He confirmed that she’d indeed had dreams of a violent intruder entering her house and hurting her family.
Loureiro added that he’d called Sandi on Saturday. She’d sounded depressed but stable. They’d scheduled a special session for this afternoon.
After Loureiro read me the dates of his sessions with Sandi, I called David Zydowicz and convinced him to do the girl’s autopsy as soon as possible. When I mentioned the additional information I wanted, he asked how old she’d been, and on telling him, he said in a critical tone, ‘I thought it was only in Brazil that girls started that young.’
‘Unfortunately, she had no choice,’ I told him.
Next, I tried Senhora Coutinho’s cell phone, but it was off. I reached Morel, however, and asked him to put her on the line.
She cut off my attempt to express my condolences. ‘Oh, Monroe, are you still in Lisbon?’ she asked. Her voice sounded merry and heavily drugged. ‘But this connection is terrible! You’d think you were on the moon!’
‘Look, Senhora Coutinho, I need to know if—’
‘I’m all ears,’ she interrupted in English, and she heaved a throaty, smoker’s laugh.
‘I’m sorry to ask you this, but did Sandi ever tell you about any sexual abuse she might have suffered at Monsieur Morel’s house in France?’
Silence.
‘Senhora Coutinho, this is important,’ I said. ‘Try to concentrate, please.’
‘Call me Susana. I feel like we’re old friends by now. I mean, if I had any friends, you’d be one of them!’ She laughed again.
‘Susana, try to hear what I’m saying. Did your daughter ever talk about any sexual experiences she’d had – violent experiences that would have upset her badly?’
‘I really do like you, but your Portuguese is abominable!’ To Morel, she said, ‘Can you understand his Portuguese?’
Morel got on the line. ‘Susana is not well. Call back later!’
‘Sandi might have been raped, so put Susana back on now!’
‘Raped? What do you mean?’
‘Susana can explain to you when I’m done. Give her the damn phone!’
After a moment, Susana asked, ‘Is that you again, Monroe?’
‘Yes. Now listen closely, Susana. Did Sandi ever tell you about what happened at Morel’s house – about her being hurt or molested?’
After a moment of silence, she pounced. ‘I want the name of the person who told you such a crazy thing!’
‘Two of her friends told me.’
‘Which two?’
‘Joana and Monica. They were with her at Morel’s house in Normandy.’
‘Were they . . . molested?’
‘No, but Sandi told them what happened to her.’
‘Look, Monroe, you’ve got me thinking things that don’t make sense. And I don’t know what you’re trying to say.’
‘Joana and Monica told me that Sandi was attacked while she was staying at Morel’s house – at his house in Normandy.’
Susana lowered the phone and spoke to Morel in French, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. When her sobbing started, he came back on the line. ‘Monroe, you are a madman!’ he shouted. ‘You make things worse!’
‘Something terrible happened to Sandi at your house. I need to know everything you know.’
‘Wait a moment.’
Morel spoke to Susana in French, as though giving an order, then told me to hold on a few more seconds while he left her bedroom. When her crying faded to silence, he said, ‘Listen closely, Monroe. We have a nice vacation together at my home. I do not know what you are talking about.’
‘So nothing bad happened with Bernard?’
‘Who is Bernard?’
‘One of the young men who works at your stables.’
‘Bernard Mercier? You think he hurt Sandi?’ Morel asked in an astonished voice.
‘Yes. You never suspected anything like that?’
‘No, never.’
‘What about the other man at your stables? What’s his name?’
‘François Savarin.’
‘Did you ever suspect that he was capable of violence?’
‘No, he is a good young man. I know his family for many years.’
‘Are both of them still working for you?’
‘François is. I send Bernard away.’
‘Why?’
‘He steals from me.’
‘When?’
‘At Easter – while Sandi and Pedro visit.’
‘I thought you said nothing bad happened then?’ I said angrily.
‘Nothing bad happened with Sandi and the other girls! That is what I say!’
‘So what exactly happened with Bernard Mercier?’
‘Pedro Coutinho sees him stealing.’
‘What did he steal?’
‘An important book. I have a valuable library. He steals the first edition of Les Confessions, by Rousseau. He still not return it. He tells me he never steal it.’
‘But Pedro saw him taking it?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you fired Bernard?’
‘What else should I do?’
‘Did Bernard know that Pedro accused him of stealing?’
‘Yes. I must tell him because I am not there when he steals it.’
‘How long had Bernard worked for you?’
‘Since he is a boy.’
‘How long in years?’
‘Maybe . . . maybe ten years.’
Before disconnecting, Morel read me the cell-phone numbers of his two stable hands. By the time I’d hung up, I’d formed a possible scenario of what could have happened.
Sandi had been raped by one or both of the young stable hands. What she told Joana and Monica about being drugged was probably true, since that was not the kind of detail a young girl would make up. Whoever raped her must also have told her that now that she’d lost her virginity, he was no longer interested in her; again, I couldn’t imagine a fourteen-year-old thinking up such a cruel remark. And I knew from many years of experience that telling truthful details made the overall lie much easier to sustain.
If I was right, then Sandi had told her father the truth. If she hadn’t been coerced into meeting her attackers, her father would have concluded that the police would have no basis on which to make an arrest. Maybe he even held his daughter partially responsible. In any case, he probably ordered her to keep what had happened a secret. She was not even to tell her mother, since Susana might go to the police, which would mean that the press would find out. In order to make Bernard Mercier pay for his crime, and in order to be sure that Sandi would never have to see him again, Coutinho found a way to have him fired. My guess was that he took the first edition of Rousseau’s Les Confessions from Morel’s library and said he’d spotted Mercier stealing it. To Coutinho, it must have seemed the ideal – and discreet – solution.
Mercier found himself out of a job after ten years of loyalty to Morel. He’d have been furious at Coutinho for lying – and ruining his reputation. And maybe at Sandi, as well.
Very possibly he believed that he had nothing to be ashamed of – after all, the girl had agreed to meet him. He used the last three months to plan his vengeance. Perhaps he’d only planned to scare Coutinho and things had got out of hand.
As for Sandi, she must have been shattered by her father failing to defend her. She fluttered desperately for three months against the flame of her own shame, and then her resistance gave out and she fell.
To check my theory, I called Luci and told her to go upstairs to Coutinho’s library and look in his locked case for Les Confesssions. I also called Inspector Quintela and asked him to turn on his computer so he could find me the date of the first edition. A minute or so later, he had it: 1782.
Luci called as I reached my office. She was holding a leather-bound edition of Les Confessions that had been published in 1782.
That it was a first edition still wasn’t absolute proof that Coutinho had stolen it f
rom Morel, but inside the front cover she discovered a badly faded nameplate that read: J. Morel, rue du Floquet, Sacquenville.
‘What do you want me to do with it, sir?’ Luci asked.
‘Bring it to me,’ I replied, but as soon as I said that I realized that Morel might have lied to me and been in on the plot to fire Mercier. And in on the cover-up. If so, then he knew the book was locked in Coutinho’s case. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I told Luci. ‘Put Les Confessions back on the shelf where you found it. I don’t want to give away that we’re aware that it might have special importance.’
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.’
Chapter 21
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.
The Night Watchman Page 25
