When he returned to town and visited Mrs. Rochester’s house, the door was open. Peering through the quiet house, Jude pulled out his cell phone and asked for a call with Mrs. Rochester. Soon he heard a middle-aged woman’s voice saying, “Hello.” It was a tired sound, full of frustration and fear. Jude’s voice was calm.
“Mrs. Rochester? You know the cookies you made for us? Was there anything particularly strange when you made it?”
[… …weird? Well, I made it as usual… I was going to give it to Martha, but I gave it to you because you guys came. ]
“Is that so? Has anyone else been here recently to help you in the kitchen?”
[Hey, young detective, everyone in our town is on good term, they come to help from time to time. There’s Martha, Mrs. Melvin and Mrs. Sarkozy.]
“Who was the last one to come?”
[Last…….? Well, everyone comes and goes often… Wait a minute. Was it Martha or Mrs. Sarkozy?….. Ah, Mrs. Sarkozy came to help me cook chicken breast the night before you guys came. And I went to Martha’s for lunch.]
“After that, have you cooked anything other than the cookies you baked us?”
The woman over the phone, a little puzzled, repeated, “Hmm…” because she couldn’t guess why Jude was asking this question.
[After you guys left, I baked scones for myself to eat, but I wasn’t at all… Why is that? Do you think I’m poisoned by cookies as well? ]
“Ma’am, think carefully. Scones and cookies have similar ingredients. What was the ingredient you were missing when you made the scones? Do you remember?”
There was a moment of silence. Entering the kitchen and opening the cupboards one by one, Jude waited for the answer. After looking at all the cupboards, he heard a little surprised and dry voice as he touched the seasoning container on the shelf one by one with his hands.
[Come to think of it ….. I’m on a diet these days… …and made it without sugar. Yes, I did. I made it without sugar.]
Suddenly, the passing hand stopped at the sugar canister. There was a big smile on Jude’s face.
“Really? Thank you. I’ll be back with good news soon, so make plans for your diet. Oh, and don’t be afraid if they’re being so dreary. They’re just doing their job. Thank you for baking the cookies. See you later.”
Ignoring the fellow detective or chief’s “What, Jude, what are you doing now…….,” Jude cheerfully closed the flip phone. Jude, who picked up the sugar canister and looked around, soon put it in his pocket and left the house.
After thinking about two possibilities for a moment, he shook his head – the possibility that this sugar was still mixed in with arsenic or it was no longer so. Since there’s no experimental set with him, there’s only one thing he can do. Just in time, Jude poured the white stuff in the sugar canister to the pigeon that was crawling in the middle of the road. Seeing a pile of white powder, it began to peck a few times. Then, Jude observed the bird quietly.
After a while, the pigeon hardened on the spot. As the sound of squeals, rolling, and agonized bird rang in the air several times, and even its wings stopped moving altogether, the bird lay stiff and motionless in its flight, its body collapsed on the ground, and the eyes of the struggling pigeon glistened at the moment. After silently looking at the scene, Jude was a little surprised when he looked up. Not far away, stood the little daughter of the Rice family. The child stood wide-eyed at the death of the pigeon.
Thinking about how to explain himself, the child soon asked Jude with a sullen look.
“Did it go to heaven?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah, maybe …”
“But when it died, it looks miserable…”
“Well, it must be painful. But where did your brother go?”
“He went out with his friends. So I’m playing alone.”
He really doesn’t have the skills to treat children well. Awkwardly scratching the back of his head, he heard Anne murmured.
“……said it was a good thing to go to heaven…… Uncle Melvin, so did them……like Uncle Sarkozy, Jane and Grandpa are going to a good place……”
“Yes…….. Wait, Mr. Sarkozy?”
“Yes, Mrs. Sarkozy’s husband. He passed away not long ago. He went fishing with her, fell off the boat, and into the water. The water was so deep that they found the body a long time later. At that time, almost all the flesh was already…”
Anne, who had been picturing a terrible scene, soon sighed shortly. When he first met this kid, she said, “Really! That’s why everyone’s next door, Mrs. Sarkozy…” was meant to say that everyone went to heaven like Mrs. Sarkozy’s husband. With a small nod, Anne said sadly, with a little slurred pronunciation.
“……Mrs. Sarkozy, she often called my family over to eat this and that……and invited me, my brother, Jane, my grandfather, and my dad from time to time. I sometimes go and eat snacks, too.”
“Ah, yeah.”
“Jane, she went to Sarkozy’s that day for tea… …and I don’t know where she went out and went to heaven.”
It was a kind of conviction that solidified slowly. Not too excited, Jude asked Anne quietly.
“Did you see Jane enter the Sarkozy’s after school the day she disappeared?”
“Yes. Ma’am, she does that often.”
“Did you see Jane come out?”
“No, I went to play with Matilda soon. But why? If she goes in, of course she comes out.”
There are many things that are not adhering to natural law in the world. Especially in my line of work, I often see that kind of devious inclination. As he muttered inwardly, Anne smiled and raised her hand.
“Oh, Ma’am!”
Jude turned around. Right on the other side of the gate, a middle-aged lady with light brown hair with a few strands of grey, was waving her hand with a gentle, quiet smile. The smile was neither sad nor happy, so Jude greeted with a blasé face. Following her eyes, she saw a pigeon and scattered white powder on the floor. As she turned her eyes again, Mrs. Sarkozy, with an unknown smile on her face, spoke politely to Jude.
“-You’re here again, detective. Would you like to come in and get some tea?”
“-I’ve got nice tea these days. I was thinking of bringing it to Martha’s.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I had a hard time finding it. Still, why was it so good to see a line of black tea?”
“Ma’am.”
“I’m just collecting things without any reason. I don’t even have a husband to drink with…”
“Ma-‘am.”
As he called her in a dull voice, the gentle middle-aged lady who was pouring tea into a white porcelain teacup with a calm motion before his eyes, caught his gaze with a light smile.
“What?”
“Why do you do that? Let’s finish it quickly. I’m not in the mood to put on a phoney act if you know everything. Here, I’ve prepared a tape recorder for you. Confess.”
“Confess?”
Jude scratched his hair roughly, while shrieking, “Ahhhhhh“ – looking as if he had been given a month’s homework by a nasty teacher. Without even looking at the teacup in front of him, he opened his mouth with a tired tone, pulling his hair hard.
“Let’s not do this. If you haven’t taken care of this sugar canister yet, it’s like asking someone to find it. You did it because you’re willing to confess. To be honest, I didn’t think there would be some residual powder left, but you didn’t take care of it at all. It’s obvious. Come on, confess. I’m tired too. And you owe me a special favor. Because you indirectly poisoned my partner I’m having a hard time driving a car that I’m not used to.”
“…….that’s what happens.”
The smile did not go away. The slender middle-aged lady, with her hair in a graceful mixture of grayish colors, closed her eyes, breathing in the fragrance that rose from the teacup. There’s nothing notably noble about tea lovers’ hobbies. When she looked at the tea with a sullen eye, she opened her eyes and put down the teacup. Silence passed further into the hour.
“First of all, I think I should say some greetings.”
“What greetings? Thank you for catching me?”
“Yes.”
That’s a fresh answer. It wasn’t very unexpected, but he was surprised first because he’d never heard this from criminal, and as she lowered her head a little, Mrs. Sarkozy looked tenderly at Jude and continued.
“I was worried, what if you’re a bad detective. I wanted you to somehow know that I’m the criminal, and it’s not because I’m heroic, but it’s because I’m afraid of myself. I don’t know how far I can go either.”
“What did you do that for?”
“I lost my mother when I was young. My father, a drug addict, stabbed my mother in the back alley and ran away. It happened when I was nine.”
With an old story that popped out of nowhere, Jude kept his mouth shut. The lady spoke calmly as she stroked the handle at the corner of the teacup she had put down. The tone was so mellow as if she was reading a fairy tale.
“No one helped me. I came out to the main road and shouted for help, but at that time no one came to me, the people who looked out of the window, and the countless people who were passing by. I don’t mean to blame them. I don’t think they ignored me out of cold indifference. You know a famous incident that happened a long time ago, detective? Once upon a time, in a New York apartment complex, about 38 residents turned on the lights and looked on when a woman named Genevie was killed, and no one reported it. Rather than being evil, it’s more like responsibility avoidance and conflict. ‘Someone else will report it, what if it’s a joke, what if it’s big enough for me to be dangerous?’ They must have had a lot of thoughts. I don’t think it’s wrong.”
After a pause, she gathered her hands together and put them on her lap. Her face, which maintained a consistent smile, trembled slightly.
“However, it seems clear that the incident shocked me as a child.”
“……Oh, yes.”
“That’s when I started feeling a little strange. I liked playing with fire, and when I watch the fire flare up and swallow other things when it was cold, I used to feel comfortable and happy as if I was addicted to drugs. Until then, I didn’t think I was too weird. Like playing with fire, other kids grow up playing with it. But when I first thought I wanted to feed laxative to the orphanage director I loved, I realized that I was strange. It was a compulsion that I couldn’t get rid of.”
Impulse. It was the most troublesome word. Jude leaned on the chair with his arms folded. It is not recommended to bend your back when you hear a long story.
The woman’s story went on.
“And that impulse deepened as I grew. Moreover, as I grew up, I had more opportunities to read toxic books. If you have a little bit of a passion for dangerous poison, you’ll know where to get it. Knowledge is exposed in a more dangerous way than you think. I quickly absorbed the knowledge and was entirely fascinated by the dying method.”
With a quiet, calm voice, flames of unknown color were blazing in her eyes. It was clearly not a normal gleam, but the woman’s attitude was extremely restrained.
“There are a lot of methods. Like the recently done with torture by a young man named Alvin Jones, killing with a gun, killing with a knife, or by hanging, guillotine, and countless others. People sure know a lot of ways to exterminate their kind. But the method I was bewitched was poison. There are so many poisons and there are many different symptoms depending on the mixing method, concentration, and processing method. To kill slowly or hastily, everything could be done in my hands.”
“On that impulse, did you touch the Rice’s family and Mrs. Rochester?”
Mrs. Sarkozy, who was staring at her hands with eyes wide open as if she saw something swaying in her palm, smiled brightly at Jude’s question. It was not just a bright smile, but there were definitely feelings of satisfaction.
“Despite living in this quiet place, my impulse hasn’t let me go all my life. Maybe you know where my first impulse came from.”
“Oh, your husband.”
When he answered casually, the woman’s smile faded a little. Her eyes were glued to the frame of numerous photos of couples hanging on the country-style wallpaper. A man with a bright smile on his face with a woman who also smiles brightly next to him. Those were undoubtedly the moments of warm memories and happiness.
“I was happy. Roy was really nice to me. While not knowing, my impulse for him to die…..treating me like a plant in a greenhouse. But I couldn’t stop from poisoning his lunch. It was like magma looking for a place to explode. I thought I’d be ruined if I put up with it any longer. I was out of my mind.”
“Aha. Like drugs.”
“Yes, like drugs. After sending my husband away like that, rather than sadness, I finally felt a big release. Since then, the magma has flowed out of control. It was bearable for a while, but soon I got the urge again. Thanks to my husband, who worked in the industry, I had a lot of toxins at home. Of course, I’ve got my own collection. My hands were overwhelmed, and I was so anxious to show them.”
“So, did you bring the grandfather and Jane home as usual and put poison in the food you served them?”
The woman lowered her head slightly then nodded a little. There was a bit of dark complexion on her face, but there was no frantic regret and fear. She closed her eyes for a moment and murmured something in her mouth. Carefully taking a sip of the hot tea, she then opened her mouth at Jude.
“I don’t mean to say that killing those two neighbors was the right thing to do. That’s why I left evidence that way. When I went to Mrs. Rochester’s house and replaced it with arsenic-infused sugar, I didn’t intend to retrieve it again. When Mrs. Rochester died and things got bigger, I thought I’d get caught anyway. I didn’t think you’d be able to catch the killer until everyone in this town died. I couldn’t guarantee what I would do in the future when I could no longer contain my urge. I knew very well that if I had the chance to poison the water supply, I would do it without hesitation. And I knew, like Roy, that I was going to put my hands on people I love first. I was afraid of it. “
“You mean you had no choice but to kill someone you loved?”
“Dear Detective, it’s uncontrollable. I’m going to keep doing this as long as I live. I know it better than anyone. If there’s anyone around me I can kill, I’m going to start with people who trust me and aren’t wary of me, not because I hate them. It’s like an instinct rooted in me in any way. It’s like gambling addiction. I can’t stop it. That’s why I wanted you to find me.”
“……you sound so much more commendable than someone I know. It’s a very difficult situation.”
Jude sighed halfheartedly once, and he looked at Mrs. Sarkozy with her hands on her chest. He was unfamiliar with the desperate look on her face.
“So, where did you dump the body?”
“It’s in a freezer in the basement. It was originally a warehouse to freeze a large chunk of meat, but it was good to keep the bodies wrapped in plastic invisible. It wouldn’t have been badly decomposed.”
“Yes, thank you very much.”
Click, Jude pressed the stop button on the recorder. Mrs. Sarkozy, with a face no different from the first time she started the story, calmly lifted the slightly cooled teacup. Unlike her calm face, the hand holding the teacup was shaking a little. Is it because of the futility that everything is over now or because of the complex feelings of a person who has made a difficult confession? Or what else is there?
Feeling somewhat strange, Jude put the tape recorder in his pocket and asked, tilting his head.
“Do you have anything else to say?”
“……Detective, I’m sorry.”
“What? What do you mean? Why all of a sudden?”
“I’ve kept you here way longer than necessary. You make a fuss even about being served tea.”
The more detailed the confession, the better, so it doesn’t matter. And he couldn’t even touch the tea. Jude, who was about to do it, narrowed his brow to the feeling of incompatibility he received at the moment. There is no need to apologize for no reason. You apologize because it was an action with a reason to apologize.
“……Mrs. …maybe…….other, someone…”
“I’m sorry, but it was my last impulse. It was like the last festival before I got caught by you… I’m not going to ask you to understand, but I needed to stall.”
Jude sprang up from his seat. Touching on the handcuffs and pistols at the same time, Jude asked with a slightly irritated face.
“Who is it?”
“It’s going to be useless to go now. I’m well aware that Martha’s tea time is around five o’clock. We’ve been living together for over 10 years. Usually at that time, she has a habit of boiling peppermint tea, leaving it until it cools down and drinking it in a hurry. So…… I asked a part-timer who was walking her dog for a while at her house. Last time I had dinner with Martha, I thought her cup and my cup had interchanged, so I asked him to change it for Martha without troubling her. Saying that my cup is hers, so please put this cup there. This cup I’m using now is Martha’s, which I got from him..…..with a poisoned cup in exchange …. It’s probably too late. The symptoms are instantaneous. It’s even more so if you’re a person like Martha who drinks tea frequently.”
Looking at the silent figure, Jude breathed a long sigh.
“Why did you confess? You said you were afraid to kill someone you love.”
“I’m sorry, but I wanted to finish this and be taken away. More than love…… it was the impulse that dominated me all my life.”
“Is that another problem…… ha, me. If the chief finds out, I’ll be pecked again.”
“I’m sorry, Detective. At the end of Martha’s…!”
When the woman suddenly opened her mouth wide, Jude could not quickly grasp the situation. But as her eyes glistened dangerously and the teacup fell from her hand and shattered, Jude quickly approached the woman. Oh, no, no, no, no. She was suffocating. Huck, Huck, Huck, Huck, the body that stretched helplessly on the chair, convulsed several times. The arms that he touched to lie down were stiff. There was no screams from her throat where the necklaces were clinking.
“Ma’am, what’s wrong with you all of a sudden, ma’am! Are you ill?”
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“No, no…….. Why…….. Why…….. This is…….. I……. Martha…..!”
It seemed extremely painful, but she did not immediately fall short of breath. Jude’s wrist, which hurriedly pulled out his cell phone and called 911, was held by a hand struggling toward the sky. Jude listened for a moment as the clear pronunciation was sparsely mixed in the sound of the wind leaking from her mouth.
“……..That……. That…….. That person……… That person, that, per, sso, son……!”
The moment he understood the word, something like a small spark popped into his head. The sudden lightning struck Jude in the middle of the night, and as if he had caught sight of the surrounding scene, he was dazed. Until the ambulance sounded from afar, Jude sat silent, holding the trembling woman’s hand.