The Fallen Angel nc-9

by David Hewson

  There was silence around the table. Then Agata brightened, chinked her glass all round and said, ‘That’s the best birthday present I could have hoped for. The very best.’

  Falcone watched her. In his face was the pride of a parent, Costa thought. And some relief too, some satisfaction that, in his own head, a turning point, a decision, had been reached.

  TWELVE

  The red Ducati was, as Maria had promised, in pieces. The wheels, engine and frame lay scattered over the downstairs forensic room, each element tidily labelled with a tag. She and Silvio Di Capua stood next to the bits, along with a couple of forensic assistants they’d called in when the labour became too physical. The Rome number plates were on the desk. Fakes, naturally.

  He felt wiped out. They’d been working twelve hours a day for almost a week. He needed a break. But the discovery of the mattress had energized the young woman next to him. Perhaps she saw it as a way into a job in the Questura. More likely, Di Capua thought, she just loved the challenge. For all her clumsiness and over-exuberance Maria Romano was a natural forensics officer: doggedly curious about everything. Even matters she didn’t begin to understand.

  ‘Remind me. What exactly are we meant to be looking for again?’ he asked, half wishing he’d accepted Falcone’s strange invitation to dinner.

  ‘Clues, silly!’

  Di Capua’s initial disdain had transmuted to desire a few days before. Now it was slowly changing again, into a grinding, subterranean sense of annoyance.

  ‘Yes,’ he said testily. ‘But what kind exactly?’

  It was a rhetorical question. He knew the answers by heart. Prints, stains, smears from leather boots or gloves. If they could find the helmet or some other clothing they might identify an individual who’d ridden, or worked on, the bike. But there was nothing, only a few marks that would take days to interpret. Scuffs on the paint. Some fabric — wool and cotton, it looked like — trapped around the tank filler cap. Corroborating material. Nothing that would put a name or a face to the man who had gunned down two people in public on a hot Roman night.

  Maria still had evidence bags to sort through. Judging by the bright and energetic expression on her face she seemed willing to work through the night if necessary.

  She pulled on her shiny black hair and looked at him, realizing this was a test.

  ‘We’ve got blood.’

  There was some, on the right-hand side, the frame, the seat, the composite casing behind the carb.

  ‘It’s smear,’ Di Capua said. ‘I told you. We’ll type it but it’s not from the rider. It’s from one of the poor bastards he shot. Look.’ He pointed to the tell-tale points of soft tissue on the black metal and scarlet paint. ‘Spatter too. He was still bleeding badly when he fell. It’s the brother or the cop. The brother would be my bet. There was some smear on his clothes that suggested he’d come into contact with the bike.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ Maria asked.

  ‘I don’t know! Does it matter?’

  ‘Maybe. We’ve got the drugs.’

  She’d retrieved two small plastic bags containing what looked like cocaine from the little compartment where tools were kept. Di Capua had had to scream at her when she seemed about to lick her little finger and taste the stuff. Too many bad movies. He’d had to point out the obvious: why would anyone do such a thing? What if it wasn’t cocaine but something poisonous? And how was she supposed to know what cocaine tasted like anyway? This was so often the problem with the work-experience kids. They thought they knew more than they did.

  ‘The drugs don’t give us a name,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re looking for. Some form of identity.’

  Still, she was supposed to be there for training.

  ‘What about the road tax?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s gone.’

  There was a clean spot on the frame where the licence should have been displayed. A rather feeble attempt to hide something, it seemed to him. Why not burn the entire machine to make sure?

  ‘Is there any other way we can identify this bike?’ he asked.

  She looked blank.

  He got down on his knees and poked around at the frame.

  ‘All vehicles come with a serial number somewhere,’ Di Capua told her. ‘Usually you need the manual to know where to look. We can get in touch with Ducati tomorrow and ask them where to find it on this one. I’ve spent enough time scrabbling around on the floor. It could be anywhere.’

  ‘Anywhere?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ he corrected himself. ‘On the frame usually, I think.’

  ‘The engine,’ said one of the assistants, a youth with long, lank hair and an unfortunate, cadaverous face. ‘You normally get a Ducati number on the case. My brother had one.’

  Maria crouched down too and said, ‘The engine’s very big.’

  Di Capua felt his eyes were going wrong. Everything was a little blurry and it was impossible to focus.

  ‘What about this?’ Maria asked. She was pointing to a patch on the right hand case, beneath the cylinders. The metal looked different, recently scoured or scratched.

  He got as close as he could, then asked for a magnifying glass. They were all watching him.

  ‘Amateurs,’ Silvio Di Capua said, shaking his head. ‘They should have just torched this thing somewhere. Or got it out of the country. Rank amateurs.’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘They tried to file off the number. Terrible job. Even you could have done better.’

  Her blank young face went pink with a touch of anger.

  ‘Get a photograph,’ he said to one of the assistants. ‘Put it on the system upstairs. I can make out three numbers just looking. Given we know the model I’m guessing we could identify it from that. Tomorrow we’ll call Ducati and track down the dealer who sold it.’

  ‘I’ll stay behind and call them now,’ Maria said.

  Di Capua sighed.

  ‘It’s the evening. Motorbike companies don’t work evenings. They’re sensible people. Tomorrow.’

  ‘So what can I do?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t care. I’m going home to bed.’ He bent down and stared into her wide, guileless eyes. ‘And nothing any of you can do will stop me. I feel old. I feel tired. I feel stupid. I feel. .’

  To his amazement she’d pulled an evidence bag out of the items tray on the bench beside the Ducati. It contained a phone, with some kind of gadget strapped to the base.

  ‘You got that from the bike?’ he asked.

  ‘No. The dead boy. The brother. It was in his jacket pocket. Dead like him. Remember?’

  ‘Dead like him,’ he repeated.

  Forensics staff had to be around the bereaved on a regular basis. He wondered how on earth he’d train her for that.

  He remembered the phone. The battery was flat.

  ‘I asked for someone to take out the SIM so we could look at it.’

  She shuffled and said, ‘I know. But there wasn’t anyone around and I have this neat charger thing for my iPod. You plug it into your USB socket and then, when it’s full, you plug it into the phone. You get plugs for phones, iPods, all kind of things. Ten euros down the market. .’

  ‘Maria!’ he barked. ‘Enough information! Tell me something or I go.’

  ‘The battery’s full,’ she said, holding up the evidence bag. ‘I set it to charge while we were working. That way we’d get things sooner.’

  The bars on the Nokia were all there.

  ‘We don’t get things off phones any more,’ Di Capua scoffed. ‘It’s got to have a PIN code on it. You can’t just recharge the thing and. .’

  She pressed the power button. It came to life straight away. No PIN, no password. These really were the worst bunch of crooks Silvio Di Capua had encountered in a very long time. Either that or, more likely, there was nothing of value on the phone.

  He watched Maria Romano working the keypad with that eager ease the young had, one that made him feel old at the age of twent
y-nine. He knew from looking at her face that once again he was about to be proved wrong.

  The girl tapped a few more times then broke into a broad, toothy grin.

  ‘Tell me,’ Di Capua said.

  ‘It’s a cool phone. No messages. No call records. But it’s got the Internet. Look. This. .’

  The brother had been using it for email. There was a single message in the inbox, received from Mina Gabriel the previous week. Two days before the death of her father. A little paper clip by the side indicated it had an attachment.

  He took the Nokia from her and looked at the message. There was no subject and the body didn’t add up to much either. It just said, ‘You’ll need this.’

  The attachment was a large pdf file, an image or a document or something. He tried opening it on the phone but it was too slow and the file was too big to be practical on the little screen, even if his eyesight would allow him to see. So he wandered over to the nearest laptop and beamed the file over. Maria was behind him following every move, purring all the time.

  The thing was so large it took almost a minute to transfer. When it finally arrived in its entirety Di Capua hit the enter key. The pdf opened straight away: a big technical document, the kind companies posted on the web for their customers. Line drawings of wheels and pulleys and stays, and how they had to be joined together in order to be safe.

  ‘What,’ Maria asked, sounding a little disappointed, ‘is that?’

  He knew at once, could feel the excitement that came from seeing two seemingly unrelated circumstances finally joined together by some ridiculously serendipitous connection.

  ‘It’s a set of instructions on how to erect the brand of suspension scaffolding used on the roof of the Gabriels’ apartment. Or, if you like, how not to erect it. How to remove the right pieces to ensure it’ll come toppling down if you throw a body out onto the platform.’

  ‘Oooh.’

  Her eyes were wider than ever. Her fleshy hands performed one little clap then fell still under the gravity of his gaze.

  ‘Are you going to call the boss?’ the girl asked.

  They were all out for dinner. He didn’t want to spoil that. Teresa deserved a break as much as any of them. Besides, she was off duty, unlike him. His first point of reporting was clear. Falcone never really rested.

  Di Capua checked his watch, told them what to do with the evidence, and what tasks to prepare for the following day. Then he bade them good-bye and walked outside. The night was still sultry and stifling. Usually he loved this time of year. September was when Rome began to wake after the hazy stupor of August. Life returned. They hadn’t got there yet.

  He didn’t feel elated by Maria’s discovery and he wondered why. Perhaps because a part of him had always hoped that everything they suspected about the Gabriel girl would turn out to be wrong. From what he’d read, from looking at her pretty, intelligent face in the papers, she seemed a nice enough kid, one who’d suffered under the nightmare of an abusive and terrible father. She deserved a few more hours of freedom before the storm cloud that had been gathering around her bright young head broke with a vengeance.

  All the same, he knew he had to make the call. Not now, though. Now there was time for a beer and some solitary thinking. A Baladin. A cigarette. Some respite from the sea of questions, doubts and possibilities that refused to stop running through his overactive mind.

  THIRTEEN

  They left the restaurant just after ten, happy, well-fed, a little drowsy from the long day. Costa offered to walk Agata home but she declined, making an excuse he didn’t believe. Something was wrong in this new life of hers. It was obvious, just as it was clear she didn’t want to discuss it.

  He watched her go. Teresa and Gianni Peroni stood, arms linked, at the edge of the Piazza delle Cinque Scole, laughing and joking with one another. The night had brought an unexpected revelation. Leo Falcone really had abandoned a difficult case, one they all suspected was more complex than it seemed. This had never happened in all the time Costa had known the man. There were failures, plenty of them. Cases that fell down in court or, more often, investigations that simply went nowhere. But he couldn’t recall a single instance where Falcone had decided that he would accept the obvious, the status quo, and no longer pursue an inquiry that, in all probability, still had some way to run. Even the matter of the brother’s death and the murder of Gino Riggi would now be handled by some other officer. A part, the private, personal part, of Costa wanted to welcome this decision. The professional side of him was quietly appalled.

  They said their farewells. Teresa and Peroni wandered off looking for a cab. Costa picked up his helmet. He’d had just a single glass of wine. It was fine to ride home. He wanted to. The city became too close, too constrictive at times, particularly in the narrow lanes of the ghetto. He’d parked the scooter near to the tiny arch beneath the Palazzo Cenci, a grim, dark alley with a small shrine supposedly marking the location of an ancient murder.

  ‘Safe journey,’ Falcone said, emerging from the dark and still amused by the idea of the Vespa. ‘I never had one of those things, you know. Straight from a bicycle to a car. Nothing in between.’

  Costa hesitated.

  ‘Is everything all right, Leo?’

  ‘Of course it is. Did Agata enjoy herself? Shouldn’t we be worrying about her?’

  ‘A little, I imagine. But she’s like you. She’ll never tell you when something’s wrong. You have to learn the signs. Then pluck up the courage to say something.’

  He left it at that. Falcone didn’t.

  ‘And you think that came from me?’ he asked.

  ‘You were the only outside figure in her life when she was in the orphanage, weren’t you?’

  The older man leaned against the restaurant wall and stared back into the piazza.

  ‘I was a kind of father, I suppose. A very poor and distant one. I remember realizing, when she was seven or eight, that she saw me that way. I retreated a little after that. Frightened. Yes, I was frightened by it. The dependence. The closeness.’ He shrugged, amused at his own frailty. ‘Some of us aren’t cut out to be family men.’

  ‘I think you did more than you realize. More than you accept.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ His face had grown long and gloomy again. He was tired. They all were. ‘How could a man like Malise Gabriel do something like that? To his own daughter? How? I don’t understand. That’s not sexual desire, is it? It’s power. Bullying. Violence. Just one more form of rape. A worse form, if that’s possible. And that girl. That child. .’ He shook his head. ‘I think she actually feels guilty herself.’

  These questions troubled Costa from time to time. There were crimes that sprang from comprehensible sources. Greed. Jealousy. Hatred. Despair. But not this one.

  ‘We can’t see inside the minds of everyone we deal with.’

  ‘We see inside the minds of their victims though, don’t we?’ He began to walk towards the square, and the place where Costa had left the scooter. ‘You know. .’

  The night was beautiful when they reached the open space of the piazza. There were lights in the apartments of the Palazzo Cenci, faces at the glass, some blank, a few happy, staring out at the sea of cars parked on the cobblestones.

  ‘I stood in the Questura today and did everything I could to try to force Mina Gabriel to talk. To get that young girl, woman, I don’t know, to tell me the truth. Or rather confirm the truth. That her father abused her. And somehow everything we’ve seen — the deaths, the agony — followed from that terrible, disgraceful act. Why did I do that? Who benefits? If she, and perhaps her mother, were accomplices, what will happen? A lengthy and expensive trial. A few months in jail at the most. Probably not even that. And. .’ He shook his head, as if scarcely able to believe he’d left the most important point till last. ‘More than anything, the pain. The agony I put them through. Why? Because it’s my job. Because, as I so pompously told Teresa, we’re all equal under the law. Are we?’

  Costa could
see the scooter now, against the wall by the low, dark arch. Malise Gabriel had died on the cobblestones beyond. ‘We can’t afford to make choices.’

  Falcone stopped, put an arm on his and said, ‘We can, Nic. We do. All the time. It’s pointless pretending otherwise. I chose to pursue this case because their reticence offended me. Almost as much as the idea that a father could do such a thing to his own child. I felt there was something here that deserved punishment, and it was my job to deliver that. But there’s no one left to punish, is there?’ He looked into Costa’s eyes. ‘God knows, haven’t they suffered enough already?’

  ‘They have,’ he agreed. ‘I’m still not sure. .’

  ‘Well, I’ve thought about this long and hard and I am.’ He pointed at Costa in the dark. ‘When you become an inspector remember this case. We need to be conscious of our humanity too. That’s more important than the law sometimes. Just don’t ever quote me on that. Especially in the Questura. Now. .’

  His phone rang. Falcone apologized, seemed ready to ignore it, then saw the number on the handset.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and stepped away to stand by a parked car.

  Costa waited. It seemed necessary for some reason. The call was short. Falcone barely spoke at all, though he listened intently, nodding all the while, his face a picture of introspective concentration. Something else too. It was difficult to tell in the dark, but it seemed, to Costa, to represent a return of the bleakness he’d seen in the man these last few days, a desolate gloom that had been dispelled by the time they arrived at Al Pompiere that evening.

  Finally Falcone ended the call with a curt ‘grazie’, no more.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said and patted Costa on the shoulder, not looking into his eyes for one moment. ‘I’m glad you did.’

  ‘Something from the Questura?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Falcone replied immediately. ‘Routine stuff. Come in tomorrow and tidy up the papers. Then take some days off. Go back on holiday. Enjoy yourself.’