[From the journal of Captain Arthur Hastings]
It is a curious thing to observe a group of the finest minds in the world brought to a complete and utter standstill. The interview with the young Yagami boy, an affair conducted in the very heart of his family home, had left a most peculiar and unsettling atmosphere in its wake. It was as if a sudden fog had descended, leaving us all to grope about in the dark. I must confess, a part of me felt a great deal of sympathy for Chief Yagami; to have his own son subjected to such scrutiny, and by a character as frankly bizarre as this 'Ryuzaki,' struck me as a deeply unpleasant business.
In the days that followed, it seemed to me that the investigation into Light Yagami had been quietly set aside. Holmes had retired to his rooms with a prodigious quantity of tobacco and a series of monographs on Japanese toxicology, while the others pursued their own inscrutable lines of thought. The boy was an enigma, a wall against which our collective genius had broken, and for the moment, no one seemed keen to charge at it again.
It was on the second afternoon of this strange lull that my good friend Hercule Poirot, who had been uncharacteristically silent and thoughtful, turned to me with a sudden spark of his old energy.
"Come, Hastings," he said, adjusting his tie with a brisk motion. "We are going out. An inquiry of a more… traditional nature is required."
"Indeed, Poirot?" I asked, intrigued. "Where are we headed? And on what grounds?"
"We are returning to our first subject. To the formidable Deputy Director, Kido Kiyomi," he announced. As we made our way to the waiting motorcar, he elaborated, his voice low and serious. "To assist L in that interview yesterday… I confess, mon ami, I felt a great unease. To confront a boy in front of his own father, based on the thinnest of spectral evidence… non, it was not a thing of method. It was a thing of brute force, and it has yielded nothing but more confusion. We shall return to what is tangible. We shall investigate not the woman herself, but the soil in which she was grown."
And so it was that we found ourselves travelling not to a sterile, modern apartment block, but to an older, quieter suburb of Tokyo, where the houses were of traditional wood and tile and the gardens were thick with ancient maples. Our destination was the home of Kido Kiyomi's maternal aunt, a Mrs. Sato, a woman said to be the matriarch and historian of the family.
Poirot's pretext was, as ever, a work of understated brilliance. We presented ourselves as a Belgian historian (Poirot, naturally) and his associate, engaged in a study of the genealogies of Japan's prominent modern families. We claimed to have learned that the Sato-Kido line was one of distinguished heritage and had hoped the esteemed Mrs. Sato might be so kind as to share some of her family's storied history.
The door was opened by a stern-looking housekeeper, but Mrs. Sato herself, a tiny, bird-like woman with hair of spun silver and eyes as sharp and black as jet beads, was clearly intrigued by her unusual foreign visitors. She received us in a beautiful room overlooking a garden, the air fragrant with the scent of pine and damp earth. The room was filled with the ghosts of a proud family: lacquered cabinets, silk wall hangings, and a veritable gallery of photographs in heavy silver frames.
"You are too kind to receive us, Madame," Poirot began, bowing with a flourish that was pure Poirot. "Your family's contribution to the new Japan is a matter of historical record, and I was most keen to learn of its origins."
Mrs. Sato's stern facade softened. Vanity, I have often observed, is a key that fits many locks. She began to speak, her voice a dry rustle of leaves, telling stories of her grandfather, a respected scholar, and her father, a diplomat. Poirot listened with an almost religious intensity, his head cocked, his little grey cells working furiously behind his immaculate brow.
"And your own brother, Madame," Poirot prompted gently, gesturing to a photograph of a handsome, confident man. "He was Kido-san's father, was he not? A great man in the world of politics, I believe."
A shadow fell over the old woman's face. "He was," she said, her voice turning brittle. "He would have been Prime Minister. He had the will. The strength. But he was… betrayed. A scandal, manufactured by his rivals. Lies, printed in the papers. It ruined him. It destroyed his honour."
"A tragedy of the first order," Poirot murmured, his sympathy so genuine it was almost tangible. "And for his daughter, the little Kiyomi… it must have been a terrible blow."
Mrs. Sato let out a short, sharp sigh. "Other children would have cried. They would have hidden in their rooms. But not Kiyomi. I remember the day the final story was printed, the day my brother resigned his post. She was but a girl of twelve. She came and found me here, in this very garden. She was not crying. Her face was pale, her eyes were… old. She looked at me and she said, 'Aunt, my father's mistake was not what he did, but that he was not powerful enough to make it meaningless. He was weak, and he was removed.'"
I felt a profound chill at these words. Poirot, however, merely nodded, as if he had been expecting them.
"She was always a brilliant child," Mrs. Sato continued, a note of awe in her voice. "So driven. After her father's disgrace, she became a machine. She studied day and night. She had no time for friends, no time for foolishness. She saw the world as a great ladder, and she was determined to climb to the very top, so that no one could ever again cast her or her family down." She looked at Poirot, her black eyes searching his. "She believes in justice, you see. A very particular kind of justice. She believes that those who are weak, who are flawed, who make mistakes… they do not deserve their place. They are obstacles. They deserve to be removed."
We spent another hour in polite conversation, but the heart of the matter had been laid bare. As we finally took our leave and settled back into the motorcar, I felt a familiar sense of being entirely out of my depth.
"Well, Poirot," I ventured. "A very sad story. But does it bring us any closer to knowing if she is Kira?"
My friend stared out of the window, his gaze fixed on the passing scenery, but I knew he was seeing something else entirely. "Mon ami," he said softly, his voice heavy with a terrible certainty. "We have not found a clue. We have not found a piece of evidence. We have found something far more important."
He turned to me, his eyes grave. "We have found a motive. We have found the life story of a woman who, from the age of twelve, has believed that the weak and the flawed have no right to stand in the way of the strong. We have found a woman who, if she were ever given the power of a god, would use it without shedding a single tear."