The Fallen Angel nc-9

by David Hewson

  Grimaldi leaned forward and peered into her eyes.

  ‘Signora Gabriel,’ he said. ‘You must understand. It will be difficult for me to end this case without some answers to these very real questions.’

  ‘Answers?’ she interrupted. ‘Very well. Malise printed that first photograph of me from an older picture that was fading. He said he wanted to keep me that way. The way I was when I was eighteen or so.’

  Her fingers toyed nervously with a twig of sprawling oleander falling over the back of the bench.

  ‘The words on it, “E pur si muove” — I wrote them. You know where they come from already.’ Her eyes fell briefly on the tower again. ‘Galileo. You know the circumstances. It was Galileo’s way of saying, “This I still believe, in spite of all the violence and pain you may bring to bear.”’

  Her eyes were glassy. She wiped them carefully with a tissue from her sleeve.

  ‘That was the name of the project he was working on for Bernard. It upset him for some reason. He wouldn’t tell me why. These last few months. . I sometimes felt I hardly knew him. I hated seeing him depressed. The night before he died I found him rereading his own book, using that photograph as a bookmark. I wrote those words on the back of that picture. It was my way of saying the same thing as Galileo. In spite of all the pain and heartache, in spite of the fact Malise was very ill, this I still believed. That I loved him and he loved me.’

  She took a deep breath and then looked at each man in turn.

  ‘A few weeks ago Malise told me that he’d given up on the treatment for his cancer. I knew already, I think, in my own heart. It was written in his face. The way he acted. The sadness. What little money we had was gone, which was what troubled him more than anything. The idea he would leave us alone, to fend for ourselves. He had a few months left, perhaps less. At some stage he would have to enter some kind of charity hospice. He wanted to spend his last few weeks rereading his own book, pointing out all the errors, all the statements he wanted to correct, to improve, to expand, and never would. He hoped I could sell it after his death.’ She smiled. ‘A ridiculous idea, of course, not that I told him so. All I wanted to say to him was that he was loved and always would be.’

  ‘You could have told us that in the beginning,’ Falcone pointed out.

  ‘I could,’ she said with a smile. ‘But I thought it was none of your bloody business, Inspector. And I was right.’

  Grimaldi shrugged and said with a wry smile, ‘Signora, the bookmark is not a piece of evidence that concerns us any more.’

  ‘Shouldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Doesn’t it tell you something? What do you want of me? Ask. If it will bring this to an end. .’

  ‘There were photographs taken in your daughter’s room,’ Falcone went on. ‘Evidence of sexual activity.’

  ‘Not Malise,’ she insisted. ‘That’s impossible. Mina’s seventeen. I don’t own her. I never did. Besides, when they’re that age these days. .’ She laughed at herself, lightly, briefly. ‘Who am I fooling? I was sleeping with Malise when I wasn’t much older. Everything happens so quickly. One moment you feel this life will never end. The next it’s running through your fingers like dust.’

  The two men glanced at one another. This had to be said. Falcone wanted the words to come from Grimaldi.

  ‘We need your daughter to make some kind of statement,’ the lawyer told her. ‘It will never be made public. But the evidence that exists requires some kind of clarification.’

  Cecilia Gabriel shook her head and stared at them.

  ‘You still believe my son and daughter conspired to murder their own father, don’t you? That this Beatrice Cenci nonsense in all the papers is true?’

  ‘Your daughter knew all about the Cenci girl,’ Falcone reminded her.

  ‘That was for Joanne! Nothing else. Some childish fantasy, perhaps. Mina’s a dreamy girl, not quite one thing or the other. It’s impossible.’

  ‘Signora Gabriel,’ Grimaldi interrupted. ‘We cannot sit here arguing forever. The fact is this. If your daughter is willing to tell us the truth, and it’s a truth I can bury, then I shall do so. If, for instance, she confirms the abuse by her father. .’

  She swore, an English word, a common one.

  ‘If she does this,’ Grimaldi went on, ‘and says, merely, that she passed on this building information to Robert because he asked for it, that she knew nothing of any conspiracy, well. .’

  He watched her wringing her hands, waiting for the woman to calm down.

  ‘Then,’ he went on, ‘we’re finished here. I can write honestly that this is a family tragedy with an unfortunate conclusion. One with several victims. One that should not waste the time of the courts, since the principal perpetrator, Robert, is now dead.’

  ‘You’re asking her to tell a lie! To make out her own father was some kind of animal!’

  They waited for a moment.

  ‘We can only help the living,’ Toni Grimaldi said eventually. ‘I don’t know if you honestly believe Mina has told you the truth. From what you say, I suspect not. Understand me, please. We’re not here for her confession. We’re here to beg her for sufficient information to allow us to declare this case closed in spite of the evidence that exists. Surely you understand it would be better, for you and for her, that this bleak episode is laid to rest? A brief conversation is all I ask. Just us, you, your daughter. No lawyers, no friends. No notes, no. . commitments. Simply something I may use as a justification to end this once and for all.’

  ‘Even if it’s a lie?’ she asked.

  Grimaldi didn’t answer. Falcone found himself looking into Cecilia Gabriel’s clear blue eyes and admiring what he saw there. This woman wished to protect her daughter more than anything. As an individual he was deeply uncomfortable with the relentless bonds of family, the ties of closeness, which so often seemed unbreakable, resolute. From time to time Falcone had privately wondered what kind of parent he would have made. A bad one, surely, willing to abandon a wayward child in the end. In Cecilia Gabriel’s stiff and determined face he saw something he could never possess: a fiery sense of protective loyalty, whatever the circumstances. In terms of the law this was awkward and problematic. Yet it seemed to him that there was, in such blind, unthinking devotion, a degree of decency and love that no law, no court, no sentence could possibly deliver. It was a private judgement, and one he would never commit to paper, but he was now convinced that no good would come of dragging any of these people into court if that eventuality could be avoided.

  ‘Even if you feel it’s a lie,’ he responded. ‘It’s of no consequence. We cannot ignore the evidence we have. If Mina will give us reason to tell our own superiors that there is insufficient material to continue with the investigation. .’

  He waited for her reaction.

  Cecilia Gabriel stared at him candidly.

  ‘I’m rather sorry I slapped you, Inspector,’ she said. ‘We’ve all got a temper in this family unfortunately. Except Mina, of course.’

  ‘I’ve had much worse,’ he confessed, and found himself wondering if he would encounter this woman again. Some time beyond the black mist of mourning and despair that had hung around her on every occasion they’d met, and would stay there until the moment Toni Grimaldi caused the fog to lift.

  ‘I imagine you have.’

  She then did something which struck Falcone as curiously English. Cecilia Gabriel clapped them both simultaneously on the knee, palms down, like some schoolmistress from a period movie who had come to some momentous decision.

  ‘I’ll ask Mina to talk to you,’ she declared, standing up, stretching, a long, lean athletic figure under the sun. ‘Just us. But I warn you now. I doubt she’ll agree to some convenient fabrication. Not even to save herself.’

  SEVEN

  They were back in the squad room. Costa stood behind one of the intelligence officers working a couple of huge computer screens simultaneously. Teresa and Silvio Di Capua were with him, liaising with forensic on the phone. Pero
ni was calling the UK, trying to locate Malise Gabriel’s brother. Finally, Costa thought, they might be on the brink of finding a way into this case.

  The young woman officer on the desk had just come off the phone to Scotland Yard. She looked at them and said, ‘There’s no one called Julian Urquhart at the address where the bike was registered. The police in London say they went back two months after the theft was reported. The apartment was rented to someone else. The new people didn’t know anything about the previous occupant. There was no mail, no forwarding address.’

  ‘Why would someone with a false identity want an expensive new motorbike?’ Costa demanded.

  She peered at the screen. Emails kept coming in almost by the second.

  ‘A crook with money doesn’t steal any old junk off the street. You buy something new under a false ID then fake a theft to get it off the register. Take it abroad. Use it without running the risk of getting stopped for driving something hot. Also. .’ She tugged at her short dark hair. ‘Crooks are normal too. They like nice cars. Nice bikes. You can do things to them. Tweak the engine. Build some compartment for explosives or guns or dope.’

  Silvio Di Capua brightened.

  ‘We found cocaine in the frame.’

  ‘We know the bike’s supposed to have come from a drugs gang,’ Costa said. ‘Where’s the surprise there?’ He stared at the screen, trying to think. ‘We’re back on the same assumptions again. I hate that. Give me some different ones.’

  Teresa Lupo got the idea straight away.

  ‘The photos in the basement were taken to incriminate or embarrass Malise Gabriel.’

  ‘Good,’ Costa told her. ‘I like that. But why? He didn’t have any money. He didn’t have anything. He was dying.’

  ‘The photos from the bedroom are real,’ said Di Capua, ignoring the question. ‘He’s our man.’

  ‘So who is he?’ Costa wondered, not expecting an answer.

  Di Capua’s face was a picture of exasperation.

  ‘Give us time, Nic! I told you. We’ll get there.’

  ‘Why is it,’ Costa asked, ‘that I don’t think we’ve got time? We appear to be dealing with someone who can steal a Ducati in a different country and bring it into Italy without a soul noticing. Falsify photographs, force a man like Malise Gabriel into sexual situations, possibly against his will. Murder two people, one a kid, one a cop, in the street and disappear afterwards. Do you think he’s waiting around for us to knock on the door?’

  They went quiet. This was not Costa’s normal, calm tone.

  ‘No,’ he went on. ‘Forget that question. Let me offer another assumption. Someone’s trying to put Mina Gabriel in the frame for her father’s death. Take another step. If they’re trying to do that, aren’t they trying to set up her brother too? Easiest way in the world to cover a crime. Blame it on a dead man.’

  ‘His sister can still talk,’ Teresa added.

  ‘Except she’s too scared and has been all along.’

  Ever since that night in the Via Beatrice Cenci, he thought. For any number of reasons. Fear. Shame. Something else. A terrified silence that would always, in the end, come to be interpreted as complicity.

  ‘I still don’t understand. Why do any of this?’ he asked suddenly. ‘If it’s not for money. .’

  ‘For the girl?’ Di Capua suggested.

  Costa shook his head.

  ‘If you’ve got this kind of money and control you surely don’t need to go to all this trouble for a seventeen-year-old kid.’ He tried another tack. ‘What about the Italian connection? Gabriel’s grandmother? She was called Wilhelmina something?’

  ‘Wilhelmina something doesn’t really help,’ the woman at the keyboard told him. ‘I’ve got someone trying to track back from the British births and deaths records to ours. It’s going to take a while.’

  ‘Is there anything that doesn’t take a while?’

  ‘Sovrintendente,’ Teresa Lupo said firmly. ‘We’re all doing our best.’

  ‘I know that. But why didn’t we see this till now? Why?’

  He knew the answer already: they thought they understood what this case was about. Beatrice Cenci brought back to life. Brute incest leading to murder. Even he’d begun to believe there was something in that story after a while.

  The intelligence officer was still hammering the keyboard.

  ‘What are you looking for now?’ Costa asked.

  ‘I thought I’d try the Europol database. It’s pretty recent stuff. A bit rough at the edges in places. The best quick way we have of sharing records across the EU. I don’t know.’ Costa watched as she typed in the name ‘Julian Urquhart’. The little icon on the screen span round slowly. Then nothing.

  He wondered what Falcone would try in a situation like this. Much the same? Probably. There was little else one could do except carry on thinking about the questions that no one had yet asked or answered. There were so many, and he didn’t feel close to penetrating any of them. Every step of this strange investigation, starting with the death of Malise Gabriel that night in the ghetto, had seemed oddly predictable, as if they were being guided towards the conclusion they sought. A conclusion, he reminded himself, that had been in his own mind almost from the moment he saw Mina Gabriel’s pained, pale face as she bent over her father’s broken body in the Via Beatrice Cenci.

  ‘Nic,’ Peroni said, interrupting this sudden reverie.

  Peroni had a notebook in his huge paw and a pen behind his ear. His face, so human, so familiar, was full of the alert intelligence Costa had come to admire. Peroni didn’t even cast a glance at the woman and her computers. He’d been doing what he did best, working the phones, working people.

  ‘You’ve got something?’ Costa asked.

  The big man took a deep breath and said, ‘I don’t know. This younger brother.’

  ‘Simon. Banker. Didn’t get on with Malise.’

  ‘I know,’ Peroni continued. ‘You told me that. You’re wrong. That’s not true. It can’t be.’

  ‘Mina told me. She said she’d never met him but her mother. .’

  ‘I don’t care. I got nowhere with that name. In the end I phoned Malise Gabriel’s old college at Cambridge. These university people keep themselves close. I guessed there had to be someone there who knew. Kept in touch.’

  Costa laughed. It was so obvious. A phone call. A conversation. A stab in the dark, reaching out for another human being, not some record in a database.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They loved Malise Gabriel in Cambridge. In spite of everything. The professor I talked to was an undergraduate with him. Hadn’t been in touch with the man for years. Seems Malise didn’t want the company. I couldn’t get this college guy off the phone. He wants to come to the funeral. That’s how much they adored him.’

  Costa tried to imagine what this meant.

  ‘And Simon? The brother?’

  ‘The brother disappeared years ago when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. According to my Cambridge man it wasn’t that Simon didn’t get on with his older brother. He hated him. Malise was the bright one, the clever academic everyone admired. Simon was a wastrel, not so bright. He couldn’t compete. All that trouble Malise got into, the pregnant student, the book, that was nothing compared to the brother. He was into student riots. Trouble. Drugs. You name it.’

  Simon Magus. The magician. Flying through the air, taunting the world.

  ‘We don’t know where he is now?’ Costa asked.

  Peroni looked at his notebook and said, ‘In Cambridge they think he changed his identity. Went to Morocco, Afghanistan, South America. Became some kind of dope king with a high-and-mighty English accent. The prof’s emailing me some newspaper cuttings. Apparently the guy was a bit of legend in England ten, twenty years ago. The cops named him as one of their principal suspects for smuggling hard drugs into the country. Never caught up with him though.’

  The intelligence officer hammered at her keyboard, waited a second and said, ‘Let me try t
he narcotics records.’ A flash of fingers. ‘Simon Gabriel. Nothing, sorry.’

  ‘According to my man in Cambridge he had lots of names,’ Peroni said. ‘These university types are fastidious, you know. He even had a cutting from a crime story in The Times of ten years ago. He read it out to me. Look.’

  Peroni held up his pad. Costa scanned down the names, got to the last one and groaned.

  ‘Have you got the Italian births and deaths database online?’ he asked the intelligence officer.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Look up the name Wilhelmina Santacroce.’

  The answers were starting to fall into place already.

  ‘Married 1922. Address. .’ She blinked at the screen. ‘It’s that place you’ve been going to, isn’t it? The palazzetto?’

  He wondered how much of what Mina had told him was really the truth, how much lies that she’d passed on unwittingly from the stories and excuses she’d been fed.

  The Santacroce palace once belonged to one side of her own family. When Malise Gabriel returned to Rome he was, in some small sense, coming home.

  ‘Sir,’ the intelligence officer said, bringing him back to earth. ‘That third name on the list. Scott Mason Nicholson. I’ve got him. I’ve got data.’ She typed frantically again. ‘There’s a mugshot on the FBI wanted list.’

  Costa looked at the screen and knew what he’d see.

  ‘Peroni,’ he called as he strode out of the room.

  The big man couldn’t keep up. When Costa got downstairs the traffic was backed up to the Questura rear gate. Noisy demonstrators were waving placards, yelling at the bored cops in blue uniform, waving banners about Beatrice Cenci and the cruelty of the police.

  It didn’t make sense that this case had generated quite so much heat. Someone had stoked it. He was starting to think he knew who and why.