The Fallen Angel

by David Hewson

  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.’

  THREE

  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?’

  Peroni laughed.

  ‘I’ll pass on that. You always said you were going to go there on a pushbike.’

  ‘Too old. Too little time.’ Costa looked at him. ‘I’ve never worked organized crime, Gianni. Not seriously. Tell me something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How many ride-by killings do we get a year? Gang assassinations? Two? Three?’

  ‘Not as many as we used to get.’

  ‘And why’s that?’ Costa continued. ‘Because it’s an Italian thing. The Sicilians, the Neapolitans. They love all that show-off stuff. But they’re not running these rings any more. They’re more interested in easy, safe money. Bribery, corruption, skimming.’

  ‘Riggi wasn’t involved with the Sicilians.’

  ‘Precisely. Here’s another thing. If you’re going to kill someone from a motorbike, surely you need two people. One to ride. One to shoot. Have you ever known a mob ride-by where there was just one person on the bike?’

  Peroni was smiling and shaking his head.

  ‘No, sovrintendente, I haven’t.’

  ‘And the small matter of the Ducati?’

  Costa folded his arms. Just before they left they’d heard that the red motorbike had been located at four that morning, at an autostrada service station on the route north to Florence. Two cops had performed a textbook arrest and taken a thirty-three-year-old man into custody. It took a local inspector only thirty minutes to realize he had a case of theft on his hands, not murder. The bike had been abandoned shortly after the shootings, left in a side street near the Via Beatrice Cenci with the keys in the ignition. The man in custody was a city bus driver who’d been on duty till midnight and seen the machine by the side of the street on the way home. He was planning to drive the Ducati north to a relative in Florence and sell it on. The original rider’s clothes were still missing. The machine itself had fake number plates. No weapon had been found, no real clue as to the identity of the man who had killed Riggi and Robert Gabriel the previous night.

  Peroni screwed up his flabby face and said, ‘Even the stupidest gangsters I’ve met, and there’ve been quite a few, would never have left a machine like that in the vicinity, with the keys in the ignition. Why take the risk? They’d have whisked it out of Rome in a van or something. Taken it out into the countryside and burned the thing. Or repainted it, changed the numbers, and put it in an empty dope crate back to Turkey or somewhere. That bike’s worth, what, seven, eight thousand euros? Either they’d destroy it or sell it.’

  Exactly as Costa had thought. ‘So?’ he asked.

  ‘So Leo knows all this. He’s just working with what he has.’

  ‘We’re here to talk to this Cakici guy for no other reason than he was Riggi’s contact with the Turkish mob?’

  Peroni’s bright blue eyes sparkled.

  ‘A contact who was trying to flee the country on a false passport, remember.’

  ‘Probably just scared we’d come looking for him. As we have. My guess is he’s as innocent of these murders as Mina Gabriel is of the death of her father.
’

  ‘I hope your guess is correct,’ Peroni said quietly, unwrapping a chocolate bar and taking a big bite of it. ‘On the latter anyway. I truly do.’

  Costa thought of the interview ahead.

  ‘All the same, I don’t like scum who sell drugs to teenagers,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a point, shall we?’

  FOUR

  Teresa Lupo liked Toni Grimaldi, the chief resident Questura lawyer. He was a friendly, portly man in his fifties with a genial face and a walrus moustache rather amateurishly dyed black to match his full head of hair. His role was not always an easy one. He acted as the conduit between the police and the judiciary, the internal Questura expert who would tell an investigating officer whether he or she had sufficient evidence to merit a search warrant, an arrest or a charge.

  Officers trusted Grimaldi, a man who’d worked in the Piazza San Michele longer than almost anyone else still serving. He rarely gave the green light to a case that would fall at the first hurdle, as many a young lawyer was wont to do. He was frank and open with his advice, sometimes suggesting routes of inquiry that had not occurred to the detectives concerned or, on occasion, the forensic team. Over the years he had become a vital cog in the workings of the Questura, an impartial eye who would not shirk from telling an investigating officer when it was time to give up. For this he was admired even if his advice was not always welcome.

  Every last file Falcone possessed, and the latest information from the forensic department, had been in his hands for two hours. Teresa now sat next to Leo Falcone in Grimaldi’s bright fourth-floor office overlooking the courtyard at the back of the building, waiting for his opinion. Much, she thought, as a patient waited for a doctor to pass on news of a diagnosis. There was the same nervous resentment, in Falcone at least. The same presentiment of bad tidings too.

  Grimaldi took off his reading glasses, looked up at them over his desk and asked, ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Falcone snapped. ‘Do you think we’d withhold something?’