The Night Watchman (27 page)

‘No, none.’

‘At first, I thought you might have killed him.’

He shook his head as though he were disappointed in me, and sat back down. At length, he closed his eyes as if listening to far-off music. Taking a deep drag on his cigarette, he let the smoke curl out through his nose. His distance seemed a kind of perfection, which made me wonder if he had also been sedated by Susana’s physician.

When I asked about that, he replied, ‘I take a pill Sylvie gives me.’ He held up both his hands as though he’d had no other choice. ‘The same pill that Sandi takes,’ he added in an embittered voice. The way he stubbed out his cigarette – absently and, because of that, overly persistently – gave me the impression he was considering how much else to tell me about his feelings. He said, ‘You know, what happens is very unfair, Inspector. Pedro has too much sadness in his life – more than one man should have,’ he replied.

‘What exactly are you referring to?’

‘The first marriage is a very big sorrow.’

Why is he telling me this?
I thought, though later that week, while daydreaming in my hospital room, I came to the conclusion that Morel might have been giving me a clue – perhaps below his level of conscious thought – as to why his friend had been killed.

‘So what happened during his first marriage?’ I asked.

‘Frederique, his wife . . . she turns the children against Pedro. She says he cheats on her, which is true, and they make a divorce. She tells the kids that Pedro does not wish to give her any money, and that he tries to steal their house.’ Morel waved a dismissive hand in the air. ‘This is not true. But everyone is
so
angry. It is a bad French opera – worse even than Offenbach! So Pedro gives up. He gives Frederique all she wants. He pays for Marie and Pierre to have a good education, but still, they do not speak to him. He sees them for the last time . . . it must be fifteen years ago. The kids at that time are adolescents. This is why he is so always together with Sandi.’

‘A second chance,’ I observed.

‘Exactement.’

‘Is Frederique still alive?’

‘Probably, but I do not speak with her for years.’

‘Would she be in Paris?’

‘Or Bordeaux. She is from there.’

‘And Marie and Pierre?’

‘I have no idea.’

Morel’s eyes fluttered closed and he drifted off again. Or pretended to. It seemed to me that he’d said what he needed to and was anxious to let go of this time and place.

A copy of the
Público
newspaper lay folded on the counter by the oven. I took it and went to the window. Maybe Morel’s view of the divorce was distorted and Coutinho had tried to ruin his first wife’s life. Perhaps some recent trauma had brought all the pain back to her and made her take revenge against her ex-husband all these many years later.

A crystal ashtray sat on the sill, and in it were two butts from the night before. I added a third.

I found no article about the murder in the paper, which meant that whoever had leaked information to the press hadn’t taken my bait. On hearing footsteps from the staircase, I gazed at the doorway and discovered the room circling slowly around me. When I reached out for the windowsill to steady myself, the newspaper I’d been holding fell to the floor. Sylvie stepped into the kitchen while I was picking it up. I was holding my pen now in my left hand.

‘Inspector, are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Just a momentary loss of balance,’ I told her. ‘What about Susana?’

‘She’s never seen the woman in your sketch or the tattoo. She also said that Sandi was not wearing her ring. She has no idea where it could be. And she says she’ll do her best to talk to you this evening. But no promises.’

As I took back the sketch from her, I noticed that the message on my hand had been completed. G had written,
So did the kid really cash in her chips all by her little self?

Standing in the foyer, I called David Zydowicz and told him what had happened to Sandi, adding that he was the only person I wanted to do the autopsy. Muffling my voice, I said that he was to check for bruises and other signs that she had been forced to swallow an overdose. After he agreed, I called Luci and asked her to join me right away.

I was wiping G’s message off my hand when the doorbell rang. Sylvie rushed in from the kitchen, clutching her fan to her chest, and opened the door to two teenaged girls.

‘Bom dia, Senhora Freitas,’ the younger-looking of the two said in Portuguese.
Good morning.
Her black bangs fell straight to her eyebrows. She looked like a pop star from the 1960s – a hopeful, fourteen-year-old Cher.

The second girl was tall and slender, and she had pulled her long blonde hair around to the front. She gripped it as though it were a rope she were clinging to, and her lips were sealed tight. She wore a billowy white shirt with long bell sleeves, which seemed to give a balletic grace to her stance.

Both girls stayed where they were, held back by timidity.

‘Come in, come in!’ Sylvie told them eagerly, and she introduced them to me as Sandi’s best friends.

Monica – the would-be Cher – exchanged kisses on the cheek with me. Joana – the tense ballerina – extended her arm as far out as she could to shake hands.

‘Is Sandi . . . is she all right, Senhora?’ Monica asked in a hesitant voice.

‘Let’s get comfortable in the kitchen and I’ll explain,’ Sylvie told them. Steering the girls forward, she looked at me as though she were walking a gangplank in her head.

Joana stepped into the kitchen first. Morel stood at the back of the room, by the open window, rubbing his hand over his stubble. ‘Joana!’ he exclaimed with eager surprise.

On seeing him, the girl gasped and thrust her hands over her mouth. Monica, stepping beside her friend to see what had terrified her, burst into tears.

‘Oh,
mes petites, qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’
Morel asked in a troubled voice.
What’s wrong, my little ones?

Monica drew in her shoulders and pressed a hand over her heart. ‘It’s just . . . just you startled us,’ she said in French, though that struck me as an obvious lie. Joana must also have heard how false it sounded and, to make up for her slip, she added, ‘We had no idea you were here. And I’ve been really nervous lately. I’m sorry – so sorry.’

‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ he assured her.

He stepped towards the girls with open arms and embraced them. As he separated from Joana, he cupped her chin and looked at her with fatherly radiance. She smiled back appreciatively. She was an accomplished actress.

Nothing between them will be what it seems,
I thought, and yet the need to decipher all their interactions made me feel certain that I had a small advantage over them – after all, I was prepared now for their attempts to fool each other and me.

‘How do you all know each other?’ I asked.

‘We meet last time Sandi comes to France,’ he replied. ‘Joana and Monica . . . they come with her. They make a weekend with me at my country house in Normandy. They even ride my horses! We have a nice time, no?’

‘Very nice,’ Joana said, and she gave me a big nod to convince me she was telling the truth.
It is important for her to fool everyone in this room, even me,
I thought, which meant that the danger Morel represented – either real or perceived – was so grave that even the police couldn’t protect her.

Sylvie took a chair for herself and asked the girls to sit next to her, one on each side. She gripped their hands tightly. She told them they had to be strong.

On hearing what had happened, Joana jumped up, fighting for air, and Monica burst into sobs. Sylvie signalled for Morel to help Joana while she comforted Monica. He convinced the girl to sit again and knelt beside her, but when he tried to warm her frigid hands in his, she pushed free of him and rushed to the far corner of the room, by the garden door. Squeezing herself into the angle between the two walls – a small child trying to push through brick and plaster to safety – she began to weep. Sylvie went to her and gripped her shoulders from behind.

Morel took a cigarette from his pack but fumbled his lighter. After he scooped it up from the floor, his eyes caught mine.

Two men mirror their uselessness, acknowledging that only Sylvie will be able to help Sandi’s best friends, because she is a woman.

Morel raised his hands and let them fall to signal our mutual defeat, and in the second it took to do that I seemed to understand more about him – about his being caught in events way beyond his control or authority – than I had over the previous half-hour.

Unfortunately, my newfound clarity about how lost he was made the girls’ reaction to him seem inexplicable.

Once Joana’s tears had subsided, she shuffled back to the table with her head down, apologizing, saying in a thin, frail, self-conscious voice – clinging to smallness for safety – that she hadn’t been herself since learning of the murder of Sandi’s father.

Joana explained to us that Sandi had called both of them the previous afternoon. Sniffling into a tissue, she said that the girl had told them about her father’s death but refused to discuss how she felt.

The three friends agreed to speak again yesterday evening, but Sandi never called either of them. Monica and Joana had both tried to reach her but her cell phone had always been off, so they’d decided to come over.

‘Where’s Sandi’s cell phone now?’ I asked Sylvie.

‘Susana has it with her,’ she told me.

When I asked the girls why Sandi had been so troubled over the last few months, Monica replied that she’d been viciously teased by kids at school for being what they called a ‘spoiled little rich girl’. She’d apparently become an easy target for classmates whose parents had lost their jobs or who’d had their salaries cut since the start of our economic crisis. Sandi began to regard herself as an outcast. She’d decided to make her image more rebellious.

‘Is that why she cut her hair so short?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, she figured it might stop the teasing,’ Monica said. ‘Though it didn’t work,’ she added bitterly. ‘Kids just started teasing her for looking so weird.’ For Morel’s benefit, Sylvie repeated Monica’s words to him in French.

‘Do you agree, Joana?’ I asked. ‘Was the teasing how Sandi’s problems started?’

The girl folded her lips inside her mouth and nodded. Morel must have jumped to the same conclusion I had; he joined his hands into a position of prayer and pleaded in French, ‘Ma
petite,
if you know something we don’t know, then I beg of you to tell us.’

Joana opened her eyes wide and drew back her head, as if he’d cornered her, and I thought she might just shout an accusation of his having planned the murder of Sandi’s father and menaced her friend. Instead, with an air of abject defeat, she laid her head onto the table and wept.

The look of dashed hope she showed me in the moment before tears washed her eyes made me realize that she needed me to know that Morel was an enemy so far beyond her capabilities that there was no hope for her. To distance myself from her despair and think things out, I said I needed to make another call and went out to the garden. Had Sandi hated the idea of a divorce so much that she’d begged her father not to permit a separation? If so, then Morel would have discovered her responsibility sooner or later, and when he did, he might have threatened her. When the girl still wouldn’t give up her objections to a divorce, he decided to free Susana in the only way that seemed possible: by having her husband killed.

While circling the lawn, I realized that – if all that were true – Sandi would have also concluded that Morel was responsible for her father’s death. She might have told him last night that she suspected him of having planned – or even carried out – his old friend’s murder. Maybe he overpowered her and forced her to swallow an overdose.

When I entered the kitchen, Sylvie was stroking Monica’s hair. The girl’s eyes were glazed with disbelief. Joana was resting with her head on the table; her eyes were closed.

Morel stood by the back window, smoking absently. Nothing in his face or posture indicated that he might be worried about what the girls could tell me about him. I sat next to Joana and placed my hand on her shoulder. When she opened her eyes, I told her I was grateful for her help. Feeling the reticent rise and fall of her back, I saw myself as though I’d entered one of those dreams where you do something you could never do in real life.

When the doorbell rang, Morel volunteered to see who it was. A few seconds later, Luci stepped into the kitchen behind him. The stiff, artificial way she smiled at me made me believe she was having second thoughts about her police career.

I asked Sylvie and the girls to wait in the kitchen while Luci and I examined Sandi’s bedroom. To draw Morel away from Joana and Monica, I asked him to join us.

We found a bottle of Absolut vodka and an empty box of Victan still on the girl’s night table, along with the vampire novel she’d been reading –
Queimada
– and two of the three CDs I’d spotted there the day before:
Day & Age
by The Killers and
Let England Shake,
by P J Harvey. A young woman with pale skin had been pictured on the cover of the missing CD but, for the moment, I couldn’t remember its title or the name of the group.

I could see that Luci was waiting for me to ask her to speak her mind, but there wasn’t time. ‘If you start to feel like you won’t be able to cope,’ I told her, ‘step out of the room for a while.’

‘No, sir, that won’t be necessary,’ she replied in a businesslike tone. ‘I’m okay.’

I put on my gloves and gave
Queimada
a shake, but no suicide note or anything else fluttered out. Neither of the two CDs contained anything unusual.

According to the blurb on the book’s back cover, it was about a young vampire named Zoey Redbird with a broken heart and ‘shattered soul’.

The bed was unmade. Sandi’s dolls and stuffed animals were grouped neatly on her desk. I took a quick look through them while Luci went through her dresser drawers. I also checked under the bed, but there was no jumble of clothing this time, and no knife taped to the corner of the mattress.