A Small Death in Lisbon

'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.

Chapter XLIII

Tuesday, 24th November 1998, Banco de Oceano e Rocha, Estefania, 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.'