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

her hibachi. Her food stores were pitiful. A handful of dry millet had spilled from a twist of paper, and among the shards of the bowl lay a few leaves of cabbage and a tiny piece of dried fish.
    He tried to remember her. She had been thin, yes, but had she actually looked starved? Surely she had had enough customers, even without adding prostitution to her labors, to live better than this.
    The tangled bedding also was quite old and had been mended many times, the stitches and patches grossly uneven. It must have been difficult to work by touch alone. The more he considered her struggle to survive, the more he was filled with wonder. That same spirit had caused her to fight against her killer even when it was hopeless.
    He turned his attention to the trunk. It had intrigued him from the start, because it was lacquered and had once been expensive. He opened it, expecting more surprises, but it was nearly empty. Only a few pieces of rough clothing, neatly folded, lay on the bottom. He had no wish to paw through a dead woman’s private possessions, but made himself do a cursory check. A few cheap cotton scarves, two pairs of cotton trousers, and two cotton jackets, the sorts of clothes worn by peasant women, scullery maids, and outcasts, were all that she had owned. If she had plied a trade as a streetwalker, she had certainly made no attempt to look attractive to men. The trunk apparently also held her bedding in the daytime. How very different were the arrangements in most houses. Each member of Akitada’s family had four trunks, one for the clothing of each season. And bedding had a separate storage place.
    Tomoe had been very poor.
    Akitada was about to drop the lid again, when he noticed a faint bulge under the bottom layer of clothes. He pulled out a small black lacquer box, a box most beautifully decorated with a design of fish cavorting among waves. The pictures were drawn in gold lacquer and the fish scales inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It was an altogether exquisite piece.
    He opened the lid, and found that the inside of the box was painted with flowers of the four seasons and that it contained cosmetics. A twisted paper held powder to whiten the face, and small compartments were filled with kohl to outline the eyes and paint eyebrows, tweezers to pluck eyebrow hairs so the new ones could be painted above them, rouge for the lips, and a vial of tooth-blackening liquid. They were the sorts of cosmetics used by highborn ladies or elegant courtesans. What possible use were they to a blind street singer? There was no mirror in the room, any more than the windowless space had needed any lamps. Had she stolen the box for resale? If so, why had she not sold it long ago?
    Among the twisted papers containing various powders he found another puzzle. One of the paper packages felt hard under his fingers. He undid it and saw that it contained three pieces of silver, an astonishing amount of money for someone who lived on the edge of starvation.
    He showed his find to the lieutenant, who was first excited, then angry.
    “Those lazy louts should have found it when they searched the room. You were right, sir. The pieces of dung cannot be trusted with an investigation. When they told me the dead woman had no money, I wondered if she’d been robbed. I suppose this proves she wasn’t. So we are still working with an unpremeditated act, with a crime of passion?”
    “Hmm.” Akitada flattened out the paper and saw some faint characters written on it, not with ink and brush, but with something like charcoal. The characters had become smudged from handling, but he thought they were names: Nobunari and Nobuko—the first male, the second female. Was the money theirs? Or had she simply wrapped the coins in a discarded piece of paper she had found somewhere? Paper was not readily available to someone who could neither read nor write. He corrected himself. It was theoretically possible for a blind person to write, provided that person had