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'Yes,' he said, and looked at me. 'Is there a question here, Inspector?'

'How could you guarantee that I'd find Felsen?' I asked, my palms running with sweat, my heart batting against my ribs.

A frown shot across his brow, faster than a lizard across a hot road.

'You tell me,' he said, his brain rattling through the permutations.

I tried again, a little more direct this time.

'How did Luisa Madrugada make the Felsen connection?'

'Ah!' he said, grasping the matter now. 'Now I see. No, Inspector, she was not involved. Don't worry yourself on that score. Ask her… ask her about some interesting notes… pointers she found in the books that she was reading at the Biblioteca Nacional, but…'

'Was that luck as well? That the investigating officer should have an affair with…'

'You don't have to believe me. It's no concern of mine,' he said. 'I would have made sure you found Felsen, whether it was in Luisa Madrugada's bed or not. And, Inspector, don't blame her for not telling you about those… ah… vital clues. I'm sure she loves you-and lovers, especially in the beginning, want to look at their best for each other.'

'Something that you would know about, Senhor Doutor,' I said.

'I?'

'A woman always wants to look at her best on her wedding day, Teresa was no exception.'

It shut something down in him. Lights went out in his face, the source of his mild affability dried up and was replaced with that fierceness, that intellectual fierceness I'd seen in his study in Cascais.

'It's easily forgotten, Inspector, that history is not what you read in books. It's a personal thing, and people are vengeful creatures, which is why history will never teach us anything.'

'You got your revenge, I can see that, and you… facilitated the revenge of others-Antonio Borrego, Klaus Felsen, even Jorge Raposo had his half-hour…'

'… and the Jewish people,' he said. 'Don't forget them. They will finally get their property back.'

'If you think that that is any justification for you, Senhor Doutor Oliveira, to conduct your own, personal balancing of the vagaries of history by punishing your late wife and murdering her illegitimate daughter, then you must be one of two things-evil or mad. Which are you?'

He leaned forward across his desk, neck dipped, eyes as bright and all-seeing as an eagle's over its territory.

'We are all mad,' he said.

'I only feel it when I'm in your company,' I said, walking to the door.

'We are all mad, Inspector, for the simple reason that we don't know why we exist and this…' he waved his hand at the tissue of existence before him, 'this life is how we distract ourselves so that we don't have to think about things too difficult for us to comprehend.'

'There are other ways of distracting yourself, Dr Oliveira.'

'Some of us, perhaps, have more recherche tastes.'

'Yes, I suppose the frisson was quite substantial for you-the knowledge that Miguel Rodrigues had sodomized his own daughter before Antonio Borrego cracked her skull open and strangled her.'

He swivelled his chair away from me and faced the window. The leather scoop rocked him.

I closed the door, went down the lighted corridor, down the wooden stairs and out on to the bone-dry calcada. The night was piercingly clear with the freshest air Lisbon would ever smell. There was a thin paring of wind-shaved moon and chestnuts were roasting in the square.

Agente Carlos Pinto came out of his coma on Friday 2 7th November. Two weeks later they inserted a steel plate in the back of his cranium. On a clear day he's sure that he can hear the Bee Gees coming over the Atlantic. I've assured him it's tinnitus. He was lucky to have a thick skull and, I like to think, that his short, dense, unmanageable hair cushioned the blow.

The only thing Carlos couldn't remember was why Antonio Borrego had hit him. I told him that after Felsen had given me his story I'd gone to A Bandeira Vermelha and asked Antonio about Maria Antonia Medinas. He'd stalled me. So when, five and a half months later, and after our brittle exchange in the street by the rusted wheel-arch of the white Renault 12, Carlos appeared in the bar on his own to ask about the same woman-the one person who could motivate Antonio to murder Catarina Oliveira-Borrego's paranoia did the rest. He wouldn't have known that Carlos and I had never discussed Maria Antonia Medinas. He wouldn't have known that to us it was just a name that needed some light shed on it. He thought he was finished.

It still hasn't rained. It's still dry and cold. The leaves are still scratching across the calcada. A Bandeira Vermelha is closed. I've had to find somewhere else to drink my bicas, someone else to make my toast.

Olivia still hasn't taught Carlos anything about clothes, he shambles about in that oversized thing, but he's reciprocated in his own way by telling her nothing of murder. He makes her happy in a way that she hasn't been for over a year.

Luisa Madrugada spares me the odd quarter of an hour from her publishing company and I occasionally look up from the book that she's been forcing me to write. Nothing about murder, of course, a children's story.

I've seen the untouchable lawyer too, Dr Oliveira in his Morgan, spanking down the Marginal with a blonde in the passenger seat. He didn't look bothered.

I'm getting out of this house. The landlord offered to sell me an apartment at a good price if I moved out and let him convert this old mansion. I thought it would be a difficult decision to make, but I agreed as soon as he proposed it. We looked at each other astonished.

And I bought a new car. The old one never forgave me for leaving her on the bridge that night. The new car's nothing special but the salesman, highlighting all the extras included, made it sound as if it could go into orbit and dock with Discovery. He knew everything, and I questioned him endlessly because it's in my nature, finally I asked him:

'How do they tint the windows so that they're clear in the shade and dark in the sunshine?'

'You know,' he said, without even a pause, holding up a finger. 'That's interesting. It's the only Portuguese element of this car.'

'Is that a selling point?'

'On the glass,' he said, ignoring me, 'they lay a very, very thin layer, less than a micron, a fraction of a micron of the finest Portuguese wolfram.'

I thought about that.

The obscure talent of wolfram.