Chapter 9

The house where Emma, the grandmother’s daughter, had been found dead looked like an ordinary family home. There was nothing particularly unusual about it.

I couldn’t explain it rationally, but perhaps it was because of Ariel’s memories, the memories of the body I now inhabited. Somehow, I had an instinctive feeling about the place.

As soon as we entered, the grandmother took the lead and headed somewhere inside the house. She opened the door to a dusty storage room and stood there motionless for a long time.

She seemed to be gathering herself, so I pretended not to notice and waited quietly. After swallowing a shaky breath, the grandmother slowly stepped inside.

“…This way.”

It was an old wooden structure with a rectangular frame of thick, elongated beams running around the ceiling. The construction reminded me of the rafters of a traditional Korean house.

I looked around before approaching one of the beams to examine its thickness and height.

It wasn’t too thick to tie a rope around, and it was sturdy enough that it wouldn’t easily collapse even if someone’s full weight hung from it. It certainly looked like the kind of place where someone could hang themselves.

As I surveyed the surroundings and tried to reconstruct Emma’s movements, the grandmother, who stood beside me, pointed to one spot with tear-filled eyes.

“Here. Our daughter was hanging right here.”

The spot where Emma had been found was at the very back of the storage room, farthest from the door.

Even if someone opened the door and came inside, the clutter piled up around the room would obscure the body behind the shelves and other junk. Anyone who merely glanced around before leaving might never notice it.

Unless the grandmother had been searching specifically for her daughter, she probably wouldn’t have checked all the way back here.

Had Emma deliberately chosen this spot? Or had someone really murdered her and dumped her body here?

I stood beneath the wooden beam in the corner and looked up at the marks left behind.

There was quite a lot of dust throughout the storage room, and the beam was no exception. A thick layer had accumulated on its surface, preserving the marks where a rope had once been hung.

In other words, the traces were almost unnaturally clear.

This… was supposed to be a suicide?

When someone hanged themselves with the intention of dying, their body would instinctively struggle against the pain in their final moments, no matter how thoroughly they had resigned themselves to death.

Yet the marks had been left in such a clean, straight line, as though there had been no struggle whatsoever.

That could only mean one thing: when Emma’s neck was placed in the noose, she was already unconscious.

But does that make any sense?

The local police force in this world, known as the Peacekeeping Corps, had closed the case in a single day despite evidence like this?

Unless the Peacekeeping Corps was extraordinarily corrupt or utterly incompetent, that should have been impossible.

…I was planning to request the case files from them, but there probably isn’t much point.

If the culprit was Emma’s husband, as the grandmother claimed, there was a good chance that traces of the murder still remained somewhere in the house.

The Peacekeeping Corps had closed the case without even dealing with evidence that was plainly visible. It was unlikely they had gone to the trouble of tampering with it.

After inspecting the storage room, I walked out into the spacious living room. The grandmother and Henry followed behind me.

If the husband was the culprit, he might have committed the murder somewhere he would normally spend time, then carried the body into the storage room afterward.

I glanced toward the kitchen before shaking my head.

It probably hadn’t happened there.

If he had attacked her in the kitchen, he would likely have grabbed whatever weapon was within reach. In that case, the injuries probably wouldn’t have been limited to a thin wound on her neck.

Once someone picked up a weapon, keeping their emotions under control wasn’t easy unless they were a psychopath.

Then how had the culprit killed Emma without leaving other injuries on her body and made it look like suicide?

Had he strangled her with his bare hands?

No. If he had, the grandmother would more likely have noticed bruises on Emma’s neck rather than a cut.

“Ma’am, did you happen to notice any traces of blood on your daughter’s neck? Around the spot where you said you saw the cut?”

“No… There wasn’t any blood. Honestly, that’s why I wasn’t sure if it was a cut in the first place. I’d never seen those marks before, so I thought it was strange.”

There had been no visible traces of blood, and the grandmother wasn’t even certain that the marks had been caused by a knife.

What could it have been? What could leave a wound like that?

Flash.

Something glinted near me as I wandered through the living room, deep in thought.

What was that? Something had definitely caught the light.

“Is something wrong?”

Henry, who had been quietly watching me, asked with a puzzled expression as I looked around for whatever had glinted.

I walked toward the kitchen, which was connected to the storage room, then slowly retraced my steps toward the living room.

Something had sparkled somewhere around here.

It had been… about here, right?

Flash.

There it is.

I immediately crouched down and picked up the object lying on the floor.

It was thin and transparent, shaped like a strand of thread. When the light hit it, a faint sheen ran along its surface.

I recognized it.

Fishing line.

Wait, does this world have nylon, too? I thought nylon was a modern invention.

“That’s just some pit cord, isn’t it?”

“Pit cord?”

“Yes. Look at the tag on the end of the thread. It has a magical product label.”

What? This world has magic?

So it really is a fantasy romance world!

Come to think of it, magic had come up in conversation before, hadn’t it?

Pit cord, huh?

It was tough and didn’t seem likely to snap easily. It might actually make a decent murder weapon.

Back when I worked as a detective in Korea, I’d encountered cases in which fishing line had been suspected of being used as a murder weapon.

It wasn’t a particularly common method, but what if the crime had been carefully planned? And what if the cord wasn’t merely strong but had been enhanced with magic?

In that case, it would certainly be suitable for use as a weapon.

“What do people usually use this for?”

“Huh? What do you mean, what do they use it for? They use it to wrap and tie things up, don’t they? The magic activates and holds things tightly so they won’t come undone.”

Henry explained, looking as though he couldn’t believe I was asking such an obvious question.

Apparently, pit cord was an extremely common item in this world.

Hmm.

There had been what looked like a knife wound on the deceased’s neck. Yet the Peacekeeping Corps had handed the body over to the family without conducting an autopsy.

Realistically speaking, there was no way to look for clues on a body that had already been cremated.

But considering the grandmother’s account of how the Peacekeeping Corps had reacted…

“The Peacekeeping Corps said they were just wrinkles on her neck. They said the marks were too thin to be considered injuries caused by something pressing or cutting into her skin, so they wouldn’t investigate.”

Marks caused by pressure.

Deep enough to be mistaken for wrinkles, yet too thin to look like something had pressed into the skin.

“Ma’am, the wound on your daughter’s neck that you saw… It might not have been a knife wound after all.”

“But it was a long cut, like she’d been sliced by something very sharp! If it wasn’t a knife, then what on earth could it have been?”

“Was this pit cord easy to get hold of?”

“Of course. You can make it with even the cheapest magic stones. Children even make it themselves for fun… But why are you asking?”

Henry frowned as though he’d heard enough nonsense for one day, then stopped and looked at me questioningly.

“Something that can be easily disposed of after use, that wouldn’t attract suspicion even if it were found in the house, and that could easily take someone’s life by cutting into the skin when tightened around their neck—”

“Wait, hold on! Come on… You’re not serious, are you? How could anyone kill someone with this? This is just…”

Henry suddenly lowered his voice. He glanced at the grandmother before leaning toward me and whispering into my ear.

“If you write a report claiming this was used to kill someone and take it to the Peacekeeping Corps, they’ll laugh at you! How could anyone kill a person with something that looks like a child’s toy? If you want to report that someone was murdered with pit cord, you’d at least need to find the bloodstained cord used at the time of the murder. Otherwise, it makes no sense.”

“Is that so?”

Judging by Henry’s reaction, the idea of using pit cord to commit murder was apparently far from obvious.

And if it was something commonly found everywhere, something people regarded as little more than a child’s toy…

By modern Korean standards, it would be like claiming someone had poisoned another person by coating slime in poison and feeding it to them, or that someone had loaded live ammunition into a toy gun.

It sounded absurd.

“What if the culprit didn’t use the pit cord to kill her, but to render her unconscious so she couldn’t resist?”

“Detective, what is wrong with you? I told you, even if you tie something with pit cord, it only contracts to fit the size of the object. It can’t dig into someone’s skin! If it could do that, how would anyone use it to package bread?”

“When did I say anything about tying it?”

“Excuse me?”

I took the pit cord from Henry, let it hang loosely, and looped it around his neck. Then I stepped behind him.

“What would happen if someone wrapped the cord around their victim’s neck like this and pulled hard from behind without tying it?”

“Well, the cord would stretch—”

I yanked it tight, then quickly relaxed my grip.

“Ghk! Cough! Cough, cough!”

Henry broke into a fit of painful coughing. Clutching his neck with both hands, he stared at me with wide, round eyes.

The greatest obstacle to reconstructing a crime or deducing what had happened was prejudice.

People tended to overlook the danger of things they were familiar with.

The closer someone was to us, the harder it was to suspect them. Likewise, we rarely considered the possibility that an everyday object we kept close at hand could become a murder weapon.

And if that object was something children were particularly familiar with, the possibility would seem even more far-fetched.

But what if someone took that familiar object and used it in an entirely different way? Especially if no one had ever committed a crime using it like this before…

I quickly pieced together the circumstances I’d uncovered so far.

The culprit was likely someone close enough to approach Emma at close range and launch a surprise attack—or, at the very least, someone she knew.

Since the murder weapon was an everyday object, the crime might initially appear impulsive. But judging by Henry’s reaction, using pit cord as a weapon wasn’t something a person would ordinarily think of doing on the spur of the moment.

That meant this was likely a premeditated murder committed by someone Emma knew, someone with a clear motive for killing her.

I looked at Henry, who was rubbing his neck with an expression that suggested he’d just realized something, then turned toward the grandmother.

“Ma’am, you’ll need to arrange a meeting between me and your son-in-law.”

The grandmother stared blankly at the pit cord for a moment before clenching both fists.

Her lips trembled as though she were reliving something horrifying. Then she lifted her head and met my gaze with a firm, resolute expression.

“Don’t you worry. I’ll bring that bastard in myself, no matter what it takes.”