The Fallen Angel (30 page)

‘Why wasn’t it burned?’ Costa said.

Falcone looked at him and sighed. Judging by the expressions on the faces of Teresa and Peroni they found the question baffling too.

Di Capua shook his head.

‘It was some crappy little place that was behind schedule or something. Am I meant to care? Maria?’

The stocky young assistant who now seemed permanently attached to Teresa’s deputy beamed as she showed them the marks left by her aerosol.

‘Semen,’ she said proudly. ‘We’ve sent off a sample for analysis.’

Costa took a closer look at the mattress.

‘Do we know for sure this is Mina Gabriel’s?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Peroni objected. ‘We were there. In the room. We saw this ourselves. It’s hers.’

Teresa placed a gloved finger on the mattress and said, ‘I’ll be able to confirm it’s the girl’s from skin residue if nothing else. Mattresses are full of it. It might
help if you can persuade her to give me a DNA sample we can match, of course.’

Costa wouldn’t give up.

‘If it turns out the semen was the father’s, it could have been one more place he slept with Joanne Van Doren.’

The pathologist stared at him.

‘His daughter’s room? Why would he use that? He had his own secret little sex club in the basement. Why take the risk in the house?’

‘Some people like risks,’ Costa began. ‘I don’t know. Why don’t we wait for some facts? Instead of trying to concoct a case to match some theory that keeps bobbing
up in front of us every time we’re stuck for an idea? Why . . . ?’

‘Let’s not allow our personal feelings to colour this investigation,’ Falcone interrupted. He nodded at Di Capua. ‘Good work.’

‘And another thing,’ Costa began, then saw Falcone’s stony face, gave up, realizing it was pointless.

Teresa Lupo was working her gloved hands along the side of the mattress, underneath the white and green sheet. She’d seen something that Di Capua and his assistant had missed. There was a
fabric handle built into the side, for carrying and turning. It protruded a little more on one side than the other.

She raised the sheet, took out a pen and poked the end down the hollow cotton loop of the right-hand fastening. Something popped slowly out of the other side. It was a tiny USB memory stick, the
kind people used for storing and moving files around computers.

‘Well, what do you know?’ Costa murmured. ‘We’re in luck again. Am I the only one who finds this steady stream of evidence a little . . . ?’

He stopped. They weren’t taking any notice. Their eyes were on the memory stick, and they were listening to Di Capua wonder whether it would be protected by a password or not.

‘Most people aren’t sad geeks like you,’ Teresa told her deputy, taking the thing in her gloved fingers over to a laptop on a nearby desk. ‘They wouldn’t even
understand how to encrypt something. They’d think hiding it down a mattress would be enough.’

‘A mattress!’ Maria said gleefully. ‘What kind of thing would you want to hide down there? Bad things. Dirty things. I wonder . . .’

Peroni gave her a filthy, judgemental look. She shut up. Teresa plugged the stick into the side of the computer. It wasn’t encrypted at all. Not even protected by a password. A flood of
images began to fill the screen automatically. Costa stared at a couple, understood what he was seeing, and turned away.

This part of the forensic department was at the front of the Questura, in a modern annexe tacked onto the original building in the seventies. It faced the cobbled Renaissance square of the
Piazza San Michele. Before being turned over to the police in the late nineteenth century, the Questura had been a palace belonging to the Vatican, home to a famous Cardinal, one known for gambling
and sexual licentiousness. The spiritual and the sensual were never far apart in Rome.

From his viewpoint he could see the gang of demonstrators milling around in the street. The protest had reached a lull. The figures outside were swigging bottles of water, wandering around in
the heat, their faces sullen with boredom. Banners stood at half-mast. The mainly female crowd chatted mostly, barely remembering to hand out leaflets to those passing through the square on the way
to the Pantheon.

He wondered what these same women would say if they could see the photographs being revealed on the nearby computer screen, stored secretly on a tiny digital device hidden in the crevices of
Mina Gabriel’s mattress. One more convenient clue, it seemed, pointing to the obvious conclusion.

‘
Sovrintendente
,’ Falcone barked. ‘Would you care to give us your opinion?’

Costa took a deep breath and went back to the screen. There must have been thirty photos there or more. All of them, he felt sure, were of Mina Gabriel. Her face was visible in many. The shapes,
the poses, the contortions . . . his eyes told him this was from the same photographer who took the pictures they’d found in the basement. In many she could have been interchangeable with
Joanne Van Doren. Except these were more explicit, more visceral. More amateurish too, somehow.

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.’

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 façade
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?’