The Fallen Angel (12 page)

She was testing him. He was sure of it.

‘No,’ he replied.

‘Another time,’ Mina replied quickly. ‘Daddy didn’t talk to me about Beatrice. What makes you think that?’

‘You said . . .’

‘About ghosts. Not Beatrice. Not ever.’

There was a hiatus in the conversation. A stiffness. Something unsaid.

‘They took her body along the Via Giulia,’ she said, returning to the subject, pointing out the direction back to the street that paralleled the river. ‘Then across the Ponte
Sisto.’ One more sweep of her arm to the old footbridge further along the Tiber. ‘Then through Trastevere, up that steep hill, to Montorio. Thousands of them. A long way. Hard work.
They hated what that man . . .’ Her eyes flashed back towards the great dome. ‘. . . did to her.’

‘I believe they did,’ he agreed.

Teresa Lupo gazed at the body on the mirror-bright table in the morgue, a skinny male corpse beneath a white sheet rolled back to reveal everything from the waist up. The
information sheet her assistant Silvio Di Capua had provided gave the basics. Malise Gabriel was sixty-one years old, pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital in the early hours of Saturday
morning, two days before. The duty morgue officer, a college intern, had examined the body, read the report from the police, and written the probable cause of death as severe head injuries
consistent with a fall from a substantial height. This could not be a formal finding. She was a temporary worker. In the absence of suspicion of foul play the full autopsy would naturally be
delayed due to staff shortages. Nothing much had happened since.

‘Leave it to the Monday people,’ Teresa grumbled. Not that there was anything to indicate the duty junior had done anything wrong. The bruised and bloodied corpse in front of her
looked the way she would have expected from seeing the police incident statement. There were no indications of other injuries. No obvious inflicted wounds. No cuts or abrasions that spoke of
anything but a fall.

She looked at the face of the man on the table. Features sometimes changed with death, particularly an end such as this. His skull had suffered multiple fractures and there were severe injuries
to his forehead and the right side, above and below the ear. Teresa had found a photograph of Malise Gabriel from his brief time in the spotlight. Twenty years before he’d seemed like the
aristocrat he was, handsome, a little arrogant perhaps, with the face of a sportsman, the broken nose of a rugby player. A strong, physical man. Not like this.

‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,’ Di Capua cut in, ‘the answer’s no, you can’t.’

She glowered at him.

‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’

‘I’ve seen it before a million times. You’ve got that look.’

‘That look?’

‘The one that means work. And trouble.’

She sighed.

‘This man deserves a full autopsy, and he will get one.’

‘Yes, but he doesn’t need to get it from the head of the department, does he? We’ve got a team going into that house in the ghetto. Half our people are on holiday.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped. ‘I get the point.’ She knew where this was leading. ‘You want to do it, then?’

Di Capua smiled. He’d turn thirty soon. The little that remained of his hair was now close cropped. His clothes were standard white office garb. The failed hippie she’d first
employed seemed to have metamorphosed into an impertinent dentist somewhere over the past few years.

‘I suggest I handle this and you go round and see what’s happening in the house.’ He smiled. ‘Let’s face it. This is just one more autopsy. You can do that with
your eyes closed. From what Peroni said . . .’

She’d listened to the phone call asking for a team to seal off the Gabriels’ apartment. Judging by the tone of Di Capua’s response, Falcone was not in the best of moods.

‘They’re trying to dredge up a speck of evidence in a building site,’ he went on. ‘Now that’s going to be hard.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with false grace, passing him back the file. ‘I was going to do that anyway. He’ll want something by the end of the day, you know.’

‘So what’s new? I’m not promising miracles. I’ll do the best I can.’

‘Good. Here’s a starter for you.’ She leaned down and indicated the bloodied, torn scalp. ‘This man is suffering from some kind of hair loss. I suggest you discover who
his doctor is and get what records you can. Also . . .’

She picked up Malise Gabriel’s right hand.

‘There are scratches here that don’t look like the kind of thing you’d get from a fall from a building. I could be wrong, but they may be worthy of further
investigation.’

He nodded, with an ingratiating pleasantness that told her he’d seen all this already.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘Enough for now. We can talk later.’

She walked out of the room trying to recall those happy days when Silvio Di Capua lived in fear and awe of her. He was up to something. She just knew it.

So Teresa Lupo waited outside for a few seconds then reopened the swinging door to the morgue and poked her head back in.

Di Capua had rolled back the fabric completely. The body of Malise Gabriel lay naked on the table, white and purple and bloody. Her assistant was staring at the lower part of the torso. He
jumped visibly as she banged open the door very deliberately. It was worth it just for that.

‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Silvio?’ she asked.

His large, wide-set eyes rolled upwards. The young pathologist’s composure returned.

‘When I’m ready,’ he said.

Peroni and Falcone spent three hours with the forensic team in the Via Beatrice Cenci as they pored over the Gabriels’ apartment, picking and prodding patiently in their
white bunny suits. The American woman’s mood had grown progressively more downcast and sullen. Falcone had what he wanted: men and women scouring every last inch of the place for physical
evidence. After a little while he had Teresa Lupo to stand over them, watching every step, every last precise action too. Not for a moment did it appear to concern him that the formal search
warrant for these actions had yet to arrive from the magistrate. It was, Peroni reminded himself, that time of year.

Joanne Van Doren was in the poky kitchen when they left, skinny fingers around another beer. Peroni made a point of going up to her and asking if there was anything he could do.

‘Write a cheque for fifty thousand euros?’ she suggested wearily.

He tried to treat it as a joke, and to ignore Falcone tapping his toes ready to leave by the door.

‘Signora, if there’s something you’d like to tell us . . . it would be better now. To hear it voluntarily, rather than discover it for ourselves.’

Her eyes flashed wildly.

‘What do you
mean
?’

‘What I said.’

For a moment Peroni thought he was getting somewhere. Then something, some second thought, intervened and she said, ‘It was an accident. I don’t know what else you expect me to
say.’

The place they were headed was so close it was pointless taking Falcone’s Lancia saloon. The directions they had received told them to go to the Palazzetto Santacroce and ask for
admittance at the door. The building lay in the warren of lanes a few minutes away on foot across the busy Via Arenula, an area much like the ghetto, dark and cramped, though rather grander in
nature. The palazzetto was a grand and imposing four-storey mansion in its own cul-de-sac behind the river, close to the footbridge of the Ponte Sisto with its beautiful view of the dome of St
Peter’s.

‘There’s money here,’ Peroni muttered as they walked through a brown stone entrance arch into a small courtyard with a fountain at the centre surrounded by lush, well-tended
grass.

‘You can say that again,’ Falcone replied, pointing at the first-floor apartment visible beyond the caretaker’s kiosk. Paintings, statues, grand gilt furniture, rich red velvet
walls. This was another Rome, barely touched by the pressure and poverty of the street.

‘We want the Casina,’ Peroni told the uniformed man behind the glass, showing his police ID.

It was only when they went through a second set of doors to the rear that he realized the full extent of the property, which ran all the way to the riverside road, making it as large, surely, as
the Palazzo Farnese, the palatial mansion close by that was now the French embassy. The hidden back was almost entirely given over to garden, a rare oasis in the city, carefully laid out with
shrubs and palm trees, fountains, flower beds, topiary and shady bowers with seats, all beneath high, unbroken walls which rendered the secluded refuge invisible to the city at large.

In the corner was what could only be the Casina. It was a tall, circular tower that stood above the grounds of the palazzetto like a guard post. The ground floor was completely windowless. The
second possessed nothing but a few narrow slots through which, Peroni assumed, archers were expected to fire their arrows. The remaining two floors had elegant arched openings, medieval in
appearance but now with modern glass windows. The roof was a crenellated battlement with embrasures in the raised portions, as if to provide another vantage point for archers. The rosy weathered
building seemed more like the abandoned tower of some lost fairy-tale castle than a Renaissance palace. Peroni had never seen anything quite like it in the heart of Rome and said so. Falcone,
clearly astonished, agreed, then narrowed his sharp eyes, stared at it again and said, ‘The Porta Asinaria. The place in the walls near San Giovanni.’

Peroni nodded. He was right. This was a precise copy of the little-noticed gate marooned behind railings next to the busy gap in the walls near San Giovanni, through which streams of modern
Roman traffic passed every day.

They were engulfed in the scent of white jasmine tumbling down in festoons around the door. It almost obliterated the stink of the traffic bustling along the Lungotevere beyond the furthest
wall.

‘The rich are with us always,’ Peroni murmured and pressed the bell.

Cecilia Gabriel answered the door and led them up three levels of a circular stone staircase, into a large room strewn with belongings: clothes, paintings, photos, books, sheet
music on stands. She was a striking woman, tall and statuesque, with an angular face, high cheekbones and attentive blue eyes. Beautiful, Peroni thought, but in a hard, unsmiling way. Her chestnut
hair was cut short in the fashion Audrey Hepburn preferred for the movie that still brought tourists to Rome more than half a century after it first appeared. She didn’t seem nervous. Just .
. . uncomfortable, impatient. Impecunious too, in a faded blue denim shirt and jeans that looked a little too young for her. The woman was, he knew from the records, a little short of forty.
Something – strain, illness perhaps – had added a few years to that. She didn’t look happy, which was understandable in the circumstances, though he felt the crows’ feet at
the corners of her elegant eyes, the creases around her mouth, were more than signs of age.

The place was a good step up from the bare apartment in the ghetto. Decent, old-fashioned furniture. Long, gilt mirrors on the walls. Deep, generous carpet and a sizeable polished dining
table.

Malise Gabriel’s widow motioned them to two sturdy antique chairs and sat down gracefully on a small sofa opposite. Her movements were feline, controlled, poised. He could imagine her as a
musician, dressed in tasteful black, bent over a cello somewhere in the orchestra, a woman who would draw the admiring attention of those in the audience.

‘Where’s your daughter?’ Falcone asked.

‘Out somewhere,’ she replied, looking puzzled by the question.

‘When will she be back?’

She didn’t know that either, and it almost looked as if she didn’t care.

‘Your son? Robert?’ Peroni chipped in.

‘Yes. That’s his name.’

He could feel Falcone stiffen next to him.

‘Where is he?’ the inspector asked. ‘Do you have any idea? Have you heard from him?’

‘Robert came round to our old apartment for something to eat the afternoon of the accident. I haven’t heard from him since. I wish he’d get in touch but it’s his
decision. There are practical things we need to discuss, apart from anything else. I’m not his keeper. He’s twenty years old.’

‘Are there places you know he stayed when he wasn’t with you? Somewhere we could look?’ Falcone asked.

‘He never talked about his friends. He liked the bars in the Campo. I imagine you know that.’

‘I believe we do,’ he agreed, shooting Peroni a sideways glance.

She sighed then said, ‘Inspector. My husband died in an accident two days ago. I’m struggling to deal with all manner of things I never knew existed. Life insurance. Funeral
arrangements – not that I know when you will allow me to reclaim his body.’ She hesitated and stared at him. ‘Grief. Mine. My daughter’s. Helping you put my son in jail over
some stupid drugs habit isn’t high on my priorities.’

‘There are a number of questions surrounding your husband’s death,’ Peroni told her.

Her head crooked to one side and she stared out of the window. There was a palm tree there, its green crown resplendent against the perfect blue August sky, the under-surface a vivid orange.

‘What kind of questions?’

‘Unanswered ones,’ Falcone said then patiently, persistently, began to extract from Cecilia Gabriel her version of events on the night her husband died. She said she had played at a
semi-professional concert in front of several hundred people at the Auditorium Parco Della Musica. The party afterwards had gone on into the early hours. She knew nothing of the accident until she
received a phone call from her daughter. Then she went immediately to the street and saw Malise Gabriel being taken away by the paramedics.

‘I went to the hospital with Mina. Not that there was much point. Then . . .’ Peroni saw the briefest flicker of emotion on her narrow face. ‘We couldn’t go home. To that
place. Not after what happened. I called Bernard and he agreed we could use our old accommodation here. It was very generous of him.’