A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter II

Saturday, 13th June 199-, Paco de Areas, near Lisbon Plates were crashing on to a marble floor. Plates were crashing and smashing and endlessly shattering on the marble floor. I surfaced into the brutal noise, the harshest reality there is, of a phone going off in a hangover at 6.00 a.m. I wrenched the handset to my ear. The blissful silence, the faint sea hiss of a distant mobile. My boss Eng. Jaime Leal Narciso gave me a good morning and I tried to find some moisture in my beak to reply.

'Ze?' he asked.

'Yes, it's me,' I said, which came out in a whisper as if I had his wife next to me.

'You're all right then,' he said, but didn't wait for the reply. 'Look, the body of a young girl's been found on the beach at Paco de Arcos and I want…'

Those words trampolined me off the bed, the phone jack yanked the handset from my grip and I cannoned off the door frame into the hall. I thundered down the distressed strip of carpet and wrenched the door open. Her clothes lay in a track from the door to the bed-clumpy big-heeled shoes, black silk top, lilac shirt, black bra, black flares. Olivia was twisted into her sheet face down, her bare arms and shoulders spread, her black hair, as soft and shiny as sable, splashed across the pillow.

I drank heavily in the bathroom until my belly was taut with water. I snatched the phone to my ear and lay down on the bed again.

'Bom dia, Senhor Engenheiro,' I said, addressing him by his degree in science, as was usual.

'If you'd given me two seconds I'd have told you she was blonde.'

'I should have checked last night but…' I paused, synapses clashed painfully, 'why are you calling me at six in the morning to tell me about a body on the beach? Throw your mind back to the weekend roster and you'll find I'm off duty.'

'Well, the point is you're two hundred metres from the situation and Abilio, who is on duty, lives in Seixal which as you know… It would be…'

'I'm in no condition to…' I said, my brain still blundering around.

'Ah yes. I forgot. How was it? How are you?'

'Cooler about the face.'

'Good.'

'More fragile in the head.'

'They say it could get up to forty degrees today,' he said, not listening.

'Where are you, sir?'

'On my mobile.'

A good answer.

'There's some good news, Ze,' he said, quickly. 'I'm sending someone to help you.'

'Who's that?'

'A young guy. Very keen. Good for leg work.'

'Whose son is he?'

'I didn't catch that?'

'You know I don't like to tread on anybody's toes.'

'This line's breaking up,' he shouted. 'Look, he's very capable but he could use some experience. I can't think of anybody better.'

'Does that mean nobody else would have him?'

'His name is Carlos Pinto,' he said, ignoring my question. 'I want him to see your approach. Your very particular approach. You know, you have this ability with people. They talk to you. I want him to see how you operate.'

'Does he know where he's going?'

'I've told him to meet you in that communist's bar you like so much. He's bringing the latest missing persons printout.'

'Will he recognize me?'

'I've told him to look for someone who's just had his beard shaved off after twenty-odd years. An interesting test don't you think?'

The signal finally broke up. He knew. Narciso knew. They all knew. Even if I'd been a stick insect those scales would still have come out at eighty-two kilos. You can't trust anybody these days, not your own daughter, not your own family, not even the Policia Judiciaria.

I showered and dried off in front of the mirror. Old eyes, new face looked back at me. Having just levered myself over forty maybe I was too old for this kind of change and yet, just as my wife had said I would, I looked five years younger without the beard.

Sunlight was beginning to colour the blue into the ocean just visible from the bathroom window. A fishing smack pushed through it and for the first time in a year I had that same surge of hope, a feeling that today could be the first day of a different life.

I dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt (short sleeves lack gravitas), a light grey suit and a pair of black brogues. I selected one of the thirty ties Olivia had made for me, a quiet one, not one that a pathologist would like to trap in a petri dish. I went to the top of the shabby wooden stairs and had a momentary feeling of a man who's just been told to take a grand piano down on his own.

I left the house, my crumbling mansion which I inherited from my parents at a peppercorn rent, and headed for the cafe. The plaster was flaking off the garden wall which was reckless with unpruned bougainvillea. I made a mental note to let the riot continue.

From the public gardens I looked back at the faded pink house whose long windows had lost all their white paint and thought that if I didn't have to go and inspect bludgeoned, brutalized bodies I could persuade myself that I was a retired count whose annuity was in a vice.

I was nervous, part of me willing this day not to proceed to my first meeting with a new person and my face naked-all that sizing up, all that accommodation, all that… and no mask too.

A corner of pepper trees in the gardens whispered to each other like parents who didn't want to wake the kids. Beyond them, Antonio, who never slept, who hadn't slept, he once told me, since 1964, was winding down his red canvas awning which sported only the name of his bar and no advertising for beer or coffee.

'I didn't expect to see you before midday,' he said.

'Nor did I,' I said. 'But at least you recognized me.'

I followed him in and he started the coffee grinder which was like a wirewool scrub on my eyeballs. Yesterday's Polaroid was already up on his memorial wall. I didn't recognize myself at first. The young-looking one between the fat man and the pretty girl. Except that Olivia wasn't looking very girlish either, more… more of a…

'I thought you were off today,' said Antonio.

'I was but… a body's been found on the beach. Anyone been in yet?'

'No,' he said, looking out vaguely in the direction of the beach. 'Washed up?'

'The body? I don't know.'

Standing in the doorway wearing a dark suit which had been cut in Salazar's time and had knuckle-brushing sleeves was a young guy. He approached the bar stiffly as if it was his first time on TV and asked for a bica, the one-inch shot of caffeine which adrenalizes a few million Portuguese hearts every morning.

He watched the black and tan mixture trickle into the cups. Antonio turned the grinder off and the golfball cleaner effect on my eyeballs eased.

The young guy put two sugar sachets into his coffee and asked for a third. I flicked him one of mine. He stirred it lengthily to a syrup.

'You must be Inspector Senhor Doutor Jose Afonso Coelho,' he said, not looking at me but glancing up at the hammer and sickle Antonio kept behind the bar. His relics.

'Engenheiro Narciso will be pleased,' I said, glancing around the empty bar. 'How did you guess?'

His head flicked round. He must have been mid-twenties but he looked no different than he had done at sixteen. His dark brown eyes connected with mine. He was irritated.

'You look vulnerable,' he said, and nodded that into me for effect.

Antonio's eyebrows changed places.

'An interesting observation agente Pinto,' I said grimly. 'Most people would have commented on the whiteness of my cheeks. And there's no need to call me Doutor. It doesn't apply.'

'I thought you had a degree in Modern Languages.'

'But from London University, and there you don't get called a doctor until you have a PhD. Just call me Ze or Inspector.'

We shook hands. I liked him. I didn't know why I liked him. Narciso thought I liked everybody but he had that confused in his mind with 'getting on with people' which he couldn't do himself because he was colder and rougher-skinned than a shark with blood on its radar. The fact was, I'd only ever loved one woman and the people I'd call close were in single figures. And now Carlos. What was it about him? That suit? Old-fashioned, too big and wool in summer said no vanity… and no money. His hair? Black, durable, disobedient, short as a trooper's said, to me anyway: serious and dependable. His irritated look said: defiant, touchy. His first words? Direct, candid, perceptive said: uncompromising. A difficult combination for a policeman. I could see why nobody else would have him.

'I didn't know about London,' he said.

'My father was over there,' I said. 'So what do you know about?'

'Your father was an army officer. You spent a lot of time in Africa. In Guinea. You've been seventeen years on the force, eight of them as a homicide detective.'

'Have you accessed my file?'

'No. I asked Engenheiro Narciso. He didn't tell me everything,' he said, sucking in his thick coffee. 'He didn't say what rank your father was for instance.'

Antonio's eyebrows switched back again and a glint of partisan interest came from deep in his eye sockets. A political question: was my father one of the younger officers who started the 1974 revolution, or old guard? Both men waited.

'My father was a colonel,' I said.

'How did he end up in London?'

'Ask him,' I said, nodding to Antonio, no appetite for this.

'How long have you got?' he asked, gripping the edge of the bar.

'No time at all,' I said. 'There's a dead body waiting for us on the beach.'

We crossed the gardens to the Marginal and went through the underpass to a small car park in front of the Clube Desportivo de Paco de Arcos. There was a dried-fish and diesel smell amongst the old boats lying on their sides or propped up on tyres amongst rusted trailers and rubbish bins. A halved oil drum was smoking with two planks of wood burning to heat a pan of oil. A couple of fishermen I knew were ignoring the scene and sorting through the marker buoys and crab and lobster pots in front of their corrugated iron work shacks. I nodded and they looked across to the crowd that had already formed even at this early hour.

The line of people that had gathered at the low stone balustrade on the edge of the beach and along the harbour wall were looking down on to the sand. Some broad-backed working women had taken time out to distress themselves over the tragedy, muttering through their fingers:

' Ai Mae, coitadinha. ' O mother, poor little thing.

There were four or five Policia de Seguranza Publica boys ignoring the total contamination of the crime scene and talking to two members of the Policia Maritima. Another two hours and there'd be girls on the beach to chat up and then not even the Policia Maritima would have had a look in. I introduced myself and asked them who'd found the body. They pointed to a fisherman sitting further along the harbour wall. The position of the body above the flattened sand of the highest tide mark told me that the victim hadn't been washed up but dumped, thrown, from just about where I was standing, off the harbour wall. It was a three-metre drop.

The Policia Maritima were satisfied that the body hadn't been washed up but wanted it confirmed from the pathologist that there was no water in the lungs. They gave me authority to start my investigation. I sent the PSP men along the harbour wall to move the onlookers back to the road.

The police photographer made himself known and I told him to take shots from above as well as down on the beach.

The girl's naked body was twisted at the waist, her left shoulder buried in the sand. Her face, with just a single graze on the forehead, was turned upwards, eyes wide open. She was young, her breasts still high and rounded not far below her clavicles. The muscle of her torso was visible below the rib cage and she carried a little puppy fat on her belly. Her hips lay flat, her left leg straight, the right turned out at the knee, its heel close to her buttock and right hand which was thrown behind her. I'd put her at under sixteen and I could see why the fisherman hadn't bothered to go down to look for life. Her face was pale apart from the cut, the lips purple and her intensely blue eyes vacant. There were no footprints around the body. I let the photographer down there to take his close-ups.

The fisherman told me he'd been on his way to his repair shack at 5.30 a.m. when he saw the body. He knew she was dead from the look of her and he didn't go down on to the beach but straight along the Marginal, beyond the boatyard of the Clube Desportivo, to the Direccao de Farois to ask them to phone the Policia Maritima.

I squeezed my chin and found flesh instead of beard. I looked dumbly at my palm as if my hand was in some way responsible. I needed new tics for my new face. I needed a new job for my new life.

Dead girl on the beach, the seagulls screeched.

Perhaps being; exposed was making me more sensitive to the minutiae of everyday life.

The pathologist arrived, a small dark woman called Fernanda Ramalho, who ran marathons when she wasn't examining dead bodies.

'I was right,' she said, her eyes coming back to me after I'd introduced Carlos Pinto, who was writing everything down in his notebook.

'The best kind of pathologists always are, Fernanda.'

'You're handsome. There were those who thought you were hiding a weak chin under there.'

'Is that what people think these days,' I said, running for cover, 'that men grow beards to hide something? When I was a kid everybody had a beard.'

'Why do men grow beards?' she asked, genuinely perplexed.

'The same reason dogs lick their balls,' said Carlos, pen poised. Our heads snapped round. 'Because they can,' he finished.

Fernanda enquired with an eyebrow.

'It's his first day,' I said, which annoyed him again. Twice in less than an hour. This boy had shingles of the mind. Fernanda took a step back as if he might start lapping. Why didn't Narciso tell me the kid wasn't house-trained?

The photographer finished his close-ups and I nodded to Fernanda who was standing by with her bag open wearing a pair of surgical gloves.

'Check your list,' I said to Carlos, who'd disassociated himself from me. 'See if there's a fifteen/sixteen-year-old girl, blonde hair, blue eyes, 1.65 metres, fifty-five kilos… Any distinguishing marks, Fernanda?'

She held up her hand. Muttering into her dictaphone she inspected the abrasion on the girl's forehead. Carlos flicked through the missing-persons sheets, plenty of names in the black hole. More cars flashed by on the Marginal. Fernanda minutely inspected the girl's pubic hair and vagina.

'Start with the ones who've gone in the last twenty-four hours,' I said. Carlos sighed.

Fernanda unrolled a plastic sheet in front of her. She removed a thermometer from the girl's armpit and eased her over on to her front. Some rigor mortis had already started. With a pair of tweezers she picked her way through a mash of hair, blood and sand at the back of the girl's head. She reached for a plastic evidence sachet and fed something into it and marked it up. She sheafed the girl's hair and kissed the dictaphone again. She looked down the length of the girl's body, parted the buttocks with finger and thumb speaking all the time. She clicked off the dictaphone.

'Mole at the back of the neck, in the hairline, central. Coffee-coloured birthmark inside left thigh fifteen centimetres above the knee,' she shouted.

'If it was her parents who reported it, that should be enough,' I said.

'Catarina Sousa Oliveira,' said Carlos, handing me the sheet.

An ambulance arrived. Two paramedics walked to the back. One pulled out a stretcher, the other carried the bodybag. Fernanda stood back from the body and brushed herself off.

I walked down the harbour wall to the sea. It was barely 7.15 a.m. and the sun already had some needle in it. To my left, looking east, was the mouth of the Tagus and the massive pillars of the 25 th April suspension bridge which floated footless in a heavy mist. With the sun higher the sea wasn't so much blue any more as a panel-beaten silver sheet. Small fishing boats, moored off the beach, rocked on the dazzling surface in the morning's breeze. A passenger jet came in low above the river and banked over the cement works and beaches of Caparica south of the Tagus to make its approach into the airport north of the city-tourists arriving for golf and days in the sun. Further west and out to sea, a tugboat pulled a dredger alongside the Bugio lighthouse, Lisbon's scaled-down, antique Alcatraz. At the end of the wall a fisherman reached back with his rod, took two steps and sent his hook out into the ocean with a violent whip of his shoulders and flick of his wrists.

'She was hit hard on the back of the head,' said Fernanda, behind me. 'I can't say what it was yet but something like a wrench, a hammer or a piece of pipe. The blow propelled her forward and her forehead connected with a solid object which I'm ninety percent certain was a tree but I'll do some more picking around back at the Institute. The blow must have knocked her unconscious and would have killed her in time but the guy made sure with his thumbs on her windpipe.'

'The guy?'

'Sorry, my assumption.'

'It didn't happen here, did it?'

'No. Her left clavicle was broken. She was dropped from the harbour wall and I found this in her hair, in the wound.'

The sachet contained a single pine needle. I called a PSP officer over.

'Sexual assault?'

'There's been sexual activity but no evidence of assault or violent entry but I'll be able to tell you more later.'

'Can you give me a time of death?'

'About thirteen to fourteen hours ago.'

'How do you work that out?' asked Carlos.

His aggression got the full reply.

'I checked with the meteorological office before I came out. They told me the temperature didn't get much below 20°C last night. The body would have cooled at around 0.75 to i°C per hour. I recorded her body temperature at 24.6°C and found rigor mortis in the smaller muscles and just beginning in the bigger ones. Therefore my deduction, based on experience, is that you're looking for someone who murdered her between five and six yesterday afternoon but it's not an exact science as Inspector Coelho knows.'

'Anything else?' I asked.

'Nothing under her nails. She was a nervy type. Hardly anything left of them. The nail on the index finger of the right hand was torn, by that I mean bloody… if that's any help.'

Fernanda left followed by the ambulance men who were staggering across the beach and up the steps of the harbour wall, the body zipped up in its bag. I asked the PSP men to search the car park and then take a squad up the Marginal towards Cascais to the nearest pine trees. I wanted clothing. I wanted a heavy metal object or tool.

'Give me your ideas, agente Pinto,' I said.

'Knocked unconscious in some pine woods, stripped, raped, strangled, thrown in a car, driven down the Marginal, ultimately from Cascais direction, which is the only way in to this small car park, and dumped off the harbour wall.'

'OK. But Fernanda said no violent entry.'

'She was unconscious.'

'Unless her murderer had the foresight to bring his own lubricant and condom there would be evidence… abrasions, bruising, that kind of thing.'

'Wouldn't a rapist think of that?'

'He hits the girl from behind, smacks her head against a tree with a blow hard enough to kill her but he strangles her for good measure. My gut tells me that he was intending to kill rather than rape but I may be wrong… let's see what Fernanda says in her lab report.'

'Murdered or raped they took some risks.'

'They? Interesting.'

'I don't know why I said that… fifty-five kilos isn't that much.'

'You're right though… why dump her here? In full view of the Marginal… cars going up and down all night. Not that this part is particularly well lit…'

'Somebody local?' asked Carlos.

'She's not a local girl. The contact addresses for Catarina Oliveira are Lisbon and Cascais. And anyway, what's local? There's quarter of a million people living within a kilometre of where we're standing. But if she did come here and meet a creep, why kill her in the pine trees and dump her on the beach? Why kill her in any pine woods in the Lisbon area and bring her here to this spot?'

'Is it relevant that you live near here?'

'I suppose you don't know why you said that either?'

'Possibly because you were thinking it.'

'And you can read my thoughts… all on your first day?'

'Maybe you're revealing more than you think now your beard's gone.'

'That's a lot to read off any man's cheeks, agente Pinto.'