you to go on living with joy. I want you to experience a beautiful, perfect moment when one of the many bits of foreshadowing scattered throughout your life suddenly hits you with an unexpected payoff.”

 

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