Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'She said your marriage hadn't worked from the beginning. I thought fifteen years was a long time for a relationship not to be working. She seemed to be scared of you and dependent on you. Your small exercise in humiliation at the beginning of the investigation confirmed that.'

'And you don't think I was humiliated by her having an affair with a boy ten years her junior, Inspector?' he said, fast and fierce, almost hissing it.

'When did you find out about the lover?'

'I don't remember.'

'Last summer possibly?'

'Yes, yes… it was last summer.'

'How?'

'I found a receipt for a shirt from a shop I don't use.'

'Did you confront her with it?'

'I watched and waited. The shirt could have been for her brother, after all. I knew it wasn't, but my profession demands that I am certain.'

'So how did you confront her with it?'

The question knocked him back. He tried to cover his reaction by an elaborate alteration of position. It snapped him out of the cosiness of our dialogue. His finger had brushed the truth and found it razor-sharp. His surface temperature dropped quickly to sub-zero.

'None of this is relevant to the investigation of my daughter's death, Inspector. More especially now that you are no longer working on the case.'

'I thought we were just talking.'

He leaned forward and sipped his coffee. He removed a small cigar from a box on his desk. He offered me one. I declined and lit a cigarette of my own. He smoked and uncreased himself. My question burned inside me.

'You were telling me what my wife said to you that night,' he said.

'She said things, very important things, without explaining them and I was very tired after a long day. She said your marriage had never worked but not why. She said you were a powerful man and that you extended that power into your intimate relationships but she didn't say how. She made a very serious allegation but offered no evidence to back it up. It was not…'

'…a conversation with somebody of sound mind,' he finished.

'There were traces of the truth, I thought.'

'What was the serious allegation?'

'She said you were abusing Catarina sexually.'

'Do you believe that?'

'She offered no evidence…'

'But do you believe it?'

'I'm a homicide detective, Senhor Doutor. People lie to me, not just occasionally, they lie to me all the time. I listen. I cross-reference. I probe further. I examine evidence. I find witnesses. And if I'm lucky I can put together enough facts to make a case. But one thing I can assure you of, Senhor Doutor , if somebody tells me something, I don't automatically believe them. If I did, we could empty our prisons of all those innocents and refurbish them into pousadas.'

'What did you say to her?'

My insides winced at that. A nagging memory. A prickling responsibility.

'I told her to proceed with extreme caution… to get a lawyer and some evidence would help.'

He sucked on his cigar, the lawyer observing the weak point.

'Sound advice,' he said. 'Did you tell her you were not the right person to be speaking to, that if…'

'I did.'

'So why do you think she came to you, Inspector?'

I didn't answer.

'Do you think she was trying to influence you perhaps… your attitude to me, for instance?'

Still I didn't answer and the lawyer came across the desk at me.

'Perhaps she offered as evidence our daughter's promiscuity, her complete disdain for any sexual morality brought about by what…? A confusion. The man, in whose unconditional love she completely trusted, took advantage of her innocence… Yes. I imagine that would do it. That would qualify as a trauma and the promiscuity as a neurosis. Am I right? Was that my wife's thinking?'

The pressure of the man's intelligence, its rapacity, had the boiling intensity of a piranha shoal stripping a body down to its skeleton. Why did you marry her? I thought. Why did she marry you? Why did you stay with each other?

'I'm right,' he said, slumping back. 'I know I'm right.'

He crushed out his cigar with venom, until he felt himself observed. I stood, annoyed and confused, my initiative gone. I opened the door to l eave, my question still unanswered, the weight not with me to ask it yet.

'There are two forms of child abuse, Senhor Doutor ,' I said. 'The one you read about is sexual abuse. It's more shocking. But the other type can be just as brutal.'

'What's that?'

'Withholding love.'

I went into the corridor, closed the door and then reopened it.

'I forgot to ask, Senhor Doutor. Do you have another car apart from the Morgan? I imagine that's your fun car and you have something more formal as well.'

'A Mercedes.'

'Was that the car your wife was driving on Sunday night?'

'Yes it was.'

I sat in the public gardens outside the lawyer's house and waited for Mariana, the maid, to come out, which she did at lunchtime. I followed her. She was a small, thick-set woman not much more than a metre and a half tall. She had dark shiny hair curled tight around her head. She was the type of person you take one look at and trust completely, the kind of woman, perhaps, that Dr Oliveira didn't deserve to have working for him. I caught up with her on a steep cobbled street, startling her.

'Can we talk for a few minutes?' I asked.

She didn't want to.

'Let's walk,' I said, and stepped into the road to let her have the narrow shaded pavement. 'You're upset.'

She nodded.

'Dona Oliveira was a good person?'

'She was,' she said. 'An unhappy woman, but a good person.'

'Will you carry on working for Dr Oliveira?'

She didn't answer. Her low heels clattered on the cobbles.

'Was Catarina a good person, Mariana?'

'I've worked for Dr Oliveira for nine years. That's how long I've known Catarina, every weekend and every summer for nine years, Inspector… and no, she was not a good person, but it wasn't her fault.'

'Even when she was six years old?'

'I have an understanding of unhappiness, Inspector. That of the rich, is not much different to that of the poor. My husband is a drinker. It changes him and he makes my children unhappy. But at least when he is sober he still loves his children.'

'And Dr Oliveira doesn't?'

She didn't answer. She couldn't bring herself to say such a thing.

'Dona Oliveira tried to give that child all the love she had, but Catarina didn't want it. She hated her mother and, you know, the strangest thing… she'd do anything for her father.'

'Dona Oliveira came to see me the night before she died.'

Mariana crossed herself rapidly.

'She told me that Dr Oliveira had been abusing Catarina sexually.'

Mariana slipped on the cobbles. I grabbed her. She backed into a wall and stood there appalled.

'Dona Oliveira said that you would corroborate this accusation,' I said. 'Is that true, Mariana?'

She swallowed hard and shook her head. The street was hot, bright and empty. The sky was a deep blue against the sunblasted whitewashed walls. The smell of lunch was on the sea breeze. Mariana was looking at me as if I was a man with a knife. She brushed a graze of whitewash off her shoulder.

'I wouldn't have been able to stay in that house,' she said.

I wanted to leave it at that, but I couldn't resist asking the question that I hadn't been able to ask either of the Oliveiras.

'Whose daughter is she, Mariana?'

'Who?' she asked, bewildered now.

'Catarina.'

'I don't understand.'

I stopped it there. A car rumbled up the street, tyres battering the cobbles. I fell in behind Mariana and followed her down to the main street and the cool of the trees. At the door to the supermarket I said goodbye, but with one last easy question. Mariana was relieved to tell me Teresa Oliveira's friend was an Englishwoman called Lucy Marques and gave me an address in'são Joao do Estoril.