He pounded on the door with his fist, rattling the handle, but there was no response. If he was just pretending to be out, fine. But this hush was far too ominous.
“Has something happened?”
When he turned around, Shiroshi was there. It seemed he’d come to check on him.
“I—I heard something like a scream from inside—”
After he’d managed a rather incoherent explanation, Shiroshi nodded. “For now, why don’t we try calling his room phone? If we let it keep ringing, he may give us some sort of response.”
“He didn’t,” a voice said behind him, and Seiji jumped.
Tosu was standing there. He was as expressionless as ever, but he’d finally taken his earbuds out, at least.
“H-how long have you been there?!” Seiji exclaimed.
“Since you started explaining. It seemed pointless to listen to the whole story, so I left in the middle and called his phone from my compartment.”
Oh, right. Tosu was in Room 202 next door.
“Y-you’re better at talking than I thought.”
“…Is that relevant right now?” Tosu shot him a disgusted look from under half-lowered eyelids. He was absolutely right: It wasn’t.
The young guy knocked lightly on the door in front of them. “It’s soundproof. As you’d expect from a good sleeper train, the great soundproofing is one of its selling points. You’d have to yell pretty loud before he could hear you.”
“…Then you mean the scream I heard was really loud?” A chill ran down Seiji’s spine. Had it been a yell of terror, or a cry for help? Something awful had definitely happened in that room. “B-but how can we unlock the—?” Seiji was muttering fretfully, when…
“My, you’re all here?”
“Dwah!”
…Takamura arrived. He’d used his usual stealth mode, erasing his presence and the sound of his footsteps.
Seiji falteringly explained the situation again.
“I understand. We’ll use the master key,” Takamura said, taking a card key out of his coat. He swept it in front of the sensor in a smooth motion, and there was a light click as the lock released—but…
“Huh?”
…when they tried to open the door, it clanked and stopped. They could see a door guard peeking through the ten-centimeter gap.
“…So he really is inside,” Shiroshi said, his eyes narrowing. Seiji broke out in goose bumps.
However, with the door guard engaged, they had no way to get in. As Seiji was practically tying himself in knots trying to see in through the gap…
“Hey, move it,” said a voice behind him.
Who—? Before Seiji could even turn around, the speaker had smashed a heel dropkick into the door guard.
It was Kaganuma.
There was a crack as the door guard snapped, and the impact threw the door open, revealing the room behind it. Egad, a corpse! Seiji thought, squeezing his eyes shut, but…
“…No one’s there,” Shiroshi murmured.
“Huh?” Seiji raised his head, blinking.
The room was empty.
He’d just assumed something he didn’t want to see would be waiting inside, but the room was quiet, and its occupant was nowhere in sight.
The layout and furnishings were exactly the same as Seiji and Shiroshi’s compartment. Nothing seemed obviously abnormal, but…
“Um, what do you think this is?” he asked.
For some reason, there was a puddle of water on the parquet flooring near the door.
It was probably where the water in the corridor had come from. It had spread all the way to the carpeted area, its surface gleaming under the ceiling lights.
…Huh?
For just a moment, Seiji felt something tug at his memory. Was it déjà vu? But before he could put his finger on it—
“The hell is this? Harassment?”
Splashing his way violently through the puddle, Kaganuma stalked into the compartment. Apparently, the concept of “preserving the crime scene” had never occurred to him. Granted, it was extremely unclear at this point whether any sort of incident had even taken place, but…
“It doesn’t look like rainwater leaked in,” Seiji observed.
“No, it doesn’t. Yet it’s hard to imagine it could have come from the toilet or the bath.” It seemed Shiroshi was out of ideas as well. That meant their only option was to ask the room’s occupant. Except…
“He really isn’t in here, is he?”
Takamura and Tosu had disappeared at some point, so the two of them and Kaganuma searched every corner of the room. In the end, though, they found nothing.
“Where could he have disappeared to?” asked Seiji.
“From what Kaganuma said, it’s conceivable that he feared someone would inform on him and left the train mid-journey,” said Shiroshi. “Since the window is fixed, however, it’s extremely unlikely that he escaped from this compartment.”
“…Could there be a secret room or something?”
“I really doubt it. A secret room on a train would require a conspiracy involving the entire corporation.”
As they were conversing in whispers, they saw Kaganuma rifling through the pockets of a jacket he’d taken from its hanger in the closet. When all he found was the room key, he spat “Tch! Lousy haul,” and tossed the jacket onto the floor. They’d just witnessed a failed attempt at luggage theft.
However, if Godou had left the key in here, maybe he hadn’t gone out after all.
“Do you have a minute?”
They turned at the sound of the voice to find Tosu and Takamura standing in the doorway. Ms. Nomura and Mao were behind them; it seemed they’d met up somewhere along the way.
Mao took a moment to pick up the poor jacket and return it to its hanger. A brilliant example of doing one good deed a day.
Tosu got right down to business. “These two were still in the dining car, so I had them help search the train. We split up and looked for any places where someone might be able to hide, but…”
In the end, they hadn’t found Godou.
“Oh, how was the observation car?” asked Shiroshi.
“Just like the engine: It had a lock requiring a security code, and entry from the passenger cars is restricted. It sounds like it’s open as a rule, but they closed it tonight because of the fog.”
That wasn’t why, of course. It was because Ibara was in there. However, if it actually was locked, then Takamura had been telling the truth about it being impossible to enter or leave.
Mao spoke up rather uneasily. “So, um, then we started wondering if he might be in someone else’s compartment.”
Maybe the underworld vocabulary words Tokyo Bay and underground casino had gotten to her: Not being able to see Godou seemed to make her anxious. She had the look of a pedestrian who’d just been told that a crocodile had escaped from a nearby zoo.
“Um, so you’d like us to show you our compartments?” asked Seiji.
“Yes. Everyone’s, if possible, in order.”
And so they checked all the rooms, starting with Car 2 and working their way back. There weren’t many of them, and it only took two or three minutes per compartment. The last one belonged to Ishizuka, who was back in the lounge drinking. Though he gave them a sarcastic earful, he still dug his key out of his pocket and opened his door for them.
In the end, though, Godou was nowhere to be found.
“So he’s somewhere no one would expect, hm? Those are quite limited on a train. There can’t be many spaces where an adult could hide in the first place.” Unusually, Shiroshi’s brow was furrowed. He folded his arms.
They were currently in the library. As they were all looking at each other, at a loss, Tosu spoke up.
“This window looks like it opens. It’s big enough for an adult to fit through, too,” he said, pointing at the crank-operated ventilation window.
Takamura promptly shook his head. “The status of the windows and exterior doors is recorded as data, and I receive a text alert whenever the library windows are opened. They have not been opened once since we left the station.”
In other words, the train was currently a locked room, and one of its passengers had suddenly disappeared.
No, no way. That’s crazy!
It wasn’t possible for a person to vanish like that. And if something impossible was happening, then they had some sort of abnormality on their hands, at the very least.
Had Godou made a run for it? Had there been some sort of accident? Or—?
“He can’t have been killed, right?” Seiji asked.
“At this point, it’s merely a disappearance. However, if it was murder…” Shiroshi fell silent without finishing his sentence, but Seiji thought he knew how it would have ended.
Then there is a killer in our midst.