The Night Watchman (32 page)

I could see through my side window that Inspector Quintela was in his office, so I handed him Joana’s phial and asked him to bring it to Forensics. If I was right, the blood on the sliver of towel would be Mercier’s or Savarin’s. Or, in the worst possible case, both men’s. I also told him to get the passenger lists for all flights to and from Paris over the last two weeks and to check if Mercier or Savarin were on any of them.

After Quintela left, it occurred to me that Sandi might have told her mother about being raped even if her father had instructed her not to. At the very least, Susana would have sensed a change in her daughter’s behaviour and probably forced a confession out of her. In that case, she might have disagreed with her husband about how to handle the problem. She’d have been aware that her husband had denied Sandi the help and compassion she deserved. She might have been in favour of informing the police and been overruled by Pedro. Very possibly there’d have been a violent quarrel. All of which would explain why she’d implied to me that there had been great cruelty in her house. Did her sense of guilt make her hope that I’d catch on? After all, she’d gone along with her husband’s plan to keep silent about their daughter’s rape.

Everything seemed to be coming together, but I sensed there was something else that no one wanted me to see – something I was missing, and that had to do with the need to make the very worst crimes disappear as if they’d never happened.

Back at my desk, I navigated to the Florence + the Machine website and found the lyrics for the
Lungs
CD. The song ‘Dog Days Are Over’ caught my attention right away because it spoke of a girl whose happiness hit her like a runaway train. It also contained a reference to menacing horses and, near the end of the song, a comparison between happiness and getting shot in the back.

We often searched for narratives that would help us make sense of our lives, and it seemed clear to me now that this particular song had provided one for Sandi.

I watched the video of ‘Dog Days Are Over’ twice on YouTube. The female singer wore a gauzy white dress, and her face and hands were painted white. Her hair was a frizzy red helmet. Her singing started breathy and soft, and her awkward, sinuous hand movements gave her dancing an unrehearsed, youthful, amateurish feel. A minute or so into the song, however, when syncopated clapping started up in the background, she began to belt out the lyrics as though she’d grown enraged.

As I was going over the list of calls to and from Coutinho’s phone to see if he’d heard from either of the two young Frenchmen over the past few weeks, David rang me on my office phone. He told me that he’d just finished Sandi’s autopsy and there were no signs that she’d been forced to take an overdose and no self-inflicted cuts. He would wait for the results of the toxic substance tests to classify her death as suicide, but he saw no reason to suspect it was anything else.

When he told me she’d been dangerously underweight, I explained that she’d suffered from bulimia.

‘There’s one last thing, Henrique,’ he added darkly. ‘The girl had been pregnant.’

David’s revelation fixed me in place. ‘How far along was she?’ I finally asked.

‘About three months, though the foetus was only sixteen millimetres long. It would have developed more fully if she’d eaten better.’

There were twists of fortune that could make continuing to struggle on seem pointless, and this had proved to be one of them. I knew I’d always remember the hard roundness of my coffee mug in my hand because it was while squeezing it that I realized that Sandi had stopped eating so no one could tell she was pregnant. Which meant she’d starved her unborn baby, as well – a crime she had only been able to live with for as long as it took to take her own life.

On completing my scan of Coutinho’s outgoing and incoming calls, I confirmed that he hadn’t spoken to either Mercier or Savarin over the last two weeks. Fonseca appeared in my doorway while I was wondering if I should put in a request for the French police to interview both young men. He gave me a rundown on the evidence that he and Vaz had collected on Friday. After excluding the fingerprints of family members and Senhora Grimault, they’d obtained prints for six other individuals, but none of them had turned up in our database. No matches had come up for the bullet either, which meant that the killer’s gun hadn’t been used to commit any other crime in Portugal. Fonseca had identified it as a Browning semi-automatic pistol, but had found no fingerprints. Curiously, it was a model that we’d used in the police until about ten years before.

As I expected, Sandi’s own blood had created the stains on the stuffed panda and her underwear I’d found under her bed. Morel’s prints had been all over the living room, and his DNA was on the Gauloise cigarette butts.
Diana
in Japanese had indeed been written in Coutinho’s blood. A fibre caught in the second character indicated that the brush used had been rabbit hair.

‘We’ll need to check the victim’s paintbrushes,’ I told Fonseca.

He eyed me cagily. ‘I’m way ahead of you again, Henrique! His brushes are cat and marten.’

‘Cat?’

‘I checked on the Internet. The Japanese use it to make brushes all the time.’

‘So the killer brought his own rabbit-hair brush to the festivities.’

‘Right, which means he expected to make enough blood for his calligraphy. He thought ahead.’

‘What about that small piece of towel? Whose blood did you find on it?’

‘No results yet. Sudoku promised me he’d analyse it this afternoon. He’ll call you.’

Fonseca went on to say that Joaquim had found nothing of interest on Coutinho’s computer, neither threatening emails nor evidence of bribes he’d paid, but he still had several hundred files to consult. As for Sandi’s laptop, he hadn’t been able to start on it yet. He knew I was in a rush and had promised Fonseca that he’d take it home with him.

‘What about the sneaker print?’ I asked.

‘A size forty-three Converse,’ Fonseca replied.

‘Anything unusual about them?’

‘Vaz says the tread showed no signs of wear.’

‘So the killer bought them for the murder – he’s a clever guy,’ I said, because even if we’d found them, we’d have been unable to learn anything about his daily routine from what we tweezered out of their tread.

Before Fonseca left, I asked him to go to Coutinho’s house and search Sandi’s room for evidence, and he promised he’d get there by the end of the day.

Our receptionist Filipa called while I was going over the lyrics to the other songs on
Lungs.
‘A pretty young lady named Joana is here asking for you,’ she told me cheerfully.

I met the girl at the top of the stairs. She smiled with relief on seeing me.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Fine, thanks.’ We kissed cheeks. ‘Listen, Chief Inspector, what if thirty isn’t really the thirty?’ she asked.

Her riddle brought nothing to mind. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

‘One of our French professors teaches yoga twice a week after school. She has a tattoo on her right hand. It’s Sanskrit for Om, the syllable that Hindus chant. I should have figured out that that’s what it was, but I must have been too upset. Om looks pretty much like thirty if you only get a quick look. If you have a computer, I’ll show you.’

Back in my office, she dropped down in my desk chair and starting tapping away on the keyboard. I leaned over her shoulder, but the father–daughter feel of our positions felt too intimate and I took a step back. A moment later, Google Images presented us with six million, two hundred thousand pictures of Om. Joana picked one that was stylishly drawn.

‘Am I a genius, or what?’ she asked me, laughing.

‘You’re an amazing girl!’ I agreed. Giving her shoulder a little squeeze, I stepped around my desk so that I could face her.

‘So what’s this teacher’s name?’ I asked.

Joana lifted up her lip like a donkey. ‘Your sketch doesn’t look much like her,’ she said, ‘and I wouldn’t want to get her into trouble.’

‘She might have been in Sandi’s house when her father was murdered. Which means she might have seen or heard the killer.’

‘It’s just . . . just that I don’t want her to hate me.’

‘If she hates anyone, it’ll be me, not you. I promise.’

‘Her name Maria Dias,’ Joana said and, as I jotted that down, she took out her cell phone and read me her phone number and address.

‘How did you get her contacts?’ I asked.

‘Miss Dias invited me, Joana and Sandi over for lunch one Saturday just after the spring break. She especially liked Sandi.’

Maria Dias lived in the Chiado, across the street from Nood, an Asian noodle restaurant that Jorge adored because the African and Brazilian waiters gave him piggyback rides if he pleaded with them shamelessly enough. The intercom for her apartment house was defaced with jagged red script reading FUCK MOODY’S. It was a reference to the American ratings agency that had downgraded Portugal’s credit rating to the level of ‘junk’ almost exactly a year earlier. I buzzed Dias’s third-floor apartment, fully expecting her to have escaped the dusty, overheated city for the beach, but after a few seconds, she asked who it was, and I explained why I needed to speak with her. She buzzed me in right away.

On opening her front door to me, she said, ‘You found me much quicker than I thought you would, Inspector.’

‘I got lucky – someone helped me identify you just a little while ago.’

‘Come on in.’ She smiled shyly.

The apartment was small and crowded with figurative paintings on the walls; she had that in common with her murdered boyfriend. The floor was tatami. A waist-high stone statue of the Buddha – meditating serenely – sat in the corner. The furniture was sleek, contemporary and uniformly white.

A handsome, well-worn leather quiver that hung over the door to the kitchen caught my attention. Its feather fletchings were slender and grey – not so different from the ones Nathan used to make.

Dias was barefoot and asked me to remove my shoes. I lined them up with the two other pairs by the door. She wore loose-fitting black trousers and a pink tank top. Her arms were lithe and tan, her waist slender – a gazelle with long-lashed green eyes. Her dark hair was clipped short and spiky. She must have had it cut over the weekend to avoid being identified. I’d have guessed she was thirty, but there was an authority in the way she carried herself that made me believe she might be older.

I was surprised that she was so different in style from Susana, but that was likely one of her attractions to Coutinho.

‘So, what can I get you?’ she asked, once again showing me a timid, reticent smile.

‘Nothing, thanks. I just had breakfast.’

She clasped her hands together as if she wanted me to give her a chance to play hostess, which gave me the idea that she didn’t often have visitors. ‘How about just some tea?’ she asked.

‘Good idea. With a little lemon if you have it.’

‘Come into the kitchen and we’ll talk. You look desperate for answers.’

Her kitchen was small and well organized. In the middle of her white marble table were twelve canary-yellow ceramic cups, arranged as though they were the petals of a lotus flower. Inside each cup were powdered spices – turmeric, paprika and others in varying shades of red, yellow and brown that I was unable to identify. Not surprisingly, the air was heavy with the scent of curry.

‘Beautiful,’ I said, pointing to her ceramic flower.

‘I’m glad you like it,’ she replied gently.

After filling her kettle, she got out our mugs – black with blue frost glazed on the rim – and set them on the counter. She hesitated for an instant when she reached for the handle of her silverware drawer and then nearly fumbled the small spoons she took out. That, together with the constrained, purposeful slant of her jaw told me she might prefer a few minutes of small talk before being questioned.

‘How long have you been doing yoga?’ I asked.

‘Since I was a kid. It was my father who got me started, as a matter of fact – yoga and judo.’

‘And how long have you taught at the French high school?’

‘Eight years.’

‘A good place to teach?’

‘I love it. The kids are great.’ She pointed to two tins of Twinings tea on a high shelf. ‘English Breakfast or Earl Grey?’

‘English Breakfast.’

Standing on her tiptoes, she knocked the tin off the shelf and caught it securely.

‘I’m guessing you’re bilingual, French and Portuguese,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Though I’m more at home in French.’

‘Were you born in France to Portuguese parents?’

‘Exactly.’ She opened the lid of the tin and took a long, grateful inhale. She had a handsome profile. I’d have bet her students did their best to please her – and that she was a talented teacher.

‘I’m told that Sandi was in your class,’ I said.

‘Yeah, she’s a wonderful girl.’ On setting down the tin, she asked, ‘So how did you find me?’

‘A construction worker spotted you leaving Coutinho’s apartment. Though you don’t look much like the sketch he helped us make. It was your hand that gave you away. At first, we thought the tattoo was the number thirty.’