Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

We drove out to Paço de Arcos. Olivia had already eaten and was watching television at my sister's house. I took Luísa to A Bandeira Vermelha and a cheerful António Borrego served us his dish of the day. It was one of his favourite Alentejano concoctions- ensopado de borrego -a large tureen of lamb broth with neck chops and breast stewed until the meat has all but parted from the bone. Nobody cooked it like him. He opened a bottle of red Borba Reserva '94 and left: us to it.

I sipped the wine and ate some cheese and olives. I didn't feel like talking even. Luísa was annoyed with me for dragging her away from the party. To her it was an opportunity to network in her new role as fearless publisher, and she would have preferred to stay.

'Eventually you'll tell me what the problem is,' she said, lighting a cigarette in time for the arrival of the main course.

'I'm depressed.'

'Is that a post-trial policeman thing, like post-natal depression is for women?'

'I don't think so.'

'Maybe you've got post-event blues… now you've got to get back to real life.'

'I want to get back to real life.'

'I don't have to tell you all the reasons why you shouldn't be depressed. Promotion. Pay rise. Pinnacle of your career. A bad man put away for life.'

'None of that matters. What matters is being here, eating António's ensopado de borrego, drinking red wine with you. I was not built for drinking champagne with arseholes. This is the best thing…'

'The best thing?'

'All right, we've…'

'Relax, Zé. I'm teasing.'

I sucked some more lamb bones, drank more red wine. We finished the meal. António cleared everything away and brought two glasses of aguardente and two bicas. We smoked. Luísa refused to coax me out of my mood. The bar emptied. António loaded the dishwasher. Tyres ripped along the Marginal. A bitter wind moved through the trees of the park.

'He didn't do it,' I said.

'What are we talking about now?' asked Luísa.

'The reason why I'm depressed,' I said, 'is that Miguel Rodrigues or Manuel Abrantes did not murder Catarina Oliveira.'

'How long have you been thinking this?'

'Do you want the truth or the media version?'

'Don't be a chato, Zé.'

'No, you're right. I'm being a chato to the last person I should be a chato to. I thought he didn't do it, from the moment I found the girl's clothes in his study.'

'Which was amongst the most damning pieces of evidence in the whole trial.'

'Exactly… with those clothes in his possession he became the stripper of the body and therefore the most likely murderer.'

'And you think somebody else put the clothes there?'

'Two things. Miguel Rodrigues was supposedly harassing me on and off the case. I wasn't getting the information on the car from Traffic. I was taken off the job. I was invaded by Narcotics. I was pushed under a tram. If he was feeling the heat that much, why didn't he get rid of one of the most damaging pieces of evidence against him? And the second thing. Why weren't the girl's knickers with the…'

It was at this point that the parasites got out of control, and the most virulent and debilitating of the diseases of the famous ran through me like a bad case of malaria. I got a large, ugly dose of paranoia.

Nobody knows the famous, the famous know nobody.

'With the what?' asked Luísa, who'd reared back at the same time. 'Why are you looking at me like that?'

'How am I looking at you? I don't mean to…'

'You're looking at me as if you're looking into me, as if you're looking into the back of my head.'

'It's nothing. I don't know what I'm thinking any more.'

It wasn't true. I did know what I'd been thinking. I'd been thinking that I'd got a lot of harassment, right up to the moment when I landed Miguel Rodrigues, and having landed him under those difficult circumstances, I had to find a way of getting public opinion on my side. And what happened? My girlfriend of one week is an expert on the Salazar Economy, she's already been looking at the Banco de Oceano e Rocha, she produces the name Klaus Felsen, she has a father in magazine publishing, who's looking for a big story for a launch issue that's ready to go. And when the story broke it was all so easy. Narciso was suddenly as dreamy as a pastel de nata from the Antiga Confeitaria in Belem. And I was desperately hanging on to the mane of a bare-back media stallion, galloping across the open plains.

It is the nature of paranoia that things which had seemed so right at the time suddenly become inflamed with suspicion. And once I'd started thinking like that, other thoughts began to assert themselves. Who had given me Luísa Madrugada's number? Dr Aquilino Oliveira.

Like pure quinine for a bad malaria attack, there's only one cure for paranoia-the absolute, undiluted truth. The arranged truth, even though there is some justice in it, will never be good enough, will never absolve the most important people.

I was sick and I had to have the one and only cure.

If, then, I could have thought beyond the tight circles in my head, I would have realized that, in reaching for the pure truth, I was going to disrupt the arranged one. If it had been arranged, then it had been arranged by somebody. Somebody powerful and somebody vindictive, who would not take kindly to the disruption.

I looked at Luísa again, trying not to dig under the surface. António Borrego, the only man still letting me pay for my food and drink, put the bill down between us.

I sat at my desk and booted up the computer. I accessed the missing-persons file and put in a search for Lourenço Gonçalves to see if he'd reappeared or been found. There was no record of a missing-persons report being logged. I looked out of the window at the brilliant sunshine and shivered.

I found Carlos and took him for a walk down to Avenida Almirante Reis. It was cold, very dry, and the wind was a lacerating northerly. There'd been no rain this year. The last three years it had rained the whole of November until I felt as depressed as an Englishman. This year it had been eerie. No rain. Day after day of brilliant sunshine, cloudless skies. And rather than joy, it brought with it the chilling notion that the planet had been irrevocably damaged.

The small, narrow bar between the Anjos and Arroios Metro stations where I'd first met JoJó Silva was packed with mid-morning coffee-drinkers. We went straight to the back of the café. JoJó Silva was sitting at a table staring into an empty coffee cup as if the grounds were going to tell him this week's lottery numbers. I blocked out his light. He looked up.

'Do they let you take your own calls yet, Inspector?' he asked.

'I stopped being a demi-god as from yesterday.'

'Welcome back to mortality.'

'What's going on, JoJó?'

'Nothing… as usual.'

'You didn't file a missing-persons report on your friend.'

'Lourenço Gonçalves?' he said. 'I did, Inspector. Oh yes, I did that. It was the least I could do for him. Why do you think I've been calling you and been told you're not available for the last three months? I even tried you yesterday.'

'Yesterday?' I said, knowing his name hadn't appeared on the message list.

'You want to know why I called you yesterday… of all the days?' he asked. 'The rent is up on Lourenço's office. He's not in a position to renew the lease, so the landlord is going to clear the place and rent it out to someone who exists. And once that's happened, Inspector… he really is lost. Wiped clean.'

The three of us crossed Avenida Almirante Reis to a 1960s featureless office building. Carlos and I went up to the second floor, while JoJó found the landlord and the key. It took him some time.