'I didn't know about London,' he said.

'My father was over there,' I said. 'So what do you know about?'

'Your father was an army officer. You spent a lot of time in Africa. In Guinea. You've been seventeen years on the force, eight of them as a homicide detective.'

'Have you accessed my file?'

'No. I asked Engenheiro Narciso. He didn't tell me everything,' he said, sucking in his thick coffee. 'He didn't say what rank your father was for instance.'

Antonio's eyebrows switched back again and a glint of partisan interest came from deep in his eye sockets. A political question: was my father one of the younger officers who started the 1974 revolution, or old guard? Both men waited.

'My father was a colonel,' I said.

'How did he end up in London?'

'Ask him,' I said, nodding to Antonio, no appetite for this.

'How long have you got?' he asked, gripping the edge of the bar.

'No time at all,' I said. 'There's a dead body waiting for us on the beach.'

We crossed the gardens to the Marginal and went through the underpass to a small car park in front of the Clube Desportivo de Paco de Arcos. There was a dried-fish and diesel smell amongst the old boats lying on their sides or propped up on tyres amongst rusted trailers and rubbish bins. A halved oil drum was smoking with two planks of wood burning to heat a pan of oil. A couple of fishermen I knew were ignoring the scene and sorting through the marker buoys and crab and lobster pots in front of their corrugated iron work shacks. I nodded and they looked across to the crowd that had already formed even at this early hour.

The line of people that had gathered at the low stone balustrade on the edge of the beach and along the harbour wall were looking down on to the sand. Some broad-backed working women had taken time out to distress themselves over the tragedy, muttering through their fingers: