A Small Death in Lisbon
This stunning, atmospheric thriller set in war-torn Europe won the CWA Gold Dagger and has now been reissued with the Javier Falcon series.A Portuguese bank is founded on the back of Nazi wartime deals.Over half a century later a young girl is murdered in Lisbon.1941. Klaus Felsen, SS, arrives in Lisbon and the strangest party in history where Nazis and Allies, refugees and entrepreneurs dance to the strains of opportunism and despair. Felsen’s war takes him to the bleak mountains of the north where a brutal battle is being fought for an element vital to Hitler’s blitzkrieg.Late 1990s, Lisbon. Inspector Ze Coelho is investigating the murder of a young girl with a disturbing sexual past. As Ze digs deeper he overturns the dark soil of history and unearths old bones. The 1974 revolution has left injustices of the old fascist regime unresolved. But there’s an older, greater injustice for which this small death in Lisbon is horrific compensation, and in his final push for the truth, Ze must face the most chilling opposition.
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ROBERT WILSON
A Small Deathin Lisbon
HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 1999
Copyright © Robert Wilson 1999
Robert Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007322152
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007378142
Version: 2014-09-24
For Janeandmy mother
Although this novel is based on historical fact the story itself is complete fiction. All the characters and events are entirely fictitious and no resemblance is intended to any event or to any real person, either living or dead.
Contents
She was lying on a crust of pine needles, looking at the sun through the branches, beyond the splayed cones, through the nodding fronds. Yes, yes, yes. She was thinking of another time, another place when she’d had the smell of pine in her head, the sharpness of resin in her nostrils. There’d been sand underfoot and the sea somewhere over there, not far beyond the shell she’d held to her ear listening to the roar and thump of the waves. She was doing something she’d learned to do years ago. Forgetting. Wiping clean. Rewriting little paragraphs of personal history. Painting a different picture of the last half-hour, from the moment she’d turned and smiled to the question: ‘Can you tell me how . . .?’ It wasn’t easy, this forgetting business. No sooner had she forgotten one thing, rewritten it in her own hand, than along came something else that needed reworking. All this leading to the one thing that she didn’t like roaming loose around her head, that she was forgetting who she was. But this time, as soon as she’d thought the ugly thought, she knew that it was better for her to live in the present moment, to only move forward from the present in millimetre moments. ‘The pine needles are fossilizing in the backs of my thighs,’ was as far as she got in present moments. A light breeze reminded her that she’d lost her pants. Her breast hurt where it was trapped under her bra. A thought tugged at her. ‘He’ll come back. He’s seen it in my face. He’s seen it in my face that I know him.’ And she did know him but she couldn’t place him, couldn’t name him. She rolled on to her side and smiled at what sounded like breakfast cereal receiving milk. She knelt and gripped the rough bark of the pine tree with the blunt ends of her fingers, the nails bitten to the quick, one with a thin line of drying blood. She brushed the pine needles out of her straight blonde hair and heard the steps, the heavy steps. Boots on frosted grass? No. Move yourself. She couldn’t get the panic to move herself. She’d never been able to get the panic to move herself. A flash as fast as a yard of celluloid ripped through her head and she saw a little blonde girl sitting on the stairs, crying and peeing her pants because he’d chased her and she couldn’t stand to be chased. The rush. The gust of terrible energy. The wind up the stairs, whistling under the door. The forces winding up to deliver. Doors banging far off in the house. The thud. The thud of a watermelon dropped on tiles. Split skin. Pink flesh. Her blonde hair reddened. The cranial crack opened up. The bark bit a corner of her forehead. Her big blue eye saw into the black canyon.
