A hooker having an evil customer and getting killed sounded like a stereotypical story line. But the girl in this case wasn’t a hooker. This was a young girl who hid her secret life, who worked hard every day as a salesperson for an insurance company. A girl who wasn’t a prostitute, but liked to pretend she was.

When they were in the love hotel Hayashi had complimented her. “Your body is so supple,” he’d said. Dressed only in her underwear, Yoshino had bent forward proudly to show him.

“I was in the rhythmic gymnastics club. I used to be much more flexible than this.”

Her spine showed through her white skin as she turned and smiled at him. He could never have imagined that just three months later that smiling face would be lying beside a road, dead.

On the morning of the same day, outside Nagasaki City and about a hundred kilometers from Fukuoka, Yuichi’s grandmother Fusae had bought some produce from the truck that came to peddle vegetables once a week, and was stuffing it into her refrigerator, all the while rubbing her throbbing knee. She’d bought some eggplants, thinking she’d pickle them, but then regretted it, remembering that Yuichi wasn’t fond of the dish.

She thought a thousand yen would be enough, but the total had come to ¥1,630. The peddler had knocked off thirty yen, but Fusae had been left with so little in her purse that she knew she couldn’t wait until next week, as she’d been planning, to withdraw some cash from her postal account.

She planned to take the bus that day to visit her husband in the hospital. If she went to see him, he was sure to say something mean to her, but if she didn’t go he’d complain about that, so she knew she had to. The insurance covered all the costs of the hospital, but she had to pay for the daily bus fare herself. From the nearby bus stop to the stop in front of Nagasaki station cost ¥310. Then she’d transfer to another bus that would let her out in front of the hospital and that would cost another ¥180. A round trip every day set her back ¥980.

For Fusae, who was trying to keep their expenses for vegetables every week to ¥1,000, spending ¥980 every day on bus fare made her feel terribly guilty, as guilty as if she had been staying in a hot-springs inn, being waited on hand and foot.

After she’d put the vegetables away in the fridge, she took a pickled plum out of a plastic container and popped it in her mouth.

“Fusae-san, are in you in?” a man’s voice at the front door said, a voice she recognized.

Chewing on the pickled plum, she went out to the entrance, where she found the local patrolman and another man she didn’t know.

“Oh, having a late breakfast, are we?” the plump policeman asked with a friendly smile.

As Fusae removed the plum pit from her mouth, the policeman went on, “I just heard that Katsuji is back in the hospital?”

Fusae hid the pit in her hand and glanced at the man in the suit. His suntanned skin looked leathery and she noticed that the hands dangling at his sides had very short fingers.

“This is Mr. Hayata from the prefectural police. He has a few questions for Yuichi.”

“For Yuichi?” As she said this, her mouth suddenly filled with a sour burst of flavor from the pickled plum.

Whenever she stopped by the police box to chat and have a cup of tea, the pistol at the patrolman’s hip never bothered her, but now she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“Did Yuichi go out this past Sunday night?”

They were in the entrance to the house. The patrolman, seated on the step up to the house, had to twist around to ask her this. The detective, standing beside him, put his hand on his shoulder. “I’ll ask the questions,” he said with a stern look.

As if nestling closer to the patrolman, Fusae sat down formally next to him.

“It seems that the girl killed at Mitsuse Pass was a friend of Yuichi’s,” the patrolman said, ignoring the warning.

“What! Yuichi’s friend was killed?”

Still seated formally, legs tucked under her, Fusae leaned back. Pain shot through her knees and she groaned.

The patrolman hurriedly took her arm and helped her to her feet. “Having trouble standing again?” he said.

“If it’s one of Yuichi’s friends, you must mean someone from his junior high school?” Fusae asked.

Yuichi had attended an all-male technical high school, so it must be someone from his junior high, she thought. Which would mean that a girl from this neighborhood had been murdered.

“No, not from his junior high. A friend he made recently.”

“Recently?” she asked. She’d always been worried that there weren’t any girls in her grandson’s life. When it came to friends, not only did she know of zero girls, but she also knew that he had, at most, only one or two close male friends.

The detective seemed upset with the talkative patrolman, and said, frowning, “I told you I’d ask the questions here… I’d like to ask you about last Sunday, whether…”

Before the detective’s overbearing voice had even finished, Fusae replied. “On Sunday I’m pretty sure he was at home.”

“Ah, so he was at home,” the patrolman interrupted, obviously relieved. “Just before we came here,” he went on, “we stopped by old Mrs. Okazaki’s. When Yuichi goes out he always takes his car. She lives right next to the parking lot and she told me she can hear whenever a car goes in or out. But according to her, on Sunday Yuichi’s car never left the lot.”

Neither Fusae nor the detective said anything as the patrolman rattled on. But Fusae noticed a slight softening in the detective’s harsh eyes.

“I told you to be quiet, but you never listen, do you,” the detective said, warning the talkative patrolman again. This time, though, there was a hint of warmth in his voice.

“My husband and I go to bed early,” Fusae said, “so I’m not sure, but I think Yuichi was in his room Sunday evening.”

The patrolman turned to the detective. “With what Mrs. Okazaki told us, and what his grandmother here says, I think it’s certain he was.”

“Yes, but actually I…” the detective began where the patrolman left off, finally taking control of the conversation. Fusae suddenly noticed the pickled-plum pit in her hand.

“On the call list of the cell phone of the woman found at Mitsuse Pass, we found your grandson’s number.”

“Yuichi’s?”

“Not just his. She apparently knew a lot of people.”

“Is she from around here?”

“No, from Hakata.”

“Hakata? Yuichi has friends from Hakata? I had no idea.”

The detective figured if he explained things one by one he’d have to deal with endless questions, so he quickly outlined what they knew about the murder. Since it now seemed certain that Yuichi had been home all that night, his explanation came off sounding more like an apology for the sudden intrusion.

The dead girl was a twenty-one-year-old named Yoshino Ishibashi, a salesperson for an insurance company in Hakata. She apparently had a wide circle of friends-people from her hometown, colleagues, and other casual friends-for, according to her phone records, in the week before the incident she’d been in contact with nearly fifty different people. And Yuichi was one of them.

“The last time your grandson e-mailed her was four days before the murder, and the last message she sent to him was the day after that. She got in touch with nearly ten other people as well after that.”

As the detective went on, Fusae pictured the girl who’d been killed. If she had so many friends, Yuichi couldn’t have anything to do with it. It was a horrible crime, of course, but there was no way she could believe that Yuichi was connected to it.

Once the detective finished his summary, Fusae suddenly recalled what Norio had told her, how the day after the murder Yuichi had had a hangover and vomited on the way to work. These had to be related, Fusae concluded. Yuichi must have heard about the girl’s death on TV or somewhere and felt sad about losing a friend, and that’s why he got sick. The instinct she’d developed over twenty years of raising him told her that this had to be true.