3
The next day, March 26th, the six arrived.
They didn’t suspect anything. There was no way to contact the mainland, no matter what happened on the island during the week. Even so, they showed no sign of anxiety and were all enjoying their adventure.
That night, he retreated to his room early, saying he wasn’t feeling well because of a cold. This was the reason he had not been drinking any water.
He knew that the symptoms of mild dehydration resembled that of a cold. He couldn’t have just faked an illness. He couldn’t have fooled Poe, who was studying to be a doctor. On the other hand, any suspicion about him would disappear if Poe examined him and declared him to be ill.
Leaving the cheerful chattering behind him, he changed into his wetsuit, put everything he needed in a knapsack and sneaked out of the window. He went down to the rocky area, set his boat up and went to J—Cape in the night. There he raced his motorbike back to O—City, returning to his own room around eleven.
He was exhausted of course, but the crucial part would only start now.
He made a phone call to Kawaminami. He needed him as a witness to the fact he was in O—City.
There was no reply, but if Kawaminami was going around as planned, then he was sure to call on Morisu eventually. He might have called here several times already, perhaps. If so, Kawaminami would probably ask where he had gone, but he had prepared an excuse for such an occasion. The painting.
He had prepared it to prove what he was doing on the mainland, while the six were on the island. The painting of the stone Buddhas. Or, to be precise, paintings, plural. He had made three paintings.
One was a charcoal sketch that he had only started to colour. In another, he had applied colour to the whole painting with a palette knife. And the third was a finished painting. The three paintings were all of the same scene, of course.
It was a scene he had come across last autumn, when he had been wandering around with his broken heart and happened to arrive in the mountains of the Kunisaki Peninsula.
From memory he prepared three paintings in different stages, changing the colours to early spring.
He put the painting in the first stage on the easel as he was looking at the letter he had sent to himself, waiting for Kawaminami’s call. If he didn’t manage to get in contact with Kawaminami, he would need to find a different “witness.” He tried to quell the restless anxiety lurking in his feverish mind.
Near midnight, the phone finally rang.
Kawaminami had taken the bait according to plan. He said he had gone to the home of Nakamura Kōjirō in Kannawa that day. Morisu had felt slightly uneasy about the appearance of Shimada Kiyoshi, however, the man Kawaminami had met in Kannawa.
He had thought that it would be better to have more witnesses. But he couldn’t have someone intervene too much. Having them ask Morisu to join their little detective game was just what he had hoped for.
Fortunately the attention of these two was not directed at the present, but at the past. At least, he didn’t have to worry about them following the six to the island. To leave as strong an impression of himself as possible on them, he used the phrase “armchair detective,” saying he would play that role in their group. After saying he would be going to Kunisaki the next day, he asked them to call again that night. The suggestion he made to visit Yoshikawa Masako in Ajimu was made to keep their attention away from the present activities on Tsunojima.
After the two had left, he slept for a while. Before dawn he rode his motorbike back to J—Cape again and hurried to Tsunojima in the boat he had left tied to the coast.
Returning to the Decagon House, he made sure nobody was out in the main hall and arranged the plates on the table.
What were those plates for?
Did he wish for them to reflect on what it meant to become “A Victim”? Was he bound to some sort of a weird sense of duty, thinking it was unfair if he did not announce their “punishments” in advance? Or perhaps he thought this to be an act of sharp irony aimed at them. The answer his twisted mind had come up with probably encompassed all of those.