A Small Death in lisbon (24 page)

'So how do you explain the pathologist's report?'

Silence while Valentim shifted the swag of his heavy hair and passed a finger across his forehead. He flicked a hank of sweat on to the floor.

'There must have been somebody else,' he said.

'When did you leave here?'

'Around two o'clock.'

'Bruno says he went home and you walked off towards the funicular with Catarina.'

'That's true.'

'Where did you go?'

'We walked down to Avenida da Liberdade and took a 45 bus. She got off at Saldanha to go back to school. I stayed on until Campo Grande and went to the Biblioteca Nacional.'

'How long did you spend there?'

'I was there until well after seven. Plenty of people saw me.'

'Have you got a car?'

'You're joking, Inspector.'

'Have you got access to one?'

'My mother's boyfriend has one. Do you think he'd lend it to me?'

'Let's go back to my first question about why you took Catarina into the band.'

'I told you.'

'What was special about her, Valentim? What did she have that particularly interested you?'

He licked his lips which had dried on him. He didn't seem to have any spit.

'She wasn't a happy girl was she, Valentim?'

'Happy?' he asked, sneering, as if this was a questionable state.

'Did you like that, Valentim? Did you like a bit of vulnerability to work with, some real suffering to get your teeth into?'

'Next you'll be telling me I hate my mother,' he said, on the end of a high-pitched laugh. 'Do they teach Freud at police college now?'

'Ask
agente
Pinto, I haven't been in police college for some time,' I said. 'I wouldn't be needing Freud anyway, after eighteen years talking to people like you.'

He looked at Carlos sniffing for a softer target.

'Have you got any bullshit for me,
agente?'

'You're not a nice guy,' said Carlos, quietly on the end of a direct look.

'If you were a nice guy,' I said, 'and a fifteen-year-old girl proposed three in a bed with some sodomy thrown in...'

'I did not sodomize her!' he shouted.

'...you wouldn't go ahead with it, would you? You'd think there was something wrong with the girl. You're a psychology student. You'd know that it wasn't normal behaviour. If you were a nice guy you'd help the girl. Talk to her parents. Get her some therapy. But you're not, are you, Valentim? You're a piece of shit. You look at someone like that and think: I can
use
that. I can
abuse
that ... and it'll make me feel better.'

'And all because I didn't say I loved my mother ... you're a radical, Inspector. You're a fucking radical.'

'But that's why you arranged this little rendezvous yesterday wasn't it, Valentim? To bring Catarina down to your own level, suck her into your own swamp. Now all I've got to find out is whether you wanted to take it one step further and kill the girl.'

'Then you've got a lot of work ahead of you.'

'In the meantime you can spend the weekend in the
tacos...
see if that refreshes your memory. And I'll get a search warrant for your room.'

Valentim ran a thumb and forefinger down his nose and flicked the sweat on the floor. He shook his head and I saw that he was worried and not about spending a few nights in the
tacos.

Saturday, 13 th June 199–, Pensão Nuno, Rua da Gloria, Lisbon, Portugal

A police car arrived to take Valentim. I sent Carlos with it to start work on the search warrant. Jorge stripped off the cellophane to what must have been his third pack of the day. I took out the photograph of Catarina.

'You're still not finished?' he said, lighting up a cigarette.

'You lost a lot of weight recently, Jorge?'

'I was sick. They thought I had lung cancer.'

'What was it?'

'Just some pleurisy.'

'Good to get the weight off though.'

'You don't have to be nice to me, nobody else is.'

'You know about people don't you, Jorge?'

'The whole world's been past this front desk.'

'Have you always done this work?'

'Probably.'

'Ever been inside?'

'If I was, it was before I can remember whether I've been doing this job all my life.'

'That memory of yours must be famous.'

'I've got a room full of industrial awards for it,' he said. 'You should drop by some time, when I'm not so busy, and I'll show them to you.'

'Do you remember this girl?' I asked, snapping the photograph down on the bar. 'She was in here with that kid and another one Friday lunch time.'

If anything Jorge's eyes got rheumier. He barely looked at the shot.

'Look, Inspector, I've got a reputation to keep up. If it gets out that my particular brain disease cleared up and I got on a quiz show with the
Policía Judiciária
I'll have an empty place.'

'Emptier than this?' I said. 'The floors aren't exactly shaking.'

'You take my point.'

'Maybe this place is due an inspection.'

'Why's it so important that I remember her?'

'Five hours after she left this place she was dead. Murdered.'

Jorge's eyebrows left his head for a moment.

'When?'

'This is ridiculous ... I just told you. Friday six, six-thirty in the afternoon.'

'Here in Lisbon.'

'Maybe. She was found dumped on a beach in Paço de Arcos.'

He nodded, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand feeling the rasp of the brisdes.

'She was in here Friday lunchtime. You must know that by now after talking to the kid. She was with another one as well ... a student.'

'How do you know?'

'This is the gateway to heaven, Inspector. The whole world comes before me ... even police officers.'

'Can I use your telephone?'

I called the home number of Catarina's teacher. She answered as if she'd been sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. I made an appointment for an hour's time. She said she wasn't going anywhere. I refitted the telephone, an old heavy Bakelite piece of work that took me back to my father's army headquarters in Africa. I headed for the stairs, Jorge's eyes on me all the way. I stopped two steps down and heard him sigh.

'The girl,' I said, 'had she been in here before?'

Jorge turned the page of his newspaper, kissed his cigarette again.

'Did you hear me, Jorge?'

'I heard you,' he said. 'I heard that phone call too. She's a schoolgirl.'

'Not even sixteen, Jorge.'

He shook his head, not that amazed at what the world had come to.

'She's been coming in here pretty regularly Friday lunchtimes, since March, April, something like that.'

'She was a hooker?'

'She wasn't going up there on her own for a nap, if that's what you mean,' he said, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the last. 'Girls these days, they're different. Clean, nicely dressed, polite. They come in here to make spending money for the weekend because they don't want to have to explain to daddy why they need 30,000 escudos for a decent Saturday night. The regular girls know it too. You go out there and watch. If they see a girl in a short skirt hanging around too long, they'll kick her half to death. If you ask me, and not many people do these days, Inspector, it's the heroin.'

'Did you know any of her clients?'

Jorge gave me a sad sorry look and tapped the side of his head.

'How many times have you been closed down?'

'Never ... unless it was before...'

'That's enough, Jorge. You're boring me now.'

'Look, Inspector, I cooperate as much as I can ... in the end.'

'How about doing some cooperating now?'

He thought about it, wanting to get me off his back.

'I'll tell you something, it's not much but if it'll get you down the stairs...'

'I won't promise you.'

'You're not the first guy to ask me about the girl ... I mean in an investigative way.'

'What are we talking about ... another cop?'

'Could be.'

'Get it out, Jorge. One go. Like pulling a tooth.'

'He looked like a cop but he wouldn't show me any ID and I wouldn't tell him anything.'

'What did he ask you?'

'He made out he was a punter and interested in the girl. I didn't believe him. He told me he was
Policía Judiciária.
I asked for ID. He wouldn't show. I told him to stop wasting my time and he left.'

'When are we talking about?'

'Not long after she became a Friday lunch time regular.'

'April, May?' I asked, and he nodded. 'Tell me what he looked like.'

'Short, stocky, and the bit of hair I saw was grey. He wore a small, brimmed hat, black, which he never took off, a grey tweed jacket, white shirt, tie, grey trousers. No moustache, no beard. Brown eyes. That's it.'

'I'm going down the stairs now, Jorge.'

'Don't rush,' he said. 'I wouldn't want you to fall.'

I went out into the dark narrow street. It had been cool in Jorge's windowless reception and I stripped off my jacket and slung it over my shoulder. There were more girls outside now and I walked down the street towards the funicular asking the odd one here and there whether they'd seen Catarina. A couple of mulatto Brazilian girls remembered her, but not from yesterday. A bleach-blonde girl, standing on one leg while she repaired the heel of her shoe, tapped the photograph and nodded but couldn't remember when she'd seen her.

I asked the funicular driver, who I reckoned must take an interest in life around him rather than looking endlessly at the same old two hundred metres of rail up and down his hill, but he shrugged me off. I walked back down Rua da Gloria, got into my car and drove back to the bus stop at Saldanha. It was mostly newly developed office buildings around here and they were all shut but I found a few little places open to ask my question.

'Boa tarde,
did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? No. Thank you.
Adeus.'

It's a stomach thing for me, police work. For a lot of my colleagues it's brain work. They have the suspects, the clues, the statements, the witnesses, the motives, and they reason them all together. I do that too but I have something in my stomach as well, something that tells me if I'm right. António Borrego once asked me what it was like and the only thing I could think of was 'love' and he told me to be careful because, as anybody knows, love is blind. Good point. It's not like love, but that's the strength of it.

'Boa tarde,
did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? No. Thank you.
Adeus.'

People ask me why I do this job, as if I have some choice in the matter, as if I could finish with it now and run off and be an avant-garde poet in Guatemala. I got into this thing because, back in 1978 when my father and I crept back into the country, that was the only job I could find, and in those days money was as scarce as a job. When I came out of the Rossio station after five years in London I knew what I'd been missing. The poverty bustle, I call it. There's a lot of it in Africa, which is why I recognized it. It's a nervous fireneticism brought about by insufficient economic activity to ensure that everybody gets fed. It's the agitation of hunger and it's gone now. The streets are calm like any other European city. Now there's only the stress left, but that's not the same as hunger, that's just neuroticism.

'Boa tarde,
did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? No. Thank you.
Adeus.'

So I do this job because over the years I've come to believe in it. The hunt for the truth or the teasing out of the truth, anyway. I like the talk. I marvel at the natural genius humans have for deception. If you think footballers are pretty good at cheating and diving and deceiving, you should see murderers perform. Mind you, they get a lot of practice lying to themselves every minute of the day. Our prisons are full of innocent people. But that's the nature of the murderer. It's the ultimate human weakness. The most radical solution to the inability to resolve, and the shame of that weakness is the inadmissible guilt. But the lies ... the lies keep the job alive. I'm like a couturier appreciating cloth, enjoying the texture, the finery of a brilliant tapestry, a fabulous, gold-threaded brocade, a silky smooth damask, a dark, rich, impenetrable velvet. But I never underestimate the value of a light, strong denim, a hard-wearing drill, a tough fine-ribbed poplin. That doesn't mean I don't get the moth-eaten taffeta, or the well-worn flannel, or wispy tissues of voile, it's just that I have the developed taste of a connoisseur.

"
Boa tarde,
did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? No. Thank you.
Adeus.
"

We've seen some liars today. The lawyer, the wife, her lover, the psychology student, the little
nouvelle riche
girl, the old money kid. But take the
Pensáo
landlord. Jorge. The one you'd expect to be a liar. The one who looked like a liar. But he wasn't. He was an elider, an omitter, an excluder, an editor, but he wasn't guarding his own secrets. That was the difference. Now Valentim. He's got potential. Plenty of practice. He's been at it since his father left, probably. He doesn't trust anybody. Not even his mother. He's got the makings of the finest brocade that one. Then there's the one I missed out. The victim. She must have done some lying in her time, but what interests me about her is the game she played on her mother. What was that? Phoning her up. Getting her to come over. So that what? So that she could show her that she knew? So that she could show her that she was better? So that she could punish her?

'
Boa tarde,
did you see this girl yesterday around two, two-fifteen? No. Thank you.
Adeus.'

My stomach's told me something. Watch the lawyer. So far that's all. I don't know about Valentim. That's a hard thing, to admit that you sodomized a young girl. Still shaming, even for him. Maybe there was someone else. Another creep who did that to her, shamed himself and killed her for the feeling she'd given him. But it's a job, this one. Jorge said she'd been coming in there for months doing tricks for pocket money. The lover said she took money off him after sex. Teresa Carvalho said she's been sleeping around the university, even with her lecturer. Bruno said that wasn't reliable. None of them know her. They know bits of her. Only Valentim has got inside, but then he knew what he was looking for.