He was sitting at the decagon table together with the remaining two, Ellery and Poe. They were nearing the last act.
The situation appeared to have turned for the worse for Poe. Ellery denied it afterwards, but at that rate, Poe might have been fingered as the murderer.
He thought his heart would stop beating when Ellery looked obviously interested at the footprints at Leroux’s murder scene. Don’t panic. It should be okay. Don’t panic, don’t panic… he kept telling himself, as he fought with the urge to throw up again. Ellery quickly turned away. Morisu sighed out of relief.
However Ellery raised the subject of the footprints again.
He thought he might have made an oversight. Perhaps a fatal oversight. He ran after Ellery to the Blue Mansion and was told to memorise the footprints as they were. It was then when he realised his mistake. He cursed at his own stupidity and thought it was all over.
As the number of victims grew, the number of suspects would narrow and he had anticipated it would become more difficult to move around. He had some things prepared in case the situation called for him to take drastic measures. In the worst case, he might need to fight with multiple persons. He always carried a small knife in the pocket of his coat just in case.
As Ellery proceeded with his examination of the footprints, he thought several times of attacking Ellery and Poe there and then with the knife. But if he acted rashly and was taken down by them, then it would all be over. At this point, it was still not sure whether he would be accused of being the murderer.
He felt the pressure as he shrank listening to Ellery’s clear voice, thinking about the best way of dealing with them.
Thankfully Ellery’s conclusion had been too simplistic and had gone off in the wrong direction. He thought the murderer was not among the three of them and that the murderer was someone else who came to the island by boat.
Ellery was thinking of Nakamura Seiji. He really believed that Seiji was still alive. Morisu had never thought that the “suggestion of Nakamura Seiji” would come around and protect him at such a crucial time.
His head cleared.
Ellery ran out of cigarettes and Poe passed his cigarette case to Ellery. Morisu decided that this was the perfect opportunity.
He quickly took a certain object out of his coat pocket. It was a small, thin box. Inside it was a single Lark cigarette which he had prepared with potassium cyanide. It was a weapon he had prepared from the start, planning to use it on Poe if the chance arose.
He also said he wanted a cigarette and was passed the cigarette case. He made the switch underneath the table. He took out two cigarettes, put one of them in his mouth and put the other in his pocket. He placed the poisoned cigarette in the cigarette case.
Poe was a heavy smoker, so he would probably smoke another one the moment he got the cigarette case back. There was a chance he wouldn’t smoke and the cigarette case would be passed on again to Ellery, but it did not matter as long one of them died. He could work out some way to deal with the last person left.
It was Poe who smoked the poisoned cigarette.
✦ ✦ ✦
6
And in the hall only two remained.
Even now that Poe had died, Ellery was still convinced that Seiji was the murderer. He showed no sign of suspicion towards Morisu at all.
It did not seem as though Morisu would need to finish the job quickly. He decided to await his opportunity calmly. For, if possible, he wanted the last person to commit “suicide” for him.
Foolish Ellery….
Ellery helped him all the way until the end.
Ellery thought himself the great detective, but he was nothing more than a helpless clown. By chance, Morisu had actually predicted this outcome. “The Detective” and “The Murderer” were the final two survivors.
But Morisu had to admit he was impressed by Ellery’s last masterful reasoning, starting from the eleven-sided cup that led them to the eleventh room inside the Decagon House. He himself had been puzzled by the existence of that cup. He could never have dreamt that something like that was hidden behind it, even though he had been told about Nakamura Seiji’s love of gimmicks by Kawaminami on the mainland.
Even so, this development did not endanger his own position. The discovery of the hidden room rather proved to be the perfect thing to help solidify Ellery’s theory that Seiji was the murderer.
The two of them entered the underground room. Ellery started searching for a path leading outside. There they discovered that horrifying corpse.
It came to him the moment he saw the body. It was the body of the gardener who disappeared, Yoshikawa Sei’ichi.
Yoshikawa had been murdered six months ago. Attacked by the insane Seiji, he had fled from the Blue Mansion to this place, where he had died. Or perhaps Seiji himself had dragged the gardener here to kill him.
He told this to Ellery, who stood quietly in front of the body. Ellery nodded several times, his hand still covering his nose, saying:
‘Indeed. So that means that Seiji got his body double from somewhere else, in the incident last year.’
He continued.
‘Let’s go, Van. We need to see where this passage leads.’
They walked around the body and stepped deeper inside the passage. “I’ll just accompany you until the end then,” Morisu thought.
He also started to think that Ellery might actually be suspicious of him.
It was, for example, obvious from the dust lying on the floor, that nobody had entered this place for a long time. So perhaps Ellery was pretending to suspect nothing and waiting for a chance to take him down.
Morisu followed Ellery into the darkness, his right hand holding the knife in his pocket.
The passage ended in front of a door. They could hear the sound of waves nearby.
Ellery opened the door. The sound of waves become louder.
They were standing halfway down the cliff facing the inlet. Outside the door was a little ledge like a small terrace. Beneath it was only deep darkness. It was quite a distance to the water surface.
Ellery carefully watched his feet as he took a step outside and let the light of his flashlight check their surroundings. He turned round with a satisfied expression and said:
‘This door is at an angle that makes it hard to spot from either above on the cliff or below from the sea. And with a little effort, it’s possible to make one’s way to the stone steps running along the rock face. Seiji used this to get into the Decagon House.’