Free The Convict's Sword by I. J. Parker Page A

they had come through.
    “Would you describe the body for me?” Akitada said to Ihara.
    The young man pointed to the blood in front of the door. “She was just there, on her stomach, her head toward the door, and her feet toward us. She was wearing a white cotton robe, which was soaked in blood from many deep cuts on her back and front. Her hair had come loose, and she was cold to the touch when I arrived. Is that what you had in mind?”
    “Yes. Did she have any money on her?”
    “No.”
    Akitada began to move about cautiously, looking at everything. “She put up a terrible fight against her attacker,” he muttered at one point.
    The lieutenant gestured to the bedding. “After she accommodated him sexually.”
    Akitada bent to look at the blood-stained quilts more closely. “Really? How do you know?”
    Ihara laughed. “Well, somebody’s used the bedding and her sash was off when we found her. She was half naked.”
    “The coroner will tell us,” Akitada said, straightening up. His eye fell on the back door with its many paper strips. “Was that door latched?’ he asked.
    “The suspect claims he found it open.”
    “Hmm.” Akitada pursed his lips. “She did not try to escape that way,” he said. “I wonder why not.”
    “I imagine she was trying to reach her landlord and his family.”
    “Yes, perhaps.” Akitada studied the back door, then opened it. The flickering light from their lantern fell on a tiny veranda. Beyond lay a service yard containing a laundry tub, clothesline, some baskets, a small pile of faggots, a broom made of twigs, a rainwater barrel, and more stone tablets. A low wooden fence with a gate ran along a street that passed behind the houses.
    “Bring the light closer.” Akitada crouched down and looked at the weathered boards of the wooden stoop. Dusty shapes marked the print of boots and of dirty bare feet. It looked as though the boots went only one way, into the room, but the bare feet were both coming and going and had also shuffled about near the threshold. Akitada placed his own foot next to the prints. The boot print matched his closely, but the bare feet had belonged to someone much smaller.
    “Was the dead woman wearing shoes?”
    Ihara frowned. “I don’t recall. Why?”
    “Somebody barefoot was here.”
    The lieutenant was unimpressed and said that the boot prints belonged to the killer, and the dead woman had probably left the others on an earlier occasion. Akitada revised his good opinion of the lieutenant’s intelligence and did not mention the small cut in one of the strips of paper on the door. He had had to bend a little to see it closely and confirm that it had been made from the outside. Someone had spied on the woman inside, someone who was shorter than either he or Tora and who had been barefoot and carried a knife.
    Back in the dead woman’s room, Akitada considered the destruction. It looked accidental rather than intentional, a direct result of the victim’s attempt to escape her attacker. Being blind, she had kept to the walls, trying to reach the door to the hallway, and in her struggle against the knife-wielding killer, she had knocked her trunk away from the wall and grabbed for the shelf and torn it off. And all the time, the killer had been slashing and stabbing at her, for there was her blood on three of the walls and finally on the interior door, where the marks of bloody fingers had left vertical smears all the way to the threshold. She had died at the foot of this door, her lifeblood soaking into the dirt.
    Akitada looked with pity at the things that had fallen from the shelf. The woman’s life must have resembled that of a starving hermit. The single small earthenware bowl was in pieces but had been chipped long before, and her chopsticks were of plain rough wood. She did not own a large pot to cook rice in, but then she had no rice either. Evidently she purchased small amounts of food in the market and cooked them in a little iron pot on