Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.10

010

I figured that I would go along with walking to my alma mater as the athletic types would, but, as a non-athletic type, I decided to drive to our first meeting place, Kanbaru’s Japanese mansion (I may have wanted to show my juniors my driving skills). And to my surprise, there was no Ononoki-chan in the back seat.

So she wasn’t taking refuge here…? Then, perhaps she had gone to play at Sengoku’s place… She sure was active for a corpse.

Oh well, regardless, it wasn’t like I could take a tween girl to a girlsbas social… So, if things proceeded according to schedule, I was supposed to meet up with two of my juniors from Naoetsu High, Kanbaru Suruga and Higasa Seiu, but…

“Well, well, it has been a while, Araragi-senpai—how have you been? It’s me, Suruga-senpai’s biggest fan, the second-year, Oshino Ougi.”

The junior who greeted me at the huge gate of the Kanbaru residence was, astride a BMX, the high school boy version of Oshino Ougi—since the Kanbaru residence was Kanbaru Suruga’s territory, it seemed he was in boy mode.

As usual, he showed up with that sort of self-introduction.

How tactful of him.

“…What about the two high school girls?”

“It seems that they were delayed in shopping for the party, so they left me to watch the house. With Suruga-senpai having so much faith in me, isn’t it obvious that I was instructed to keep Araragi-senpai company?”

It was hard to believe Kanbaru would entrust Ougi-chan—er, Ougi-kun—with watching the house, but if it was obvious, then I guess nothing could be done.

It was obvious, after all.

“I also had some business to attend to with Suruga-senpai, so it was perfect timing. No need to worry, as I won’t do anything like follow you to that social. How about it? While we wait for those two to return, why don’t we form a duo and clean up Suruga-senpai’s room?”

“Two boys shouldn’t mess around in a girl’s room while she’s out…”

“Aah, Araragi-senpai, so you actually are conscious of Suruga-senpai as a girl? Have you been looking at my Suruga-senpai in that way?”

“……”

Boy mode Oshino Ougi was hard to deal with. No, I guess he was like this even when he was a girl? Either way, it felt pretty fresh for me, seeing as I never really had the chance to talk with other high school boys when I was in high school.

It was like, there was no need for Araragi Koyomi to stand firm against Oshino Ougi.

“Although, I’m secretly in the Higasa-senpai camp,” said Ougi-kun. “So no fighting over her, okay?”

“Even though you keep going on about Suruga-senpai. That’s way too secret. And fighting over her…”

“Ha ha. Then, would you like to trade and make your fave a ‘replacement child’?”9

“…Haha.”

I couldn’t let my guard down.

Even if “Ougi-kun” was the darkness in Kanbaru’s heart, he was still the exact same as the “Ougi-chan” that was the darkness in my heart, so I should’ve expected him to see through me to this extent.

Since he was Oshino Meme’s niece—Oshino Meme’s nephew.

“No, no, I don’t know anything. You’re the one who knows, Araragi-senpai.”

“I wish I did. I said this to Tsukihi-chan earlier, but I only know what I know.”

“In that case, how would you like to complain to your devoted junior about the circumstances that you know of? Just use that power dynamic to make me quietly listen without resistance.”

“Do I look like the kind of senior that would perform such a power play?”

Especially since you weren’t the type to listen quietly.

All you did was resist.

But, well, rather than wasting time in front of Kanbaru’s house, I may as well bring up child abuse and the professor’s disappearance as the topic of the conversation.

If I made the mistake of complaining to Kanbaru or Higasa-chan, it would do nothing but put a damper on the senior-junior social… This wasn’t the fable of “The King with Donkey Ears”, but if I chattered away at Ougi-chan… er, Ougi-kun, then perhaps it could lift my spirits.

With that excuse in mind, I summed things up as concisely as possible and bared my emotions to Ougi-kun—something like this was like talking to myself to the extreme, but, well, it was a tradition of Araragi Koyomi to be loose-lipped when Oshino Ougi was his conversation partner.

“I see. A threefold locked room. That makes me really happy. These days, we don’t hear much about locked-room tricks anymore, do we?”

“There’s no need for you to act all innocently happy about that. There may have been locked rooms, but none of the doors had any tricks on them.”

Ever since then, I’d been keeping the key to the professor’s apartment in the pocket of my pants, and shrugged my shoulders with that in mind—she’d disappeared before I could return it, but that didn’t mean I could throw it away, so I’d been carrying it around with me the whole time.

Maybe that was a bad thing.

“Not to mention, Ononoki-chan kicked down the second door.”

“Indeed. To put it in a rather dull way, producing impossible crimes such as locked-room murders is probably not what intellectual criminals do. Although there is no occupation more intellectual than a university professor,”

said Ougi-kun with a smirk.

Even when he heard a story full of heavy words like “abuse” and “disappearance”, he didn’t waver a bit—regardless of his gender, he had to be like this, huh.

“So, what do you think? Ougi-kun.”

“And what do you mean by what I think?”

“About the contradiction. Of the right and wrong behind the action of stabbing a cloth doll that looked like her own child, and then locking it in a cage.”

“If it’s a question of right or wrong, then it’s most certainly wrong. And if it’s a matter of the contradictory spear and shield, then I would say it’s the shield.”

“The shield?”

“It’s self-protection. Defense. For reference, the spear would be aggression based on resentment and murderous intent.”

“…Stabbing a defenseless doll in the back is self-protection?”

“Yes. A cowardly crime, to kill before you yourself are killed.”

He’d said it wasn’t something an intellectual criminal would do, but a cowardly crime… His criticism of Associate Professor Iesumi was pretty intense.

Was that coming from my inner psyche?

But Ougi-kun was different from Ougi-chan in that the origin of his existence was based on Kanbaru… But, in terms of what lay beneath Kanbaru’s surface…

“Oh please, Araragi-senpai. I’m not criticizing Associate Professor Iesumi at all.”

“Eh?”

“After all, there’s no evidence—we can’t assume that Associate Professor Iesumi is the one who stabbed the defenseless doll in the back.”

Innocent until proven guilty—said Ougi-kun.

Of course, as a resident of a constitutional state, I was certainly aware of that rule… But, huh?

It was true that there was no evidence. Now that he mentioned it.

It wasn’t as if forensics came in and checked the fingerprints on the fruit knife, and more importantly, they didn’t perform any interview of the person in question… It was all something I’d just come up with on my own.

I was the one who knew—

“There was no criminal investigation performed. If I had to say it, then what was performed was simply media manipulation.”

“……”

Hold on. I had to think about this properly.

It was a matter of civil rights… It wasn’t the first time for Ougi-kun to jump on one of my carelessly-made comments, but if it became a hotbed for false accusations, then it needed to be examined seriously.

Right.

It was a contradiction.

I had felt very uncomfortable in the nursery because I’d felt that the act of stabbing in the back the abused doll that resembled one’s child was inconsistent, but if I interpreted it in parts, the contradictory spear and shield would not clash.

As for the “truth” that she locked her “three-year-old daughter” in a cage at home, she’d confessed that in her own stammering words when she made the request to me… So when I saw the blade stuck in the doll in the cage, I didn’t hesitate to accept that it was also the work of Associate Professor Iesumi.

“However, you just went and felt uncomfortable all on your own, didn’t you? When people feel things like, ‘This is weird,’ or, ‘How did this happen?’ or, ‘Why did things turn out like this…’, it’s usually because multiple people were rampantly involved from multiple directions. That’s why it goes beyond your comprehension.”

Multiple people—multiple culprits.

No, that made it sound as if there was an accomplice, but in this case, if this was a complete division of labor by individual people with no communication…

A system where confidentiality is maintained by dividing the work into small segments and assigning them to large numbers of disparate people so that no one can see the big picture—a system where not only outsiders, but also the people themselves, didn’t know what they were doing.

To put it simply.

I hadn’t considered at all the possibility that the “culprit that had encaged” Iie-chan and the “culprit that had stabbed” Iie-chan were completely different people.

The act of abusing her, and the act of murdering her.

The pieces of the puzzle seemed to sit right next to each other, and yet they did not need to be joined together.

“……”

But… It raised some other questions.

First, if we adopted the idea that there was a child murderer in addition to a child abuser, then the question was, who and where were they?

And how did they manage to carry out the crime?—was another question. That was what good old-fashioned mysteries were about. Threefold secret rooms and impossible crimes.

Most of the logic that was based on the fact that the crime scene was Associate Professor Iesumi’s home collapsed, and the killer’s image, motive, and trick became inexplicable.

“Not quite.”

“What do you mean, Ougi-kun?”

“That sort of typical assistant role doesn’t suit you, Araragi-senpai. I don’t know anything, so please use your brain cells to think about the main point. Your little gray cells, that is.”

How shameless.

But I couldn’t get used to relying on this kid—I’ll stretch out the wings of my imagination as far as I can so that I can get to say the phrase that suits me: “It’s elementary, my dear Ougi-kun.”

Putting aside the motive for now. Not like I was the queen of motives. In the case of Associate Professor Iesumi, whether it was abuse or murder, “because she is my daughter” (which should be the reason to protect her) could paradoxically be connected to the motive… If there was another culprit, then there were infinite variations on why people would kill other people.

“I dunno about that. Most of the time, people kill for love, grudges, money, or war. If you include accidents, then there are only five patterns. You can count them on one hand.”

It seemed that Ougi-kun took on the role of my assistant, but he was quite the nasty assistant… He was just making fun of me instead of supporting my detective role at all.

He should never take charge of the narration.

“When it comes to a reason to kill a three-year-old, perhaps we should include perverted sexual desire as a motive. Not to mention, it would be a doll.”

What the heck.

Anyway, putting the motive aside… What about the locked-room trick?

The bolt lock on the cage wasn’t a problem. It didn’t even require lockpicking. However, the only one who could unlock the nursery door, as well as the front door, was the homeowner, Associate Professor Iesumi, herself—

“I wonder about that. After all, the first door was unlocked by you, Araragi-senpai, and the second door was spectacularly broken through by Ononoki-chan, correct?”

With superficial politeness, my assistant’s verbal jabs did not stop—but see, I could respond to that. After all, the second door was broken through, as if knocked down with a battering ram.

Rather than spectacular, it was destruction I would rather not spectate.

Even I could only open the first door because the homeowner had entrusted me with the key, and without it, it would have been impossible to get into that locked room—or did the culprit have a spare key?

Perhaps they temporarily borrowed the house key from the professor’s key ring… Or they stole the master key from the apartment’s management…

“Huh? What if… they didn’t have to go that far?”

What if it wasn’t a spare key?

If it wasn’t—then the locked-room nature of the second door, and the problem of the motive that I had set aside… Frighteningly enough, they could all be solved in one fell swoop.

“Wh, wh-wh, what do you m-m-m-mean? Th, th-th, that they didn’t, didn’t, didn’t, have to go that f, f-f-f-far.”

“Don’t start pretending to be an assistant now.”

That assistant was trembling way too much. He’s so out of his mind he’s acting like a DJ.

Why couldn’t you do things properly?

No, the one who couldn’t do things properly was me—this deduction was something I should’ve come up with when I was right there.

I opened my mouth.

If it wasn’t a spare key, but a legitimate key that the owner had proper ownership of.

“It’s not necessarily the case that the estranged husband left his keys behind when he left that apartment, right?”