"Going out to catch fish in the middle of the night—and fast-swimming sea fish at that. Are you Tokyo people out of your minds?"
Hattori Heiji raised his arm and used a stone he had picked up in the woods to smash the coconut with a series of loud thuds. Then he shook out his aching hand and muttered to Conan, "Or did Jiang Xia just not want to smash coconuts, so he made up an excuse to run off?"
"Jiang Xia isn't that kind of person." Conan was holding a coconut as well, turning it over and examining it.
After chatting idly for a while, Conan glanced at "Miss Shirai" nearby and lowered his voice. "Come to think of it, don't you find it strange? That suspicious woman didn't follow Jiang Xia. She stayed here with us instead."
Hattori Heiji was puzzled by that as well. "Yeah. Before, she followed Jiang Xia everywhere he went. Why did she suddenly change?"
Conan rubbed his chin. "Maybe there were too many people before, so her behavior wasn't obvious. But now, only Jiang Xia and Sonoko went to the beach—she was worried that following too closely would put Jiang Xia on guard, so she held herself back and stayed here?"
Seven or eight meters away.
Curacao glanced at the two whispering figures from the corner of her eye, adjusted her glasses, and pretended not to notice that they were discussing her.
Those two weren't exactly good people either, but "on a dark and windy night," "with Uzo," "going to the beach to catch fish"... Any one of those factors was enough to put Curacao on alert.
And all three together... All she could picture was a helpless corpse falling into the sea, perhaps even being devoured by fish, meeting a gruesome end.