Okiya Subaru: "..." Sure enough, before long, the senior student was dead.
At the same time, despite all his precautions, he had still gotten dragged in and nearly become a prime suspect. If Jiang Xia had not happened to be here too...
The Great Detective, seeming to radiate holy light from head to toe, listened to him while looking toward the door.
Just then, an officer from the Forensics Department ran in. "Mr. Jiang Xia, we lifted a fingerprint from this glass bottle that held poison—but strangely, it doesn't belong to anyone in the private room."
Jiang Xia examined the bottle and asked the graduate students present, "When you were gathering, did anything happen like a coat falling or a backpack getting knocked over?"
"Um..."
The old professor, Okiya Subaru, and the short-haired senior student suddenly remembered something. The two of them turned sharply to look at Senior Togashi.
The short-haired senior student hesitated. "When I came early to arrange the private room, the professor accidentally sat on that wobbly chair and knocked over Togashi's backpack."
Jiang Xia spoke as though he had seen the scene himself. "Then the things in the backpack spilled out, and a passing waitress helped pick them up and put them back?"
Okiya Subaru's heart skipped a beat. How did he know that so clearly?
"Truly... worthy of a Great Detective." After replaying the events in his mind, Okiya Subaru seemed to understand why Jiang Xia had asked that question. He silently told himself, Don't overthink it. This must be the kind of deductive ability that saves countless people from suffering. Yes, that must be it.
Beside him, the old professor and the short-haired senior student clearly had not thought of anything else. They nodded, unable to keep slightly admiring looks from appearing on their