The Fallen Angel

by David Hewson

‘Perhaps,’ the stiff, middle-aged man from the council agreed. He looked unhappy, with the company, and with what he had to say. ‘I don’t know if this is of any use or not. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It’s why I asked to meet you here. Not inside. You need to see. To comprehend. Or not.’

  He strode over to the edge of the building. They followed, Costa feeling the fluttering of vertigo in his stomach. Di Lauro was in a grey office suit but leapt onto the mechanism of the scaffolding structure as if he were still the builder he’d surely once been.

  ‘You must understand,’ the man said, banging a fist against the rusting pulleys that had once held the timber platform which had collapsed beneath the weight of Malise Gabriel, sending him plunging to the hard cobbled street. ‘I can only tell you the facts. Nothing more. How any of this could happen . . .’

  ‘What?’ Falcone asked impatiently.

  ‘These ties,’ Di Lauro said, indicating some rusty hook-like mechanisms that seemed designed to hold the ropes that bore the strain of the structure below. ‘They’re incomplete. I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw them. I asked Signora Van Doren – she was an architect. She found this as baffling as I did.’

  ‘Incomplete?’ Peroni said.

  ‘That’s what I said. A small part of the mechanism is simply missing. It’s supposed to fix the rope to stop it running through. I could only imagine that perhaps the workmen had taken them away after the accident for some reason. Otherwise I would have told you earlier, but I needed to speak to Signora Van Doren’s team to be sure. It seems such an extraordinary omission I couldn’t believe it was accidental. But we’ve now interviewed all of the men. They all say the apparatus had not been changed since it was first assembled six months ago. So the pulleys were secure when they finished work on the day before the accident happened. In which case . . .’

  He shrugged, as if the conclusion were obvious.

  ‘In which case what?’ Falcone demanded.

  Di Lauro looked at him as if the question were stupid.

  ‘In which case it wasn’t an accident. These things were removed. Once you do that this end of the platform will collapse under the slightest weight. Immediately. It had nothing to hold it in place except the residual tension in the rope itself. A cat might have sent those planks tumbling to the ground. A man certainly.’

  ‘These workmen could be lying to cover up their own incompetence,’ Teresa said.

  ‘No. They’re decent people. I know them. Professionals. If there’d been some kind of mistake I would have expected the missing pieces to be around here somewhere. They’re not.’

  He frowned as he stared at the stork-like rusting mechanism that protruded over the edge of the roof.

  ‘This was deliberate?’ Falcone asked. ‘Sabotage? Murder?’

  Di Lauro shrugged.

  ‘I’m a building inspector. I can only tell you what I find. This is something entirely new to me. I cannot and will not say in my report that this was an accident. Nor will I allow Signora Van Doren’s men to take the blame, since I do not believe in my heart that they could possibly be responsible. It’s unthinkable they would do such a thing, as a prank or anything else. Any one of them, more, could have died if they’d stepped onto that scaffolding in this condition.’

  Falcone looked at Teresa and said, ‘Get a description of these parts he’s talking about. Pass it on to your people. Let’s find them.’

  The council officer stood there, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Falcone asked.

  ‘You saw the blood?’ Di Lauro asked. ‘Downstairs? In the girl’s room? The smear on the radiator near the window?’

  Teresa came and stood in front of him and asked, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I didn’t think this was important. Perhaps it isn’t.’

  ‘Yes?’ she repeated.

  ‘When I first came here we walked into that room together, Signora Van Doren and I. This was early the Saturday morning. When . . . it was just an accident, nothing else. She was dreadfully upset. There was still . . . in the street . . . you could see where the man had fallen.’

  They were all looking at him.

  ‘When we walked in the first thing she saw was the blood on the radiator. The unfortunate woman burst into tears. There was a lot of it. I thought perhaps some hair too. At least, something dark. Signora Van Doren seemed a good woman. I felt embarrassed. So . . . I thought this was an accident.’

  ‘So you what?’ Teresa asked.

  He licked his lips and said, ‘I tried to clean it as best I could with my handkerchief. It seemed only kind.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ she began. ‘You stupid man. How on earth . . . ?’

  Di Lauro pulled a clear plastic bag out of his pocket, the sort used in a freezer. A crumpled bloodied hankie was inside.

  ‘I managed to get it before my wife put it in the wash. Only just,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’d no idea you would be dealing with something so horrible. If I’d known . . .’

  ‘We weren’t supposed to know, were we?’ She stared at the stained handkerchief. ‘You do realize that thing is now of intellectual interest alone? If I had to stand up in court and prove there was no contamination . . .’

  ‘Thank you,’ Falcone cut in, and removed the plastic bag from Di Lauro’s hands. ‘Go downstairs, find one of my officers, and make a statement. Then it’s best you left.’

  They watched him go. Falcone phoned the Questura and called for orders demanding search warrants for the Casina delle Civette and the examination of the Gabriels’ financial and medical records.

  When he’d done he looked at them and said, ‘We should assume Robert Gabriel murdered his adoptive father and Joanne Van Doren. One way or another we have to try to understand how much Cecilia Gabriel and her daughter were involved. I’m damned certain one of them knows where that kid is. We’re going in there.’

  Costa looked at his watch. It was getting late and he said so.

  Falcone nodded then said, ‘Fine. Let them sleep as easily as they can. We can take the mother and daughter back to the Questura while we search the premises. Bring along Santacroce too. I doubt we could exclude him.’

  Peroni looked sceptical.

  ‘What are you saying, Leo?’ he asked. ‘That the newspapers got it right? It is the Cenci case all over again?’

  ‘I don’t care about the newspapers. Look at the facts.’

  ‘What facts?’ Peroni demanded. ‘A few blood and semen stains and a lot of possibilities that don’t join up. Are those really reason enough for tearing this family apart? I don’t think you have sufficient reason. You may find a magistrate thinks so too when we send a lawyer for that warrant. Nic?’

  Costa hated taking sides. Both men had a point.

  ‘We need to talk to them,’ he said. ‘Separately, together. I don’t know. Joanne Van Doren was murdered. Robert Gabriel clearly has material information about her death. There’s enough here for a formal interview. We’d be remiss if we didn’t carry it out.’

  ‘Fine. And until then?’

  Falcone glanced at his watch.

  ‘Forensic can keep going here. Keep trying to find the trash that was taken out by the builders. You two can go home. Tomorrow may be a long day.’

  TEN

  The door was at the end of the garden of the Casina delle Civette, hidden in an algaed corner that was overgrown with twisting serpents of ivy. It was kept locked, always. The key was in Bernard Santacroce’s desk. She’d taken a copy months before, when they first lived in the Casina, and kept it carefully in her bag.

  At the end of the afternoon Mina Gabriel slipped out into the deserted garden and sat on the bench seat in the leafy, fragrant bower of bergamot and lemon trees, rereading Shelley next to the crumbling fountain and its soft, liquid song.

  The finale. Beatrice in her cell, awaiting the last call for pardon from the Pope, knowing in her heart this ultimate plea was futile.

  The young English g
irl held the play in her hands, acting out the final tragic scene in her imagination, something she had done many times before. Her hands moved through the thin air with its traffic fumes and specks of dust. Her voice, clear and precise, each word enunciated with care, rang out from the citrus grove and over the spike of red and yellow canna lilies that sat like a sea of antique gold before the laden grape vines that adorned the southern wall.

  Beatrice’s words from Shelley’s pen, hers too now:

  ‘Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be

  No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;

  The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

  If all things then should be . . . my father’s spirit,

  His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;

  The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!

  If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,

  Even the form which tortured me on earth,

  Masked in grey hairs and wrinkles, he should come

  And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix

  His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!’

  She stopped, looking up at the long, vaulted windows of the Casina. On the top floor was her mother, stiff at the glass, next to the imposing figure of Bernard Santacroce, his arms folded, magisterial as always.

  Mina’s head went down, she pouted, hating the way they followed her.

  Down, down, down . . .

  A long minute staring at the cracked paving of the Casina garden, spoiled by dark moss, teeming with insects: ants and beetles and earwigs, denizens of another discrete world that ran from century to century, unheeding of mankind, creatures of the wide, grey, lampless deep.

  Her gaze returned to the stone tower where Galileo had once listened to Bernard Santacroce’s ancestors pledging their allegiance, if only he might concede some dishonest accommodation with the Pope across the river.

  ‘“E pur si muove”,’ she murmured, and wondered why she’d said those words to Nic Costa. He was an honest, likeable man, someone who cared. There weren’t many like that.

  The faces at the window were gone. They’d taken the hint. She pulled out her phone, checked the list of numbers she had for Robert, each tied to a specific day, for safety’s sake, chose the right one and called.

  He sounded breathless. Tired. Crabby.

  ‘I need to see you,’ Mina Gabriel said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Robert . . .’

  A long, weary sigh.

  ‘OK. Don’t nag. Where?’

  ‘The bridge. Where else?’

  She took one more look to make sure they’d stopped spying on her. Then Mina Gabriel dragged back her long, blonde hair behind her head, pulling it away from her face as much as possible, securing the locks with a band. She retrieved from her bag a pair of cheap, heavy black plastic sunglasses bought the previous week from a hawker near the Campo and placed them on her face.

  ‘Minerva Gabriel,’ she said, in a pompous grown-up voice that mocked her mother’s harsh patrician tones. ‘What do you look like?’

  The girl got to her feet and reached up and squeezed the open-pored leathery skin of an ageing lemon on the nearest tree, breathing in its aroma, citrus scent and the stain of stale, dank traffic.

  ‘Anyone, mother. Everyone,’ she whispered.

  Then she strode through the sea of red and yellow cannas, found the door, unlocked it with her illicit key, and let herself out into the street.

  ELEVEN

  He had sunglasses too, the same cheap kind. A black T-shirt that was tight over his muscled torso. The familiar old faded denim jacket. Fake Adidas sneakers going to ruin. It was poverty that drew this family together more than anything, she thought, and as they slipped further into penury and uncertainty the bonds grew ever closer, so tight they had long felt ready to snap.

  The tourists had gone to eat, to drink. The Ponte Sant’Angelo was almost deserted: two men selling postcards and souvenirs, a tramp with a German shepherd on a piece of rope, slumped with his dog beneath the statue of a grieving angel. But there was always a steady stream of traffic thundering over the worn patch of asphalt that stole its way into her imagination every time she passed this place.

  Robert Gabriel took hold of her skinny shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks. She responded. Not too much. That was never a good idea.

  They walked up and down the bridge, beneath the gaze of the angels, talking, thinking, exploring. She told him about Costa and the visit of the police. She listened to his stories, his fears. He said little of any moment. Robert never changed. Still, it was good to speak.

  Finally she made him stand by the angel with the cruel flail and said, ‘I wish Joanne was still alive.’

  ‘Me too,’ he answered, and didn’t look her in the eye. ‘I liked her. We both did.’

  ‘I try to like everyone,’ Mina told him. ‘Even when it’s not easy. Especially when it’s not easy.’

  ‘St Mina of Rome,’ he said, a sarcastic smile on his strong, handsome face. ‘They’ll make you that, when it all begins. That thing. The process. What’s it called?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All that mumbo jumbo about making a saint. I used to laugh about it with Malise.’

  He would never call him ‘father’, even when he was young.

  ‘I think they call the first step beatification. It means someone has reached a state of bliss. I don’t see that happening soon, do you?’

  ‘When you’re dead, St Mina, they’ll light candles. Put your T-shirt in a glass case by the altar.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid!’

  ‘I’m not. You deserve it. You’ve got the looks. That pale, pained innocent face. The sacrificial maiden.’

  ‘Shut up, Robert,’ she said, cross, beginning to regret this.

  He persisted. He never knew when to stop.

  ‘No. I mean it. Look at the papers. That photograph.’ He burst out laughing, clutching his stomach like a bad actor. ‘The one where they put your head on her portrait . . .’

  ‘I’d nothing to do with that.’

  ‘You’d everything to do with it. You painted yourself as her, didn’t you? What did you expect? What did we expect?’

  That was a question she could answer.

  ‘Freedom,’ she said softly. ‘The chance to live. To breathe. Security, I don’t know.’

  The very things Beatrice Cenci had sought too, only to finish her days beneath the flash of an executioner’s sword a few short steps from where they now stood.

  ‘So it’s all worth it, then?’ he asked, and stood closer to her, backing Mina’s willowy body against the stone parapet of the bridge across the Tiber.

  ‘Worth what?’

  He leaned against her, leering, nudged his lips against her ear and whispered something coarse and common. His fingers fell to the belt of her jeans, slipped below, stroking the tender skin beneath her navel.

  Mina Gabriel pushed him back and said, ‘Cut that out.’

  ‘Sorry. I forgot. You’re a saint.’

  ‘And you’re an animal.’

  ‘Animals are useful too, aren’t they? A bit more than saints, I’d say.’

  She walked away from him, back towards the lost place of execution and the endless stream of cars. This hadn’t been a good idea. It wasn’t worth the risk. He was, she realized, beyond hope, beyond advice.

  Robert followed her, struggling to voice some pathetic excuses.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked as they reached the shops and houses that led into the centro storico. ‘Where are you going to stay?’

  ‘Best you don’t know.’

  Mina Gabriel wished more than anything she could make him take off those opaque sunglasses, could do the same herself. That they could look straight into each other’s eyes, just this once.

  ‘Robert,’ she said. ‘Be serious, please. They’re going to come for us. Just like the papers are saying. You act as if it’s all some kind of a joke.
Everything.’

  ‘A joke,’ he repeated. ‘Not even a very funny one either. You as Beatrice. Me as Pangloss. Watch and wait. And remember . . .’

  He slapped her backside, hard.

  ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. See you, sister. Take care.’

  The blow hurt. She felt her eyes begin to sting, heard some tiny little voice start to chant inside, the vicious, pained refrain that had been absent for a little while, along with all those familiar words she never dared utter out loud.

  Don’t touch me, don’t hurt me, don’t, don’t, don’t you dare . . .

  PART EIGHT

  ONE

  Costa wasn’t ready to listen to Falcone’s orders. There were too many questions buzzing around his head. So he went back to the Questura for a few hours, checking to see if forensic had picked up anything new, and whether there was any more information about the missing brother. It was early evening by the time he’d finished, none the wiser. Falcone’s determination to pin everything on searches and formal interviews with Cecilia and Mina Gabriel the following day was starting to make sense. There seemed no other way forward.

  Around six thirty he went outside and perched on the scooter, checking the messages on his personal phone, looking forward to some time at home. Someone prodded him on the shoulder. It was Rosa Prabakaran, looking glamorous in her evening uniform: short dress, skimpy T-shirt, gaudy jewellery. She sashayed in front of him and said, ‘Oh my, Nic. A Vespa. You need me on the back, don’t you? Complete the look.’

  ‘I’m a little old for that,’ he replied.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She was smiling in a way she hadn’t when they’d met earlier, with Gino Riggi. Costa had always liked this smart, difficult woman, and was aware his feelings had, on occasion, been reciprocated, perhaps more than he wanted. ‘We’d make a good pair together down the Campo. You’ve never worked that beat, have you?’

  He had, back when he was a young agente, and said so.

  ‘Ten years ago? It’s different now.’ The smile disappeared and she looked like the pretty young Indian woman he first got to know a few years before. ‘Lots of things are different. It’s important to notice.’