Prologue (2)

The Case of the Headless Princess or the Saint — The Challenge

This happened on my birthday, just as I was entering my late twenties.

It was dusk—no, almost night—and I was staggering through a narrow, filthy alley in the drizzle.

“Damn… that hurts…”

I groaned, clutching my stomach.

It hurt. Of course it did.

I’d been stabbed in the side.

The blade had gone in deep and then been pulled out, and no matter how hard I pressed the wound, blood kept trickling through my fingers.

My white shirt had turned a dark, reddish black, a color that made me think of death.

Am I going to die?

“Damn it…”

No one was going to find me in an alley this dark.

Using every bit of strength I had left, I clung to the wall and tried to make my way toward the main street where there would be people, but my legs tangled beneath me and I collapsed.

“Guh…”

I fell into the mud, and the rain mercilessly stole the heat from my body.

“Damn… it…”

I groaned again.

I tried to push myself up, only to realize that my arms and legs were as stiff and useless as sticks.

How did things end up like this?

No, I knew exactly why.

Because I screwed up.

That punk—I thought he was just some swaggering street thug. I never imagined he was a drug addict.

I witnessed a deal going down, and then the target panicked and stabbed me. It wasn’t even funny.

Marlowe—Philip Marlowe—would never have ended up like this. Columbo probably wouldn’t have either.

I guess I was never cut out to be a detective.

Something I had vaguely suspected for a long time finally became painfully clear.

Cold.

I was unbearably cold. My body didn’t even feel like my own anymore.

I had loved books ever since I was a child.

Mysteries in particular. Holmes, Lupin, Ellery, Poe, Edogawa Rampo… I devoured everything I could get my hands on.

Cold.

My body really didn’t feel like mine anymore.

“Heh…”

Even with death right in front of me, I couldn’t help laughing. Mud and rainwater slipped into my mouth.

I really had been the stereotypical mystery nerd.

I used to proudly lecture friends who couldn’t care less about Knox’s Ten Commandments and Van Dine’s Twenty Rules. My university thesis was on “The Late Queen Problem.”

I read true-crime novels and police procedurals, so it felt only natural that I would eventually choose a career in law enforcement.

And becoming a police officer was fine at first.

What was also natural, I suppose, was that I couldn’t endure the gap between my ideals and reality—and ran away.

I ran almost immediately.

The harsh training, the relationships, the endless routine duties. I had thought I was prepared for all of it, but none of those things appeared in mystery novels, and none of them had anything to do with the world I had imagined. Faced with them, I fell into despair.

And even after enduring all of that, there were no great unsolved cases, no investigation meetings where everyone wracked their brains to crack an impossible mystery, no investigations driven by both logic and intuition.

That only made the disappointment worse.

This isn’t the real me.

This is only a temporary version of me.

My true place isn’t somewhere like this.

Thinking things like that—excuses, really—I began considering quitting the police. I dragged the decision out for a while, but in the end, I left after only two years.

Then I became a detective.

I joined a private detective agency, believing that this time, finally, I would have a place where my abilities could shine.

Of course, most of the work involved investigating affairs. I knew that. I knew perfectly well that real detectives didn’t solve murders the way they did in novels.

Even so, I thought that here, at least, I could finally become the real me.

That was what I believed.

And this was the result.

Lying there soaked by the rain, I let out a bitter, self-mocking laugh.

This pathetic state was the result.

The only thing anyone ever praised me for was how I wrote reports. Everything else was useless. Tailings, communicating with clients, thinking on my feet—everything.

“We expected more because you used to be a cop. The part-timer who joined six months ago is more useful than you.”

That was what the agency chief had told me with a sigh just last week.

I had nothing to say in response.

Because he was right.

I had no instinct for the job. I was inefficient. Timid. Awkward.

There was a distance between the person I had imagined myself becoming through all those books and the person I actually was—a distance that felt impossible to bridge through effort alone.

What is someone supposed to do when they carry something effort can’t overcome?

“Endure.”

That’s what Marlowe would probably say.

So that was what I did.

I endured and kept working as a low-level detective.

And this was the result?

What a joke.

There was no “real me.”

There was no place where my true abilities would suddenly reveal themselves.

Hey, Marlowe.

I’m not cut out for hard-boiled life.

If I work hard, I want to be rewarded.

If I set a goal, I want to achieve it.

I want power—any kind of power. Physical strength, violence, stamina, money, intelligence, authority.

More than anything else…

Talent.

With that final, pathetic, completely honest wish in my mind, my consciousness began to fade.

Am I really dying, damn it?

My field of vision narrowed.

Even the sound of the rain seemed to drift farther and farther away.

I tried to think of my parents, but instead I found myself remembering the mystery novel I had left half-finished.

And as I died, I laughed.

And then…

I died.