Chapter 17
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.
‘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?
Chapter 18
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 Jo
ana, 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.
The Night Watchman Page 21
