The Master Key Read online

  Her mind swam. Before her eyes proceeded a vision of the faces of the residents of the apartment block. The blame had to fall on someone who had no work, who was generally at home throughout the day, someone who was unpopular or regarded with suspicion… passing the key would be just like getting rid of the Queen in the children’s card game called Slippery Ann!

  As if in a trance, she left the room, locking the door as she went, and hurried back to the staircase. She made her way up one flight of stairs and took off her slippers. She crept along the corridor and paused in front of the fifth door from the landing, Room 305. She looked around cautiously, and listened. No one about! Putting her ear to the door, she made sure that there was no sound from within. Just to make certain, she surreptitiously turned the doorknob; it was locked. She quickly slipped the master key into the keyhole.

  Her feelings at that moment were a mixture of the relief of one who has just discarded a heavy load and the exhaustion brought on by pointless labour. She bent down and put on her slippers, noticing the while that the tally still swung on its red ribbon from the master key in the lock.

  All trace of envy or sense of inferiority towards Toyoko Munekata had melted away on seeing those pitiful manuscripts, but she had no sense of triumph from laying bare her adversary’s secret. She only felt as if the bonds of circumstance which had linked her to Toyoko for so long had been cut, and she was on her own in a world of darkness and aimlessness. She felt that she would have been better off in her previous ignorance. Suddenly she felt hatred and anger towards the man who had telephoned her. Why had he done it? What was his purpose? How had he known what was going on? How had he known her feelings towards Toyoko? She began to dread this unknown man, this omniscient plotter who had drawn her into his schemes. For a moment everything went black as she wondered who this person was who must have visited Toyoko’s room before she did; then, with slumped shoulders she walked back along the corridor, this time quite careless of any sound her slippers might make on the floorboards.

  PART FOUR

  Four months before the building was moved

  The case of Noriko Ishiyama

  At about two am, two contrasting black shadows confronted each other in the deserted kitchen of the third floor. One was large, the other small. The large shadow kept hissing at the small one, which reared its tail, mewed grumpily and leaped up onto the windowsill. The larger shadow squatted down and foraged in the oil drum that did service as a trash-can under the sink and, finding a few fishbones, scooped them into an earthenware casserole in her lap and beat a silent retreat.

  As she emerged into the dim light in the corridor, a watcher would have recognised Noriko Ishiyama, an old woman with lank dry hair and the gait of a crazy beggar-woman. She was known to the other inhabitants of the building as ‘Miss Bladderwrack’—after the worn and ragged edges of the trailing skirts she always affected. Until her mid-forties, she had been an art teacher at a primary school, but had spent the last three years living on Public Assistance.

  She always wore an old pair of canvas shoes with rubber soles. She found it easier to walk in them, and they had the additional advantage of silence.

  Her objective on these midnight foraging trips was always the same—fishbones. She went from floor to floor, hunting down the bones and heads discarded by the other residents after their evening meals. The reason for this lay in the advice given to her by a doctor six years before. ‘You must take lots of calcium,’ he had said. ‘For instance, eat fish heads and bones—it’ll be good for you.’

  This was after she had slipped and fallen on the apartment stairway while wearing Wellington boots. She had damaged her hip-bone, and had gone to see the doctor. His advice to her then had remained the guiding principle of her life. In fact, the diagnosis was erroneous, but nonetheless as a result of it Noriko had given up everything else which lent meaning to her existence, obsessively concentrating instead on the search for, the boiling and the slow mastication of, heads and bones, which she ate completely, leaving no waste.

  She returned to her room just by the landing and glanced swiftly around before slipping inside. As she had learned to match her actions to those of an alley cat, she had acquired the same instincts and no longer had to spend much time in reassuring herself that she was unobserved.

  The name card on her door was stained by years of dirt, but one who examined it closely could just make out the lettering against the once-white background: ‘305 Ishiyama Noriko’. The lettering was done by hand in an elegant italic script denoting the fact that the writer was someone with a gift for such things. In fact, until she had suffered her fall her room had been full of dainty little book-containers, dolls and paintings all reflecting in their pure lines and bright colours the childish hands that had made them; there had hardly been any space left on the walls, the shelves and the table-tops. Nowadays, however, the whole room had an unpleasant fishy smell such as no normal person could stand for more than a minute or so.

  After his first diagnosis of a cracked bone, the original doctor had diagnosed nervous pains, and indeed within a year Noriko was laid up with all sorts of aches; the balance between her nerves and her resistance was soon destroyed. Her imaginary pains became real, and every day she felt them in some place or other. They became the central feature of her life, and she spent her energies trying to diagnose them for herself, looking up the names in medical books.

  She visited one doctor after another, but none of them was good enough to name her illness. Instead, they would laugh and say, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s all in the mind.’

  Finally, she had had to give up her job, and with it went the necessary income to visit doctors. Thenceforth she could only discuss her ailments with her neighbours in the apartment block. She would waylay in turn anyone she could and chronicle her various aches and pains. At first, they used to listen sympathetically, but they soon found her a bore—and, worse still, began to treat her as a madwoman.

  When her audience had finally vanished, Noriko Ishiyama set about creating her own little world in her room. She began to live like a mouse. After all, a mouse can’t complain of its pains to human beings; a mouse makes its nest in a cupboard and only emerges at night. Indeed, on her midnight foragings she would sometimes imagine herself to be a mouse.

  Her first steps on the path to a rodent’s existence were to divorce herself from the everyday conveniences of human life. She switched off her gas supply at the main. She would have done the same to the electricity, removing the fuses, but she needed some light for her nocturnal existence and so changed her light bulb for the smallest she could buy, a dim light such as normal people leave on all night in the toilet.

  By this cheese-paring, Noriko was able to reduce her gas and light bills, normally the smallest item in the budgets of her neighbours, to almost nothing. Also, she did her best to make do with what other people had thrown away. There was plenty for her to glean amongst the trash discarded in this large block of flats.

  After five or six years of this existence, her floor was covered with other people’s rubbish so that she had to pick her steps with care. In just the same way, mice too pull together all that they can find… Her storage cupboard was emptied and became her bed; all the rest of the floor space was littered and piled high with junk.

  By night, the weird silhouettes of piles of cardboard boxes, newspapers and worn rags heaped in old wicker baskets were projected strangely against the walls and ceiling by the tiny low-watt lamp.

  She entered the room and, picking her way with accustomed skill between the empty cans and bottles that littered the floor, made her way to a pot-bellied stove with a chimney that stood by the windowsill. She put down the earthenware casserole on top of it. The fire within glimmered faintly, fed as it was by finely shredded cardboard, newspaper balls and odd scraps of wood. She stoked it up, and a faint haze of white steam rose above the casserole which begun to bubble as the stove got hotter. There was a scratching at the door; t
he smell of the boiling fish scraps had reached the corridor.

  ‘Beastly cat! Who said there’d be any for you?’ she said, turning where she stood by the stove and glancing in the direction of the door. The malice in her voice was very real.

  She poured a little soy-sauce into the casserole and, picking up a fish by its tail, used it to stir the brew. The silence of the room was broken by the bubbling of the pot and the sound of her sucking the fish scraps and slowly munching the bones.

  The meal—if such it could be called, for it was to her more of a cure—lasted for about an hour. Then she rose from the pile of newspapers which served her as a chair and opened the sliding door of her storage cupboard. Picking up the lampstand with its trailing flex and tiny bulb, she carried it as if it was a candlestick and entered the cupboard.

  Her bed made up the bottom half. The sides of the cupboard, and her bedding too, were covered with a fine white powder. It was DDT, which she sprinkled regularly, fearing that her unmade bed would otherwise become a breeding ground for insects. She wanted to keep her person, at least, clean. Her bed consisted of three under-mattresses, covered by a sheet which was so worn that the pattern of the cloth below showed through. A permanent hollow was worn in the centre, which fitted her body to her satisfaction. Above this were spread an ancient blanket with dirty edging and a heavy quilt, the stuffing of which had worked its way into the four corners, leaving nothing in the centre except the covering material. This deficiency was remedied by piling old newspapers on top of where the kapok should have been. The whole arrangement was a grubby chaos, but at least the bed was warm.

  Noriko put the lamp on an old orange box by her pillow, closed the sliding door and sat on top of the bed. Now that two doors separated her from the outside world, she felt at peace—just like a mouse in its nest. She reached into the orange box and took out a tea-caddy which she up-ended, scattering its contents on the bed. An old brooch, a broken wrist watch, a magnet, a fragment of a mirror—the sort of rubbish a child would collect—such were her treasures. But amongst them was the master key with its wooden tally. She took it up, discarding the rest, and laid it on her pillow. Since finding it in the lock of her door a week before, she had taken it out and examined it every night, pondering on the reason for its having turned up there.

  Just as a mouse will carefully examine the bait in a trap, occasionally touching it with its forepaws, so Noriko now inspected the key, picking it up from time to time and then replacing it on the pillow. One thing at least was clear to her: the loss of the master key having been announced on the noticeboard downstairs three days before, there was no possibility of her now returning it without incurring suspicion. But she could think of no way in which she could use the key for her own purposes.

  Having adopted the life of an animal, her instincts were enough to convince her that this master key was something dangerous, boding ill-fortune for her.

  PART FIVE

  The stolen violin

  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!’