A Small Death in lisbon (25 page)

'Boa tarde,
did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? Yes. You did?'

I was in a café now on Avenida Duque de Ávila, a few buildings down from Catarina's school, the Liceu D. Dinis.

'She came in here sometime after two o'clock,' said the barman. 'I've seen her before. She's at the school. She buys a coffee, drinks it, leaves ... just like everybody else.'

'Was there any particular reason you remembered her?'

'I came on at two, she came in a few minutes later. She was the only person in the place.'

'Was she with anybody?'

'No. She stood at the counter, like I said. Blonde hair, blue eyes, white top, short skirt, nice legs, big shoes with shiny stones in the heels.'

'You took a good look at her.'

'Why not?'

'Any reason?'

He leaned on the stainless-steel counter, drummed his fingers on the edge of it, looked up into his head, went through a long list of pros and cons and balanced it all out. I didn't take my eyes off his face. He stopped fooling around.

'You're joking,' he said.

'I'm not.'

'Because,' he said, flipping his thumbs up on the counter, 'I wouldn't have minded fucking her. She had a very nice ass. OK? Now, who are you?'

'Police,' I said. 'Have you got a phone?'

'Down the end of the bar.'

I called Carlos who still hadn't got the search warrant. I told him to wait for me in the office when he got it, that I was going to talk to the schoolteacher for no more than an hour, and then we'd search Valentim's room together. I hung up, slapped some coins on the bar and left.

Catarina's teacher lived at the top of a smart, renovated four-storey apartment building in Rua Actor Taborda, which was just on the other side of Saldanha from the school and not far from the
Polícia Judiciária
building. It was after seven o'clock and still light with a little way io go but the heat was backing off now.

First thing. She didn't look like any schoolteacher I'd ever had or met. She had short, dark, shiny hair, fashionably cut. She wore earrings which looked like two bent coffee spoons and lipstick ... even for the police. She had green, penetrating eyes that never left my face and perfect, white hard-looking teeth. She was wearing a lightweight, very short blue shift with the four inches of sleeve rolled over her shiny shoulders to keep herself cool. She was my height with long slim legs and long slim arms. Her name was Ana Luísa Madrugada.

'But I use Luisa,' she said. 'Ice tea? Homemade.'

I nodded.

'Take a seat.'

She went into a galley kitchen and opened the fridge. I sat in the dark room, the shutters partly closed to the light and heat outside. She'd been working. There was a table lamp on over piles of books and papers, some typed, some in longhand. A computer with text on the screen flickered in the corner. She handed me the ice tea and slumped into a chair opposite. She stretched out a long, tubular arm, not muscular but taut. She placed her glass elegantly on a side table, where there was an ashtray with two cigarette butts which had been smoked right down to the filter as if they were an allowance. She was hardly sitting, almost lying with her back on the seat of the chair and her legs so far out in front that her knees were almost touching mine.

She was careless with her limbs which was why I looked at them so much. I mentioned her work. She told me she was working on a doctoral thesis on a subject that did not snag in my brain. I found myself too concerned by the shift which was working its way up her thigh at her every movement, so that I thought I was going to see something that was none of my business, but I wanted it to be. A few seconds later I realized they were culottes and she could afford to be negligent. I could relax. My eyes drifted back up to her shiny shoulders and the bent spoons. I wished I'd brought Carlos along with me now. There would have been someone else to ask and answer questions while I did some idle watching without the pressure of having to pay attention.

I wanted to know how old she was. I tried to look at the back of her hands, but she wouldn't keep still. She looked anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. She kicked me on the leg, and put her hand on my knee to say sorry. I felt plugged in, the blood zipping around me like quicksilver. How did it go? What were the words to use? Where were the words?

'Inspector?'

'Yes,' I said, seeing her head on one side, waiting for an answer. 'It's been a long day,
Senhora Doutora.'

'Luisa,' she said. 'I've been talking too much. When I work all day and it gets to night-time I just need to talk. Having you here is a luxury. Normally I have to go down to the café and try to engage the barman, but they're surly down there and hard work. I give it to them anyway, my whole day's worth of nonsense. I'm doing it again. I'm talking too much. It's your turn.'

'I wouldn't mind some more nonsense myself,' I said. 'I don't get enough nonsense. Too much senselessness, not enough nonsense.'

'I got up at eight. By nine I was working. It was perfect. Everything was coming out just right. Then I heard some kids playing in the street, but there's no traffic, and I remember it's Saturday and that's why I'm working and not teaching. Then I think: What are kids doing in the city on the first hot day of summer? What am I doing in the city? Why aren't I having lunch with somebody out on the beach? Why isn't someone taking me out to lunch on the beach? Why am I sitting indoors writing learned rubbish that only five people will ever read? I can feel the pointlessness beginning to break like a tidal wave, so before it does I go back to work. I work all afternoon ... and nobody calls me. They're all out at the beach.'

'Mine's the only call you get.'

'My saviour.'

'The police.'

She laughed.

'That is your job, isn't it?'

I ducked out of that one. I haven't been in the saving business for years. I've been in the picking-up-the-pieces business.

'I was lucky you were in,' I said. 'One other phone call and you'd have been gone.'

'I was always going to be in,' she said, a little melancholy creeping into the room.

'Not just work?'

'No,' she said and took a careful look at me, then shrugged. 'I split up with a boyfriend recently and fell off the edge of the earth. But anyway, that's not nonsense, that's deadly, seriously boring.'

'A long-term relationship?'

'Too long. So long we didn't get married,' she said, and then caught me on the hop. 'What about you?'

'What about me?' I said, defensive, only used to dealing the questions, nobody ever asking
me
anything personal.

'Are you married?'

'I was for eighteen years.'

'Police work probably isn't that good for marriage.'

'She died.'

'I'm sorry.'

'About a year ago,' I said and then thought of something which I said out loud, 'which means, in fact, that I was married for seventeen years, I suppose. I just still...'

It had grown darker in the room. We were sitting out of the restricted light from the table lamp and were now upright on the edges of our chairs, trying to see each other's faces in the warm dusk.

'I've been coming to the surface,' I said, stirred by the intimacy present in the room, and then disturbed by it, I pulled out. 'But that, too, is probably deadly, seriously boring.'

'And this is what happens to us.'

'What?'

'The deadly, seriously boring people end up working on Saturday afternoons. It's the only thing that makes us feel worth something.'

'I have a daughter. That helps. And I'm working only because a faceless man on the end of a mobile phone assigns things to me and I obey.'

'What sort of an assignment could bring you to my door? Is one of my kids in trouble?'

'You've had no calls today?'

'Don't rub it in.'

'Which of your kids do you think would be in trouble?'

'Boy or girl?'

'Girl.'

'Catarina Sousa Oliveira.'

'First time.'

'I thought somebody would be coming to talk to me about her in the end.'

'What about?'

'Drugs, probably.'

'I'm with Homicide.'

She put her hands up to her face. The word had chilled her. She went over to the window and opened a shutter to let more light in and some of the day's residual warmth.

'What's happened?' she asked.

'She was murdered yesterday, late afternoon,' I said. 'I'm surprised nobody's called you. Dr Oliveira said he tried last night.'

'I was out with my sister in the Alfama.'

'You were expecting trouble with drugs,' I said.

'I see it as part of my job to look for signs. Needle rash, dilated pupils, poor concentration, loneliness.'

'How many of those did Catarina have?'

'Everything except the needle rash.'

'Did you talk to her about it?'

'Of course. I talk to all the suspect kids.'

'Why was she lonely?'

'That doesn't mean she wasn't popular. You know how it is. She had talent. It attracted a lot of attention. She had a great voice and the blonde hair and blue eyes. A lot of the kids liked her and wanted to be like her ... but she didn't have any friends amongst them ... too far ahead for that.'

'You heard her sing?'

'It wasn't a beautiful voice, nothing clear or sweet about it but it could raise the hairs on the back of your neck. She could do
fado
but what she really liked was black music, the blues numbers ... Billie Holiday. She loved doing Billie Holiday.'

'And
she
had plenty to cry about,' I said. 'What about mood swings?'

'She hasn't been so bad this term. She went through a patch of incredible anger. She'd go puce and look as if she was going to toss her desk out of the window, then she'd calm down just as quickly and go morose. I talked to her mother and things got better almost instantly.'

'She didn't have any medication in her blood.'

'Maybe she stopped taking whatever was causing the trouble.'

'She was sexually active in an extreme way for a girl her age. Were you aware of any relationships within the school?'

'Nothing happens in that place without the whole world knowing about it, but sometimes rumour is more exciting than the truth, and it's not so easy to distinguish, so I don't talk about what I hear.'

'I'm only interested in what you've seen.'

She came back from the window and sat on the edge of her chair again.

'I'll put it another way,' I said. 'I've retraced her steps from a
Pensáo
in Rúa da Gloria to the café down the street from the school, La Bella Italia, at around two-fifteen. She went to school, I presume. She wouldn't have come all this way not to.'

'She was in my class until close to four-thirty.'

'Then what?'

She wrung her hands and looked into the floor.

'I saw her leave the building. She was with this guy, a young guy who's teaching English Language. He's Scottish. Jamie Gallacher. He was talking to her on the corner of the street and she wasn't talking back. Then she walked off up Duque de Ávila and he followed ... that's all I saw.'

'Was that unusual?'

'If you listened to the rumour there was something going on there. I heard that Catarina would go back to his apartment after school sometimes. But that is not reliable and shouldn't appear in any of your reports. It's girl talk.'

'What do you make of Jamie Gallacher?'

'He's OK, but he's like a lot of these English people. He likes to drink and he drinks heavily ... and then he's not such a nice guy.'

20th December 1941, Serra da Malcata, Beira Baixa, Portugal

The mule train had split up. Abrantes had sent the younger man on ahead. He was cursing himself for overloading the mules but there was no sense in leaving just a few hundred kilos behind for another trip. Two of the mules had broken down, one lame, the other with a snapped girth. They'd tried to spread their loads out over the other mules, but it was impossible, they risked losing more. There'd been no let-up in the weather which had turned colder, bringing ice in the rain on the back of a fierce north-easterly, while black clouds crowded the hills.

Abrantes and one of his men, Salgado, unloaded the mules. While Abrantes worked on one mule's hoof, Salgado did his best to repair the torn leather strap of the other. They were down by the river when they heard them. Men on horseback. The
guarda.
One of the regular border patrols. The two men looked at the wolfram, over two hundred kilos of it, nearly one hundred and fifty thousand escudos' worth. They pinched their cigarettes out and calmed the animals.

Abrantes jerked his head at Salgado and they picked up a sixty-kilo sack of wolfram each and staggered to the edge of the freezing river. Salgado wanted to drop his in at the edge but Abrantes urged him out into the faster flowing water in the middle. They went back. Salgado couldn't manage the second one, so they picked up the next two sacks between them and waded out. They went back to the mules and coaxed them into the water and back out again. They could still hear the horses of the
guarda
closer now but not making progress, assessing the situation.

They didn't see them at first, the acoustics of the river valley playing games with the sound of the hooves on the rocks. The
guarda
appeared directly above them, their peaked caps silhouetted against the lighter distant sky. One of the men pointed down to their position. Two of the
guardas
unholstered their sidearms, the third took out a rifle from the back of his saddle. They shouted down to them. The rifleman levelled his weapon and aimed. Abrantes and his man put up their hands. The two
guardas
with pistols galloped along the ridge and came down into the gully. Their horses trod carefully over the rocks towards the two mules. The
guardas
dismounted. The man on the ridge lowered his weapon, stuck it back in his saddle, and reined his horse round to join the party down by the river.

The
chefe da brigada
approached the two men still with their hands up. He adjusted the grip on his gun in his gloved hand. He looked over the mules.