It’s time for everyone’s favorite severed head-tective to reveal the identity of Hannah Godard’s murderer. Everyone is assembled in the study as Rindou Aya begins by reiterating her seven starting seven problems, five of which rule out an outsider doing the deed. As innocent as everyone looks, the killer is in this very room.
The sixth of the seven problems has to do with the sound of the murder. Hammering a silver stake would have made a sound. But whether someone heard that sound depends on the time. The seventh problem solves the problem of the sound: the silver stake was merely planted in the storage with the madame’s blood to look like it was the murder weapon.
In truth, the weapon no longer exists. It was a stake made from frozen holy water, which melted upon being thrust into the madame’s chest. An empty bottle was left at the scene, but it had dust on the inside, meaning there was never water in it. She even determines that the killer arranged the scene to trick Lord Godard into thinking the murder took place while he was hunting, when it really happened before then.
Put it all together, and the only person who had the strength to stake Hannah without a hammer and break the storage room lock to plant the stake…is Godard’s younger son, Raoul. His last line of defense is that his hand doesn’t bear the burn marks from handling the silver stake, but Aya chalks that up to him cutting his burnt fingers off with a sword. Because he’s a vampire, his fingers would regenerate without the burns.
When he has no other avenue of escape from Aya’s accusations, Raoul rushes to attack her, but is stopped dead in his tracks with Tsugaru’s free hand. He hands Aya, who is disappointed Raoul outed himself before she finished her conclusions, to Shizuku, then kicks Raoul out the window.
As for the motive, both of Godard’s sons didn’t share their parents’ desire to ally themselves with humans. Raoul was the more disillusioned of the two, such that he acted to make it seem as though a human hunter had killed his mother so Godard would end his pro-human practices.
But now that he’s been caught, there’s no escape for Raoul. He may be a vampire, but he’s no match for the Tsugaru, who toys with his prey with a florish of step-right-up showmanship, applying precise yet devastating blows with all the ease of cracking his knuckles. Before killing Raoul, Tsugaru tells the tale of a band of “ruffians” hired by the Meiji to purge all supernaturals, called the Oni Killers…and Tsugaru’s one of them.
For her part, Aya is apologetic that things might not have worked out so well for Lord Godard, but at least the wool was pulled from his eyes. Vampires living in harmony with humans is a nice ideal, but clearly much harder to pull off than he imagined. Before the sun comes up, Lord Godard sees Aya, Tsugaru, and Shizuku off, while Miss Annie from the press shows up for interviews.
While Shizuku chases Tsugaru with their trunks, she gives Lord Godard some parting words of advice not to give up the good fight. Even if his son is outed as a murderer, there’s nothing stopping the lord, who is undying, from trying again to be a credible ally to humans.
She also confirms that the man who stole her body and half of Tsugaru’s—London-based, professor, cane with an “M” engraved on it—visited Godard before she did. This is clearly Professor James Moriarty, who has definitely messed with the wrong immortal detective woman.
I didn’t expect Raoul to be the culprit, but Aya did a thorough job laying out the facts of the case and burning away all of the irrelevancies until naught but the truth remained. It’s talky for sure, but like Kitou Akari’s Kotoko in In/Spectre, it helps that Kurosawa Tomoyo’s Aya is very fun to listen to, and her words are accompanied by visuals and fun camera angles to kept me engaged.
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