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The superintendent says, ‘You can only have ten minutes with him, and an officer will be present the entire time.’
The man standing beside the desk gives her a small smile and raises his hand in a short wave. His other is poised next to the gun strapped to his hip, the thumb trained on the top of the handle. No doubt it has been like that for the last few days.
Shinobu is not afraid of anything anymore.
The door opens with a metallic yawn and when she moves into the room, her shoes click too loudly against the floor, sounding like gunshots in the cold, quiet air. The officer moves behind her, making his way to the edge of the table, so he is simultaneously behind and next to her, facing the room’s occupant, and she knows now, without having to see it, that his hand is now fully gripped around the gun, his body trained and ready to fire and defend her when needed.
She swallows. She grips the strap of her handbag hard enough that the leather gives a tiny squeak. Each step towards the table feels like an eternity, walking through a thick mud, as if she is subconsciously trying to stop herself from reaching him.
But she does. She stands behind the spare chair opposite the table for a few seconds, not wanting to start talking and start uncovering the truth, but soon, like before, she reaches out for the chair, pulls it back, the metal legs squealing against the floor tiles and sits down.
A silence befalls them. He does not look up at her. He hasn’t made any indication he heard or saw her when she entered the room. He doesn’t seem to notice or care about her now.
The man looks exhausted, blonde hair bloodied and dirty, falling around his scratched face. His eyes are focused on the table top, hands lying listlessly over his lap, the silver of his handcuffs glinting in the small gap between the table and the chair.
She recognises the shirt as the one he left the house in yesterday morning, under his white suit jacket, though now it is just as dirty, with a rip in the shoulder exposing a sliver of bare flesh. The knees of the trousers are totally black, scuffed and filthy. She thinks she can see dots of blood dotting the shin. Part of her hopes it isn’t his.
That suit - she was there when it had been bought - had seen it worn for the first time. By - by - her husband. Kosaku.
Kosaku, her husband.
Not him. Not this stranger.
Kosaku bought that suit. The man she met at university. The man she married. The man she had a child with. Not this blond man sat before her, tired and broken, who had slept alongside her and played house, a snare lying amongst the foliage.
A monster that she had let in willingly for she had no idea what it was he truly was.
A monster wearing the skin of her husband, in every sense of the word. A man who had taken advantage of her, had used her, and now had to face consequences.
Shinobu had requested to speak to him before he was sent off to Tokyo - it had been rapidly assessed that Morioh was too small and unsafe for him to be kept there; that he could escape from custody as easily as he had evaded them for the best part of a decade, and the only truly safe place for him was a maximum security branch in the heart of the capital, where officers used to the yakuza and far worse would be able and competent enough to keep an eye on him. If they kept him there, safe and out of the way, their investigations for his victims and other signs around his house could go a lot more smoothly, and the officers there, trained and far better in interrogation than their Morioh counter-parts, would relay back what they found. He would be held there for further questioning, the collection of information for the start of his criminal file, and taking him to the labs there for samples of DNA for evidence collection. The police and investigators had too readily agreed - perhaps it was because they thought they could get a little more information from him if he spoke to his supposed ‘wife’ for a few moments before being sent off for the real deal, as well as seeing what more they could find out about his character through the interaction.
Or maybe it was pity. Knowing that she was seeking out closure.
She’d been planning what to say since she’d been told the news. She wanted to storm in, grab him by the shoulders and shake him, shake him until his eyeballs rattled in his skull and demand he explain what he’d done to her, to her husband, to her son, how dare he waltz into her life and destroy whatever he wanted and think he wouldn’t get away with it.
The rage that had overcome her when she’d found out that her husband was murdered by the man who had taken her place, currently living in her house, was unlike anything she’d ever felt. It felt light, like air, within her, like she could float off her feet with the sheer power of the anger that rose within her, felt like she could grab that man and throttle him, dig her hands in and strangle him and succeed and laugh as the light faded from his eyes.
But now that she was here, sitting across from him, watching him, the rage seems to dissipate. Shinobu can’t reach it. She doesn’t feel anything.
Nothing at all.
The guard shifts behind her, the leather of his shoes shifting against the floor audibly, and with a grim resolution, Shinobu realises she should start. Start what?
Where did you begin to start with this?
She wets her lips, swallows and searches for what she could possibly say. How could she possibly know what to choose?
Shinobu whispers, sounding too soft, too gentle, ‘Good afternoon.’
Good afternoon. What a fucking joke.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even move.
Shinobu presses her mouth together. She looks down at the tiled floor. Through the gap of the table, she can see his brown shoes just visible amongst the dark. Talking to him as though nothing were wrong, as though they were just meeting after he’d finished work early, where she’d ask for a kiss and ask him how his day went, and blush when he answered and giggle when he would say something funny. Doing exactly what led to them being here; letting him burrow his way in and hide. She’d been too gentle, too open to him, it’s what allowed him to stay hidden and safe for so long - thanks to her and her selfish, selfish fucking needs, her stupid pathetic dreams of finally having a loving husband, a lovely little family. She couldn’t be that now. He didn’t deserve to see that now.
She breathes in, squeezes the fabric of her skirt in his fists and looks back up.
He is looking at her.
She feels a shiver run through her, a jolt straight down to her stomach, though why she can’t tell.
His eyes are light blue. They stare at her, from the tired wreck that is this man’s face, and Shinobu realises that there is nothing in there that she can recognise. No depth. No emotion.
No reminder of the man she once loved, however indirectly.
For a moment, it feels like they’re falling away, the two of them, away from here, like she’s seeing him for the first time, meeting him for the first time, like this man she knows so well and so little is a brand new stranger, whose facial features pop out in newness.
But then the guard shifts and coughs and it’s shattered instantly.
They are not strangers. Not any more.
He eyes her, blue tracing her figure, and she wonders what he is thinking, if he thinks anything at all when he sees her. He is slumped. Defeated. A man grasping at the very end of the will to continue.
She came here, pushed herself to reach him. She can push herself even further - she can. She has to.
Shinobu swallows again, and says, ‘Have you eaten?’
It’s a reflex, second nature to when she sees him. If he wanted anything, if he was feeling alright, darling, look at how I act like a kitty, darling, would you like some tea, darling, hold me tighter, darling, darling, darling -
Why couldn’t she say anything meaningful, anything good, anything worthy?
She’s just a stupid girl, a brainless dreamer who refused to look harder. It grinds at her, hangs on her shoulder that she saw all the signs and did nothing, that she could have done something, that people died and are dead because of her and her actions and it does nothing to make this easier.
But it seems to have done something to him, this familiar phrase. He looks at her, and mumbles, his voice scratchy, ‘Yes.’
‘Ah.’ she says.
She’s breaching it. Getting closer. But how could she even begin to get close to breaking it? Too many questions to ask in so little time. If he was this quiet now, what would he be like during professional questioning?
She’d heard somewhere that most serial killers were difficult to get to talk to, when it came to the things that mattered. That really mattered. Not the blood and the guts and the gore. The source of it. The inside. The personal history that had led them to do it. Maybe the same applied to here, and him. The part where she asked him why he did it.
Or maybe it was just her. He’d been vulnerable, even if he never considered it - she’d burst in on him naked, arguing with him even as he stood, defenceless before her.
And other moments. Other times, lost in the dark.
Maybe it made sense he would be tense around her. He’d tried to hide in her house, only to be found. She had once been something of hope. Now she was just a reminder of how hard he had tried before he failed.
That had to be it. It was the only thing she could possibly think of that she could stomach. Or else, the alternative was playing home with a stranger who never cared. Who never showed anything towards her. All those moments were lost to nothing.
Shinobu can’t bear the thought of it.
She clears her throat as quietly as she can, and manages to ask, her voice still hoarse, ‘How have you been feeling?’
Another pause. She sees the muscles of his throat slide as he swallows and the sound is rough, like molluscs grinding against each other and it makes her feel nauseous.
‘Well.’
It wasn’t like he would say the truth, would he? Not now. Not ever.
Shinobu is sick of taking things for face value.
All those times when her husband had sulked or stayed silent, made dinner even though she had offered or there was ramen for him to eat, clipped his nails and opened the door to let the cat out, and let her lament to him in the silence that followed - what had he been hiding? What had he been thinking? Just stay silent, lay low and hope for the best?
What kind of moron would go into a situation like that, just hoping he wouldn’t get caught? It was a miracle he had even managed to look like her husband - now he - now he -
Now.
Now he doesn’t look anything like him.
It’s the cheekbones, she rationalises. The blond hair, the blue eyes, sure, they’re different. Kosaku was dark where he is light. But it’s the cheekbones that make the difference. They’re so pronounced they cleave against his face, two solid strokes of bone sharpened down against his skin. How he had managed to fill them out, hide them, in Kosaku’s image she could not understand. Neither could any of the other officers, apparently.
How had such a man transformed himself?, They wondered. How had he been able to hide in plain sight?
Shinobu wonders, too, of course. He looked so alike. So exact.
She has no idea when she last saw her real husband.
Real husband. The thought that that meant Kosaku should have something, should have been everything, but the more she thought about it, the more she tried to think it over, to piece these two men together, the more that she began to realise they bled into a third, that man who had lived in her home, both husband and not, both lover and not, a man strung between two different people, the more she began to realise she couldn’t even know who he was.
Kosaku, Kosaku, Kosaku -
And now him.
She wanted to know. Wanted to know everything. Be brave, she squeezed her bag strap and swallowed, ask him. Ask him. There is no point in hiding any more from him. You’ve already shown him everything.
She hadn’t realised until then how much it took to even speak. The muscles that moved tongue to wet lips, the pursing of lips, the constrictions of the throat to swallow, to clear the airway like tidying away dust on a living room floor, to open the mouth, the ways the jaws flexed and separated, the way the tongue geared itself to be used like a swimmer gearing back to dive forward:
‘Why did you choose him?’ she asks, her voice barely above a whisper.
Kosaku is a ghostly tie, a bloodied piece of red string that has sewn them together so tightly she can barely see the stitches. Now it is as though she can barely remember his face, his real face, when it was his own muscles and thoughts that moved his eyes, his lips, his own decision to speak, his own choice to move, to cook, to smile, to love. The man she once knew is gone, and she was never even aware of it.
Kosaku is nothing but a memory, an empty name to be said on files and investigative reports, on witness stands and in mortuaries. Not here. Not now.
Not to him.
Kira Yoshikage. Yoshikage Kira. That is his real name. The man who pretended to be her husband for all that time. She had repeated the name to herself as she made her way to the police department, an officer guiding her, a calming hand on her forearm to help lift her as though he was afraid she would somehow collapse onto the ground.
Shinobu is not scared. The world has swirled and merged around her, names and faces blurring as people came to announce that her husband was not her husband, that her husband was dead, that the man she loved was gone, that the man she loved was living in her home, how brave she had been, how courageous, to live with a murderer right beneath her nose and never be aware of it. How terrifying it must have been, to make every move as if it were her last, to not know that every night that she lay next to the reaper.
She’d heard the policeman explain it all to her, had a detective come, long hair tucked away into a bun, saying gently that she would take Shinobu into the kitchen to get some tea, to sit down because it was a lot to take in, and she would need to answer some more questions later.
But she hadn’t been there the entire time, had been disjointed and elsewhere, her body moving on basic instinct and reflex as opposed to choice. Everything swirled and moved around her, refusing to settle and remain still.
She knows Kira will be dissected, torn apart by psychologist after psychologist, that defence lawyers and judges will shred him in the courtroom, expose every fraction of his life, explain every bump in the journey that led up to this moment. She knows this, knows because she has seen the dramas and the television shows and the films, and she knows those people, with their degrees and experience will know better than she does the meaning behind motive and psychosis, the inner-layering that forms the brain of a serial killer, knows that those people will understand Kira on a layer she knows she never can, that maybe Kira himself does not either. He will be opened up to the world for crimes, to people who never met him, who never saw him before, before a courtroom or police station.
But Shinobu has. Shinobu does.
Shinobu knows Kira in a way nobody else does.
That red string has tied them together, pierced their fingertips and sewed them to touch, and Shinobu, who saw that gathering as merely normal, wants, needs, craves to know why. It could have been anyone. Any other woman in Morioh who he chose.
But he chose her.
Kira looks at her, and it strikes her, sickeningly, that he is almost attractive under the overhead lights and grime. In another life, with his blonde hair flopping over his forehead and his sharp blue eyes, he could have been a model. He would have been the kind of person Shinobu slyly looked at out of the corner of her eye for just a little too long.
When he speaks, it is the same low tone as before. No shift in cadence or rhythm, nothing that suggests remorse or regret.
‘He was the first one I saw.’
Shinobu feels her gut lurch.
‘…you saw?’
‘I was running. I needed to hide. So I found the first person I could hide with.’ his head twitches. It could be a shrug. It could be anything. ‘It was just him. The first person I could find.’
Shinobu feels her world tilt.
The first person he could find.
He could have talked about the murder, about the bodies, the blood, the gore, and it would have been anything better than that. Anything better than that randomness. That she was just a lucky grab for him, that their whole life, her and Hayato’s and even Kosaku’s, was just something randomly stolen out of the blue.
Shinobu remembers tracing him in the dark, feeling warmth beneath her fingertips and seeing his face crease with vulnerability. She remembers his hands tracing her, gently scouring every dip and plane of her body, moving in a way that was bizarrely tender, though at the time she hardly knew why. She remember warmth, engulfing her, surrounding her, as arms nestled around her waist, holding her close, hearing his heartbeat pounding in his chest, it’s rhythm matching her own.
All that - all that time - built up together - the way the tense hours managed to strengthen into days, how time began to soothe itself around them, the way the three seemed to group together in their orbits, becoming a family instead of strangers trapped in a single house -
Anyone. It could have been anyone else.
She was nothing.
He had never been like this, she had thought at the time, the morning after, he had never held her so gently, touched her so curiously. No man had ever been like that with her before; touching her as though they were a blind man making his way through a room of glass, gentle, too-gentle, as though afraid, as though reaching out into something unknown and terrifying. He had stroked the right places, slipped in and settled where he was supposed to, and yet something had been off. Something strange.
Anyone else. Any other body.
And she could have been his.
All those other women who he killed during that time, those hands, their bodies -
Her.
She sat back sharply. He didn’t even react. No emotion across his face. Nothing whatsoever.
Knowing he didn’t care -
She could feel it swelling inside her again. Whatever it was. There was no word for it. Not anger, not heartbreak - just the desire to grab him and smash him against the table until it turned scarlet, until his blonde hair was dyed crimson, she wanted to claw the blue out of his face -
Shinobu couldn’t think of anything. That one sliver, that one little slice of happiness she had been able to claw up for herself from the wreckage of that marriage - gone . . .
He was a serial killer what the fuck was she thinking?
Stupid girl.
She thought - maybe -
She thought now? She had thoughts now? As opposed to before, when her husband came back acting strange, his face settling strangely, behaving oddly, in ways he never had, she had thoughts then, did she? She thought she was smart then, did she?
All those brains for just a little attention flung her way. A little happiness for the spoilt housewife.
When it came from an unknown source - how could you begin to understand it?
When all the happiness you’d enjoyed, the life you’d craved, the world you’d always wanted had come at the cost of knowing it would never be from the person you trusted the most - could you be content with that?
Shinobu had wanted that life with Kosaku: a happy life, a happy family, a man she had loved.
A man to love - someone to love. The word was thrown around so often, so frequently, but to love, to really, truly love - to know another person as well as you know yourself, to be there for them, to withstand the same storms -
To love someone who never was. To fall in love all over again.
And for what?
For her own self. For her own desires. For her own selfish thoughts she had let something creep into her house, make its nest and she allowed it to stay because it let her fall into an embrace she had always wanted.
This man with his blue eyes and his blonde hair and his high cheekbones and his soft, raspy voice that sounded exactly the same as when they had lain together in the dark, tracing the skin of the other, whispering to each other -
He had given her all that she had wanted.
And it only cost her everything.
Where could you go from here? How could you go from here?
‘Are you going to cry?’ he murmurs.
Shinobu says, ’No.’
She has not been able to cry. She finds she cannot. Something has held it down, pressed and flattened it to nothing, and all Shinobu can do is just carry it around with her.
Of course she would want to. Being a baby at something like this. Crying because there was nothing else she could do. What a joke.
He’ll be in prison. He’ll be locked up. Bombarded with hate and bile. He’ll never even survive the storm the media will throw at him in a few weeks time. She knows he’s only tolerating her now, but maybe in the future he’ll see it as what it is, a moment of peace in an otherwise terribly busy life of a serial killer about to go down. It gives her some twinge of satisfaction knowing she’ll be the last kind face he’ll ever see.
A chair creaks in the background. The ruffle of fabric. ‘It’s time to go.’
Of course it is.
She looks at him, that final last look, and manages to steel herself together long enough to say, ‘I hope you have a nice trip to Tokyo.’
He doesn’t respond.
She wants him to. She stands up, and he vanishes in the shadows. She sneers, ‘Maybe you could send me a postcard when you do. I’ve always wanted to go.’
Nothing. Nothing - fucking nothing - this bastard - this miserable bastard -
She finds her throat seizing, and she cries, and her voice cracks like a fucking infant’s, ‘I wanted it to be you! I wanted - I wanted it to be just you! Just with you! Anyone else - anyone else and - and - and - and you couldn’t even give me that!’
A movement in the shadow but her vision blurs and she spits out, ‘I couldn’t give a damn about anything else, anything you could have offered me - I just wanted - I just - it just had to be you. Only you. And you - you couldn’t -’
She feels herself sway, clenching her eyes so tightly diamonds pop behind her eyelids, and the gloved hands of an officer touch her biceps. She hears him saying something, but his voice is a haze of noise.
Amongst the blur of sound, she spits, ‘I can’t even tell if you’re the one I loved any more.’
The hands push her, and she’s being turned away from the table. It’s over now. No more. Safe now. No more blond, no blue -
He says something about going to the kitchens, but she knows she’s not spending another minute in this place.
As the door opens, Shinobu opens her eyes, looks back, and for a moment, however brief, however quick, she glimpses it -
Blue eyes staring at her, creased with emotion, though which one she can’t place. They are open, wide, and so, so blue, so different from Kosaku’s, and filled with tenderness. She has seen that before, when he had put a plaster around her toe, his face blushing fiercely even as he coldly told her to not put too much pressure on it, seen it when her hand had accidentally brushed his own, fingers tracing the bowl of his palm, when he had loomed above her in the dark, how even in the shadows she had been able to see it, the depth within, how something flickered and hesitated, something unsaid and beyond words.
His lips part, and for a moment his face takes on a whole new shift in emotion, something too vulnerable, too sad.
What had it been, that he had wanted to tell her, all those times? All those moments in the dark?
The officer pushes her through and the door clicks behind her. The corridor is nauseatingly white, the thrumming hum of air conditioning in the background the only sound. The officer shifts and the rustle of his uniform sounds like scratches down a chalkboard.
‘I’m sorry, Madam.’ he says. So many have said it these days. None of them mean in the right way. He gestures down the hall. ‘We can make you a nice cup of tea, if you’d -’
‘No.’ She wants out. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘Are you sure? We can -’
‘No.’ She wants to rake the skin off her neck with her nails, let flesh clump beneath them and blood run down her chest, her breasts. ‘I’d like to go home now, thank you.’
He nods and herds her down the corridor. The poor widow. The poor, poor victim. The worst one of all - and not in the way any of them mean it -
She’ll become acquainted with them all, soon. All these people, this place, long after he has gone. They’ll call her in for formal questioning, for an official interview, information about his character, about his behaviours, his motives, his movements. Already, they are coming to the house, to collect evidence, steal away parts of their lives - their lives? Her life, hers and Hayato’s -
And whoever it is ‘he’ is supposed to be.
This will become a home. Where all these secrets will spill forth, a ghost house, where memories and thoughts are brought to life again, to act out a shallow recreation of what happened, and then, Yoshikage/Kosaku will dance again with her, in and out of that ghost house, the real house, the line between alive and dead.
It will all happen, so very soon. And all she wants now is to enjoy the peace before the carnage begins.
Shinobu isn’t sure what she says, or if she says anything at all, but all she knows is that she’s on the front steps of the station, the officer by her side, giving that polite, tense smile she knows like the back of her palm by now.
‘Have a good afternoon, miss.’ he says.
She walks out into the warm sunlight of Morioh. It’s blinding. White on top of everything else. No need to see anything. Nothing but blank, pure space.
Shinobu stares out for as long as her eyes will let her, unto the blankness of nothing that she can get. She doesn’t want to think and see anything. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
She steps down. A group of people are gathered near the left hand side of the steps, huddled around something like a bunch of hooligans.
Another step, and a flash of red. Hayato.
He’s here. That her child is near a police station shouldn’t be second thought, second memory, and yet it is. That Hayato exists as something that is part of her yet not at all is almost horrifying to realise. He was her son - is her son, is her child, her flesh, her blood - and his, his flesh, his blood, his child -
Another step and she can focus on the people around him. A man in a white coat. Three teenagers, all in their school uniforms, brown schoolbags tied to their shoulders.
Another, and heads turn. It’s easier, when it’s not her.
Another, and she’s staring down at her son, her blue eyes in a face with bones borrowed from a man who grinds against dead and alive. Cold concrete presses against her knees
She feels something. Warm. Solid. Here.
She looks up.
A kid sits next to her, and he rests his hand gently on her shoulder. It is warm and comforting through the layers of her clothes.
His eyes are wide and kind and blue.
Something snaps. Like a flower stalk. The bones in a hand. A neck.
She howls into his shoulder, holding him tight, the last of her strength letting her do so, squeezing her eyes shut as tightly possible so she can block out the looks of warm sympathy, the gentle smiles of comfort and consolation that tell her she’s brave and so incredibly lucky, block out warm blue eyes and white suits and let herself merge in the darkness.