The Night Watchman (40 page)

‘Is your brother Pierre also in Bordeaux?’ I asked, anxious to check my reasoning.

Her eyes opened wide. ‘How do you know about my brother?’ she asked roughly.

‘Jean Morel told me about the two of you,’ I replied, trying to keep all inflection out of my voice, as I did with violent suspects.

She smiled bitterly, but with a coquettish slant of her head. ‘So, how is dear Monsieur Morel?’

‘He seems to be in love with your father’s second wife.’

‘Now that
is
interesting,’ she said with slow, drawn-out irony, but a moment later she gazed past me as though a dangerous figure had just appeared in the distance.

Ernie looked at me questioningly. He seemed confused by her.

‘Miss Dias,’ I said to call her back to us, and as she turned to me, I asked, ‘When was the last time you saw Monsieur Morel?’

‘At the time of the divorce. He came to the courthouse with Coutinho a few times.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘And if you don’t mind my asking, when did your father start . . . hurting you?’

‘When I was thirteen – thirteen and three months and six days. He came into my room one night when my mother was away and told me he had something special for his
big girl
– now that she was all grown up.’

Dias looked between Ernie and me, challenging us to doubt her story.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, though the sympathy I felt was largely subdued by my fear of her.

She stared at her Om tattoo. ‘You know what troubled me the most, Inspector? He got off watching us in the big mirror in his room – seeing what he was doing to me. And do you know what saved me? You’ll laugh when you hear it.’

‘I doubt that very much.’

‘The transcendence in me that would survive no matter what – my Buddha nature.’

I didn’t know what she meant by that, and though I had no doubt that she was sincere, it also seemed a declaration she’d memorized long ago. Her Buddhism seemed to be her strategy for maintaining her wild rage under strict control.

‘Did his abuse come out at the divorce hearing?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘We had no proof, and Coutinho would have claimed that our lawyer was just trying to get my mom and me more sympathy and money. He’d have humiliated me in public. He had no qualms about that, I can assure you.’

‘You call your father Coutinho,’ I pointed out.

‘A suggestion my therapist made years ago, back in Paris. We decided it was best for me not to consider him my father.’

‘And you believe that Monsieur Morel knew what he’d done to you?’

‘He was Coutinho’s best friend,’ she said, sneering. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think that some men are experts at fooling people. They’re charming and clever – great joke-tellers, excellent singers or dancers. They’re the star of every dinner party.’

She laughed mirthlessly. ‘You talk like you know my father well.’

‘I’m familiar with men like him.’

‘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 men? 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.