CH 108

I looked around Tamaki san’s hospital room. At first glance, the room looked a little larger than a normal hospital room. However, despite the spaciousness of the room, there were no unnecessary decorations, just a minimal refrigerator and television set in an inorganic manner. I wondered if the water server next to the bed was exclusive to this room.

“Oh my, is it still bothering you?”

“Yes, very much so. I haven’t been in many hospital rooms.”

“I see. Well, then, be my guest.”

With Tamaki san’s permission, I openly look around the various parts of the hospital room. In the refrigerator, behind the TV, and even under the bed.

“Wait, what are you doing?”

“……”

Not answering Yukika’s question, I continued to look around the room. Tamaki san looks at me happily. From the looks of it, it seems that there is, after all. She’s not complaining, so it seems that she has become cooperative with me. This alone is a considerable gain.

(……Is it not in plain sight or reachable places?)

Then……

“I’m a little tired and would like to sit down. Do you have a chair?”

“Huh? Get one yourself.”

“Ruri, bring it to him.”

Her mother told her so, and with a bitter expression on her face, Yukihana brought a plastic chair from the end of the room. Then he pushes the chair to me.

“Well.”

I spread the chair out and stood up, not sitting on it but putting my feet on it. Yukihana gives me a look as if to ask me, what the hell am I doing, but I guess she thinks I have an idea as she silently looks at me. Or maybe she believes that.

“……”

Then I look at the fluorescent light on the ceiling. There’s nothing particularly strange about them, and there’s no sign that they’ve been forcibly removed. So it must be the……air conditioning.

I shifted my chair and peeked through a gap in the air conditioning unit embedded in the ceiling. The cold air caresses my cheeks, but I ignore it and look around to see if there is anything strange in the room. Then I see a green glowing object screwed inside.

(……I knew it.)

I pull out a multi-tool from my pocket. A multi-tool is a tool that has various functions and is used for outdoor activities. The one I brought this time is embedded with tools, etc., and can do most things, such as cutting and disassembling. By the way, I don’t usually carry outdoor tools with me, because they are like knives.

“Hey, what are you really doing !?”

Yukihana is yelling at my feet, and I start to remove the louvered part that is the entrance to the air conditioning system. If it’s about this size, even if I don’t have to remove all of them, I should be able to remove just one. However, the power supply is apparently controlled by the hospital, so I can’t turn off the air conditioning from here. I reached out to the fan moving in the back, careful not to get caught up in it.

“…….”

Unplugging the cord, I removed the black object from the A/C. The green light went out, as if the cord had lost power, and I could see with my eyes that it had completely stopped working. Then I got off the chair and exposed the obvious foreign object that should not be here to Yukihana and the others.

“……What’s that?”

“A wiretap.”

“Wiretap !?”

Yukihana was surprised by the existence of the wiretap, but Tamaki san was calmer as she had expected this situation to happen. In other words, the conversation we had been having was being listened to by someone somewhere. Well, that was my main goal this time.

“Now, we can finally talk to each other as equals, can’t we?”

“……Yes, that’s brilliant.”

The reason why Tamaki san was answering my question in a roundabout way was to imply the existence of a wiretap.

And I was once again in her good graces.

“I think it was about a month ago that the bug was planted. The contractor was just doing some electrical work.”

“Did you notice anything suspicious about that person?”

“No, but it didn’t look like he was just replacing fluorescent bulbs, so I was always on the lookout.”

And that caution must have been put to good use now. If Tamaki san had unconsciously told them about the household, there was no telling what kind of weakness they might find. I can imagine that she must have been under a lot of stress, but the fact that she didn’t let it show on her face shows that she is indeed the wife of a top official.

“Hey, why is there a bug here?”

“……”

The main reason for planting a wiretap is to gain information. If so, what kind of information was the person who installed this bugging device aiming to obtain?

The information obtained from Yukihana Tamaki probably wasn’t very deep in content. Judging from the discretion, we did not exchange important information concerning ourselves in this room. We should have exchanged documents such as messages. In other words, nothing was to be gleaned.

Did they install it without knowing it, or did they have some other purpose for doing such a criminal-like thing? I will never know the answer to that question unless I ask the culprits.

“……”

But I have a theory as to one of the possibilities. No, I originally wanted to meet Tamaki san after constructing that hypothesis.

Yes, the purpose of this wiretap is……

“To determine who visited the room.”

“…..Huh?”

Yukihana tilted her head and Tamaki san also looked at me with her eyes darting around. Tamaki san probably didn’t fully understand the purpose of this bugging device either. No, she may have thought that this bug was set up to bug her. However, the true purpose of this wiretap was to investigate the person who approached her.

And whether my hypothesis is correct or not will become clear later on. That’s why I just gave my personal information……

Brrrr……

Just as I was thinking that, a sound rang from the receiver diagonally behind Tamaki san. Probably a call from the hospital. It would not be allowed in a normal hospital room, but because it’s a private room for VIPs, they must be able to set up something like a telephone receiver.

Tamaki san picked up the receiver with a dubious look on her face and began to answer the phone.

“Yes……yes,……yes, a visitor?”

Tamaki san said and gave a curious look. From the content of the conversation, it seems that someone else must have asked for a visit. She looked at us once and accepted the request.

“Yes, you can let them through.:

Saying that, she put the phone back where she had put it. However, her face was full of caution. She seemed to be a little fed up with the situation.

“I’m leaving, Yukihana.”

“Eh?”

If the person who is coming now is as expected, at least I want to avoid meeting him in this hospital room. However, considering that it’s a one-way from the elevator to this place, it’s inevitable that I will encounter him somewhere. That’s why I wanted to at least move the location.

“…….Ruri, do as Tachibana san says. Thank you for your visit.”

“Eh……yeah.”

That was the last conversation of the day between Yukihana and her mother, and we left the hospital room. In my left hand, I still have the wiretap that I retrieved earlier. I’m going to disassemble it and see if there are any clues left inside and then dispose of it. Well, there probably won’t be any useful clues left.

As I was walking down the hallway, Yukihana poked me from the side with her elbow.

“Hey, I’m not convinced about a lot of things.”

“….I thought so.”

“Things like the bugging device, and the fact that you were able to communicate with my mother. Also…..why did you use a fake name?”

Yukihana, who didn’t know that I was using the name [Tachibana] until a while ago, probably thinks that I got through that situation by saying a different name.

I could have called myself [Shiina] right then and there, but there was something I really wanted to verify.

“Yukihana, I think you already know it. This is a hospital, don’t scream and act violent.”

“Huh? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“…….You’ll see.”

I stopped once in the middle of the corridor and once again closed my eyes. Yukihana, who was wondering about my appearance, also stopped for a moment and looked at me with an irritated look. Yukihana is also very disturbed because she still doesn’t understand what I’m doing or saying or reasons for cooperating. But that’s it.

(Phew…….well, I’ve given Yukihana a lot of pressure, now it’s my turn.)

Ding dong

I heard the sound of an elevator arriving from the elevator hall in front of me. And coming out of it was a man holding a package of something. He was wearing the same uniform as the rest of us, and he was dressed in a way that would not have been appropriate for a hospital visit.

“……!?”

Yukihana’s eyes widened and she gasped at the same time when she saw the man coming out of there. She was astonished, bewildered, and disgusted. A mixture of these expressions appeared on Yukihana’s face, sending her into a state of confusion. Then the man in front of me noticed our presence.

“Hm, It’s you, Ruri chan. What, are you here to visit your mother? Or are you picking me up?”

He sounded frivolous, but his words had a certain weight to them. I wonder if I should call it pressure. I had only seen him from afar before, but when I confronted him directly, I was still surprised at how much he had changed. If I had no prior information, I would have thought that he was a stranger.

“….Hm? There’s a man who doesn’t look very much like him.”

Then, he turns toward me. The fact that this guy showed up here convinced me that my hypothesis was correct.

The wiretap was not to find out information about the Yukihana family, but to research the people who visited. And now that the person I was looking for was reported to have visited, he must have shown up here too.

And he came to talk to me with a big smile on his face. It was just like before.

“I thought you had withdrawn, Tachibana kun?”

“……Shinya.”

I had been avoiding and running away from this development for a long time. The situation that I would have avoided even if I had been forced to do so before. But I won’t hesitate anymore.

And so I finally confronted the past.

–

–