The Night Watchman (26 page)

If I’d have replied, I’d have said that being
good
was precisely how you ended up so broken along a mountain road in Colorado that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put you together again.

Sensing her first probe hadn’t landed anywhere useful, she said, ‘Listening to what people need to tell you is more important than being grammatically correct.’

‘Except that I didn’t hear what Sandi was trying to tell me.’

‘Probably because she didn’t yet know what she wanted to say!’

‘But I should have been able to figure things out by the way she looked at me.’

Ana’s eyes burned. ‘When did you become clairvoyant?’

‘I’m talking about being sensitive to what people in trouble won’t permit themselves to say.’

‘Look, I’ve got news for you: you couldn’t have changed that girl’s mind even if you’d read her thoughts. You were a stranger to her!’

‘You can’t possibly know that!’ I said in desperation. ‘You can’t know what positive effect we can have even on people we meet just for a few minutes. It’s one of the best things in life – that strangers can help us.’

I closed my eyes, squeezing hard on the darkness because I’d spoken rudely. ‘There are places in Colorado where you can look twenty miles in each direction and you won’t see anything but ancient rock and reflected sunlight,’ I said. ‘And those places are still in me.’

I wasn’t sure why I’d told her that. But maybe she knew. ‘Black Canyon might be a dangerous place for a foreigner like me,’ she said.

‘I’d never let anything bad happen to you.’

‘No, I can see you wouldn’t.’ She took my bolo tie of a kachina – a Native American goddess – out of her backpack. It was silver and inlaid with red coral, and it was the most powerful talisman I owned. Nathan had given it to me just before I left Colorado. He’d told me that the kachina had been made by his father, who had studied with Black Elk.

Nathan also told me that it would prevent even the most
ornery
demon –
ornery
was one of his favourite words – from learning the secret name he’d given me. ‘And remember, Hank,’ he added, his big, sun-darkened hand resting on my head, ‘a demon who doesn’t know your name can’t hurt you!’

I reached out to take the bolo from Ana, but she said, ‘Let me put Debbie on you.’

Debbie was the name that Ernie and I had given the kachina, because it seemed the single most unlikely name for a Native American goddess – and therefore of no use to anyone who might want to harm her or us.

I bent my head down to Ana, and as she spread the tie’s leather cord around my head, I sensed her taut, purposeful, creative power – and the confidence in herself that had first attracted me to her because I found it such a mystery.

For a moment, it seemed as if we’d grown up together – and that we were taking part in a ritual far beyond our time and place.

‘I thought you didn’t believe in magic,’ I said when I rose back up.

‘But you do,’ she told me.

I slid Debbie’s crown up into the V of my collar. Her sharp silver edges pressing into my palm seemed to be points of contact between me and all that I’d never understand about the world but would forever be thankful for.

My wife grinned as she did when she saw me as a challenge. ‘You see awful things, Hank,’ she said, ‘but you keep going back. You try everything to make things turn out right. That’s what I meant by being a good man.’

‘But maybe that has nothing to do with courage or anything else that could be considered . . . praiseworthy.’

‘No? Then what’s it got to do with?’

I stated the truth for the first time, though I had no idea why. ‘Because only people in pain seem absolutely real to me. And I need to be with them to be sure I’m real, too.’

Eyeing me sceptically, she said, ‘And that’s the only reason you try to solve these terrible crimes?’

‘Maybe not the only one. I think maybe the other reasons are why I live on Valium.’

She smiled, as I’d hoped, and pressed her lips to mine, and I thought what I have nearly always thought when Ana kisses me:
I could never have predicted that I wouldn’t have to spend my life alone.

When I kissed her back, it was the ease and warmth of our bodies coming together – like wintering animals seeking each other’s comfort – that allowed me to leave her.

She took my shoulder as I started to get out of the car. ‘Give me a ring if you need more magic, Chief Inspector.’

As she drove off, I took the kachina in my hand again. When I turned around to face Coutinho’s house, I saw myself as though on a bridge leading straight from Colorado to Lisbon. I wondered what Nathan would think of the man I’d become, which was probably why I heard him whisper to me,
Hank, you’ve got to find out which demon was able to learn Sandi’s real name.

An elderly man with a gaunt face answered my knocks on Coutinho’s door. His thick silver hair was neatly combed. His blue eyes were weary.

‘Jean Morel?’ I asked.

‘Oui. Et qui êtes-vous?’

When I told him, he said in resentful, heavily accented English, ‘You come too late!’

After a brief search for how to reduce all I felt to a single sentence, I said, ‘I made the mistake of underestimating how bad things were. I’m sorry. How is Senhora Coutinho holding up?’

‘Holding up? She’s not
holding up
at all!’ he told me, obviously regarding my phrasing as unfit for the circumstances. He didn’t invite me in.

‘I need to talk to her,’ I said.

‘No, no, no,’ he replied, wagging his finger as if I were a schoolboy.

‘I’m on official police business,’ I said. The authoritative tone of my voice made me aware that his animosity had transformed me back into a police officer again.

He barred my way with his hands crossed over his chest – a gesture that earned my respect even as it narrowed my options. I could have pushed past him easily enough, but instead I looked up the street towards the Jesus Church, searching its deeply shadowed archways for the right words to prevent two strangers from quarrelling at a bad moment. I didn’t find them, but a slender elderly woman with shiny, copper-coloured hair cut in severe bangs and a long, flowing, hippyish white dress came to the door and broke the impasse. She wore black-rimmed sunglasses held together by tape, a knee-length strand of amber beads and an embroidered peasant shirt. She reminded Morel in precise, carefully worded French that Susana wanted me there.

After I’d followed her inside, she removed her dark glasses and introduced herself as Pedro Coutinho’s elder sister, Sylvie Freitas. She had big leaky eyes – red-rimmed and puffy. Bending over the coffee table, she picked up a closed fan. The tendons straining in her hand as she pressed it to her chest told me that she wasn’t going to let go of it again for a while.

She told me she’d come over the night before to help take care of Sandi and Susana. She lived in Cascais.

Sitting around the kitchen table, Sylvie explained to me – with despairing hesitations and pauses – what had happened the night before. She fluttered her fan by her face whenever she lost her voice. It was painted with black and gold geese flying against a blue sky. It looked Japanese – a present from her brother, perhaps.

Sandi had been doing surprisingly well, Sylvie said – had even let her poodle Nero chase her around the garden for a while and had managed to eat some spaghetti for supper. She’d gone to bed early. Susana sat with her until she’d fallen asleep.

Sylvie spoke in a voice that had been scraped raw by grief. She spoke in English because Morel couldn’t follow our Portuguese. A Scottish lilt played over her vowels, and when I asked her about that, she told me that she’d studied art history at the University of Edinburgh in the 1960s. She made a point of telling me she’d spent her student years in a commune, much to her parents’ embarrassment. I had the feeling she needed me to know that she’d been the black sheep in her family. Maybe she was trying to distance herself from her brother and his troubles.

I asked her and Morel if Sandi had been wearing her turquoise ring, since I wanted to know if she’d thought she needed to keep it hidden, even though she would soon be dead. Neither of them had noticed, however. ‘We saw nothing out of the ordinary with her,’ Sylvie told me in summation.

‘This is not quite true,’ the Frenchman corrected with an apologetic tilt to his head. He stood up, took a pack of Gauloise Blondes from his shirt pocket and pinched one out. Reaching into his pants’ pocket, he took out his lighter, which was sleek and gold, and which reminded me I’d entered a world I usually only glimpsed on magazine covers.

‘Sandi gives me a gift after dinner,’ Morel explained. ‘And later, before bed, she kisses me goodnight.’

‘That was unusual?’ I asked.

Tearing up, he replied, ‘Yes. She is not . . .’ He tapped a fist against his head and looked to Sylvie for help.

‘Affectionate,’ she suggested.

‘She is not affectionate with me for some months.’

‘What was the gift?’

He lit his cigarette. ‘A cookbook. I fetch him.’

Morel headed into the living room and returned with a huge volume entitled,
Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa.
‘Sandi tells me that her mother does not cook – not even eggs – so I will have to. She says her grandparents give her the book but she wants me to have it. I refuse but she insists. You understand, Inspector? It is her way to say she accepts me.’ Morel made a Gallic puffing sound with his lips. ‘You cannot know the relief this means to me. And yet the story ends in the worst possible manner.’

I decided not to mention that people who intended to kill themselves often gave away their prized possessions, but Sylvie must have already had her suspicions and made a tight, strangulated sound while running her hand down her neck. When Morel looked at her worriedly, she told him she needed more coffee. Maybe she feared he might break down if he learned the truth. I asked for a cup, as well; my participating in their small ritual might help me gain their confidence.

While filling the kettle, Morel told me that Susana had come downstairs at four in the morning because she’d been unable to sleep. She’d discovered Nero sitting in the kitchen – ‘looking miserable’ – and let him out into the garden. He’d joined her shortly afterward. They’d conversed in the living room. Susana had checked on Sandi at about 5.15 a.m. and saw the box of sleeping pills – Victan – on her night table, along with a half-empty bottle of vodka. Her breathing was dangerously shallow.

‘Susana called 112,’ Sylvie told me.

Morel began to pour the boiling water through the coffee filter.

‘Have either of you moved anything in Sandi’s bedroom?’ I asked.

‘We search for a note,’ Morel replied, ‘but we not find it. We remove nothing.’

‘Good. I’ll need to look around. Later, someone from Forensics will come over. Where’s Susana?’

‘In bed,’ Sylvie replied. ‘Unfortunately, we’ll have to get her up later.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Pedro’s funeral. It’s today – at two in the afternoon.’ Noting my surprise, she shrugged and added, ‘It was too late to alter the date. Friends are coming from Paris.’

I pressed on my temples because the word
funeral
had started an insistent pulsing in my head. Gabriel was already standing behind me – watching and waiting.

‘I need to show Susana something,’ I told Sylvie, hoping that an active conversation would keep G from taking me over. I took out my portrait of the woman who’d been seen leaving the house on the morning of Coutinho’s death and explained why I was so keen on identifying her, but neither Sylvie nor Morel recognized her. Nor had they ever seen a tattoo of the number thirty. ‘I don’t think it will do any good to show the sketch to Susana now,’ Sylvie added. ‘Her doctor was here and gave her sedatives.’

Morel held up my coffee cup. ‘Milk or sugar?’ he asked.

‘Inspector . . .?’ Sylvie raised her eyebrows in a questioning fashion.

I was facing her, which seemed wrong. I was holding my pen, too.

‘If you want paper, I can get you some,’ Sylvie said.

It took me a moment to realize what she meant. When I did, I said, ‘I often write on my hand when I don’t want to risk losing an important thought.’

‘Milk or sugar?’ Morel repeated.

‘Neither,’ I answered. I took the cup from him and sat back down.

What was scribbled on my palm had been written in the code Ernie and I had made up as kids. Deciphered, it read,
The good wife wanted you to understand that cruelties have taken place in this house. So did . . .

The message stopped abruptly – probably because Sylvie had interrupted G.

After a first sip of my coffee, I told Sylvie, ‘I want you to take the drawings upstairs to Susana. Wake her if you have to. Tell her that Monroe needs her help. And ask her if her daughter was wearing her turquoise ring.’

As soon as Sylvie had left, Morel sat down beside me and offered me a cigarette. For the first time in years, I accepted. Maybe I just wanted a brief escape from my usual patterns of behaviour, or was hoping for the comfort of an old vice, but it was possible, too, that G had slipped soundlessly across the border between us and influenced my decision.

Smoking made me feel as though I were standing at the edge of a deep precipice – one false move away from losing everything.

Morel stood up and ran his finger along a row of ornamental tiles on the wall, tracing the contours of the bright yellow and blue glazes. Watching him, I realized that as men grew older their very way of moving – the faltering grace – became a test of one’s own solidarity and fear of death.

When he noticed my staring, he turned to me, tearing up again – as though he’d spotted more empathy in my face than he’d expected.

Moved by the loneliness in his eyes, I said, ‘You’ve lost a lot.’

‘I know Sandi since she is born,’ he told me. ‘I am her godfather.’

‘Do you think that Susana will be able to talk to me later today?’

‘I doubt this very much.’ Instead of elaborating, he gazed at the tiles again.

‘Any ideas on who might have murdered your friend?’ I asked. I tried a second puff of my cigarette, but it was worse even than the first.