Outside, the night air was oppressive. The smoke from thousands of cooking fires, oil lamps, and torches hung in the still air. They encountered few people. A young nobleman hurried home from a tryst, and a page boy ran toward the palace with a flowering branch; somewhere a lady or her lover had attached a poem to the branch, to commemorate their lovemaking. Among the good people, nighttime was for romance, not murder.

As they walked along Nijo Avenue, they heard the gong in the palace grounds striking the hour of the tiger, and then faintly the voice of the guard officer, giving his name and the time. Shortly after, the soft twanging of bowstrings came from the imperial residence. Eternal vigilance was required to keep evil spirits from entering His Majesty’s chamber and wreaking havoc there.

Apparently evil did its dirty work unhampered in the great city beyond the palace walls. Akitada felt another twinge of guilt for having ignored Tora’s pleas. He walked silently and glumly beside the lieutenant, who led the way with his lantern.

It was a long way to the ninth ward, and Akitada had walked a great distance the previous day. He had a hard time keeping up with the young lieutenant’s long strides. Spending hours sitting or kneeling in his office bent over documents seemed to age a person beyond his years, and the old knee injury did not help. Eventually the lieutenant noticed and slowed down. Ashamed, Akitada forced himself to walk more briskly and evenly.

When they reached the street of shacks and dilapidated wooden houses where the stonemason lived, he was bathed in sweat and wished only to sit down. It was still dark, but there was enough light to see that the small yard was littered with samples of the mason’s work. More stones leaned against the walls of the house, and a light flickered inside. There was no one about. The lieutenant gave a grunt and pushed aside the front door curtain. Ducking in, he barked, “What are you doing, you lazy oaf? I told you to stand guard.”

Akitada followed. A family huddled in a corner of what must be the main room. They were curled up close together under quilts, their eyes startled and fearful. In the center of the room, a constable staggered to his feet and fell to his knees, beating his forehead against the dirt floor.

“I just came in for a moment,” he babbled. “To make sure all was well.” His sleep-puffed face gave away the truth.

“Outside!” snarled the lieutenant. The constable scrambled up and slunk past them to resume his guard duty. The lieutenant did not apologize for the negligent guard—Akitada rather liked that about the man. Instead Ihara told the family, “We’re having another look at the room. Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep.” Taking up one of the small oil lamps in passing, he headed toward the back of the house. Akitada nodded a greeting and followed him.

In the back of the house, the lieutenant stopped in front of a door and ripped off a strip of paper that had been placed there to keep people from walking in on the crime scene. When the door was open, he directed the lantern light at the scene of the murder.

The street singer’s room was small, windowless, and bare, a mere storage space for the main house. Once it might have been neat, but now it showed signs of a dreadful struggle.

A second door, old and badly warped but with a new wooden latch, probably led to a backyard. Someone had tried to cover the gaping cracks between the boards with strips of paper that would do little to keep out the icy blasts of the winter months.

The furnishings were meager. A single trunk for clothing stood askew in a corner, a broken shelf once held a bit of food and eating utensils, all of which now lay scattered about the floor. A small hibachi had fallen on its side, its coals and ashes spilled on the dirt floor. It must have served the blind woman as a stove. On top of a thin mat, some bedding had been spread. The bedding was also tumbled about.

They stepped across a pool of blood and closed the door.

The woman’s body was gone, but her blood seemed to cover everything she had left behind. Thick, dark puddles marked the floor where she had died; streaks and spatters covered the walls, the mat, the bedding; and smears and bloody handprints defaced the walls and the door they had come through.

“Would you describe the body for me?” Akitada said to Ihara.

The young man pointed to the blood in front of the door. “She was just there, on her stomach, her head toward the door, and her feet toward us. She was wearing a white cotton robe, which was soaked in blood from many deep cuts on her back and front. Her hair had come loose, and she was cold to the touch when I arrived. Is that what you had in mind?”

“Yes. Did she have any money on her?”

“No.”

Akitada began to move about cautiously, looking at everything. “She put up a terrible fight against her attacker,” he muttered at one point.

The lieutenant gestured to the bedding. “After she accommodated him sexually.”

Akitada bent to look at the blood-stained quilts more closely. “Really? How do you know?”

Ihara laughed. “Well, somebody’s used the bedding and her sash was off when we found her. She was half naked.”

“The coroner will tell us,” Akitada said, straightening up. His eye fell on the back door with its many paper strips. “Was that door latched?’ he asked.

“The suspect claims he found it open.”

“Hmm.” Akitada pursed his lips. “She did not try to escape that way,” he said. “I wonder why not.”

“I imagine she was trying to reach her landlord and his family.”

“Yes, perhaps.” Akitada studied the back door, then opened it. The flickering light from their lantern fell on a tiny veranda. Beyond lay a service yard containing a laundry tub, clothesline, some baskets, a small pile of faggots, a broom made of twigs, a rainwater barrel, and more stone tablets. A low wooden fence with a gate ran along a street that passed behind the houses.

“Bring the light closer.” Akitada crouched down and looked at the weathered boards of the wooden stoop. Dusty shapes marked the print of boots and of dirty bare feet. It looked as though the boots went only one way, into the room, but the bare feet were both coming and going and had also shuffled about near the threshold. Akitada placed his own foot next to the prints. The boot print matched his closely, but the bare feet had belonged to someone much smaller.

“Was the dead woman wearing shoes?”

Ihara frowned. “I don’t recall. Why?”

“Somebody barefoot was here.”

The lieutenant was unimpressed and said that the boot prints belonged to the killer, and the dead woman had probably left the others on an earlier occasion. Akitada revised his good opinion of the lieutenant’s intelligence and did not mention the small cut in one of the strips of paper on the door. He had had to bend a little to see it closely and confirm that it had been made from the outside. Someone had spied on the woman inside, someone who was shorter than either he or Tora and who had been barefoot and carried a knife.

Back in the dead woman’s room, Akitada considered the destruction. It looked accidental rather than intentional, a direct result of the victim’s attempt to escape her attacker. Being blind, she had kept to the walls, trying to reach the door to the hallway, and in her struggle against the knife-wielding killer, she had knocked her trunk away from the wall and grabbed for the shelf and torn it off. And all the time, the killer had been slashing and stabbing at her, for there was her blood on three of the walls and finally on the interior door, where the marks of bloody fingers had left vertical smears all the way to the threshold. She had died at the foot of this door, her lifeblood soaking into the dirt.

Akitada looked with pity at the things that had fallen from the shelf. The woman’s life must have resembled that of a starving hermit. The single small earthenware bowl was in pieces but had been chipped long before, and her chopsticks were of plain rough wood. She did not own a large pot to cook rice in, but then she had no rice either. Evidently she purchased small amounts of food in the market and cooked them in a little iron pot on her hibachi. Her food stores were pitiful. A handful of dry millet had spilled from a twist of paper, and among the shards of the bowl lay a few leaves of cabbage and a tiny piece of dried fish.