Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 44, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1999

Too late. The long hair, matted with mud and rank vegetation, stuck to her skin, was tangled in the clammy folds of her fine silk clothes (lovely rose colors shading all the way to the palest blushing skin tone), and reached to her small, slender hands and feet. There was so much hair, so many layers of wet silk that she seemed to be wrapped in them as in a strange pink and black cocoon.

Akitada approached, feeling strangely reverent, and knelt, his eyes on her face. He saw no marks on her except for a thin red line high on her neck beneath the jaw. It disappeared under her hair. He extended a hand, almost apologetically, and brushed aside a strand that covered her right ear.

There it was, a dainty dark brown mark, no bigger than an orange seed. According to her sister, it had worried her, but Akitada thought it most beautiful, this small imperfection in the otherwise perfect face of the girl Tomoe.

“Oh!” he murmured, overcome with pity and regret. The puzzle had turned into something far more real that touched him deeply.

The thin red line widened and deepened just below the ear but did not continue around her neck. It was recent. Whatever had caused it had not been strangulation, though something might have been put around her neck and then jerked backward.

“What is it?” asked the sergeant. “Anything out of the ordinary?”

She was everything out of the ordinary to Akitada’s mind, but he asked, “Did she have anything around her neck?”

“No. Well, was it suicide or what?”

“What makes you think it was suicide?”

“My boss told me it was. He said she left a letter or something before drowning herself.”

Akitada sighed. It was too likely that Tomoe had written a tragic love letter. If Masahira was the lover, he was beyond her reach. He looked at the lovely, silent face before him. A young romantic girl would have found the noble captain irresistible. Masahira was in his late thirties and one of the handsomest men at court. All the empress’s ladies in waiting were said to be in love with him. For all that, Masahira had had an excellent reputation up to now. Married to a daughter of the chancellor, he had never been rumored to have affairs or even flirtations. If he was indeed the man, she must have seen him at one of the wrestling contests held in the palace. He would be in attendance, riding at the head of the imperial guard, resplendent in golden armor shining in the sunlight and seated on a prancing steed.

“Well?” urged the sergeant. “Shouldn’t you take off her clothes?”

Akitada recoiled from the suggestion. Instead he gently opened her lips and felt inside. He pulled out a fragment of a water plant and some wet dirt. “She drowned,” he told the sergeant. “The fact that she swallowed water mixed with vegetation and pond mud proves that she was alive when she fell in.”

“Ah,” nodded the sergeant. “I shall put it in my report.”

Akitada turned her head and felt the skull, moving the wet hair aside from the skin. On her left temple he found a bruise, slightly swollen and discolored. Her hair had become glued to the scalp and as he pulled it loose the tips of his fingers came away red.

The sergeant peered. “Must’ve banged her head when she went in.”

Akitada looked up. “Not if she committed suicide. She would have walked into the water. Unless she jumped from a high place and hit some obstruction. Where was she found?”

“She didn’t jump. It was just a murky garden pond frill of frogs.”

Frogs! Akitada was momentarily distracted by the memory of the poem. He asked, “Was the water deep?”

“No. It only came to my hips.”

Akitada looked at the sergeant. “Would you drown yourself in that? Where was this place?”

“Small villa in the western part. You know how things are over there. It’s pretty much deserted. She was staying by herself. Not even a servant. If you ask me, it was your typical love nest.”

“Whose house?”

The sergeant cast up his eyes and grinned. “Ah! Your guess is as good as mine. The chief says it’s immaterial. She committed suicide. Case closed.”

“But what about her family?”

“Well post a notice. If anybody missed her, they can claim the body.” The sergeant looked worried suddenly. “It is suicide, isn’t it? Of... an accident?”

“You mean, could she have run into something with her head and fallen in the water? I don’t know. You’ll have to show me the place.”

The sergeant frowned. “Aren’t you going to look at the rest of her?”