The Fallen Angel nc-9

by David Hewson

  He thought for a moment, then added, ‘We’ve had cases before, you know, where disgruntled children have set traps for their parents. Accidents in waiting, ones that may never be triggered. The son, or the daughter, could have removed those stays from the roof, thinking, if this monster does walk out there for a cigarette he could tumble to his death. It’s an easy, cowardly way out, isn’t it? You leave the man’s fate to chance or God. If he lives, you carry on. If he dies, you forgo the blame. In your own head anyway.’

  ‘Let’s leave God out of this, shall we?’ Falcone replied.

  ‘If you feel that’s possible. The fact remains. You need to persuade one of these two to confirm your suspicions. To confess, perhaps.’

  ‘Which is why I need to arrest them,’ Falcone exploded. ‘Without that they simply won’t talk.’

  ‘Then,’ Grimaldi said, with a smile, ‘you’ll have to go back to work and find me some real evidence to support these theories of yours. What you have is flimsy, circumstantial and insufficient. The crimes of a dead man, however vile, are insufficient to justify throwing these women into an interview room for twenty-four hours and leaving you to try to break them. This is not the sixteenth century. We are not the Pope’s inquisitors.’

  He closed the folder in front of him ostentatiously and looked at Teresa Lupo.

  ‘More evidence please. Until you have I won’t look at this case again.’

  ‘You do realize I have yet to persuade these two even to set foot inside the Questura!’ Falcone bellowed.

  Grimaldi looked puzzled.

  ‘What do you mean? They’ve been in to identify the brother’s body, surely?’

  Teresa shrugged and said, ‘Not yet. We’ve asked them. The mother said she’s still too upset. It’s standard practice to leave the timing up to the relatives. It’s not critical in this case. So I’ve never pushed them.’

  The two men stared at the pathologist.

  ‘They’ve got a dead son on a slab in the morgue and they don’t want to see him?’ the lawyer asked.

  ‘Dead son, dead father,’ she said. ‘You’d be surprised, Toni. Sometimes people are like that.’

  ‘Then. .’ Grimaldi extended a hand. ‘There you have it, Leo. Tell them it’s important you have an ID, however upsetting that may be. Once you have them here I bow to your improvizational skills. Just don’t expect me to pick up any debris you leave behind. Consider yourself warned.’

  FIVE

  By the time they were back in the morgue, waiting on the Gabriels to arrive for the formal identification of Robert, Falcone was in an oddly foul mood. The nature of this case, and the way it had propelled him into the usually cherished role of antagonist, had come to haunt the man in some way. Peroni had told Teresa how Cecilia Gabriel had slapped him that day in the Casina delle Civette when he first broached the subject of incest. Falcone was thoughtful, intelligent and, in spite of himself sometimes, deeply sensitive. His personal distaste for the case was obvious. The very fact that its successful prosecution might depend upon his own resolute curiosity into these dark and disturbing secrets unsettled him, she felt. Grimaldi’s comment — that success might lie in breaking Mina Gabriel or her mother — weighed on his mind. He was never happy or predictable in such moods.

  ‘Can you tidy him up a little?’ Falcone asked as he stared miserably at the body on the silver table, shifting on his shoes, uncomfortable. More from the prospect of questioning the family than any squeamishness, she guessed. ‘I don’t want this to be any worse than it has to be.’

  ‘We’ve done as much as we can,’ she said. There was a folded sheet covering the gaping wound in the skull. The blood had been washed off his face. He had olive skin, and deep, sunken eyes. Seen like this she began to understand he could only be an adopted child. There was no physical resemblance at all to the young girl she’d seen in the newspapers. ‘Let’s get the ID out of the way and then I’ll finish. It’s not as if I’m looking for any surprises, am I?’

  ‘I imagine not,’ Falcone answered.

  ‘I hate this part,’ Teresa murmured, staring at the still, sad corpse. She liked to think of herself as a professional, someone who worked alongside the inevitable, death in all its forms, an officer of the state who brought, on occasion, some justice to the living. But comfort? That was rare, and slow to arrive if it ever did. Grief was the invisible spirit that rose from the dead, swiftly, bringing with it anger and resentment. She and Falcone had enjoyed many long conversations about the popular notion of ‘closure’ for the relatives of those who had died through violence, accident or any one of the everyday diseases that stole breath from the mouths of both young and old, most of whom who never dreamed for a moment that their lives would come to such an end, without warning, often without explanation or any rational need. Both she and Falcone hated the term, thought it a misnomer, an easy lie, like ‘moving on’. The bereaved needed such fantasies, perhaps, as a way to allow them to survive the difficult days. But these were convenient lies that fooled no one, fabrications designed to hide the plain truth: death was a cruel intrusion, an ever-present ghost dogging the footsteps of the living as they trudged through the world.

  Leo Falcone loathed this necessary legal ceremony as much as she did, even when he hoped to gain some insight from it. The tall inspector, serious in a darker suit than he normally wore, went out of the room then led Mina and Cecilia Gabriel back into the morgue. They looked like mother and daughter, Teresa thought, both tall and slender, with very English faces, classically beautiful in an old-fashioned way. She rather envied women like this: high cheek-bones, large, sad eyes, pale, perfect skin, a timeless kind of beauty, that of women from the pages of glossy magazines or canvases on the walls of galleries.

  The mother’s cheeks were a little hollow, her eyes and mouth surrounded by lines, as if marked with some long-standing pain. This was the first time she’d seen the girl in the flesh and she appreciated immediately how someone as careful and attentive as Nic would find her fascinating. The daughter had none of the detached, incurious disdain of her mother. She wore a simple black T-shirt and jeans. Her pale young face was bright, intelligent, alert, with sharp brown eyes that swept these strange, perhaps frightening surroundings, and avoided nothing. With her fair hair swept back her appearance seemed astonishingly close to that of the famous image of Beatrice Cenci that had appeared to be everywhere, on TV screens, in newspapers, on magazine racks, over the past few days. There was an intelligent, touching grief about her, not the blank, raging anger Teresa felt she saw in the mother.

  There was a man behind them. He wore a dark navy suit, a pale pink shirt and a black silk tie, a little overdressed for a lawyer, she thought.

  Falcone stepped forward and said, ‘Signor Santacroce. This is a family affair, I think.’

  ‘If they want me, Inspector,’ the man said in a patrician tone that bordered upon condescension. ‘I’m a family friend after all. But only if I’m needed.’

  ‘Stay, Bernard,’ Cecilia Gabriel announced without turning her head for a moment as she approached the corpse on the metal table. ‘But don’t look, please. This is distressing enough for us. It’s not for you.’

  The man nodded and stayed at the door, out of sight of the corpse on the table.

  The two of them, mother and daughter, of similar height and stature, and the same stiff, upright English stance, reached the body and stood there in silence. Then Mina Gabriel reached beneath the white sheet, lifted the fabric and took the still right hand there, holding the fingers in her own. Teresa watched and felt a deep, wordless sadness at this sight. The youth’s cold flesh was, for a few moments, enclosed in her thin white fingers, those of a musician or an artist. Brother and sister, in name if not blood. They grew up together, must once have held hands this way as they walked down the street.

  Teresa was conscious of Falcone, glowering at her. She stepped forward and took the girl’s elbow lightly.

  ‘Mina. I’m sorry. There are rules in these situat
ions. Please. You mustn’t touch.’

  ‘He’s my brother,’ she said softly, staring at the waxy, frozen face on the table, and the folded sheet that covered the dreadful wound to the skull.

  ‘He’s a murder victim,’ Falcone replied, quietly, respectfully. ‘I must insist. .’

  Slowly, reluctantly, she placed the youth’s hand back beneath the sheet then looked at her own fingers.

  She went and stood closer to the mother. Neither said a word.

  ‘Don’t you want to know anything?’ Falcone asked.

  ‘About what?’ Cecilia Gabriel said.

  ‘About how Robert died?’

  She seemed cold, unmoved almost, as if this were not quite real. Mina’s arms were wound round herself. The girl was starting to weep in silence.

  ‘My son was a drug dealer, Inspector,’ Cecilia Gabriel said in very precise, clipped tones. ‘You know that. You know, also, that in a sense we lost Robert a long time ago. He chose the kind of people he wished to be with. I’m sure you have a much better sense of how he came to die than I can ever begin to appreciate. Does it matter? He’s. .’ Then the mask cracked, the real woman, a mother, Teresa thought, was visible, though there were still no tears. ‘He’s gone for good. I imagine you can heap on him all the blame you wish and none of us can object, can we?’

  A brief touch of colour rose in Falcone’s cheeks.

  ‘I’m trying very hard to understand the circumstances of four violent deaths. Your husband. Your son. Joanne Van Doren. A serving police officer.’

  ‘From what I’ve read in the papers about him. .’ the Englishwoman began.

  ‘The papers,’ he retorted, ‘are full of material I find deeply questionable. I can’t help but wonder where some of it came from.’

  Mina Gabriel as Beatrice Cenci, Teresa thought to herself. He was making a good point. The girl’s hair, her very manner, almost seemed to be modelled on that now infamous portrait. The publicity was inevitable, though the Roman media had picked up the connection very quickly indeed.

  Santacroce intervened, in a mild, conciliatory tone.

  ‘I was under the impression that Cecilia and her daughter were asked here to identify Robert,’ he said. ‘Nothing more. If that’s the case, then I think this distressing, if necessary, appointment is concluded, isn’t it?’

  Falcone glared at Santacroce.

  ‘No, sir. It is not. Mrs Gabriel, I would be grateful if you and your daughter joined me in my office. Alone. These are personal matters.’

  ‘I came here to identify my son,’ Cecilia Gabriel interrupted. ‘That is all I intend to do.’

  ‘Please. .’

  ‘You heard what Cecilia said,’ Santacroce interrupted. ‘If you’ve anything to say, then say it now.’

  Falcone glanced at Teresa Lupo and she knew what he was thinking, understood how reluctant he was to take this step.

  Then he walked over to the desk, removed the folder with the latest set of photographs, and handed it, unopened, to the mother.

  ‘I’m deeply sorry I have to raise this in such a way,’ he said. ‘But you leave me with no choice. Please. Look at them.’

  SIX

  Bedir Cakici was alone, bored, hungry and down to his last stick of gum. He’d been sitting in the immigration police’s interview room for four hours. It was a small, windowless cubicle with noisy air conditioning that didn’t work. The place was as hot as an oven and stank from the cooking fat of some nearby canteen drifting in from the single vent.

  He shook his handcuffs and wondered again when there might be some avenue of escape. From here it was impossible. But they’d been making noises about the police wanting him, about a move to the city Questura. If he could make a phone call, get the right guy. If the men he knew were willing to take a couple of risks to spring an old friend from some sleepy cop car as it tracked down the Via Appia Nuova. Then he could do the smart thing, hide out for a while, work his way to the Adriatic, get across in one of the smuggling speedboats that brought in contraband tobacco from Croatia.

  If, if, if.

  He couldn’t believe they’d stopped him. Or that he’d been dumb enough to use one of the oldest fake passports he carried. Life had been a little hectic since Tuesday evening. Now he was paying the price.

  One of the immigration officers, a man who looked like a prissy schoolteacher, walked back in followed by a couple of surly-looking individuals in shapeless suits who announced themselves as state police. He believed this. They had that nasty, suspicious look about them. Nevertheless they were the oddest couple of cops he’d seen in a while, one youngish, slim, good-looking with features that seemed as if they ought to be pleasant, smiling, but weren’t. He had dark hair and the kind of stance the Turk associated with sportsmen, football players and the like. The older one was tall, heavily built and ugly, a scary individual with a battered face that might have been through a windscreen once or twice. Yet the tough guy seemed strangely deferential around the younger man, as if he were the boss, not the other way round, as Cakici could have expected.

  They didn’t show ID. They just yawned, pulled up a couple of chairs at the table, then stared at the immigration officer.

  ‘You want me to stay?’ the man asked. ‘I’m supposed to stay. That’s what the rules say.’

  The big ugly one had his huge hands behind his balding head and was giving him a very nasty look.

  ‘I mean, I think that’s what the rules say,’ the immigration man added.

  ‘Sir?’ the big one asked the cop with him.

  Sir? Cakici thought.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ the younger officer told him. ‘Isn’t it your lunch time or something?’

  The immigration man left, mumbling under his breath.

  The one who’d ordered him out waited, then got up and walked round the room, examining things, ignoring Cakici entirely.

  ‘There’s a microphone here, sir,’ the big cop said, pointing at a little plastic stick in the middle of the table.

  ‘I don’t think we need that, do we?’

  The big guy reached over with one huge arm and ripped the mike out of its housing, wrapped the cable round the body, then threw the thing into the corner of the room.

  The other had stopped in front of a video camera lens set high on the wall above the table.

  He turned, still ignoring the Turk, and asked the old cop, ‘Am I imagining this or is it chewing gum?’

  Cakici’s head came up from the table. This had been a bad day. He deserved a little respect. He didn’t like being referred to as ‘it’.

  The huge one stared at him, as if examining some foreign object, and said, ‘It is. Unbelievable.’

  ‘It? It?’ Cakici kept on chewing, all through his outrage. ‘What am I? An animal or something? How about some courtesy around here? I got a name.’

  The young cop came and sat down. So the Turk had the big guy on his left and the shorter one on the other side, which didn’t feel good.

  ‘What name? Mickey Mouse?’

  ‘Minnie more like,’ the big one grumbled, staring at his pale linen designer suit.

  ‘Real Armani, muttonhead,’ Cakici told him, trying to stab a finger across the table, not that the cuffs let him do it properly. ‘Guess you can’t buy that on your wages.’

  They went very quiet and then the young one said, ‘You’d be surprised what we could buy if we wanted.’

  The big cop shook his head, as if this saddened him deeply.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered in a quiet, mournful voice. ‘You get some dope dealer with a fake passport. It’s chewing gum. And it wants courtesy?’ He opened his hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘Sir. This is so. . unreasonable.’

  The Turk sighed, struggled in the cuffs but finally managed to take out the gum, placed the damp lump on top of the shiny plastic table and began to say, ‘OK. Do not call me “it”. I got rights, I got. .’

  He fell quiet. The young cop, the boss cop, had picked up the gum in his fing
ers, stared at it with an expression of disgust. Then, as Cakici watched, bemused, he walked over to the video camera and placed the grey blob on the lens, patting it until the gum extended across the whole of the round glass eye, blocking the camera’s view completely.

  No mike. No video. This was an unusual interview.

  The big guy yawned, pulled his chair up very close to Cakici, placed a gigantic arm around his shoulders and squeezed.

  It was a bone-breaking hug and the cop smiled at him, quite affectionately it appeared, throughout. His breath smelled of mints.

  The Turk was starting to sweat.

  ‘First impressions count, you know. The gum was a bad start,’ the cop told him. ‘My sovrintendente has never liked gum. It offends him.’

  He squeezed harder. Cakici let out a little cry of pain and said, ‘I didn’t kill nobody. Honest, I didn’t. I was just going on holiday. There’s this girl. I didn’t want her to know. . Women. .’

  The cop sighed, shook his head, removed his arm, shuffled the chair a short distance away and said, ‘It thinks we’re stupid now.’

  The other one was patting his jacket absent-mindedly as if he’d lost something. The Turk watched, worried, unsure what to say.

  ‘I know I’ve got it somewhere,’ the young one said, still looking. ‘Oh, wait a minute.’

  He reached into his side pocket and took out a black handgun, a Beretta 92. Cakici knew his firearms. He had one of these himself, in the little armoury he kept in a safe in the garage.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked, laughing nervously. ‘Some kind of a joke.’

  The young one held the Beretta loosely, lazily in his right hand and leaned forward.

  ‘Are we laughing?’ he asked the other one. ‘Did I laugh once since I came into this room?’

  ‘No, sir, you didn’t-’ the big one began.

  ‘Shut up!’ Cakici screeched. ‘Cut this out. All this “sir”, and weird stuff. Gimme a little dignity, huh?’