The Vanished Truth

"Mr. Takeda Ryuji, you know what you're saying, right?" Yamane looked at Takeda Ryuji sternly—almost gravely.

While ordinary people who killed for the first time often cracked under suspicion and confessed easily, Takeda Ryuji's reaction was truly strange!

Why had he suddenly confessed just when suspicion had shifted elsewhere?

At first, Takeda Ryuji had seemed highly suspicious. Even when the police asked him to cooperate with the investigation, he had acted as though he tacitly accepted it. Then, when the police discovered that there was a problem with the "locked room," Ryuji immediately perked up and insisted that he had not killed anyone. Now that the police had begun suspecting Takeda Shinichi, he was admitting it himself?

"Yes, but—I should have killed him in self-defense, right? I saw him rummaging through things in the room, so—" Ryuji said in a muffled voice, lowering his head.

At the same time, Ryuji's wife pulled the two girls, who still knew nothing, aside. Misa looked at her second uncle in astonishment.

"If that's really the case, then although it wouldn't count as legitimate self-defense, the sentence could indeed be reduced at the court's discretion. It might even—"

"Possibly be ruled as manslaughter. You can find a lawyer yourselves for that," Yamane said directly.

The charges and sentencing had nothing to do with the police.

Judging from the scene, there was a high probability that it would be ruled manslaughter. In fact, if Ryuji had said this from the start, it would almost certainly have been "manslaughter."

After all, there were signs that the place had been searched through. The victim had no reasonable reason to be in the Takeda family home, and the cause of death had been the back of his head striking the floor—a fatal injury that was easily ruled accidental.