Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

The maid came back on her own. I asked the question again. She thought about it for some time until her eyes widened with memory.

The only one I didn't know was the telephone man, but they're always different.'

'How come you remember him after all this time?'

'He wore a hat, and wouldn't take it off even when he came into the house, even when I glared at him.'

'What did he say the problem was with the phone?'

People in the area had been complaining about static. He wanted to check all our lines.'

'Was he carrying anything?'

'A suitcase of tools and one of those phones they use for testing.'

'Did you see inside the case?'

'He opened it, but I wasn't much interested.'

'Where were you?'

'There are three lines,' she said. 'One in the living room and two in Senhor Rodrigues' study. One is a fax line.'

'Did you leave him alone?'

'Of course I did. I'm not going to watch a repair man for half an hour.'

'Half an hour?'

'Maybe less.'

'Did you see his van?'

'No. He didn't have a van.'

'You left him in the study for half an hour.'

'No. Fifteen minutes in the study.'

I took out the photograph of Lourenço Gonçalves.

'Is that the man you saw?'

She glanced over the photograph, with no hint of surprise in her face.

'He was greyer,' she said, 'but that was him.'

We continued down the Marginal to Caxias. The prison, high up on the hill, must have given some of the prisoners one of the most expensive sea views in the area. We parked up outside, watched with casual interest by some T-shirted inmates behind the chainlink.

We sat in an empty interview room while the staff brought the prisoner up from the cells. Miguel Rodrigues' body wasn't looking too bad on the prison regime. He'd lost maybe fifteen kilos. His face, however, was grey with depression, his eyes dull. He'd lost his manicured sleekness, his billion-escudo glow.

'If this is about that General Machedo business,' he said, without sitting down, 'I'm not talking without my lawyer present.'

'That's Spanish business,' I said. 'I just need some help on some dates.'

'I don't have much use for dates any more,' he replied.

'This might help you.'

'Or not,' he said.

'Did you know you were being followed for nine months before your arrest?'

'By the police?'

'Privately.'

'By whom?'

'We'll come back to that.'

'To answer your question,' he said, deliberately, 'no, Inspector, I did not know that I was being followed.'

'You had two offices. One on the top floor of the Banco de Oceano e Rocha building on the Largo Dona Estefânia and the other in the Rua do Ouro.'

'That's right.'

'Until five months ago you used to spend Friday lunchtimes and afternoons in the Baixa office. Was there any reason for that?'

'I liked my privacy at the end of the week.'

'Does that mean you used to entertain women down there?'

'I thought you were going to ask me about dates.'

'We're getting there.'

'Jorge Raposo used to send girls down to those offices.'

'And what happened to make you start going to the Pensão Nuno?'

'Boredom,' he said. 'Jorge revealed another service.'

'You only ever entertained women in the Rua do Ouro offices?'

'It was private. There were no secretaries. If papers needed to be signed my secretary would have them brought down to me. It was my Friday office.'

'Was it always that way?'

Silence for some long moments.

'Since my brother died,' he said. 'That was his office. I didn't want to get rid of it. I made it my own and…'

'When was this?'

'He died New Year's Day 1982,' he said, desperation and sadness leaking into his already grey face, as if this had been a watershed moment. 'Then soon after that it started.'

'What?'

'Seeing girls. That didn't happen when Pedro was alive.'

'Who was the company lawyer at the time?'

'The lawyer?' he said, sounding surprised. 'The lawyer was Dr Aquilino Oliveira. He was my father's lawyer, too, before the revolution.'

'And what happened to him?'

Miguel Rodrigues blinked, his brain trying to make a connection that would help him see why he'd ended up in prison for killing his ex-lawyer's daughter.

'I don't know. I'm not sure what you mean.'

'He's not the lawyer any more is he?'

'No, no, he retired years ago.'

'Retired?'

'I mean he stopped working for us. It was a very confused period in file company. I remember I wanted him to stay. I wanted the continuity, but he was adamant. He said he had a new wife and he didn't want to spend too much of his later years working at high pressure. That was it. I had to accept that.'

'Did you meet his wife?'

'No, never.'

'You didn't go to the wedding.'

'It wasn't that sort of relationship.'

'Did you ever see the wife?'

'If I did, I don't remember.'

'So from early 1982 you started seeing girls in your office in the Rua do Ouro. In those first few months did any of those girls stand out: particularly?'

'I was a jaded man, Inspector. It's probably some kind of disease. I couldn't help myself. I used to feel very excited at the prospect, but afterwards it was nothing. My mind blanked the experience out. If a girl came back three or four times, maybe I'd remember her.'

'Were all these girls blonde?'

He sat with his wrists crossed between his legs and frowned, but not as if he was having to think about it, more as if he was examining new information.

'At that time, yes, they were pretty well all blondes,' he said finally. 'I've never thought of it like that. I never asked for blondes, but that seems to have been the case.'

'In those first few months of 1982 when you started seeing girls do you remember a time when you had to get rough with a particular girl… some time in April perhaps?'

'Rough?'

I took out the photograph of Teresa Oliveira. She was lying down, her dyed blonde hair all around her. She looked relaxed, asleep, not that young, certainly not as fresh as she would have been at twenty-one. I pushed the photograph across to Miguel Rodrigues. He looked down at it without picking it up.

'There's no trick to this,' I said. 'You won't be charged with anything. This woman has since died quite recently. Can you remember whether this woman ever came to your offices in the Baixa and whether you had to get rough with her, in order to have sex.'

'I don't remember,' he said. 'I really don't. It was a very difficult time for me. I'd lost my brother, his whole family, it was an awful time.'

'Your secretary at the bank. Is she still there?'

He shrugged, a little aggressively.

'Was she the same one as in 1982?'

'Yes. But look, Inspector, who is this woman?' he asked, tapping the photograph.

'You tell me,' I said.

We left Miguel Rodrigues in a state of anguish, still shouting questions to us as he was taken back down to his cell. He had less idea than we did why he'd been followed for nine months. We went back into Lisbon and straight to the Banco de Oceano e Rocha tower. We took one of the glass bubble lifts up the full height of the atrium and on to the top floor.

The top floor of the bank felt empty. Most of the staff had already been laid off. The people who remained were the key workers, being interviewed daily by the government investigators. We had to wait half an hour to talk to Miguel Rodrigues' secretary. She was in her late forties, wore spectacles and looked efficient, and slightly fierce from some recent stress lines that had appeared around her mouth. She was the kind of woman who'd know everything there was to know about the company she worked for. She recognized me from the newspapers. It tightened up her mouth.

After a look through the diaries she recalled that period in the bank's history. Early 1982 had been hell. They'd been in temporary offices in Avenida da Liberdade which were bigger than the Baixa ones but not much.