by David Hewson
Mina looked scared, tired, reluctant, even drugged in some, as if taking part in a performance she was unable to refuse. There was only one part of the man that was visible, the predictable part, though in a single shot it was possible to make out the barest outline of a hand reaching out to the back of her head, pulling her face towards him.
‘Well?’ Falcone persisted.
‘What do you want me to say?’
The inspector scowled.
‘Malise Gabriel was committing incest with his own daughter while simultaneously conducting an affair with Joanne Van Doren,’ Falcone said. He sounded more than a little disheartened and disgusted by what they’d found, but there was relief in his voice too, and determination. ‘He kept his secret with the American woman in the cellar. He hid his abuse of his daughter in her own bed.’ Falcone glared at the computer screen. ‘Turn that off. I’ve seen enough.’
‘Bastard,’ Di Capua spat. ‘No wonder they wanted him dead.’
There were no words left, Costa realized. No possible objections he could raise.
After a long pause Peroni asked Falcone, ‘What do you want to do next?’
‘I’m going to get an arrest warrant out of Grimaldi,’ the inspector said. ‘The girl and the mother. Mina Gabriel has to admit to what went on here. She’s not leaving the Questura until I get that. We’ll show them this. .’ His hand swept towards the screen. ‘If we have to.’
‘Do you think you have enough to justify a warrant?’ Costa asked.
‘Scaffolding tampered with on the roof?’ Falcone asked. ‘Cecilia Gabriel round there the very morning her husband died, clearing the place so quickly we don’t get to look at what was there? Some kind of a struggle in the girl’s room? And she never noticed a thing? Please.’
‘And Joanne Van Doren?’ Costa asked.
‘Perhaps she found out. She must have known what kind of man Gabriel was.’ Falcone looked at him. ‘Try and distance yourself from this girl. Look at the facts dispassionately. We may not know the full story, but we surely understand the direction it’s taking. Alone, or in concert with the mother and daughter, Robert killed them.’
Peroni was staring at Costa from across the room. The big old cop was, in some ways, one of the smartest people he knew, a man in touch with his own emotions and those of others, even if his physical appearance belied this fact entirely. At that moment Costa was sure Peroni was trying to share something, to say that he’d his doubts too.
A uniformed officer came through the door. He looked happy.
‘Immigration got the Turk at the airport,’ he announced. ‘The one called Cakici. Riggi’s contact. Picked him up waiting for a flight to Izmir from Ciampino. Trying to leave the country on a false passport.’
There was a contented murmur of approval in the room. Riggi was still a cop. People wanted his killer brought to justice.
‘Fetch him,’ Falcone ordered. ‘This man murdered a serving police officer. I want him here. In the Questura.’
‘They say we have to interview him there first,’ the officer said. ‘False passport. That’s their territory.’
Falcone swore, pulled out his phone, was about to start yelling at someone, then thought better of it. The tall, thin inspector was thinking, finger on his tidy silver goatee, striding round the forensic room, silent.
He turned to Costa and Peroni, aware, perhaps, that they’d exchanged some unspoken misgiving a few seconds before.
‘Go to Ciampino,’ he told them. ‘Get him out of their hands. You can leave Mina and Cecilia Gabriel to me.’
THREE
The first Appian Way, the Antica, curved away from the gate of San Sebastiano in the Aurelian walls then ran south-east across Italy, past ruined tombs and temples, gatehouses and the debris of imperial-era barracks. Past Nic Costa’s home too, where it was little more than a narrow cobbled lane surrounded by the detritus of a lost empire. The Via Appia Nuova, its modern equivalent, was very different, a broad, busy highway choked with traffic, its city stretch passing low, grey housing estates, supermarkets and furniture warehouses, the ugly facade of twenty-first-century urban life. It was this that took them to Ciampino.
They were passing a line of cheap stores not far from the airport turnoff, Costa driving, a habit he’d kept from the days he and Peroni were of equal rank. There was something in the older cop’s silent, sullen mood that intrigued him.
Rome’s second airport, originally a military and business installation, was now an unlovely provincial dump preferred by the budget operators unwilling to pay the fees of the flashier Fiumicino. It was a few minutes away. Without being asked, the big man called ahead and made sure immigration knew to expect them, and to expect, too, that the Questura would send an armoured meat wagon to take the Turkish gangster Cakici back into their custody in central Rome before the day was out.
‘Why are we blaming the Turks again?’ Costa asked, fishing to get the big man talking out loud.
Without emotion Peroni repeated Falcone’s reasoning. It lay in the flimsy intelligence they’d received from Rosa Prabakaran’s superiors. Gino Riggi had been in the pay of the gang known as the Vadisi, the Wolves, that held the drugs franchise for the tourist dives around the Campo and Trastevere. The Gabriel kid had been the go-between for Riggi and the Turks. The fierce burst of publicity about the case had persuaded the Vadisi their operations could be jeopardized by the arrest of Robert Gabriel for murder. So they acted to save themselves.
‘Would they murder two people, one of them a cop, for that?’
Peroni’s jowly face contorted into a scowl.
‘Seems a little excessive, doesn’t it?’ he said.
‘Seems like asking for trouble,’ Costa thought.
‘I guess. . Leo knows that too.’
They’d worked together for so long that they could almost read one another’s moods. Falcone wasn’t content with the explanations he was trying to use as a basis for this case, and his dissatisfaction made him cling to them all the more. Not out of arrogance or laziness. It was his way of testing a theory, pushing it until the flimsy structure fell to pieces.
‘None of this fits,’ Peroni muttered as he watched a couple of tourist coaches pull out from the entrance to the airport, cutting across a line of cars without thinking. ‘Or maybe it fits too well. I hate this whole damned thing. I hate the thought of what that man did to his own daughter. Someone intelligent, cultured. Why? What would drive someone to do such a thing?’
‘He was sick physically,’ Costa suggested. ‘Perhaps that made him sick in the head too?’
Peroni gave him a cold stare and asked, ‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Not for one minute. Mina loved her father. I’m sure of it. Would she feel that way if he abused her?’
‘You wouldn’t think so,’ the big cop muttered. Then he cheered up briefly and asked, ‘Did your father ever read you fairy stories?’
Costa laughed and said, ‘You’d never have asked that question if you’d met him. No. He didn’t.’
‘Well I did. With my kids. Loved doing it. One day I picked up a copy of Grimm’s tales, an old, cheap one at a church sale.’ The smile left his face. This memory troubled him. ‘Picked a story at random, sat down by their beds and read it out loud. They were eight, ten at the time.’
‘And?’ Costa said, prompting him when he fell quiet.
‘It was about a king whose beautiful wife was dying. So she made him promise he’d never marry again unless he found someone who was more lovely than she was.’ They stopped and waited for a tourist bus to disgorge its line of backpacking passengers. ‘The mother never thought that would happen, of course. But there was someone more beautiful, to the father. His daughter. When the mother died, he became crazy with grief and told his daughter he’d marry her.’
Costa thought for a moment and murmured, ‘This may be why my father didn’t read fairy stories.’
‘There was all the kids’ stuff,’ Peroni went on. ‘The girl running
away into the forest. Coming back disguised, working as a servant, trying to hide her true identity. But the king fell in love with her anyway, even though he’d no idea who she really was. And in the end, after a lot of stupid shenanigans, they married. Father and daughter. Happily ever after.’
He scowled at the vast car park, the lines of taxis waiting to get into Ciampino’s overcrowded pickup area. ‘Happily ever after. And no one said a word. Last time I bought a kids’ book at a church sale, I can tell you. Why can’t life be just good and bad, the way it’s supposed to be?’
Costa flashed his police ID at the car park and drove to the secure area. Peroni waited as he parked the blue liveried police car, a cheap, dirty Fiat, not the flashy Alfas the Carabinieri got.
‘Still, I suppose I should be glad you left the Vespa at home,’ he added, breaking the mood a little.
‘Bit far for her,’ Costa replied. ‘But she’s still as strong as an ox. A little ox. One day,’ he pointed back towards the Via Appia Antica, ‘I’m going to ride her all the way down there, into the hills. Want to come?’
Peroni laughed.
‘I’ll pass on that. You always said you were going to go there on a pushbike.’
‘Too old. Too little time.’ Costa looked at him. ‘I’ve never worked organized crime, Gianni. Not seriously. Tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘How many ride-by killings do we get a year? Gang assassinations? Two? Three?’
‘Not as many as we used to get.’
‘And why’s that?’ Costa continued. ‘Because it’s an Italian thing. The Sicilians, the Neapolitans. They love all that show-off stuff. But they’re not running these rings any more. They’re more interested in easy, safe money. Bribery, corruption, skimming.’
‘Riggi wasn’t involved with the Sicilians.’
‘Precisely. Here’s another thing. If you’re going to kill someone from a motorbike, surely you need two people. One to ride. One to shoot. Have you ever known a mob ride-by where there was just one person on the bike?’
Peroni was smiling and shaking his head.
‘No, sovrintendente, I haven’t.’
‘And the small matter of the Ducati?’
Costa folded his arms. Just before they left they’d heard that the red motorbike had been located at four that morning, at an autostrada service station on the route north to Florence. Two cops had performed a textbook arrest and taken a thirty-three-year-old man into custody. It took a local inspector only thirty minutes to realize he had a case of theft on his hands, not murder. The bike had been abandoned shortly after the shootings, left in a side street near the Via Beatrice Cenci with the keys in the ignition. The man in custody was a city bus driver who’d been on duty till midnight and seen the machine by the side of the street on the way home. He was planning to drive the Ducati north to a relative in Florence and sell it on. The original rider’s clothes were still missing. The machine itself had fake number plates. No weapon had been found, no real clue as to the identity of the man who had killed Riggi and Robert Gabriel the previous night.
Peroni screwed up his flabby face and said, ‘Even the stupidest gangsters I’ve met, and there’ve been quite a few, would never have left a machine like that in the vicinity, with the keys in the ignition. Why take the risk? They’d have whisked it out of Rome in a van or something. Taken it out into the countryside and burned the thing. Or repainted it, changed the numbers, and put it in an empty dope crate back to Turkey or somewhere. That bike’s worth, what, seven, eight thousand euros? Either they’d destroy it or sell it.’
Exactly as Costa had thought. ‘So?’ he asked.
‘So Leo knows all this. He’s just working with what he has.’
‘We’re here to talk to this Cakici guy for no other reason than he was Riggi’s contact with the Turkish mob?’
Peroni’s bright blue eyes sparkled.
‘A contact who was trying to flee the country on a false passport, remember.’
‘Probably just scared we’d come looking for him. As we have. My guess is he’s as innocent of these murders as Mina Gabriel is of the death of her father.’
‘I hope your guess is correct,’ Peroni said quietly, unwrapping a chocolate bar and taking a big bite of it. ‘On the latter anyway. I truly do.’
Costa thought of the interview ahead.
‘All the same, I don’t like scum who sell drugs to teenagers,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a point, shall we?’
FOUR
Teresa Lupo liked Toni Grimaldi, the chief resident Questura lawyer. He was a friendly, portly man in his fifties with a genial face and a walrus moustache rather amateurishly dyed black to match his full head of hair. His role was not always an easy one. He acted as the conduit between the police and the judiciary, the internal Questura expert who would tell an investigating officer whether he or she had sufficient evidence to merit a search warrant, an arrest or a charge.
Officers trusted Grimaldi, a man who’d worked in the Piazza San Michele longer than almost anyone else still serving. He rarely gave the green light to a case that would fall at the first hurdle, as many a young lawyer was wont to do. He was frank and open with his advice, sometimes suggesting routes of inquiry that had not occurred to the detectives concerned or, on occasion, the forensic team. Over the years he had become a vital cog in the workings of the Questura, an impartial eye who would not shirk from telling an investigating officer when it was time to give up. For this he was admired even if his advice was not always welcome.
Every last file Falcone possessed, and the latest information from the forensic department, had been in his hands for two hours. Teresa now sat next to Leo Falcone in Grimaldi’s bright fourth-floor office overlooking the courtyard at the back of the building, waiting for his opinion. Much, she thought, as a patient waited for a doctor to pass on news of a diagnosis. There was the same nervous resentment, in Falcone at least. The same presentiment of bad tidings too.
Grimaldi took off his reading glasses, looked up at them over his desk and asked, ‘Is this it?’
‘Of course,’ Falcone snapped. ‘Do you think we’d withhold something?’
‘Only if it damaged your case,’ Grimaldi replied. ‘And since you have no case. .’ He shrugged. ‘What would be the point?’
‘No case? No case?’
‘We’ll be getting more forensic, Toni,’ Teresa said quickly. ‘We’ve got the photos to show Malise Gabriel had a sexual relationship with the Van Doren woman. Once we get the report back from the girl’s mattress we’ll know whether he had sex in his daughter’s bed too.’
‘Malise Gabriel’s dead,’ Grimaldi pointed out. ‘Can’t put him in the dock. Even if you could you can’t place him in the girl’s bed or say he had sex with her.’
‘Not yet,’ she said.
He looked at her, frowned and said nothing.
Falcone added, almost calmly, ‘The father’s behaviour establishes motive. On the part of the mother. On the part of the daughter and the adopted son too.’
‘And the motive for killing the American woman?’
Falcone looked desperate for a moment.
‘Jealousy? Perhaps she discovered something? I don’t know. I want the chance to ask them.’
Grimaldi didn’t answer. He shuffled the papers again.
‘Who killed the son and this bent cop of ours?’ he asked.
‘Probably the drugs people they were involved with,’ Falcone told him. ‘We think we have a suspect out at Ciampino. Costa’s talking to him now.’
The lawyer didn’t look happy.
‘It’s a bloody old affair, isn’t it? Families.’ He shook his head. ‘And drugs. You always hope the two won’t meet.’
‘Malise Gabriel wasn’t murdered because of drugs,’ Falcone insisted. ‘He was having an affair and abusing his own daughter. Racked with a terminal illness. A monster.’
‘Just like the Cenci father,’ Grimaldi cut in. ‘So the papers got it right.’
‘Perhaps! But I need a search warrant for their home. I need to arrest the mother and the daughter and bring them in so we can question them properly. They’re so damned slippery.’
Grimaldi’s walrus moustache wrinkled. He stared at the papers in front of him and asked, ‘On the basis of what I have here? Nothing more?’
‘Precisely.’
‘No,’ the lawyer said straight out. ‘You don’t have the evidence. I’d let you bring in the son, but he’s dead. Even if you can prove the father was abusing the daughter there’s no live criminal case there for precisely the same reason. You surely aren’t suggesting we try to prosecute her for incest instead? This isn’t the Middle Ages. The monstrous regiment out there would riot in an instant.’
‘Of course I’m not suggesting that!’ Falcone insisted. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. This whole affair is distressing. But we have to-’
‘Leo!’ Grimaldi looked cross. This was rare. ‘Will you kindly try to see this with some perspective? The commissario has made it clear to me we must proceed with the utmost care here. The media. The public interest.’
‘To hell with the media!’
The lawyer sighed.
‘You’re too intelligent a man to mean that. In order for me to approve a warrant I will require more than mere motive. I need you establish an evidential link between the mother and the daughter and one or more of these crimes. Is there anything to suggest they were there when the American woman died? Quite the contrary. The mother has a firm alibi and a seventeen-year-old girl couldn’t strangle a grown woman and then suspend her corpse from the ceiling. Is there any evidence that they, not the son, tampered with the scaffolding, or scuffled with Gabriel, causing his head to fall against the radiator and give you your convenient blood stain? No. In fact I see no evidence that anyone was with Malise Gabriel at the time of his death. He was drunk. He’d had sex with someone unknown earlier. Perhaps he stumbled against the radiator, and went outside for a cigarette as the daughter says. Nothing you have proves otherwise.’