A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XIII

Saturday, 13th June 199-, Cascais, Portugal Carlos and I stood outside the apartment block of the lawyer's wife's ex-lover. It was brand-new, finished in nasty yellow, with a sea view over the railway line, over the Marginal, over the car park of the supermarket. Not perfect, but good enough to be way beyond what a policeman could ever afford.

There was a chain across a forecourt of calcada on which was parked a brand-new jeep called something like a Wrangler, with chrome and black roll bars and a high polish finish. It was a lot of jeep to go pavement-hopping in Cascais. Under the apartment building there was a small garage with a silver 3 series BMW and a jet-black Kawasaki 900 motorbike. These all belonged to Paulo Branco, the ex-lover and only occupier of any of the apartments in the block. A salesman's foot wedged open the door to the building while he fitted in his last two metres of bullshit to a young couple leaving. We walked past them and up to the penthouse.

We got Paulo Branco out of bed. He came to the door in shorts and smelled of a recent sexual encounter although we didn't see much of her-a tanned arm over a sheet, a brown foot dangling. He was good-looking in a way that hundreds of guys are-black hair swept back, dark brown eyes, square jaw with regular cleft and a gym-worked physique. Bland but confident, until he saw our identification.

We went into the open-plan living room with a floor-to-ceiling arched window and the view. We sat around a table scattered with photographs and four coloured mobile phones.

'You know Senhora Teresa Oliveira?' I asked.

He frowned.

'She's the wife of Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira, a lawyer. They have a house here in Cascais,' I reminded him.

'Yes, I know them.'

'How?'

'I sold him a computer last year.'

'Is that your business?'

'It was then. Now I'm at Expo. I installed most of the equipment there.'

'The stuff that didn't work?' asked Carlos, getting his needle in early.

'We had some teething problems.'

'Made some money though?'

The photographs on the table showed a farmhouse in the Alentejo by the look of the land-the cork trees and olive groves. Another fashion accessory.

'This yours too?' asked Carlos.

He nodded. So did we.

'We understand you became intimate with the lawyer's wife. When did that happen?'

He looked over his shoulder at the bedroom door, open a crack.

'May,' he said. 'I think it was May, last year. I'd like some coffee… would you like some?'

'We won't keep you long,' I said. 'Why did you become intimate with Teresa Oliveira?'

'What sort of a question is that?'

'One of the easier ones,' said Carlos.

He leaned across the table to take us into his confidence.

'She wanted sex. She said the old guy wasn't up to it any more.'

'Where?' asked Carlos.

'In the usual place,' he said, pulling some cockiness together, now that he knew this wasn't a fiscal investigation.

'Geographically.'

He gave Carlos his best false smile.

'In her Lisbon house.'

'Not here?'

'Once or twice when I was home early on a Friday evening she'd come over… but it was mainly in Lisbon. I'd go out on a sales call and drop by her house. That was it.'

'And the daughter,' I said, 'Catarina?'

He looked like a man whose parachute had just failed to open.

'The daughter?' he said.

'Her name was Catarina.'

Was?'

'That's what I said.'

'Now look, I haven't seen Catarina for… for…'

'Go on… for how long?'

He swallowed hard and put his hand through his styled hair.

'We heard you went to bed with her,' I said. 'When was the last time?'

He slapped his thighs, stood up, shouted something inarticulate and strode across the room gesticulating. Suddenly we were in soap opera.

'Sit down please, Senhor Branco,' I said, getting out of my seat and pointing at his.

He was stunned. The door to the bedroom clicked shut-the girl probably looking for her underwear by now. Paulo Branco sat down and viced his head between his hands, not wanting to hear any more.

'I want a lawyer,' he said.

'You've got the number of one here in Cascais,' said Carlos, enjoying himself too much.

'We're not going to charge you with having sex with an underage girl… or child abuse as it's more commonly known, Senhor Branco,' I said. 'But if you murdered her. That's a different thing. Maybe you should get a lawyer.'

' Me? ' he said, his sunny day suddenly gone very black. 'I didn't kill her. I haven't seen her for… for…'

'When was that last time?'

'Months ago.'

'How did you meet her?'

'In the house in Lisbon.'

'How? Senhor Branco… not where.'

'I came out of the bedroom…'

'Whose bedroom?'

'Her mother's… Teresa's bedroom. She was standing in the corridor.'

'When?'

'It was a lunchtime… June, July last year.'

'What happened?'

'I don't… she had her shoes in her hand. She walked down the stairs. I was leaving. I looked back at her mother and followed her. We met again in the street. She was putting her shoes on.'

'Did she say anything?'

'She told me to be there the next Friday lunchtime.'

'You took that from a fourteen-year-old girl?'

'Fourteen! No, no. That's not possible. She said…'

'Don't waste our time, Paulo,' I said. 'Let's have the rest of it.'

'I turned up the next Friday. Teresa wasn't there. She went to Cascais on Fridays.'

'We know.'

'I had sex with her,' he said, and shrugged.

'In the mother's bed?'

He scratched the side of his head and nodded.

'Anything else?'

'She took five thousand escudos off me.'

'You allowed that?'

'I didn't know what to make of it. I wasn't sure what she could do.'

'Don't give me this shit,' I said. 'You're a grown man compared to her.'

'You didn't even have to turn up,' said Carlos.

He sized us up for the big schoolboy admission.

'We can take it,' I said.

'I got a kick out of it,' he said. 'Having sex with the mother and the daughter in…'

'Big deal,' I said. 'Now how many times did this happen before Teresa found out?'

'Three. She came in on the fourth.'

'Anything unusual about that day?'

His face weakened to a six-year-old's. He giggled with nerves.

'Shit,' he said, and squeezed the bridge of his nose, 'there was something different. That was the first time Catarina seemed to be enjoying it.'

'She didn't put it on all the time?' asked Carlos.

Paulo stared into the table determined not to rise to it.

'She was shouting, and kind of smiling, but not up at me… over my shoulder. I looked round and Teresa was standing by the door.'

'What did Teresa do?'

'I got off the bed. Catarina sat up… didn't even close her legs, just looked at her mother and smiled. Teresa ran at her and smacked her across the face, shit, it was like a rifle shot.'

'Did Catarina say anything?'

'In a baby-girl voice she said, "Sorry, mummy.'"

'And you?'

'I was out of there and down the stairs.'

'You never saw Teresa again.'

'No.'

'And Catarina?'

He glanced back at the bedroom door again and spoke quietly.

'She came round a few times. The last time was… March. Yes, March… a couple of days after my birthday, the seventeenth.'

'She came round for sex?'

'It wasn't conversation.'

'You didn't talk?'

'She walked straight in there and took her clothes off.'

'Do you think she was on drugs?'

'Maybe.' He ducked his head.

'Did she take money from you?'

'Yes, until I hid my wallet.'

'Did that annoy her?'

'She didn't comment.'

'How many times did she come here?'

'Ten, twelve times.'

'And why didn't she come back after the nineteenth of March?'

'She did. I just didn't let her in.'

He nodded back at the bedroom door and we looked over there too.

We left a little after that and sat in the car outside. The girlfriend came out a few minutes after us, taking strides far too long for her legs, her stacked heels wobbling on the calcada. Carlos nodded, satisfied that the girl had seen what he had.

'That guy,' he said, ' novo rico.'

We drove back to the lawyer's house. I had a couple of questions for Teresa but Dr Oliveira wouldn't allow it until she came into the corridor and beckoned us in. She was moving like an old woman and her speech was slow and drifting at the edges.

'The day you found Catarina in bed with Paulo Branco… why did you go back to the house?'

'I don't remember.'

'Weren't you already here?'

'I was.'

'It must have been something important to go all the way back into Lisbon.'

She didn't say anything. I apologized and stood to leave. Her face had sagged. Pouches that hadn't been there before appeared below her eyes.

'I went back,' she said, so tired she could hardly get it out, 'because Catarina called me. She said she'd hurt herself at school.'

The three of us exchanged looks. She held her hands open to show us how life could be.

'That was the end of me and Catarina,' she said.

We drove back to the 2° Circular around Lisbon in silence. I liked Carlos for this. No need to ask questions for which neither of us had any answers. He was contemplative. A different man to the edgy one he'd revealed on the beach and in Paulo Branco's flat. I doubted he had many friends.

I was feeling sick at how a family like the Oliveiras could go so wrong. The family. The strongest unit of Portuguese currency. Our gold. Our greatest asset. The pure element that keeps our streets mostly clean. Nobody in Europe understands the value of family better than us and it's not just leftover Salazarist propaganda. Was this where society's cracks started to appear?

We were heading for a massive development on the north edge of Lisbon called Odivelas. We skirted one of our present glories-Colombo, the biggest shopping centre in Europe-opposite one of the older ones-Benfica stadium, toying with bankruptcy. We curved off and back under the 2° Circular and headed uphill. At the top we had the best view there was of Odivelas-twenty square kilometres of distressed tower blocks, covered in a frazzled hair of clustered television aerials. It was a hellish vision, a construction company's Elysium. They built these things in weeks-concrete skeleton bones, skin walls with no fat-they were baking in the summer and freezing in the winter. I've never been able to breathe in them, the air's been re-used too much.

We walked up the stairs to the fourth floor of a block which was part of a development within another development. This block was one of the originals, the rest clones. The lift didn't work. Tiles were broken and missing underfoot, and the concrete walls had encrustations from dried damp. Televisions squabbled between floors. Music and the smell of lunches piped down the stairwell. A couple of kids bounced off the walls and squeezed past us.

We knocked on a cardboard door where we were hoping to find the lead guitarist from Catarina's band. The man who opened the door was thin, with what looked like a badly applied moustache of the same lank texture as the dark hair on his head. He wore a purple short-sleeved shirt open all the way down. His hand was on his chest where he stroked the hair around his nipples with the two fingers he used for smoking. He knew we were police.

'Is Valentim Mateus Almeida in?' I asked.

He turned without speaking. We followed him down the narrow corridor. He tapped on a door as he was passing.

'Valentim,' he said. 'Police.'

He carried on into the kitchen where an overweight woman with bleached hair, who'd squeezed herself into a turquoise skirt, was clearing away lunch. She asked him who'd been at the door. He told her, and she sucked in her stomach. We knocked on Valentim's door again. The place smelled of fried fish.

Valentim invited us in but didn't look up from where he was sitting on the bed playing an electric guitar, unplugged. He had a huge thick swag of long dark brown ringlets, sheafed down the length of his back. He wore a T-shirt and jeans. He was thin, olive-skinned with big dark eyes and hollow, underfed cheeks. Carlos closed the door of the narrow room which had a bed, a desk but no bookcase. The books were piled on the floor. Some of them were in English and French.

'Your father's not too concerned about the quality of your visitors.'

'That's because he's not my father, not even my stepfather. He's just the resident asshole who keeps my mother from getting lonely… and don't worry, I've told her.'

'What?' asked Carlos.

'That it's better to be lonely than live with a tick, but then… she'd scratch him off and get another one in its place. That's the nature of ticks and those they feed on.'

'Are you reading zoology?'

'Psychology,' he said. 'Zoology's something I live with. It creeps under my door.'

'You know a girl called Catarina Sousa Oliveira?'

'I know her,' he said, going back to his fingerwork on the guitar.

'She's dead. Murdered.'

His fingers stopped. He took the guitar by the neck and leaned it against a chair at the end of the bed. He was thinking, composing himself, but shocked too.

'I didn't know.'

'We're reconstructing her last twenty-four hours.'

'I haven't seen her,' he said, quickly.

'Not for twenty-four hours?'

'No.'

'Did you speak to her?'

'No.'

'When did you last see her?'

'Wednesday evening.'

'What happened?'

'The band met to talk about the weekend gig and rehearsals for Friday and Saturday.'

'Yesterday was Friday,' said Carlos.

'Thanks for reminding me. One day's like the next in Odivelas,' he said. 'The band also bust up on Wednesday. There was no rehearsal, there will be no gig.'

'Why did you bust up?'

'Musical differences,' he said. 'Teresa, she's the keyboard player… she's fucking some guy who plays the saxophone, so she thinks we suddenly need a saxophonist. She thinks we need to do more instrumental stuff. I said…'

'Less emphasis on the lead singer?' said Carlos.

Valentim turned to me for an opinion.

'I can't help you there,' I said. 'Nothing's happened in my life since Pink Floyd.'

'How musical were these differences?' asked Carlos.

'That's your first decent question and you go and answer it yourself.'

'What about Bruno, what does he play?'

'Bass.'

'Were either you or Bruno going out with Catarina?' I asked.

'Going out?'

'Were you fucking her?' said Carlos, picking up words as we went along.

'We had a "no relationships" agreement in the band.'

'The saxophonist didn't have a chance.'

'I don't suppose he did.'

'The meeting. Where did it take place?'

'In a bar called Toca. It's in the Bairro Alto.'

'And you didn't see her after that-not on Thursday, nor Friday?'

'No.'

'Do you know what she was doing yesterday?'

'She went to school, didn't she?'

'Where were you?'

'In the Biblioteca Nacional… all day… until seven, seven-thirty.'

I gave him a card and told him to call me if he remembered anything. Valentim's mother was looking down the corridor from the kitchen when we came out. I gave her a good afternoon which brought the tick to her shoulder.

'Where was Valentim yesterday?' I asked.

'He was out all day and most of the night,' said the tick. 'Didn't get in until three in the morning.'

The woman looked despondent behind the make-up she'd just put on. The tick wanted us to take the kid away right now. We left and got back in the car, which was too hot to touch. I lit a cigarette and put it out after two drags.

'He's lying,' said Carlos. 'He saw her.'

'Let's go and talk to the keyboards,' I said, starting the car.

'Don't we get lunch on this job?'

'English lunch.'

'I don't like the sound of that.'

'You wouldn't. You're Portuguese.'

'They said…' he pulled up.

'What did they say?'

'They said you were married to an Englishwoman.'

'Was that supposed to explain something to you?'

'I think… I was surprised when you said Pink Floyd back there.'

'I was in England in the seventies.'

He nodded.

'What else did they say?' I asked, surprised that people bothered to talk about me when I wasn't there.

'They said you weren't… normal.'

'Why do you think they put you to work with me?' I asked. 'Get all the weirdos off in one corner?'

'I'm not weird.'

'Just boring… you still haven't talked about girls, cars or football. You're twenty-seven years old. You're a policeman. You're Portuguese. What do you think they make of that?'

'Sporting,' he said, to satisfy requirements.

'They're a good team.'

'I can't afford a car.'

'Not the point.'

'I worked in a garage. I only know about old cars that don't work. Like Alfa Romeos.'

'Girls?'

'I don't have a girlfriend.'

'Still not the point. Are you gay?'

You'd have thought I'd slipped a sharpened screwdriver between his ribs.

'No,' he said, mortally wounded.

'Would you have told me if you were?'

'I'm not.'

'Do you think any of our colleagues talk to each other like this?' He looked out of the window.

'That's why they put us together,' I said. 'We're the outsiders, we're weird.'