‘I expect you’ve arrested a few.’
‘Whenever I get the chance.’
Something odd happened then. I was sure that Gabriel had just entered the room, but not to take me over. He wished to observe us. I looked towards the front door, as though expecting to see exactly what he looked like for the first time.
‘Something wrong?’ Dias asked.
‘I was just thinking of an old friend. You’re an excellent actress, you know. All that fear you showed at being pursued by the murderer during our last conversation – I was certain you were terrified.’
‘What happened with Coutinho taught me the usefulness of giving a standout performance.’ Gesturing towards a small white sofa against the wall, she added, ‘Listen, you two can sit down if you like. I can see this might take a while. I’ll be right back. I remembered something I need to pack.’
‘Is it all right if I use your bathroom?’ Ernie asked.
Dias pointed towards the door, just past her bookshelves. While they were both out of the room, I realized that my key mistake was assuming that Dias had been Coutinho’s last lover. And it was clever of her to have worn men’s sneakers just long enough to make a bloody shoeprint. She must have just finished watching her father choke to death when the construction worker bumped into her on the Rua do Vale.
Dead moths clouded the translucent bottom of her circular ceiling lamp. It seemed a telling oversight. Staring at the accumulation of so many small deaths, I pictured Dias meditating in her prison cell, and lived out ten years of her life in just a few seconds. Tattoos of Buddhist symbols wrapped around her arms and climbed up her neck as the need to hide her anger and despair grew stronger. Her hair greyed and her eyes shone with the strange, isolated light of the ascetic who has renounced all attachments to the world.
She would tell other prisoners that she had chosen this life, had embraced the path she had been on since she was a girl.
Ten years hence, in July of 2022, would I still be wondering if arresting her had been the right thing to do?
I stepped up to the nineteenth-century portrait of the young mother that had been hanging in Coutinho’s house until Friday. It was leaning against the wall by the front door. Dias must have spotted it on the day she murdered her father; she’d have hated the idea of him keeping a likeness of her. It must have seemed as if a symbolic part of her were still his prisoner.
Ernie sauntered back into the room. His right hand was red; he’d scrubbed it with scalding water. Waving away my concern, he sat down beside me and pointed towards a one-euro coin he’d spotted between the cushions. I retrieved it and offered it to him to give to Dias, but he told me he wouldn’t touch anything more unless he had to. ‘She seems high on something,’ he whispered.
‘She probably is,’ I said, and I touched my fingertip to my forehead, which he agreed to with a nod.
After crossing his arms, Ernie leaned over himself. I patted his leg encouragingly. ‘We’ll leave soon,’ I said.
‘It’s okay, the Valium just kicked in.’
After Dias darted back into the room, she tucked a small black bag into the larger of her suitcases. I guessed it contained her gun, but I didn’t ask. She drew up one of the wooden chairs that had been around her dining table. I handed her the euro coin. ‘My brother found it in your couch,’ I said.
‘Thanks.’ She took it in her fist and sculpted a quick-worded prayer. On noticing Ernie’s awkward posture, she spoke gently for the first time since we’d arrived. ‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Just a little dizziness – I got up too early this morning,’ he replied, sitting back up.
She looked at Ernie sympathetically, but I didn’t want Dias anywhere near the hole in his heart left by our mother.
‘Are you taking the portrait you stole from your father?’ I asked.
‘Absolutely. As far as I was concerned, he had no right to it.’
‘Why did you have Coutinho write Diana in Japanese lettering with his blood?’
‘He didn’t write it – I wrote it!’ she exclaimed vengefully. ‘It was his pet name for me. He taught me how to write it in Japanese when I was a kid. It seemed fun at the time. The thrill of having him move my arm around the paper so that I could write those beautiful characters . . . I thought he was amazing!’
‘Why the name Diana?’
‘I’m not sure – he just started calling me it when I was little.’
‘But why write it on the wall after the murder?’
‘I wanted to assume responsibility for what I’d done. Think of it as a part of my mindfulness, Inspector. I needed the world to know that I’d achieved justice – me, the little stupid girl he’d abused, the fool who’d trusted him, who’d worshipped him.’ Her eyes radiated amusement again. ‘I knew you’d assume he’d written it. And no one in Portugal knew it was his private name for me. So it put me at no extra risk.’
‘Do you know who your father was sleeping with – his final lover?’
‘Inspector, you can be certain he had more than one,’ she said, as though I still didn’t understand anything about him. ‘All the time he was abusing me, he had other girls. One of them was even my closest friend, though neither of us knew it until years later.’ She looked towards the window as though the past were there. ‘My friend thought Coutinho was in love with her. Maybe he even was – for a time. But who knows what a man like him feels and thinks?’
‘So you have no idea who slept with him on the night before you killed him?’ I asked.
‘No, but I’d look for a girl between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, slender, blonde, pretty and . . . what?’ She looked for the word. She seemed eager to help me now.
‘Lacking in self-esteem,’ I suggested.
She tossed off a bitter laugh and said, ‘Yes, he was a master at destroying the confidence of the girls he wanted.’ She carved the air with imaginary brushstrokes. ‘An artist whose medium was the promise of a deeper love from a very special man.’
‘Do you know the names of any girls he might have molested here in Lisbon?’
‘No. When I first found out that he had moved here, I wanted nothing to do with him. And I sure as hell didn’t want him recognizing me! I cut my hair short and dyed it, and I avoided any meetings with parents, when I might have had to see him.’ She tossed the coin up and caught it, then turned it over. ‘Heads,’ she said, and she looked at me as if expecting my view on the importance of chance in our lives, but I had no opinion at the moment. ‘If he hadn’t returned to Portugal,’ she continued, ‘then none of this would have happened. Or was it completely predictable that we’d meet again one day? What do you think, Inspector?’
She needed to test me for a belief in destiny – or some Buddhist concept of fate with which I wasn’t familiar. ‘I have no idea,’ I told her.
‘I think you do,’ she insisted.
‘I don’t believe there is any plan, if that’s what you’re asking,’ I told her.
She sighed as if I were being stubborn. ‘You know, when I learned he had moved back to Lisbon, I didn’t think of killing him – at least, not right away. He forced me to make that decision.’
What I didn’t then dare ask was, And were you also forced to kill him in such a painful way?
‘We’ll get to what happened last Friday,’ I said instead, ‘but first tell me if anyone found out about your father’s abuse and did nothing to stop it.’ I was thinking again of Morel – wondering if he had any responsibility for Sandi’s death.
She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and turned away from me. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I do know that Coutinho had other friends with the same . . . inclinations. I found a photograph he had of himself with two young girls and a group of other men. This was before he started abusing me.’
‘Was Morel one of the men?’
‘No, he wasn’t there.’
‘Did you know any of the girls?’
‘No.’
‘So who were the me
n? Friends of your father’s?’
‘I assumed they were businessmen and politicians he knew.’
‘From France or Portugal?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In Coutinho’s agenda. This one time, he left it right on the kitchen table – just forgot about it. When I picked it up, the picture fell out.’
‘Did you save it?’
‘No. I made the mistake of bringing it to my mother. She burned it.’ Sneering, she added, ‘She said she wanted to protect the girls.’
‘But you thought she burned it to protect your father.’
‘Let’s just say that my mother was too often a woman of misguided loyalties.’
She looked at Ernie, so I did, too. His eyes were closed, with his head angled down; he was trying to burrow into that part of himself with no doors or windows.
‘So who wrecked your childhood, Inspector?’ Dias asked.
We looked at each other. I don’t know what she saw, but I saw a woman who was far too pleased by her own intuition.
‘Our childhood wasn’t wrecked by anyone,’ I told her.
‘No?’ she asked, her ironic tone indicating that she knew better. Maybe she had a kind of radar for people like my brother and me. Most of us with bad childhoods did, I’d learned since joining the police.
‘It was our father,’ Ernie told her. He was sitting up, and he’d put on his cowboy hat. I hadn’t noticed him changing positions. I checked my hands, but nothing was written on either palm.
‘But he’s gone now,’ Ernie said insistently, ‘and we’re still here.’ He looked over at me, anxious for my confirmation.
As I nodded, it seemed that my life was made of the thousand times I’d noticed that Ernie and I were sitting together in our own dimension, no matter what we were doing or how far away we were from each other.
‘When did you find out that Coutinho had moved from Paris to Lisbon?’ I asked Dias. ‘Did you even know he had a second family?’
‘I spotted him at a meeting with parents last September,’ she said, ‘just after the start of school. He was with his wife. It was a shock to see him. I hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years. I thought he was still in Paris. I’d heard he’d married again, from my mother. She’d spotted an article about his wedding in some gossip magazine. But I didn’t know he had a daughter. Part of why I moved to Lisbon was to get away from any chance of ever running into him. And then he was here, and Sandi was in my class . . .’ She shook her head at her bad luck. Or perhaps at the impossibility of fighting fate. ‘Inspector, if I hadn’t slipped up, would you have caught me?’ she asked anxiously, as though desperate to confirm how clever she’d been.
‘What do you think?’ I asked, hoping her reply would give away what she meant – and how G had figured things out.
‘I have no idea. I don’t know what evidence you turned up.’
‘Your sneaker print – a men’s size forty-three.’
She laughed girlishly and said, ‘You’d never have found me with just that.’ She turned to the window facing the square once again. I sensed she was looking out into an alternative world in which she hadn’t been caught. There, in a city whose buildings and streets were constructed according to her wishes, Sandi must still have been alive, and overflowing with tearful thanks for what her half-sister had done for her.
‘So you figured out how my brother ended up knowing the killer was you?’ Ernie asked, realizing it was a question I couldn’t ask.
‘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 o
f 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.
The Night Watchman Page 32
