The Master Key

PART FIVE

The child was plainly bored. He stood self-confidently before the music stand, but it was clear that he had no real interest in the violin in his hands, and that his concentration was straying. When the instructor was demonstrating the correct way of playing, instead of fixing his attention on the bow he would from time to time sneak a glance at her out of the corner of his eyes.

Suwa Yatabe stood stiffly erect, her head inclined to the left the better to grip the violin under her chin and, putting all her skill into the playing, swept the bow from side to side in an exaggerated manner so that the child could understand what she was trying to teach him. Her knuckles stood out under her lacklustre skin and her fingers quivered mincingly up and down the strings; nonetheless, they seemed to dance like living things. They gave away the fact that their owner, although now condemned to play and listen to such pedestrian sounds, had once been one of the leading Western musicians of Japan, a lady violinist of breathtaking skill whose performances had often brought the house down.

The child stared at those so-correctly positioned fingers. Her little finger and ring finger pressed down the strings, whilst her index finger hopped up and down all the time, touching lightly on their surface. Her middle finger stood stiff and motionless, without ever seeming to give way to the instinct of moving. The child found this fascinating, and wanted to ask his teacher how she could accomplish this but fought back against the temptation, remembering that his mother had told him it was rude to draw attention to people’s physical peculiarities.

Suwa Yatabe was aware of the child’s impertinently curious gaze, but today it did not trouble her. She was herself interested in the powers of observation possessed by this highly strung boy.

Most of her pupils were children who lived nearby, those whose parents wanted them to pass the time in something more than mere play or who were sent merely because there was a violin at home on which they could practise. Mothers who could not afford a piano would give their child a small violin and send him or her off to study this fashionable instrument under Suwa. Her fees were extremely low. She had started teaching friends’ children as a favour when she experienced boredom after retiring from her post as a music teacher at a girls’ school; imperceptibly, as the word got around, numbers had swelled and now her apartment had more or less become a classroom. The number of pupils seemed to have reached a natural ceiling, and thereafter neither grew nor diminished: everyday, four or five children came for lessons.

Since leaving the world of the concert hall, Suwa Yatabe had suffered the chagrin of seeing the names of her former colleagues in the newspapers, and even though she was now over sixty she still felt the agonies of the frustrated artist. So, whilst teaching her pupils, she would torment herself with the thought that perhaps amongst these children there might be one in whom some latent genius lay concealed from her eyes. But at such moments the child whose practice of the necessary passages in Holman’s Primer did so much for his mother’s self-esteem, would appal the ears of the once-famous accompanist who taught him, such were the cacophonous sounds of his violin.

But the child who was with her today was different. At the very least, Suwa thought, he was better than the neighbourhood children who were her other pupils. He had been brought by his mother for the first time a week before—they lived a couple of stations away on the underground—and Suwa had detected some feeling for music in him. Of course, his accomplishment was patchy, but her long experience told her that the child had potential talent. Such a child had to be taught to the best of her ability.

‘Well, listen to this, and listen carefully.’ She rapped the music stand with her bow to attract the child’s attention. He gazed at her timidly. ‘Why does your finger not move, Teacher?’

She looked at the middle finger of her left hand. It had suddenly become paralysed when she was in her mid-thirties, at the height of her musical career, and she no longer regarded it as being part of her. She felt revive within her the terror and mortification of those days when she had first realised that the finger would no longer move. The doctors had been able to do nothing about it. They said that there was nothing really wrong with her finger, except that it would not bend. There was no medical cause that they could find.

Over the thirty years since then, Yatabe Suwa’s life had been changed by the circumstance of her paralysed finger. Because of it, she had been forced to abandon her musical career and to become a mere teacher. It was only natural that she resented any questioning about it by others. On the surface, it was because she could find no answer to the question ‘Why?’ But deep in her subconscious she felt that she knew the answer; there it lurked, and there she preferred to leave it…

At this moment, prompted by the child’s innocent question, the true answer stirred deep down in a corner of her mind. Her arm quivered as she wrestled with the problem; she tried to put it into words and failed. So once again she recited the lie, the fiction which she always produced when confronted with the question.

‘Well, a long time ago your teacher had a very close friend. We always used to practise the violin together. We were just like sisters; we attended the same Academy of Music, we shared this very room. We shared everything. But one day a competition was held; the winner would get a scholarship and be sent abroad to study. We both entered the contest. As the set piece was one at which I excelled, I took first place. My friend came second; she congratulated me with a smile, but deep in her heart there was bitterness and resentment. Shortly afterwards, she left this apartment and went back to her home in the country. She took with her one single strand of my hair, and do you know what she did? She made a straw effigy of me with my hair in the centre; everyday she would take it to the garden shed and drive a nail through the middle finger of the left hand of the doll. It was because her middle finger had let her down in the competition, you see.’

The child froze. He gazed intently at Suwa’s left hand, and said,

‘Oh what a terrible woman she was! She was jealous of you, Teacher!’

These words, the reverse of the real truth, stirred Suwa’s heart. Once again she felt the anguish of having come second in the contest. How bitter it had been for her! She wanted to blurt out the truth, to say,

‘I didn’t fail from want of skill. It was just that I didn’t have a decent instrument. Now she was all right—she had an Italian violin. Her parents were rich, whilst I was poor. I was beaten by money…’

For thirty years, this speech had been on the tip of Suwa’s tongue. Now once again it floated around her mind.

Well, she thought, as a result she went to Europe to complete her studies, whilst I was doomed to spend my days teaching children the fundamentals of music from Holman’s Primer. People would call it destiny, but I can’t just accept it like that. The old French Professor at the Conservatory—what was it he was always saying—’C’est la vie, c’est la vie’… But I’m not a fatalist—I resisted to the end. I felt sure that I would win.

She looked up at the corner cupboard that hung in her room. On top of it, covered in dust, she saw a battered old violin case. The renewed sense of defeat which had suffused her mind began to fade. She had not realised before how much the real answer to the question lay in that old violin case which had altered her whole life.

‘Well, let’s get back to practice. Now I’ve told you the reason, you’ll see that I can only play with three fingers whilst you can use four. So you should be able to do better than me, shouldn’t you?’

The child nodded his head. For the remaining thirty minutes of the lesson, he could not tear his eyes away from that frozen middle finger, the object of witchcraft and a curse.

When he had left, Suwa sat in a trance in the chilly classroom, which was divided from the rest of her room by a curtain.

On top of the piano there were several classical-style busts of famous composers. They glared down at Suwa, their features contorted by the agonies of genius, their hair wild and ruffled. She looked back at them, reflecting that artistic genius brings torments in its train, and that therefore much must be forgiven those who suffer it. The busts seemed to agree with her, and their expression towards her changed to one of soft forgiveness.

Ishiyama Noriko squeezed through a gap in the slate wall and made her way back into the inner garden of the building. It was five am and still half-dark, but a glow in the eastern sky and the crisp freshness of the air proclaimed that dawn was at hand. She was carrying a bottle of milk that had only just been delivered. At first it had chilled the palm of her hand, but now the temperature had risen to match her own and a light dew had formed on the glass. Certain sounds still echoed in her ears—the sound of the milkman sliding open the wooden gate, the jangle of bottles, the tinkle of the bell fixed to the gate. She was still trembling with excitement, and felt that she never wanted to take such risks again, but in her heart she knew that before the week was out she would steal another bottle of milk. Every day she would creep out as was her custom and forage for wood shavings for her stove; sometime soon she would again chance upon a freshly delivered bottle of milk that had carelessly been left within her reach. Just like a ripe fruit growing in someone’s garden, hanging over the wall, waiting to be picked… But sometime she would surely be caught by a furious householder—crime always brought punishment in its wake. She thought back to the first time when she had chanced upon a milk bottle waiting for her in a delivery box with a broken lock. She had not meant to steal it at all. She had slipped her fingernail under the cap, opened the bottle and just drunk a mouthful. But so small a quantity seemed to lack flavour. She replaced the cap; it seemed to her that no one would be able to detect what she had done. All would be well, she thought, and was about to return the bottle to its box when suddenly the first rays of the sun appeared, shining directly onto the bottle in her hand. They lit up the glass revealing her fingerprints which she felt had been etched onto the bottle so that they could never be removed.

There was nothing for it but to take the bottle home. And since then, every morning, she felt the challenge of milk bottles tempting her to do the same again.

‘Fingerprints.’ Few other words in the language seemed to exercise such a deep hold upon her. Two years earlier, when she had picked up a man’s wooden clog which had been abandoned by a dog, she had fallen into the hands of the owner, a cross-grained old gentleman who had dragged her off to the nearest policeman and accused her of theft. In order to scare her, the officer had told her that it would be a simple matter to apply a little powder to the clog, and that the fingerprints of the culprit would invariably be revealed. He had then released her with a caution, but his words had left their effect. The thought that a little powder could reveal her fingerprints on anything that she had touched unnerved her so much that the words burned themselves into her subconscious. Calcium… Fingerprints…

The inner garden was surrounded on three sides by the brick building. There were a few flowerbeds, but apart from a small greenhouse everything was covered by straw matting in winter. There was a large incinerator with a chimney in the middle of the garden. She skirted the garden along its eastern edge and made her way to the fire escape. Her room was just next to the window giving access to the third floor, and by placing an old wooden box on the stair she could get in and out with ease and without being observed. Such was her regular custom, and today was no different. She made her way quietly up the stairs, treading the iron steps cautiously with her rubber-soled shoes, and then, when she reached the second floor, she chanced to glance back and catch sight of something she had not noticed before. On top of the incinerator was a pile of old newspapers. Their whiteness was picked out by the early-morning sun.

She made her way back down the stairway and retrieved them. They were bound neatly with string, with a sheet of cardboard at the top and the bottom to hold them in shape. The cardboard in particular would come in useful for kindling her stove. Thinking no more of the matter, she returned with them to her room. It was not until that evening that she discovered something of significance in her find.

She had spent the whole afternoon disguising the milk bottle she had stolen earlier. It was her habit to turn them into Mexican-style pitchers, or flower vases, or pot-bellied containers by covering them with papier mâché and decorating them with distemper and water-colours.

‘This should do it,’ she would mutter. ‘Must hide the fingerprints, or else…’

By the time it was dusk, she had completed yet another little handicraft to join those she had made before. She looked at it with pleasure, wiping her paint-stained fingers on an old newspaper. Then she suddenly noticed the date on the page.

It was ridiculously old—26 January 1933. It was one of the newspapers in the bundle she had found that morning. It had been folded in four, and the edges were yellow with age.

If it had just been old, that in itself would have amounted to nothing much. But somehow the date seemed to ring a bell in her head—was it not the same as that appearing on the main noticeboard downstairs? A few days earlier, someone had put a notice there offering a high price for a newspaper of about that date. If it was, then her morning find was just like a prize-winning lottery ticket. Could her luck have taken such a turn for the better? Pausing only to wash her hands, and to smooth the paper out and press it flat between a pile of magazines, she hurried down to the noticeboard in the entrance hall. She read the notice carefully.

It was the same date! Her mind full of mixed emotions, she paced up and down the hall wondering what to do. If she received any income, she was supposed to report it to the Social Security office. What exactly was meant by ‘High Price’? Until she knew, would it not be better to keep her find to herself? She felt the gaze of Miss Tojo burning into her back from where she sat behind the window and so hurried back upstairs before she could be drawn into conversation.

That night, as she lay curled up in her lair inside the cupboard, it suddenly occurred to her that she had not yet even read the paper. Why on earth would anyone want such an old newspaper? What could be its value? It wasn’t as if anything of particular historical interest had happened on 26 January 1933. She got the paper out from the pile of magazines and, placing it close to the 5-watt bulb, read it with mounting emotion.

The clue was on the crime page. Under a headline ‘Famous Guarnerius violin stolen’ there appeared a large photograph of a balding middle-aged foreigner dressed in a greatcoat and carrying a violin case.

The text that followed described how André Dore, having completed a five-year contract as a professor at a musical academy, was about to return home. He had been invited to give two farewell concerts in the Hibiya Concert Hall, but on returning to his hotel at the end of the first one he had opened his violin case and discovered that someone had substituted a cheap instrument for his precious Guarnerius. It was probable, but by no means certain, that the crime had occurred in the Concert Hall. The police had no clues as to the criminal’s identity. As M. Dore had gone straight back to his hotel by car, and had not let go of the violin case throughout the journey, it seemed clear that the switch had taken place during the few short minutes he had placed the case on a table in his dressing room after the concert. Of course, there were many visitors, so to have taken the violin, case and all, would have been no particular achievement in itself, but to exchange the contents of the case without being detected seemed little short of a conjuring trick, if not impossible.

What really caught Noriko’s attention was one of the names at the bottom of the column. Various people had been interviewed, and amongst them was a name known to her—Suwa Yatabe, who lived on the first floor of the same apartment block. She was quoted as follows:

‘It truly grieves me that my teacher should suffer this tragic loss, just as he was leaving Japan, a country he has grown to love. I hope the thief will hasten to return the violin. The only person who can get the full effect from that violin is the Professor himself.’

The article went on to say that Suwa Yatabe was the Professor’s favourite pupil. As she read this, Noriko pictured Suwa in her mind as she always saw her in the corridor of the building, holding herself erect and looking every inch a musician.

And for the first time she realised why she had always felt some unconscious affinity for Suwa. It was because they were both thieves.

Noriko felt sure of it. Thirty years ago, Suwa had left her fingerprints on the violin. And how could she hope to remove them from that varnished surface? She felt an overwhelming desire to see those fingerprints for herself. And just as earlier, Miss Tamura had been tempted to pry in the room of her classmate, Toyoko Munekata, and had turned to the master key, so now was Noriko drawn by the same magnetic force of the key which was in her possession. She took it out of the tea caddy; suddenly it had become a treasure beyond worth. She squeezed it between her fingers, examining it minutely from every angle as she imagined herself using it to enter Suwa’s room. She saw herself looking at the stolen violin. And after her long day’s work decorating the milk bottle, she fell asleep with these pleasant thoughts on her mind.

The unending rain which had washed the bricks of the apartment all day persisted into the evening. The damp spread up the staircase and along the corridors, making the air heavy and oppressive. Suwa Yatabe finished the last lesson of the day and led her pupil to the front porch. She opened the child’s umbrella.

‘Take care how you go!’

‘Yes, Teacher. Bye bye!’

She watched the small figure bobbing through the rain as far as the tram stop. The cold rain occasionally blew in under the eaves, dampening her face. The chill of the stone floor crept up into her body. Age seemed to have blunted her sense of hot and cold. She felt lethargic, with no particular desire to go back to her room and make supper. After seeing the last child off every day, particularly on rainy evenings, she felt overwhelmed by an unpleasant sadness.

She pushed the heavy door to and made her way back into the apartment block. She could see Miss Tamura at her desk behind the receptionist’s window. She was knitting; the needles seemed to be moving unduly slowly.

As Suwa passed the noticeboard, her eye fell on a new notice that she had not observed before. She hardly took it in until the date mentioned—26 January—struck home. This notice which so coolly required a copy of a thirty-year-old newspaper seemed to her to have a deeper motive. Clearly it was aimed at her. That was the date which had been burned into her memory for thirty years. In fact, that particular day’s paper lay hidden in the recesses of her chest of drawers together with the newspapers in which she had first made her appearance on the music page all those years ago.

Her astonishment gradually changed to a blend of anger and unease. Even when the woman who lived next to her greeted her as she returned from work, Suwa didn’t seem to notice. She just stood in front of the board as if blind and deaf to the world. She sensed that the great and final drama of her life had hung over her head for all those years, but had never seemed as if it was about to break until today.

She went back to her room and sat down in front of the piano. She remained there in that position all night without getting a wink of sleep. Every now and again she would look up at the old violin case on top of the three-cornered bookshelf. The famous Guarnerius had slept away the last thirty years up there. A few times each year, Suwa had taken it down and played a few notes on it, just to confirm that its tone was as beautiful as ever.

She had become quite convinced of the propriety of her actions in stealing the Guarnerius. She felt that she had been in the right, and suppressed the guilty feelings in her innermost heart by assuring herself that should the truth ever come out her defence would be artistic justification. Yet deep down she knew better. She only had to close her eyes to see again those events of thirty years before when she had acquired the violin.

Her respected teacher, André Dore, was on the brink of his departure from Japan. His final recitals were due to commence on the next day, but in spite of that he was giving Suwa her usual private lesson. She had begun to entertain sentimental feelings about him because of her admiration for him as an artist. And as she pictured once again his deep-set gentle eyes and his finely drawn high-bridged nose, she once again embarked upon the soliloquy which she had composed for herself in the role of a tragic heroine.

‘When that last lesson came to an end, André Dore gazed at me. His eyes seemed at the same time to convey both passion and melancholy. I wonder—was I truly in love for the first time, or was I just pretending in order to make a pretext for getting hold of that violin I had desired for so long? He took me in his strong arms, and I closed my eyes and let him feel the smallness and softness of my body. When it was all over, I wept—I wonder why that was? Just at that moment, a car arrived to take him off for a newspaper interview; was that mere chance, or was it an intercession of God? He told me to wait there for him; after he left, I sat for a long time on the bed, and doubt gradually took possession of my mind. Did he respect me as an artist, or had he only been interested in me as a woman? It made me feel miserable. Whichever was true, in the end I could only be sad, but secretly I preferred the thought of his admiring me as a musician.

‘His favourite violin, that famous Guarnerius, was just where he had left it in the room. He had not worried about it, feeling that it would be safe with me. But I left before his return, taking the Guarnerius away in my violin case… I still can’t explain why I did it. Was it to hinder his departure, to have him with me a little longer? Or was it that I was overcome by the desire for a classic Italian violin? A bit of both, I suspect.

‘I thought he would have to cancel his farewell recitals, but he didn’t. He just carried on as if nothing had happened; as if the instrument in his hand was the Guarnerius. Neither the critics nor the audience seemed to notice that it was not so. If they did observe any poor quality in the tone, they must have put it down to the rainy weather.

‘He announced the theft of his violin after that concert. Just before he left Japan, he carefully parcelled my violin, the one I had substituted for the Guarnerius, and posted it to me. It was plain he knew that I was the thief, and that he was not demanding the return of his violin. Instead, he put the blame on “some visitor unknown”; was it because he was afraid of the scandal if our brief affair came to light, or was it that he truly admired me as a violinist, or was it just that he pitied me?

‘On the day he left Japan, I went down to Yokohama and stood in the crowd seeing him off. It was most unlikely that he noticed me in all that throng, but I somehow sensed in the sad glance he directed towards us a message of personal forgiveness for me. At that moment I wanted to shout out to him “I love you”, but I didn’t. Well, he may have forgiven me, but some months later, while trying to play the Guarnerius I noticed that the middle finger of my left hand had become paralysed. I, who had vowed to devote my whole life to playing the violin…’

With that, her soliloquy was brought to an end by her overwhelming feelings of sorrow and self-pity. She looked up once more at the violin case on the shelf. There could be no doubt that the notice asking for a copy of that day’s paper, thirty years after the event, was linked with the stolen violin. She resolved to find out who it was who was now trying to track down her stolen prize.

The day after she saw the notice, she went to the receptionist’s office to try and find out who was its author. Rather than attract suspicion by asking outright, she masked her intention under the guise of paying a call on whoever was on duty to pass the time of day. She reasoned that her best hope lay in picking a time when the good-natured Miss Tamura was on duty, which was from noon onward on that day.

She went down to the front office at about four pm, and, arranging her features in an unnatural smile, went to the window. Miss Tamura looked up in a startled manner; a small drop of saliva dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She had undoubtedly been catnapping again.

Suwa gradually brought the conversation round to the point. Laughing artificially, she led off: ‘What a fascinating advertisement! How much would one get, I wonder, if one produced a copy of the paper?’

‘Eh? Do you mean to say you have a copy?’

‘No, I don’t, but…’

‘Nor I. It makes me wish that I’d kept my papers all these years. But old newspapers… one just throws them away after a while.’

‘Has anyone come up with a copy?’

‘No one so far. But there’s quite a hunt going on, I can tell you. Miss Takiguchi on the fifth floor may have a copy. She’s got every copy of Woman’s World since it was first published twenty years ago. But she doesn’t want to break up her collection, so she won’t part with it, even on loan.’

‘Ah, but that’s a magazine. I can understand people keeping old magazines, but newspapers… who could imagine keeping every copy of a newspaper for all those years? And even if they did, surely they’d have donated them to a salvage drive during the war!’

‘Well, the way he saw it, this is an old building and many of the residents have lived here a long time. And as she pointed out, there’s one or two who are, shall we say, a bit odd, so the chances are that a copy will turn up. A bit cheeky of him to say that, I must say, even if it’s true.’

‘He? Who do you mean?’

‘Oh, the foreigner who came and asked us to display the advertisement. He certainly wasn’t stingy, though. He left this envelope to be given in exchange for the newspaper. And how much do you think was in it? Five thousand yen!’

Miss Tamura opened her desk drawer and produced a white envelope which she passed to Suwa.

‘It’s pretty bulky. Must all be in hundred-yen notes.’

Suwa looked at the back of the envelope, and saw the initials ‘A.D.’—the same as those of André Dore, from whom she had stolen the Guarnerius! But André Dore had died fifteen years ago, in Switzerland, at the ripe age of seventy. She tried to conceal her emotion by chatting animatedly, but realised that her face had gone as white as a sheet.

‘Well, there certainly are some queer foreigners around, I must say! What on earth would he want with such an old newspaper?’

‘Well, I wasn’t here when he came—it was Miss Tojo. Seems he was a young man, around thirty, and handsome too—just like a movie star, it seems. He’s a historian, specialising in studies of ancient Tokyo. Apparently that newspaper had a photograph of an old temple which has since been burned down.’

That was obviously a lie. If his objective was just to get a photo of the temple, the mysterious foreigner would only have to visit the newspaper publishers. So the story about the temple was just a pretext. But who on earth could the young man be? Clearly, André Dore must have had a child by some woman. For a moment, Suwa felt a pang of jealousy.

Miss Tamura went on gossiping in her usual manner. But Suwa’s mind was full of other things, and she heard not a word of it all. She memorised the address on the back of the envelope before returning it to Miss Tamura. There was just a lot number in Nihonbashi, Tokyo.

‘I’d love to get a look at that foreigner next time he comes.’

‘Well, he says he spends a lot of time travelling, and so no one can tell when he might turn up.’ Miss Tamura spoke regretfully; Suwa felt insecure at the thought of not knowing when the foreigner might appear. She resolved to go to Nihonbashi and take a look for herself.

The next day, Suwa put on one of her better kimonos, which she had scarcely had occasion to wear of late, and went to the address in Nihonbashi. It proved to be a large music shop. She bought one or two small items for her pupils, and then asked the young girl who had served her about the foreigner.

‘No, there’s no foreigner working here that I know of—but try the publicity department upstairs. You never know—that’s the sort of place they might employ a foreigner.’

Suwa went up and asked for the manager, who proved to be a middle-aged man. She gave her name, and then very politely asked if she could contact André Dore.

The manager looked at her queerly and replied that there were no foreigners employed in the shop.

‘Well, have you recently had a European ask you to hold and forward letters for him?’ Suwa felt on the point of giving up.

The manager phoned all the other departments, and then regretfully informed her that there was no such case that he could discover.

Suwa, who had convinced herself of the existence of the young man called André Dore, felt bitterly disappointed and then annoyed at the trick which had been played on her. Instead of going straight home, she went to the cinema for the first time in over a year. But she could not take her mind off the foreigner who called himself ‘A.D.’ Her emotions were in conflict; half of her wanted to meet this man who seemed to be the son of André Dore, the other half wanted to flee him. On her way home, she bought some cakes for Miss Tamura, and gave them to her with the request that she be informed as soon as the foreigner appeared again.

But there was no word of him for several days, during which time Suwa’s emotions were disturbed every time she passed the noticeboard and caught sight of the advertisement on it.

It was not until a week later that she received the letter. It seemed as if the writer knew the correct psychological moment to strike.

But before that, there was another development. Someone found a copy of the newspaper which was being sought.

On the morning of the fourth day after its appearance, the advertisement disappeared. Just as Suwa noticed this, Miss Tamura called her into the office. It was about tenthirty; those who were going to work had all left, and there was no one around the hall.

‘Well, at last someone found the paper! She brought it here last night and took the five thousand yen. She doesn’t want anyone to know her name. I made sure it was the right date, and then got Miss Tojo to check too, just to be sure. It would be a terrible mistake to give all that money for the wrong paper.’

‘And was there a photo of the temple in it after all?’

Well, I didn’t look, to tell the truth. I just folded it up quickly and put it in a large Manilla envelope—Miss Tojo said we should take great care of it and not handle it too much in case it got damaged.

She took out the envelope from the drawer and showed it to Suwa. It was sealed.

‘This is it. I hope he comes for it soon. I bet he’ll be pleased.’

‘Yes, but I can’t help thinking of the woman who had it for thirty years. She must hoard things carefully!’

‘Ah, but she’s no ordinary person, that one. Her room is full of old newspapers—ah, what am I saying! I’ve given her away to you—you’re bound to know who I mean.’ Miss Tamura giggled, and went on.

‘Of course, it’s Miss Ishiyama, who lives on the third floor. You know, the one they call Miss Seaweed! The one with the ragged skirt, who used to be an art teacher. Well, she’s receiving Public Assistance, so she’s supposed to declare any income that she receives. That’s why she doesn’t want anyone to know. As if we would concern ourselves about her private affairs. But I wonder what she’ll find to use five thousand yen on. She’s a real miser, that one. Would you believe that her gas and electricity bills are next to nothing?’

The image of the beggarly Noriko Ishiyama floated into Suwa’s mind. That old miser had spent the last four days going through all the newspapers in her room in order to get her hands on five thousand yen. And at last she had found it; had she read it, and, seen the article about the violin? Well, even so, it didn’t matter. Suwa felt that Noriko Ishiyama’s finding the paper bore no direct connection to her own problem.

‘But please don’t tell a soul, Miss Yatabe, I beg of you—it wouldn’t do to have it get around.’

Miss Tamura smiled sweetly at Suwa. Clearly she wanted to strengthen the relationship between the two of them. Suwa thereby realised that she need have no fear that her secret—her link with the old newspaper—was known to either of the receptionists. Thereafter, her only worry was Noriko lshiyama, and she felt a slight frisson every time she passed her in the corridor.

During that week, apart from Noriko having found the newspaper and claiming her five thousand yen, nothing out of the ordinary occurred. The foreigner did not turn up to collect the paper. Nonetheless, Suwa felt a sense of foreboding. Then the letter arrived, brought to her one afternoon by a pupil who had been given it to deliver by the front office. Suwa put it on the piano and tried to conduct the lesson as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. But she was more than usually severe with her pupil during that lesson, torn as she was by the desire to leave her duties for just a moment to attend to her private business. That square white envelope seemed to dance before her eyes wherever she looked, threatening her and disturbing her concentration. Suwa’s name and address were written with unexceptionable penmanship; when she had received the envelope from the hands of the child, she had sneaked a glance at the back, and sure enough, in the space reserved for the sender’s name there appeared the initials ‘A.D.’ Well, the anticipated had at last occurred; she felt half resigned to the fact that her fate had caught up with her, half afraid, and altogether disturbed. The thirty-minute lesson period seemed to drag on and on. At last it came to an end; she saw the pupil off and then hurried back to her room and tore the envelope open. There was just one sheet of notepaper inside; the message was written in perfect Japanese.

The handwriting could not have been that of a foreigner; some Japanese must have written it at A.D.’s request. But what was the meaning of the reference to the newspaper, the insinuation that Suwa had sent it to him? He hadn’t come to the apartment block; instead, he proposed a meeting at the Hibiya Hall. Why? And why did the sender shelter behind initials, instead of having the grace to reveal his full name and details? It was all beyond her. There was just one possibility that occurred to her; dismiss it as she might, she could not drive it entirely from her mind. Perhaps someone else living in the apartment block had sent a copy of the newspaper using her name. But she could think of no possible motive for anyone doing such a thing. Nonetheless, she could not entirely rule out the possibility.

She wondered what attitude she should adopt when she met the foreigner. Even more important was the question as to whether she should meet him at all. The more she racked her brains, the harder the problem became.

André Dore had publicly forgiven her, and the question of theft no longer arose. But now it was as if the case had been reopened after a lapse of thirty years, and the sole witness to her intentions and his forgiveness was no longer of this world. She was afraid, but there was no alternative to going to Hibiya Hall at the appointed time, on 12 February—the very next day.

The corridor on the ground floor was a gloomy place even in the middle of the day, and when the weather outside was overcast or when it was sleeting it was necessary to turn on the lights to find one’s way around.

Noriko came out of the washroom and made her way along the passage, pausing for a few seconds at each light switch. She turned the light on for a moment, to make sure she knew where the next switch was, and then flicked it off again. In this manner, she progressed slowly towards Suwa Yatabe’s room, pausing every now and again to make sure that no one was coming. If she had perchance been observed by any of the other residents, the chances were that they would find nothing strange in her behaviour, knowing her eccentricity as they all did.

She had carried out this procedure for the last four or five days, on the pretext of visiting the downstairs toilet. Every time she had crept up to Suwa’s door and listened carefully for a while. Sometimes she had heard music, or rather attempts at music shrill enough to set her teeth on edge; at other times, she heard Suwa’s voice, usually scolding her pupil. Once or twice, she had bumped into Suwa making her way to the front hall, a shopping basket in her hand. But she did not feel that the length of absence involved in a mere shopping trip would give her long enough for her purpose.

Ever since finding the old newspaper on top of the incinerator, Noriko had been consumed by the desire to enter Suwa’s room, find the stolen violin, and ascertain the state of the thief’s fingerprints on it. So every night she would get out the master key, the loss of which had caused old Miss Tamura so much trouble, and arouse herself with the thought of using it for her purpose.

‘Like me, she’s haunted by the thought of her fingerprints. All those years ago… Maybe, just as I only wanted to try a mouthful of milk, she wanted to play that famous violin just once.’ Such were her thoughts as she massaged her aching thighs. Suwa was like her, a victim of similar misfortune. But in spite of this feeling of Noriko’s, she sensed that when they bumped into each other, Suwa gave her the same suspicious glance as the other residents did.

Somewhere behind her she heard a door grating open. She felt sure that it was Suwa’s door. This was her third sally into the ground-floor corridor that morning, and so far she had heard not a sound from Suwa’s room. Plainly, she had no pupils that day. Noriko pretended to be looking for something she had dropped on the floor, meanwhile stealing a glance back down the corridor.

Suwa was quite plainly dressed to go out. Instead of the shopping basket she had a handbag; in place of the slipons she wore to go around the neighbourhood, she had on a pair of high-heeled shoes. She seemed to be lost in thought as she locked her door and made her way towards the exit. She paused for a few words with the receptionist and left the building. She did not seem to have noticed Noriko.

The sky was slate grey, and seemed pregnant with sleet or rain. Noriko, who was following Suwa at a distance, felt a piercing chill around her shoulders; she shivered, and drew the lapels of her jacket closer across her breast.

Suwa was plainly deep in thought. She stepped onto the pedestrian crossing without noticing that the light was red, and was shouted at by a taxi driver who had to pull up suddenly. The wind whipped up the skirts of her long winter coat, revealing for a moment her spindly legs. Then the light changed, and she hurried across the road.

Noriko watched her go, and almost lost sight of her in the throng. Then she saw her again; without casting a glance behind her, Suwa jumped onto a tram. It was crowded with cheerful and bustling children, for the school day had just ended. Pushed here and there by the young students, Suwa, as was her wont, yet stood as stiff as a ramrod amongst the seething mass of people.

Noriko stayed hidden behind a telegraph pole until the tramcar had vanished into the distance. She wondered where Suwa was going. It didn’t look to her as if she would be back all that soon. Noriko turned round and made her way back as fast as her strange prancing gait, which seemed designed to protect her loins from some attack, would permit her. Her long tattered skirts brushed against the ground, sometimes fluttering in the wind. Her jacket only came down to her elbows; underneath it she was wearing a grubby blouse. Her lank, dry hair was disordered in the wind. Passers-by turned to stare at her retreating figure.

Miss Tojo was sitting at the reception desk, her head bowed over a book. Noriko wandered slowly down the ground-floor corridor, taking in her surroundings cautiously. There was no one around; this was her chance to enter Suwa’s room. She slipped her hand under her blouse and withdrew the precious master key from its hiding place between her flaccid breasts. She felt the warmth of her own body in the metal.

She opened Suwa’s door and slipped into the room. She stood in the tiny entrance space which opened directly onto the room, which she took in in one glance. Suwa must have had the gas stove on until just before leaving; Noriko felt the warm air brush against her cold cheeks. She stole one more swift glance down the corridor, and then closed the door and locked it from the inside, leaving the key in the lock. She didn’t even bother to slip off her canvas shoes, but gazed around the room in wonder. The main items of furniture were a piano and a standard lamp. They had both been articles of some quality in their day but now had a faded and worn look. The large lampshade was covered in blotches and stains so that it looked like some strange map. Two curtains hung across the room, dividing it; beyond them she could see an unmade bed, the covers of which were thrown half back. Everything about the room spoke of the occupant having left in a great hurry.

She decided to begin her search in the living half of the apartment. Discarding her shoes, but carrying them with her, she entered the room.

The first focus of her attention was the piano. There were three uncased violins on top of it but clearly, from their size, they were children’s instruments. There didn’t seem to be anywhere where a violin case could be hidden.

She went through the curtain into the inner half of the room. There, on the bedside table, she found a black violin case which seemed to have been put down untidily without any particular concern. She wrapped an old rag around her finger and opened the catch of the case. The violin shone sombrely in the gloom. Her feeling was that both the case and the instrument reeked of humanity, suggesting that both were in regular use. Although she knew nothing of musical instruments, and had no way of telling the stolen Guarnerius from any other violin, she instinctively felt that this was not it.

But she did somehow sense that the stolen violin was not far away. She put the case back on the side table and peered under the bed. The space was occupied by empty cardboard boxes, odd shoes, rolled-up blouses and stockings, all covered with dust, but there was no sign of a violin case. The only remaining hiding places were the wall cupboard and the wardrobe. She looked inside the wardrobe first; as soon as she opened the doors, she was overpowered by a strong smell of mothballs issuing from the dated and faded dresses and gowns which must have been designed long ago for appearances on the concert platform. The wall cupboard was full of dress boxes and willow baskets such as Japanese clothes are stored in. She went through them all, but to no avail. She had already spent nearly twenty minutes in her search, and felt on the verge of giving up. She went over to the piano, opened the lid, and peeped inside. There was nothing to see but the dusty strings. She looked again at the violin on top of the piano. It told her nothing.

She went and sat down on the small chair which was obviously used by the students, and took one final look around the room. Surely she had overlooked nothing? The violin could not be in this room.

She heard footsteps outside, and started up towards the window. Whoever it was went past the door and further down the corridor. But at that moment, as she gazed fearfully towards the door, she caught sight of a small triangular shelf, set high up in the corner, on which there reposed a black violin case. It lay there, covered like everything else in the room with a film of dust, showing signs of long neglect. It had to contain the Guarnerius. She dragged her chair over to the entrance and stood on it. She could easily reach the violin case; once again covering her fingers with rags, she gripped the case and took it down from the shelf. Her nostrils tingled, sensing the proximity of stolen property. Hardly daring to breathe, and holding her discovery high above her head, she carefully stepped down from the chair and laid the case on the floor. Her trembling hands swiftly sought the catch—but it was locked! She tried rapping the fastening to see if it would loosen but, decrepit as the case seemed, it would not yield to her efforts. Suwa must have taken the key with her when she went out. There was no point in searching for it. Her blood raced as she experienced both dread and an overwhelming desire to see inside the violin case. The latter emotion proving the stronger, she stood up with the intention of looking for something with which to force the lock.

At that very moment, she heard footsteps in the corridor. They stopped outside the door, and there was a grating sound as a key was pushed into the lock. Suwa had come back! Noriko almost fainted from fright.

The master key, which she had left in the lock on the inside of the door, began to move under the pressure from outside. If she did nothing about it, the key would be pushed out of the hole and Suwa would be able to enter the apartment.

But what could she do? Hypnotised by dread, she could not even think. For if she was discovered in Suwa’s room, she would be branded as a thief and at the very least forced to leave the apartment block. A hot feeling on her inner leg aroused her; without noticing, she had passed water.

There was only one route of escape—the window. She raced over and unwound the catch, throwing the two leaves of the window outwards. She looked down; the ground was only about one metre below her, and there was no one in the inner courtyard. She looked back at the door; the master key had not yet yielded to the siege. Suwa was now rattling the knob impatiently. The Guarnerius case lay where she had left it on the floor. Now that her escape route lay open, and with no sign that Suwa would be able to effect entrance very quickly, she calmed down and realised that she had left her canvas shoes in the room and that also it would be a pity just to leave the violin behind after all her efforts.

There were sounds of other people gathering in the corridor. Miss Tojo’s shrill voice could be heard amongst them. There was no time to spare. Noriko acted as if in a trance, seizing up the violin case and her shoes and racing to the window. As she climbed out, her bedraggled skirt caught on the window catch and ripped as she tumbled to the earth. Without pausing to look around, she raced barefoot across the muddy yard; and slipped and fell. The violin case flew from her grasp and struck the brick-built incinerator house, suffering severe damage. She picked it up again and gazed wildly around the courtyard looking for somewhere to hide. With so many people around, she could not use the fire escape as was her normal custom. It looked as if she was cornered.

But there was one hiding place available to her—the incinerator. She wrenched open the iron doors and, pushing the violin case in first, crawled in after it. The interior was much wider than appeared from the size of the doors. Provided she was not discovered, she could remain hidden until nightfall and then make her escape. She only had to put up with cramped conditions for an hour or so. The incinerator had not been used for some time, and the recent rainfall had turned the half-burned paper and rubbish inside into a black paste which was extremely unpleasant to the touch. She wiped her feet with her rags and put on her canvas shoes.

After a while, she peeped out through a crack in the doors. She could see some of the windows on the lower two storeys of the building—but not the window of Suwa’s room. Doubtless people were clustered around that window, gazing into the courtyard. Indeed, she felt as if every window must conceal a pair of eyes gazing directly at the incinerator. She crouched in the dark, hardly daring to breathe and clasping the violin case to her breast.

Thirty minutes passed in this way, with no sign of anyone coming into the courtyard. She felt a strong desire to uncurl herself and have a look at the violin. Her eyes were now accustomed to the dark; indeed, what with various cracks in the structure and the open chimney, the interior of the incinerator was quite light. She felt around in the cinders and found a rusted five-inch nail. She tried to force open the lock of the case with it, but to no avail.

Then she noticed that the hinge had been distorted in the fall. She slipped the nail under it and prised it open in no time at all. The lid then came apart from the case with ease.

The violin lay there, its paint cracked in places. Not one string remained unbroken. There was a hole in the belly of the instrument, through which she could see a slip of brown paper pasted to the inside of the back. Could this indeed be the famous Guarnerius violin?

‘Poor violin,’ she thought. ‘Just to cover up her fingerprints, she scrubbed your paintwork and stuck on a piece of paper to hide the traces.’

She put the violin down, and conjured up a vision of Suwa’s face covered with the fingerprints of guilt. They were two of the same tribe, she and Suwa.

Her long-awaited object at last achieved, Noriko succumbed to the mental and physical exhaustion of the hunt. She fell asleep in the incinerator, the violin cradled in her arms. She awoke with a sneeze some while later, chilled to the bone. She put the violin back in its case, and hid it carefully in the back of the furnace.

Outside, it was pitch dark. A few lights yet shone in the windows as Noriko crept to the fire escape and made her way back to her room.

The evening concert had begun half an hour before. Suwa Yatabe was standing in the cold winter dusk outside the Hibiya Hall, gazing at the gloomy park. Occasionally, the sound of music within was wafted to her in the wind, arousing the bright memories of her past, only to fade as her career had faded.

It was well past the time of her appointment, but the foreigner who called himself ‘A.D.’ was nowhere to be seen. But she could not bring herself to give up and leave, hoping against hope that he would finally turn up.

The square in front of the Concert Hall was bathed in the pale light of mercury lamps. Apart from the occasional latecomer hurrying into the Hall, it was more or less deserted. A uniformed driver got out of a parked limousine, but it was only to wipe the window before retreating back into the car.

Suwa stamped her feet to keep the cold at bay, and from time to time moved from one pillar to the next.

A car turned in off the road, sweeping the square with its baleful headlights. It crunched across the gravel and came to a stop. A foreigner, wearing a long greatcoat turned up at the collar, got out and paid the driver. She could not see his face clearly, but he turned towards her and came bounding up the steps. Suwa stepped out from behind the pillar which had been hiding her, her heart pounding like a drum. But then she noticed that he was wearing glasses, and her heart sank.

The foreigner did not enter the Concert Hall but stood near her looking around as if seeking someone. He looked at her, and as their eyes met he seemed to be laughing. Suwa was just about to speak to him when a young girl rushed out of the Hall and greeted the foreigner effusively. They linked arms and went inside, leaving a disappointed Suwa outside.

Suwa realised that it was now three hours past the appointed time, and that there was really no use waiting any longer. But she could not tear herself away from the pillar by which she was standing.

She had arrived twenty minutes late. She had come by tram because she felt that an hour was plenty of time to allow. She had changed trams at K Street, and thus escaped the rumbustious school children who had trodden all over her in the other tram. Gazing out of the window, she had passed the time with memories of long ago. For whatever other changes had occurred, the trams were still the same. The streetcar rolled on, stopping and starting, drawing nearer to her destination. Her thoughts turned towards the meeting that lay ahead; what sort of stance should she take towards the foreigner?

The tram came to the area full of old ministerial offices built in red brick. They soothed her eyes and her heart. She realised that the desire that had caused her to steal the violin was now dead. She was sixty-five years old, and one of her fingers would not move properly. There was no possibility of her playing the Guarnerius ever again.

The tram stopped, and an old woman of about Suwa’s age got on, leading her grandson by the hand. They took a vacant seat, and gazed out of the window together. Seeing them, anyone would think what a charming and happy pair they made, but Suwa was never one to be moved by such warm emotions. Even when she was a schoolgirl, and the class had been taken to the zoo, she had not been as enchanted as her form-mates by the sight of a mother bear playing with her cub. She was more interested in the solitary male bear pacing to and fro in the next cage.

But for once her mood was different, and the sight of the old lady taking care of her grandchild did not annoy her. If this Mr A.D. was really André Dore’s son, then, she decided, she would return the Guarnerius to him without a word. How happy that would make him!

There was still half an hour to go to the appointed hour of her meeting—ample time to go back to her apartment and collect the Guarnerius without further ado. She alighted at the next stop. She took a taxi, and reached her apartment in less than ten minutes, never dreaming that during her brief absence someone else had stealthily entered her room. So she wasn’t particularly disturbed at first when the key refused to fit into its hole, putting it down to her hastiness. Until someone had brought Miss Tojo from the reception desk, it didn’t even cross her mind that there was another key in the hole, but on the inside of the door.

‘Hullo! Anyone in there? Who’s there?’

Miss Tojo rattled the doorknob and pushed with all her might as she shouted, but there was no reply.

‘Why don’t we get in through the window?’ panted Miss Tamura, who had also come to the scene as quickly as her legs would carry her.

‘But it’ll be locked from the inside,’ replied the woman who lived three doors up. She spoke as confidently as if it were her room. Suwa could do nothing but stand and gape as the debate raged round her. Finally it was agreed that the best thing to do would be to poke out the key with a piece of wire, but in practice this was not as easy as it had seemed and took a full five minutes. When at last they got the door open, there was no particular sign that anyone had been inside apart from the fact that the window was open. Suwa immediately looked up at the top of the corner cupboard and her heart sank. The Guarnerius, which had reposed there for so many years, was gone.

‘Good heavens above! It’s the missing master key!’ exclaimed Miss Tamura, holding it up for all to see.

‘Whoever it was got in here using the master key, which she had to leave behind in her haste to escape when Miss Yatabe came back. And if we find out who that person is, we shall also know who stole the master key,’ said Miss Tojo in an icy tone of voice.

Suwa went to the window and looked out into the garden. Not a soul was to be seen. The thief who had made good her escape was clearly a fellow resident of the building.

‘Well, we’d better call the police,’ said Miss Tamura. But Suwa could not afford to waste any more time. It was imperative that she get to Hibiya on time, and she had already spent twenty minutes in the apartment since getting back there.

‘No, it really won’t be necessary. Nothing is missing.’

‘That’s all very well and good, but it isn’t nice to think that there’s someone amongst us who is capable of stealing the master key and breaking into any room she likes. However, I suppose it’s all right now we have the master key back,’ reassured Miss Tamura.

‘Very well,’ said the floor representative on the residents’ committee. ‘But I insist that we have a full committee meeting first thing tomorrow to thrash this matter out.’

And with that, the crowd began to dissolve and so permitted Suwa to hurry off to her meeting. Now, more than ever, she felt she had to meet this foreigner who called himself ‘A.D.’ There was no time to be lost, so she took a taxi rather than the streetcar. She urged the driver on, but to no avail; by the time she reached Hibiya, it was twenty minutes after the appointed time for her meeting.

Unfortunately, her arrival coincided with the end of the matinee performance and the emerging crowd streamed down the steps, and she was caught up in the jostle and buffeted from side to side. At last the mass thinned out a little, and Suwa peered anxiously around, seeking a man wearing a red artificial flower in his buttonhole, but he was nowhere to be seen. The crowd melted away until Suwa was left standing on her own, but she still couldn’t bring herself to go home. She stood in the dusk gazing vacantly at the darkening park.

After two more hours, the audience for the evening performance began to arrive. She stood gazing mechanically at the lapels of the people around her, but everyone was wearing heavy overcoats which hardly seemed suitable for a red artificial flower.

By now she was cold and tired, and felt as if her body was being sucked into the hard concrete under her feet. Nevertheless, she refused to give up. The violin itself had ceased to concern her—all she wanted was to meet the young man whom she imagined to be the spitting image of her long-dead teacher—André Dore’s shadow on earth, as it were.

She took little strolls to try and keep warm, always returning to the pillar, but by now there was nobody else around. At the entrance, the girl who had been checking tickets stood shivering slightly and gossiping with a friend. Suwa determined to stay on to the bitter end.

But when the concert was over, and the emerging audience once again engulfed her, drawing her body along with it, she realised at last that she had to go home. The thought of returning alone to her room, with no one to speak to, overcame her with sadness. Solitude and loneliness were her lot in life. If only she had borne a child… But she had only had one chance to do that in all her life, and that was on that evening with André Dore. She thought back to what had happened then, reliving every moment, until her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Whilst in his arms, she had called out again and again how she was afraid of becoming pregnant. She really felt that she was going to conceive, and when it was over she kept repeating one word over and over again. ‘Baby. Baby. Baby.’ André Dore took her gently in his arms and cradling her face between his hands reassured her in soft whispers.

And now, thirty years later, those moments were rekindled and Suwa remembered what he had said. Once again she heard his nasal French in her ear—‘I cannot give you a child—it’s impossible for me to do so.’

And now the force and meaning of those words came back to her. ‘I cannot give you a child—it’s impossible for me to do so.’

The realisation made her lose touch with her surroundings, almost as if she was about to faint. The dark woodlands of the park, the hard concrete beneath her feet, the steps, the pillar, all seemed to fade away before her eyes as at last she understood the final meaning of what the Frenchman had said. He could have no child; therefore, no child of his could possibly be alive; now, more than ever, she was all alone in the world.

She began to sob, and made her way down the long stairway, choking back her tears and wondering how she could face the loneliness of her room that night. Suwa Yatabe turned away all her pupils for the next week on the grounds of ill-health. When they saw her pale drawn face peering round the door, they were at first astonished, but then their feelings gave way to jubilation at the thought of having a break from music practice.

It took her a full seven days to get over her experience outside the Concert Hall. She pondered long and painfully over how to unravel the tangled skein of her life. At last she realised that the first step must be to put the mysterious foreigner out of her mind. Once she had made up her mind on that point, she began to feel slightly better, and was at last able to get up from her bed. Going to open the window she discovered a torn piece of black cloth caught in the latch, of a colour and type that could belong to none but Noriko Ishiyama.

The mere sight of that small black scrap of evidence brought to Suwa’s mind the vision of Noriko prowling past her door. For there was no one else in the apartment block who still wore so outmoded a thing as a skirt made of black crêpe de Chine. From the shape of the tear, too—a clean, right-angled rip enclosing the jagged and frayed hem of Noriko’s unique costume—she could be sure of the owner’s identity. And last but not least there was the musty, beggar-woman’s smell—final proof of Noriko’s guilt.

She had no way of knowing why Noriko had entered her room and stolen the violin, nor of how she had come to possess the master key which she had left behind in her flight. She could only imagine that Noriko had scented the violin’s presence in her room through reading that old newspaper article.

She no longer minded so much that Noriko had taken the Guarnerius. For that tramp-like old woman could hardly have any use for the instrument; all Suwa needed to do, she reasoned, would be to confront her with her guilt and secure the prompt return of the violin by means of a few well-chosen threats.

The next morning, after taking a late breakfast, Suwa made her way upstairs to Noriko’s room and knocked on the door. There was no reply, but she refused to be put off and kept up a steady knocking until at last the door was opened. Noriko Ishiyama had plainly just risen from her bed; her hair was in disarray and a little saliva was dribbling from the corner of her mouth. She stood stunned by the sight of her unexpected visitor, whose relentless glare she could feel penetrating beyond her, seeking out the mountainous pile of old papers and cardboard boxes in her room behind her.

Suwa paused to take in the scene, astonished by the sheer volume of Noriko’s collection, before thrusting the torn cloth in front of Noriko’s eyes.

‘Yours, I think?’

Her look seemed to forestall any possibility of denial, but nonetheless Noriko replied, ‘I’ve no idea. I know nothing about it.’

‘It’s no good pretending innocence! That filthy skirt of yours got caught in the window while you were escaping—look, you can see where it tore!’

Suwa pointed down to a jagged rent in the hem of Noriko’s skirt.

‘That’s an old tear! I didn’t tear it in your room, whatever you say!’

‘What’s the point of lying about it? I know perfectly well that you broke into my room and stole the violin. But so far, I’m the only one who knows, so if you’ll just give it back to me, I’ll forget all about it, and no one else need ever know. But if you don’t, then I’m going to tell everybody that it was you who broke into my room, you who stole the master key. Then you’ll be kicked out of your room for sure!’

Noriko just ignored her. She stood tight-lipped and pale, saying not a word.

‘Come on—say something! You’d better—this whole room of yours is full of stolen goods by the look of it.’

‘How dare you say that? What proof have you got, to come here and speak of stolen goods? You’re a fine one to talk, I must say! What a nerve you’ve got! You stole a famous violin, and then come accusing me of theft! I suppose you think you can treat me like this because I’m on Social Welfare? Well, you’d better think again!’

As Noriko spoke, she got more excited, and her body began to tremble violently as her voice rose to a shout. Suwa began to feel that the tables were being turned; the fortress of her own righteous wrath was being battered by Noriko’s anger.

‘Stop trying to evade the issue!’ she replied. ‘If that’s going to be your attitude, I’ll just have to report you to the police.’

‘Oh really? You just try that and see! They’ll find your fingerprints on the violin, and then what will you say? Now get out, and don’t come back, or I’ll scream so that everyone can hear!’

And with that she slammed the door in Suwa’s face. Suwa seethed with impotent rage, but could do no more than retrace her steps back to her own room, muttering curses as she went. ‘Dirty insect! Filthy caterpillar!’

Once back in her own room, she pondered how best to recover the violin. In her mind’s eye she saw the heaped pile of rubbish in Noriko Ishiyama’s room. Without doubt, her precious Guarnerius lay buried somewhere in the middle of that pile.

She thought of starting a fire. If that mass of old paper caught light, Noriko would have to run for her life. And everyone else would be absorbed in rescuing their most valued possessions and fleeing the building. Under cover of the confusion, she might be able to recover the violin. Even if she didn’t, at least she’d have the pleasure of having punished Noriko. Having got this thought into her mind, Suwa set about working out a means to implement her plan. She thought of a way of setting fire to the newspapers in Noriko’s room.

Many years before, when she was still a mere child, Suwa had lived in the country next to a fruit farmer. She remembered how she used to watch her neighbour kill off the insects on the trees. He used to take a long bamboo pole, and fit some benzine-soaked rags to the tip. Lighting this torch, he would burn off the insects before they could harm his cherry trees. In her rage, she could think of no better way of dealing with ‘that caterpillar’.

And so it came about that a day or so later, at about three-thirty am, Suwa put the necessary materials for fire-raising into a bag and taking up a thin bamboo about a yard long made her way back to Noriko’s room. In the silence of the night, even the slightest sound carried, so that it seemed even more likely to awaken suspicion by trying to muffle her steps. So perversely she took no precautions, other than wearing a pair of straw sandals, to conceal the sounds of her progress. She flushed the toilet on the landing of her floor and, under cover of that sound, made her way up to the floor above.

There was no light to be seen from within Noriko Ishiyama’s room. She pressed her ear to the door, but could hear no sound. Suwa squatted down in the corridor and began to unpack the contents of her paper bag. She took out a small bundle of kindling wood, and some torn scraps of rag, and placed them on the floor. She soaked the rags in benzine and then wound them round the kindling wood so that the final result looked like a lollipop. Taking the bamboo, she pushed against the fanlight above the door, until it opened a few inches. As she had expected, it was not locked from within. She let it close again, and then looked around carefully, holding her breath and listening. There was not a sound to be heard, and nothing untoward apart from the strong smell of the benzine. She struck a match; the sound grated in the silence. Then she applied it to the rags, which flared up, lighting her immediate surroundings and throwing a dim light beyond. She bided her time while the kindling wood caught fire, opening the fanlight once again with the bamboo pole and counting up to ten before she threw the burning torch into Noriko’s room. She let the fanlight close again, and paused to await the results of her action, but could see no glimmer of light from within. She walked slowly back to the toilet on the floor below. The window was set at an angle so that she could see the side of the courtyard overlooked by Noriko’s room. It took her a minute or so to get there, and then with careful deliberation she opened the frosted glass window and looked out. Now she would know if her scheme had worked.

A deep red glow could be seen in Noriko’s window. Suwa had remained icy calm throughout the preparation and execution of her plan, but now for the first time she felt her flesh creep. She rushed out of the toilet and, reaching the landing of the floor above, tried to shout ‘Fire! Fire!’ with all her might, but her vocal chords seemed paralysed.

Just at that moment, she tripped over a small, round black object, and the shock overcame her paralysis. The cat, for such it was, reared up and hissed before escaping. Suwa beat at the nearest door to hand and then, hearing screams from a room down the passage, turned and fled back to her own room as if in a trance. Her teeth chattered, and she had lost control of her senses. She threw herself down and burrowed between her bed-covers without bothering to undress. After a minute or so she heard a siren approaching in the distance. She covered her head with the pillow and remained, trembling, in her bed.

After an hour, the red dawn light filtered into her room through the window. She heard the bustle subside and the last fire engine drive away in the street below, its bell still ringing. But still the building echoed with the coming and going of many feet.

She put on a coat and made her way to the confusion that raged on the floor above.

The corridor outside Noriko Ishiyama’s room was crowded by other residents of the building, many of them from other floors who were already dressed to go to work. A small group was standing outside Noriko’s room, peering in. The floor of the passage was covered with the drenched ashes of burned quilts and clothing. Everywhere there was the stench of scorched cloth and cardboard.

The interior of Noriko’s room was a swamp of burnt rubbish, on top of which, here and there, an empty milk bottle floated. The walls and ceiling were coated with small scraps of charred cardboard. Suwa peered over the shoulders of the crowd, dreading what she might see But there was no sign of a burnt corpse, nor was there any trace of a violin case.

‘They took her away in an ambulance,’ said someone knowingly. ‘She slept in the cupboard, you know, so she was very badly burned before they could get her out. The whole room was full of old paper, and it went up like a bonfire. The firemen said that it’s sheer madness to use a pot-bellied stove in such conditions—it’s bound to lead to a fire in the long run.’

It seemed that no one suspected the real cause of the fire. Suwa went back to her room. But it was a long time before she could overcome her dread of a sudden call by the police. She stayed behind locked doors, and gradually her pupils ceased to come.

Noriko Ishiyama’s life was saved, but she spent a long time in hospital. Miss Tamura opined that she would have to spend the rest of her days in an old people’s home.

Suwa Yatabe abandoned all hope of ever seeing the Guarnerius again.

The violin case lay under the pile of ashes in the incinerator, just as Noriko had left it. From time to time, people kindled fires above it, never dreaming that it was there.