A Small Death in Lisbon

‘My father was over there,’ I said. ‘So what do you know about?’

‘Your father was an army officer. You spent a lot of time in Africa. In Guinea. You’ve been seventeen years on the force, eight of them as a homicide detective.’

‘Have you accessed my file?’

‘No. I asked Engenheiro Narciso. He didn’t tell me everything,’ he said, sucking in his thick coffee. ‘He didn’t say what rank your father was for instance.’

António’s eyebrows switched back again and a glint of partisan interest came from deep in his eye sockets. A political question: was my father one of the younger officers who started the 1974 revolution, or old guard? Both men waited.

‘My father was a colonel,’ I said.

‘How did he end up in London?’

‘Ask him,’ I said, nodding to António, no appetite for this.

‘How long have you got?’ he asked, gripping the edge of the bar.

‘No time at all,’ I said. ‘There’s a dead body waiting for us on the beach.’

We crossed the gardens to the Marginal and went through the underpass to a small car park in front of the Clube Desportivo de Paço de Arcos. There was a dried-fish and diesel smell amongst the old boats lying on their sides or propped up on tyres amongst rusted trailers and rubbish bins. A halved oil drum was smoking with two planks of wood burning to heat a pan of oil. A couple of fishermen I knew were ignoring the scene and sorting through the marker buoys and crab and lobster pots in front of their corrugated-iron work shacks. I nodded and they looked across to the crowd that had already formed even at this early hour.

The line of people that had gathered at the low stone balustrade on the edge of the beach and along the harbour wall were looking down on to the sand. Some broad-backed working women had taken time out to distress themselves over the tragedy, muttering through their fingers:

‘Ai Mãe, coitadinha.’ O mother, poor little thing.

There were four or five Polícia de Segurança Pública boys ignoring the total contamination of the crime scene and talking to two members of the Polícia Marítima. Another two hours and there’d be girls on the beach to chat up and then not even the Polícia Marítima would have had a look in. I introduced myself and asked them who’d found the body. They pointed to a fisherman sitting further along the harbour wall. The position of the body above the flattened sand of the highest tide mark told me that the victim hadn’t been washed up but dumped, thrown, from just about where I was standing, off the harbour wall. It was a three-metre drop.

The Polícia Marítima were satisfied that the body hadn’t been washed up but wanted it confirmed from the pathologist that there was no water in the lungs. They gave me authority to start my investigation. I sent the PSP men along the harbour wall to move the onlookers back to the road.

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 Direcção de Farois to ask them to phone the Polícia Marítima.

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 25th 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 Búgio 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.’