The Strange Case of the Department’s Suicides

On 14 August 1920, at 6.30 a.m., the cleaner of the Department’s headquarters suffered a massive scare. When she entered Inspector Eliseu Torcato’s office, she found him hanging by the neck, the other end of the rope tied to a beam in the ceiling. The woman’s screams were heard by the night shift officers, who confirmed the death and called an ambulance to take the body to the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

The following week, another inspector turned up dead in his bathtub, at home, with an empty bottle of pills lying next to him on the floor. This second case set off alarm bells throughout the Department. himself in the head with his service weapon, in the middle of the street. It was with great effort that the Department managed to hush up the case. Two weeks later, a trainee officer threw himself off the D. Luís Bridge and, when he was retrieved from the river, he was already a corpse.

Some of the speeches at the Department’s High Council almost reached panic level, during an emergency meeting, but the session ended inconclusively.

Tomé Silva was a 2nd class agent who had recently been admonished by his boss for repeatedly using unorthodox methods in the course of his work. The investigators also recommended that he should be temporarily placed on administrative duty. Therefore, Tomé Silva was working at the Archives, where the successive reports produced on the suicide cases passed through him. And since his work at the Archives wasn’t particularly demanding, Tomé had time to think about the subject.

He first went to see if there were any commonalities between the various suicides and discovered that all the deceased had been part of the team investigating the death of Inspector Eliseu Torcato. He then went to look at the material in the Evidence Deposit about Inspector Eliseu. Along with the usual things – documents, the service weapon, photos of family members –, Tomé found a black-bound notebook filled with what he recognised as the inspector’s handwriting. Tomé left everything at the Deposit except the notebook, which he put in his pocket.

That evening, in the rented room where he lived, Tomé took a bottle of wine out of his suitcase, which was always locked his position as a Department agent allowed him to obtain some products that were difficult to find on the market – and filled a glass. He sat down on the bed to find a comfortable position, opened the notebook and began to read.

As he flipped through the pages, he realised that the notebook was a time bomb. Inspector Torcato had gathered quotes from authors –- Paine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, Zola, Victor Hugo, Robespierre –, all of whom fiercely anti-monarchy, demonstrating in a thousand ways that the existence of a king, considered superior to all other citizens simply because he was the king’s son, was an aberration that made no sense in a civilised and enlightened world.

It was two o’clock in the morning when Tomé Silva finished his reading (and half a bottle of wine). And he had a theory about the suicides.

Inspector Eliseu Torcato’s research into anti-monarchist literature had shaken his convictions so deeply that the inspector, until then a fervent supporter of the Cause, saw no other solution than suicide. And the quotes transcribed were so convincing that the next three agents, after reading the notebook, were led to the same end.

Tomé Silva, however, considered himself a pragmatist. It wasn’t that he didn’t see some reason in what he had just read. But he liked his job, and as long as he got paid, he was going to stick with it. The future belonged to the future.

He went to the kitchen –- the whole house was asleep at that hour – and confirmed that the cast iron cooker still had a few embers in the furnace. Then, he methodically tore the pages out of the notebook, one by one, and threw them into the embers, where they curled up, blackened and were finally consumed in flames.

When he was finished, Tomé returned to his room, locked the bottle again and went to bed, almost immediately falling into a dreamless sleep.

And there were no more suicides in the Department.