Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'I wouldn't mind some more nonsense myself,' I said. 'I don't get enough nonsense. Too much senselessness, not enough nonsense.'

'I got up at eight. By nine I was working. It was perfect. Everything was coming out just right. Then I heard some kids playing in the street, but there's no traffic, and I remember it's Saturday and that's why I'm working and not teaching. Then I think: What are kids doing in the city on the first hot day of summer? What am I doing in the city? Why aren't I having lunch with somebody out on the beach? Why isn't someone taking me out to lunch on the beach? Why am I sitting indoors writing learned rubbish that only five people will ever read? I can feel the pointlessness beginning to break like a tidal wave, so before it does I go back to work. I work all afternoon… and nobody calls me. They're all out at the beach.'

'Mine's the only call you get.'

'My saviour.'

'The police.'

She laughed.

'That is your job, isn't it?'

I ducked out of that one. I haven't been in the saving business for years. I've been in the picking-up-the-pieces business.

'I was lucky you were in,' I said. 'One other phone call and you'd have been gone.'

'I was always going to be in,' she said, a little melancholy creeping into the room.

'Not just work?'

'No,' she said and took a careful look at me, then shrugged. 'I split up with a boyfriend recently and fell off the edge of the earth. But anyway, that's not nonsense, that's deadly, seriously boring.'

'A long-term relationship?'

'Too long. So long we didn't get married,' she said, and then caught me on the hop. 'What about you?'

'What about me?' I said, defensive, only used to dealing the questions, nobody ever asking me anything personal.

'Are you married?'

'I was for eighteen years.'

'Police work probably isn't that good for marriage.'

'She died.'

'I'm sorry.'

'About a year ago,' I said and then thought of something which I said out loud, 'which means, in fact, that I was married for seventeen years, I suppose. I just still…'

It had grown darker in the room. We were sitting out of the restricted light from the table lamp and were now upright on the edges of our chairs, trying to see each other's faces in the warm dusk.

'I've been coming to the surface,' I said, stirred by the intimacy present in the room, and then disturbed by it, I pulled out. 'But that, too, is probably deadly, seriously boring.'

'And this is what happens to us.'

'What?'

'The deadly, seriously boring people end up working on Saturday afternoons. It's the only thing that makes us feel worth something.'

'I have a daughter. That helps. And I'm working only because a faceless man on the end of a mobile phone assigns things to me and I obey.'

'What sort of an assignment could bring you to my door? Is one of my kids in trouble?'

'You've had no calls today?'

'Don't rub it in.'

'Which of your kids do you think would be in trouble?'

'Boy or girl?'

'Girl.'

'Catarina Sousa Oliveira.'

'First time.'

'I thought somebody would be coming to talk to me about her in the end.'

'What about?'

'Drugs, probably.'

'I'm with Homicide.'

She put her hands up to her face. The word had chilled her. She went over to the window and opened a shutter to let more light in and some of the day's residual warmth.

'What's happened?' she asked.

'She was murdered yesterday, late afternoon,' I said. 'I'm surprised nobody's called you. Dr Oliveira said he tried last night.'

'I was out with my sister in the Alfama.'

'You were expecting trouble with drugs,' I said.

'I see it as part of my job to look for signs. Needle rash, dilated pupils, poor concentration, loneliness.'

'How many of those did Catarina have?'

'Everything except the needle rash.'

'Did you talk to her about it?'

'Of course. I talk to all the suspect kids.'

'Why was she lonely?'

'That doesn't mean she wasn't popular. You know how it is. She had talent. It attracted a lot of attention. She had a great voice and the blonde hair and blue eyes. A lot of the kids liked her and wanted to be like her… but she didn't have any friends amongst them… too far ahead for that.'

'You heard her sing?'

'It wasn't a beautiful voice, nothing clear or sweet about it but it could raise the hairs on the back of your neck. She could do fado but what she really liked was black music, the blues numbers… Billie Holiday. She loved doing Billie Holiday.'

'And she had plenty to cry about,' I said. 'What about mood swings?'

'She hasn't been so bad this term. She went through a patch of incredible anger. She'd go puce and look as if she was going to toss her desk out of the window, then she'd calm down just as quickly and go morose. I talked to her mother and things got better almost instantly.'

'She didn't have any medication in her blood.'

'Maybe she stopped taking whatever was causing the trouble.'

'She was sexually active in an extreme way for a girl her age. Were you aware of any relationships within the school?'

'Nothing happens in that place without the whole world knowing about it, but sometimes rumour is more exciting than the truth, and it's not so easy to distinguish, so I don't talk about what I hear.'

'I'm only interested in what you've seen.'

She came back from the window and sat on the edge of her chair again.

'I'll put it another way,' I said. 'I've retraced her steps from a Pensáo in Rúa da Gloria to the café down the street from the school, La Bella Italia, at around two-fifteen. She went to school, I presume. She wouldn't have come all this way not to.'

'She was in my class until close to four-thirty.'

'Then what?'

She wrung her hands and looked into the floor.

'I saw her leave the building. She was with this guy, a young guy who's teaching English Language. He's Scottish. Jamie Gallacher. He was talking to her on the corner of the street and she wasn't talking back. Then she walked off up Duque de Ávila and he followed… that's all I saw.'

'Was that unusual?'

'If you listened to the rumour there was something going on there. I heard that Catarina would go back to his apartment after school sometimes. But that is not reliable and shouldn't appear in any of your reports. It's girl talk.'

'What do you make of Jamie Gallacher?'

'He's OK, but he's like a lot of these English people. He likes to drink and he drinks heavily… and then he's not such a nice guy.'

The mule train had split up. Abrantes had sent the younger man on ahead. He was cursing himself for overloading the mules but there was no sense in leaving just a few hundred kilos behind for another trip. Two of the mules had broken down, one lame, the other with a snapped girth. They'd tried to spread their loads out over the other mules, but it was impossible, they risked losing more. There'd been no let-up in the weather which had turned colder, bringing ice in the rain on the back of a fierce north-easterly, while black clouds crowded the hills.

Abrantes and one of his men, Salgado, unloaded the mules. While Abrantes worked on one mule's hoof, Salgado did his best to repair the torn leather strap of the other. They were down by the river when they heard them. Men on horseback. The guarda. One of the regular border patrols. The two men looked at the wolfram, over two hundred kilos of it, nearly one hundred and fifty thousand escudos' worth. They pinched their cigarettes out and calmed the animals.

Abrantes jerked his head at Salgado and they picked up a sixty-kilo sack of wolfram each and staggered to the edge of the freezing river. Salgado wanted to drop his in at the edge but Abrantes urged him out into the faster flowing water in the middle. They went back. Salgado couldn't manage the second one, so they picked up the next two sacks between them and waded out. They went back to the mules and coaxed them into the water and back out again. They could still hear the horses of the guarda closer now but not making progress, assessing the situation.