by David Hewson
She glanced at her mother and said, softly, ‘I’m sorry. Honestly.’
Cecilia Gabriel got up and stood at the window behind, a tall, thin figure staring out at the grounds.
Mina waited for an answer. When it didn’t come she turned back to Costa.
‘The evening before he died Daddy came to me and said he’d had enough. He said he’d told Bernard he would go to the police if it didn’t stop immediately. I thought. . I assumed that’s what would happen. That night, while I was practising, I heard the two of them. Arguing.’ Her eyes wandered. ‘Bernard came to the building during the day. Joanne said he’d been on the roof for some reason. It puzzled her. I thought the two of them were just having a row. And then. .’
Her lips trembled, she began to stutter, to struggle with the words.
‘It all got louder. Shouting. Screaming. Something like bricks falling, I don’t know. Bernard came to me in the music room. He said there’d been an accident. Daddy had fallen out of the window. I had to keep quiet, tell no one what had been going on. Because if I did it would be bad for all of us. We’d be the ones who’d get the blame. It would be like Beatrice Cenci all over again. We’d never escape, never be a family again. Never recover. It could kill us.’
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
‘He told the truth there, didn’t he? I think. .’
The girl fell silent, unable to go on.
‘He was determined to make sure the blame would come your way,’ Costa said. ‘The photographs. The way they were carefully doctored. The so-called evidence.’
He found himself looking at Falcone. The man looked horrified, perhaps as much by the gullibility they’d all shown in this case as anything.
Then something came back. The old Falcone perhaps. He got up and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mina. We all owe you an apology. This man, Santacroce. Gabriel. Whatever his name is. I don’t want. .’
‘I’ve got men on the gate,’ Costa cut in. ‘If he’s here, he won’t be leaving.’
Falcone had stopped and was staring at the palm trees outside. Cecilia Gabriel was no longer at the window. She seemed to have slipped out of the room, unseen, unheard, while they were engrossed in the final details of Mina’s story.
Costa walked to the window.
He could see her in the garden, striding back towards the palazzetto where Santacroce kept his private apartment. Something silver glittered in her hand.
ELEVEN
The sun seemed too dazzling for September. Costa raced across the grass of the garden. The woman had disappeared beneath the grand courtyard arch, into the elegant building ahead.
The four uniformed officers stood by the gate, bored, a couple of them smoking. Costa barked at the caretaker, demanding directions to Santacroce’s apartment.
It was on the first floor, the side of the courtyard facing back towards the river, overlooking the gardens and the tower. He ordered the men to follow him, found the broad stone staircase that led into the building, running through the double doors, up worn grey steps, past paintings and statues, tapestries and porcelain, the treasures of an old Roman family that had fallen, somehow, into the hands of a rogue.
An old story, Costa thought. A little like the tragedy of the Cenci after all.
He reached the first floor, found himself in a wide corridor with a polished wood floor. There was a door open at the end, light streaming through it, some elegant antique furniture just visible.
Three steps away, no more, he heard the first scream and he’d no idea at that moment whether it was a man or a woman, there was something so violent, so animal in that high, guttural shriek of pain.
‘Sir,’ said one of the uniforms, a fit man, faster than Costa, pushing in front of him, gun out, the way they’d been taught.
‘You don’t need that,’ Costa told him, and elbowed his way back in front then got through the door. He found himself in a long, airy studio filled with light that danced off polished chairs and tables, tall walnut cabinets and gilt-frame paintings. A high rack of books ran one length of the room. At the end Bernard Santacroce sat at an ornate desk, his heavy body twisted round in a captain’s chair, his face bloodied and racked with agony.
Cecilia Gabriel was over him, half on the desk, half on his knees, her right arm arcing backward and forward.
The only sound was that of the man’s racked breathing and the repetitive slash of knife against flesh.
The uniform had his gun out again.
Costa glared at him and snapped out an order to put it away.
By the time he got to the desk it was over. Bernard Santacroce, Simon Gabriel. . There was no saving him. The woman’s fierce torrent of hatred had taken his life just as surely as the cobblestones of the Via Beatrice Cenci stole away that of his elder brother. Now Cecilia Gabriel sat over him, the bloodied blade still in her right hand, gasping, from effort, from emotion, her blue eyes icy with fury.
‘Signora,’ said a voice from behind.
He turned. It was Falcone. Himself again, though his lean face looked a little more bloodless than usual. He was holding out his hand, staring at the woman locked above the dead Santacroce as if she were a partner in some bloody tableau, one disturbed before it had reached its final scene.
She dragged herself off the desk, off the man, walked towards them and placed the long, stained knife in Falcone’s outstretched fingers.
‘There, Inspector,’ Cecilia Gabriel said. ‘You wanted to find yourself a murderer. Now you have.’
Costa’s eyes fell to the expanse of verdant lawn outside. The girl sat near the fountain at its centre, knees drawn up to her chin like a child, face hidden in her skinny arms, a tight, hunched bundle of misery struggling to withdraw herself from the bright, golden day.
PART ELEVEN
ONE
Eight days later Costa found himself alone outside the tiny pink-washed church of San Tommaso ai Cenci, in the little square at the summit of the gentle mound behind the bleak old palace where Beatrice had lived. There were so many churches in Rome, and this one was unremarkable except for its connections.
He watched the small crowd of mourners, mostly women, dressed in black, enter through the narrow single door. When they were inside, and he began to hear the tremulous tones of an organ, Costa came out of the shadows and walked up to the facade, trying to remember enough Latin to decipher the inscription on the imperial tombstone set high on the wall, between two tiny circular windows that would surely have allowed in little light. The Cenci, who had built this terraced place of worship, seemed to thrive in darkness. He could read a name on the tombstone: Marcus Cincius Theophilus. Cenci. Cincius. One of their ancestors, or so the family had wished to think.
And four centuries on Romans still gathered here each year to mark the execution of Beatrice. There were flowers on the Ponte Sant’Angelo that morning. Some worshippers would, he knew, visit the spacious interior of Montorio on the Gianicolo hill opposite, wondering as they prayed whether any trace of the Cenci girl still remained in the dun, dry earth beneath its marble stones.
No one would mourn the man who, in Rome, had called himself Bernard Santacroce. His body still lay in the Questura morgue, awaiting instructions, and would probably remain there for months to come. Cecilia Gabriel had made it plain she would not be responsible for any burial. No other relatives existed. The British and American authorities had expressed an interest in the case immediately Santacroce’s true identity became known. Simon Gabriel, it seemed, was a man with an international reputation, wanted around the world for drug and people smuggling, money laundering, fraud, a litany of twenty-first-century sins. All of them pursued, for almost a decade, from behind the genteel walls of the Palazzetto Santacroce, a property he had bought back from a distant relative, apparently through legitimate means, and used as an opaque front for his activities.
The legal accountants were now poring over Santacroce’s empire and finding, for the most part, little but obfuscation and mystery. The palazzett
o itself had been signed over to the Confraternita delle Civette, the charitable organization he had revived in order to lend his presence in Rome some plausibility. Control of that would now, ironically, fall to his sister-in-law, Cecilia Gabriel, the woman who had been charged over his death. She had been released on bail after a brief court appearance for manslaughter, a heroine it seemed to the Roman crowds, who had followed the story of this English family with the same voracious appetite that their predecessors, four centuries before, had shown towards the Cenci.
Some things never changed in this city, Costa thought to himself. Though there was, perhaps, a little more mercy now. Everyone knew that the Gabriel woman would never see the inside of a jail. She’d lost her husband, her son, and the honour and dignity of her daughter. The popular consensus was that she had done nothing wrong. That a crime committed in the defence of innocence was no real crime at all. Beatrice and her stepmother went to the scaffold; Mina and Cecilia Gabriel stepped onto the front pages of the newspapers and magazines, becoming a cause celebre in the worthy fight against domestic violence and abuse.
Costa had taken Falcone’s advice and gone back on holiday. The two men needed a little distance between them. Both had recognized this. Falcone himself had taken sudden leave and disappeared to Sardinia to stay with an old colleague from the Questura. This case had tested their closeness and left each a little wary of the future. The younger officer was growing, working towards the inevitable, the next promotion, a rank that would one day equal that of Falcone. He did not feel in any way in competition with a man he regarded as both mentor and one of his closest friends. Yet the Gabriel case had created difficulties that would not easily disappear. Falcone hated mistakes, in himself most of all. The hurt he felt for the way he pursued Mina and Cecilia Gabriel would, Costa judged, take some time to subside.
Investigations such as these always possessed some kind of aftermath, a lingering sense of doubt and failure. This one in particular.
He’d stayed at home as Falcone had suggested, calling Agata, who’d gone to the convention in Milan with her boss, with no success. Concerned, Costa had phoned her school repeatedly only to be told she wasn’t there. The messages he left on her phone went unanswered until two days before, when a single text promised that she was fine and would soon be back in Rome.
So he worked on the Vespa, painting out more rust, tidied the garden, and paid a neighbour to harvest the vines and take away the grapes to be made into the usual soft red table wine, the humblest of vintages, that his field produced.
And from time to time he visited the Questura, forensic in particular, asking questions. He was the only one to do so. The matter was closed, with gratitude mostly. The tantalizing, unanswered details shelved. Why spend money out of academic interest? Bernard Santacroce, Simon Gabriel, the monster at the heart of this tragedy, was dead.
The singing ceased in the church opposite. Someone came and threw open the shiny green wooden door into San Tommaso ai Cenci. Costa retreated back into the shadow beneath the wall of the vast, sprawling palace that overlooked this tiny piazza.
He barely recognized Mina when she came out. Her hair was cut short and dyed a chestnut colour. She wore large black sunglasses to hide her features, which was understandable since her face was now well known in Rome. With her black skirt, black jacket and white shirt she could have been twenty or more, no longer the child in pink pyjamas he’d seen curled into a close ball of agony on the lawn of the Palazzetto Santacroce a week before.
Without a word to any other mourner she set off on foot, back down the alley, towards the Via Beatrice Cenci and the river. The route to the tower of the Casina delle Civette, the place that, in spite of all its memories, still seemed to be home.
He followed her from a distance, across the busy Via Arenula where she waited for a tram from Trastevere to pass, then on into the dark nexus of lanes that led towards the Campo dei Fiori. When she went back into the palazzetto he found his courage failing.
In a tiny cafe near the footbridge across the river he drank a macchiato slowly, called Agata again and got no answer. Then he walked out to the road by the river, thinking of the point a little further along where Beatrice had died four centuries before by the pretty bridge of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, with its marble angels bearing the instruments of both ecstasy and torture.
The funeral cortege would have passed close by. He could almost imagine that he saw it crossing the Ponte Sisto with its ragged beggars hunched on the ground and their mongrels tethered with string.
Costa called Agata. When there was no answer he walked back into the darkness, knowing he needed to see Mina Gabriel again. One more time. One more.
TWO
The girl was alone in the living room in the upstairs apartment of the Casina delle Civette, curled up on the sofa with a book in her hands. Her adult black business suit had been replaced by fashionable tight slacks. Mina Gabriel wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a beaded necklace. This close he regretted the loss of her young, blonde hair, its replacement with a short, stylish cut, more sophisticated, more adult. The young, distressed girl he’d met that dark hot August night seemed to be gone for good.
It was just past midday. Bright, sunny, cloudless. The palms shimmered in the heat beyond the windows. The room hummed gently to the tune of the air conditioning.
He took the chair opposite her and asked, ‘Where’s your mother?’
‘Sorry? I was deep in the book.’
She showed him the title: The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe.
‘ “Mon c?ur est un luth suspendu: sitot qu’on le touche, il resonne”,’ she recited, reading from the page in front of her.
‘I’m afraid my French isn’t so good,’ he said.
Mina screwed up her nose. For a moment she was childlike again.
‘I suppose you could translate it as, “My heart is a silent lute, touch it and it sounds.” Poe uses it as an epigraph, misquoted unfortunately. I think I prefer The Tell-Tale Heart, to be honest. Usher’s a bit. . I don’t know. A bit too creepy.’
Her words trailed off into silence.
‘You’ve done something?’ he said, indicating her hair.
‘You like it?’ She bobbed the side with her long fingers. ‘Photographers. I had to do this magazine shoot. What a pain! They said I couldn’t look like a schoolgirl. Not that I ever was one. Apparently it was some famous cutter. I don’t know. And these clothes. I don’t care much for them really. Appearances.’
‘Your mother?’
‘She’s seeing the lawyer again. Everyone’s so kind in Rome. I’m glad this happened here. Anywhere else. .’
Something he remembered brought a shadow of a smile to Costa’s face.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘A friend of mine from Turin says all Romans are children, really. We spend our days luxuriating in one long daydream, trying to imagine we’re in a world that’s always beautiful, one without pain and grief, cruel reality. That if we were left to our own devices everything, ourselves, Italy even, would fall apart.’
‘It’s a compliment, isn’t it? We’d all stay children if we could.’
He nodded and said, ‘Perhaps. How is she?’
Mina Gabriel frowned.
‘Mummy will survive. We’re good at that. Plenty of practice. The lawyers say she won’t go to jail. She got bail easily enough. I don’t know who put up the money. Why am I telling you all this? You’re a policeman. It can’t be news.’
He was aware of the details. They were insignificant.
‘A million people would have put up the money to keep her out of prison,’ Costa said. ‘If it was left to most Romans she wouldn’t be in court at all. She’d be getting a medal. A heroine. The mother who stood up for her child against the man who violated her. It’s as if the Cenci case happened all over again. Only this time we got it right.’
She put down the book and sat upright on the sofa.
‘I never
thought of it that way.’
‘I’m sure you didn’t. Will you stay here? In Rome?’
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she replied immediately, shaking her head. ‘When Mummy’s free to travel again and they’ve sorted out wills and ownership and things, she thinks we might sell this place and move to New York. I’m supposed to need a college education.’ She grimaced. ‘I keep getting all these offers. Talking. Writing.
Media. Why? Because I’ve something to say? I don’t think so. They just want to stare at me and say: so that’s what she looks like. That’s the one it happened to. Perhaps they want to. .’ She hesitated a moment before continuing. ‘They want to picture it in their own heads. I’m theirs now, aren’t I? I belong to them. They can imagine whatever they like.’
‘It’s not easy being in the public eye,’ he said.
‘I’d be an idiot to turn it down, though, wouldn’t I? I’ve never really been outside my own family before. I ought to see what’s there. And I get paid.’
He looked around the beautiful apartment.
‘Everyone needs money,’ he agreed. ‘Independence. Self-respect. It’s when we deprive people of these things. .’ He thought of the many troubled individuals he’d dealt with over the years. How difficult it was to reconcile the evil they inflicted with their own ordinariness. There were no monsters. Every murderer he’d ever met, however vicious, however cruel, was someone who would never turn a head on the subway. ‘The miracle is how often we treat others badly, how people suffer with poverty and hatred and cruelty and still turn out sane and decent in the end. Not everyone, though.’
‘What makes the difference?’ she asked, suddenly interested.
‘One unkindness too many. Some brutal act that goes beyond the pale. I don’t know. I don’t think those it affects understand either. They feel the pain and the anger and crave some way to release it, to let all that disappear by passing on the hate to someone else. And then they’re a little happier for a while. Not cured. Not quite. But free for a time. Able to pretend that it was all someone else’s fault, another man’s evil.’ He thought about it a little more. ‘In a way it is, I suppose. Mine. Yours. Everyone’s. I think we created the Devil for a reason, a selfish one. He makes it easier for us to accept the imperfect, fallen state we’re in. He allows us to shrug off the blame.’