by David Hewson
‘You’re with the construction company?’ Peroni asked.
‘I am the construction company.’ She pulled out her card and passed it over. It said: Joanne Van Doren, CEO, Cenci Enterprises.
‘You speak good Italian,’ Peroni noted.
‘My mother came from Rome. My father was on Wall Street. I grew up in New York. Some strange sense of belonging, a recovered memory maybe, persuaded me to come to Italy and try to do my own thing.’ She stared around at the apartment. ‘More fool me, huh?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Costa said. ‘I don’t follow. Your people were responsible for the scaffolding?’
‘I’m responsible for everything. I own this entire block. Bought the dump for a song five years ago, when songs cost a lot more than they do now. I employ the construction crew. I design what’s supposed to become of this place. That’s what I am, really. Or was. An architect. This . . .’ One more caustic glance at the bare, grim apartment. ‘. . . is meant to be one of the most prestigious condo blocks in Rome. If I can get ten thousand euros per square metre I might even manage to scrape a profit.’
She ran a lean hand through her hair and stared at them.
‘What do you think? Interested?’
‘A little out of my range,’ Peroni said. ‘Not that I’m looking.’
‘Who is?’ she asked. ‘I’m the person everyone sues, of course. The banks when I default on payments. The city when they think I screwed up over something as simple as a suspended scaffold. Oh, and Cecilia Gabriel, who seems to have decided I’m responsible for poor Malise’s death. You’d think she’d have waited a day or two before threatening me with the lawyers. I let her family have this place for next to nothing. I know enough not to expect thanks from the English aristocracy but even by their standards she seems a little eager with the ingratitude.’
‘You’ve spoken to Signora Gabriel?’ Peroni asked.
‘She was round here at ten thirty this morning. Picking up things. Telling me she wouldn’t set foot in the place ever again. Oh, and saying she’d be serving a writ real soon.’ Joanne Van Doren licked her lips. ‘You mind if I see if there’s a beer left in their refrigerator? This has been one hell of a weekend.’
They followed her into the kitchen where she found a bottle of Moretti. Then they came back and sat down in the living room, listening as she talked freely and frankly about the Gabriels, her tenants.
It was the kind of story Costa had heard before. A foreign family coming to Rome, the parents hoping to forge a fresh life in the city, to chance upon some thread of luck, some new opening in their lives that had never been there elsewhere. The American woman seemed to like them, in different ways. The father was friendly, intellectual, a little intense. The mother seemed quiet, committed, perhaps a controlling influence, she was never sure. The son, Robert, was wayward, unpredictable, but never caused any trouble that she knew of.
Joanne Van Doren’s face lit up when she said the girl’s name.
‘Mina,’ she said, beaming, ‘is a doll. If I were ever to have a kid, which seems somewhat unlikely, I’d pray for one like her. Bright as a button, interested in everything, so talented it makes you sick. Put her in front of a piano and you can lose a couple of hours of your life. Same for drawing, books, poetry, literature. Malise and Cecilia can take the credit for that, I guess. They taught her at home. Said it was the only way.’
‘They did that with Robert too?’ Peroni asked.
She thought for a moment and said, ‘No. Now you mention it. Robert said he went to some boarding school in Scotland, the same one Malise got dumped in when he was a kid. Perhaps that’s why he turned out the way he did. These snooty families have strange habits. You could never send Mina away. It’d be too painful to have her out of the house. Let me show you something.’
They followed her into a room at the far end of the floor, as distant from Mina’s bedroom as it was possible to be. There was a digital piano there, the kind that could be played in silence through headphones. Alongside was a violin case, a classical guitar and a little laptop computer.
‘Cecilia played violin in some amateur orchestra. Good, but Mina left her behind as a musician long ago from what I gathered. Listen.’
She hit the keyboard of the computer. A kind of software Costa didn’t understand came up. A few more taps and deep, powerful organ music, very familiar, began to emerge from the headphones.
Joanne Van Doren flicked a switch and it came out of the little speakers seated on the desk.
‘Bach,’ she explained. ‘Touch cheesy, I guess, though that’s because it’s been so misused over the yeara. Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Or the voice of God in human form as someone once said, hopefully not within earshot of Malise. Mina had scarcely been here four weeks before she’d talked her way into understudying the organist at the church on the Campidoglio. This is her playing there. She’d record it on the computer then bring it home to listen, try to make it better. Can you believe that? Also she speaks Italian better than I ever will, and for the life of me I don’t actually recall Cecilia even teaching her. God, I love that kid. This is my old laptop. I gave it her. Bought her the music kit too. Malise and Cecilia didn’t have two pennies to rub together.’
Costa was thinking.
‘She’d work on her music in here? With her headphones on?’
‘Usually,’ she agreed. ‘Mina was very particular about not disturbing people. Incredibly thoughtful. Not your average teenager at all.’
He closed the door.
‘Like this? So she wouldn’t know if someone came or went from the apartment?’
The American woman looked puzzled.
‘I guess. So what? How is Mina? They said she found Malise outside. Jesus . . . it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
She reached for a tissue, dabbed at her face, then apologized.
‘I just can’t believe it happened here. Then Cecilia blames me . . .’
‘People don’t think straight in situations like this,’ Costa said. ‘She’ll feel differently in a day or two.’
‘You don’t know her.’
Costa bent down and looked at the computer. In an open window there was a piece of notation, one that looked as if it was being worked on recently. He hunted round the menus until he found a way to pull up some information about the piece. It had last been saved at a quarter to midnight on Friday evening. The girl had told uniform she was practising when her father died. The computer seemed to corroborate this.
‘Can we see her bedroom?’ Costa asked.
‘Sure. It’s a mess, mind. Not Mina’s fault either.’
They followed her to the door at the far corner of the building. The men in city council overalls were still in there, peering out of the window at the shattered scaffolding tubes and cables. Peroni showed some ID and asked them to leave for a moment. Costa glanced at his colleague. The room was filthy with dust and dirt. There were boot marks on the single bed by the wall, stamped on the sheet, which had a distinctive design: white and green, with a repeating square pattern like an antique Roman mosaic. Books and CD covers lay scattered on the bare floor. These men were interested in the outside only. Nothing within.
A poster on the door had fallen down at some stage and now lay crumpled on the bed, covered in shoe marks. He picked it up and found himself looking at Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci from the Barberini, the one from the books, a good print which brought out the sensitive, sad beauty of the subject.
‘She liked that story,’ Joanne Van Doren said. ‘Found out about it soon after they moved in. I’d never even heard of it. Mina took me all over Rome, to places that had connections with Beatrice. We thought it might be good publicity when I got around to selling the condos. That’s why I put the Cenci name on my company. Mina was going to be the guide for potential buyers. I promised her a little pocket money.’
There was a bookshelf on the wall opposite the bed. Costa bent down and looked at the titles. One shelf was entirely devoted t
o works on the Cenci and their time: Dumas, Stendhal, Shelley, Moravia. Then he shook the duvet on the bed. Dust and dirt and bits of plaster and rubble fell on the floor. He threw back the cover and examined the sheet underneath. Fresh boot marks apart, it was spotlessly clean, newly ironed. Newly changed.
Costa was about to move on to the mattress beneath when Peroni coughed loudly and gave him a black look. This wasn’t the time.
The older cop walked towards the window, glanced out, then asked, ‘Why did the scaffolding collapse?’
Joanne Van Doren shrugged.
‘If I knew I’d tell you. Whether it’s the fault of my workmen or not. Do you imagine I feel good about this? I liked Malise. He was a decent, caring man. I guess that’s why Mina turned out the way she did.’
‘The scaffolding . . . ?’ Peroni persisted.
She didn’t like being pressed.
‘Do you have a head for heights?’ Joanne Van Doren asked. They didn’t have time to say anything. ‘Good. Then follow me.’
SIX
There was a set of external metal stairs at the back of the building. They climbed up the steps to the roof. The view was extraordinary, a sweeping prospect of Rome stretching from the Campidoglio to the Gianicolo hill and St Peter’s across the Tiber.
A heavily built man in council overalls was clambering over some bulky apparatus at the front. Joanne Van Doren walked over and said to him, ‘You’ve got company. The police are back and want to know what happened.’
He was about fifty, with a brutish, ill-tempered face and a grey moustache. He didn’t look as if he wore an overall often, particularly on Sundays.
‘Signor Di Lauro is the building inspector in charge of the investigation,’ she explained with a friendly wave. ‘I am, of course, offering all the help I can.’
‘Any ideas?’ Peroni said, flashing his card.
‘Don’t you people ever talk to one another?’ Di Lauro grunted. ‘I went through this with those guys I spoke to this morning. I really have better things to do.’
‘Please,’ Costa interrupted. ‘Just briefly.’
‘Briefly.’ He climbed down from the mechanism he was looking at, a complex set of wheels and pulleys and platforms, and put his hands on his hips. ‘This is what’s known as a suspension scaffold. That means the strain is taken by the anchorage and counterweights you see here. On the roof.’
‘How much can it support?’ Peroni wanted to know.
‘This apparatus is licensed for a load of three hundred and fifty kilos. Three men.’ He waited to see if they understood. ‘So if there was just one man on it . . .’
‘Got you,’ Peroni replied. ‘And . . . ?’
‘And what?’
‘Why did it break?’
Di Lauro closed his eyes as if in pain.
‘I don’t know. Maybe structural failure in the scaffolding itself. Metal fatigue. Or maybe someone did their job wrongly. It happens.’
He grimaced. Something didn’t seem quite right.
‘Often?’ Costa asked.
‘This scaffolding was erected by Signora Van Doren’s own people. They worked on it. They stood to suffer if it went wrong. No. Not often. Scaffolders are meticulous men. The paperwork’s in order. The tiebacks, the counterweights . . . this seems to be a professional job.’
Costa grabbed hold of a piece of loose cable, took one step towards the edge of the roof and peered down over the edge at the distant cobblestones below. The view down to the street made him feel a little queasy. He looked at Di Lauro and asked, ‘Would it be easy to make it fail deliberately?’
The council man sighed.
‘No. Possible. But not easy. You’d need to know what you were doing.’
‘Nobody has access to this roof,’ Joanne Van Doren cut in. ‘The building’s empty except for my workmen and the Gabriels. Trust me.’
‘So when will we know?’ Peroni asked.
Di Lauro shrugged.
‘Impossible to say. A week at least. Possibly longer. We’ve taken away the debris from the ground. Tomorrow I’ll find some people to look at it.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Costa asked.
The man sighed. ‘It’s . . .’
‘Sunday. I know. And August.’
‘Listen,’ the council man snapped. ‘You do your job. I do mine. I will find out what’s happened here. If it’s negligence, there could be criminal charges, Signora Van Doren.’ He didn’t look at her as he said this. ‘In cases of extreme negligence it can be manslaughter.’
‘I was at home drinking a glass of wine in front of the TV,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘That would seem a little cruel.’
‘The last case of this kind took three years to come to court. It got thrown out after four months.’ Di Lauro shook his head. ‘None of this is easy.’
‘More lawyers,’ the American woman grumbled.
‘Thanks,’ Costa said, and led the way back downstairs. He was glad to be inside again. Joanne Van Doren was starting to look impatient with their presence.
‘What are you going to do with this building now?’ Costa asked.
‘Try to sell something,’ she said, as if the question were idiotic. ‘Get this damned apartment finished so I can put it on the market. I need the money. Otherwise everything goes to the bank and I’ll be as broke as my old man back home. These aren’t good times for the private sector, gentlemen. Haven’t you noticed?’
She looked briefly ashamed and for a moment seemed on the verge of tears. It struck Costa that this woman appeared genuinely affected by the death of her tenant, though she did not, perhaps, want this to show.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. This is nothing next to what Mina and her mom are having to deal with. Malise loved them. I can’t imagine what life’s like without him. You know . . . instead of poking around here you might be better off trying to help them get through the next few days.’
Costa nodded, then watched as some new men arrived at the door.
‘I’ll pass that on to the appropriate authorities,’ he murmured as she walked away to greet them.
Peroni was poking around in the living room, going through the newspapers and magazines that were piled in a jumble on the glass table in front of the sofa.
‘This is where he must have been drinking last night before he stepped outside,’ the big man said. ‘There’s a ring from a glass here. Just one.’ He bent down and sniffed it. ‘Whisky. Got spilled too. Good point you made back there.’
‘Which one?’
Peroni stared at him, surprised.
‘If that kid was wearing headphones in that music room a small army could have walked through here and she’d never have noticed. Also, there’s this. I don’t get it.’
He stood up, a thick book in his hands. It was an old edition, a fat, tall paperback. The title was All the Gods are Dead. The author’s name was Malise Gabriel. Bells were ringing in Costa’s head again.
Joanne Van Doren saw what they were doing and came over.
‘I put that under the table myself,’ she said. ‘We had to sit down and use it when the council people turned up. They wanted to see some plans. I should have told Cecilia when she came round. She was looking for all the little personal things she could find. The conversation got a little . . . tense. I kind of forgot.’
Peroni flicked open the book and glanced at Costa.
‘So this is what he was reading,’ Peroni said. ‘His own book? And it’s . . .’ He turned to the front and checked the date. ‘. . . twenty years old. Why would someone read a book they wrote themselves? An old one?’
‘Maybe to remember the good times?’ the American woman suggested. ‘Who knows? Excuse me. I really need to talk to these guys.’
She crossed the room and began addressing the newcomers in overalls. Costa couldn’t hear a word she was saying.
Peroni was flicking through Gabriel’s book.
‘You know something, Nic? I doubt I’d understand a word of
this even if my English were better. It’s all jargon and academic-speak. Almost makes me want to step outside for a cigarette. Do you have the faintest clue what “non-overlapping magisteria” means? Or why it should be a bad thing?’
‘I’d have to say no on both fronts. How do you know he was reading that chapter?’
‘Bookmark,’ Peroni replied, and showed him the page.
There was what looked like a postcard in it with a line in Italian, the script in a cursive, elegant hand, ‘E pur si muove.’
Peroni stared at the words in front of him.
‘Now I’m an uncultured oaf. But the way I’d spell that is “eppure si muove”. Maybe these foreign academics aren’t as clever as they think. Funny thing to write on a bookmark, though. “And yet it moves”. What moves?’
‘No idea,’ Costa said. He picked up the bookmark, stared at it, thinking about the words. Then he turned it over, saw what was on the back, and felt his heart sink.
‘That’s unusual,’ Peroni said, his broad, pale face wrinkling with puzzlement.
This wasn’t a real postcard but a black and white photo from a domestic printer. It showed a naked girl writhing on an off-white crumpled sheet, her slight frame posed artfully, the way a sculptor might have placed it. There was a visible stain next to her thigh. Her willowy body was that of a teenager, with pale, perfect skin, thin legs crossed and turned, so that the lens saw only her thighs and a side view of her navel, nothing else. It was if she was struggling to hide. As if some inner sense of shame or shyness wished to protest, to say that what was happening felt wrong.
The picture was cut off at her neck – decapitated, he thought for a moment. In the topmost portion of the image two taut sinews stretched up towards the smooth white skin of her throat, as if extended by pain or guilt. There was a tantalizing lock of hair in shadow cast by a light or an object out of view. It was light hair, fair or blonde perhaps.
‘Is that the daughter?’ Peroni asked.
‘It could be.’
‘Could be?’
‘Yes,’ he said with audible impatience. ‘Could be.’
The American woman had stopped talking to her workmen. She was watching them and Costa didn’t like the curiosity in her face.
