The police photographer made himself known and I told him to take shots from above as well as down on the beach.
The girl's naked body was twisted at the waist, her left shoulder buried in the sand. Her face, with just a single graze on the forehead, was turned upwards, eyes wide open. She was young, her breasts still high and rounded not far below her clavicles. The muscle of her torso was visible below the rib cage and she carried a little puppy fat on her belly. Her hips lay flat, her left leg straight, the right turned out at the knee, its heel close to her buttock and right hand which was thrown behind her. I'd put her at under sixteen and I could see why the fisherman hadn't bothered to go down to look for life. Her face was pale apart from the cut, the lips purple and her intensely blue eyes vacant. There were no footprints around the body. I let the photographer down there to take his close-ups.
The fisherman told me he'd been on his way to his repair shack at 5.30 a.m. when he saw the body. He knew she was dead from the look of her and he didn't go down on to the beach but straight along the Marginal, beyond the boatyard of the Clube Desportivo, to the Direccao de Farois to ask them to phone the Policia Maritima.
I squeezed my chin and found flesh instead of beard. I looked dumbly at my palm as if my hand was in some way responsible. I needed new tics for my new face. I needed a new job for my new life.
Dead girl on the beach, the seagulls screeched.
Perhaps being; exposed was making me more sensitive to the minutiae of everyday life.
The pathologist arrived, a small dark woman called Fernanda Ramalho, who ran marathons when she wasn't examining dead bodies.
'I was right,' she said, her eyes coming back to me after I'd introduced Carlos Pinto, who was writing everything down in his notebook.
'The best kind of pathologists always are, Fernanda.'
'You're handsome. There were those who thought you were hiding a weak chin under there.'
'Is that what people think these days,' I said, running for cover, 'that men grow beards to hide something? When I was a kid everybody had a beard.'
'Why do men grow beards?' she asked, genuinely perplexed.
'The same reason dogs lick their balls,' said Carlos, pen poised. Our heads snapped round. 'Because they can,' he finished.
Fernanda enquired with an eyebrow.
'It's his first day,' I said, which annoyed him again. Twice in less than an hour. This boy had shingles of the mind. Fernanda took a step back as if he might start lapping. Why didn't Narciso tell me the kid wasn't house-trained?
The photographer finished his close-ups and I nodded to Fernanda who was standing by with her bag open wearing a pair of surgical gloves.
'Check your list,' I said to Carlos, who'd disassociated himself from me. 'See if there's a fifteen/sixteen-year-old girl, blonde hair, blue eyes, 1.65 metres, fifty-five kilos… Any distinguishing marks, Fernanda?'
She held up her hand. Muttering into her dictaphone she inspected the abrasion on the girl's forehead. Carlos flicked through the missing-persons sheets, plenty of names in the black hole. More cars flashed by on the Marginal. Fernanda minutely inspected the girl's pubic hair and vagina.
'Start with the ones who've gone in the last twenty-four hours,' I said. Carlos sighed.
Fernanda unrolled a plastic sheet in front of her. She removed a thermometer from the girl's armpit and eased her over on to her front. Some rigor mortis had already started. With a pair of tweezers she picked her way through a mash of hair, blood and sand at the back of the girl's head. She reached for a plastic evidence sachet and fed something into it and marked it up. She sheafed the girl's hair and kissed the dictaphone again. She looked down the length of the girl's body, parted the buttocks with finger and thumb speaking all the time. She clicked off the dictaphone.
'Mole at the back of the neck, in the hairline, central. Coffee-coloured birthmark inside left thigh fifteen centimetres above the knee,' she shouted.
'If it was her parents who reported it, that should be enough,' I said.
'Catarina Sousa Oliveira,' said Carlos, handing me the sheet.
An ambulance arrived. Two paramedics walked to the back. One pulled out a stretcher, the other carried the bodybag. Fernanda stood back from the body and brushed herself off.
I walked down the harbour wall to the sea. It was barely 7.15 a.m. and the sun already had some needle in it. To my left, looking east, was the mouth of the Tagus and the massive pillars of the 25 th April suspension bridge which floated footless in a heavy mist. With the sun higher the sea wasn't so much blue any more as a panel-beaten silver sheet. Small fishing boats, moored off the beach, rocked on the dazzling surface in the morning's breeze. A passenger jet came in low above the river and banked over the cement works and beaches of Caparica south of the Tagus to make its approach into the airport north of the city-tourists arriving for golf and days in the sun. Further west and out to sea, a tugboat pulled a dredger alongside the Bugio lighthouse, Lisbon's scaled-down, antique Alcatraz. At the end of the wall a fisherman reached back with his rod, took two steps and sent his hook out into the ocean with a violent whip of his shoulders and flick of his wrists.
'She was hit hard on the back of the head,' said Fernanda, behind me. 'I can't say what it was yet but something like a wrench, a hammer or a piece of pipe. The blow propelled her forward and her forehead connected with a solid object which I'm ninety percent certain was a tree but I'll do some more picking around back at the Institute. The blow must have knocked her unconscious and would have killed her in time but the guy made sure with his thumbs on her windpipe.'
'The guy?'
'Sorry, my assumption.'
'It didn't happen here, did it?'
'No. Her left clavicle was broken. She was dropped from the harbour wall and I found this in her hair, in the wound.'
The sachet contained a single pine needle. I called a PSP officer over.
'Sexual assault?'
'There's been sexual activity but no evidence of assault or violent entry but I'll be able to tell you more later.'
'Can you give me a time of death?'
'About thirteen to fourteen hours ago.'
'How do you work that out?' asked Carlos.
His aggression got the full reply.
'I checked with the meteorological office before I came out. They told me the temperature didn't get much below 20°C last night. The body would have cooled at around 0.75 to i°C per hour. I recorded her body temperature at 24.6°C and found rigor mortis in the smaller muscles and just beginning in the bigger ones. Therefore my deduction, based on experience, is that you're looking for someone who murdered her between five and six yesterday afternoon but it's not an exact science as Inspector Coelho knows.'
'Anything else?' I asked.
'Nothing under her nails. She was a nervy type. Hardly anything left of them. The nail on the index finger of the right hand was torn, by that I mean bloody… if that's any help.'
Fernanda left followed by the ambulance men who were staggering across the beach and up the steps of the harbour wall, the body zipped up in its bag. I asked the PSP men to search the car park and then take a squad up the Marginal towards Cascais to the nearest pine trees. I wanted clothing. I wanted a heavy metal object or tool.
'Give me your ideas, agente Pinto,' I said.
'Knocked unconscious in some pine woods, stripped, raped, strangled, thrown in a car, driven down the Marginal, ultimately from Cascais direction, which is the only way in to this small car park, and dumped off the harbour wall.'
'OK. But Fernanda said no violent entry.'
'She was unconscious.'
'Unless her murderer had the foresight to bring his own lubricant and condom there would be evidence… abrasions, bruising, that kind of thing.'
'Wouldn't a rapist think of that?'
'He hits the girl from behind, smacks her head against a tree with a blow hard enough to kill her but he strangles her for good measure. My gut tells me that he was intending to kill rather than rape but I may be wrong… let's see what Fernanda says in her lab report.'