A Small Death in lisbon (60 page)

'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.

Tuesday, 24th November 1998, Banco de Oceano e Rocha, Estefânia, Lisbon

We went for a late lunch in a small seafood restaurant on Avenida Almirante Reis. I had grilled squid, Carlos went for the cuttlefish in its own ink, which my wife had always referred to as the tarry gym shoe. We drank a half-bottle of white and finished with coffee.

'Maybe you should have told Miguel Rodrigues who the woman in the photograph was,' said Carlos, meaning Teresa Oliveira.

'I'd have had to spell it out for him,' I said, 'and prison is a lonely place full of nothing but the smell of men cooped up together and empty time. Miguel Rodrigues is serving a minimum of twenty years for a crime he did not commit. I don't like him. I don't think he's a good man. He's possibly a sick man. But I am not going to be the one to inflict on his mind the fact that he sodomized his own daughter.'

There was a prolonged silence while Carlos stirred his coffee up to the required syrup.

'If he raped her, why didn't she report it?' he asked.

'She was a young woman on the brink of a brand-new life. A week away from getting married. And that's quite apart from it being 1982. The feminist movement hadn't exactly built up a head of steam in Portugal by then. You'd have had a job to find women anywhere, even in England, prepared to report rape in those days. Think about it. It would have had an impact on her marriage, it would have destroyed a large chunk of her husband's business, there would have been a long, intrusive investigation, perhaps with a trial at the end of it. No ... she just hoped it would go away and maybe it would have done, if she hadn't got pregnant. When that baby was born with those blue eyes ... that must have been a hard day.'

We paid the bill and walked back up over dry, dead leaves to where we'd left the car. The kids had come out in the Arroios park
to run screaming through the pigeons which swooped over the old boys playing cards in their woollen hats.

'So, we have a motive now,' said Carlos.

'I don't think we've got all of it yet. This was just the obsession of the man—he was going to bring Miguel Rodrigues down. But I think there's something else in this.'

'And the killer?'

'We'll find the killer.'

'You don't think Dr Oliveira paid someone to kill her.'

'Like Lourenço Gonçalves?'

'Possibly.'

'I don't think so. I think his obsession was a little more refined.'

We stopped under a shop's awning while a blast of freeze-dried air shot through the Largo Dona Estefânia.

'And what now?' asked Carlos.

'We go to Paço de Arcos and find Faustinho Trindade.'

'You don't sound happy about this.'

'I'm not.'

'If you think some justice has been done, why don't you leave it?'

'Don't you want to nail Dr Oliveira?' I asked, hating myself for asking it.

'We'll be interfering, won't we?'

'We will.'

'They've achieved some kind of result.'

'Are you including the Minister of Internal Administration in "they"?'

'I think I might be.'

'And all those big men who came to watch my first interview with Miguel Rodrigues ... those spectators at the coliseum, who enjoy the smell of blood as long as it's not their own?'

He swallowed hard, disgusted by it. I put my arm around his shoulder.

Let's go to Paço de Arcos,' I said. 'And take it from there.'

The traffic was terrible in Lisbon and out on the Marginal there'd been a four-car smash, the blood fresh and bright on the tarmac under the setting sun. It was early evening by the time we arrived in Paço de Arcos, the sea already dark, but choppy in the wind with white caps still visible in the failing light. The horizon was just a
crack of light with two long, grey melancholic streaks of cloud. I did a small circuit through the town and came back on to the Marginal heading for Lisbon. We pulled into the car park by the boatyard of the Clube Nautico.

There were a couple of anglers out on the stone quay. I didn't know what they were expecting to catch in this weather but then fishing doesn't always seem to be about catching fish. The lighthouse on Búgio was already flashing. Three ships sat off the Costa do Estoril, their cabin areas lit. Faustinho was in his work shed, wearing a pair of blue overalls and a heavy jacket, working with very little light on a stripped-down outboard motor. His hands were dry and scaly with the cold. His dog got up and sniffed us over.

'When did you get out, Faustinho?' I asked.

'Just under a week ago and I'm not talking about it, Zé. I'm sorry if I caused trouble for you, but I'm not going to say anything. It's finished.'

'You should find a workshop to do this,' I said.

'It's too expensive.'

'You remember that kid...'

'Look, Zé ... I told you,' he stopped. 'The kid ... what kid?'

'You remember that kid you told me about, who saw something that night before the girl's body was found on the beach?'

'I never saw him again,' he said. 'He used to spend quite a lot of the summer out here ... but this year...'

'Is this the one?'

Carlos handed him the photograph of Xeta.

'That's him,' he said, taking it down to the light, looking at it more closely. 'He's dead, isn't he? This is a photograph of a dead person.'

I nodded. Carlos took the photograph back.

'What does that mean?' he asked.

I looked across the Marginal, the town dark behind the trees in the park.

'It means that maybe we're going to have to look closer to home,' I said.

We went through the underpass and up into the public gardens. They were empty. The wind buffeted the trees. The paths were covered in their dry, scratching detritus. I wiped a bench off and we sat down. António's bar was shut, no lights on, and we could have used a drink.

'Remember what I said to you that first morning,' said Carlos, 'about the significance of the body being here, and you living nearby?'

'We've come full circle,' I said. 'We lost sight of that. I lost sight of it.'

A white car pulled up outside
A Bandeira Vermelha.
António Borrego got out and opened the boot. He lifted out a box of fruit, vegetables and a separate one of meat. He put them back in, opened the door to the bar and turned the light on. He went back to the boot.

'It's nice to see one of those still running,' said Carlos.

And now, finally, you start talking about cars,' I said.

'That
,' said Carlos, 'is a Renault 12. Car of the Year back in the 1980s some time. My father had one ... but his was a pile of shit. I spent a lot of my youth working on one of those.'

The two ventricles of my heart iced up. Suddenly the blood was only going through in thin spurts and the oxygen in my breathing hard to find.

'Come with me,' I said.

We walked out of the gardens towards where the old faded pink cinema had been, which was now the beginnings of an office block. We turned left and left again and came up behind António's car.

'You remember your handwritten notes. What did the guy say? The one who saw
Senhor
Rodrigues' Mercedes. What else did he see?'

'I don't remember.'

'What he saw in front of the Mercedes was a brand-new metallic grey Fiat Punto and behind...'

'Was a white Renault 12 with a rusted wheel-arch.'

'Rear wheel-arch.'

In the poor street lighting and with the light coming from the open bar the corroded edges of the rear wheel-arch were visible. António came out to pick up whatever else he had in his boot. He saw us. I waved.

'How is it?' he asked.

'It's fine,' I said.

'You want something to eat? I've got some beautiful spare ribs already marinated.'

'Sounds good.'

António picked up another box and went into the bar.

'When Faustinho took me to meet Xeta and he wasn't there,' I
said, almost talking to myself now, 'we went back to
A Bandeira Vermelha
and Faustinho described the kid in detail in front of me and António.'

Carlos' head didn't move, his eyes stayed fixed on the light coming from the bar. I told him to go in there and talk to António about anything except the obvious while I phoned the local PSP. If he'd already killed Catarina and Xeta, there was no reason why he shouldn't go down fighting. I went round the corner to make the call. It took me a couple of minutes to explain the situation to them, how I didn't want them sprinting in there and provoking him into an attack. By the time I walked back to the bar I was feeling sick, cold and tired, not ready for this, not wanting this.

I walked into the wedge of light coming from the door. Lying face-down on the bar floor, in a pool of blood that I couldn't imagine having got to that size in the short few moments I'd been away, was Carlos. The collar of his shirt showed red above his jacket and coat. The back of his head looked all wrong, his hand twitched, the thumb splashing in his own blood. António was standing between Carlos' feet with the hammer raised above his head. It was the hammer he kept behind the bar, next to the sickle. His relics. His workers' tools. His weapons.

I stepped into the doorway. He turned to me.

'What have you done, António? What the hell have you done?'

His eyes had gone. There was still the tiniest light in them, but it was a pinprick at the end of a four-mile tunnel, as if I was seeing straight through to some nicks of bone on the inside of his cranium.

'Let me call an ambulance,' I said.

He turned to me with his hammer raised and took one step forwards.

'What did he say to you, António? What did he say to make you hit him?'

'Maria Antónia Medinas,' he said, each name separate.

'Is that what this is all about? Is that why you killed the girl?'