by David Hewson
Falcone was interested.
‘Why should you do this Santacroce a favour?’
‘Because. .’
‘Because what?’
She placed her thin hands together and pleaded with him, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I need the money.’
Falcone scanned the room.
‘I’m not happy with Malise Gabriel’s death, Signora. You’ve removed what may be material evidence from these premises in circumstances I still do not understand. As long as I remain unhappy I will keep the keys to this building. Why did you do these people a favour?’
She looked angry. And worried too, Peroni thought. Close to the edge. Falcone could have tackled this with a little less aggression, even if it wasn’t his usual style.
‘Because I felt sorry for them! OK?’ The blood had drained from her face. ‘I felt sorry for Mina most of all. It wasn’t her fault her father couldn’t walk down the street without picking a fight with someone. They were all going nuts in that crazy little place of Bernard’s. They had to leave.’ She got a little closer. ‘Look. I’m sorry if I’ve done something wrong here. I didn’t mean to. I can help you out. Tell me what you want. It can be fixed. But I’ve got to let these people in to view. If I don’t. .’
Falcone dismissed her with a wave of his hand.
‘I want this entire apartment closed except to my people and a forensic team until further notice. No one is coming in without my permission. Including you.’
‘Are you trying to bankrupt me?’
He wasn’t interested.
‘You may stay here until the forensic team arrive. After that you’ll have to leave. We will tell you when we’re finished.’
‘This is going to a lawyer right now,’ she said and stormed off.
Falcone walked over to the window and looked at the broken scaffolding. Then he leaned out and peered down to the street below. Peroni joined him. The Via Beatrice Cenci was open again now. This part of Rome looked the way it usually did, quiet, residential, a little run-down.
‘Why would she clear this place so quickly?’ the inspector asked. ‘On a Sunday night? Without giving you a clue it was on the cards when you came here yesterday afternoon?’
‘It’s annoying. I wouldn’t read into it any more than that. Go easy on that woman, will you? She looks in a bad way. Worse than yesterday I think.’
Falcone raised his eyebrows and said nothing.
‘OK,’ Peroni sighed, thinking about it. ‘I agree. Something here stinks. I’ll get Teresa’s people in straight away and see if they can find something in all this muck and dust. One of the juniors can start hunting the dumps to see where all that stuff has gone. That may not be easy. If they’ve used some illegal site. .’
Falcone closed his eyes for a moment and muttered, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t come round myself.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, sir,’ Peroni said and didn’t regret the note of acid in his voice. He wasn’t taking the blame. They had all thought this was the accident it appeared.
‘I want to see Cecilia Gabriel,’ Falcone said, barely noticing. ‘And this girl, Mina. I want that brother found too.’
‘Narcotics are looking.’
Peroni thought of the way Nic had talked about the daughter, about how bright and sincere she was, and the pain he’d seen on her pretty young face. He wondered how Nic would feel when he realized it was his insistence on examining events more closely that would bring Mina Gabriel into a police interview room before long.
‘We’ve got a case, haven’t we?’ he asked, knowing the answer.
Falcone moved his foot through the grime and rubble on the floorboards. Joanne Van Doren’s voice was rising to a scream in the big room beyond. Some Roman lawyer was beginning to feel her anger. It sounded as if the man wasn’t giving her the news she wanted.
The inspector’s mournful grey eyes scanned the bare room, and the larger space outside, then came to rest on Peroni.
‘I honestly don’t know. I hate this sort of thing. It’s starting to feel grubby already. I wish Nic were on duty. Perhaps if I-’
‘He needs a break,’ Peroni cut in. ‘He needs to learn there’s more to life than work. There’s Agata too. We agreed on this, Leo. Remember?’
‘I remember,’ Falcone muttered and threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.
FOUR
The little turquoise scooter wound its way slowly around the hot and humid streets of Rome as Costa listened to Mina unearthing the traces of Beatrice Cenci’s past as if they were ley lines waiting to be rediscovered beneath the dust.
They stopped at the site of the ancient Tordinona prison, northwest of the Piazza Navona, where she was tortured. Then the Vespa worked through the back streets towards the Campo dei Fiori, to the spot in the Via di Monserrato where a plaque on the wall marked the position of another former Vatican hellhole, the jail of Corte Savella. It was in this narrow, ordinary street that she spent her last night on earth before being walked by hooded monks to the block a few minutes away by the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It had taken until 11 September 1999, four hundred years after her execution, for the city’s rulers to make public their shame about her death. The words on the wall marked the site from which she had been taken to the scaffold, ‘vittima esemplare di una giustizia ingiusta’ — an exemplary victim of an unjust justice, said the sign.
By lunch time they stood outside the Palazzo Cenci. In the bright August sunlight the place still seemed forbidding, a private fortress, built on its own little hill which, like much else around, had taken on the Cenci name. Mina showed him the tiny pink-walled church in the intimate little piazza at the summit of the modest mound, in the shadow of the palace. The tablet on the facade marked its reconstruction in 1575, thanking ‘Franciscus Cincius’, Beatrice’s own tormenting father, for the work. Inside the closed building, Mina said, was an unmarked tomb originally planned for Francesco. It now contained the quartered remains of Giacomo, his son and murderer. The father himself was hurriedly buried in the countryside where he was killed, in the hope that the crime would never be discovered.
‘Every September the eleventh,’ she said, looking back at the palace, ‘there’s a mass here for Beatrice and her family in the chapel. I want to go if I can.’ She looked at him. ‘Some Romans still love her.’
‘It was Romans who killed her,’ Costa pointed out.
‘Not the ordinary people. They approved of what she did. Standing up for herself.’
‘Do you?’ he asked.
She sat down on the bonnet of a Fiat saloon parked lazily in the road and toyed with her long, blonde hair again.
‘Yes, I think she was right. What choice did she have?’ She took a piece of gum out of her pocket, popped it in her mouth and said, ‘You know an awful lot for a policeman.’
FIVE
Next the Vespa went to the bridge where Beatrice died, now little more than another traffic-choked stretch of road by the Tiber. Mina pointed out what she believed to be the place: in the middle of the busy Lungotevere where pedestrians crossed to walk onto the footbridge of the Ponte Sant’Angelo. He parked the scooter outside a cafe in a little lane. They waited for the lights then walked to the cobbled stones that led across the Tiber to the vast, hulking shape which had once been the mausoleum of Hadrian. The Castel Sant’Angelo’s soft brown stone, a vast cylinder towering over the river, seemed to shimmer in the midday heat. The girl dragged him past each of the angels on the bridge, fanciful, heavenly creatures, some bearing musical instruments, some vicious devices from the stations of the cross.
This bend in the river was one of his favourite points in Rome, a place where every aspect of the city’s character, imperial, Renaissance and modern, seemed to converge. It was hard to imagine the streets thronged with crowds, silent, anticipating a hideous act to end a brief and terrible story. Yet here, by the bridge that was now a favourite place for tourists to take pictures, the city had once executed criminals with a shocking regularity.
‘They say that every September the eleventh Beatrice’s ghost comes back here, carrying her head beneath her arm.’
Costa frowned. He’d heard so many such tales.
‘Romans have a fondness for the supernatural. We’re a credulous race.’
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked outright.
‘No.’
She seemed to approve of his answer.
‘I remember talking to Daddy about it. He said, if you think of all the millions of people who’ve died there ought to be ghosts everywhere. It doesn’t make sense. We’d be surrounded by ghosts in mourning. For each other. For us. You wouldn’t be able to think for the sound of their crying.’
Mina Gabriel placed a finger on the stone base of the statue of an angel in front of them, a beautiful figure, fluid and full of movement, in its hands a cruel crown of thorns.
He followed the gaze of the statue above them. The creature’s blank eyes were set on the dome of St Peter’s, as if seeking salvation, or some semblance of reason.
A scowl crossed her innocent face as she glanced towards the great basilica too.
‘They’d kill someone just for wanting to be themselves.’
‘Did you talk to your father about Beatrice a lot?’
‘I was talking about Galileo. And all the others. Don’t you know about the Confraternita?’
She was testing him. He was sure of it.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘Another time,’ Mina replied quickly. ‘Daddy didn’t talk to me about Beatrice. What makes you think that?’
‘You said. .’
‘About ghosts. Not Beatrice. Not ever.’
There was a hiatus in the conversation. A stiffness. Something unsaid.
‘They took her body along the Via Giulia,’ she said, returning to the subject, pointing out the direction back to the street that paralleled the river. ‘Then across the Ponte Sisto.’ One more sweep of her arm to the old footbridge further along the Tiber. ‘Then through Trastevere, up that steep hill, to Montorio. Thousands of them. A long way. Hard work. They hated what that man. .’ Her eyes flashed back towards the great dome. ‘. . did to her.’
‘I believe they did,’ he agreed.
PART FIVE
ONE
Teresa Lupo gazed at the body on the mirror-bright table in the morgue, a skinny male corpse beneath a white sheet rolled back to reveal everything from the waist up. The information sheet her assistant Silvio Di Capua had provided gave the basics. Malise Gabriel was sixty-one years old, pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital in the early hours of Saturday morning, two days before. The duty morgue officer, a college intern, had examined the body, read the report from the police, and written the probable cause of death as severe head injuries consistent with a fall from a substantial height. This could not be a formal finding. She was a temporary worker. In the absence of suspicion of foul play the full autopsy would naturally be delayed due to staff shortages. Nothing much had happened since.
‘Leave it to the Monday people,’ Teresa grumbled. Not that there was anything to indicate the duty junior had done anything wrong. The bruised and bloodied corpse in front of her looked the way she would have expected from seeing the police incident statement. There were no indications of other injuries. No obvious inflicted wounds. No cuts or abrasions that spoke of anything but a fall.
She looked at the face of the man on the table. Features sometimes changed with death, particularly an end such as this. His skull had suffered multiple fractures and there were severe injuries to his forehead and the right side, above and below the ear. Teresa had found a photograph of Malise Gabriel from his brief time in the spotlight. Twenty years before he’d seemed like the aristocrat he was, handsome, a little arrogant perhaps, with the face of a sportsman, the broken nose of a rugby player. A strong, physical man. Not like this.
‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,’ Di Capua cut in, ‘the answer’s no, you can’t.’
She glowered at him.
‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’
‘I’ve seen it before a million times. You’ve got that look.’
‘That look?’
‘The one that means work. And trouble.’
She sighed.
‘This man deserves a full autopsy, and he will get one.’
‘Yes, but he doesn’t need to get it from the head of the department, does he? We’ve got a team going into that house in the ghetto. Half our people are on holiday.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped. ‘I get the point.’ She knew where this was leading. ‘You want to do it, then?’
Di Capua smiled. He’d turn thirty soon. The little that remained of his hair was now close cropped. His clothes were standard white office garb. The failed hippie she’d first employed seemed to have metamorphosed into an impertinent dentist somewhere over the past few years.
‘I suggest I handle this and you go round and see what’s happening in the house.’ He smiled. ‘Let’s face it. This is just one more autopsy. You can do that with your eyes closed. From what Peroni said. .’
She’d listened to the phone call asking for a team to seal off the Gabriels’ apartment. Judging by the tone of Di Capua’s response, Falcone was not in the best of moods.
‘They’re trying to dredge up a speck of evidence in a building site,’ he went on. ‘Now that’s going to be hard.’
‘Thank you,’ she said with false grace, passing him back the file. ‘I was going to do that anyway. He’ll want something by the end of the day, you know.’
‘So what’s new? I’m not promising miracles. I’ll do the best I can.’
‘Good. Here’s a starter for you.’ She leaned down and indicated the bloodied, torn scalp. ‘This man is suffering from some kind of hair loss. I suggest you discover who his doctor is and get what records you can. Also. .’
She picked up Malise Gabriel’s right hand.
‘There are scratches here that don’t look like the kind of thing you’d get from a fall from a building. I could be wrong, but they may be worthy of further investigation.’
He nodded, with an ingratiating pleasantness that told her he’d seen all this already.
‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘Enough for now. We can talk later.’
She walked out of the room trying to recall those happy days when Silvio Di Capua lived in fear and awe of her. He was up to something. She just knew it.
So Teresa Lupo waited outside for a few seconds then reopened the swinging door to the morgue and poked her head back in.
Di Capua had rolled back the fabric completely. The body of Malise Gabriel lay naked on the table, white and purple and bloody. Her assistant was staring at the lower part of the torso. He jumped visibly as she banged open the door very deliberately. It was worth it just for that.
‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Silvio?’ she asked.
His large, wide-set eyes rolled upwards. The young pathologist’s composure returned.
‘When I’m ready,’ he said.
TWO
Peroni and Falcone spent three hours with the forensic team in the Via Beatrice Cenci as they pored over the Gabriels’ apartment, picking and prodding patiently in their white bunny suits. The American woman’s mood had grown progressively more downcast and sullen. Falcone had what he wanted: men and women scouring every last inch of the place for physical evidence. After a little while he had Teresa Lupo to stand over them, watching every step, every last precise action too. Not for a moment did it appear to concern him that the formal search warrant for these actions had yet to arrive from the magistrate. It was, Peroni reminded himself, that time of year.
Joanne Van Doren was in the poky kitchen when they left, skinny fingers around another beer. Peroni made a point of going up to her and asking if there was anything he could do.
‘Write a cheque for fifty thousand euros
?’ she suggested wearily.
He tried to treat it as a joke, and to ignore Falcone tapping his toes ready to leave by the door.
‘Signora, if there’s something you’d like to tell us. . it would be better now. To hear it voluntarily, rather than discover it for ourselves.’
Her eyes flashed wildly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I said.’
For a moment Peroni thought he was getting somewhere. Then something, some second thought, intervened and she said, ‘It was an accident. I don’t know what else you expect me to say.’
The place they were headed was so close it was pointless taking Falcone’s Lancia saloon. The directions they had received told them to go to the Palazzetto Santacroce and ask for admittance at the door. The building lay in the warren of lanes a few minutes away on foot across the busy Via Arenula, an area much like the ghetto, dark and cramped, though rather grander in nature. The palazzetto was a grand and imposing four-storey mansion in its own cul-de-sac behind the river, close to the footbridge of the Ponte Sisto with its beautiful view of the dome of St Peter’s.
‘There’s money here,’ Peroni muttered as they walked through a brown stone entrance arch into a small courtyard with a fountain at the centre surrounded by lush, well-tended grass.
‘You can say that again,’ Falcone replied, pointing at the first-floor apartment visible beyond the caretaker’s kiosk. Paintings, statues, grand gilt furniture, rich red velvet walls. This was another Rome, barely touched by the pressure and poverty of the street.
‘We want the Casina,’ Peroni told the uniformed man behind the glass, showing his police ID.
It was only when they went through a second set of doors to the rear that he realized the full extent of the property, which ran all the way to the riverside road, making it as large, surely, as the Palazzo Farnese, the palatial mansion close by that was now the French embassy. The hidden back was almost entirely given over to garden, a rare oasis in the city, carefully laid out with shrubs and palm trees, fountains, flower beds, topiary and shady bowers with seats, all beneath high, unbroken walls which rendered the secluded refuge invisible to the city at large.