A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XLII

Tuesday, 24th November 1998, Poticia Judiciaria building, Rua Gomes Freire, Lisbon I sat at my desk and booted up the computer. I accessed the missing-persons file and put in a search for Lourenco Goncalves to see if he'd reappeared or been found. There was no record of a missing-persons report being logged. I looked out of the window at the brilliant sunshine and shivered.

I found Carlos and took him for a walk down to Avenida Almirante Reis. It was cold, very dry, and the wind was a lacerating northerly. There'd been no rain this year. The last three years it had rained the whole of November until I felt as depressed as an Englishman. This year it had been eerie. No rain. Day after day of brilliant sunshine, cloudless skies. And rather than joy, it brought with it the chilling notion that the planet had been irrevocably damaged.

The small, narrow bar between the Anjos and Arroios Metro stations where I'd first met JoJo Silva was packed with mid-morning coffee-drinkers. We went straight to the back of the cafe. JoJo Silva was sitting at a table staring into an empty coffee cup as if the grounds were going to tell him this week's lottery numbers. I blocked out his light. He looked up.

'Do they let you take your own calls yet, Inspector?' he asked.

'I stopped being a demi-god as from yesterday.'

'Welcome back to mortality.'

'What's going on, JoJo?'

'Nothing… as usual.'

'You didn't file a missing-persons report on your friend.'

'Lourenco Goncalves?' he said. 'I did, Inspector. Oh yes, I did that. It was the least I could do for him. Why do you think I've been calling you and been told you're not available for the last three months? I even tried you yesterday.'

'Yesterday?' I said, knowing his name hadn't appeared on the message list.

'You want to know why I called you yesterday… of all the days?' he asked. 'The rent is up on Lourenco's office. He's not in a position to renew the lease, so the landlord is going to clear the place and rent it out to someone who exists. And once that's happened, Inspector… he really is lost. Wiped clean.'

The three of us crossed Avenida Almirante Reis to a 1960s featureless office building. Carlos and I went up to the second floor, while JoJo found the landlord and the key. It took him some time.

'Are you doing anything tonight?' I asked, leaning up against the wall outside the unnamed office, looking for something to take my mind off the monster that was forming in my head.

'Just taking Olivia to the movies.'

'To see what?'

' City of Angels'

' Again?

'She likes it,' he shrugged.

'It's a romantic movie.'

'It's not the romance she's interested in,' he said. 'She likes the idea that there's something bigger than all of us out there, acting in an unpredictable way. Not always good, not always bad. She says it makes her feel secure.'

'Maybe you have to be young to have that kind of faith in things.'

'Bad night, last night, was it?'

'I just have the feeling that there's something big on the other side of that door.'

'Why?'

'Lourenco Goncalves… that name… whenever I've thought about it I've felt a need to do something but I've never cracked it. And now… somebody's thought it's important enough to delete the name from the missing-persons file. That never happens, not even if he's found.'

The landlord opened the door and left us to it. JoJo sat in his missing friend's chair. The office wasn't crowded out with furniture. There was a desk, another chair and a filing cabinet. There were four files in the filing cabinet and three empty drawers. The files were old. All dating to work the previous year. Carlos began taking the desk to pieces. JoJo didn't move.

'Was he working when you last saw him?' I asked.

'He always said he was working,' said JoJo. 'He just grumbled about not getting paid.'

'None of this work is current.'

'The desk is empty,' said Carlos.

I moved the filing cabinet away from the wall. There was nothing behind it. I tipped it on its back. Carlos went to the door. I fiddled with the surround of the cabinet.

'Something big on the other side of the door,' said Carlos, tapping it.

There was a large poster covering most of the door. It was a movie poster of a massive Kodiak bear in mortal combat with a man.

'He was obsessed with that movie,' said JoJo. 'It gave him his catchphrase.'

'What was the line?' asked Carlos.

'I'm going to kill the bear.'

We laughed.

'He had a sense of humour, Lourenco,' said JoJo.

'Tap that door again, Carlos,' I said.

It was hollow-sounding at the edges and solid in the middle. It was one of those cheap doors made by slapping two pieces of veneer on to a frame, and those sort of doors normally sound hollow from top to bottom.

'Take the poster off.'

Behind the poster was a panel. Carlos unscrewed it with a penknife. Set into the door was a thick file bound up with rubber bands.

'You know what that looks like,' said JoJo. 'Insurance.'

'You'd better leave now,' I said to him. He didn't want to. 'I'm telling you for your own safety.'

'If that's the bear you've found,' he said, making for the door, 'kill it.'

On the front of the file Goncalves had written Oliveira/ Rodrigues. It was the only work in hand, and we saw why when we opened up the files. It appeared that Dr Aquilino Oliveira was the client and Miguel da Costa Rodrigues the job. In the file there were three thick dossiers containing every movement Miguel Rodrigues had ever made between August 30th of last year and June 9th of this year. Nine months' solid surveillance. In the last five months he'd only missed three Friday lunchtimes in the Pensao Nuno.

'What have you got there?' I asked.

'Photographs. Shots of girls in the street, dates on the back. Presumably girls that Rodrigues had bought. Look at them.'

'They're all blondes.'

'An obsession.'

'And that last one?'

'Catarina Oliveira.'

I shivered badly, shuddered the length of my body, as if I'd just had a trickle of liquid slime down my spine. Carlos raised his eyebrows at me.

'I was just wondering,' I said, 'what sort of a person Dr Oliveira is, to use his own daughter as bait in a murder set-up.'

'Not his own daughter.'

I planted the heels of my hands into my eye sockets and didn't move or speak for five long minutes. When I took my hands away the room was strangely dimmed, as if autumn had moved quickly into winter.

'Do I get to know?' asked Carlos, sitting across from me, looking young and unconcerned.

I had been thinking that I could stop this now, that I could shred the files and walk away. We could accept the original and believed version of events and move on. But I couldn't, I had to satisfy myself, I had to be sure that Luisa Madrugada had not been involved. And if I didn't do that… I could see myself lying in bed watching her sleep, one: of those guys like a million others, wondering why I couldn't make that ultimate commitment, but knowing too.

'What are we going to do?' asked Carlos, sensing the decision crisis.

'Did you keep all your handwritten notes on Catarina's case?'

'They're somewhere, but it's all in the reports.'

'You might think it's all there, but you and I know it's not. Not absolutely everything and that's what I have to have now. I want every single thing on Catarina's case and I'm going to read it all from beginning to end ten times over. And tomorrow we're going to Caxias Prison to see Miguel da Costa Rodrigues.

'What's he going to tell us?'

'Amongst other things, why he would think that somebody would spend nine months on his tail.'

I left the office early with the file and Carlos' notebooks and took them back home. I read everything through several times until it was late and dark and I was hungry. I had a quick steak in A Bandeira Vermelha and drank two coffees. I went back home and moved pieces of paper around again. Olivia came in about 11.00 p.m. and went straight to bed. I opened another packet of cigarettes.

By midnight I had the beginnings of three ideas. The first was to do with dates and times, but I didn't have all the information. The second was much more interesting, but I needed a photograph that wasn't in Catarina's case files. The third needed the help of Senhora Lurdes Rodrigues and another photograph I didn't have. I went to bed and didn't sleep.

Carlos was already in the office when I arrived. I'd finished the night with an hour of deep sleep between six and seven and had woken up feeling as if I'd been broken on the wheel. I sent him off to find the marriage date of Dr and Senhora Oliveira while I went to the personnel department and asked for Lourenco Goncalves' old PJ file. I hoped he hadn't grizzled up too much because the latest photograph of him was during his last weeks as an officer with the PJ and was ten years out of date.

Carlos came back with the date of 12th May 1982 for the Oliveiras' marriage. I sent him down to the files to find a usable photograph of Xeta, the murdered male prostitute who'd been found in Alcantara and another of Teresa Oliveira looking as young as possible. I arranged with the prison in Caxias to see prisoner number 178493 at 11.30 a.m. I phoned Inacio in Narcotics and asked him whether he was still holding the fisherman, Faustinho Trindade. He wasn't.

We went first to the Rodrigues house in Lapa. The maid answered the door and left us on the step. Lurdes Rodrigues took her time coming to see us. She didn't want us in the house. Her face was unambiguously hostile.

'And now, Inspector?' she said.

'A question, Senhora Rodrigues. Did anybody you didn't know come into this house between Saturday 13th June and Friday 19th June?'

'What a question, Inspector. Do you really think I'd be able…'

'I'm talking about tradesmen, delivery men, repair men, electricity meter readers.'

'You'll have to ask the maid,' she said, backing into the house. 'She wouldn't even bother to tell me that sort of thing.'

The maid came back on her own. I asked the question again. She thought about it for some time until her eyes widened with memory.

The only one I didn't know was the telephone man, but they're always different.'

'How come you remember him after all this time?'

'He wore a hat, and wouldn't take it off even when he came into the house, even when I glared at him.'

'What did he say the problem was with the phone?'

People in the area had been complaining about static. He wanted to check all our lines.'

'Was he carrying anything?'

'A suitcase of tools and one of those phones they use for testing.'

'Did you see inside the case?'

'He opened it, but I wasn't much interested.'

'Where were you?'

'There are three lines,' she said. 'One in the living room and two in Senhor Rodrigues' study. One is a fax line.'

'Did you leave him alone?'

'Of course I did. I'm not going to watch a repair man for half an hour.'

'Half an hour?'

'Maybe less.'

'Did you see his van?'

'No. He didn't have a van.'

'You left him in the study for half an hour.'

'No. Fifteen minutes in the study.'

I took out the photograph of Lourenco Goncalves.

'Is that the man you saw?'

She glanced over the photograph, with no hint of surprise in her face.

'He was greyer,' she said, 'but that was him.'

We continued down the Marginal to Caxias. The prison, high up on the hill, must have given some of the prisoners one of the most expensive sea views in the area. We parked up outside, watched with casual interest by some T-shirted inmates behind the chainlink.

We sat in an empty interview room while the staff brought the prisoner up from the cells. Miguel Rodrigues' body wasn't looking too bad on the prison regime. He'd lost maybe fifteen kilos. His face, however, was grey with depression, his eyes dull. He'd lost his manicured sleekness, his billion-escudo glow.

'If this is about that General Machedo business,' he said, without sitting down, 'I'm not talking without my lawyer present.'

'That's Spanish business,' I said. 'I just need some help on some dates.'

'I don't have much use for dates any more,' he replied.

'This might help you.'

'Or not,' he said.

'Did you know you were being followed for nine months before your arrest?'

'By the police?'

'Privately.'

'By whom?'

'We'll come back to that.'

'To answer your question,' he said, deliberately, 'no, Inspector, I did not know that I was being followed.'

'You had two offices. One on the top floor of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha building on the Largo Dona Estefania and the other in the Rua do Ouro.'

'That's right.'

'Until five months ago you used to spend Friday lunchtimes and afternoons in the Baixa office. Was there any reason for that?'

'I liked my privacy at the end of the week.'

'Does that mean you used to entertain women down there?'

'I thought you were going to ask me about dates.'

'We're getting there.'

'Jorge Raposo used to send girls down to those offices.'

'And what happened to make you start going to the Pensao Nuno?'

'Boredom,' he said. 'Jorge revealed another service.'

'You only ever entertained women in the Rua do Ouro offices?'

'It was private. There were no secretaries. If papers needed to be signed my secretary would have them brought down to me. It was my Friday office.'

'Was it always that way?'

Silence for some long moments.

'Since my brother died,' he said. 'That was his office. I didn't want to get rid of it. I made it my own and…'

'When was this?'

'He died New Year's Day 1982,' he said, desperation and sadness leaking into his already grey face, as if this had been a watershed moment. 'Then soon after that it started.'

'What?'

'Seeing girls. That didn't happen when Pedro was alive.'

'Who was the company lawyer at the time?'

'The lawyer?' he said, sounding surprised. 'The lawyer was Dr Aquilino Oliveira. He was my father's lawyer, too, before the revolution.'

'And what happened to him?'

Miguel Rodrigues blinked, his brain trying to make a connection that would help him see why he'd ended up in prison for killing his ex-lawyer's daughter.

'I don't know. I'm not sure what you mean.'

'He's not the lawyer any more is he?'

'No, no, he retired years ago.'

'Retired?'

'I mean he stopped working for us. It was a very confused period in file company. I remember I wanted him to stay. I wanted the continuity, but he was adamant. He said he had a new wife and he didn't want to spend too much of his later years working at high pressure. That was it. I had to accept that.'

'Did you meet his wife?'

'No, never.'

'You didn't go to the wedding.'

'It wasn't that sort of relationship.'

'Did you ever see the wife?'

'If I did, I don't remember.'

'So from early 1982 you started seeing girls in your office in the Rua do Ouro. In those first few months did any of those girls stand out: particularly?'

'I was a jaded man, Inspector. It's probably some kind of disease. I couldn't help myself. I used to feel very excited at the prospect, but afterwards it was nothing. My mind blanked the experience out. If a girl came back three or four times, maybe I'd remember her.'

'Were all these girls blonde?'

He sat with his wrists crossed between his legs and frowned, but not as if he was having to think about it, more as if he was examining new information.

'At that time, yes, they were pretty well all blondes,' he said finally. 'I've never thought of it like that. I never asked for blondes, but that seems to have been the case.'

'In those first few months of 1982 when you started seeing girls do you remember a time when you had to get rough with a particular girl… some time in April perhaps?'

'Rough?'

I took out the photograph of Teresa Oliveira. She was lying down, her dyed blonde hair all around her. She looked relaxed, asleep, not that young, certainly not as fresh as she would have been at twenty-one. I pushed the photograph across to Miguel Rodrigues. He looked down at it without picking it up.

'There's no trick to this,' I said. 'You won't be charged with anything. This woman has since died quite recently. Can you remember whether this woman ever came to your offices in the Baixa and whether you had to get rough with her, in order to have sex.'

'I don't remember,' he said. 'I really don't. It was a very difficult time for me. I'd lost my brother, his whole family, it was an awful time.'

'Your secretary at the bank. Is she still there?'

He shrugged, a little aggressively.

'Was she the same one as in 1982?'

'Yes. But look, Inspector, who is this woman?' he asked, tapping the photograph.

'You tell me,' I said.

We left Miguel Rodrigues in a state of anguish, still shouting questions to us as he was taken back down to his cell. He had less idea than we did why he'd been followed for nine months. We went back into Lisbon and straight to the Banco de Oceano e Rocha tower. We took one of the glass bubble lifts up the full height of the atrium and on to the top floor.

The top floor of the bank felt empty. Most of the staff had already been laid off. The people who remained were the key workers, being interviewed daily by the government investigators. We had to wait half an hour to talk to Miguel Rodrigues' secretary. She was in her late forties, wore spectacles and looked efficient, and slightly fierce from some recent stress lines that had appeared around her mouth. She was the kind of woman who'd know everything there was to know about the company she worked for. She recognized me from the newspapers. It tightened up her mouth.

After a look through the diaries she recalled that period in the bank's history. Early 1982 had been hell. They'd been in temporary offices in Avenida da Liberdade which were bigger than the Baixa ones but not much.

'Do you remember a Friday in late April or May,' I asked, 'a young woman from the lawyer's office coming in to get some papers signed? Probably urgent papers and probably a lunchtime.'

'I normally sent one of our own girls down…'

She was a blonde girl, no more than twenty-one years old.'

'Yes, I do remember her,' she said. 'She got married to our lawyer, Dr Oliveira. She was his secretary. I thought about her just the other day. I used to see her in VIP. She died you know.'

'Did she ever go down to Senhor Rodrigues' office around April, May 1982… on her own.'

The secretary blinked behind her gold-framed glasses.

Yes, she did. It was the week before she got married. And she didn't come up here any more after that. Yes, there was nobody available to take the papers down to Senhor Rodrigues and she said she'd do it herself.'

I showed her the photograph of Teresa Oliveira and she nodded slowly.

She doesn't look so well in this photograph,' she said.