The Fine Art of Invisible Detection by Robert Goddard EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Robert Goddard
- Language: English
- Genre: Murder
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
UMIKO WADA WASN’T A PRIVATE DETECTIVE. SHE JUST WORKED FOR ONE. She
answered his phone, managed his accounts, kept his records, talked through
problems with him, greeted his visitors, fetched him bento-boxed lunches and
made him tea, which he’d taken to drinking virtually all day now he’d
supposedly given up smoking.
The sign on the door of the seventh-floor office in the Nihonbashi district
of Tokyo where Wada spent her working days described it as the premises of
the Kodaka Detective Agency. But there was only one detective in the
agency: fifty-eight-year-old Kazuto Kodaka. There’d been several detectives,
apparently, when Kodaka senior was in charge. But his son preferred to
operate alone. What would happen if and when his body collapsed under the
strain of his unhealthy habits and chronic overwork was easy to predict.
Wada would need a new job. Which wasn’t a happy thought. She liked this
job. It suited her.
She always thought of herself as Wada rather than Umiko because that was
how Kodaka referred to her. It had seemed disrespectful at first. Now she was
rather fond of it. It reinforced an image of herself she’d honed over years of
being alone. Simple, strong, independent. That was Wada. Umiko was a girl
she’d once been. The Wada she’d become was nearly forty-seven, though she
looked younger, probably because, as her mother regularly reminded her,
she’d never had children to raise and worry over.
That wasn’t Wada’s fault, as her mother used to acknowledge but now
seemed inclined to forget. She was a widow. Her husband Tomohiko – Hiko,
as she’d called him and still did, in the privacy of her own thoughts – had
been killed in the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway back in 1995, though
technically he hadn’t actually died until twelve years later. The decade and a
bit he’d spent in a coma froze Wada’s life. Her mother had still hoped, when
he finally expired, that Wada would find somebody else to marry. But it had
never happened.
Sometimes, though she’d never have admitted it to anyone, she was glad
she hadn’t gone on in the world with Hiko, bearing his children, keeping
house for him, cooking, cleaning, deferring, conforming. She was as sorry as
anyone could be that he’d died as he had. There was a time when she’d been
sorry on the same account for herself. But that time had passed. That was
why she’d finally dropped his surname and gone back to the one she was
born with: Wada.
She’d met Kodaka because of the sarin attack. He was gathering evidence
to use against members of Aum Shinrikyo, the murderous cult responsible, on
behalf of relatives of other victims and wanted to know if Hiko had said
anything to her, before lapsing into his coma, about Yozo Sasada, the cult
member who’d released the gas in the train carriage Hiko had been travelling
in that fateful spring morning in 1995. No, was the answer. Hiko was already
unconscious when she’d reached the hospital. He’d said nothing. To her or
anyone else.
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