Author's note: so okay, I'm being suicidal again, but really, I can't help it. I know I've begun a KaitoAoko chapter story already, and a HeijiKazu one, but that obviously meant I would come out with a ShinRan one sooner or later. Well, that time has come. And for once, the whole story's written out before I start publishing now, so the chappies should be updated on a regular basis (let's live in hope). It's a try of a real detective story. I thought I'd give it a shot.
Disclaimer: I don't own Detective Conan's rights. I don't own Ran, who's the main character in this, or Sonoko, or whoever's going to appear in this story, Shinichi included (yes, yes, he's in here!); I don't even own the names, I had to peel off every DC volume to find them. I'm not such a master in Japanese names. I'm babbling, okay.
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Lawyer's problem
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"Something wicked this way comes."
Macbeth
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Sunlight was bathing the opposite roof, just outside the window. It played on the tiles in delicately chased puddles of golden water, swaying and changing and blurring at the edges, when a light mist of heat screened the sun's brightness for one or two seconds, and a light grey shade challenged to take over to take over the pool of light – before a breeze shook the mist away and it disappeared in a swirl of smoke, leaving the roof's brilliance pure and unscathed.
A flash of silver, when it touched the glass of an open skylight over to the left; a faint glimmer of the roof's auburn red through the light gold; a line of blue shade just underneath the dark-grey tube of the gutter; and then below, the long surface of the wall descending to the street,– but to see that one had to bend outside over the windowframe and look downward, and Ran had other business to care about.
She appreciated the light, thank you very much, for casting itself over her writing table, thus sparing her the need of switching the lamp on in the morning; in fact, the early sunbeams flounced inside the bureau with careless familiarity, lit up the walls' whiteness and the bookcases' brown wood, and drowned the carpet in a flood of morning light. It was one of the last mornings of a summer that had been hot and shiny, and it was still enthusiastically luminous until it would eventually have to resolve in the greyer shades of autumn, and then winter.
For the moment, as foretold, Ran had other business to care about. As a lawyer (and at twenty-eight she was one of the best hopes of her generation), the reading of the morning papers, happily supplied with tons of extra coffee, was a ritual she could hardly escape to – since any occurrence, however small, even a merely insignificant fait divers, could turn out important, meaningful or even crucial in cases she was working on. And she still had to survey her colleagues' trials.
Doing so, she could scarcely avoid the more than occasional mention of Kudo Shinichi's name, in the narrative of some theft of murder case he had successfully solved; but ten years ha gone way and all that it cost her now was – say, a wince, half a shrug, and she resumed her careful lecture. (When she thought about it, it was perhaps very strange that they had never confronted in court, but she wasn't going to complain about it.)
When the papers were read through, they were folded and set aside on a tablet, and the morning post passed into inspection. Bills and correspondence with her costumers formed the majority of it, accompanied from time to time by letters of thanks; she peered over them while finishing the coffee pot. Mechanical were the gestures of tearing the envelope open, extricating the paper from it, unfolding it, pouring part of her attention and concentration onto the formally printed words, reaching the signature and finally placing it aside to take up another.
The chair's back was soft and deep behind her back, and the sunlight warm onto her cheek, bathing her sitting position in an agreeable glow; and she was slowly nodding off to a sunny, drowsy dreamland when she was suddenly roused from that sleepiness by the sight of a familiar writing on one of the envelopes. She blinked, and for a second or so contemplated the letter disbelievingly – she had not received anything written from Sonoko since that postcard of her friend's honeymoon five years before. Why bother writing when it was so much simpler to pick up one's phone – that was Sonoko's point, and she was rich enough not to care about telephone bills.
Astonishment acquired skyrocket proportions when, upon tearing the paper open, she discovered inside multiple sheets clumsily folded, clipped by Sonoko's scrawl-like writing.
'Dear Ran-chan,' it ran,
'We are having a problem here.' (Ran frowned at this and read more attentively; when Sonoko didn't chat for half an hour before coming to the point and was actually serious from the start, it was necessarily important.) 'I thought that as a lawyer, you'd have enough experience on such matters to offer us help, while keeping the essential discretion.
'You've probably seen in the papers (I know how carefully you read them) that we have welcomed in one of our secondary residences a group of scientists and lawyers who needed a quiet location for a common study – don't expect me to tell you what it's about, it's not my business to ask. Makoto and I knew some of them, and they demanded that house particularly – though I think what they want is discretion rather than isolation.'
If it was so and the 'secondary residence' was the one Ran thought about, the choice was a good one – backed into the woods, miles away from any inhabited place, since the only neighbouring villa had been abandoned by its owners more than ten years in the past, the only access to it was a fragile bridge of string and crossing a ravine. Discretion there was an euphemism.
'The first problem showed up two or three days before that, by the morning post, in the shape of an anonymous letter warning us not to accept our guests there – under the pretext that crimes had been committed in the house before – I'm sure you remember about that – and it was now under a curse.'
Ran repressed a shudder that had nothing to do with cold : the window and her desk were drenched with sunlight.
'Of course, we didn't pay any attention to it, and the guests arrived and the study began as formerly planned. The night immediately after that, however, more anonymous letters were slid under people's doors: ours, and one of our guests', both on the third floor. they were not found until morning, and the messages they contained were mostly threatening us for having overstepped the first notice and calling the house's curse upon us or something of the kind.
'It's didn't stop there. Every morning following there were similar letters to be found on the bedrooms' threshold – nobody has been excepted and some of us have received two, or several more. The real trouble is, the author, or Poison Pen, or whatever, is necessarily someone of the house. All the notes have been found inside the building, during nighttime, when the gate and doors are closed, which means nobody can get in. So it must have been one of them.
'There hasn't been any real incident, but I don't feel good about this. Makoto and I are leaving for Mexico at the end of the week, and we don't like to leave the whole of them in the house with only one or two menservants, with perhaps a lunatic in the lot. And the letters are getting worse. They were merely menacing at first, but now they've become really frightening – I'm afraid the person who wrote them is mentally unbalanced and might turn out dangerous.
'I know you're a busy person, but I would really appreciate it if you visited us before the end of the week. Your being a lawyer provides you with a good cover since there are two others among us, and your experience could be of some help – if not to act, at least to give us some advice. Be sure to call as soon as you receive this–"
Ran reached the end of the letter with mixed feelings. In a postscript, Sonoko explained that she had rather not call, for fear the culprit should overhear and guess her intentions, whereas a letter posted at the nearest village was not likely to rouse suspicion; and it would have all been very well if Ran had been impressed – which she was not. Sonoko had always had an overdeveloped sense of drama. 'As a lawyer', and as a corpse-magnet-detective's daughter, Ran had witnessed worse than anonymous letters.
When she read the letter through a second time, she felt the matter deserved to be looked into further. That a Poison Pen should be counted among guests assembled over a secret study in a lonesome mansion was an interesting circumstance, and she could not very well decide of the gravity of the situation 'till she had read the letters and agreed, or not, upon their supposedly 'dangerous' consequences… there was no harm in visiting one's old childhood friends, anyhow.
When she dialled the number Sonoko had scribbled on the first sheet's right-hand corner, however, the composed voice of a manservant at the other end of the line responded to her enquiries that Suzuki Sonoko was not a home presently, and could he take a message.
Ran balanced for a second between accepting or calling Sonoko on her cell phone, then deciding to tackle the matter professionally, replied, "Yes – this is Mouri Ran. Please tell Sonoko that I have received her letter, and will visit her tomorrow in the morning." That was innocent enough; even if the message was repeated publicly, it could not mean anything serious. "If she wishes to alter this – she can call me back, she knows my number."
"Certainly, miss. Thank you for calling. Goodbye, miss."
"Goodbye."
The click of hanging up on the other end, and Ran's hand on the receiver hesitated a second before putting it down. She was not altogether certain that this had been the wisest solution she could take, not considering the matter at hand, but considering some ten-years-old events. When she had last visited that secondary residence of Sonoko's, she had been fully ignorant of a knowledge that had had greatly, and not for the better, influenced some of the most important choices she had had to make later on – and going back there could very well force back recollections she didn't want intruding.
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Ran's first surprise, in reaching the villa, was to discover that the ravine, which previously forbid any car from passing on, had in the interim been partly filled in, and an actual bridge of stone had been built over it to replace the fragile former one, thus allowing her drive up directly to the mansion. The second surprise was to find the building grown with two wings, one on each side; it now resembled one of these old Elizabethan houses overseas in England, smaller in proportion, but similar in shape.
That, she thought as she pulled up below the steps was a relief: with those differences and the ten years' time that had elapsed in between, the mansion differed enough from the one she used to know to make recollection less painful, and memory itself could but shrink. At least she'd be able to handle the matter of Sonoko's anonymous letters without something constantly snagging at the back of her mind.
The front door was opened, almost before she had time to knock, by a butler in a livrée, with a Jeeves-like poker face and the composed voice that had answered her on the phone. He gave a stiff little bow and said, drenched in cold politeness, "Mouri Ran-san? Please come in, miss. Suzuki-san has been waiting for you."
Ran was then ushered inside – the doors banging shut behind her – in a quick succession of rooms passing by, until they were at last met halfway through by one very enthusiastic Sonoko. Arms were flung around Ran's neck, a high-pitched voice's greetings, and for a second they were eighteen all over again, back to being best friends in high school.
However, when they sat together in her bureau – a large, well-furnished room with sunlight floundering in through the tall window – Sonoko recovered all the seriousness and noble mien proper to the heir of the Suzuki family. She got out a dossier from a drawer and handed it over, without a word; forced back into her position of a lawyer, Ran received it ceremoniously and inspected the letters.
Somebody – Makoto-kun, probably; Sonoko was too absent-minded to think about it – had been sensible enough to classify and date them. In shape they were all the same – black, neatly-printed letters on white, rectangular cards – and in message they varied but little: from the very first 'Do not accept that study into your house' to the last theme of 'Thou hast been warnt', the evolution was only what Sonoko had described to her in her letter – if merely menacing at first, the writer seemed to have become exasperated by the lack of reaction, and the threats had turned grim and dark in proportion.
No misspelling or grammar mistakes that she could see, and the cards were such that they could have been printed out of anyone's computer. No – the only peculiarity resided perhaps in that few letters were impersonal or generally applicable; the message aimed almost each time at a particular somebody, which tended to confirm the hypothesis of their author's being one of the guests. Ran observed this to Sonoko, who said they had remarked that, too.
"Is there anything more on these cards here, anything you can see," she asked greedily, "that might turn out as a clue? Anything that could help us discover the author of them?"
"Only that they've been printed out of a computer, which is rather clever," Ran observed. "In a book, if one was to write an anonymous letter, one would cut letters out of some daily and paste them on a sheet of paper so as to form a message without having to write anything, but in reality that's far too easily traceable. Even if one burnt the newspapers there would always remain suspicious pieces of articles that had unbeknownst flown through the window or a significant amount of ashes in the hearth. But a file in a computer – deleted with one click, and no trace to be found. It adds to the dangerous side, if anything. Is that all there is?"
"All that I know of," Sonoko answered. "Tell me, Ran – what do you think? What are we to do? Is it worth calling for the police–" (anxiously) "–because that's precisely what I want to avoid. Or some paid detective? Anything?"
At the mention of a paid detective, Ran's face had darkened, and for a second they had the same person in mind. Then, slowly, "If you really want no scandal, I think it's better not to call for the police – yet. Our man – or woman – doesn't seem dangerous to speak of, but he or she may become so."
"Then what?"' Because we can't stay like that. Makoto and I are leaving for Mexico on Sunday and–"
"–and you can't leave with an unwatched maniac ready to slaughter half your guests, I grasped that." Ran was silent for a second, pause after which she added more thoughtfully, "When exactly did you receive that first letter?"
"By morning post the day just before the study started – that's Monday of the past week."
"And then every night after that?"
"Just so." Sonoko shifted restlessly in her chair; she looked anxious and nervous about the whole business. "Most of them were slid under bedroom doors to be found in the morning, but sometimes they were found in a drawer, or under one's plate–" she made a vague, rather dejected wave of the hand, hastily checked; then a more decisive look settled on her face, and she bent slightly forward across her desk. Hands brought together on her leather tablet, fingertip joined to fingertip, she for once looked thoroughly like the businesswoman she was meant to be. "Do understand, Ran – this cannot go on. The Suzuki's are a rich and respectable family, and we can't – I can't – allow a common criminal to bring scandal to tarnish out reputation."
That was an aspect of Sonoko Ran was not able to understand. To her mind, better risk the publicity of a police inspection than murder done – but perhaps that was only the argument of a lawyer, to whom scandals brought clients.
"Look – I'll tell you what," she said finally. "I'll stay over 'till the end of the week; and if there has been no alteration by Sunday we'll decide of what to do – whether this requires dealing by professionals or not."
Sonoko beamed at so brilliantly Ran was immediately convinced that this solution was what she had tended to all the while, but she felt all the more patient and amused that she had missed the frivolity of her former conversations with her best friend. As annoying and boy-hunter as Sonoko had been at seventeen, she had been her most precious best friend and the one person she could confide in – yet, what with her own life-taking job and Sonoko's constant travelling, they hardly saw each other twice a year now.
It was agreed between them that Ran would go back home that day, to fetch clothes and stuff, and then would come back the next as a perfectly genuine guest. When, however, she drove up to the sun-bathed entry the following morning, she was not met in the hall by Sonoko but by the butler from yesterday, who informed her that 'Suzuki-san had been taken away on an urgent and completely unexpected account, and would probably be late for lunch.'
He had seized her luggage and was preparing to show her to her room, when a white-dressed figure with a spot of blond hair and a smiling composure called out in a familiar voice, "Why, it's Mouri Ran-chan! Have you come to visit Sonoko-chan, or do you intend to solve our local mystery?"
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Yep – no Shinichi appearing in this. Don't kill me… ? And in case you wonder, the house is the one they stay over in vol. 4 (correct me if that's a mistake), and there's that awful case of the beheaded woman… it's a good location. Lost and abandoned amidst the woods… grin
And just to let you know, today's rather a special day for me. Not only the day I'm publishing this, thus forecasting my death in trying to finish it in time… but today's actually my birthday. Yep – I'm eighteen now. I'm a grown girl.
Hope you liked the read…