A Small Death in Lisbon

'In that it's come full circle, through the Nazis who stole it in the first place, through Lehrer, through Felsen, through Abrantes and right the way round to… if not the original owners of the gold, then their families at least,' I said. 'Yes, I can see the justice in that but I'm concerned about the method.'

'Nothing in this world is what it seems,' said the man, touching my shoulder and indicating with a look that, as far as he was concerned, the conversation was over.

'And Lourenco Goncalves?' I asked, to clear up that loose end for JoJo Silva.

'He's a happy man, Inspector, but he won't be coming back to Portugal.'

'Sold his soul to the devil… or shall we call him Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira?'

'You have to leave Dr Oliveira alone, otherwise it could all go very badly wrong,' he said, severely, meaning it.

'The sacred cow,' I said.

They looked at me with the dead eyes of men who have made things go very badly wrong before.

'I'd like to speak to him.'

'I don't think so.'

'I'm not going to do anything to him,' I said. 'I'd just like to speak to him… clear a few points up.'

'Have we reached an understanding?'

'We have as long as I can speak to him for ten minutes.'

The silent one got up, took a mobile out of his pocket and walked off. He made two calls, packed up his phone and we left.

They drove me to the lawyer's office in the Chiado in a black Mercedes. We parked and walked down some steps of calcada under dry, rustling trees. They buzzed on an unmarked door and we were let in. We walked up to the first floor. They searched me very intrusively and fed me through the door.

I went into a dimly-lit anteroom and on to a corridor. Dr Oliveira was standing at the end of it smiling, immaculately suited. He had his hand out showing me the door of his office, as friendly as if he was my lawyer and I still owed him a big bill.

His office was wood-panelled, with English hunting prints of red-coated men dashing about with great futility and bugling. I sat in a black leather chair which put me at a marginal height disadvantage to him on the other side of his green leather inlaid desk. He leaned back and waited.

'Where is Lourenco Goncalves by the way?' I asked, just to get started.

'California,' he said. 'He wanted to be somewhere where the sun always shines.'

'I suppose he could have ended up in the foundations of an apartment building around the Expo site. There might have been some propriety in that.'

Dr Oliveira breathed in and closed his eyes as if he was thinking beautiful thoughts to keep the nasty ones away.

'You have some questions, apparently,' he said.

I wrestled with the one question which would give me what I wanted to know, but I couldn't get it out. I was the rummy player who didn't know which cards my opponent was collecting. I came in on a tangent.

'You knew about Senhor Felsen from your first job working for Joaquim Abrantes… writing him out of the bank's statutes. Did you know why you were doing that?'

'He was a convicted criminal.'

'But did you know why Abrantes had him put away?'

'Not at the time.'

'That only came out when you went back to Senhor Felsen?'

'He came to me after he got out of prison. Pedro wouldn't talk to him. He found out that I was the lawyer who'd drawn up the new statutes. He told me his story which I dismissed as fantastic at the time.'

'But you went back to him after…'

'Yes,' he cut in hard.

'When did you find out that Manuel Abrantes had raped your wife?'

'Raped her?' he said, digging deep into the question.

'Isn't that what happened, Senhor Doutor?'

'If he'd raped her, Inspector, she would have told me, wouldn't she? She wouldn't have waited until I looked down on a child I knew instantly was not my own to… surely she would have told her husband, Inspector.'

I couldn't tell if there was some madness at play here. Did he actually believe that his wife had consented or was he using the skewed logic of the cuckold to justify his actions?

'Did your wife say she'd been raped?'

'Pah!' he said, and threw his head round to one of the hunting prints, refusing to look at me-not accepting any more questions on that subject.

'What did Senhor Felsen know about your… scheme?' I asked.

'He was the key,' he said, eyes back on me, riveting. 'I knew a lot from having worked with Joaquim Abrantes but I never knew about the gold. He never spoke about it and Pedro, like a good son, didn't either.'

'So you didn't know about the two remaining bars.'

'Luck…' he said.

'He also told you about Maria Antonia Medinas.'

Dr Oliveira chewed on his thumbnail and nodded.

'How did you approach Antonio Borrego?'

'Like we did everybody… through Lourenco Goncalves.'

'When did you decide to use your daughter as bait?'

'My daughter?'

'Catarina… Oliveira,' I added.

'Goncalves reported that they were using the same pensao. He investigated further and found that Abrantes was always in the adjacent room when she was in the pensao. Later on he went into that room and found the mirror. The plan evolved from that situation.'

'Didn't Goncalves find it difficult to persuade Antonio to kill the girl?'

'I was surprised he killed her. I can only think that something went wrong, that she must have seen his face and he was forced to strangle her. I'm not sure how Goncalves put the plan to Borrego in the first place, but he told me that once Borrego knew who she was, once he knew the girl's connection to Miguel Rodrigues, then I think Borrego became a difficult man to control. I don't think he was quite balanced. Manuel Abrantes had killed his wife and unborn child.'

'Did anyone speak to Borrego afterwards?'

'Goncalves… when he went to pick up the clothes.'

'Didn't he ask Borrego what had happened?'

'Borrego's version of events was that he'd followed them into the Monsanto park. He saw the Mercedes leave the road. He parked up and walked through the trees. He saw the car rocking, heard…' he cleared his throat, '…heard the girl shouting out. Then Abrantes got out of the car, opened the passenger door, dragged her out and left her on the ground. Borrego waited for the car to leave and…'

'And what?' I asked, determined to make him say it, make him say everything.

'And he hit her.'

'With what?'

'He hit her on the head with a hammer, Inspector. You know this. Now let's…'

'In the fifteen years that you shared the same house as Catarina you didn't once feel any paternal…'

'She was a constant reminder, Inspector,' he said, slowly.

'Of what… your disappointment, your…?'

'Let's move along, Inspector. I agreed to ten minutes.'

'If you didn't expect Borrego to kill Catarina, what did you expect of him?'

He played the edge of the table with his fingertips… a sonata to clear his mind.

'And the Minister of Internal Administration,' I said, 'what did… what does he know?'

'He's a politician and a very successful one. Results, like getting elected for instance, are important. How they are achieved… not so interesting. He was only concerned with the delivery of Miguel Rodrigues' disgraced head.'

'Yes, I suppose that was an important factor… that he was disgraced.'

'We didn't want him to have anywhere to hide.'

We sat in silence while I tried to heave the question over my larynx. Dr Oliveira doodled with his mind.

'You asked about Felsen before,' he said. 'About his involvement. He wasn't involved in any of this… business. He was important, of course, because you had to find him. You had to extract his story but he… he's a very old man now. His mind's only really up to telling and retelling the story of his life in its many versions.'

'He had the documents though.., they were important.'

'Yes, I knew that… he'd shown them to me.'

'So he was very important to this… this intrigue of yours. Very important.'