A Small Death in Lisbon

‘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, the one who taught her on Friday afternoon, wasn’t available. You know . . . it was Santo António . . .’

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 António 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 Paço 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 Belém past the Bunker, or the new Cultural Centre as it is sometimes known, and the gothic intricacies of the Jerónimos 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, façades 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 Alcântara. 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 Sodré 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.’

‘Why speculate when you can call him on his mobile?’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m kidding.’

The yellow façade and the massive triumphal arch of the Terreiro do Paço sucked us away from the river towards the grid of the Baixa valley between the hills of the Fort of São Jorge and the Bairro Alto. The temperature hit thirty degrees. Fat, ugly bronzes loafed in the square. The lawyer’s Morgan cut right down the Rua da Alfândega and left into Rua da Madalena which climbed steeply before dropping away into the new-look Largo de Martim Moniz with its glass and steel box kiosks and disinterested fountains. We skirted the square and accelerated up the slope of the Rua de São Lázaro past the Hospital de São José and into the square dominated by the pedimented, pillared façade of the Institute of Medicine. We parked close to the statue of Dr Sousa Martins, his plinth heaped with stone tablets of thanks, wax limbs and candles. Dr Oliveira was already parked and walking down the hill to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. Carlos took his jacket off and revealed a long dark stripe of sweat-soaked shirt.

By the time we arrived in the Institute the lawyer was using all his training to get what he wanted – the staff, however, were more difficult to impress than a judge. I left him with Carlos and arranged for the body to be displayed. An orderly brought in Dr Oliveira, who had removed his dark glasses and now wore the bifocals. The assistant drew the sheet back. The lawyer blinked twice and nodded. He took the sheet from the assistant and pulled it back to see the whole body which he inspected closely. He drew the sheet back over her face and left the room.

We found him standing outside in the cobbled street. He was cleaning his sunglasses endlessly and wearing an expression of extreme determination.

‘I am sorry for your loss, Senhor Doutor,’ I said. ‘I apologize for not telling you earlier. You have every right to be angry.’

He didn’t look angry. The initial determination had flagged and the confusion of emotions that had followed had left his face strangely flaccid. He looked as if he was concentrating on his breathing.

‘Let’s walk up here and sit in the gardens in the shade,’ I said.

We walked on either side of him through the cars, past the good doctor’s statue which rather than being imbued with the success of the cured was, in its pigeon-shit-spattered state, infused with the sadness of those who’d been lost. The three of us sat on a bench in surprising cool some distance from the pigeon-feeders and the coffee-drinkers idling in plastic chairs around the café.

‘You may be surprised to know that I am glad that you are investigating the murder of my daughter,’ said the lawyer. ‘I know you have a difficult job and I also realize that I am a suspect.’