Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

I caught the train back down the Linha to'são João and walked away from the sea and station for a nearly a kilometer until I found myself in front of a traditionally-styled, but recently-built house with gates, a circular drive and wide steps leading up to a portico. It said money to me, but not enough for the real thing. I introduced myself to an intercom and video camera at the gate which opened electronically. There was a large white satellite dish on the roof of the house.

A heavy-set Cape Verdian maid took me across tiled white marble floors towards a living room from which came the sounds of an English soap opera. Lucy Marques was sitting with her feet up on the sofa cradling a remote and a large tumbler of what proved to be a gin and tonic with plenty of backbone. There was a stack of Hello! magazines on the floor beside her. She clicked off the television.

'I'm not speaking any more bloody Portuguese,' she said, fanning me away, 'so if you don't speak gin and tonic you can get lost right now.'

'My gin and tonic's pretty good,' I said.

'Is it? Pass me a nail then.'

'A what?'

'Fallen at the first, Inspector. A coffin nail. A cancer stick. A bloody fag, for God's sake… in the box there on the table.'

She took two cigarettes from the box and put one behind her ear. I lit the one in her mouth.

'Help yourself,' she said. 'Have a drink. Do the necessary. You look a bit sharper than Gumbo Gomes. What a depressing character he was.'

'Abílio…'

'Able was I ere I saw Abílio,' she said and cackled at her own madness.

I put Lucy Marques in her mid-fifties from the back of her hands but her face and body age seemed to have been arrested at around thirty-eight, an achievement given her regime. She wore white jeans and a T-shirt with some nautical appliqué.

'Can we talk about Teresa Oliveira?'

'Only if you join me with a drink. Gin and tonic. That was the agreed language.'

I poured myself a weak one and lit a cigarette.

'Teresa, Teresa, Teresa,' she sighed, and gulped her drink. 'What a mess.'

'I was investigating her daughter's death.'

'You were?'

'I was taken off it. Internal politics. Gumbo Gomes is working it now.'

'Gumbo Gomes. He's just the kind of Portuguese I detest. So serious. So gra-a-a-ave. You couldn't brighten him up if you offered him a Molotov cocktail and a light.'

'Mrs Marques. I'm sorry, can we…'

'Of course, gin makes me gabble. Teresa. No. Catarina. Yes, well, I'm not surprised she came to a sticky end. She was what we call a little minx that one. Do you know what a minx is, Inspector?'

'I can guess.'

'A flirty, dirty little schemer,' she said, and wriggled herself into the sofa preparing to deliver the dirt. 'You know Teresa had a lover last year.'

'Paulo Branco.'

'Right.'

'And she caught Catarina in bed with him.'

'It was a little more graphic than finding them under the covers, Inspector Coelho. Pumping buttocks. Ankles round the ears. The works, I can tell you. Teresa felt faint for weeks after whenever she thought about it.'

'I understood that Catarina called her to the house so that she would catch them at it.'

'You are well-informed. You must like to gossip, Inspector.'

'I was married to an Englishwoman.'

'Naughty, naughty now.'

'You had a crack at the Portuguese.'

'One all,' she said licking a finger and scoring the air.

'The lover, Mrs Marques?'

'Ah, yes. Teresa was convinced that he put her up to it.'

'Who?'

'Aquilino put Catarina up to it. Finding out about the lover and then taking him to bed.'

'My God,' I said, 'how did she get to think that?'

'Well, I said to her: "You're paranoid, dear." But she told me she'd cornered Catarina one day and confronted her with it, and Catarina's reply? "You shouldn't be having sex with other men." Nice family, eh?'

'Why didn't Teresa leave him?'

'You Portuguese and your marriage contracts,' said Lucy Marques, shaking her head. 'Aquilino and Teresa's agreement was… how do you call that arrangement when everything from both sides is thrown in the pot?'

'Communhão total de bens'

'That's it. Teresa came to him with hardly an escudo to her name. She worked for him, remember. It was all Aquilino's. He wasn't going to divorce her and let her have half his cake, which was what she'd have had to take…'

'But…'

'Exactly. He was crazy about her. He left his first wife for her and she was loaded… money and name.'

'So what happened?'

'Something right at the beginning and I don't know what. Teresa never talked about it. And believe me, I tried,' she said, tapping her Hello! magazines. 'This lot would have paid money for that, I can tell you.'

Suddenly I wasn't sure how much I liked Lucy Marques.

'Teresa came here on Saturday night.'

'She slept here, Inspector.'

'She came to see me first. She told me that Aquilino had abused Catarina sexually.'

'She was always telling me he was impotent, and I don't know how she knew that because she also told me that they didn't have sex again after Catarina was born. So, make of that what you will, Inspector.'

'What did she do on Sunday?'

'She must have taken a rhino-sized sleeping pill because she didn't get up 'til midday. I was worried about her, and checked on her breathing several times in the morning. She left here at one o'clock, saying she was going out to lunch and I didn't see her again.'

'She had a Mercedes, what colour was that?'

'Black.'

'Model, series number?'

'Haven't a clue.'

'Registration number?'

'I might look like a sad old lush to you, Inspector Coelho, but I've got better things to do with my time than remember my friends' registration numbers. Anyway, Gumbo Gomes has the car… ask him.'

I took the train back to Lisbon wondering if it had come to that. The mother killing her own daughter. I couldn't see it. I couldn't feel it. I stared out to sea, mesmerized by the waves breaking over the hump of a sand bank in the middle of the estuary and thought about the Oliveiras, their hopes foundered, the family broken up and dead… because of what? Because it had all gone wrong from the beginning.

I didn't get off at Alcântara. I could see from the train that the scene at the back of the Wharf One was now empty. It was lunchtime by the time I got to Cais do Sodré. I started to cross the tram rails on Avenida 24 de Julho to get to a restaurant near the market. One of the new trams, a humming electronic slug of effervescing 7Up, approached. The crowd of people around me waiting to cross seemed to contract and pop open. Somebody thumped me in the back. I fell off the pavement, my ankle went, my knee connected with the tarmac. My fingers slid into the silver strips of track scintillating to the approach of the tram. Life slowed. Sound crunched. Faces slipped across my retina. A dark, curly-haired girl, wire-hanger thin, reached out a hand, not to help but to point. A thick-set man, with vast belly and wrestler's forearms stepped forward and reared back. The woman's face next to his had pencilled-in eyebrows which disappeared into the creases of her forehead, her mouth opened and a strange and distant ululation came out. The strip of film in my head jumped out of its sprockets. Light and dark colour ripped through the gate. My muscles unfroze. I rolled. Metal squealed. Hydraulics hissed. My fingers slipped out of the silver rail. A steel wheel screeched through.

I was looking up at the sky, through the criss-cross cables overhead, and everything beyond seemed suddenly simple after life's complexities. Faces canopied over me. Someone held my hand, which was cold, and rubbed it warm. I must have been smiling like an idiot because everybody was smiling back. Today had not been the day. I sat up. People helped me to my feet. A woman brushed me down. Someone told me I'd been lucky. I said I knew it and laughed and they all laughed with me, as if they'd escaped it too. I found myself swept into a restaurant with three or four people and they sat down with me at a long table and told all the other lunch people that I'd nearly been the slice of lemon under the 7Up tram.