At that, the lover suddenly remembered something. He hurriedly pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. "This is it!"
Sato Miwako put on her gloves and carefully took it from him.
She examined the utterly ordinary photocopied paper from every angle, but could not see where the "spice" was hidden. She could only unfold it and read what was written.
There were only two brief printed lines on the paper. One was the message, and the other was the signature:
[At 11:30 this afternoon, I'll be waiting for you at my home. Please make sure to come.
Kazumi]
Sato Miwako: "..." With a few slight changes, she would have believed it was a ransom note rather than a love letter.
And besides...
"Never mind that the paper is ordinary, and never mind that it wasn't handwritten—but it uses honorific language." Sato Miwako was full of question marks. "Do lovers talk like that?"
Hirose Shunzo's old face reddened. "I thought she was trying to spice things up, you know, like a repairman coming to help a rich housewife fix something, or a teacher visiting a student to give guidance. So before I came, I spent a while agonizing over what kind of clothes to wear. We used to..."
Inspector Megure sensed that this was heading somewhere wrong and warily cut him off. "All right, stop!"
...They were here to solve a case, not listen to strange role-play.
Inspector Megure interrupted Hirose Shunzo's recollections. He sighed and continued, "But when I got to her door, no one answered no matter how I knocked. She didn't pick up the phone either. I thought Kazumi was in a bad mood, or had changed her mind again, so I left first."
Inspector Megure picked out the key point. "So not only do you