A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXX

Monday, 15th June 1998, Avenida Duque de Avila, Saldanha, Lisbon By 7.00 a.m. I was washed, inexpertly shaved, suited and standing outside the Liceu D. Dinis on the corner of Duque de Avila and Republica, enjoying the early cool of the day. I'd woken up at 5.00 a.m. wanting it to be my summer holiday, with nothing to think about other than book choice, beach position and lunch. The photos in my pocket of Catarina Oliveira jolted me back on to the rails. I was going to work on the streets around the school to see if there was anything in Jamie Gallacher's car pick-up story.

I had a bica in the Pastelaria Sequeira on the corner opposite the art nouveau school building and asked myself if I felt lucky. I had to after a weekend like that and immediately I drew a blank from the staff of the pastelaria. I went up to the cafe Bella Italia whose barman had seen Catarina come in for a coffee after the session in the Pensao Nuno. It wasn't the same barman as on Saturday, but he pointed me to an old woman who sat in the window.

'It's her first shift,' he said. 'Morning, lunchtime, end of the afternoon. Nothing happens on that stretch of pavement that she doesn't know about.'

I spoke to her. The skin of her face was like crepe paper. She wore white gloves with a single button at the wrist, a heavily pleated blue dress and hefty white, leather low-heeled shoes. She nodded at the photo of the girl. She'd seen her with a man that fitted Jamie Gallacher's description.

'They were not happy,' she said, and returned the photo.

Fifty metres down the street from the Bella Italia was the traffic light where Avenida 5° de Outubro crossed Duque de Avila. This was the point where Jamie Gallacher said Catarina got into the car. The crossroads was surrounded by apartment and office buildings. This was a place of work. At that time of the afternoon there must have been plenty of people on the street heading for their weekend. I went to the bus stop opposite the Bella Italia. As the time approached 8.00 a.m. more people arrived. If Gallacher had hit the girl there must have been someone on this side of the street who'd been at the bus stop and seen it.

Marshalling Portuguese people is not an easy thing to do, even when they're from the same family and heading for lunch, but when they're getting off a bus on the way to work they become a thunderous herd. But I was lucky that day, and so was Jamie Gallacher. I found a twenty-five-year-old marketing executive who worked for an international computer company on 5° de Outubro. She'd seen the man hit the girl and walk away down Duque de Avila. She saw three cars pull up at the traffic light. The first was small and silver, the second one was large and dark, the third white. The driver of the second car, dimly visible behind tinted glass, had leaned across the seat and shouted out of the window. The girl had come off the pavement. They'd talked briefly. The lights had changed, the silver car took off and the girl got into the passenger seat. The car had crossed Avenida 5° de Outubro and headed in the direction of the Gulbenkian Museum and the Museum of Modern Art complex.

'Did you see what make of car it was?'

'I was looking at the girl most of the time,' she said. 'I'd seen him slap her face and if he'd gone after her I'd have done something, but he didn't, he fell back on a car and its alarm went off.'

'The car the girl got into, did it look expensive?'

'It was new. The windows were tinted… that's all I can tell you. You can talk to my work colleague who was with me. He's a guy, he'll know about the car.'

The woman's work colleague remembered the car. Without a doubt, he said, it was a black Mercedes.

'If I send you some Mercedes brochures do you think you could give me a series type and a model number?'

He shrugged his eyebrows.

I took down their telephone numbers and walked back to the Policia Judiciaria building. I took a slight detour so that I could walk the length of Rua Actor Taborda and look up at Luisa's attic window. I knew she wasn't there but I wanted to enjoy feeling young and foolish. I succeeded on one count only.

I went to the personnel department in the PJ building to follow up Jorge's lead on the private detective who'd been sniffing around after Catarina in the Pensao Nuno. I asked one of the older guys if he knew of any retired policemen who were currently engaged in private work. He gave me a list of six names.

'Do you know any of these guys to look at?'

'Most of them. If I haven't seen them in the flesh I've seen their photographs.'

'Short, stocky, grey hair, no facial hair, brown eyes… wears a black, brimmed hat which he never takes off.'

'Lourenco Goncalves. He was bald and had a red birthmark on the back of his head which was why he never took the hat off.'

'Have you got a number for him?'

He told me to try the phone book and gave me the full name.

I went up to my office. Carlos had the search warrant for Valentim's garage unit. I sent him out to get the Mercedes brochures and take them round to the computer company. I had Jamie Gallacher brought up from the tacos. I called Lourenco Goncalves' apartment in Benfica. There was no reply.

I pumped Gallacher for more information on the car. He was in poor shape, but relieved and keen to help. When I saw invention begin to play behind his eyes I sent him back to the cells.

I sat down and, in an hour and a half, wrote a six-page report on the investigation. Carlos came back towards the end of that time and said that the car had been identified as a C series. I rounded off the report, collected the statements together and sent them up to Narciso. I tried Goncalves again. Still no reply. He must have a place of business. I dropped it for the moment.

By 11.30 a.m. I was sitting in front of Narciso, watching him smoke his SG Gigantes and finger my report as if it might be worth something. He went to the window. He was a small man in his mid-forties who took such care over his appearance that you'd have thought he was due on television at any moment. Even in high humidity he could always get his shirts to puff out at the back and the creases down his arms were never anything less than blade-sharp. He looked more powerful and cooler than any policeman in the building.

'How's it going with agente Pinto?' he asked, something I'd forgotten about already.

'There's nothing wrong with agente Pinto, he'll make a good detective.'

'Answer the question will you, Inspector.'

'Nobody likes him, I know.'

And you do?'

'I have no problem with him.'

'I heard there was a fight across the street on Saturday night. Your hand, you cut your hand.'

'And that fight wasn't his first?'

'I'm surprised to hear you like him, that's all.'

'He has a difficult personality but it doesn't bother me.'

Narciso turned his smooth handsome face on me. It had darkened a few shades over the sunny weekend but it hadn't warmed him up-he was still and chill as always.

'The one concern I have about your report is this spurious allegation from Senhora Oliveira about child abuse.'

'I presume she didn't make a formal complaint.'

'No, she didn't,' he said. 'She died yesterday.'

Silence. The air conditioning reached my bone marrow.

'You make that sound like natural causes.'

He shook his head.

'Overdose,' he said. 'She was found in her car parked on a street in'Sao Joao do Estoril, about three hundred metres from a friend's house where she'd spent the night.'

'A considerate woman,' I said, more guilt humped up on to my shoulders.

'We're looking into it now.'

'Who is?'

'Inspector Abilio Gomes.'

'Ask him to make sure that Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira can account for every minute of his Saturday night.'

'Which brings us back to your report.'

'The allegation, you mean.'

'An allegation made to the wrong person on an informal basis with no supporting evidence by an unstable woman with a history of barbiturate dependency.'

'Has the maid said anything?'

'Not that I know of.'

'You don't think it warrants inclusion in the report?'

'That was a good day's work, Inspector. Let's see what Valentim Almeida's garage unit produces. I want to see your report on that and the interview with him afterwards.'

I grabbed Carlos, signed out a car from the pool and headed north to Odivelas. We sat in a traffic jam on Campo Grande for half an hour. I told him about Teresa Oliveira which silenced us for several minutes. Horns blared, indifferently. Techno music thumped loudly from behind tinted windows adjacent.

'You're right about Olivia,' he said, seeing as we were following a van with that name on the back.

'Are we talking about my daughter now?'

'She's different.'

'Half-Portuguese, three-quarters English,' I said. 'What did she talk to you about?'

'She told me about a kid at her school who has his own Range Rover.'

'That doesn't sound like her to be impressed.'

'She wasn't. That's what I meant. She's different. She asked me what I thought a seventeen-year-old kid with a Range Rover could aspire to.'

'A test question-what did you say?'

'I said it could leave him free to aspire to greater things than more material wealth.'

'Did she buy that?'

'No,' he said. 'She thought he'd already been corrupted. It was good. I found I was arguing against myself for once.'

'She likes that,' I said, looking across at his face staring resolutely out of the windscreen. 'Ideas. Arguing. Intellectual aggression… it's something she rarely sees in girls her own age. What would you call her…?'

I got his attention.

'A chicken with giblets?' I asked.

The traffic jam unlocked. The vertebrae of metal snake stretched. The techno music behind the tinted glass took off. Other things were playing on Carlos' mind.

'You were in there a long time,' he said.

'What are we talking about now?'

'With Narciso,' he said. 'Was that all you talked about… Senhora Oliveira's suicide?'

And her allegation against her husband.'

'Anything else about the investigation in general?' he hedged.

'He asked how we were getting on, too.'

Carlos' hand tightened around the ceiling grip.

'I suppose he knew about the fight,' he said.

'Not your first by all accounts.'

'I had one with Fernandes in Vice.'

'I don't know Fernandes,' I said. 'What happened?'

'Fernandes is a pig,' he said, jutting his face at the windscreen. 'He had something going with some pimps and their girls. He wanted to initiate me into his little score. I refused. He asked me if little boys was more my thing and I hit him.'

'You've got to try and lengthen that fuse of yours, you know.'

'I overdid it, too. I punched him in the gut and he didn't get off the floor for fifteen minutes. I was transferred away from him the next day.'

'I'm glad we didn't get that far.'

'I'd never have hit you. You had every right to be angry. When I told my father what I'd said to you, he damn nearly beat me up himself.'

'He sounds a good man.'

'He's a hard, proud Alentejano who still eats pig's tail and ears at Christmas.'

'Boiled or what?'

'No, no, grilled.'

'He must be a hard man.'

It was lunchtime when we arrived at the garage units and most of the others were closed. Only a tyre shop was doing any business. We let ourselves in through the small door and walked into a black partition wall and the smell of death.

The lights didn't work. We took out pen torches. Carlos squeezed past a wooden staircase and went through a black curtain underneath. I went up the stairs. Carlos gagged at the smell getting stronger. I came out on to a platform in the roof gable. I still couldn't find the fuse box for the unit. There was an expensive piece of computer equipment, a video camera and a television. Along the wall were seven polystyrene heads with wigs. All the eyes had been burnt out with cigarette ends.

'Porra!' said Carlos. Fucking hell.

'What?'

'This stink. I've found it. There's some dead chicks down here.'

'Chicks?'

'That's what I said… and a snake. A very unhappy snake.'

'I don't like snakes. Is it in a cage?'

'Do you think I'd be talking like this if it wasn't?'

'I'm coming down.'

I joined him in a three-walled stage set. At the back of the set there were seven pairs of stilettos, three rubber dresses, a bed, a chest, a moped, a spare can of petrol and a tool board.

'Have you seen what's missing from the tool board?' asked Carlos.

From the outline, a short-handled heavy lump hammer was missing.

'Let's find the electrics.'

'There's a box over there by the moped, near the floor.'

'Turn it on and let's take a look at Valentim's oeuvre.'

Carlos stepped over the chest and opened up the box. He flicked the main switch and dropped four others. There was a loud crack and four powerful halogen lights came on overhead.

'Shit!' yelled Carlos. 'This is… Out! Get out!'

The studio lights suddenly went out, sucking us back into a more intense darkness, except the darkness wasn't total. Around the electrics box were yellow flames. Carlos crashed over the moped. I ran at the black partition and dropped my shoulder into it. It collapsed and I tore it away from the wall. Carlos was at my back when I heard the low thump of the spare can of petrol catching alight and I ripped the door open. We fell out into the parking area followed by smoke and flames. I got into the car and reversed it away from the unit. Carlos called the fire brigade. I sat on the car bonnet in the shade of the units opposite and watched 7D burn. Carlos was wild, sweating, still scared and pacing up and down in front of the car.

'He booby-trapped it.'

'Are you sure?'

'No, I'm not sure. I didn't have enough time to check the fucking wiring diagram…'

'Calma pa, calma.'

'You saw what happened.'

'I'm asking you.'

'I threw the switches. The thing started fizzing. Sparks everywhere. There seemed to be petrol, the smell of petrol.'

'From the moped or a booby-trap?'

'Why don't we go and ask him.'

At 3.00 p.m. we were sitting in an interview room with Valentim playing the air guitar, his eyes closed in simulated ecstasy. I introduced the cast to the tape recorder and asked Valentim to give his full name and address. He complied without stopping his guitar practice.

Do you like film?' I asked.

'Movies?'

'Making them with film… or do you prefer video?'

'I like film.'

'I didn't see any in your studio… just video. I suppose it's cheap, but it gives an ugly effect. You have to light everything or you lose it, that's the problem. Film's more subtle. Even 16 millimetre.'

'But it's expensive.'

'There are other problems too, aren't there?'

Valentim stopped playing his guitar. He tapped a single finger on the table, keeping time in his head. Waiting.

'What other problems?'

'You have to develop the film. Edit it. Make a master print. Telecine that on to a videotape and then make your copies.'

'Like I said, it's expensive,' he nodded.

'And not private, either.'

'That's true.'

'But if you go the video way, there's a heavy initial investment. You have to come up with what? Thirty million escudos?'

'You don't know anything about computer equipment, do you, Inspector?'

'Tell me.'

'That edit suite was a million escudos,' he said. 'Cheap, isn't it?'

'You'd be a long time working in McDonald's to put that sort of money together.'

'If you thought that was the best way of raising it.'

'How did you?'

'Like normal people. I went to the bank.'

'And they don't mind lending to a student.'

'I'm not a policeman, Inspector Coelho. It's not a compulsion of mine to be totally honest about who I am and what I do. Banks want to lend money. They've got a lot of it. Interest rates are going to come down when we join the Euro. I'll make the repayments. What do they care?'

'How many movies did you make of Catarina?' asked Carlos.

Silence.

'Don't make us go through your whole collection.'

'You wouldn't enjoy it.'

'How do you know?'

'You don't seem to have a very artistic temperament.'

'Just tell us how many films.'

'Three. They were silent movies. Not pornography. Sorry, agente Pinto, to disappoint you.'

'We're talking art, are we… with baby chicks, a snake, rubber dresses?'

'Take a look. I'd be interested in your opinion.'

'What were the three films of?'

'Her face… looking into camera.'

That sounds interesting.'

'She had a very special look.'

'Which was?'

'That's why it was special,' said Valentim, staring at me.

'What did this look say to you?'

'This seems to have gone from interrogation to therapy now.'

Carlos snapped.

'I'm going to bust you, you piece of shit,' he said, quietly. 'I'm going to bust you for murder.'

'Then you've got a job on your hands, agente Pinto, because I did not kill her.'

'Where's the hammer?'

'The hammer?'

'From your tool board. It was missing.'

'It should be in there somewhere. Take another look.'

Silence, while Valentim played a drum solo on the table.

'Where were you on Friday afternoon?' asked Carlos, desperation creeping in.

'I told you.'

'Tell us again.'

'I went to the Biblioteca Nacional. I stayed there until closing time which is seven-thirty. Go and ask the librarian. We had an argument. She wouldn't let me use the computer after seven o'clock.'

'Do you know anybody with a C series black Mercedes?'

Valentim laughed and frowned.

'I didn't borrow that much money from the bank.'

'How do you make your repayments?'

'I work. I sell my videos. I make money.'

'Pornography?'

'Like I said… you don't have a very artistic temperament. Perhaps it's something to do with your work. It must be quite boring…'

Carlos' fist was already closed.

'I should stop the tape recorder if I were you, Inspector Coelho. Agente Pinto wants to resort to more conventional police methods.'

I terminated the interview at a few minutes before 16.00. Carlos and I walked to Duque de Avila.

'He's involved,' said Carlos, still furious. 'I know he's involved. We should have asked him if he booby-trapped the switchbox… just to see his face.'

'I think he'd humiliated us enough by then. We'll let the fire department give us that bit of information.'

By 4.25 p.m. we were working the bus queues on either side of Duque de Avila showing photographs of Catarina. It was an advertisement for not committing crime because there's always somebody out there who's seen you. Four people saw Catarina get into the black Mercedes. One guy remembered it like it was one of the best scenes from his favourite movie. The car in front was a metallic grey Fiat Punto. The black Mercedes was a C200 series, petrol engine with the letters NT in the registration. The car behind it was an old white Renault 12 with a rusted rear wheel-arch. And the car that Jamie Gallacher fell against was… I told him that he'd given us more than we needed and took his name. I sent Carlos back to the Policia Judiciaria and told him to give the information to Traffic. I also gave him Lourenco Goncalves' name and told him to find a business address and phone number. And I did what I'd wanted to do all day-I went to my favourite apartment in Rua Actor Taborda.