Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'I worked in a garage. I only know about old cars that don't work. Like Alfa Romeos.'

'Girls?'

'I don't have a girlfriend.'

'Still not the point. Are you gay?'

You'd have thought I'd slipped a sharpened screwdriver between his ribs.

'No,' he said, mortally wounded.

'Would you have told me if you were?'

'I'm not.'

'Do you think any of our colleagues talk to each other like this?' He looked out of the window.

'That's why they put us together,' I said. 'We're the outsiders, we're weird.'

We lunched on bifanas, a sandwich but with a hot slice of pork as a filling-an Anglo-Portuguese solution to lunch. I teased Carlos back round to me, cooled his temper. We ordered coffee. I handed over my sugar without a word. He asked me about my wife-something nobody ever did. He asked me what it was like being married to an Englishwoman.

'What was the difference, you mean?' I asked, and he shrugged, not that sure what he meant. 'The only differences we had were on how to bring up Olivia, our daughter. We had fights about that. She had fights about that with my parents. It was a cultural thing. You know how it is in Portugal.'

'We're pampered every inch of the way.'

'And adored. Maybe we have a romantic vision of childhood, that it should be a golden time with no responsibilities, no pressure,' I said, remembering all the old arguments. 'We cosset our kids, we let them know they're a gift to us, we encourage them to think they're special. And, for the most part, they come out confident, happy people. The English don't think like that. They're more pragmatic and they don't indulge… well, my wife didn't anyway.'

'So what's she like… Olivia?' he asked, getting used to the name.

'As it turned out the English upbringing was the best thing. She's a sixteen-year-old girl going on twenty-one. She can take care of herself. She can take care of me. She has taken care of me-that was how she managed her grief. She's socially adept too. She can handle situations on her own. She does things. She's a brilliant seamstress. It was my wife's hobby. The two of them spent all day running up clothes, talking to each other all the time. But I still don't know whether it was what I would call a childhood. It drove me crazy sometimes. When Olivia was a little girl my wife wouldn't listen to her unless she talked sense. If she wanted to talk little kid's rubbish she had to come to me… And, you know, sometimes that comes out… she has a need to prove herself all the time, to be good at things, to always be interesting. She can't always live up to her own high standards. Look, you've started me off now. I'll shut up, or you'll get this for the rest of the day.'

'How did your wife like the Portuguese?'

'She liked us,' I said. 'Most of the time.'

'Did you tell her?'

'That we're not so nice to each other? She knew. And anyway, the English hate each other even more, but at least- she said this-the Portuguese like foreigners, which the English don't. She also said I had a jaded view of my countrymen from talking to liars and murderers all the time.'

'She couldn't have liked everybody. '

'She didn't like bureaucrats, but then I told her they were specially trained. It's all that's left of the Inquisition.'

'What did she really hate about the Portuguese? There must have been something she really hated.'

'The television programmes never came on time.'

'Come on. She could do better than that.'

'She hated Portuguese men in their cars, especially the ones who accelerated when they saw they were being overtaken by a woman. She said it was the only time she saw us macho. She always knew she was going to die on the roads and she did.'

Silence. He wasn't satisfied though.

'There must have been something else. Something worse than that.'

'She used to say: the quickest way to get trampled to death is to come between the Portuguese and their lunch.'

'Not the lunch we've just had… and anyway that just means we're hungry. Come on… what else?' said Carlos, that inferiority complex of his trying to push me to further extremes.

'She thought that we didn't believe in ourselves.'

'Ah.'

'Any more questions?'

None.

Teresa Carvalho, the keyboards player, lived with her parents in an apartment building in Telheiras, which is not far from Odivelas on the map, but a steep climb on the money ladder. This is where you come when your first cream has risen to the top of your milk. Insulated buildings, pastel shades, security systems, garage parking, satellite dishes, tennis clubs, ten minutes from the airport, five minutes from either football stadium and Colombo. It's wired up but dead out here, like pacing through a cemetery of perfect mausoleums.

The Carvalhos had the penthouse. The lift worked. An Angolan maid kept us outside while she took our IDs in to Senhor Carvalho. She showed us into his study. He sat behind his desk with his elbows and hairy forearms braced. He wore a red YSL polo shirt with more hair pouring up out of the neck. His head was nut-brown with not a strand of hair across it. His moustache was strong enough that he must have trimmed it with bolt cutters. He tilted his head forward so that he looked at us from under where the boss of his horns should have been. He was less friendly than a bull with six bandarilhas in its back. The maid closed the door with the faintest click as if the slightest thing could draw the big bad bull's attention.

'What do you want to talk to my daughter about?' he asked.

'This wouldn't be your first visit from the Policía Judiciária ,' I said. 'Has your daughter been in trouble before?'

'She's never been in any trouble, but that doesn't stop the police from trying to push her into some.'

'We're Homicide, not Narcotics.'

'But you knew.'

'A guess,' I said. 'What are they talking to her about?'

'Manufacture and supply.'

'Of what?'

'Ecstasy,' he said. 'Her chemistry lecturer at the university is being held for questioning. He gives out names to make his life easier. One of them was my daughter's.'

I explained our business and he slowly released himself from the harness of his anger. He went to get his daughter. I called Fernanda Ramalho on my mobile. The pathologist might have been a marathon runner, but she gave her information out in one-hundred-metre sprints.

'Things you might be interested in,' she said. 'Time of death: near enough six or six-thirty P.M. on Friday. Cause of death: asphyxiation by strangulation, pressure applied by gloved thumbs to the windpipe (no nail marks on her neck). The blow to the back of the head: she was only hit once by something very hard and heavy, not an iron bar-the shattered cranium and the area of contusion suggest something like a sledgehammer. She was definitely unconscious when asphyxiated. I can't find any evidence of a serious struggle, no abrasions apart from the one on her forehead which was caused by contact with a pine tree. There was bark in the wound. She had nothing under her fingernails. Sexual activity: you're not going to like this. She had been penetrated both vaginally and anally. Condoms were used. No semen deposits. There were traces of a water-based lubicrant in her rectum and the damage to her sphincteral muscle would suggest that she had not practised anal sex before. Blood: her blood group is unusual, AB negative, and there were traces of three, four methylenedioxymethamphetamine… also known as E or Ecstasy. She had also smoked cannabis and there were traces of caffeine.'

'Anything in her stomach?'

'She hadn't eaten anything for lunch.'