A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter VI

Saturday, 13th June 199-, Paco de Arcos, near Lisbon We worked the boatyard next to the harbour and came up with nothing. We crossed the Marginal using the underpass and talked to the people who were clearing up last night's mess in the Bombeiros Voluntarios tent but none of them had been working the night shift. The restaurant/cafe in the gardens was closed. We walked up to the pine woods to see how the PSP men were getting on. They had the usual array of used condoms, syringes and bleached and tattered pornography. No such thing as an innocent pine wood in this area. I told them to bag the lot and send it up to Fernanda at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Lisbon. Carlos and I went back to Antonio and had some toast and more coffee.

At 08.30 I put a call in to Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira who I assumed was the girl's father and, given his two addresses in Lisbon and Cascais, was not engaged in the great financial struggle that the rest of us were. It was a Saturday so I tried the Cascais number first and thought I was wrong until he picked it up at the twelfth ring and groggily agreed to see us in half an hour's time. We got into my black 1972 Alfa Romeo, which was not, as many thought, a classic car, just an old car, and it started without having to draw on any reserves of bravery. We headed west on the Marginal with Carlos pinned to his seat by the belt that was stuck at one length and for a girl Olivia's size.

There were big fans of Cascais but I wasn't one of them. It used to be a small fishing village with houses falling down steep cataracts of cobbled streets to the harbour and port. Now it was a townplanner's nightmare, unless you were one of the townplanners who'd passed the numerous development projects in which case you'd be living in a dream elsewhere. It was a tourist town with an indigenous population of women who dressed to shop, and men who shouldn't be allowed out of a nightclub. Real life had been stripped out and replaced with an international cosmopolitanism which appealed to a lot of people who had money, and about as many again who wanted to ease it away from them.

We rolled in past the supermarket, the railway station and an electronic signboard which told us that it was 28°C at 08.55 and we should get some insurance. The fish market was wrapping up for the morning. The lobster and crab pots were piled high in front of the Hotel Bahia. The fort, square and ugly, out on the point, dominated. I drove up a cobbled street at the back of the town hall and turned into a tree-lined, heavily shaded square, cool and sombre with wealth, in the old part of town. Dr Oliveira's traditional villa on two floors was large and silent in the breathless morning. Carlos Pinto sniffed like a dog that's picked up the whiff of the first possible scrap of the day.

'Pine,' he said.

'The pine needle angle could be a lot of work in this area, agente Pinto.'

'There's a pine tree in the back garden,' he said looking down the side of the house.

We let ourselves in by the front gate and went past a pillar of red bougainvillea to the back of the house. The pine tree was huge and shut out the light to the garden. The floor beneath it was a perfect brown carpet of dried needles.

'Put your foot on that,' I said.

Carlos' foot crunched through a couple of inches of needles.

'I don't think you could kill someone on that and leave it…'

'Bom dia, senhores,' said a voice behind us. 'And you are…?'

'We were admiring your pine tree,' said Carlos, electing to be the idiot.

'I'm going to cut it down,' said the thin, tall, erect man with white brilliantined hair, combed in rails off a high forehead and curling at the collar. 'It kills the light in the back of the house and makes the maid feel gloomy. You are the Policia Judiciaria, I take it?'

We introduced ourselves and followed him into the house. He wore a lightweight, English chequered shirt, grey slacks with turnups and brown loafers. He walked with his hands behind his back and stooped a little like a thoughtful priest. The parquet-floored corridor was lined with portraits of ancestors depressed at being cooped up in the dark. His study had more parquet flooring and Arraiolos carpets of some quality and antiquity. His desk was large and made out of walnut and had a brown leather chair behind it which was shiny where he'd buffed it with his back. Four lamps, supported by polished women carved from jet, provided light. The red bougainvillea outside had eclipsed the sunshine. He sat us down at a three-piece suite in a book-lined corner of the room. Only a lawyer would have so many books in the same bindings. An ormolu clock ticked as if each tick was going to be its last.

Dr Oliveira was in no hurry to talk. As we sat down he fitted his dark-skinned face into a pair of bifocals and searched his desk for something he didn't find. The maid came in and laid out coffee without looking at us. There was a photograph of the dead girl on a shelf squeezed in between some old paperbacks, thrillers, written in English.

Catarina Oliveira was smiling at the camera. Her blue eyes were wide open but they didn't match what her mouth was doing. Something tightened in my chest. I'd seen the same look in Olivia's eyes after I'd told her that her mother was dead.

That's her,' said Dr Oliveira, his white eyebrows jumping over the frames of his bifocals.

He was old for the father of a fifteen-year-old girl-late sixties in his body and more than that in the lines and creases of his face and neck. He should have been trying to remember the names of his grandchildren. He leaned forward and picked out a small cigar from a jade box on the desk top. He licked his lips which became the colour of pig's liver and screwed the cigar between them. He lit it. The maid rattled a coffee cup down in front of him and reversed out of the room.

'When did you last see her?' I asked, putting the photograph back.

'Thursday night. I left my Lisbon house early on Friday morning. I had to get to my office to prepare for a day in court.'

'What sort of law do you practise?'

'Corporate law. Tax. I've never done criminal work if you think that's relevant.'

'Did your wife see Catarina on Friday morning?'

'She dropped her off at school and came down here. It's what she does in the summer at the weekends.'

'And Catarina makes her own way here after school… on the train… from Cais do Sodre?'

'She's usually here by six or seven o'clock.'

'She was reported missing at nine.'

'I got back here at about half-past-eight. My wife had been here about an hour worrying, we phoned everybody we could think of and then I reported her missing at…'

'Does she have any particular friends? A boyfriend?'

'She sings in a band. She spends most of her spare time with them,' he said, leaning back with his coffee. 'Boyfriends? None that I know of.'

'Is that a school band?'

'They're all at the university. Two boys-Valentim and Bruno-and a girl. The girl is called… Teresa. Yes. Teresa, that's it.'

'All of them a lot older than Catarina.'

'They must be twenty, twenty-one, the boys. The girl, I don't know. Probably the same but she wears black and uses purple lipstick so it's difficult to tell.'

'We'll need all their details,' I said, and Dr Oliveira reached for a pad and began leafing through his address book. He scribbled down names and addresses. 'Is she your only child?'

'From this marriage, yes. I have four grown-up children. Teresa…' he let the name drift with his cigar smoke, his eyes glanced at a photograph on his desk.

'Is that your current wife?' I asked, and looked at the same photograph, which was of the four children from his previous marriage.

'My second wife,' he replied, annoyed with himself. 'Catarina's her only child.'

'Is your wife here, Senhor Doutor?' I asked.

'She's upstairs. She's not well. She's sleeping. She takes… she's taken something to help her sleep. I don't think it would be a good idea…'

'Is she a nervous woman… ordinarily?'

'When it comes to Catarina, when it comes to her only daughter missing the whole night, when it comes to a phone call from the Policia Judiciaria first thing in the morning… then yes, she becomes…'

'How would you describe their present relationship? Catarina and your wife.'

'What?' he said, looking across to Carlos as if he might be able to clarify this sort of question.

'It's not always a simple relationship-mother and daughter.'

'I don't know what you're driving at,' he said, coughing a half-laugh.

'The Chinese character for "strife" is represented by two women under the same roof.'

Dr Aquilino Oliveira supported himself with the heels of his palms on the edge of the desk and looked out at me over the rims of his glasses. His dark brown eyes reached in.

'She's never run off without a word before,' he said, quietly.

'Does that mean they have been known to disagree?'

'Strife,' he said, ruminating over the word. 'Catarina has been practising at being a woman, yes, I see what you mean. That's very interesting.'

'By "practising", Senhor Doutor, you mean sexual experimentation?' I asked, easing myself down on to some of my own eggshells.

'It has been a concern of mine.'

'Do you think she might have got out of her depth?'

The lawyer sucked himself in and then sagged to one side of his chair. Was it acting or real? It was surprising the number of people who resorted to soap in times of stress… but a lawyer of this calibre?

'Last summer, Teresa, my wife, doing the usual Friday routine forgot something in the Lisbon house. She drove back around lunchtime and found Catarina in bed with a man. There was a big fight…'

'Catarina would have been fourteen then, Senhor Doutor. What did you make of it?'

'I think that's what kids do given half the chance… less than half the chance. But, for me, it's different. I've had four children already. I've been through all that. I've made mistakes. I've tried to learn. It's made me more understanding… more liberal. I didn't get angry. We talked. She was very straight, very candid, even brazen as they are, kids, these days… showing off that they're adult too.'

Carlos had been sitting with his coffee cup ten centimetres from his mouth for the last two minutes, transfixed by the exchange. I shot him a look and he ducked into his coffee.

'When you said "man", your wife "found Catarina in bed with a man", that sounds as if her companion was older than… than one of the "boys" in the band for instance. Was that the case?'

'You're a careful listener, Inspector Coelho.'

'How old was he, Dr Oliveira?' I asked, volleying his flattery straight back at him.

'Thirty-two.'

'That's very precise. Did Catarina tell you that?'

'She didn't have to. I knew the man. He was my wife's younger brother.'

The ormolu clock nearly missed a tick.

'Didn't that make you very angry, Dr Oliveira?' I said. 'You don't have to be a lawyer to know that your brother-in-law broke the law-that's child abuse.'

'I'm hardly going to run him in, am I?'

'I didn't mean that.'

'I'm a mixture, Inspector Coelho. I was an accountant before I became a lawyer. I'm sixty-seven years old now and my wife is thirty-seven. I married her when I was fifty-one and she was twenty-one. When she was fourteen…'

'But she wasn't, Senhor Doutor, when you knew her. You weren't taking advantage of a minor.'

'That's correct.'

'Perhaps, after this incident, Catarina, in your talk with her, gave you some reason to be tolerant with your brother-in-law?' I said, struggling with the sentence as if it was a giant octopus.

'If, by that, you mean, she wasn't a virgin, Inspector Coelho… you would be right. You might also be shocked to know that she admitted to seducing my brother-in-law,' he replied, copying my syntax.

'Do you think she was telling the truth?'

'Don't imagine that they're thinking like we were when we were fourteen.'

'Did drug-use come up in this conversation?'

'She admitted to smoking hashish. It's very common as you know. Nothing more. She wouldn't… I know,' he faltered. 'I'm beginning to see from your expression, Inspector Coelho, that after a conversation like that you think I should have locked her in a tower until she was twenty.'

I wasn't thinking that. I was thinking a whole turmoil of things but not that. I've got to get this face under control.

'Perhaps you're a more advanced ethical thinker than most Portuguese, Senhor Doutor.'

'We're nearly a generation beyond the dictatorial age and prohibition makes for a criminal society. I don't call that advanced… just observant.'

'You said she wouldn't have admitted to using anything more than hashish…'

'My son's a heroin addict… was a heroin addict.'

'Catarina knew him?'

'She still knows him. He lives in Porto.'

'He's off it?'

'It wasn't easy.'

I remembered his stooped clerical walk. With these burdens he should have been bent double.

'You're still a practising lawyer.'

'Not so much now. Some corporate clients keep me on a consultative basis and I represent a few friends on tax points.'

'In these calls on Friday night, did you speak to any of her teachers?'

'The one I wanted to speak to, who I consider to be a concerned woman and the one who taught her on Friday afternoon, wasn't available. You know… it was Santo Antonio…'

He wrote down her name, address and number without my asking.

'I'd like some shots of your daughter and I think we should speak to your wife now, if possible.'

'It would be better if you came back later,' he said, and tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to me. 'My mobile number's on there too, if you hear anything.'

'You gave your daughter a lot of freedom, would she have gone to the Santo Antonio celebrations without telling you?'

'Friday night we always have dinner together and she likes to go down to the bars in Cascais afterwards.'

We left the house. He didn't see us out. The maid watched us from the end of the corridor. It was hotter outside after the chill of the house. We sat in the car with the windows down. I stared into the square beyond the line of trees seeing nothing.

'Shouldn't you have told him?' asked Carlos. 'I think you should have told him.'

'A complex individual, the lawyer, don't you think?'

'His daughter is dead.'

'I just had a feeling that by not telling him we might learn more,' I said, giving Carlos the paper. 'My decision.'

Fifteen minutes later a flame-red Morgan convertible, containing the lawyer in dark glasses, eased into the street. We followed him around the square, past the fort, through the centre of Cascais and back on to the Marginal heading for Lisbon. The day seemed to be taking shape.

'See if he looks at the beach when we pass Paco de Arcos,' I said.

Carlos, braced as an astronaut for lift-off, didn't blink but the lawyer's head didn't turn. It didn't turn until we cruised into Belem past the Bunker, or the new Cultural Centre as it is sometimes known, and the gothic intricacies of the Jeronimos monastery. Then, it suddenly snapped to the right to catch the ship's prow monument to the Discoveries-Henry and his men looking out across the Tagus at a gigantic container ship nosing out into the well-known, or maybe it was the blonde in the BMW overtaking him in the inside lane.

'Well?' asked Carlos.

I didn't answer.

The mist had cleared from around the bridge, the cranes being used to sling the new rail link underneath it saluted Cristo Rei, the massive Christ statue on the south bank, whose outspread arms reminded us that it could all be possible. I didn't need reminding. I knew it. Lisbon had changed more in the last ten years than in the two and a half centuries since the earthquake.

It had been like a mouth that hadn't seen a dentist for too long. Rotten buildings had been yanked out, old streets torn up, squares ripped out, centuries of plaque scraped off, facades drilled out and filled with a pristine amalgam of concrete and tile, gaps plugged with offices and shopping centres and apartment blocks. Moles had tunnelled new stretches of Metro and a brand-new intestine of cabling had been fed into the root canals of the city. We'd wired in new roads, built a new bridge, extended the airport. We're the new gnashers in Europe's Iberian jaw. We can smile now and nobody faints.

We thundered over the patchy tarmac at Alcantara. An old tram dinged past the Santos station. To the right the steel hulls of freighters flashed between the stacks of containers and advertisements for Super Bock beer. On the left office blocks and apartment buildings climbed up the hills of Lisbon. We ran the light at Cais do Sodre as a new tram, a mobile hoarding for Kit Kat, hissed behind us. I lit my first cigarette of the day-SG Ultralights-hardly smoking at all.

'Maybe he's just going to his office,' said Carlos. 'Do a bit of work on a Saturday morning.'

'Why speculate when you can call him on his mobile?'

'You're kidding.'

'I'm kidding.'

The yellow facade and the massive triumphal arch of the Terreiro do Paco sucked us away from the river towards the grid of the Baixa valley between the hills of the Fort of Sao Jorge and the Bairro Alto. The temperature hit thirty degrees. Fat, ugly bronzes loafed in the square. The lawyer's Morgan cut right down the Rua da Alfandega and left into Rua da Madalena which climbed steeply before dropping away into the new-look Largo de Martim Moniz with its glass and steel box kiosks and disinterested fountains. We skirted the square and accelerated up the slope of the Rua de'Sao Lazaro past the Hospital de'Sao Jose and into the square dominated by the pedimented, pillared facade of the Institute of Medicine. We parked close to the statue of Dr Sousa Martins, his plinth heaped with stone tablets of thanks, wax limbs and candles. Dr Oliveira was already parked and walking down the hill to the Institute of Legal Medicine. Carlos took his jacket off and revealed a long dark stripe of sweat-soaked shirt.

By the time we arrived in the Institute the lawyer was using all his training to get what he wanted-the staff, however, were more difficult to impress than a judge. I left him with Carlos and arranged for the body to be displayed. An orderly brought in Dr Oliveira, who had removed his dark glasses and now wore the bifocals. The assistant drew the sheet back. The lawyer blinked twice and nodded. He took the sheet from the assistant and pulled it back to see the whole body which he inspected closely. He drew the sheet back over her face and left the room.

We found him standing outside in the cobbled street. He was cleaning his sunglasses endlessly and wearing an expression of extreme determination.

'I am sorry for your loss, Senhor Doutor,' I said. 'I apologize for not telling you earlier. You have every right to be angry.'

He didn't look angry. The initial determination had flagged and the confusion of emotions that had followed had left his face strangely flaccid. He looked as if he was concentrating on his breathing.

'Let's walk up here and sit in the gardens in the shade,' I said.

We walked on either side of him through the cars, past the good doctor's statue which rather than being imbued with the success of the cured was, in its pigeon-shit-spattered state, infused with the sadness of those who'd been lost. The three of us sat on a bench in surprising cool some distance from the pigeon-feeders and the coffee-drinkers idling in plastic chairs around the cafe.

'You may be surprised to know that I am glad that you are investigating the murder of my daughter,' said the lawyer. 'I know you have a difficult job and I also realize that I am a suspect.'

'I always start with those closest to the victim… it's a sad fact.'

'Ask your questions, then I must go back to my wife.'

'Of course,' I said. 'When did you finish in court yesterday?'

'About half-past-four.'

'Where did you go?'

'To my office. I keep a small office in the Chiado on Calcada Nova de'S. Fransisco. I went by the Metro from Campo Pequeno, changed at Rotunda and got off at Restauradores. I walked to the Elevador, took that up to the Chiado and continued on foot to my office. It took me maybe half an hour and I spent half an hour there.'

'Did you speak to anybody?'

'I took one call.'

'From who?'

'The Minister of Internal Administration asking me up to the Jockey Club for a drink. I left my office just after half-past-five and as you may know it's only a two-minute walk to Rua Garrett from there.'

I nodded. It was cast-iron. I asked him to write down the names of the people who were with him at the Jockey Club. Carlos gave him his notebook for the purpose.

'Can I talk to your wife before you tell her what's happened?'

'If you follow me back there, yes. If not, I won't wait.'

'We'll be right behind you.'

He gave me the paper and we walked back towards the cars.

'How did you know to come here, Senhor Doutor?' I asked, as he threaded his way back to his Morgan.

'I spoke to a friend of mine, a criminal lawyer, he told me that this is where they bring the bodies of those who have died in suspicious circumstances.'

'Why did you think she'd died like that?'

'Because I'd already asked him about you and he told me you were a homicide detective.'

He turned and walked across the cobbles to his car. I lit a cigarette, got into the Alfa, waited for the Morgan to pull away and followed.

'What did you make of that?' I asked Carlos.

'If it had been my daughter in there…'

'You were expecting more distress?'

'Weren't you?'

'What about numbness? Trauma leaves people numb.'

'He didn't seem numb. The look he had on his face when we came out, he was galvanized.'

'Concerned about himself?'

'I couldn't say… you know, I only saw him from the side.'

'So you can only tell me what I'm thinking about when you look at me head-on?'

That was just a bit of luck, Senhor Inspector.'

'Was it?' I said, and the boy smiled. 'What did you think of Dr Oliveira's accountancy? The mathematics between him and his wife.'

'I thought he was a bloodless son of a bitch.'

'Strong feelings, agente Pinto,' I said. 'What does your father do?'

'He was a fitter with LisNave. He installed pumps in ships.'

'Was?'

'They lost some contracts to the Koreans.'

'Your politics might be to the left of centre perhaps?'

He shrugged.

'Dr Aquilino Oliveira is a serious man,' I said. 'He's high calibre ordnance… 125 mm cannon, no less.'

'Was he a colonel in the artillery, your father?'

'The cavalry. But listen. The lawyer has used his brain all his life. It's his job to use his intelligence.'

'That's true, so far he's one step ahead of us all the way.'

'You saw him. His instinct was to check the body. His brain always operates in front of his emotions… until, perhaps, he remembers he's supposed to have feelings.'

'And then he leaves the room to go and collect them.'

'Interesting, agente Pinto. I'm beginning to see why Narciso put you on to me. You're an odd one.'

'Am I? Most people think I'm very normal. They mean boring.'

'It's true you haven't said a word about football, cars or girls.'

'I like the way you see the order of things, Senhor Inspector.'

'Maybe you're a man of ideals. I haven't seen one of those since…'

'Nineteen-seventy-four?'

'A little after that, in the mess that followed our glorious revolution there were lots of ideas, ideals, visions. They petered out.'

'And ten years later we joined Europe. And now we don't have to struggle on our own any more. We don't have to sweat at night thinking where the next escudo is coming from. Brussels tells us what to do. We're on the payroll. If we…'

'And that's a bad thing?'

'What's changed? The rich get richer. The ones in the know go higher. Of course, it's trickled down. But that's the point. It's a trickle. We think we're better off because we can drive around in an Opel Corsa which costs us our entire living wage to run while our parents house us, feed us and clothe us. Is that progress? No. It's called "credit". And who benefits from credit?'

'I haven't heard anger like that since… since FC Porto came down here and put three past Benfica.'

'I'm not angry,' he said, cooling his hand out of the window. 'I'm not as angry as you are.'

'What makes you think I'm angry?'

'You're angry with him. You think he killed his daughter and he's given you the best possible alibi a man can have… and you're angry about it.'

'Now you're reading my face in profile. Next it'll be the back of my head.'

'You know what annoys me?' said Carlos. 'He makes out he's some kind of liberal thinker but you think about this. He's nearly seventy years old. He must have worked the best part of his life under the Salazar regime and you know as well as I do that you didn't work in those days unless you were politically sound.'

'What's happening here, agente Pinto? I've spent the last twenty years of my life not thinking about the revolution other than the fact we get a holiday on 25th April. I've been with you less than half a day and we've talked about it three or four times. I don't think it's any way to start a murder investigation by going back twenty-five years and looking…'

'It was only talk. He was projecting himself as a liberal. I don't believe him… and that's one of the reasons why.'

'Guys like that are too intelligent to believe in anything. They change…'

'I don't think they do. Not this late on. My father's forty-eight, he can't change and now he's scrap in the breaker's yard along with all his old pumps.'

'Don't get fixed ideas about people, agente Pinto. It'll cloud your vision. You don't want to ram somebody into a life sentence just because they're politically disagreeable, do you?'

'No,' said Carlos, innocent as his hair, 'that wouldn't be fair.'