Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'Do you remember a Friday in late April or May,' I asked, 'a young woman from the lawyer's office coming in to get some papers signed? Probably urgent papers and probably a lunchtime.'

'I normally sent one of our own girls down…'

She was a blonde girl, no more than twenty-one years old.'

'Yes, I do remember her,' she said. 'She got married to our lawyer, Dr Oliveira. She was his secretary. I thought about her just the other day. I used to see her in VIP. She died you know.'

'Did she ever go down to Senhor Rodrigues' office around April, May 1982… on her own.'

The secretary blinked behind her gold-framed glasses.

Yes, she did. It was the week before she got married. And she didn't come up here any more after that. Yes, there was nobody available to take the papers down to Senhor Rodrigues and she said she'd do it herself.'

I showed her the photograph of Teresa Oliveira and she nodded slowly.

She doesn't look so well in this photograph,' she said.

We went for a late lunch in a small seafood restaurant on Avenida Almirante Reis. I had grilled squid, Carlos went for the cuttlefish in its own ink, which my wife had always referred to as the tarry gym shoe. We drank a half-bottle of white and finished with coffee.

'Maybe you should have told Miguel Rodrigues who the woman in the photograph was,' said Carlos, meaning Teresa Oliveira.

'I'd have had to spell it out for him,' I said, 'and prison is a lonely place full of nothing but the smell of men cooped up together and empty time. Miguel Rodrigues is serving a minimum of twenty years for a crime he did not commit. I don't like him. I don't think he's a good man. He's possibly a sick man. But I am not going to be the one to inflict on his mind the fact that he sodomized his own daughter.'

There was a prolonged silence while Carlos stirred his coffee up to the required syrup.

'If he raped her, why didn't she report it?' he asked.

'She was a young woman on the brink of a brand-new life. A week away from getting married. And that's quite apart from it being 1982. The feminist movement hadn't exactly built up a head of steam in Portugal by then. You'd have had a job to find women anywhere, even in England, prepared to report rape in those days. Think about it. It would have had an impact on her marriage, it would have destroyed a large chunk of her husband's business, there would have been a long, intrusive investigation, perhaps with a trial at the end of it. No… she just hoped it would go away and maybe it would have done, if she hadn't got pregnant. When that baby was born with those blue eyes… that must have been a hard day.'

We paid the bill and walked back up over dry, dead leaves to where we'd left the car. The kids had come out in the Arroios park to run screaming through the pigeons which swooped over the old boys playing cards in their woollen hats.

'So, we have a motive now,' said Carlos.

'I don't think we've got all of it yet. This was just the obsession of the man-he was going to bring Miguel Rodrigues down. But I think there's something else in this.'

'And the killer?'

'We'll find the killer.'

'You don't think Dr Oliveira paid someone to kill her.'

'Like Lourenço Gonçalves?'

'Possibly.'

'I don't think so. I think his obsession was a little more refined.'

We stopped under a shop's awning while a blast of freeze-dried air shot through the Largo Dona Estefânia.

'And what now?' asked Carlos.

'We go to Paço de Arcos and find Faustinho Trindade.'

'You don't sound happy about this.'

'I'm not.'

'If you think some justice has been done, why don't you leave it?'

'Don't you want to nail Dr Oliveira?' I asked, hating myself for asking it.

'We'll be interfering, won't we?'

'We will.'

'They've achieved some kind of result.'

'Are you including the Minister of Internal Administration in "they"?'

'I think I might be.'

'And all those big men who came to watch my first interview with Miguel Rodrigues… those spectators at the coliseum, who enjoy the smell of blood as long as it's not their own?'

He swallowed hard, disgusted by it. I put my arm around his shoulder.

Let's go to Paço de Arcos,' I said. 'And take it from there.'

The traffic was terrible in Lisbon and out on the Marginal there'd been a four-car smash, the blood fresh and bright on the tarmac under the setting sun. It was early evening by the time we arrived in Paço de Arcos, the sea already dark, but choppy in the wind with white caps still visible in the failing light. The horizon was just a crack of light with two long, grey melancholic streaks of cloud. I did a small circuit through the town and came back on to the Marginal heading for Lisbon. We pulled into the car park by the boatyard of the Clube Nautico.

There were a couple of anglers out on the stone quay. I didn't know what they were expecting to catch in this weather but then fishing doesn't always seem to be about catching fish. The lighthouse on Búgio was already flashing. Three ships sat off the Costa do Estoril, their cabin areas lit. Faustinho was in his work shed, wearing a pair of blue overalls and a heavy jacket, working with very little light on a stripped-down outboard motor. His hands were dry and scaly with the cold. His dog got up and sniffed us over.

'When did you get out, Faustinho?' I asked.

'Just under a week ago and I'm not talking about it, Zé. I'm sorry if I caused trouble for you, but I'm not going to say anything. It's finished.'

'You should find a workshop to do this,' I said.

'It's too expensive.'

'You remember that kid…'

'Look, Zé… I told you,' he stopped. 'The kid… what kid?'

'You remember that kid you told me about, who saw something that night before the girl's body was found on the beach?'

'I never saw him again,' he said. 'He used to spend quite a lot of the summer out here… but this year…'

'Is this the one?'

Carlos handed him the photograph of Xeta.

'That's him,' he said, taking it down to the light, looking at it more closely. 'He's dead, isn't he? This is a photograph of a dead person.'

I nodded. Carlos took the photograph back.

'What does that mean?' he asked.

I looked across the Marginal, the town dark behind the trees in the park.

'It means that maybe we're going to have to look closer to home,' I said.

We went through the underpass and up into the public gardens. They were empty. The wind buffeted the trees. The paths were covered in their dry, scratching detritus. I wiped a bench off and we sat down. António's bar was shut, no lights on, and we could have used a drink.

'Remember what I said to you that first morning,' said Carlos, 'about the significance of the body being here, and you living nearby?'

'We've come full circle,' I said. 'We lost sight of that. I lost sight of it.'

A white car pulled up outside A Bandeira Vermelha. António Borrego got out and opened the boot. He lifted out a box of fruit, vegetables and a separate one of meat. He put them back in, opened the door to the bar and turned the light on. He went back to the boot.

'It's nice to see one of those still running,' said Carlos.

And now, finally, you start talking about cars,' I said.

'That ,' said Carlos, 'is a Renault 12. Car of the Year back in the 1980s some time. My father had one… but his was a pile of shit. I spent a lot of my youth working on one of those.'

The two ventricles of my heart iced up. Suddenly the blood was only going through in thin spurts and the oxygen in my breathing hard to find.