The Devil's Disciple by Shiro Hamao Page B

course in reality it only took a second for Jinbei and the maids to take all of it in. In fact very little time had passed since Otane first woke up. Seeing what had happened to his master, Jinbei ran to him and held him from behind. His kimono was covered in blood that came flowing out of his mouth and from a wound on his right breast. As Jinbei lifted him up Seizō looked him straight in the eye and said, with all the strength he had left in his body, ‘Ōtera… Ōtera…’
    Michiko was in a grave condition but her husband’s scream seemed to revive her and suddenly she said a single word, ‘Ichirō…’
    Jinbei and the two maids all heard this quite clearly. It caused them all to catch their breath at once.
    As soon as Jinbei heard his master say ‘Ōtera’ his first thought was to find the man. He looked around him and there, in the adjoining study, he saw a man standing as rigid as a statue. Of course you will have guessed that this was Ōtera. We are told that his pyjamas were covered in blood and all dishevelled as if he had just been in a fight. He held something shiny in his right hand as he stood there silently in the dark, looking like a man deep in meditation.
    The courageous Jinbei raised his cane and struck Ōtera repeatedly on the right hand. As soon as the ostensible murder weapon fell out of Ōtera’s hand Jinbei tackled him. The latter put up no resistance, almost as if he were expecting it, and in no time Jinbei had tied him up with an undersash. Jinbei ordered the frightened maids to call the police immediately. The investigation began from that point on and I suppose most of you know the rest since the newspapers covered it so extensively, but allow me briefly to remind you of a couple of important points.

III
    I learned afterwards that the prosecutor who got wind of the murders immediately requested an arrest warrant from the examining judge who then took care of the autopsies, the inspection of the crime scene and the securing of the weapon. What I am telling you now is based partly on the results of those investigations and part of it was already known to the public at the time. So the order in which I came to know the facts is different from the order in which I am going to relate them to you now. But we won’t bother with such matters of legal procedure and I’ll just tell you what was going on at the time.
    The cause of death of Oda Seizō and his wife Michiko was of course determined to be homicide. The weapon used was an extremely sharp blade. The pool of blood around Seizō was determined to have come from his lungs and the mortal wound to have been a blow to his right breast. He was stabbed through his pyjamas and there was also a bruise on his forehead but this latter was assumed to have been caused when he fell on the table. In other words, Seizō was only wounded in one place.
    But Michiko, as I said a moment ago, died a horrible and cruel death. She was wounded in three places: stabbed on each of her breasts and cut across her cheek. The stab wound that killed her was the one on her left breast. The top of her nightgown had been torn off and her hands were tied behind her with her own sash. Her wrists were rubbed raw, presumably from having struggled to untie herself or to keep from being tied up, and the skin on her throat was slightly chafed as well from the cord wrapped around it. It was also established that man and wife had breathed their last within moments of each other.
    The culprit was of course Ōtera Ichirō and he was apprehended at the scene of the crime. The object in Ōtera’s hand was a jackknife that Oda Seizō kept in his study and it proved to have been the weapon that inflicted the victims’ wounds.
    ÅŒtera did not resist arrest but he refused to speak when he was brought to the police. I believe he spent two whole days without uttering a single word.
    The prosecutor immediately