A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXXII

Tuesday, 16th June 1998, Policia Judiciaria, Saldanha, Lisbon There was a rush on at the office that morning which did not include me. Narciso's secretary was waiting for me in the corridor and led me straight up to see him but, of course, he wasn't ready and the five minutes that his secretary had promised turned into twenty. She wouldn't let me leave.

At 08.30 I was standing in front of Narciso on the other side of his desk. He was standing too, with his chair pushed back to the wall, his hands spread wide apart gripping the edge of his desk as if he was going to tip it over me. Emotions made rare appearances in his face but that morning there was one-anger. Not the eruptive, volcanic type, more the penetrating, gelid variety.

'I haven't seen your revised report yet.'

'I haven't had the opportunity to get behind my desk this morning.'

'I also haven't seen the report on what happened yesterday.'

'For the same reason, Senhor Engenheiro.'

'But I have already heard things,' he said, 'about you and agente Pinto putting yourselves at risk and the destruction of all evidence in a fire.'

'That was unfortunate.'

'What have you learnt from the fire department?'

'I haven't…'

'I've heard a taped interview with the suspect of such glaring incompetence that I can't believe the two of you have got your minds properly on the job.'

'Our minds are very firmly on the job, Senhor Engenheiro.'

'What time did you leave this building yesterday?'

'Something like quarter-past-four, we were working the bus queues on Avenida Duque de Avila, which was where the girl was last seen, getting into…'

'And you didn't come back to the office.'

'I sent agente Pinto…'

'And where did you go?'

'I had nothing further…'

'You were seen going into an apartment building just up the road here in Rua Actor Taborda.'

'The victim's teacher lives there.'

'How long did you spend with her?'

Silence.

'I can't hear you, Inspector.'

'Four hours.'

'Four hours! And what did you have to discuss over four hours?'

'I'm seeing her privately, sir.'

Narciso hardly missed a beat. He'd planned this through to the end.

'Do you have any idea of the pressure I'm under?' he asked.

'I'm sure it's considerable.'

'You asked me to make sure that Inspector Abilio Gomes found out where Dr Aquilino Oliveira was at the time of his wife's death.'

'It was just a thought.'

'He was having dinner in the private residence of the Minister of Internal Administration.'

I shut up. The situation was not calling for my observations on the friendship between the lawyer and the minister. Narciso dropped his head and stared into his desk top.

'I'm taking you off the case,' he said, quietly. 'Abilio Gomes will handle it from now on. I want you to go down to Alcantara and investigate a body that's been found in a rubbish bin at the back of the Wharf One club.'

'But Senhor Engenheiro Narciso, you haven't…'

'You are in no position to defend your professionalism on the Catarina Sousa Oliveira case. "Investigating officer has affair with witness",' he said, stretching his hand out into the possible banner headline in the Correio da Manha. 'Now take agente Pinto and go down to Alcantara.'

I sat in my office chewing various nails. Carlos had left a note with Lourenco Goncalves' telephone number and a business address on Avenida Almirante Reis. I tried the number wondering why Narciso had praised me yesterday morning for looking in the wrong direction, and frozen me out twenty-four hours later just when I was getting somewhere. There was no reply. Carlos came in and sat across the desk. I put the phone down.

'We've got a problem,' he said.

I know.'

'Traffic won't give me the information.'

'We're off the case.'

'Do they know that?' he asked, slumping back in his chair.

'Maybe,' I said, and picked up the phone.

I called one of my friends in Traffic who would do favours for me. He put me on hold. Five minutes later he told me the computer had crashed. I hung up.

'We have an internal problem here,' I said.

Carlos looked suddenly bewildered, cold, like a kid on the beach who'd lost his parents. I gave him a resume of Narciso's conversation.

'What does it mean?'

It means that whereas before we were swimming close to the beach, now the tide has suddenly swept us out over the continental shelf and we've got ten fathoms of dark, cold water underneath us.'

Carlos leaned closer, serious as a headstone.

'What are you talking about?'

I don't know any more.'

It was hot and humid down in the Alcantara docks complex and the body in the rubbish bin was already high enough for people to be holding handkerchiefs to their faces. The photographer had been and gone, and the pathologist, a woman I didn't know, was struggling into a pair of surgical gloves. I took a quick look at the body which was of a male, about eighteen years old, dark-skinned, with black, wavy hair, no fat on him and only wearing a pair of brief burgundy underpants with a smiley face over the genital area. I felt his feet. Soft. The killer had stolen his shoes or somebody else had come along afterwards. The pathologist joined me.

A couple of the staff were finishing cleaning up the nightclub,' she said. 'They emptied the rubbish at five o'clock and by seven when they closed up to leave out the back there, the body was in place. They also told me he's a known male prostitute. Can I move the body?'

I nodded her on. She was fast and thorough. I briefed Carlos on what he had to do and we waited for the pathologist's initial report.

'Right. Cause of death,' she said. 'Severe cerebral haemorrhage caused by savage and multiple blows to the top, back and side of the head. The killer wanted this one unambiguously dead. I'll run an HIV test on the blood, that could be a possible motive. I had a quick look in his rectum and he'd been working. I'll be fuller once I've seen him in my lab.'

I left Carlos with his notebook and dark intelligence and walked to the Alcantara train station. I telephoned my friend in Traffic again while waiting for the train.

'Is your computer still down?'

'Sorry, Ze,' he said.

'Does that mean that it's always going to be down when I call?'

'I can't say.'

I telephoned the lawyer's house and the maid answered. I said I wanted to speak to her. She said she was alone in the house.

I boarded the Cascais train and by 10.00 a.m. I was walking up to the lawyer's house through the old village. I rang the bell. The maid opened the door but Dr Aquilino Oliveira was walking down the corridor behind her.

'Thank you, Mariana,' he said, and ordered her to bring us some coffee. He stood at his desk in his study. I remained standing too.

'I wasn't expecting you, Inspector,' he said. 'I called your office and they told me you were off the case. I was put through to Inspector Abilio Gomes. Not the same calibre as yourself, of course, but no doubt competent. What can I do for you?'

'I came to offer you my condolences. Your wife. It's hard to believe what you've had to go through in the last forty-eight hours.'

He lowered himself slowly into his chair. His eyes didn't leave my face.

'Thank you, Inspector Coelho,' he said. 'I didn't think policemen could afford to care.'

'One of my weaknesses… but possibly a strength, too.'

'Is that what drives you, Inspector?'

'Yes,' I said, 'that… and I still have a belief in the sanctity of the truth.'

'You must be a lonely man, Inspector,' he said, which shook me.

'There's the mystery, too,' I said, papering over my unease. 'Humans need mystery.'

'Speak for yourself.'

'Yes, perhaps lawyers and mystery don't go together.'

'Well, we love to mystify… so I've been told by my clients.'

Mariana brought the coffee in. She poured. We waited. She left.

'Your wife came to see me the night before she died, Senhor Doutor. Were you aware of that?'

His eyes came up from his coffee, blinking but galvanized, searching the inside of my head.

'She'd tried to kill herself before, Inspector. Did you know that?'

'How many times?'

'Check at the local hospital. They've stomach-pumped her there twice before. The first time Mariana found her just in time. That was about five years ago. The second time I did. Last summer.'

'What did you put these attempts down to?'

'I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know how neuroses work on the human brain. I don't understand chemical imbalances, that kind of thing.'

'A neurosis usually results from an original trauma which the victim is trying to suppress.'

'That sounds about right, Inspector. How do you know such things?'

'My late wife was interested in the works of Carl Jung,' I said. 'Were you aware of anything that could have…'

'Did my…? What did my wife say to you that night?'

'She said your marriage hadn't worked from the beginning. I thought fifteen years was a long time for a relationship not to be working. She seemed to be scared of you and dependent on you. Your small exercise in humiliation at the beginning of the investigation confirmed that.'

'And you don't think I was humiliated by her having an affair with a boy ten years her junior, Inspector?' he said, fast and fierce, almost hissing it.

'When did you find out about the lover?'

'I don't remember.'

'Last summer possibly?'

'Yes, yes… it was last summer.'

'How?'

'I found a receipt for a shirt from a shop I don't use.'

'Did you confront her with it?'

'I watched and waited. The shirt could have been for her brother, after all. I knew it wasn't, but my profession demands that I am certain.'

'So how did you confront her with it?'

The question knocked him back. He tried to cover his reaction by an elaborate alteration of position. It snapped him out of the cosiness of our dialogue. His finger had brushed the truth and found it razor-sharp. His surface temperature dropped quickly to sub-zero.

'None of this is relevant to the investigation of my daughter's death, Inspector. More especially now that you are no longer working on the case.'

'I thought we were just talking.'

He leaned forward and sipped his coffee. He removed a small cigar from a box on his desk. He offered me one. I declined and lit a cigarette of my own. He smoked and uncreased himself. My question burned inside me.

'You were telling me what my wife said to you that night,' he said.

'She said things, very important things, without explaining them and I was very tired after a long day. She said your marriage had never worked but not why. She said you were a powerful man and that you extended that power into your intimate relationships but she didn't say how. She made a very serious allegation but offered no evidence to back it up. It was not…'

'…a conversation with somebody of sound mind,' he finished.

'There were traces of the truth, I thought.'

'What was the serious allegation?'

'She said you were abusing Catarina sexually.'

'Do you believe that?'

'She offered no evidence…'

'But do you believe it?'

'I'm a homicide detective, Senhor Doutor. People lie to me, not just occasionally, they lie to me all the time. I listen. I cross-reference. I probe further. I examine evidence. I find witnesses. And if I'm lucky I can put together enough facts to make a case. But one thing I can assure you of, Senhor Doutor, if somebody tells me something, I don't automatically believe them. If I did, we could empty our prisons of all those innocents and refurbish them into pousadas.'

'What did you say to her?'

My insides winced at that. A nagging memory. A prickling responsibility.

'I told her to proceed with extreme caution… to get a lawyer and some evidence would help.'

He sucked on his cigar, the lawyer observing the weak point.

'Sound advice,' he said. 'Did you tell her you were not the right person to be speaking to, that if…'

'I did.'

'So why do you think she came to you, Inspector?'

I didn't answer.

'Do you think she was trying to influence you perhaps… your attitude to me, for instance?'

Still I didn't answer and the lawyer came across the desk at me.

'Perhaps she offered as evidence our daughter's promiscuity, her complete disdain for any sexual morality brought about by what…? A confusion. The man, in whose unconditional love she completely trusted, took advantage of her innocence… Yes. I imagine that would do it. That would qualify as a trauma and the promiscuity as a neurosis. Am I right? Was that my wife's thinking?'

The pressure of the man's intelligence, its rapacity, had the boiling intensity of a piranha shoal stripping a body down to its skeleton. Why did you marry her? I thought. Why did she marry you? Why did you stay with each other?

'I'm right,' he said, slumping back. 'I know I'm right.'

He crushed out his cigar with venom, until he felt himself observed. I stood, annoyed and confused, my initiative gone. I opened the door to l eave, my question still unanswered, the weight not with me to ask it yet.

'There are two forms of child abuse, Senhor Doutor,' I said. 'The one you read about is sexual abuse. It's more shocking. But the other type can be just as brutal.'

'What's that?'

'Withholding love.'

I went into the corridor, closed the door and then reopened it.

'I forgot to ask, Senhor Doutor. Do you have another car apart from the Morgan? I imagine that's your fun car and you have something more formal as well.'

'A Mercedes.'

'Was that the car your wife was driving on Sunday night?'

'Yes it was.'

I sat in the public gardens outside the lawyer's house and waited for Mariana, the maid, to come out, which she did at lunchtime. I followed her. She was a small, thick-set woman not much more than a metre and a half tall. She had dark shiny hair curled tight around her head. She was the type of person you take one look at and trust completely, the kind of woman, perhaps, that Dr Oliveira didn't deserve to have working for him. I caught up with her on a steep cobbled street, startling her.

'Can we talk for a few minutes?' I asked.

She didn't want to.

'Let's walk,' I said, and stepped into the road to let her have the narrow shaded pavement. 'You're upset.'

She nodded.

'Dona Oliveira was a good person?'

'She was,' she said. 'An unhappy woman, but a good person.'

'Will you carry on working for Dr Oliveira?'

She didn't answer. Her low heels clattered on the cobbles.

'Was Catarina a good person, Mariana?'

'I've worked for Dr Oliveira for nine years. That's how long I've known Catarina, every weekend and every summer for nine years, Inspector… and no, she was not a good person, but it wasn't her fault.'

'Even when she was six years old?'

'I have an understanding of unhappiness, Inspector. That of the rich, is not much different to that of the poor. My husband is a drinker. It changes him and he makes my children unhappy. But at least when he is sober he still loves his children.'

'And Dr Oliveira doesn't?'

She didn't answer. She couldn't bring herself to say such a thing.

'Dona Oliveira tried to give that child all the love she had, but Catarina didn't want it. She hated her mother and, you know, the strangest thing… she'd do anything for her father.'

'Dona Oliveira came to see me the night before she died.'

Mariana crossed herself rapidly.

'She told me that Dr Oliveira had been abusing Catarina sexually.'

Mariana slipped on the cobbles. I grabbed her. She backed into a wall and stood there appalled.

'Dona Oliveira said that you would corroborate this accusation,' I said. 'Is that true, Mariana?'

She swallowed hard and shook her head. The street was hot, bright and empty. The sky was a deep blue against the sunblasted whitewashed walls. The smell of lunch was on the sea breeze. Mariana was looking at me as if I was a man with a knife. She brushed a graze of whitewash off her shoulder.

'I wouldn't have been able to stay in that house,' she said.

I wanted to leave it at that, but I couldn't resist asking the question that I hadn't been able to ask either of the Oliveiras.

'Whose daughter is she, Mariana?'

'Who?' she asked, bewildered now.

'Catarina.'

'I don't understand.'

I stopped it there. A car rumbled up the street, tyres battering the cobbles. I fell in behind Mariana and followed her down to the main street and the cool of the trees. At the door to the supermarket I said goodbye, but with one last easy question. Mariana was relieved to tell me Teresa Oliveira's friend was an Englishwoman called Lucy Marques and gave me an address in'sao Joao do Estoril.

I caught the train back down the Linha to'sao Joao and walked away from the sea and station for a nearly a kilometer until I found myself in front of a traditionally-styled, but recently-built house with gates, a circular drive and wide steps leading up to a portico. It said money to me, but not enough for the real thing. I introduced myself to an intercom and video camera at the gate which opened electronically. There was a large white satellite dish on the roof of the house.

A heavy-set Cape Verdian maid took me across tiled white marble floors towards a living room from which came the sounds of an English soap opera. Lucy Marques was sitting with her feet up on the sofa cradling a remote and a large tumbler of what proved to be a gin and tonic with plenty of backbone. There was a stack of Hello! magazines on the floor beside her. She clicked off the television.

'I'm not speaking any more bloody Portuguese,' she said, fanning me away, 'so if you don't speak gin and tonic you can get lost right now.'

'My gin and tonic's pretty good,' I said.

'Is it? Pass me a nail then.'

'A what?'

'Fallen at the first, Inspector. A coffin nail. A cancer stick. A bloody fag, for God's sake… in the box there on the table.'

She took two cigarettes from the box and put one behind her ear. I lit the one in her mouth.

'Help yourself,' she said. 'Have a drink. Do the necessary. You look a bit sharper than Gumbo Gomes. What a depressing character he was.'

'Abilio…'

'Able was I ere I saw Abilio,' she said and cackled at her own madness.

I put Lucy Marques in her mid-fifties from the back of her hands but her face and body age seemed to have been arrested at around thirty-eight, an achievement given her regime. She wore white jeans and a T-shirt with some nautical applique.

'Can we talk about Teresa Oliveira?'

'Only if you join me with a drink. Gin and tonic. That was the agreed language.'

I poured myself a weak one and lit a cigarette.

'Teresa, Teresa, Teresa,' she sighed, and gulped her drink. 'What a mess.'

'I was investigating her daughter's death.'

'You were?'

'I was taken off it. Internal politics. Gumbo Gomes is working it now.'

'Gumbo Gomes. He's just the kind of Portuguese I detest. So serious. So gra-a-a-ave. You couldn't brighten him up if you offered him a Molotov cocktail and a light.'

'Mrs Marques. I'm sorry, can we…'

'Of course, gin makes me gabble. Teresa. No. Catarina. Yes, well, I'm not surprised she came to a sticky end. She was what we call a little minx that one. Do you know what a minx is, Inspector?'

'I can guess.'

'A flirty, dirty little schemer,' she said, and wriggled herself into the sofa preparing to deliver the dirt. 'You know Teresa had a lover last year.'

'Paulo Branco.'

'Right.'

'And she caught Catarina in bed with him.'

'It was a little more graphic than finding them under the covers, Inspector Coelho. Pumping buttocks. Ankles round the ears. The works, I can tell you. Teresa felt faint for weeks after whenever she thought about it.'

'I understood that Catarina called her to the house so that she would catch them at it.'

'You are well-informed. You must like to gossip, Inspector.'

'I was married to an Englishwoman.'

'Naughty, naughty now.'

'You had a crack at the Portuguese.'

'One all,' she said licking a finger and scoring the air.

'The lover, Mrs Marques?'

'Ah, yes. Teresa was convinced that he put her up to it.'

'Who?'

'Aquilino put Catarina up to it. Finding out about the lover and then taking him to bed.'

'My God,' I said, 'how did she get to think that?'

'Well, I said to her: "You're paranoid, dear." But she told me she'd cornered Catarina one day and confronted her with it, and Catarina's reply? "You shouldn't be having sex with other men." Nice family, eh?'

'Why didn't Teresa leave him?'

'You Portuguese and your marriage contracts,' said Lucy Marques, shaking her head. 'Aquilino and Teresa's agreement was… how do you call that arrangement when everything from both sides is thrown in the pot?'

'Communhao total de bens'

'That's it. Teresa came to him with hardly an escudo to her name. She worked for him, remember. It was all Aquilino's. He wasn't going to divorce her and let her have half his cake, which was what she'd have had to take…'

'But…'

'Exactly. He was crazy about her. He left his first wife for her and she was loaded… money and name.'

'So what happened?'

'Something right at the beginning and I don't know what. Teresa never talked about it. And believe me, I tried,' she said, tapping her Hello! magazines. 'This lot would have paid money for that, I can tell you.'

Suddenly I wasn't sure how much I liked Lucy Marques.

'Teresa came here on Saturday night.'

'She slept here, Inspector.'

'She came to see me first. She told me that Aquilino had abused Catarina sexually.'

'She was always telling me he was impotent, and I don't know how she knew that because she also told me that they didn't have sex again after Catarina was born. So, make of that what you will, Inspector.'

'What did she do on Sunday?'

'She must have taken a rhino-sized sleeping pill because she didn't get up 'til midday. I was worried about her, and checked on her breathing several times in the morning. She left here at one o'clock, saying she was going out to lunch and I didn't see her again.'

'She had a Mercedes, what colour was that?'

'Black.'

'Model, series number?'

'Haven't a clue.'

'Registration number?'

'I might look like a sad old lush to you, Inspector Coelho, but I've got better things to do with my time than remember my friends' registration numbers. Anyway, Gumbo Gomes has the car… ask him.'

I took the train back to Lisbon wondering if it had come to that. The mother killing her own daughter. I couldn't see it. I couldn't feel it. I stared out to sea, mesmerized by the waves breaking over the hump of a sand bank in the middle of the estuary and thought about the Oliveiras, their hopes foundered, the family broken up and dead… because of what? Because it had all gone wrong from the beginning.

I didn't get off at Alcantara. I could see from the train that the scene at the back of the Wharf One was now empty. It was lunchtime by the time I got to Cais do Sodre. I started to cross the tram rails on Avenida 24 de Julho to get to a restaurant near the market. One of the new trams, a humming electronic slug of effervescing 7Up, approached. The crowd of people around me waiting to cross seemed to contract and pop open. Somebody thumped me in the back. I fell off the pavement, my ankle went, my knee connected with the tarmac. My fingers slid into the silver strips of track scintillating to the approach of the tram. Life slowed. Sound crunched. Faces slipped across my retina. A dark, curly-haired girl, wire-hanger thin, reached out a hand, not to help but to point. A thick-set man, with vast belly and wrestler's forearms stepped forward and reared back. The woman's face next to his had pencilled-in eyebrows which disappeared into the creases of her forehead, her mouth opened and a strange and distant ululation came out. The strip of film in my head jumped out of its sprockets. Light and dark colour ripped through the gate. My muscles unfroze. I rolled. Metal squealed. Hydraulics hissed. My fingers slipped out of the silver rail. A steel wheel screeched through.

I was looking up at the sky, through the criss-cross cables overhead, and everything beyond seemed suddenly simple after life's complexities. Faces canopied over me. Someone held my hand, which was cold, and rubbed it warm. I must have been smiling like an idiot because everybody was smiling back. Today had not been the day. I sat up. People helped me to my feet. A woman brushed me down. Someone told me I'd been lucky. I said I knew it and laughed and they all laughed with me, as if they'd escaped it too. I found myself swept into a restaurant with three or four people and they sat down with me at a long table and told all the other lunch people that I'd nearly been the slice of lemon under the 7Up tram.

After lunch, still dazed, I decided that underground travel was safer. I stood well back from the tracks in the Cais do Sodre Metro. The train travelled as far as Anjos and I climbed the stairs on to Avenida Almirante Reis. It was there that I discovered that the day had edged up to 35°. It was there that I felt strange and cold inside. It was there that I threw up my lunch and that I realized that I wasn't as safe as I had been before.