The Fallen Angel nc-9

by David Hewson

  The movement of the people on the street guided him. The source of the gunfire was two alleys away running north. A group of shocked bystanders was starting to gather round two dark, stationary shapes on the ground. Costa slewed the scooter to a halt, turned to Rosa and said, ‘Deal with it.’

  She dismounted in a flash, ripping off her helmet, and was down with the figures on the grey cobbled street. Costa snatched off his own headgear too and started to ask questions.

  ‘Him,’ said a young kid, no more than sixteen, in a bright purple shirt.

  The youth was pointing back across the piazza they’d just crossed to a street that dipped down by the side of the Lungotevere and led back towards the bridge.

  There was a red motorbike there, a serious machine, the rider anonymous in black, carefully weaving his way through the early-evening crowd that had ground to a halt, puzzled by the nearby commotion.

  ‘The bike?’ he asked.

  The kid nodded.

  Costa wheeled the little scooter round and set off back the way he’d come. When he entered the open space of the piazza he lifted the front wheel onto the pedestrian space that ran from one side to the other, shortcutting the distance between him and the red bike slowly disappearing down the narrow street opposite. Tramps bellowed at him, brandishing their bottles of cheap beer, tourists licked their ice creams in silence, looking shocked and scared.

  When he made it to the far side the bike was starting to edge its way towards the end of the lane at a steady, decent speed, one that wouldn’t attract attention. Costa jerked back the throttle on his little machine until the twist grip would go no further, tried to ignore the screeching, high-pitched whine it made, and began to close the distance between them.

  With no more than ten metres to go, the rider ahead noticed what was happening and began slowing to a crawl, one so leisurely he had to put down his feet to keep the big bike upright.

  Costa had no weapon, nothing much that could change the situation. This was more than a little foolhardy. But he couldn’t get those two bodies on the ground out of his head, and the nagging thought that he knew who one of them was, and could already begin to feel the pain that loss would cause.

  The helmet on the bike turned to watch him, attentively, in a way that gave Costa pause for thought as he flew along the cobbled alley, bare-headed, wondering what would happen when they met.

  The black-leather figure faced the road ahead and tore open the throttle on his machine. The powerful engine roared like a whipped beast. The front wheel lifted. The machine burst away towards the bridge with a turn of speed that seemed impossible. In a second or so it was already outpacing the rusty Vespa, increasing the distance between them. The front wheel came down, found purchase on the cobbles, then Costa watched as the red beast rode onto the steeply sloping pavement, using the incline as a ramp to leap high into the air, over the static stream of traffic locked on the choking Lungotevere.

  It landed on the bonnet of a large black official-looking Mercedes with a crash so loud Costa could hear it over the two-stroke engine beneath him. The bike rider kicked and fought to stabilize the machine as its heavy wheel punched deep indents into the bonnet of the vehicle beneath. With the skill of a stuntman he kept himself upright, then blipped the throttle again and lurched forward, working his way over the bonnets of two more adjoining vehicles, kicking at windscreens, levering his boots off doors and roofs and anything he could use to keep upright and get himself to the other side. Drivers opened their windows, shook their fists, furious, impotent as the rider used them as a pontoon across the broad riverside road.

  As he got closer to the pavement the engine roared to its full extent again. The red shape and then the black-clad figure disappeared. Costa listened as the loud, violent voice of the bike ripped through the evening, diminishing with distance.

  He took out his phone, called the control room, gave them the licence-plate number that he’d memorized when he got close enough.

  At the bridge the bike could turn left into the centro storico, or right for the Via Garibaldi and the suburbs beyond. There were so many escape routes. Or. . Costa was trying to think like a fugitive, aware it came naturally after all these years.

  Or the rider would simply pull into some deserted alley nearby, leave the machine, take off the black leather suit and the helmet, dump them too, and stride off into the city, one more face among thousands, anonymous, invisible.

  The control room said officers were already on the way. There was nothing else to do, no other chore he could think of that would delay the inevitable any longer.

  He turned the scooter around and slowly worked his way back towards the Piazza Trilussa and the bar beyond. The street was packed with people, both scared and curious, the way the public always was in such circumstances. A uniform car was there already, blocking the foot of the alley.

  He knew one of the cops.

  ‘What should we do?’ the officer asked when Costa turned up. ‘They said it was a guy on a bike.’

  ‘He’s gone.’

  Someone had placed blankets over the shapes on the ground. Rosa was on a stool by the door to the bar. Her make-up had run with the tears. She was clutching a drink that didn’t look like soda water and ice any more. Her eyes never left him.

  Costa walked over, put a hand on her arm and asked, ‘Riggi?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  She looked down the little street, back towards the river and shook her head. There was fury as well as shock in her face.

  ‘How the hell did you know he was here?’ she demanded.

  ‘I put a trace on his phone and called him.’

  ‘You might have told me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I’m sorry. There wasn’t time.’

  I was thinking, he wanted to say. About Agata and what she’d told him. About fairy-tales and the curious, insubstantial nature of human belief.

  ‘If we’d been here a couple of minutes earlier. .’ Rosa added.

  He took the drink away, put it on the table, took her arms. She fought him a little, but not much.

  ‘Then we’d be dead too. Don’t you know that?’

  She grabbed hold of the booze and took a clumsy drink.

  ‘He was still a cop, wasn’t he?’

  Costa turned round, bent down, lifted the first sheet and saw Riggi’s sour features beneath the fabric.

  It was wrong to stop there and he knew it. So he walked round and removed the sheet from the second corpse. A woman in the crowd cried out, a shriek of shock mixed with disgust, and it sounded like a scream of protest, at him, for letting this ugly, bloody fact be seen beneath the fading light of a beautiful Roman evening.

  A small red fire lit up in Costa’s head. He turned round, saw the woman, saw the anger and outrage in her face, and said, ‘If you don’t want to see, Signora, I suggest you walk away.’

  A few of them started to mutter. None moved. He didn’t care any more.

  Costa knelt down by the corpse and looked at the kid’s face. Part of his scalp had been blown away, revealing bone and tissue. His glassy eyes seemed locked on something in the distance. The thin line of his mouth was pulled back in a rictus leer. Washed-out denim jacket, black T-shirt, cheap jeans, curly dark hair. The same clothes Costa had seen in the Lone Star bar the night before, when this same youth had led him to the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci, and the corpse of Joanne Van Doren, a suicide that wasn’t.

  Gingerly, he lifted the edge of the jacket, aware that Teresa would screech at him for this. But there was something in the inside pocket, a shape that looked familiar, and Costa knew he had to see.

  A stash of notes. Eight euros, just enough for a meal and a drink or two. A small plastic bag with white powder in it. A single condom. A passport with the maroon cover of a European Union document, and the crest of the United Kingdom.

  He opened it up and saw the same face he’d seen the previous evening, the same blank, surly expression too on the photograph be
neath the clear security film, issued only six months before. And a name: Robert Peter Gabriel.

  PART NINE

  ONE

  The first Thursday of September, a morning so hot it seemed summer would never leave.

  A day and a half had passed since the murders in Trastevere. The gunning-down of a police officer and the missing Robert Gabriel had changed everything, brought a feverish anxiety to the headlines, the mood in the Questura, and the minds of the large team of officers now working on the case. It was rare for a member of the police to die on duty, an event that would usually demand some show of visible mourning on the part of the authorities.

  The circumstances of Riggi’s murder made this difficult. The media had quickly picked up the rumour that the dead man was under investigation for corruption. They soon learned, too, that Robert Gabriel had been in the pay of the Vadisi. When they coupled this with their existing fascination for the Gabriel case, and its links with the Cenci, they seemed to feel they’d found the perfect story, one that embraced everything that could sell news to a public desperate for both titillation and a source of outrage about the damaged state of the world. Murder, crime, sex — and the young, innocent-seeming face of Mina Gabriel, now grieving for her dead, wicked brother. The tale had it all.

  The demonstrations outside the Questura had grown. Judging by their posters, their complaints now extended to police incompetence and inefficiency in allowing the suspect brother to be killed by a group of criminals who should have been arrested years ago, and thrown out of Italy as unwanted foreigners. Costa recognized this shade of public opinion. It was one that surfaced from time to time, when a case of injustice hit the headlines and touched some popular nerve.

  The Gabriel case had unleashed a torrent of deep resentment towards the authorities over the state of law and order on the streets. It was a bad-tempered spirit, one that someone other than Leo Falcone might have exorcized the easy way, swiftly laying the blame for the murders of Malise Gabriel and Joanne Van Doren at the door of the dead son, closing that side of the case for good. Then, when the furore had abated a little, quietly working through a list of the known henchmen the Vadisi might have used for the hit.

  But easy was never Falcone’s style. The Gabriel case continued to concern him. The dogged inspector would not rest until he got to the very bottom of the strange and opaque event in the apartment in the Via Beatrice Cenci the previous weekend. As he made clear repeatedly in meeting after meeting, it was this that appeared to have triggered the series of tragedies which culminated in the shooting in the street two nights before. Truth never acquiesced to convenience in Falcone’s mind. It was one of his defining characteristics, an awkward, staunch persistence that seemed ingrained in the man’s personality.

  Costa admired this, and could see and understand his reasoning. They now knew that Malise Gabriel’s death was not accidental, as it was meant to appear. The loose scaffolding ties. The blood and tissue that had been revealed on Di Lauro’s handkerchief, wiped from the radiator in Mina’s room. The clear evidence that Gabriel was a difficult, argumentative man, one who had been conducting an adulterous affair with Joanne Van Doren in the secret photographic studio in the basement of her building.

  All of these factors aroused suspicion. What irked Falcone most was the continued silence on the part of Mina and her mother, their mute response to his many questions, their unwillingness to become involved. This was irrational and odd, and Costa knew it too. He had told Agata that he believed Mina was an innocent party in what had taken place, perhaps an aggrieved one too, not that he had mentioned that. His words were only partly meant to reassure her. Some truth continued to elude them and it went beyond the curious silence on the part of the young English girl and her mother.

  Then, as they assembled for one more case conference, Teresa Lupo summoned them suddenly to forensic. Finally, some hard evidence had, it seemed, been unearthed.

  TWO

  In the Questura’s largest forensic lab office Silvio Di Capua gazed at the grubby object in front of him, grinned and said, ‘You’ve no idea how lucky we are. There are a million illegal dumps around Lazio and most of them would have this stuff in ashes by now. Behold.’

  Forensic had tracked down some of the household material taken away by Joanne Van Doren’s builders the previous Sunday. It had been found on a site near Latina, untouched since it arrived. Di Capua’s attention had come to focus on a mattress from a single bed, one that looked depressingly familiar. The sheet was still on it, with the white and green mosaic pattern Costa and Peroni had seen when they walked into Mina’s room the previous Sunday, before the place had been cleared.

  ‘Why wasn’t it burned?’ Costa said.

  Falcone looked at him and sighed. Judging by the expressions on the faces of Teresa and Peroni they found the question baffling too.

  Di Capua shook his head.

  ‘It was some crappy little place that was behind schedule or something. Am I meant to care? Maria?’

  The stocky young assistant who now seemed permanently attached to Teresa’s deputy beamed as she showed them the marks left by her aerosol.

  ‘Semen,’ she said proudly. ‘We’ve sent off a sample for analysis.’

  Costa took a closer look at the mattress.

  ‘Do we know for sure this is Mina Gabriel’s?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Peroni objected. ‘We were there. In the room. We saw this ourselves. It’s hers.’

  Teresa placed a gloved finger on the mattress and said, ‘I’ll be able to confirm it’s the girl’s from skin residue if nothing else. Mattresses are full of it. It might help if you can persuade her to give me a DNA sample we can match, of course.’

  Costa wouldn’t give up.

  ‘If it turns out the semen was the father’s, it could have been one more place he slept with Joanne Van Doren.’

  The pathologist stared at him.

  ‘His daughter’s room? Why would he use that? He had his own secret little sex club in the basement. Why take the risk in the house?’

  ‘Some people like risks,’ Costa began. ‘I don’t know. Why don’t we wait for some facts? Instead of trying to concoct a case to match some theory that keeps bobbing up in front of us every time we’re stuck for an idea? Why. .?’

  ‘Let’s not allow our personal feelings to colour this investigation,’ Falcone interrupted. He nodded at Di Capua. ‘Good work.’

  ‘And another thing,’ Costa began, then saw Falcone’s stony face, gave up, realizing it was pointless.

  Teresa Lupo was working her gloved hands along the side of the mattress, underneath the white and green sheet. She’d seen something that Di Capua and his assistant had missed. There was a fabric handle built into the side, for carrying and turning. It protruded a little more on one side than the other.

  She raised the sheet, took out a pen and poked the end down the hollow cotton loop of the right-hand fastening. Something popped slowly out of the other side. It was a tiny USB memory stick, the kind people used for storing and moving files around computers.

  ‘Well, what do you know?’ Costa murmured. ‘We’re in luck again. Am I the only one who finds this steady stream of evidence a little. .?’

  He stopped. They weren’t taking any notice. Their eyes were on the memory stick, and they were listening to Di Capua wonder whether it would be protected by a password or not.

  ‘Most people aren’t sad geeks like you,’ Teresa told her deputy, taking the thing in her gloved fingers over to a laptop on a nearby desk. ‘They wouldn’t even understand how to encrypt something. They’d think hiding it down a mattress would be enough.’

  ‘A mattress!’ Maria said gleefully. ‘What kind of thing would you want to hide down there? Bad things. Dirty things. I wonder. .’

  Peroni gave her a filthy, judgemental look. She shut up. Teresa plugged the stick into the side of the computer. It wasn’t encrypted at all. Not even protected by a password. A flood of images began to fill the screen automatic
ally. Costa stared at a couple, understood what he was seeing, and turned away.

  This part of the forensic department was at the front of the Questura, in a modern annexe tacked onto the original building in the seventies. It faced the cobbled Renaissance square of the Piazza San Michele. Before being turned over to the police in the late nineteenth century, the Questura had been a palace belonging to the Vatican, home to a famous Cardinal, one known for gambling and sexual licentiousness. The spiritual and the sensual were never far apart in Rome.

  From his viewpoint he could see the gang of demonstrators milling around in the street. The protest had reached a lull. The figures outside were swigging bottles of water, wandering around in the heat, their faces sullen with boredom. Banners stood at half-mast. The mainly female crowd chatted mostly, barely remembering to hand out leaflets to those passing through the square on the way to the Pantheon.

  He wondered what these same women would say if they could see the photographs being revealed on the nearby computer screen, stored secretly on a tiny digital device hidden in the crevices of Mina Gabriel’s mattress. One more convenient clue, it seemed, pointing to the obvious conclusion.

  ‘Sovrintendente,’ Falcone barked. ‘Would you care to give us your opinion?’

  Costa took a deep breath and went back to the screen. There must have been thirty photos there or more. All of them, he felt sure, were of Mina Gabriel. Her face was visible in many. The shapes, the poses, the contortions. . his eyes told him this was from the same photographer who took the pictures they’d found in the basement. In many she could have been interchangeable with Joanne Van Doren. Except these were more explicit, more visceral. More amateurish too, somehow.