The Night Watchman (36 page)

‘Do you think the same person who murdered my brother is responsible?’

‘That’s certainly a possibility.’

‘And where did he get the keys to the house?’

‘It’s easy enough to make copies. All anyone would have to do is get hold of the key chain belonging to your brother – or Susana or Sandra – for a little while.’

As I said that, I realized that Mercier could have stolen Sandi’s keys after he’d hurt her. She’d have been too upset to notice them missing, which would have given him time to make copies and for them to appear
mysteriously
somewhere around the house the next day. Even if she’d realized her key chain had gone missing, she wouldn’t have wanted to admit it, because she’d have then been forced to explain how Mercier had had a chance to steal it.

I found Luci sitting on the floor of the library, gazing down into the wings of a leather-bound volume, surrounded by a sea of lost books. It was easy enough to see her as a little kid seated in a sandbox, lost in a children’s mystery.

She pointed to the shelves, where a couple of hundred books were already neatly lined up. She told me that she was arranging them in alphabetical order. She hadn’t yet come upon
Les Confessions.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked.

‘Oh, this? It’s the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes in Portuguese – an edition I’ve never seen before. I’m sorry for taking a break, sir.’

‘You’re forgiven, Luci.’

‘There was a time when I’d have given anything to be Dr Watson,’ she said, shaking her head as if to dismiss a silly fantasy.

‘And here you are, just a few years later, impersonating Holmes himself!’

‘Unfortunately, sir, I don’t think Mr Holmes and I have much in common. Everything he finds elementary, I find a mystery.’

‘Maybe so, but we all have moments of insight, Luci. And I’ll need you to tell me when you have yours. I’m counting on you, in fact.’

She smiled gratefully. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘So what story are you looking at?’ I asked.

‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band.’

‘A favourite of yours?’

‘When I was a girl, it terrified me that the villain used a poisonous snake to commit his murders.’

‘Yes, an Indian swamp adder,’ I observed.

‘You even remember the species!’

‘When you grow up in Colorado, Luci, identifying snakes can be a matter of life and death. Though for better or for worse, Conan Doyle invented the Indian swamp adder.’ I sounded as though I were trying to impress her, which made me uncomfortable, so I added, ‘Enough of my tricks of memory. Let’s get back to work.’

Luci closed her book and stood up. A pile of swept glass crowded the corner of the room, near to where the locked case had been smashed open. The classical CDs were missing but it didn’t appear that any of the first editions were gone. When I pointed that out, she said, ‘Yeah, it makes no sense. Unless there was something secretly valuable about the CDs.’

‘Maybe they didn’t contain music,’ I speculated.

‘You think they had some secret information on them, don’t you?’

‘A few decades’ worth of details about bank transfers and payoffs, I’m guessing – maybe direct evidence of criminal behaviour, rather than just a list. Possibly even recordings of conversations with crooked politicians. He probably kept a lot of information for his own protection. I’m getting the feeling that the flash drive we found was just for quick consultation.’

‘The Frenchmen wouldn’t have cared about information on Coutinho’s illegal transactions, so we’re back to your theory about two separate crimes.’

‘At least for now,’ I agreed.

While we were both searching for
Les Confessons,
Morel stopped by. He was on his way to the kitchen to make more coffee.

‘Is Susana any better?’ I asked.

‘What do you think?’ he said with a sour look.

‘Can she talk to me yet?’

‘No.’

The front door opened and closed. A moment later, Sylvie called upstairs, ‘Your technicians have arrived, Inspector.’

I had Fonseca and Vaz start on the top floor, in Sandi’s room, and instructed them to take a careful look around the garden after that. About an hour later, at exactly 5.49, I found
Les Confessions.

Finding
Les Confessions
seemed to rule out my theory that the Frenchmen had burgled the Coutinhos’ home, which left the possibility that a corrupt politician had been after records of shady business deals. He or she might have somehow learned that Coutinho’s flash drive was kept in the French–Farsi dictionary. And it now seemed possible that they also wanted to get their hands on the dictionary itself, which was why I asked Luci to go to the evidence room at headquarters after she was done in the library and to check if any words or sentences in the book had been highlighted in any way.

I left her in the library, intending to ask Fonseca and Vaz if they’d come to any conclusion about how many burglars had been in on the job, but on reaching the staircase, I heard Sudoku conversing in the living room with Sylvie. I started down just as he appeared at the bottom step of the staircase.

He waved, then started up. We met halfway. Since I’d last seen him, he’d cut his hair so short that he looked like an army recruit.

‘Is your cold all better?’ I said.

‘It’s not me, Henrique,’ he whispered. ‘I just told the others that to avoid problems. Maria is back on chemo.’

‘I’m sorry, Sudoku. I hope you get some good results quickly.’

‘One day at a time,’ he replied.

I slapped his arm playfully. ‘Hey, you were supposed to call me about the piece of bloody towel!’

‘I would have, Henrique, but I got a weird result the first time I analysed the sample, so I went back to the beginning. But I got the same result. So I figured I’d better talk to you in person. I just got here.’

‘What’d you find out?’

‘You’re not going to be happy about it.’

‘I’m not happy about anything having to do with this case.’

‘The DNA is the victim’s.’

‘Which
victim?’

‘Pedro Coutinho.’

When I came to myself, I was sitting on a bench in a small, shady park circled by a waist-high black railing. I was sweating hard. I’d been in a dark hot room only a moment before – humid and nearly airless.

My lungs felt as though they were flecked with rust, and I was having difficulty breathing. My mouth and tongue tasted of tobacco; three cigarette butts were stubbed out on the pavement near my right foot. I was gripping my kachina. The goddess’s crown had made three perforations in my right palm. I realized I’d been waiting for Nathan to tell me where to hide Ernie.

A tiny old woman with brittle-looking grey hair and opera glasses around her neck stood nearby, dropping breadcrumbs onto the ground from a plastic bag, cornered by a knot of greedy pigeons. I looked from her to my left hand.

I can see now that maybe we didn’t want to know that this was possible.

Gabriel had underlined that message twice, but I didn’t know what he was referring to; for the moment, I’d forgotten what Sudoku had told me.

It was 6.27 p.m. Turning around, I recognized the towering silk-cotton tree behind me. I was in Alegria Square. The tree had a massive trunk that was creased like elephant hide and spiked with thorns. Their brittle sharpness against my fingertips confirmed what I needed to know – that the world outside my head was real.

I turned on my cell phone.

Fonseca:
Where the hell are you?

Luci:
I need to speak with you.

Mesquita:
Turn your damn phone on!

Ana:
I send you lots of kisses.

When I checked my outgoing calls, I discovered that G had made two. The first was to Maria Dias. It had only lasted four seconds, which meant that he hadn’t been able to speak with her and had decided not to leave a message. I suspected that he didn’t want to risk another person hearing what he had to tell her, but why not let me know what he wanted from her?

I didn’t recognize the second number. On calling it, I discovered it was the Chiado Health Club. G’s call had lasted seven minutes. He must have been anxious for Maria Dias to tell him more about Sandi.

After speaking with the receptionist at the health club, I remembered my conversation with Sudoku. So many scattered bits of information made sense now. It was as though I could see a complex constellation – in the exact shape of this case – where before I’d only seen points of light. I even knew now why Coutinho had been so desperate to stay married; he couldn’t bear losing Sandi just when he wanted her most.

I was struck then by the odd certainty that this case must have picked me; unlike most people, I knew – in my flesh and heart – that there were men who were able to plan for a very long time to hurt the people they loved. The strat-egizing gave them purpose.

Coutinho must have scared Sandi with a bloody ghost story at Morel’s house in the hope that she’d come to him in the night. Though it’s possible he lured her to him some other way, of course. He had probably been undermining her confidence for months.

Sandi had tried to make herself as unattractive as she could over the weeks that followed his attack. But the knife she kept in her bed told me that that strategy had not worked. Did she become pregnant on that first night or only later?

She had taken off the ring he’d given her as a birthday present, but she couldn’t bear to throw it away. She must have wanted her mother to ask her why she no longer wore it and to insist on a reply. She wanted her mother to tell her that she’d listen to anything Sandi needed to say to her – and to promise that she’d believe anything the girl told her.

Was it a paradox that truths left unspoken ended up taking away your voice?

Sandi never made it back home after her Easter vacation in France. That girl only existed in a before-time that was no longer within her reach.

It had long seemed unforgivable to me that I continued to miss my father every day of my life, and I’d guess that Sandi had felt the same, at least for a while – that she continued to miss the dad she knew in the before-time. And yet, like me, it’s possible that she also prayed every night for her father to die – even to be murdered. And with a bullet in the back.

Sandi cut her hair and purged what she ate down the toilet. She stopped having her periods. Maybe she figured her mom had to put the clues together sooner or later.

And maybe she had. Was Susana Coutinho the greatest actress I’d ever encountered?

If so, then she would probably have told any professional killer she hired to be gentle with her husband. Though maybe he’d just disregarded her orders. Or perhaps she’d given in to her rage and told the man she’d hired that she wanted the son of a bitch to die in a lot of pain. Once I managed to obtain Susana’s bank statements, maybe I’d find that she’d taken out a large sum of cash in the weeks prior to the murder. But given what her husband did to her daughter, did I really want to try to prove that she was guilty?

On taking out Gabriel’s pack of Marlboros from my coat pocket, I also discovered a list of Sandi’s incoming and outgoing calls over the past week. Sudoku must have handed it to me during our conversation – after G was already in control of me.

A quick call to Inspector Quintela confirmed that he’d given it to Sudoku to give to me.

On Saturday afternoon, Sandi had received three unanswered phone calls from Dias, and one more on Sunday. There was no record of the girl having made any attempt to call Dias back. There was a total of eleven unanswered calls from two other numbers; I suspected they belonged to Joana and Monica.

When I phoned Fonseca, he hollered, ‘You just vanished, Monroe! You can’t do that!’

‘Sorry, Ana called to tell me Jorge was sick.’

‘Does he have a fever?’

‘No, stomach problems. He ate a spoiled hot dog.’ Lying gave my words an easy, confident arc. ‘He’s better now but for a while he was really bad.’

‘Give him a kiss from Uncle Eduardo. So where are you?’

‘I’ve just left my apartment. I’ll be there soon. What have you got for me about the burglary?’

Fonseca confirmed that the intruders had climbed over the back wall to the garden; two small branches on the ruby-red bougainvillea snaking over the wall had recently been snapped. Also, he’d retraced the burglars’ route into the adjoining property and discovered what looked like imprints from the base of a ladder. Unfortunately, he held out little hope that he’d turn up any evidence more useful than that: the intruder or intruders had worn gloves and must have had the back door key, just as I’d suspected. The only evidence that he, Vaz and Sudoku had managed to find in the house was a faint shoeprint stamped on a CD cover in Sandi’s room. It appeared to have been made by a man’s sneaker – size forty or forty-one, according to Vaz. ‘Too small for our murderer,’ Fonseca reminded me.

‘Where would you say the burglar started hunting around?’ I asked.

‘The girl’s room. It was messed up the worst.’

‘And do you think there might have been more than one of them?’

‘That’s my working theory – a lot of damage was done.’

‘Which rooms weren’t hit?’

‘The living room, parents’ bedroom, kitchen and pantry. And the storage room on the top floor.’

We both knew that the burglars must have known that whatever they wanted wasn’t in those rooms. Which meant that either they were working with someone who’d visited the Coutinhos’ house before, or they had been there themselves.

‘You hear about Sudoku’s result?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah, Coutinho was a real piece of work.’

‘Maybe his wife had him killed and paid somebody to destroy whatever evidence the guy may have left behind.’

‘If that’s what happened, she deserves the Fonseca Medal of Honour!’

‘Yeah, except that she should have planned things a whole lot better – Sandi ended up killing herself. Anyway, first thing tomorrow, I’ll try to interview the neighbours we haven’t managed to speak to yet. I’m also going to try to get copies of Susana Coutinho’s bank records and talk to Coutinho’s employees. Depending on what I learn, I may need you again.’