Surrender?

A woman from the neighboring apple orchard happened to see Takeda Ryuji return while taking a break from farm work—

"But—it was only just two o'clock then. If the victim arrived at the Takeda family home within half an hour after Takeda Ryuji got back and asked him to open the door, Ryuji could still have let him in and killed him—" Yamane frowned as he forcibly pushed forward his own speculation.

Two-thirty was both the lower limit of the estimated time of death and the time when Ryuji called the police.

His claim that he got home at two did indeed match Ryuji's statement.

But if so, waiting half an hour before calling the police seemed rather too late.

Although Ryuji claimed that he had not discovered the body immediately, but had searched room by room after noticing that other rooms had been ransacked, eventually finding the body before calling the police, the explanation was too far-fetched. The police were clearly skeptical.

Now that someone had seen him return home at two, it somewhat confirmed that he had delayed calling the police by half an hour—

However, Shiraishi shook his head at that moment. "No. If only Negishi was there, that can't prove Ryuji would have opened the door for him."

And if Shinichi had been there too, then Shinichi's current disappearance was itself the flaw in the locked-room mystery!

Okamoto also said awkwardly from the side, "And—Aunt Sato from the apple orchard said that she rested for around half an hour at the time. She had been looking into the distance the entire time and did not see anyone enter the Takeda family home."

It could be argued that she had not been watching carefully, but there was still no evidence that Ryuji had committed the crime—

"Lord