Robert Wilson: A Small Death in Lisbon

'Are you doing anything tonight?' I asked, leaning up against the wall outside the unnamed office, looking for something to take my mind off the monster that was forming in my head.

'Just taking Olivia to the movies.'

'To see what?'

' City of Angels'

' Again?

'She likes it,' he shrugged.

'It's a romantic movie.'

'It's not the romance she's interested in,' he said. 'She likes the idea that there's something bigger than all of us out there, acting in an unpredictable way. Not always good, not always bad. She says it makes her feel secure.'

'Maybe you have to be young to have that kind of faith in things.'

'Bad night, last night, was it?'

'I just have the feeling that there's something big on the other side of that door.'

'Why?'

'Lourenço Gonçalves… that name… whenever I've thought about it I've felt a need to do something but I've never cracked it. And now… somebody's thought it's important enough to delete the name from the missing-persons file. That never happens, not even if he's found.'

The landlord opened the door and left us to it. JoJó sat in his missing friend's chair. The office wasn't crowded out with furniture. There was a desk, another chair and a filing cabinet. There were four files in the filing cabinet and three empty drawers. The files were old. All dating to work the previous year. Carlos began taking the desk to pieces. JoJó didn't move.

'Was he working when you last saw him?' I asked.

'He always said he was working,' said JoJó. 'He just grumbled about not getting paid.'

'None of this work is current.'

'The desk is empty,' said Carlos.

I moved the filing cabinet away from the wall. There was nothing behind it. I tipped it on its back. Carlos went to the door. I fiddled with the surround of the cabinet.

'Something big on the other side of the door,' said Carlos, tapping it.

There was a large poster covering most of the door. It was a movie poster of a massive Kodiak bear in mortal combat with a man.

'He was obsessed with that movie,' said JoJó. 'It gave him his catchphrase.'

'What was the line?' asked Carlos.

'I'm going to kill the bear.'

We laughed.

'He had a sense of humour, Lourenço,' said JoJó.

'Tap that door again, Carlos,' I said.

It was hollow-sounding at the edges and solid in the middle. It was one of those cheap doors made by slapping two pieces of veneer on to a frame, and those sort of doors normally sound hollow from top to bottom.

'Take the poster off.'

Behind the poster was a panel. Carlos unscrewed it with a penknife. Set into the door was a thick file bound up with rubber bands.

'You know what that looks like,' said JoJó. 'Insurance.'

'You'd better leave now,' I said to him. He didn't want to. 'I'm telling you for your own safety.'

'If that's the bear you've found,' he said, making for the door, 'kill it.'

On the front of the file Gonçalves had written Oliveira/ Rodrigues. It was the only work in hand, and we saw why when we opened up the files. It appeared that Dr Aquilino Oliveira was the client and Miguel da Costa Rodrigues the job. In the file there were three thick dossiers containing every movement Miguel Rodrigues had ever made between August 30th of last year and June 9th of this year. Nine months' solid surveillance. In the last five months he'd only missed three Friday lunchtimes in the Pensão Nuno.

'What have you got there?' I asked.

'Photographs. Shots of girls in the street, dates on the back. Presumably girls that Rodrigues had bought. Look at them.'

'They're all blondes.'

'An obsession.'

'And that last one?'

'Catarina Oliveira.'

I shivered badly, shuddered the length of my body, as if I'd just had a trickle of liquid slime down my spine. Carlos raised his eyebrows at me.

'I was just wondering,' I said, 'what sort of a person Dr Oliveira is, to use his own daughter as bait in a murder set-up.'

'Not his own daughter.'

I planted the heels of my hands into my eye sockets and didn't move or speak for five long minutes. When I took my hands away the room was strangely dimmed, as if autumn had moved quickly into winter.

'Do I get to know?' asked Carlos, sitting across from me, looking young and unconcerned.

I had been thinking that I could stop this now, that I could shred the files and walk away. We could accept the original and believed version of events and move on. But I couldn't, I had to satisfy myself, I had to be sure that Luísa Madrugada had not been involved. And if I didn't do that… I could see myself lying in bed watching her sleep, one: of those guys like a million others, wondering why I couldn't make that ultimate commitment, but knowing too.

'What are we going to do?' asked Carlos, sensing the decision crisis.

'Did you keep all your handwritten notes on Catarina's case?'

'They're somewhere, but it's all in the reports.'

'You might think it's all there, but you and I know it's not. Not absolutely everything and that's what I have to have now. I want every single thing on Catarina's case and I'm going to read it all from beginning to end ten times over. And tomorrow we're going to Caxias Prison to see Miguel da Costa Rodrigues.

'What's he going to tell us?'

'Amongst other things, why he would think that somebody would spend nine months on his tail.'

I left the office early with the file and Carlos' notebooks and took them back home. I read everything through several times until it was late and dark and I was hungry. I had a quick steak in A Bandeira Vermelha and drank two coffees. I went back home and moved pieces of paper around again. Olivia came in about 11.00 p.m. and went straight to bed. I opened another packet of cigarettes.

By midnight I had the beginnings of three ideas. The first was to do with dates and times, but I didn't have all the information. The second was much more interesting, but I needed a photograph that wasn't in Catarina's case files. The third needed the help of Senhora Lurdes Rodrigues and another photograph I didn't have. I went to bed and didn't sleep.

Carlos was already in the office when I arrived. I'd finished the night with an hour of deep sleep between six and seven and had woken up feeling as if I'd been broken on the wheel. I sent him off to find the marriage date of Dr and Senhora Oliveira while I went to the personnel department and asked for Lourenço Gonçalves' old PJ file. I hoped he hadn't grizzled up too much because the latest photograph of him was during his last weeks as an officer with the PJ and was ten years out of date.

Carlos came back with the date of 12th May 1982 for the Oliveiras' marriage. I sent him down to the files to find a usable photograph of Xeta, the murdered male prostitute who'd been found in Alcântara and another of Teresa Oliveira looking as young as possible. I arranged with the prison in Caxias to see prisoner number 178493 at 11.30 a.m. I phoned Inácio in Narcotics and asked him whether he was still holding the fisherman, Faustinho Trindade. He wasn't.

We went first to the Rodrigues house in Lapa. The maid answered the door and left us on the step. Lurdes Rodrigues took her time coming to see us. She didn't want us in the house. Her face was unambiguously hostile.

'And now, Inspector?' she said.

'A question, Senhora Rodrigues. Did anybody you didn't know come into this house between Saturday 13th June and Friday 19th June?'

'What a question, Inspector. Do you really think I'd be able…'

'I'm talking about tradesmen, delivery men, repair men, electricity meter readers.'

'You'll have to ask the maid,' she said, backing into the house. 'She wouldn't even bother to tell me that sort of thing.'