But precisely because she was that kind of tactician─it was undeniably true that she’d never pointlessly kill her comrade and decrease the number of “pawns” at her disposal. Just as a shogi player would never ignore her knights, even if they aren’t particularly useful.
In other words, “Zigzag” was the antithesis of a tactician, closer to Tamamo than Shiogi─a berserker?
What did that mean? For the locked-room question. And the dismemberment question. Judging from the wounds, the Director’s murder was not the work of “Zigzag.” The culprit was someone else. I’d suspected Shiogi─but if she hadn’t killed Tamamo, then my basis for that suspicion was pretty thin. And there was no reason to suspect Tamamo of the Director’s murder, since she’d been killed now too.
So was the culprit a member of the “faculty” after all? Speaking of which, it was seriously suspicious that none of them had poked their noses out yet. If one of them was pretending to be the Director and still manipulating Shiogi and her crew─if Shiogi the Tactician of all people was being manipulated like a marionette, her head suspended from a string…
Embroiling me, and Shiogi, and Hime-chan and Tamamo, and even Jun Aikawa…
In something as stupid as a power struggle within the school? A proxy war? Something with not even a glimmer of hope for success. Not in the culprit’s wildest dreams─and. Did she really think she was going to get away with it?
Maybe it was time─to take this puppet master down a notch.
“Are you all right? You got so quiet all of a sudden.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s a hobby of mine to get quiet all of a sudden. By the way, Shiogi, mind if we play another game? Do you read detective novels at all?”
“Why would I?” Shiogi cocked her head in confusion.
“I mean…to pass the time, or to study, or…”
“Using books to study, hah… Katai Tayama says, ‘We can derive much greater inspiration from living people than we can from books.’”
“It’s cool that you aren’t even quoting from Throw Out Your Books, but you actually read Tayama?”
“Sure. Doesn’t every high school student?”
Apparently.
“Okay then, Quiz Time. How about this scenario…”
Without letting on that it had actually happened (and of course not telling her that Hime-chan and I were involved), I told Shiogi all about the locked-room murder and the Director’s dismemberment. About the strictly controlled iron door, the corpse within, the body parts, the suspended head. Top floor, double locks on the windows. The one-way ventilation shaft.
“That one’s pretty simple,” said Shiogi. “Doesn’t make for much of a quiz.”
“Simple, eh?” Of course, I’d posed this question to Shiogi not only to get her opinion, but also to see if she had any kind of reaction to it, on the off chance that she was in fact the culprit. But as far as I could tell, she wasn’t flustered. She just wore the disappointed expression of someone who was hoping for a challenge. “Okay then, let’s hear the solution.”
“The door was never locked in the first place,” answered Shiogi, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “From what you said, they assumed that the door was locked from the start, but no one ever actually tried it out, right? They just assumed it was a locked room when in fact it wasn’t.”
Someone had said something like that earlier, hadn’t they? When you decide that it’s a locked room, there are two possibilities. Either it is a locked room, or it isn’t. Interesting─just because something appears to be a locked room doesn’t mean it necessarily is. What a hackneyed trick.
When you try to cover up a lie with another lie, the first lie is instead laid bare. In which case starting with a single massive lie obviates the need for any follow-ups─was that it? If the door was “just closed” all along and not locked, then literally anyone could have killed the Director. Which would mean we’d jumped the gun in determining that it was a locked room─
“No, that’s wrong.”
If it were just me and Hime-chan who’d discovered the body, I’d have no problem accepting Shiogi’s solution as the correct one. But there was someone else: Jun Aikawa. No way she could’ve made such an elementary mistake.
“Really? Then─yeah. That room wasn’t necessarily the scene of the crime. After dismembering the body, the culprit tossed the pieces in from the next room through some opening─through the ventilation shaft, maybe. Through it, for instance, she’d be able to tie the severed head to the lights without ever entering the room.”
“But the ventilation shaft can only be opened from inside the room.”
“Which is why it’s just a for instance. Even if it wasn’t the ventilation shaft, the culprit surely would’ve been able to find some passage, some opening that a chopped-up corpse could fit through. A garbage chute, or a drainage pipe or something.”
“I dunno…”
“Or they just had a master key.”
That, too, was a solution that didn’t require any courage, or hope, or dreams…but maybe it’s crazy to look for such things in a person’s demise.
It felt like a total dead end. I needed a helping hand. I wondered idly how Hime-chan would mangle that expression.
“Hm?” Something. Was on the tip of my brain. “Well, forget the quiz. Sorry it was so lame. But seriously, this is one weird school, huh…”
“Is it? I really like it.”
“You don’t think about what it might be like if you’d had a normal life?”
“What other life would let me put my skills as a tactician to such good use?” smiled Shiogi, undaunted. “Same as there aren’t many places where your ‘non-action’ would come in handy─which reminds me. I wanted to ask, did you go to a normal high school?”
“Nope. I didn’t even finish my compulsory education. After that…” She probably knew about ER3, but maybe it was best not to mention it. “I got my GED, and now I’m a freshman at Rokumeikan University.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I’m not lying to you. I’m just not telling you everything.”
“When you’re trying to deceive someone, doesn’t that amount to the same thing?”
This was a conversation fit for a tactician and a charlatan, regardless of time or place or circumstance. Lying, deceiving, dissembling, misrepresenting, bullshitting, falsifying, prevaricating. Dammit, it was like we weren’t even having the same conversation.