Interesting─so that was his evidence.
In other words, Ms. Towai had a “criminal record” dating back to when she left Yubiwa Academy seven years ago─she had “kidnapped” the people from a painting.
Of course, there were some differences between the two cases.
There was the scale, for one, and the fact that in the case of this mass kidnapping, she’d removed the people from her own painting, not from masterworks of the past.
Also, calling it a kidnapping was never anything but a metaphor─since she must’ve just replaced the painting that showed the entire student body attending an assembly with one of an empty auditorium, after all the students had left.
There were things about it that still didn’t quite add up, but in contrast to the other eccentricities Sakiguchi had told us about, this act seemed designed to carry a powerful message.
Though I’m not sure whether she meant to imply that the students would desert a school that treated art so cavalierly, or something else entirely.
Anyway.
She had followed through on her threat.
“You ask me, she didn’t just send a message, she messed with the law. She may have painted that picture, but the school owned it, and she switched it without permission. That’s a hell of a lot different than fiddling around with some old paintings,” the delinquent commented.
Not a surprise that he knows so much about breaking the law.
“Are you saying that was the real reason she got fired?” Mr. Bare-Legs asked.
“No,” Sakiguchi replied. “Strictly speaking, no one ever proved it was Ms. Towai who switched the paintings. By the time the switch was discovered, she’d gone missing.”
“Gone missing?”
“Yes. Her resignation was found lying in front of the new painting like she’d slammed it down there before she left… But she never claimed her severance package, and she disappeared without a trace.” Sakiguchi shook his head. “To this day, no one knows what became of her.”
After “disappearing” the entire student body from the painting, the artist herself had “disappeared”─how bizarre.
“So when she quit teaching, she quit painting, too?”
“It appears so─she ceased all public activities, and even the fact of her disappearance isn’t widely known.”
In other words, there was no direct evidence that Ms. Towai was responsible for the switch, which was itself the basis of our circumstantial evidence that she was responsible for the thirty-three paintings in the art room? Maybe she was using her own disappearance to shift the blame for the crime.
But given the circumstances, it was hard to come up with any other likely suspect─even if she hadn’t announced her crime in advance, who else would derive any meaning from changing one painting for another?
“It’s hard to imagine it was meaningful for her, either,” Mr. Bare-Legs said. “It’s not like the school kept art in the curriculum because of what she did, right?”
“Correct. On the contrary─Ms. Towai’s disappearance became an opportunity for the school to eliminate electives completely,” Sakiguchi replied.
“Truly meaningless,” our leader said with a nod. “But that is exactly what makes it beautiful! Kidnapping an entire school without harming anyone or even really causing them any trouble is no easy feat.”
I guess his sympathies really did lie with the artist.
It made sense that Manabu the Aesthete didn’t simply pity the art teacher but genuinely sympathized with her─but then, you’d think Manabu the Aesthete wouldn’t be the one whose sympathies were strongest.
What about Sosaku the Artiste?
I looked over at the child genius.
He’d been listening to Sakiguchi’s explanation so quietly I’d forgotten he was even there─what could be going through his mind?
As usual, I couldn’t tell a thing from his perfectly blank expression.
There was no way he was indifferent to it, though, both as a member of the Pretty Boy Detective Club and as an artist.
Plus.
He was heir to the Yubiwa Foundation, the parent organization of Yubiwa Academy─in other words, the guy who would one day take over the organization that had fired Ms. Towai.
He wasn’t responsible for that, of course, but perhaps he felt some kind of connection to the whole episode?
“But Mr. President, people were harmed, weren’t they? It did cause them trouble. We’ve been calling what she did ‘switching’ the paintings, but we coulda called it theft,” the delinquent pointed out, pragmatically enough.
Hmm, I suppose he was right.
“Don’t you think maybe she split because if the school filed a police report, she coulda been arrested, not just fired? ’Course, from what Nagahiro says, it sounds like they hushed it all up.”
“Hushed it up─indeed. Well, I presume the school was wary of too much publicity, given how hard they had pushed the changes to the curriculum. Yubiwa Academy isn’t the first school to keep things to itself, you know. Educational institutions have always been insular.”
Sakiguchi probably added that last bit for the child genius’s benefit─though in my opinion even the most secretive organization would be likely to tell the police about a theft that massive.
Had they decided that an artist stealing her own work didn’t constitute a crime?
“Naturally that was part of it─but the main reason Yubiwa Academy didn’t file a police report was that the mass kidnapping in question was an impossible crime.”
“An impossible crime? Um… Isn’t that a bit of an overstatement?” I couldn’t help asking.
If she’d genuinely kidnapped every student in the school, that would have been the very definition of an impossible crime, but the fact was that all Ms. Towai had done was switch one painting for another─wait a minute, all?
All she’d done?
This painting?
This humongous, size 1,000 or even 2,000 painting?
I finally realized why Sakiguchi had been acting so glum─it had nothing to do with uncovering the shameful past of our school.
He thought he was solving the mystery, but instead, he’d found a new mystery─which was precisely the opposite of detective work.
Nevertheless, I kept pressing him.
“Sakiguchi.”
I couldn’t help myself.
“How did Ms. Towai switch a pair of paintings─that are way bigger than the entrance to the auditorium?”