Spoilers: This article covers the kidnapping solution, Date’s final request and the rescue scenes.
Takagi and Date and the Notebook Promise (Part 1) and Takagi and Date and the Notebook Promise (Part 2), international episodes 1167-1168 (Japanese episodes 1109-1110), adapt Files 1079-1081 from Volumes 101-102. Date’s notebook is not only a keepsake connected with his engagement ring. It contains the unfinished investigation he entrusted to Takagi, and its clues lead to two people who still need rescuing.
The arrest that reopens Date's unfinished work
Conan Edogawa and the Detective Boys are returning from a visit to Professor Agasa in hospital when they encounter Wataru Takagi pursuing a robber. Miwako Sato approaches by another route, and the suspect is caught.
Takagi opens the notebook he inherited from Wataru Date to record the arrest time. A coded note left by his late mentor draws attention. The scene begins with routine police work, which makes the transition to unfinished business especially effective: Takagi is carrying Date’s influence even before he realizes that the notebook contains a new task.
Date died in a traffic accident a year earlier. His absence matters to the present investigation because he can no longer explain the note. Conan and the others must recover its purpose from what he wrote and from traces still left in the ordinary world around them.
What the notebook code tells them
The note contains strings of numbers and symbols alongside a reminder about Sunday and Takagi. The decoding method uses telephone keypad input of the kind associated with pager-style messages and an SMS center’s voice prompts.
The result gives a place, time and identifying detail: Sunday at noon, Café Poirot at Beika 5-6, a seat by the window, and a red bow tie. The message is a set of instructions for a ransom handover, not an abstract puzzle left for its own sake.
That specificity turns a familiar café into an investigation site. The window seat, tape marks, a game device and a paper bag matter because they can be used to reconstruct how the handover was meant to work. The case advances by comparing the decoded words with physical remnants at the location.
The pleasure of solving the code is tempered by what it implies. Date had found a lead to a person in danger, yet the investigation did not end with his death. Understanding an old instruction may still determine whether someone can be saved now.
The promise was about Takagi becoming a detective
When Date entrusted the notebook to him after the accident, Takagi focused on the ring inside and understood the request as delivering it to Date’s fiancée, Natalie. That explains why the notebook’s emotional meaning had seemed settled before the code resurfaced.
The hidden request concerns the case as well. Date wanted Takagi to solve it, earn his own achievement and develop as a police officer. Tooru Amuro interprets Date’s earlier encouragement in that professional sense rather than as an unrelated personal promise.
Amuro’s interpretation has an additional emotional weight because he knew Date from the police academy. At Poirot he is outwardly the familiar café employee, but his response is shaped by the man he remembers. The notebook links Date’s former classmate and his junior officer without requiring Date to appear in the present.
Azusa remembers a plea for help
Azusa Enomoto recalls seeing a foreign boy in a car making unusual hand movements a year earlier. What seemed odd at the time is recognized as an SOS signal. Her memory connects the café clues with the kidnapping of Alain Cassel.
The recognition changes the urgency of the investigation. An unexplained gesture in an everyday setting becomes evidence that a child was asking for help. The question is no longer merely what Date had been investigating, but whether the captive can still be reached.
Kido organized the kidnapping to obtain ransom money because of substantial gambling debts. He has since died, but his death did not automatically release the people held by his subordinate. The subordinate did not know his leader was dead and continued following the instructions.
This is a kidnapping and confinement case, not a new murder committed by Takagi. The distinction becomes particularly important during the final confrontation, when Takagi deliberately says something untrue about Kido’s death.
One rescue reveals another captive
The reconstruction at Poirot uses the window-seat traces, game device and paper bag to restore the logic of the ransom exchange. Following that line of inquiry leads to Alain’s rescue.
The relief is short-lived because Alain reveals that Yuji Inukai is still confined. Rescuing one victim has supplied the witness needed to reach the other, but it has not finished the case.
That second stage prevents the old notebook from functioning as a simple sentimental reveal. Its discovery initiates practical work: decoding, interviewing, reconstructing, searching and finally taking a physical risk. Date’s legacy matters because the living characters keep acting on it.
How Alain's fragments identify the apartment
Alain cannot simply give an address. Instead, he remembers a Nichiuri Radio traffic report, a car journey of about thirty minutes, and a building whose elevator goes up to the fifth floor. Each piece restricts the possibilities without identifying a place by itself.
The light through the windows, including memories of sunrise and sunset, helps establish orientation. A pool used by children points toward an elementary school’s rooftop pool. A brown silo-like structure and a red flag with a crescent supply another distinctive feature of the surrounding view.
The flag and building lead to a Turkish restaurant in Toriya. Combined with the other observations, the geography identifies Shiromino Apartments and the room at the far end of the south side of the fourth floor where Inukai is held.
The deduction is satisfying because it treats a frightened witness’s imperfect recollections as usable evidence. The traffic report and travel time provide a route constraint; the floor count and sunlight narrow the building and room; the pool and restaurant flag anchor the view to recognizable features.
The search also gives Takagi, Sato and Amuro complementary work to do. The case moves outward from the café through several directions, then converges on a single place. The clues do not become stronger by being repeated; they become stronger by fitting the same location.
Takagi's dangerous bluff buys time
At the apartment, Takagi confronts Kido’s subordinate as he tries to move Inukai. Takagi exploits the man’s ignorance of Kido’s death by falsely claiming to have killed his leader. The claim is a provocation, not a confession: Kido was killed by a drunken man, not by Takagi.
The point of the lie is to draw the subordinate’s anger toward Takagi and buy time for the rescue. Takagi accepts the risk of being attacked so that the hostage is not the immediate focus.
Sato and Amuro arrive in time, and Inukai is protected. Alain and Inukai can finally reunite. The ending resolves both stages of the kidnapping rather than treating the first rescue as a sufficient success.
Takagi’s action gives Date’s encouragement a present-day answer. He does not honor his mentor merely by understanding an old phrase. He makes a difficult decision at a live scene and helps save the person entrusted to him through that unfinished investigation.
What Sato recognizes, and what remains unspoken
Sato asks Amuro whether they have met before, and he denies it. The background connection is an encounter during his police-academy days, when Sato was a university student. Her sense of familiarity must be distinguished from a full recognition of his identity or past.
The exchange leaves the academy connections near the surface without turning them into an open conversation. Date and Jinpei Matsuda remain part of the emotional background, while Amuro keeps his response guarded.
The case’s warmth comes from the rescue and reunion; its sadness comes from the person who cannot witness them. The notebook bridges both. It preserves a practical lead and a belief in Takagi, allowing an old promise to be fulfilled through the work of people still alive.
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