The Tragedy of Kirisaki Island

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 Urahara Kyosuke and Lira Guanhall were students from Crime Research of Yokohama in Yokohama Ocean University with a professor named Moriaty-Smith. They went to Kirisaki Island to conduct their research about what happened at the island fifty years ago during the World War II. These two students were the most exceptional among the others who were asked to solve the mystery happening on the island as their final exam.

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 They went to Kirisaki Island by yacht from the university. The deserted island with perimeter of two kilometers was always shrouded by fog. As the yacht passed through the thick fog, they found the island. The sky was so dull that it was about to rain. They walked along the path into the deep jungle. Inside the jungle they found an old building where was once used by Japanese government during the World War II.

            “It looks like an asylum. It really reminds me of the movie I watched last night before coming here. It is called ‘The Shutter Island’,” said Lira.

            “Ha ha ha! Come on! Let’s go inside! I am pretty excited to see what is inside. Professor! I am very curious of what you are writing in your notebook. I have seen you writing something since we reached here,” said Kyosuke.

            Professor Moriarty-Smith quickly hid his notebook in his pocket inside his suit and said, “that is none of your business!”

            As they walked into the building, in the hallway they found pictures of famous novel detectives such as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Although the island was abandoned for a very long time, a kitchen and other appliances were still usable.

            “Wow! The food is already in the stock. It is totally packed in the fridge. There is even flour and butter. It looks very tasty!” said Kyosuke.

            “Kyahhhhhhhh…!!!,” a very loud scream from Lira.

            “W… What happened?!?!” Everybody rushed toward Lira to check on her.

            “Th… there was a rat! A very huge rat!”

            “What! Oh! It is just a rat. Ha ha ha! You screamed like a girl!” said Kyosuke.

            “Of course! I am a girl and am delicate.”

            “Delicate my ass! At the university you act like a guy! With your black belt karate, you have beaten up almost every guy in the class! Still you call yourself as a girl?!?!”

            “Shut up! You mystery geek! Every time we went out, all you said was how Sherlock Holmes solved this or that! It is very annoying, you know?”

            “Ha ha ha! You guys are such a perfect couple, but this is not the time for the lover quarrel. Let me show you where you two stay,” said Professor Moriarty-Smith.

            After they kept their stuff in their own room, Professor Moriarty-Smith called them to the meeting room. Both of them went to the meeting room where looked like a classroom. The normal classroom where the teacher normally stood behind the podium and there was a blackboard behind the podium. There were many desks and chairs in the classroom for the students. Suddenly Professor Moriarty-Smith came out to the front of the class and started to tell a story about the unsolved cases that happened on this island’s building fifty years ago.

            “Everyone, do you know Jack The Ripper?”

            “Huh!!! Ja… Jack the Ripper?!?” Both of them were stunt after hearing of that name.

            “Professor Moriarty-Smith, he was a serial killer who lived in England for a long time, wasn’t he?” asked Kyosuke.

            “That is correct. In 1888, there was a serial killer in a poor town in East End, London. He was one of the most famous murderers in all history. He wore a bowler hat and a long coat, and dubbed himself as ‘Jack The Ripper.’ As the name implies, he murdered five women in White chapel. All the murdered women were cut into pieces with a large knife. He stole some of the innards with his name encrypted on the wall using the victims’ blood. He sent the police letters detailing his crimes to ridicule them. In the end, the case was left open. Until fifty years ago, in this building where we are now, there was a similar case which the victims were cut in half! The victim blood was encrypted on the wall with the name of ‘Jack The Ripper’!”

            Suddenly a very bright light hit the window as the thunder rumbled with a heavy rain. The sound of the windows banged against one another. The lightning began to strike the building repeatedly and the thunder rumbled crazily.

            “In… this building! The victims were ripped apart!?” said Lira.

            “Yes… During the World War II, Japanese military held British prisoners of the war in the prison on this island. After the war, there appeared the serial killer… who called himself ‘Jack The Ripper.’ After he had killed three victims with a knife… he disappeared with no trace… From the room behind with two locked doors, he left only a key inside the room.”

            “Two locked doors…!” Kyosuke murmured. FLASH… the lightning strike again as the thunder rumbled even louder. The strong wind hit the trees and blew away.

            “He…he…he… I am very sorry. I did not mean to scare all of you. It is already late. So, I will call it for tonight. We will continue tomorrow during investigating the scene. Good night… Future young detectives!”

            In the next morning, professor was the first one who arrived at the dinner hall. There was a special menu from Kyosuke.

            “Um! This is delicious! You are really good at cooking, Kyosuke,” said Professor Moriarty-Smith.

            “Thanks professor! Have you seen Lira? Is she still sleeping? … Sorry, professor, but I am going to look for her,” said Kyosuke.

            “Wait, Kyosuke! She probably takes her time putting on her make-up, you should know how girls are always taking time to do things unnecessarily. I think we should start your final exam. But first, let me tell you a little more about what happened on this island fifty years ago.”

            “Fifty years ago? Sorry, professor! But I hate that history and I think I knew it enough from yesterday. I prefer solving more mysterious problems, especially the two-lock-door-room-murder that you have talked about. Could you tell me more about that instead?”

            “Hmm… All right. Let’s go to the place where the murder occurred fifty years ago.”

            As both of them went up to the attic, they found a suspicious muddy footprint going upstairs. Both of them decided to follow that footprint which led to the small warehouse where the two-lock-room-murder happened fifty years ago.

            “What is this, Professor? Why are the footprints in front of the storage?” said Kyosuke.

            “Hmmm… that I don’t know, but I have a bad feeling about this,” said Professor Moriarty-Smith.

            “Let’s open the door, Professor! … Shit! The door is locked, professor! Do you have the key to this door?”

            “I do … here.”

            They key which Professor Moriarty-Smith used looked quite unique. A round-shape at the holder with spike in the body which it was impossibly replicated. As they opened the door, the first door of the room was filled with rows of wooden boxes which were placed as a pathway to the second door of the room. With the same key, he opened the second door. The dark room with one small sealed window. Look from the window, there was only a precipitous cliff below.

            As Kyosuke and Professor Moriarty-Smith went inside that room, they used their flash light to look at the way. When Kyosuke used his flash light, he saw the blood encrypted as ‘Jack The Ripper’ on the wall and surprisingly said to Professor Moriarty-Smith.

            “Hey! Look at this, professor! I cannot believe that you even re-created the bloody words, ‘Jack The Ripper’,”

            “What? I did not know about this. This is the first time I have seen it.”

            “Hmm… What is this?” Kyosuke lifted the long log covered with a piece of old cloth under the bloody encrypted words. What Kyosuke found that was Lira’s body cut vertically in half and laid horizontally on the wooden floor inside that dark second door room.

            A sudden appearance of the left half of Lira’s body seemed to be a reproduction of the same horrified tragedy happening half a century ago. They had no answers for the mystery of the two lock doors and the missing right half.

            Kyosuke was stiff. He dropped his flash light on the floor as he kneeled down beside her left half body and cried. Lira was Kyosuke’s girlfriend. He cried hard beside her body. Suddenly he found a key at the corner of the room. It looked exactly the same as the key that Professor Moriarty-Smith handed him to open these warehouse doors. A perfect sealed of the two-lock-door-murder.

            “Professor, aren’t you said that the key is impossible to replicate? But why I found the exact same key you gave it to me?”

            “I’m very sorry Kyosuke! To tell you the truth someone stole the key from the office this morning…”

“Isn’t this supposed to be a re-creation of the murder case for exam? Why did this happen?”

            “… As I checked the body, the death time was during last night to this morning. I am very sorry for this, Kyosuke”

            “I swear on my blood and soul that I will solve this case and catch Jack The Ripper!”

            On the way out of that murdered room, Professor Moriarty-Smith accidentally dropped a ten-yen-coin on the floor. When it hit the ground, the coin rolled back inside the room instead of being stopped, Kyosuke noticed something was wrong and suspicious about that room.

            “Professor, I might already solve the mystery behind the two-lock-room trick, but could you wait here for a few minutes? There is something needed to be prepared first… Can I borrow the key?”

            Kyosuke went downstairs into the kitchen and mixed the butter with the flour, trying to shape it as a ball with the key inside. He went back up to the murdered room. As he passed the same old footprints which he noticed before finding Lira’s body, he took a closer look at those dried prints and noticed something really odd about them. He decided to let it go since he did not have any evidence, but it clearly showed on his face that he definitely noticed something.

            He went back up to Professor Moriarty-Smith who was waiting for him to solve the trick behind the two-lock-door-murder. He took out the butter ball he made in the kitchen and rolled it outside the warehouse past the rats’ hole. At first, the ball stopped at the corner between the first two boxes at the entrance, and then the ball started rolling again. The ball kept rolling as it hit another box. It kept rolling and hitting the boxes as it changed in direction toward the second door. When it reached the corner of the second door, the ball stopped where the key was found in the beginning.

            “Kyosuke, why did the ball roll? Shouldn’t it stop after hitting the first box?”

            “Because the floor is slightly tilt.”

“Your deduction is great! Yet, you miss something. What we found was the key, not the butter ball!”

            “Just wait and see, professor.”

            Right after he finished his sentence, hundreds of hungry rats rushed toward the butter ball and finished it within a few seconds. Now what left behind was the key at the same place as it was found.

            “There is something weird about Lira’s corpse,” Kyosuke quietly murmured.

            “Professor! I want to find some more clues that might be left in this building. Let’s meet up in an hour!”

            “Alright! But be very careful about this, ok? Jack The Ripper might still be here”

            Kyosuke walked around inside the building trying to find some more clues about this incidence. Then he smelled something nice like a perfume in the hallway. He looked intensely at those pictures, and then he noticed something out of the place. The position of the pictures was changed compared to the positions he saw at the beginning when he walked down the hall. The position of those pictures was at his eye level, but now it was changed to the lower part of his body. He could clearly see the mark left behind as the pictures being slid a little down.

            Furthermore, he found Lira’s handkerchief lay down below one of the portraits. Now he knew where the smell came from.

            “Now I found all of evidences against Jack The Ripper, but I still miss the motive. Why did he kill Lira?” Kyosuke spoke to himself while drown himself into thought.

            It had been an hour, but there was still no sign of Kyosuke. Professor Moriarty-Smith was really worried about him, so he looked for him. Suddenly he heard of a loud voice from one of the room. It was Kyosuke’s. Professor Moriarty-Smith quickly rolled his wheelchair to Kyosuke, but it was too late. What Professor Moriarty-Smith found was Kyosuke’s head on the bed and half of his body was stuck onto the wall.

            “H… how could this be, Kyosuke?”

            Suddenly Kyosuke opened his eyes and smirked. He got up and said, “this is your motive, right, professor? … How long are you going to sleep over there, Lira?”

            Kyosuke pulled her out of the wall where pieces of her body should be.

            “In the end, nobody dies. All of these situations are parts of our final exam, right? Professor Moriarty-Smith, you are Jack The Ripper!”

            “He…ha…ha…hah!!! How did you find out that Lira did not actually die?”

            “That is very easy, Professor! Do you remember when I solved the mystery behind those two locked doors? At that time, when hundreds of rats rushed toward the butter ball, none of them ate Lira’s corpse. Also, the odd footprints. Normally when people walk upstairs, there should be only half of their shoes printed on half of the stairs, not the whole shoes. With these clearly evidences state that someone has purposely done this. The only person who is able to do these things is only you, professor! Still, I am not sure at the beginning until I found the lower portraits. Professor, you lowered them so that you could reach them, right? Also, Lira’s handkerchief which I think she accidentally dropped it.”

            “Ha ha ha!!! Oh my, you got me! You have passed your final exams!!! Actually I wanted to pass you before everything was revealed. But I never realized you would see through all of these. Well done, Kyosuke!!!”

            “UGH! Now that everything has finished let take vacation here, under the blazing sun in the blue sky with emerald green sea” Kyosuke stretch him self out of his tiredness. 

Lira suddenly hugged Kyosuke and said, “Kyosuke! You did really cry for me, didn’t you?”

            A very long pause from Kyosuke and he decided to take their vacation on the island before going back to the university. A quality time between the two love birds.