A Small Death in Lisbon. Robert Thomas Wilson
you insane, Inspector?’
‘And your daughter?’
Silence.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, after a while.
‘I’ll need to speak to him,’ I said.
Carlos handed her the notebook. She scribbled fiercely and finished with a pile-driving dot that must have gone through to the cardboard.
‘How did your husband find out?’
She pushed up her chin like a boxer who could take anything now. Truth, part truth and lies passed behind her eyes.
‘You can imagine the atmosphere in this house . . . between me and Catarina. My husband talked to her. He’s good with words. He wrung it out of her.’
‘Did she seduce your lover . . . Paulo Branco?’
‘The delicacy of young flesh is difficult to resist so I’m told.’ She said it in a way that particularly pained her.
‘She was a drug-user. Your husband knows about hashish. Were you aware of her taking anything stronger?’
‘I wouldn’t know the difference. I’ve never taken drugs.’
‘But you know how you feel when you’ve taken a sleeping pill. Senhora Oliveira?’
‘I go to sleep.’
‘In the morning, I mean.’
She blinked.
‘Doesn’t it give you an insulated feeling, the real world kept at a distance? Did you ever notice Catarina in that state or perhaps the opposite, nervous, hyperactive, wired . . . I think they call it?’
‘I really don’t know,’ she said.
‘Does that mean you didn’t notice or . . .’
‘It means that, of late, I haven’t cared.’
It was a long silence in which the unheard air conditioning made its presence felt.
‘How did she get her money?’ I asked.
‘I gave her five thousand escudos a week.’
‘What about clothes.’
‘I used to buy her clothes until . . . until last year,’ she said.
‘Did you buy the clothes she was wearing?’
‘Not the skirt. I wouldn’t have bought her anything that short. It barely covered her knickers but then that’s the fashion so . . .’
‘Was she doing all right at school?’
‘I didn’t hear anything to the contrary.’
‘No attendance problems?’
‘We would have been told, I’m sure. Whenever I dropped her off she walked in there like a lamb.’
‘One minute,’ I said, and left the room.
I found Dr Oliveira in his study smoking a cigar and reading the Diário de Notícias. I told him I wanted to break the news to his wife and asked him if he’d prefer to do it. He said he’d leave it to me. We went back into the room. Senhora Oliveira was talking animatedly to Carlos. She was sitting sideways on the sofa and her skirt had crawled up her legs. Carlos was as stiff as his hair. She saw us and froze. Her husband sat next to her.
‘At a quarter-to-six this morning, Dona Oliveira,’ I started, and her eyes looked into me avid and horrified. ‘The body of your daughter, Catarina Oliveira, was found on the beach in Paço de Arcos. She was dead. I am very sorry.’
She said nothing. She stared into me hard enough to see the texture of my organs. Her husband took her hand and she absentmindedly removed it from his grip.
‘Agente Carlos Pinto and myself are conducting the investigation into your daughter’s death.’
‘Her death?’ she said, astonished and coughed out an appalled laugh.
‘We are very sorry for your loss. I apologize for not telling you earlier but there were certain questions I had to ask which needed a clarity of mind.’
Her husband made another attempt on the hand. She left it there this time. She was speared rigid by what I’d said.
‘We believe that she had been murdered elsewhere and her body taken to the beach in Paço de Arcos and left there.’
‘Catarina has been murdered?’ she said, incredulous, as if this was what happened to riffraff on television only. She slumped back into the sofa, stunned. She tried to swallow but couldn’t, couldn’t gulp down the dreadful news. I realized we weren’t going to get any further today. We shook hands and left. At the garden gate we heard a long unrestrained wail from the house.
‘I’m not sure I understood all of that,’ said Carlos.
‘It was . . . very disappointing.’
‘I thought it was . . .’
‘It was very disappointing for someone of your youth and optimism to have to look at that sort of behaviour.’
‘Why did we have to know anything about this affair with the brother or the lover . . . what was Dr Oliveira’s game with all that?’
‘That was what was so disappointing,’ I said. ‘He was using us . . . he was using our investigation into his daughter’s murder to punish his wife’s infidelity. What we saw in there was a master class in humiliation. Now you’ve observed the intelligence of the lawyer.’
‘But the wife,’ said Carlos, agitated, ‘the wife . . . when you left the room she didn’t ask one question about her daughter’s disappearance. Not one. She chatted. She asked me things about the stupid paintings, how long I’d been in the Polícia Judiciária, did I live in Cascais . . .’
‘Yes, well, there was a couple of things about those two in there. First, Dr Oliveira kept a photograph of his previous family on his desk while Catarina was up on a bookshelf with some dog-eared paperbacks. The second, was that both of them had brown eyes.’
‘I didn’t notice,’ he said writing it down in his notebook.
‘And brown eyes plus brown eyes don’t often make blue, and Catarina Oliveira had blue eyes.’
2nd March 1941, South-west France.
It was a perfect morning. The first perfect morning for days. The sky was pristine, cloudless and of such a blue that only pain could come from looking at it. To the south the mountains, the snow-capped Pyrenees, were just catching the first rays of the rising sun and the thin, spiky cold air up there sharpened the white peaks and deepened the blue of the sky close to them. Felsen’s two Swiss drivers couldn’t stop talking about it. They were from the south and spoke Italian and they knew mountains, but only the Alps.
They didn’t talk to Felsen unless he spoke to them first which was infrequently. They found him cold, aloof, abrupt, and on one occasion brutal. In the few moments he fell asleep in the cab they heard him grinding his teeth and saw the muscles of his jaw bunching under the skin of his cheek. They called him ‘bone-crusher’ when he was visible and at some distance. That was the only risk they were prepared to take after witnessing the excessive kicking he’d given a driver who’d accidentally reversed into a gatepost in the barracks outside Lyons. They were Italian-Swiss after all.
Felsen hadn’t noticed. He didn’t care. He was treading a well-trodden circle, going over and over the same ground so that if he’d walked his thoughts he’d have been in a circular trench up to his shoulders. He’d smoked hours of cigarettes, metres of them, kilos of tobacco while he dissected his every living