A Small Death in Lisbon

'Does that mean they have been known to disagree?'

'Strife,' he said, ruminating over the word. 'Catarina has been practising at being a woman, yes, I see what you mean. That's very interesting.'

'By "practising", Senhor Doutor, you mean sexual experimentation?' I asked, easing myself down on to some of my own eggshells.

'It has been a concern of mine.'

'Do you think she might have got out of her depth?'

The lawyer sucked himself in and then sagged to one side of his chair. Was it acting or real? It was surprising the number of people who resorted to soap in times of stress… but a lawyer of this calibre?

'Last summer, Teresa, my wife, doing the usual Friday routine forgot something in the Lisbon house. She drove back around lunchtime and found Catarina in bed with a man. There was a big fight…'

'Catarina would have been fourteen then, Senhor Doutor. What did you make of it?'

'I think that's what kids do given half the chance… less than half the chance. But, for me, it's different. I've had four children already. I've been through all that. I've made mistakes. I've tried to learn. It's made me more understanding… more liberal. I didn't get angry. We talked. She was very straight, very candid, even brazen as they are, kids, these days… showing off that they're adult too.'

Carlos had been sitting with his coffee cup ten centimetres from his mouth for the last two minutes, transfixed by the exchange. I shot him a look and he ducked into his coffee.

'When you said "man", your wife "found Catarina in bed with a man", that sounds as if her companion was older than… than one of the "boys" in the band for instance. Was that the case?'

'You're a careful listener, Inspector Coelho.'

'How old was he, Dr Oliveira?' I asked, volleying his flattery straight back at him.

'Thirty-two.'

'That's very precise. Did Catarina tell you that?'

'She didn't have to. I knew the man. He was my wife's younger brother.'

The ormolu clock nearly missed a tick.

'Didn't that make you very angry, Dr Oliveira?' I said. 'You don't have to be a lawyer to know that your brother-in-law broke the law-that's child abuse.'

'I'm hardly going to run him in, am I?'

'I didn't mean that.'

'I'm a mixture, Inspector Coelho. I was an accountant before I became a lawyer. I'm sixty-seven years old now and my wife is thirty-seven. I married her when I was fifty-one and she was twenty-one. When she was fourteen…'

'But she wasn't, Senhor Doutor, when you knew her. You weren't taking advantage of a minor.'

'That's correct.'

'Perhaps, after this incident, Catarina, in your talk with her, gave you some reason to be tolerant with your brother-in-law?' I said, struggling with the sentence as if it was a giant octopus.

'If, by that, you mean, she wasn't a virgin, Inspector Coelho… you would be right. You might also be shocked to know that she admitted to seducing my brother-in-law,' he replied, copying my syntax.

'Do you think she was telling the truth?'

'Don't imagine that they're thinking like we were when we were fourteen.'

'Did drug-use come up in this conversation?'

'She admitted to smoking hashish. It's very common as you know. Nothing more. She wouldn't… I know,' he faltered. 'I'm beginning to see from your expression, Inspector Coelho, that after a conversation like that you think I should have locked her in a tower until she was twenty.'

I wasn't thinking that. I was thinking a whole turmoil of things but not that. I've got to get this face under control.

'Perhaps you're a more advanced ethical thinker than most Portuguese, Senhor Doutor.'

'We're nearly a generation beyond the dictatorial age and prohibition makes for a criminal society. I don't call that advanced… just observant.'

'You said she wouldn't have admitted to using anything more than hashish…'

'My son's a heroin addict… was a heroin addict.'

'Catarina knew him?'

'She still knows him. He lives in Porto.'

'He's off it?'

'It wasn't easy.'

I remembered his stooped clerical walk. With these burdens he should have been bent double.

'You're still a practising lawyer.'

'Not so much now. Some corporate clients keep me on a consultative basis and I represent a few friends on tax points.'

'In these calls on Friday night, did you speak to any of her teachers?'

'The one I wanted to speak to, who I consider to be a concerned woman and the one who taught her on Friday afternoon, wasn't available. You know… it was Santo Antonio…'

He wrote down her name, address and number without my asking.

'I'd like some shots of your daughter and I think we should speak to your wife now, if possible.'

'It would be better if you came back later,' he said, and tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to me. 'My mobile number's on there too, if you hear anything.'

'You gave your daughter a lot of freedom, would she have gone to the Santo Antonio celebrations without telling you?'

'Friday night we always have dinner together and she likes to go down to the bars in Cascais afterwards.'

We left the house. He didn't see us out. The maid watched us from the end of the corridor. It was hotter outside after the chill of the house. We sat in the car with the windows down. I stared into the square beyond the line of trees seeing nothing.

'Shouldn't you have told him?' asked Carlos. 'I think you should have told him.'

'A complex individual, the lawyer, don't you think?'

'His daughter is dead.'

'I just had a feeling that by not telling him we might learn more,' I said, giving Carlos the paper. 'My decision.'

Fifteen minutes later a flame-red Morgan convertible, containing the lawyer in dark glasses, eased into the street. We followed him around the square, past the fort, through the centre of Cascais and back on to the Marginal heading for Lisbon. The day seemed to be taking shape.

'See if he looks at the beach when we pass Paco de Arcos,' I said.

Carlos, braced as an astronaut for lift-off, didn't blink but the lawyer's head didn't turn. It didn't turn until we cruised into Belem past the Bunker, or the new Cultural Centre as it is sometimes known, and the gothic intricacies of the Jeronimos monastery. Then, it suddenly snapped to the right to catch the ship's prow monument to the Discoveries-Henry and his men looking out across the Tagus at a gigantic container ship nosing out into the well-known, or maybe it was the blonde in the BMW overtaking him in the inside lane.

'Well?' asked Carlos.

I didn't answer.

The mist had cleared from around the bridge, the cranes being used to sling the new rail link underneath it saluted Cristo Rei, the massive Christ statue on the south bank, whose outspread arms reminded us that it could all be possible. I didn't need reminding. I knew it. Lisbon had changed more in the last ten years than in the two and a half centuries since the earthquake.

It had been like a mouth that hadn't seen a dentist for too long. Rotten buildings had been yanked out, old streets torn up, squares ripped out, centuries of plaque scraped off, facades drilled out and filled with a pristine amalgam of concrete and tile, gaps plugged with offices and shopping centres and apartment blocks. Moles had tunnelled new stretches of Metro and a brand-new intestine of cabling had been fed into the root canals of the city. We'd wired in new roads, built a new bridge, extended the airport. We're the new gnashers in Europe's Iberian jaw. We can smile now and nobody faints.

We thundered over the patchy tarmac at Alcantara. An old tram dinged past the Santos station. To the right the steel hulls of freighters flashed between the stacks of containers and advertisements for Super Bock beer. On the left office blocks and apartment buildings climbed up the hills of Lisbon. We ran the light at Cais do Sodre as a new tram, a mobile hoarding for Kit Kat, hissed behind us. I lit my first cigarette of the day-SG Ultralights-hardly smoking at all.

'Maybe he's just going to his office,' said Carlos. 'Do a bit of work on a Saturday morning.'