A Small Death in Lisbon

I had a bica in the Pastelaria Sequeira on the corner opposite the art nouveau school building and asked myself if I felt lucky. I had to after a weekend like that and immediately I drew a blank from the staff of the pastelaria. I went up to the cafe Bella Italia whose barman had seen Catarina come in for a coffee after the session in the Pensao Nuno. It wasn't the same barman as on Saturday, but he pointed me to an old woman who sat in the window.

'It's her first shift,' he said. 'Morning, lunchtime, end of the afternoon. Nothing happens on that stretch of pavement that she doesn't know about.'

I spoke to her. The skin of her face was like crepe paper. She wore white gloves with a single button at the wrist, a heavily pleated blue dress and hefty white, leather low-heeled shoes. She nodded at the photo of the girl. She'd seen her with a man that fitted Jamie Gallacher's description.

'They were not happy,' she said, and returned the photo.

Fifty metres down the street from the Bella Italia was the traffic light where Avenida 5° de Outubro crossed Duque de Avila. This was the point where Jamie Gallacher said Catarina got into the car. The crossroads was surrounded by apartment and office buildings. This was a place of work. At that time of the afternoon there must have been plenty of people on the street heading for their weekend. I went to the bus stop opposite the Bella Italia. As the time approached 8.00 a.m. more people arrived. If Gallacher had hit the girl there must have been someone on this side of the street who'd been at the bus stop and seen it.

Marshalling Portuguese people is not an easy thing to do, even when they're from the same family and heading for lunch, but when they're getting off a bus on the way to work they become a thunderous herd. But I was lucky that day, and so was Jamie Gallacher. I found a twenty-five-year-old marketing executive who worked for an international computer company on 5° de Outubro. She'd seen the man hit the girl and walk away down Duque de Avila. She saw three cars pull up at the traffic light. The first was small and silver, the second one was large and dark, the third white. The driver of the second car, dimly visible behind tinted glass, had leaned across the seat and shouted out of the window. The girl had come off the pavement. They'd talked briefly. The lights had changed, the silver car took off and the girl got into the passenger seat. The car had crossed Avenida 5° de Outubro and headed in the direction of the Gulbenkian Museum and the Museum of Modern Art complex.

'Did you see what make of car it was?'

'I was looking at the girl most of the time,' she said. 'I'd seen him slap her face and if he'd gone after her I'd have done something, but he didn't, he fell back on a car and its alarm went off.'

'The car the girl got into, did it look expensive?'

'It was new. The windows were tinted… that's all I can tell you. You can talk to my work colleague who was with me. He's a guy, he'll know about the car.'

The woman's work colleague remembered the car. Without a doubt, he said, it was a black Mercedes.

'If I send you some Mercedes brochures do you think you could give me a series type and a model number?'

He shrugged his eyebrows.

I took down their telephone numbers and walked back to the Policia Judiciaria building. I took a slight detour so that I could walk the length of Rua Actor Taborda and look up at Luisa's attic window. I knew she wasn't there but I wanted to enjoy feeling young and foolish. I succeeded on one count only.

I went to the personnel department in the PJ building to follow up Jorge's lead on the private detective who'd been sniffing around after Catarina in the Pensao Nuno. I asked one of the older guys if he knew of any retired policemen who were currently engaged in private work. He gave me a list of six names.

'Do you know any of these guys to look at?'

'Most of them. If I haven't seen them in the flesh I've seen their photographs.'

'Short, stocky, grey hair, no facial hair, brown eyes… wears a black, brimmed hat which he never takes off.'

'Lourenco Goncalves. He was bald and had a red birthmark on the back of his head which was why he never took the hat off.'

'Have you got a number for him?'

He told me to try the phone book and gave me the full name.

I went up to my office. Carlos had the search warrant for Valentim's garage unit. I sent him out to get the Mercedes brochures and take them round to the computer company. I had Jamie Gallacher brought up from the tacos. I called Lourenco Goncalves' apartment in Benfica. There was no reply.

I pumped Gallacher for more information on the car. He was in poor shape, but relieved and keen to help. When I saw invention begin to play behind his eyes I sent him back to the cells.

I sat down and, in an hour and a half, wrote a six-page report on the investigation. Carlos came back towards the end of that time and said that the car had been identified as a C series. I rounded off the report, collected the statements together and sent them up to Narciso. I tried Goncalves again. Still no reply. He must have a place of business. I dropped it for the moment.

By 11.30 a.m. I was sitting in front of Narciso, watching him smoke his SG Gigantes and finger my report as if it might be worth something. He went to the window. He was a small man in his mid-forties who took such care over his appearance that you'd have thought he was due on television at any moment. Even in high humidity he could always get his shirts to puff out at the back and the creases down his arms were never anything less than blade-sharp. He looked more powerful and cooler than any policeman in the building.

'How's it going with agente Pinto?' he asked, something I'd forgotten about already.

'There's nothing wrong with agente Pinto, he'll make a good detective.'

'Answer the question will you, Inspector.'

'Nobody likes him, I know.'

And you do?'

'I have no problem with him.'

'I heard there was a fight across the street on Saturday night. Your hand, you cut your hand.'

'And that fight wasn't his first?'

'I'm surprised to hear you like him, that's all.'

'He has a difficult personality but it doesn't bother me.'

Narciso turned his smooth handsome face on me. It had darkened a few shades over the sunny weekend but it hadn't warmed him up-he was still and chill as always.

'The one concern I have about your report is this spurious allegation from Senhora Oliveira about child abuse.'

'I presume she didn't make a formal complaint.'

'No, she didn't,' he said. 'She died yesterday.'

Silence. The air conditioning reached my bone marrow.

'You make that sound like natural causes.'

He shook his head.

'Overdose,' he said. 'She was found in her car parked on a street in'Sao Joao do Estoril, about three hundred metres from a friend's house where she'd spent the night.'

'A considerate woman,' I said, more guilt humped up on to my shoulders.

'We're looking into it now.'

'Who is?'

'Inspector Abilio Gomes.'

'Ask him to make sure that Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira can account for every minute of his Saturday night.'

'Which brings us back to your report.'

'The allegation, you mean.'

'An allegation made to the wrong person on an informal basis with no supporting evidence by an unstable woman with a history of barbiturate dependency.'

'Has the maid said anything?'

'Not that I know of.'

'You don't think it warrants inclusion in the report?'

'That was a good day's work, Inspector. Let's see what Valentim Almeida's garage unit produces. I want to see your report on that and the interview with him afterwards.'

I grabbed Carlos, signed out a car from the pool and headed north to Odivelas. We sat in a traffic jam on Campo Grande for half an hour. I told him about Teresa Oliveira which silenced us for several minutes. Horns blared, indifferently. Techno music thumped loudly from behind tinted windows adjacent.

'You're right about Olivia,' he said, seeing as we were following a van with that name on the back.

'Are we talking about my daughter now?'

'She's different.'

'Half-Portuguese, three-quarters English,' I said. 'What did she talk to you about?'

'She told me about a kid at her school who has his own Range Rover.'

'That doesn't sound like her to be impressed.'

'She wasn't. That's what I meant. She's different. She asked me what I thought a seventeen-year-old kid with a Range Rover could aspire to.'

'A test question-what did you say?'

'I said it could leave him free to aspire to greater things than more material wealth.'

'Did she buy that?'

'No,' he said. 'She thought he'd already been corrupted. It was good. I found I was arguing against myself for once.'

'She likes that,' I said, looking across at his face staring resolutely out of the windscreen. 'Ideas. Arguing. Intellectual aggression… it's something she rarely sees in girls her own age. What would you call her…?'

I got his attention.

'A chicken with giblets?' I asked.

The traffic jam unlocked. The vertebrae of metal snake stretched. The techno music behind the tinted glass took off. Other things were playing on Carlos' mind.

'You were in there a long time,' he said.

'What are we talking about now?'

'With Narciso,' he said. 'Was that all you talked about… Senhora Oliveira's suicide?'

And her allegation against her husband.'

'Anything else about the investigation in general?' he hedged.

'He asked how we were getting on, too.'

Carlos' hand tightened around the ceiling grip.

'I suppose he knew about the fight,' he said.

'Not your first by all accounts.'

'I had one with Fernandes in Vice.'

'I don't know Fernandes,' I said. 'What happened?'

'Fernandes is a pig,' he said, jutting his face at the windscreen. 'He had something going with some pimps and their girls. He wanted to initiate me into his little score. I refused. He asked me if little boys was more my thing and I hit him.'

'You've got to try and lengthen that fuse of yours, you know.'

'I overdid it, too. I punched him in the gut and he didn't get off the floor for fifteen minutes. I was transferred away from him the next day.'

'I'm glad we didn't get that far.'

'I'd never have hit you. You had every right to be angry. When I told my father what I'd said to you, he damn nearly beat me up himself.'

'He sounds a good man.'

'He's a hard, proud Alentejano who still eats pig's tail and ears at Christmas.'

'Boiled or what?'

'No, no, grilled.'

'He must be a hard man.'