We are told ... Mr Amaral doesn't speak English.
It is quite possible that he doesn't, or that he doesn't speak it well.
The info about kids being taught English for 8 years at school seemingly applies to anyone under the age of 60. I have not checked when it was made mandatory.
Back to Mr Amaral. He was not a front-line officer, dealing with anyone in English. He was higher up the food chain, where quite clearly he would have been communicating in Portuguese, not English. I can't think of any situation where he would have required English, but to be honest, I haven't given it a great deal of thought.
I learned Latin for 3 years to age 15. Since then, I have not used it in any significant way. The longest joined up sentence I can manage now is 'te amo', which is not useful in an emergency.
There are clear instances in the files where people were not confident about speaking in English. Like Mr Amaral, I would expect the GNR commander that night to conduct his work in Portuguese, not English. I would not expect the cooks, chefs, gardeners and cleaners were not required to speak English.
But this is all irrelevant. The Tapas 9 spoke to Portuguese people in English, not Portuguese. To now make a language barrier a reason for not calling the authorities directly does not bear scrutiny. They did not call the authorities directly. They did not ensure English speaking staff called the authorities in a prompt manner.
Despite this, chapter 4 of Kate's book informs her audience that the response was tardy. p73 "Just after 10 past 10, Gerry asked Matt to run to the Ocean Club's 24 hour reception to get the staff to call the police." Thus putting into the reader's mind that there was a very swift call to the police, when Matthew's statement in English makes it plain this did not happen.
Followed by p73 "At 10:35 the police had still not arrived,". Despite the fact that Kate claimed to be something of an expert of the files, she may not have twigged that the first call was at 10.41. But the reader gets the perception of a tardy response, even before the police were called.
Followed by p75 "It was not until about 11.10pm that two policeman arrived from the nearest town, Lagos," The reader now has the perception that the patrol came from Lagos, not Odiaxere, the other side of Lagos. The reader has the perception that the response time was 60 minutes, not 30 minutes.
This is gross disinformation.
Before the GNR arrived, they were already discussing roadblocks and sealing borders. It is impossible to tell from the book whether this discussion occurred before or after the first phone call to the GNR, because the actual time of the first call to the GNR is not in the book.
