A Small Death in Lisbon. Robert Thomas Wilson

with a violent whip of his shoulders and flick of his wrists.

      ‘She was hit hard on the back of the head,’ said Fernanda, behind me. ‘I can’t say what it was yet but something like a wrench, a hammer or a piece of pipe. The blow propelled her forward and her forehead connected with a solid object which I’m ninety percent certain was a tree but I’ll do some more picking around back at the Institute. The blow must have knocked her unconscious and would have killed her in time but the guy made sure with his thumbs on her windpipe.’

      ‘The guy?’

      ‘Sorry, my assumption.’

      ‘It didn’t happen here, did it?’

      ‘No. Her left clavicle was broken. She was dropped from the harbour wall and I found this in her hair, in the wound.’

      The sachet contained a single pine needle. I called a PSP officer over.

      ‘Sexual assault?’

      ‘There’s been sexual activity but no evidence of assault or violent entry but I’ll be able to tell you more later.’

      ‘Can you give me a time of death?’

      ‘About thirteen to fourteen hours ago.’

      ‘How do you work that out?’ asked Carlos.

      His aggression got the full reply.

      ‘I checked with the meteorological office before I came out. They told me the temperature didn’t get much below 20°C last night. The body would have cooled at around 0.75 to 1°C per hour. I recorded her body temperature at 24.6°C and found rigor mortis in the smaller muscles and just beginning in the bigger ones. Therefore my deduction, based on experience, is that you’re looking for someone who murdered her between five and six yesterday afternoon but it’s not an exact science as Inspector Coelho knows.’

      ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

      ‘Nothing under her nails. She was a nervy type. Hardly anything left of them. The nail on the index finger of the right hand was torn, by that I mean bloody . . . if that’s any help.’

      Fernanda left followed by the ambulance men who were staggering across the beach and up the steps of the harbour wall, the body zipped up in its bag. I asked the PSP men to search the car park and then take a squad up the Marginal towards Cascais to the nearest pine trees. I wanted clothing. I wanted a heavy metal object or tool.

      ‘Give me your ideas, agente Pinto,’ I said.

      ‘Knocked unconscious in some pine woods, stripped, raped, strangled, thrown in a car, driven down the Marginal ultimately from Cascais direction, which is the only way in to this small car park, and dumped off the harbour wall.’

      ‘OK. But Fernanda said no violent entry.’

      ‘She was unconscious.’

      ‘Unless her murderer had the foresight to bring his own lubricant and condom there would be evidence . . . abrasions, bruising, that kind of thing.’

      ‘Wouldn’t a rapist think of that?’

      ‘He hits the girl from behind, smacks her head against a tree with a blow hard enough to kill her but he strangles her for good measure. My gut tells me that he was intending to kill rather than rape but I may be wrong . . . let’s see what Fernanda says in her lab report.’

      ‘Murdered or raped they took some risks.’

      ‘They? Interesting.’

      ‘I don’t know why I said that . . . fifty-five kilos isn’t that much.’

      ‘You’re right though . . . why dump her here? In full view of the Marginal . . . cars going up and down all night. Not that this part is particularly well lit . . .’

      ‘Somebody local?’ asked Carlos.

      ‘She’s not a local girl. The contact addresses for Catarina Oliveira are Lisbon and Cascais. And anyway, what’s local? There’s quarter of a million people living within a kilometre of where we’re standing. But if she did come here and meet a creep, why kill her in the pine trees and dump her on the beach? Why kill her in any pine woods in the Lisbon area and bring her here to this spot?’

      ‘Is it relevant that you live near here?’

      ‘I suppose you don’t know why you said that either?’

      ‘Possibly because you were thinking it.’

      ‘And you can read my thoughts . . . all on your first day?’

      ‘Maybe you’re revealing more than you think now your beard’s gone.’

      ‘That’s a lot to read off any man’s cheeks, agente Pinto.’

Chapter VI

      Saturday, 13th June 199–, Paço de Arcos, near Lisbon.

      We worked the boatyard next to the harbour and came up with nothing. We crossed the Marginal using the underpass and talked to the people who were clearing up last night’s mess in the Bombeiros Voluntarios tent but none of them had been working the night shift. The restaurant/café in the gardens was closed. We walked up to the pine woods to see how the PSP men were getting on. They had the usual array of used condoms, syringes and bleached and tattered pornography. No such thing as an innocent pine wood in this area. I told them to bag the lot and send it up to Fernanda at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Lisbon. Carlos and I went back to António and had some toast and more coffee.

      At 08.30 I put a call in to Dr Aquilino Dias Oliveira who I assumed was the girl’s father and, given his two addresses in Lisbon and Cascais, was not engaged in the great financial struggle that the rest of us were. It was a Saturday so I tried the Cascais number first and thought I was wrong until he picked it up at the twelfth ring and groggily agreed to see us in half an hour’s time. We got into my black 1972 Alfa Romeo, which was not, as many thought, a classic car, just an old car, and it started without having to draw on any reserves of bravery. We headed west on the Marginal with Carlos pinned to his seat by the belt that was stuck at one length and for a girl Olivia’s size.

      There were big fans of Cascais but I wasn’t one of them. It used to be a small fishing village with houses falling down steep cataracts of cobbled streets to the harbour and port. Now it was a town planner’s nightmare, unless you were one of the town planners who’d passed the numerous development projects in which case you’d be living in a dream elsewhere. It was a tourist town with an indigenous population of women who dressed to shop, and men who shouldn’t be allowed out of a nightclub. Real life had been stripped out and replaced with an international cosmopolitanism which appealed to a lot of people who had money, and about as many again who wanted to ease it away from them.

      We rolled in past the supermarket, the railway station and an electronic signboard which told us that it was 28°C at 08.55 and we should get some insurance. The fish market was wrapping up for the morning. The lobster and crab pots were piled high in front of the Hotel Bahia. The fort, square and ugly, out on the point, dominated. I drove up a cobbled street at the back of the town hall and turned into a tree-lined, heavily-shaded square, cool and sombre with wealth, in the old part of town. Dr Oliveira’s traditional villa on two floors was large and silent in the breathless morning. Carlos Pinto sniffed like a dog that’s picked up the whiff of the first possible scrap of the day.

      ‘Pine,’ he said.

      ‘The pine needle angle could be a lot of work in this area, agente Pinto.’

      ‘There’s a pine tree in the back garden,’ he said looking down the side of the house.

      We let ourselves in by the front gate and went past a pillar of red bougainvillea to the back of the house. The pine tree was huge and shut out the light to the garden. The floor beneath it was a perfect brown carpet of dried needles.

      ‘Put