By seven she had given up pretending to sleep. By half past she was on the 28 again, which in the morning was a different animal: commuters instead of tourists, a woman with a bag of oranges, a man in a suit reading a contract with his lips moving. Inés stood the whole way, because sitting would have felt like settling in.
She got off at Estrela and went down into Lapa on foot, rehearsing. Good morning, Senhor Vilar. I'm sorry to come so early. Your phone called me in the night and I'm afraid I'm the sort of person who worries. It sounded reasonable in her head. It would sound reasonable on his doorstep, and he would be in his navy cardigan, faintly embarrassed, and he would offer her coffee, and she would ask to see the book once more, purely to discuss the conservator.
The light was hard and white, already warm, bouncing off the limestone setts so that she walked half-squinting. The streets that had been a maze last night were simply steep this morning. Below, between the embassy walls, the river showed in slices, flat and bright, the cranes at Alcântara standing over it like herons.
She turned the last corner and stopped.
A PSP car was parked across the lane with its lights turning lazily, blue on pink stucco. Behind it stood an unmarked white van with its rear doors open. Blue-and-white tape ran from a lamppost to the railings of the house opposite and back, sagging in the middle where someone had leaned on it. A uniformed officer stood beside it with his hands behind his back, looking like a man who had been told to stand there an hour ago and had not been told anything since.
Her hands went cold first. That was how she knew, later, that her body had understood before she did. Her fingers simply lost their warmth, as if she had stepped into a thermocline, and in her head, unasked, the voicemail began to play: the rustle, the distant thud, the breath that might have been air conditioning.
On the pavement a few metres from the tape, a woman in a grey maid's tunic from one of the neighbouring houses was talking to a delivery rider straddling his scooter, an insulated box on its back. They were not quite whispering.
“—the housekeeper found him. Fátima. Half past six, she goes in at half past six every day. She was screaming in the street, my God, you should have heard her.”
“In the house?”
“In his office. They say—” The woman lowered her voice for the first time, and Inés lost the rest.
Through the gate she could see the terrace. Two figures in white coveralls were crouched on it, one photographing something on the flagstones, the other holding a numbered yellow marker as though uncertain where it belonged. The study curtains were closed. A stretcher stood folded against the wall by the front door, not yet needed or no longer needed; she could not tell which, and she found she did not want to.
She could leave. Nobody had seen her. She could walk back up to Estrela, catch the tram home and wait for whoever came, because someone would. Her number was the last one on his phone. Her name was, presumably, on a calendar somewhere in that house. If she walked away now, there would be a version of this morning in which she had come to the scene, looked, and left, and someone would eventually ask her why.
And the book was in there. Or it was not.
She went to the tape.
“Bom dia,” she said to the officer. “My name is Inés Valdés. I was here yesterday evening, working for Senhor Vilar. He called me last night. I think whoever is in charge will want to talk to me.”
He looked at her the way people looked at a dog that had walked into a shop: probably harmless, definitely irregular. Then he spoke into the radio on his shoulder.
The woman who came out of the house ten minutes later was in her forties, short, with cropped grey hair and a linen jacket that had been slept in, or at least sat in for a very long night. She held a coffee in a paper cup and did not drink it.
“Inspector Marta Lobo, Polícia Judiciária.” She did not offer her hand. “You're the expert. Valdés.”
So her name was in the house. “Yes.”
“You came to see him at eight in the morning.”
“He called me at six minutes past one. There was nothing on the message. I called back twice. He didn't answer.” Inés heard how it sounded and kept going anyway. “I thought he'd pocket-dialled me. I came to apologise for worrying.”
Lobo studied her for a moment over the cup. “Is he dead?” Inés asked.
“Yes.” The inspector lifted the tape. “Come. Touch nothing. Stay where I put you.”
The hall smelled of the same furniture polish, and something else under it now, chemical and faintly sweet, the smell of the technicians' sprays. The painted cherubs on the ceiling went on with their faded business. Lobo walked her along a path of plastic stepping plates laid on the parquet and stopped her at the study door with two fingers on her sleeve.
“Here. From here only. You were in this room yesterday. Tell me what's different.”
It was a test. Inés understood that and did not resent it, much. She was being used as an instrument and watched as a suspect at the same time, and she suspected Lobo did both before breakfast most days.
The curtains were drawn again, as Vilar had drawn them when he wanted to shrink the room. The desk lamp was still on, pouring its circle onto the green baize, and the baize was empty. No navigation book. No magnifier marks, no pad of headed paper. The pen stand stood where it had stood. Near the visitor's chair, the left-hand drawer of the desk had been pulled out and left open, a dark slot. Beyond the desk, a white screen on stands blocked the floor between the window and the drinks cabinet, and she did not look at the floor beneath its edge for longer than it took to decide not to.
On top of the drinks cabinet stood two glasses. Short tumblers, cut crystal. One had a centimetre of amber in it. The other was empty, or nearly. The phone was gone.
“The book,” Inés said. “The navigation book was on the desk. Leather, about this size.” She shaped it in the air. “It isn't there.”
“You're certain it was on the desk when you left?”
“It was on the desk when I signed my report. He walked me to the door. He didn't take it with him.”
Lobo said nothing.
“That drawer was closed. And he didn't drink while I was here. He offered me wine twice and never poured himself anything. There were no glasses out.” She searched the desk again, the cabinet, the side table. Two white pages, side by side, in her own hand. She could not see them anywhere. “I left him a signed preliminary report. Two pages. Is it here?”
“How did he die?” Lobo said, which was not an answer, and then answered her own question before Inés could notice that she had not asked it. “A blow to the head. Some time in the night. We're treating it as a homicide.” She turned her cup a quarter turn in her fingers. “You looked at the desk before you asked about him. Interesting.”
Inés opened her mouth and found nothing in it worth saying.
“It's not an accusation,” Lobo said. “It's an observation. I imagine you make a lot of those. I'd like you to come to Gomes Freire and give a statement. Voluntarily. Today.”
The headquarters of the Polícia Judiciária was a big modern block of glass and pale stone on Rua Gomes Freire, the sort of building that looked from outside as though it held conferences on sustainable mobility. Inside, it held a series of small rooms with grey tables, and Inés sat in one of them for forty minutes with a plastic cup of water before Lobo came in with a younger officer, a laptop and a folder.
It began gently. Name, address, profession. How long had she known Duarte Vilar? Since yesterday afternoon. How had he contacted her? By email, three weeks ago, through her website. What had he asked her to do? Authenticate a navigation book.
Then Lobo opened the folder and stopped being gentle.
“I want you to understand where you are,” she said. “The housekeeper, Dona Fátima Correia, let you in yesterday at about a quarter to six and saw you leave after eight. Your name is in his diary for yesterday, and nobody else's is. At six minutes past one he called you. That's the last call he made. At fourteen minutes past, and again a minute later, you called him. Those are the last calls he received. The pathologist's preliminary window runs from roughly midnight to three.” She folded her hands on the folder. “You live alone?”
“Yes.”
“Anyone see you come home? Anyone with you during the night?”
“My laptop,” Inés said. “It will tell you I was transcribing until nearly two. It will not tell you who was typing.”
“No,” Lobo agreed. “It won't.”
The younger officer typed. The keys made small, unhurried sounds, the sound of a record being made.
“You're not under arrest,” Lobo went on. “You're not arguida. You're a witness who happens to be the last person we know saw him alive, and who was on the phone with him, or nearly, around the time he died. You see the difficulty.”
“I see it.”
“Then tell me about yesterday. Money first. How much was he paying you?”
Inés told her: her standard day rate, an invoice not yet sent. Lobo wrote it down.
“Did you argue?”
And there it was, the small fork in the road. Inés felt it the way you felt a current change underwater before you saw anything move. She could say no. It would be almost true. They had disagreed about a chart, politely, the way professionals did. There was no need to mention the offer. And the strip, the strip was a scholarly matter, a fragment of old paper with an uncertain date; it had nothing to do with a man struck on the head in his study. Introduce it here and it would become evidence, a thing in a police folder, photographed and numbered and argued over by people who could not read secretary hand. It might never come out again.
She heard the reasoning assemble itself, tidy and sensible, and recognised it. We'll test it later.
“Yes,” she said. “In a way. The book contained a chart I identified as a modern forgery. He asked me to leave that out of my written assessment. In return he offered me exclusive access to something else in the book. Imaging, laboratory analysis, publication under my name.”
Lobo's pen stopped. “A bribe.”
“I called it that. He didn't seem offended. I refused, wrote a preliminary report saying the chart was a modern production and gave him the original. Signed, two pages.”
“What was the something else?”
“A strip of manuscript hidden under a repair in the binding. Portuguese, apparently early. It mentions a ship. It's unverified. It may be as fake as the chart.” She hesitated. “Someone had lifted the repair recently, with a blade. He said it wasn't him.”
“And this strip is valuable?”
“If it's genuine, to historians. To certain collectors, possibly a great deal. I can't tell you how much. Nobody can, yet.”
“You photographed it.”
It wasn't a question, and Inés wondered for a moment how she knew. Then she realised Lobo had simply looked at her and seen the kind of person she was. “Yes. And the report. Both pages, before I handed them over.”
She took out her phone and showed them. Lobo leaned in to read the report, her lips moving faintly over the numbered points, and then gave the younger officer an address to note. Inés sent the four images of the report there while they watched. When she swiped on to the strip, the raking light, the brown iron-gall strokes, Lobo looked for perhaps three seconds.
“How many of those?”
“Thirty-one.”
Lobo wrote: 31 fotos — fragmento. Then she turned the page.
That was all. Inés felt it twice, in quick succession: a sting, absurd and vain, that something which had kept her up all night meant less to the inspector than a pharmacy receipt; and then, under it, a guilty slackening of relief. The strip was still hers. Nobody had asked what it said.
Nobody asked about Bemdara, or chests, or boats, and she did not offer. She noticed herself not offering. She told herself it was because Lobo had not asked, which was true, and that a provisional transcription by an unqualified palaeographer was not evidence of anything, which was also true. It was a smaller silence than the one she had nearly kept a minute earlier. She was aware that this did not make it a different kind of silence.
They played the voicemail. Lobo listened to it twice with her eyes closed, then had it copied. They went over the timeline again, and again, from slightly different angles, the way you walked around a wreck to see what the current had exposed. Who knew you were going there? He asked me that too, Inés said, and Lobo's eyes opened properly for the first time.
“When?”
“Just before I left. His phone buzzed. He didn't answer it. Then he asked whether anyone knew I was coming.”
Lobo wrote that down with more care than she had written anything else.
At a quarter to one they let her go. Her passport stayed in her bag. She was to remain contactable, not leave the country without telling them, and not discuss the case with anyone, least of all the press. Lobo walked her to the lifts herself.
“For what it's worth,” the inspector said, pressing the button, “people who hit someone on the head don't usually turn up at eight the next morning to apologise for worrying.”
“Usually,” Inés said.
“Usually,” Lobo agreed, and the doors closed.
She did not get far. At the top of Campo Mártires da Pátria there was a pastelaria with three tin tables on the pavement, and she sat at one because her legs suggested it. She ordered a bica and a pastel de nata out of habit. The coffee came in a thick white cup, black and bitter, and she drank it in two swallows. The pastry sat on its saucer, flaking, its custard blistered dark, and she could not make herself take a second bite.
Ambulances threaded up towards the hospitals. Pigeons worked the gravel of the square with the diligence of auditors. An old man on a bench under the trees was feeding them from a paper bag while a sign above him asked the public not to.
It arrived then, the thing she had been holding at arm's length all morning. Not grief, she had known him for three hours. Something blunter. His tired face in the lamplight, older than at the door. The way his hands had tightened on the chair back and let go. The curtains drawn, then opened again for her, the river coming back. Did anyone know you were coming here today? He had been afraid, and she had heard it, and she had gone home and enlarged photographs of a dead man's paper until one in the morning while his phone lay face down on the drinks cabinet. If she had answered at 01:06. If she had called the police at 01:15 and been laughed at.
She held the empty cup with both hands until they stopped shaking, then called Rui Mendonça, who had defended a dealer she had testified against in Seville and had afterwards, to her surprise, bought her lunch. He listened without interrupting, which for a lawyer was a sign of seriousness.
“Did you sign anything?”
“My statement.”
“Fine. Go home. Write down everything you remember about yesterday, every word, every object, the times. Today, while it's fresh, before you start improving it. Date it. Don't talk to journalists. Don't talk to his family. If they call you back, you call me first.” A pause. “And Inés? Don't go looking for that book.”
“I wasn't going to.”
“You've never once in your life not been going to,” he said, and rang off.
The stairwell in Graça smelled of soup, as always, cabbage and garlic and stock, and for the first time in four years it turned her stomach. She climbed the three flights with her hand on the rail, an ache settling behind her eyes like a bruise someone had pressed. In the flat she opened the window wide and let the noise of the square come in.
Then she did as she was told. Two hours at the dining table, longhand first, in a fresh notebook: arrival, the chart, the curtains, the phone lighting up, the strip, the offer and its exact words as best she could recall them, the report, the buzzing, the question, the door. The hall ceiling. The tram. The man in the cap. She dated each page and signed it, and felt faintly ridiculous, and kept going.
When she had finished she checked the photographs. The cloud first: thirty-one images of the strip, four of the report, timestamps intact. The laptop: the same. The external drive from the drawer of batteries and menus: the same, the file sizes matching to the byte. Three copies, as Seville had taught her.
She sat looking at the three windows open side by side on the screen, and the thought came up from somewhere below her ribs before she could stop it. If the book was gone, then these were the strip. Whatever that writer had seen, whatever he had meant by Bemdara, the only surviving witness to it might be sitting on her dining table next to a cold cup of yesterday's tea.
The thrill of it was immediate and complete, and it was followed so closely by shame that for a moment she could not tell them apart. A man was dead. She was not supposed to feel like someone who had been handed a key.
She made herself do something useful with the feeling. She went back through the strip photographs one by one, not for the text this time but for the edges of the frames. Most were tight close-ups. But six, the wider shots she had taken for context, showed the open book on the green baize, the lamp's circle, a corner of the pen stand. The report photographs, taken at 20:07 by the metadata, showed her two signed pages side by side, and at the top edge of both frames, out of focus, the brown curve of the book's spine still lying where she had left it.
So it had been there. She had not misremembered, and Lobo would have that in a file now, if she cared to look.
She looked for the drinks cabinet. It appeared in none of them; she had been bent over the desk with her back half turned to it. Nothing in thirty-five photographs could tell her whether the two tumblers had stood ready on its surface when she left, or who had come afterwards and been offered what she had refused.
At ten to five her email chimed.
The sender was a name she did not know, a culture journalist whose signature block named a Lisbon weekly and a mobile number. The subject line was Request for comment. The message was short and courteous, and she read it three times.
Dear Ms Valdés, I am writing a piece on the death of the collector Duarte Vilar and understand you recently carried out an authentication of his navigation book. I would be grateful for any comment you can offer, and in particular whether you stand by its conclusions. My deadline is tomorrow at midday.
Authentication. She had not authenticated anything. She had written, in plain words, that the chart was a modern production and that the strip was unverified. Nothing about Vilar's book had been made public; nothing about her involvement either, unless the police leaked faster than she gave them credit for, and even they did not have the word authentication from her. Its conclusions. As if there were conclusions, a verdict, a seal of approval someone could stand by or abandon.
She did not reply. Rui would have been proud of her, briefly.
Instead she opened her own photograph of the report and enlarged it until the paper filled the screen. Her handwriting, the plain careful one she kept for documents that might be read aloud in a courtroom. Preliminary report. The numbered findings. Conclusion: a modern production presented as period material. Unverified. And at the foot of each page, her signature, the loop of the V a little lazier on the second page than the first, because by then she had been tired.
She had given him that signature across a desk, in a room that now had no book on it. She had not seen it this morning. Lobo had not said where it was.
Outside, the light was going gold over the castle walls, and a tram ground round the curve below the square. Inés sat very still in front of the screen and understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with evidence, that somewhere in this city there was a piece of paper with her name on it, and she no longer had any idea what it said.