The Company of Strangers (25 page)

Voss was dismissed. He went to his office light on his feet again, threw himself into his chair. Happy.

‘You in love, sir?’ asked Kempf.

Voss whipped round, hadn’t seen him there in the corner of the room, leaning up against the window.

‘Just had a good night’s sleep, that’s all, Kempf. First cool night in weeks. You?’

‘What, sir? Sleeping well?’

‘Or in love?’

‘Not that sort of love, sir. Not the sort that makes you happy.’

‘What sort, Kempf?’

‘The sort that makes the first piss of the morning absolute agony, sir. Think I’ve got myself a dose.’

‘Take the morning off, Kempf.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

Voss lit a cigarette, stretched his feet out and saw the
cello of Anne’s body at the window and the thick black sash of her hair over one shoulder. The phone rang. He listened, hung up and left the legation, buying his usual newspaper as he went.

He walked down to the Pensão Rocha with nothing on his mind apart from the blue Tagus in front of him and ships easing past, visible though the gaps in the buildings heading for the Atlantic.

He took his usual table in the courtyard, laid the newspaper in front of him, saw a small item at the foot of the front page. The PVDE announced that a communist cell had been captured in a safe house in Rua da Arrábida. The same place where Mesnel had been visiting and he’d sent Paco to check. Paco, thought Voss. You have to be careful of Paco. He has only one loyalty – money. A few minutes later Rui lowered himself into the chair opposite.

‘Your Frenchman was shot last night. Dead,’ said Rui.

‘Tell me.’

‘We followed him to the caves, as usual. He went off to do his business and we left him to it, except we heard a shot, two shots. We went back up there this morning. Somebody found the body around six o’clock. The PVDE were up there because he was a foreigner, so I didn’t get too close. He’d been shot in the head at the viewpoint of the Alto da Serafina.’

‘That’s it?’

‘I heard he was found with a gun on him,’ he said, ‘and some PVDE men were talking about a triple killing up in a big house in Estoril. Two foreigners and a Portuguese woman from a big family.’

Voss drummed the tabletop, gave Rui a cigarette which he pocketed without thinking.

‘Do we do anything?’ asked Rui.

‘You wait,’ said Voss, and left the newspaper on the table.

The PVDE had been hard at it since they arrived at Quinta da Águia at close to 2.15 a.m. They were working conscientiously to hide the fact that they had been unimpressively late on the scene. The first phone call about gunshot noise from the Wilsheres’ house had come in around 1.50 a.m. and had been discounted as carpet beating. By 2.00 a.m., however, there’d been another four calls, each reporting the same thing, gunshots – one quite loud, followed by two very loud and then two not so loud – and so it was that two PVDE men and two GNR men reluctantly got into a car and drove up to the Quinta da Águia with the bell on, just so that everyone in the neighbourhood would be woken up and they could feel important.

At 6.00 a.m., because of the names of the dead found in the house, Captain Lourenço was informed and once he took a personal interest in the investigation the servants were rounded up and later in the morning a search began for the Englishwoman, whose address on her visa application was given as Quinta da Águia. They were waiting for her at the Shell building when she came back from Rua de Madres. They put her into a car and drove her to the PVDE headquarters on Rua António Maria Cardoso where there was intense activity as the reports of three other murders were being filed.

Sutherland and Rose had gone through Anne’s story and come up against a serious difficulty – the hours spent in the café after Voss had dropped her placed her in Estoril. They had hoped to be able to hide her at the Cardews’ house – dinner and then too tired to go home, stayed the night. The time at the café made this impossible. They toyed with the idea of the truth, omitting her presence at the Wilsheres’ house but confirming that she spent the night with Voss – but it would compromise Voss. They’d hammered away at the problem until Anne put the idea of Wallis.

Jim Wallis was found. He’d spent the night alone. A story was plugged into him – that Anne had dined with the Cardews, been dropped at the
quinta,
gone to the café, waited and waited for him, left, met him outside and gone back to his apartment in Lisbon. There were some shaky elements, not least of which was that Anne had never been to Wallis’s apartment and Wallis had a landlady. Anne was instructed to play her interrogation coy and reticent until the murders were disclosed and then, well, natural instincts would prevail. As she walked to the Shell building she elaborated the germ of the lie until it was an infection of perfect reality in her mind. She was desperate for it to work, her fear being that they would keep her locked up without charge for as long as they wanted to.

The PVDE worked on her throughout the morning as more and more information came in. The Frenchman, Mesnel, whose revolver had not been fired, had been shot twice, grazed once and mortally wounded the second time. The bullet in Mesnel’s body matched that of the Smith & Wesson lying near Lazard’s body, with his fingerprints on it, in the Wilsheres’ house. The sides and underside of Lazard’s car, found outside the casino, were covered in cement powder and sand, and the tyre tracks matched those left at the site of the half-built villa belonging to Lazard where the bodies of the Couples had been discovered. The PVDE inspector was not convinced, by the way the bodies lay, that Hal Couples had done this unspeakable thing to his wife, strangled her and then shot himself in the head. As a scenario he didn’t believe it, and he said as much in his initial report to Lourenço, who had the benefit of an autopsy on Lazard which revealed blood on his penis and undershorts.

By the end of the morning Lourenço saw it like this: Lazard had shot Mesnel in Monsanto, driven to Malveira, raped and strangled Mary Couples, shot Hal Couples with
the man’s own gun. He had then driven to Estoril where there had been a disagreement, resulting in Wilshere shooting him with a gun probably kept in the safe. Wilshere had then been shot by Mafalda on the stairs and Mafalda had apparently shot herself by accident in the sitting room. There were some questions. Why did Mafalda put both barrels into the ceiling? Had she first attempted to kill her husband by dropping the chandelier on him? It seemed unlikely. Why was there the stink of brandy in the study, an empty bottle, a stain on the floor, but no stains on any of the bodies? Why, if the motive was robbery, was the safe open with four bars of gold in it? It wasn’t long before Lourenço was convinced that there was somebody missing from the scene.

None of this information filtered down to Anne, who was in Room 3 with a single interrogator who asked a lot of questions and took copious notes. She told him how she had dined with the Cardews (tomato soup, mutton stew and cheese), gone to a café for a drink and then gone back to the Wilsheres’ where she’d overslept in the morning, taken the train to Lisbon and walked to work, arriving late. He drew the story out of her again, chipping away at her for more detail and getting it, masses of it. What she wore in bed, her dreams, whether she heard anything in the night (no), breakfast with Mr Wilshere (Dona Mafalda rarely attends), the walk to the station, the beauty of the morning sunshine coming through the mist, the cool after the terrible days of swelter. It was only after she was asked for a third rendering that Anne began to appear concerned.

The PVDE man gathered the copious notes and left the room. She was there on her own for an hour (early lunch for the interrogators) and she developed some worry, which was not hard to do.

At 12.15 two men came in and it was immediately
different. They had strong alcohol and coffee on their breath and the words that came out on the back of it were ugly – liar, thief, murderer. She asked for a cigarette. They hit the table with their fists. They stood on either side of her, each with one hand on the back of her chair and the other on the table in front. They hemmed her in, breathed on her and told her what had happened at the Quinta da Águia the night before. She winced, shrank, paled and looked down into her hands, her shoulders shaking, her back shuddering under the implacable eyes of the two PVDE men.

They gave her a cigarette, pulled their chairs around to the side of the table and smoked with her. One gave her his handkerchief and it was to him that she revealed her affair with Jim Wallis. Two
agentes
were dispatched. They picked up Wallis within the hour. During that hour Lourenço received a report in which he was informed that officially Lazard had left the country from Lisbon airport on a flight to Dakar the previous afternoon. This complicating development had the effect of clarifying everything to the PVDE chief, who treated this detail as confirmation that only foreign intelligence services could possibly have made such a fantastic mess.

Voss returned to the legation and put a call in to his contact at the PVDE who told him the names of the three murdered people in the Quinta da Águia. He went straight across to Wolters’ office and asked to see him urgently. They sat in the darkened office, shutters closed to the high sun, only cracks of intense light around the edges.

‘I’ve had some disturbing news which I don’t fully understand,’ said Voss. ‘One of the agents I’ve been using to follow the French communist Olivier Mesnel reported to me that he was shot last night. The agent went up to Monsanto in the morning to where the body was found
and overheard two PVDE men discussing a triple murder in a big house in Estoril. I’ve just contacted the PVDE who’ve confirmed the names of the three dead as follows: Mr Patrick Wilshere, Senhora Mafalda de Carmo Wilshere and Mr Beecham Lazard.’

Wolters’ face was perfectly still, the only movement in the room was the cigar smoke trailing from his fingers. The phone rang, more urgent than usual to Voss’s mind, and he sat back to admire Wolters’ collapsing world.

The call was from Captain Lourenço demanding to see a representative from the German Legation in his office in Rua António Maria Cardoso. This was how Voss came to be sitting at the hottest point of the day staring at the PVDE chief’s back as he stood looking out of the unshuttered window in the vague direction of the São Carlos theatre. Voss was still thinking about Wolters, convinced that the general was as stunned by Lazard’s murder here, in Portugal, as he was himself.

‘It’s been very hot these past few days,’ said Lourenço. ‘I’ve been glad my office faces east…not that it makes that much difference. In Lisbon, you see, it’s the humidity that throttles.’

‘You should get out of the city more, sir,’ said Voss.

‘I would. I’d love to…if people would give me the time.’

‘Surely…’

‘People like yourself, Senhor Voss.’

‘Me, Captain?’

‘What’s going on, Senhor Voss?’

‘You’ve confused me now, sir.’

‘I don’t think so, Senhor Voss. You don’t strike me as a man who confuses easily,’ said Lourenço. ‘I’m looking at six murders, five of them foreigners. I’m quite certain that that is a record for one night in Lisbon and it is one record I am not proud of holding.’

‘Were any of them German?’ asked Voss. ‘Is that why…?’

‘No, none of them were German. That is why you’re here,’ said Lourenço. ‘I find it interesting that the military attaché has been sent, don’t you?’

‘I was sent because I was on hand,’ said Voss, wondering how long his dumb show could continue.

‘This
is
an intelligence matter, Senhor Voss,’ he said, settling behind his desk, smoothing his moustache with his fingertips. ‘So, please, let’s not walk around each other for an hour.’

‘We are as shocked by last night’s…’

‘Yes, yes…please, Senhor Voss, the point.’

‘We were expecting some goods from Senhor Lazard, that is true,’ said Voss. ‘But we were expecting him to leave the country in order to procure them. In fact, we
know
he left the country and we were very surprised to find him still here and even more –’

‘What were the goods?’

‘Well, I say “goods”…what I mean is that he left with diamonds in order to buy dollars. We have a hard currency problem in Europe.’

‘So he should have had some diamonds on him?’

‘I don’t know about on him, but they should have been in his possession, unless they were being carried by the man who boarded the Dakar flight impersonating Mr Lazard.’

‘Don’t try to confuse the issue, Senhor Voss. It’s very clear in my mind. All I want to know is why Lazard should shoot a Frenchman in Monsanto, drive to the Serra de Sintra to rape and strangle Senhora Couples, shoot Senhor Couples and then go on to Estoril where I am sure he was about to shoot Senhor Wilshere.’

‘I’d like to propose the theory that Senhor Lazard was operating in his own interests,’ said Voss. ‘Have the Allies
been forthcoming about Senhor and Senhora Couples?’

Lourenço’s dark eyes didn’t leave Voss’s face as they lit up with his first idea of the afternoon.

‘Ah, yes, now I see…is it possible he was using your diamonds to buy something from Senhor and Senhora Couples? Then, having got what he wanted, he killed them. The only problem is that Senhor Couples, according to the American consulate, is a salesman for a company which makes printing machines for use in the construction industry…she was his wife. There’s been gossip that she was having an affair with Senhor Lazard, which I find hard to believe. What was the value of the diamonds?’

‘Why?’

‘I would like to know, Senhor Voss.’

‘I meant why do you find it hard to believe that Senhor Lazard would be having an affair with Senhora Couples?’

‘The details of her death were not pleasant…You will have noticed that I used the word rape…that was…I was being…ach!…the man was an animal,’ said Lourenço, throwing his hand away. ‘And who is this Frenchman? That’s another thing.’

Voss dipped his head, sorry that he was unable to enlighten.

‘Have you spoken to the English girl who was staying at the house, she must…?’ said Voss.