A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXIV

Saturday, 13th June 199-, Alfama, Lisbon I arranged for a car to pick us up. I let Jamie Gallacher buy cigarettes and he smoked all the way to the Policia Judiciaria and played with the door lock until the driver couldn't take it any longer. I hadn't let him wash or shave. He was still in the creased T-shirt and beer-stained jeans but with a brand-new pair of Nikes on his feet which might not be his for very much longer in the tacos, which is what I had in mind for him after he'd made his statement. It wasn't that I didn't believe him. It was that I didn't like him.

The big, dark car possibility coincided with the way my thoughts were leaning, that a creep had turned up after Valentim and Bruno, after Jamie Gallacher, and had sodomized her and killed her for being someone out there who knew the type of person he really was. It felt right, too, that the victim had had a spat and stormed off. It could happen to girls-they got emotional, became vulnerable and that was when a creep might pick them off and rape or kill them. I've seen them, not many of them, Lisbon's not a violent city. They're cruel these creeps. They offer comfort-a hug, a stroke, a little kiss, a small squeeze, an ugly grab and then mayhem.

It was possible that the driver of the big dark car knew her already. Maybe he'd been waiting outside the school, seen Gallacher hit her and moved in. My stomach was telling me things. The only problem was that it had been telling me things since I'd been in Luisa Madrugada's apartment.

Jamie Gallacher made his statement and I sent him down. He protested, telling me he had to teach on Monday morning.

'You're under suspicion of murder, Mr Gallacher. You've admitted to a sexual relationship with an underage girl who was one of your pupils,' I told him. 'I can keep you in a police cell for a year without charge while I carry out my investigations. This is Portugal. It's our system of law. You're guilty until proven innocent. Have a nice weekend.'

Carlos had the search warrant. We drove out to Odivelas. It was getting late now but I had to see.

The tick opened the door and read the warrant through. He took it to Valentim's mother. She sat at the kitchen table, smoking, facing away from the television in the next room which showed fat people pretending to be rich and trying to be funny with no success. The tick sucked on a bottle of Sagres. She looked up, red-eyed, the sockets blackened by mascara, lipstick worn off. Her voice was thick with saliva, from drink and tears.

'Where do you want to start?' she asked.

'Just his room. Is it locked?'

She shrugged. The tick nodded.

'Key?'

The tick shook his head. The tick knew everything.

I turned the door handle down and leaned into it. It cracked open easily, the door too small for the frame. I started at one end of the room, Carlos at the other. He gave me a pair of surgical gloves and snapped into a pair himself. He was methodical, careful. I knew he would be. He went through every page of every book, treating each one as if it was his own. He did the same with the sheet music. I went through the bedside locker. There was nothing unusual in the drawer. The cupboard contained spiral-bound exercise books which were full of notes from academic books. I leafed through them. Carlos slid under the bed with a pen torch in his mouth. A few moments later he grunted and came out with a key with a plastic tag. It had '7D' written on it. We bagged it and left the room.

'Find what you want?' asked the mother.

I asked them if the key meant anything to them. The tick shook his head, but he knew. The woman looked down at the ashtray in front of her, the strap of her bra down her shoulder.

We sat in the car and held the key up to the street lighting.

'What do you think?' asked Carlos.

'Garage maybe.'

'The car?'

'Possibly. Or just somewhere to keep his things private.'

A face appeared at the window on Carlos' side. The tick out for more blood.

'You want to know which door that key opens?'

'You don't like him do you?' I said.

'Little piece of shit.'

'Get in.'

The tick took us on a short drive of less than two kilometres into a light industrial zone with small warehouses, workshops for panel-beating, car repairs, foam-rubber furniture makers and other low capital businesses. Unit 7D was the size of a double garage with a large door for shipping and delivery and a small door for the office. It was a cheap place, if you weren't a student and this was how you made your money. I tried the key. It fitted and turned. I pulled it out.

'You're not going in?' asked the tick.

'Not without a search warrant.'

' I'm not going to tell.'

'I don't give a shit,' I said. 'If there's something in there I don't want to risk not being able to use it. And I don't know what your game is either. Maybe you'll change sides.'

We dropped the tick at a bar close to the apartment block. He wen't in there and hooked his buttock up on a stool and flicked his finger for a beer. We drove back to Saldanha and did the paperwork for the key. Carlos was sulking so I took him across the road and bought him a beer in the only place open, the city dead on its feet around here after a long week and the heat. We sat in silence under the glare of neon and sipped Super Bock with our jackets hooked over the chair backs. The barman was watching football. I asked him the score, not that interested.

'Zero-zero,' he said, barely listening.

'You can watch that stuff all year round now,' I said.

No answer. I turned back to Carlos who was weighing things in his head.

'You speak English like an Englishman,' said Carlos.

'1 was there for four and half years, four and a quarter of them in the pub,' I said. 'I only spoke to my wife in English and I still use it with Olivia.'

'You didn't tell me why you were in England.'

I lit a cigarette and gave him a direct look.

'Aren't you tired?' I asked.

'Something's got to happen while I drink this beer.'

'You don't want to talk about football.'

'I don't know anything about football.'

'Shit!' said the barman.

We looked up in time to see the ball sailing into the stands.

'My father was in the army, you know that already. He was serving in Guinea fighting those good old colonial wars under General Spinola. Maybe you know this too…'

'Carry on.'

'They were unwinnable wars. Guys your age were getting killed every day for no very good reason other than that Salazar wanted to be an Emperor. General Spinola had a brilliant and unconventional idea. Rather than killing people in order to make them Portuguese citizens why not be nice to them. He decided to wage what was called a "hearts and minds" war. He improved medical care, education, supplied books, that kind of thing and suddenly the Africans loved him and the rebels lost their cause. It meant that my father's men didn't get killed any more, and it also made him a big Spinola fan.'

Carlos sat back, a little resistance building already. It made me feel tired.

'So after the revolution, after the euphoria had worn off, when Portugal was a seething mass of dozens of different political parties and agendas, with the communists cornering a fair amount of the functionary power, my father decided that his old pal Spinola's solution to the problem of this chaos was the right one.'

'A second coup,' said Carlos.

'Exactly. And as you know, it was uncovered and my father had to get out fast. He had friends in London so we moved there. That's it.'

'He should have been shot,' said Carlos, into his beer.

'What was that?'

'I said… your father… he should have been shot.'

'That's what I thought you said.'

'There'd been a revolution. The democratic process was in hand, chaotically in hand, I agree, but that's the process. What it didn't need was another coup and the installation of a military dictatorship. I think, without absolutely any doubt at all, that your father and all the rest of them, should have been shot.'

It had been a long day and a hot one. I'd had a beer on an empty stomach. I'd spent a day having my new, exposed face read by people who didn't know me. There were all sorts of reasons why hearing this kid calmly condemning my father, my dead father, to death… well, it brought something out in me that hadn't been aired for some time. To use an English expression-I lost it. I'd never been sure what the 'it' had been until then. Now I know. It's the control that makes us human. I lashed out claws exposed for once.

I slammed my fists down on the table, the two beers jumped and hit the deck, the barman braced himself against the steel counter.

'Who the fuck do you think you are!?' I roared. 'Are you the prosecutor, jury and judge rolled into one? You weren't even out of your nappies when all this happened. You didn't even have your own teeth. You didn't know my father. And you have no fucking idea what it's like to live under a fascist dictatorship, to see men getting killed, to see them saved by the ideas of one man, to see your country dropped in the shit by a bunch of power-seeking, self-aggrandizing bastards. So who the fuck do you think you are condemning men to death? You're the whole bloody reason this kind of shit happens in the first place.'

Carlos tipped back on his chair and saved himself on the front window, beer down his shirt and trousers, but his face calm, impassive, not cowed.

And you think that's part of the democratic process, do you? To get back into your tanks and drive down the Avenida da Liberdade. You think that's the proper way to address political differences in a modern world? Maybe they should have shot you as well.'

I went for him, crashed straight through the table, tripped over it, cut my hand on some broken glass, slipped on the beer, got back on to my feet, lunged at him and found myself connecting with the fat, porky shoulder of the barman, who must have seen this sort of thing happen before and had vaulted his hundred kilos over the bar faster than a Chinese gymnast. He grabbed my flailing arms.

Filho da puta!' I roared.

'Cabrao!' Carlos shouted back.

I lunged at him again, taking the barman with me and we all went down in a pile by the glass door of the bar. God knows what anybody would have made of it from the outside looking in-another football argument that had got out of hand.

The barman got to his feet first. He kicked Carlos out into the night and hauled me away to the toilets at the back of the bar. I sat down shaking, blood streaming down my wrist, soaking into my shirt cuff. I washed the wound out in the sink. The barman gave me some napkins.

'Never in my life,' said the barman, 'have I seen you like that. Never.'

He went back behind his counter. I picked my jacket up and opened the door.

'Shit!' said the barman, back at the TV, 'how did it get to be 2-1?'

I crossed the road to the Policia Judiciaria building and did some first-aid on my hand. I drove home, my blood still fierce, rocketing around my system with bigger and better arguments ripping though my brain. I was approaching a choppy version of calm by the time I parked up in Paco de Arcos and walked to the house.

Olivia was out and the door locked. I searched my pockets for the keys.

'Inspector?' said a female voice behind me.

Teresa Oliveira, the lawyer's wife, was standing a couple of metres down the street, looking different, her hair tied back and wearing jeans and a red T-shirt with the word GUESS on the front. I tried to summon some gentleness from the corner of my brain where it was still cowering.

'Is this important, Dona Oliveira?' I asked. 'It's been a long day and I don't have any news for you I'm afraid.'

'It won't take long,' she said, but I thought it might.

We went into the kitchen. I drank some water. She upset herself over my bloody shirt. I changed and offered her a drink. She went for Coke.

'The medication, you understand,' she felt the need to explain.

I poured myself a glass of whisky from an old bottle of William Lawson's that hadn't seen the light for the last six months.

'I've left my husband, Inspector,' she said, and I lit a cigarette.

'Was that wise?' I asked. 'They say it's better not to make traumatic changes immediately after a tragedy.'

'You might have realized that it's been coming for some time.'

I nodded without commenting. She fumbled in her bag for her own cigarettes and lighter. Between us we got one going for her.

'It never worked, right from the start it didn't work,' she said, referring to her marriage.

'How long ago was that?'

'Fifteen years.'

'That's a long time for a marriage not to be working,' I said, looking for angles here and seeing none.

'It suited us to keep it going.'

'And now you're leaving him,' I said, and shrugged. 'Was your daughter's death the catalyst?'

'No,' she said, flatly, the hand with the cigarette shaking so badly she had to hold it with the other. 'He was abusing her… sexually.'

Her Coke fizzed in its glass.

Now we're getting to it.

'That's a very serious allegation,' I said. 'If you're going to make a formal complaint I would suggest you get a lawyer on your side and establish some strong evidence. And, if it's true, it could also have an impact on my murder enquiry, but I am not the person you should be talking to.'

I laid it out for her so that she knew I knew.

'It is true,' she said, feeling stronger. 'The maid will corroborate it.'

'How long had this been going on for?'

'Five years, that I know of.'

'With you tolerating it?'

Her hand still shook as the cigarette went to her mouth.

'My husband has always been a powerful man, both publicly and privately. He extended that power into his relationships… with me and his children.'

'Was that the attraction in the first place?'

'I never went for men my own age,' she shrugged. 'My father died when I was young… maybe that was it.'

'You were twenty-one when…'

'I was only ever interested in established men,' she cut in. 'And he took an interest in me. He can be very charming. I was flattered.'

'How did you meet?'

'I worked for him. I was his secretary.'

'So you know everything there is to know about him?'

'I used to know,' she said, 'when I was his secretary. As you might know, wives are not so well informed.'

'So you don't know who these few clients are he's working for now?'

'Why do you ask?'

'I want to know who I'm up against.'

'I only know who he used to work for, fifteen, sixteen years ago.'

'Who were they?'

'Big people.'

'For example?'

'Quimical, Banco de Oceano e Rocha, Martins Construcoes Limitada.'

'Very big people,' I said. 'Do you think you, your maid and whatever lawyer you can find for the money are up to taking on this kind of person?'

'I don't know,' she said, her thumb flickering over the filter of her cigarette.

'Is that why you came here tonight?'

She looked up with charcoal-smudged eyes in deep sockets, her face not puffy as it had been in the morning, gravity taking over from fluid retention.

'I'm not sure what you mean by that?'

'I have my work cut out for me in this case already, Dona Oliveira,' I said, shying away from a small but unpleasant truth. 'Your daughter was very promiscuous.'

'Wouldn't you expect that from a girl who'd been abused?' she said, getting a handkerchief out and wiping her eyes.

'The behaviour's been noticed in girls who haven't been abused,' I said. 'But that's your point, not mine. As the day's gone on we've discovered that she's had sex with your ex-lover and she's had sex with two boys from the band in a group session in a pensao in Rua da Gloria. The landlord of that rooms-by-the-hour pensao had seen her before on Friday lunchtimes with other men who he thinks were paying customers. And I've just finished interviewing one of her teachers, who had a six-month involvement with her. Catarina could have gone with anybody and I've got to the point in my investigation where I need some luck to move it on.'

'I know all that,' she said. 'I'm trying to help. I'm trying to show you that there were psychological…'

'I'm not on anybody's team, Dona Oliveira,' I said, quiet and firm.

She stood and chased the ashtray around the table, crushing her cigarette out. She shouldered her handbag. I followed her to the door with half a mind to ask my burning question. Was Catarina your daughter? But I was too exhausted for the reply. The front door clicked shut. I opened it again to call after her, but she was already halfway down the street, walking into the yellow glow of the municipal street lighting, having trouble with her heels on the cobbles.