The Night Watchman (41 page)

‘Yeah. I knew right away I’d made a bad slip. He didn’t tell you?’ she asked in a surprised voice.

‘No. Henrique doesn’t always like to share the details of his police work – at least not with me.’

Dias smiled at him knowingly, as though she and my brother had just formed a team that excluded me. In a confidential tone, she said, ‘I told your brother I’d read about how Coutinho was murdered at my health club, and that I worked there on Tuesdays and Fridays. It was Monday when I told him that, so he knew I was claiming that I’d read about it on Friday. But the newspapers only carried the news of Coutinho’s death on
Saturday.
I couldn’t have known he was dead on Friday unless I’d been involved. Pretty stupid, right?’

So G had called the Chiado Health Club to double-check that she hadn’t given any special yoga classes on Saturday.

Dias turned to me. ‘I started watching you very closely to see if you’d picked up on my mistake, but you gave nothing away. You’re a pretty good actor yourself, Inspector!’

Standing up, she went to the window. After pulling back the curtain and opening it a bit further, she flipped the one-euro coin outside. Facing me again, she said, ‘When you came to see me the first time, I was sure you’d caught me. Then, when you assumed I was Coutinho’s girlfriend, it was . . .’ She raised her hands in thanks. ‘Like the universe was smiling down on me.’

Unwilling to let her get away with such a self-serving belief, but not wanting to set her off, I said gently, ‘Until you found out about Sandi.’

‘Yes, till then.’ She swiped a tense hand back across her hair.

If her conscience were as stunted by all she’d suffered as I thought it was, then she’d soon recover her composure and convince herself that Sandi’s death was an unfortunate – but necessary – consequence of her achieving justice.

‘When did you realize Sandi was being hurt by Coutinho?’ I asked.

‘After she stopped eating. I tried the opposite technique to keep Coutinho away from me, you know. I ate all I could!’ She puffed out her cheeks. ‘He hated how fat I got!’ With her eyes twinkling, she turned to Ernie, so her new friend could share her glee. ‘He couldn’t get it up with a chubby thirteen-year-old in his arms. That’s how my mom figured things out. He was a bit too insistent that I go on a diet – and too angry when I refused.’

‘You were smart,’ my brother told her admiringly.

‘Yeah, except I looked
hideous!’
She hid her face in her hands – a little girl craving reassurance.

‘You did what you had to do.’

I didn’t like Dias prompting Ernie’s reactions. He probably didn’t either, but he gave her what she wanted for the same reason that I didn’t dare mention that her half-sister had been pregnant.

‘Did Sandi know how concerned you were about her?’ I asked.

She sat back up very straight, as though to reclaim her adulthood. ‘Yes, I went to her and told her I knew what was going on. She told me there was nothing I could do – at least, at first. She was feeling hopeless. And guilty.’

‘Guilty because her father convinced her she’d seduced him?’

‘And because she was torn between wanting to please him and kill him. Yes, Inspector, please him
in bed!’

She bit down hard on her last words as though to shock me but, given my past, Sandi’s confused and tragic hopes didn’t surprise me in the least.

‘Did you know that she kept a knife below her mattress?’ I asked.

‘No, but it makes sense.’ She looked off, considering this new detail. ‘I think that not using it . . . might have been what she found hardest to forgive about herself.’

‘Why didn’t you want Sandi to know you were related?’ I asked.

‘Because I was scared she’d reject me. I suspected that Coutinho had told her awful things about me; what a selfish monster I was for refusing to ever speak to our
sweet, generous
daddy – our
handsome, youthful-looking
daddy!’ With a vicious, triumphant smile, she added, ‘You know he had a face-lift, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I spotted the scars.’

‘Probably more than one,’ she said contemptuously.

‘So did you end up telling Sandi you were half-sisters?’

‘Yes, and she confirmed that Coutinho told her I was mean-spirited and spoiled, and that I’d made his life miserable during the divorce.’

‘When did you first talk to her about the abuse she was suffering?’

‘A couple of weeks or so after she cut her hair, she started getting dangerously thin. Looking at her bamboo arms made me sick – physically sick! What was amazing was that at first I didn’t know why I had such a visceral reaction to her losing weight. The mind is a funny thing . . . And then it hit me one day at school.’ Dias flexed her arms over her head, needing to be reminded, perhaps, that she was strong and determined – no longer a hopeless, overweight teenager. ‘I’d called on Sandi in class, to analyse a poem by Baudelaire. She answered with such . . . what would I call it? Timid hesitation? She’d always loved being called on before, so it shocked me. When the meaning of the grief I spotted in her eyes hit me, it hit me
really hard.
There were many nights when I didn’t sleep at all. All my fear of him was back – the absolute terror!’ She focused on me with predatory eyes. ‘Do you know what it’s like to be hallucinating your father’s voice while you’re giving a class? My God, how I hated that voice of his!’

‘Is that why you gagged him?’

‘He started ordering me around. Imagine, he has a bullet in his gut, and I’m still holding my gun, and he thought he could tell me what to do!’

‘When did you first start planning to kill him?’

‘In early June. After a week or two of panic-filled insomnia. I only started sleeping again when I bought a gun.’ She put a hand atop her heart as though needing to make a vow. ‘He gave me no choice, Inspector,’ she told me. ‘If I didn’t kill him, I’d have failed Sandi. And myself.’ She turned away when tears washed her eyes.

‘Where did you get your gun?’ I asked.

‘I have an old friend from Paris who lives now in Madrid. When we were younger and a lot stupider, we robbed houses in Neuilly and other fancy suburbs of Paris. He’s cleaned up his act by now, but he still knows some resourceful people.’

‘Was there any special point to your using a Browning semi-automatic?’

‘My friend told me that you cops used to use them. So the choice seemed right to me – a kind of symmetry.’

I didn’t believe she could have had anything to do with the burglary at Coutinho’s house, but given what she’d just told me, I had to ask.

‘No, I don’t want anything of his – anything he’s touched,’ she replied. ‘So what’d they get – the oil paintings?’

‘No. We’re not sure what they took just yet. Do you still have your gun?’

‘It’s with my sneakers – under fifty feet of water.’

‘In the Tagus?’

‘Yeah. There’s a lovely boardwalk in Vila Franca de Xira now. I went there on Saturday. You can see a lot of birds if you go early – herons, egrets . . .’

She spoke as if she were talking about a relaxing day in the country. And with her father no longer stalking her thoughts, it probably had been. I could easily imagine her watching her gun sinking into the jade-coloured water and whispering to herself,
If we follow our destiny far enough, we are rewarded with the world’s beauty.

‘The key to Coutinho’s house – where did you get it?’ I asked.

‘I took it from Sandi’s backpack when she came here for lunch with Monica and Joana. I told the girls I’d forgotten a bottle of wine in my car. There’s a tiny shop around the corner for making keys. I was gone only a few minutes.’ She gazed down and laughed to herself. On looking up, she steeled herself for another battle. ‘You can’t imagine how I hoped that Coutinho wouldn’t have more children. Or would change. If I hadn’t killed him, he’d still be molesting Sandi.’

She looked at Ernie as though needing his agreement, but he’d had enough of her pressured glances by then and turned away. Reading his wariness as a criticism, she shouted, ‘Sandi killing herself wasn’t supposed to happen! I was trying to prevent that! I was the only one helping her!’ She pointed a damning finger at me. ‘What do you ever do to help the kids who are being abused in this fucking country? The police do nothing.’ Turning to Ernie, she shouted, ‘Your brother does nothing!’

Ernie jumped up, his anger in the ferocious depth of his eyes and the wide set of his shoulders. ‘You have no idea how many bad people my brother has put in prison,’ he told our host in a quivering voice. ‘And you have no idea what we’ve been through.’

Looking up at him, she took a sharp intake of breath and shrank back. Did she realize she’d understood nothing about the depth of complicity between my brother and me? Maybe she simply felt the more basic terror of being outnumbered by men.

Although Dias seemed keenly intelligent, she also seemed to me to be unable to see the shape and scope of what others were thinking about her. Later that week, it would occur to me that she’d only glimpsed the vaguest outlines of Sandi’s tormented feelings and had mistaken them for her own need for vengeance. Maybe she even thought that Sandi had given her unspoken permission to murder their father.

In a wounded voice, trying to win us back to her, Dias said, ‘I only meant that it’s impossible to prosecute child abusers in Portugal.’

I couldn’t tell if her remorse was genuine. I didn’t even want to make the effort. I wanted to leave and see my kids, and ask Ana to let me back into her life. Ernie’s gaze had turned inside and he had begun to shiver. I stood up and took his hand. I imagined we looked ridiculous, two grown men holding hands like little kids, but appearing ridiculous has often seemed the world’s way of telling me I was doing just the right thing.

Dias showed us a harsh, judgemental expression, and it was gratifying to discover I didn’t care. ‘I have just a few more questions,’ I told her.

‘Good, because I need to get back to packing,’ she told me in a businesslike tone.

I gave Ernie’s hand a final squeeze and let it drop. ‘So do you think Sandi’s mother realized what was happening to her?’ I asked.

‘I doubt it. Sandi hoped she’d picked up on her clues, but she didn’t want to know.’

‘You tried calling the girl over the weekend, but she wouldn’t answer.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Were you going to tell her you killed her father?’

‘She must have figured that out already. She guessed what I was thinking of doing when I told her I understood what she was going through.’

I realized then that Sandi had been trying to protect Dias when she’d denied knowing anything about the painting that had been taken by the killer. Very likely, she’d also hidden – or destroyed – the photographs of the living room that her mother couldn’t find.

‘Did Sandi ask you not to do anything violent?’ I questioned.

She eyed me angrily. ‘You want to hear her death is my fault, don’t you? Let me tell you something! Not even her looking like a skeleton put Coutinho off! If you could have heard her voice when she told me that . . . She was so desperate. She told me she didn’t want me to hurt him. It’s true. But she was telling me one thing with her words and another with everything else about her! Still, I agreed not to hurt him if she’d do something for me.’

‘What?’

‘I told her I’d give the police an anonymous tip about him. I assured her that no one would ever hold her responsible for his arrest. But I also told her that we had to try to find some photographs of him with other girls – as evidence. But she couldn’t find them anywhere. At least, that’s what she said. I had the feeling she’d have preferred starving herself to death to getting Coutinho in trouble or participating in any way in my plan. So I sneaked over to her house once when her parents were away and made her search with me. We didn’t find any pictures, but something in her manner, something reticent and anxious . . . I began to suspect that she’d found the photos already and wasn’t going to tell me where they were – which gave me no other choice but to take matters into my own hands.’

I sensed Gabriel standing by the door again. Somehow, I was certain that he wanted me to disregard my professional and personal codes and let Dias go free.

‘I’m guessing you’ll get rid of your cell phone at some point,’ I said, needing to buy myself a little time. ‘So how do I reach you? In case someone else in the police figures out it was you.’

‘I suppose I could give you my mother’s number in Bordeaux,’ she said, as if it were being charitable.

I jotted it down.

Did she see something accusatory in Ernie’s eyes while I was writing? She slashed her hand in the air between us. ‘I don’t regret what I did!’ she shouted. ‘You can both think I should, but I don’t!’

You step outside after a disagreeable interrogation and are surprised to find that it’s still early morning, and you trace a streamer of sunlight across the pale yellow façade of the building across the street, and you marvel at how it folds, jagged, around the bevelled column of a black street lamp just ahead of you, and you count one, two, three, four, five motorcycles parked on the traffic island at the centre of Rafael Bordelo Pinheiro Square, and you watch a white cat with a pirate-like black eye-patch crouching under a silver Honda – maybe scenting its own mortality in the dry wind sweeping in from Spain – and finally, calmed by the give and take of friendly voices coming from an apartment above you, you look up and spot two pigeons on a rooftop and imagine – smiling to yourself – that they’re having the conversation you’re eavesdropping on. You see all these things as though they were necessary, because you believe – improbable though it may sound – that all of them are sure to become important at some point in the story. Which story? Your own and the world’s, for at that moment there is no separation between the two.

I turned around to Ernie. He smiled his sideways smile, and it was reassuring precisely because it was his and always had been. He put his arm over my shoulder and told me something that made me laugh, and although I doubt it was about how I used to call him Wyatt Earp when he was a kid, that’s the way I remember it.