A Small Death in lisbon (21 page)

'Is Valentim Mateus Almeida in?' I asked.

He turned without speaking. We followed him down the narrow corridor. He tapped on a door as he was passing.

'Valentim,' he said. 'Police.'

He carried on into the kitchen where an overweight woman with bleached hair, who'd squeezed herself into a turquoise skirt, was clearing away lunch. She asked him who'd been at the door. He told her, and she sucked in her stomach. We knocked on Valentim's door again. The place smelled of fried fish.

Valentim invited us in but didn't look up from where he was sitting on the bed playing an electric guitar, unplugged. He had a huge thick swag of long dark brown ringlets, sheafed down the length of his back. He wore a T-shirt and jeans. He was thin, olive-skinned with big dark eyes and hollow, underfed cheeks. Carlos closed the door of the narrow room which had a bed, a desk but no bookcase. The books were piled on the floor. Some of them were in English and French.

'Your father's not too concerned about the quality of your visitors.'

'That's because he's not my father, not even my stepfather. He's just the resident asshole who keeps my mother from getting lonely ... and don't worry, I've told her.'

'What?' asked Carlos.

'That it's better to be lonely than live with a tick, but then ... she'd scratch him off and get another one in its place. That's the nature of ticks and those they feed on.'

'Are you reading zoology?'

'Psychology,' he said. 'Zoology's something I live with. It creeps under my door.'

'You know a girl called Catarina Sousa Oliveira?'

'I know her,' he said, going back to his fingerwork on the guitar.

'She's dead. Murdered.'

His fingers stopped. He took the guitar by the neck and leaned it against a chair at the end of the bed. He was thinking, composing himself, but shocked too.

'I didn't know.'

'We're reconstructing her last twenty-four hours.'

'I haven't seen her,' he said, quickly.

'Not for twenty-four hours?'

'No.'

'Did you speak to her?'

'No.'

'When did you last see her?'

'Wednesday evening.'

'What happened?'

'The band met to talk about the weekend gig and rehearsals for Friday and Saturday.'

'Yesterday was Friday,' said Carlos.

'Thanks for reminding me. One day's like the next in Odivelas,' he said. 'The band also bust up on Wednesday. There was no rehearsal, there will be no gig.'

'Why did you bust up?'

'Musical differences,' he said. 'Teresa, she's the keyboard player ... she's fucking some guy who plays the saxophone, so she thinks we suddenly need a saxophonist. She thinks we need to do more instrumental stuff. I said...'

'Less emphasis on the lead singer?' said Carlos.

Valentim turned to me for an opinion.

'I can't help you there,' I said. 'Nothing's happened in my life since Pink Floyd.'

'How musical were these differences?' asked Carlos.

'That's your first decent question and you go and answer it yourself.'

'What about Bruno, what does he play?'

'Bass.'

'Were either you or Bruno going out with Catarina?' I asked.

'Going out?'

'Were you fucking her?' said Carlos, picking up words as we went along.

'We had a "no relationships" agreement in the band.'

'The saxophonist didn't have a chance.'

'I don't suppose he did.'

'The meeting. Where did it take place?'

'In a bar called Toca. It's in the Bairro Alto.'

'And you didn't see her after that—not on Thursday, nor Friday?'

'No.'

'Do you know what she was doing yesterday?'

'She went to school, didn't she?'

'Where were you?'

'In the Biblioteca Nacional ... all day ... until seven, seven-thirty.'

I gave him a card and told him to call me if he remembered anything. Valentim's mother was looking down the corridor from the kitchen when we came out. I gave her a good afternoon which brought the tick to her shoulder.

'Where was Valentim yesterday?' I asked.

'He was out all day and most of the night,' said the tick. 'Didn't get in until three in the morning.'

The woman looked despondent behind the make-up she'd just put on. The tick wanted us to take the kid away right now. We left and got back in the car, which was too hot to touch. I lit a cigarette and put it out after two drags.

'He's lying,' said Carlos. 'He saw her.'

'Let's go and talk to the keyboards,' I said, starting the car.

'Don't we get lunch on this job?'

'English lunch.'

'I don't like the sound of that.'

'You wouldn't. You're Portuguese.'

'They said...' he pulled up.

'What did
they
say?'

'They said you were married to an Englishwoman.'

'Was that supposed to explain something to you?'

'I think ... I was surprised when you said Pink Floyd back there.'

'I was in England in the seventies.'

He nodded.

'What else did
they
say?' I asked, surprised that people bothered to talk about me when I wasn't there.

'They said you weren't ... normal.'

'Why do you think they put you to work with me?' I asked. 'Get all the weirdos off in one corner?'

'I'm not weird.'

'Just boring ... you still haven't talked about girls, cars or football. You're twenty-seven years old. You're a policeman. You're Portuguese. What do you think
they
make of that?'

'Sporting,' he said, to satisfy requirements.

'They're a good team.'

'I can't afford a car.'

'Not the point.'

'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.'

Saturday, 13th June 199–, Telheiras, Lisbon, Portugal

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.'

'Is that it?'

'Something, even this quick, is never enough for you guys.'

'Fernanda,' I said. 'You know it's appreciated.'

She hung up.

Teresa Carvalho had long purple hair, dark purple eye make-up, lipstick and nail varnish. She wore a black vest, a black short skirt, black tights and purple calf-length Doc Martens. She sat in an armchair in the corner of her father's study and crossed her legs.
Senhor
Carvalho left the room and we sat in the silence left over from Teresa's gum-chewing.

Senhor
Carvalho's shoes did not move off. Teresa didn't look at either of us but focused on a point above Carlos' head. I opened the door and told
Senhor
Carvalho that I'd like to talk to him again later. He moved off like a bear back into its cave. There was a micron of trust in Teresa's eyes when I sat down again.