by David Hewson
‘Only if it damaged your case,’ Grimaldi replied. ‘And since you have no case . . .’ He shrugged. ‘What would be the point?’
‘No case? No case?’
‘We’ll be getting more forensic, Toni,’ Teresa said quickly. ‘We’ve got the photos to show Malise Gabriel had a sexual relationship with the Van Doren woman. Once we get the report back from the girl’s mattress we’ll know whether he had sex in his daughter’s bed too.’
‘Malise Gabriel’s dead,’ Grimaldi pointed out. ‘Can’t put him in the dock. Even if you could you can’t place him in the girl’s bed or say he had sex with her.’
‘Not yet,’ she said.
He looked at her, frowned and said nothing.
Falcone added, almost calmly, ‘The father’s behaviour establishes motive. On the part of the mother. On the part of the daughter and the adopted son too.’
‘And the motive for killing the American woman?’
Falcone looked desperate for a moment.
‘Jealousy? Perhaps she discovered something? I don’t know. I want the chance to ask them.’
Grimaldi didn’t answer. He shuffled the papers again.
‘Who killed the son and this bent cop of ours?’ he asked.
‘Probably the drugs people they were involved with,’ Falcone told him. ‘We think we have a suspect out at Ciampino. Costa’s talking to him now.’
The lawyer didn’t look happy.
‘It’s a bloody old affair, isn’t it? Families.’ He shook his head. ‘And drugs. You always hope the two won’t meet.’
‘Malise Gabriel wasn’t murdered because of drugs,’ Falcone insisted. ‘He was having an affair and abusing his own daughter. Racked with a terminal illness. A monster.’
‘Just like the Cenci father,’ Grimaldi cut in. ‘So the papers got it right.’
‘Perhaps! But I need a search warrant for their home. I need to arrest the mother and the daughter and bring them in so we can question them properly. They’re so damned slippery.’
Grimaldi’s walrus moustache wrinkled. He stared at the papers in front of him and asked, ‘On the basis of what I have here? Nothing more?’
‘Precisely.’
‘No,’ the lawyer said straight out. ‘You don’t have the evidence. I’d let you bring in the son, but he’s dead. Even if you can prove the father was abusing the daughter there’s no live criminal case there for precisely the same reason. You surely aren’t suggesting we try to prosecute her for incest instead? This isn’t the Middle Ages. The monstrous regiment out there would riot in an instant.’
‘Of course I’m not suggesting that!’ Falcone insisted. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. This whole affair is distressing. But we have to—’
‘Leo!’ Grimaldi looked cross. This was rare. ‘Will you kindly try to see this with some perspective? The commissario has made it clear to me we must proceed with the utmost care here. The media. The public interest.’
‘To hell with the media!’
The lawyer sighed.
‘You’re too intelligent a man to mean that. In order for me to approve a warrant I will require more than mere motive. I need you establish an evidential link between the mother and the daughter and one or more of these crimes. Is there anything to suggest they were there when the American woman died? Quite the contrary. The mother has a firm alibi and a seventeen-year-old girl couldn’t strangle a grown woman and then suspend her corpse from the ceiling. Is there any evidence that they, not the son, tampered with the scaffolding, or scuffled with Gabriel, causing his head to fall against the radiator and give you your convenient blood stain? No. In fact I see no evidence that anyone was with Malise Gabriel at the time of his death. He was drunk. He’d had sex with someone unknown earlier. Perhaps he stumbled against the radiator, and went outside for a cigarette as the daughter says. Nothing you have proves otherwise.’
He thought for a moment, then added, ‘We’ve had cases before, you know, where disgruntled children have set traps for their parents. Accidents in waiting, ones that may never be triggered. The son, or the daughter, could have removed those stays from the roof, thinking, if this monster does walk out there for a cigarette he could tumble to his death. It’s an easy, cowardly way out, isn’t it? You leave the man’s fate to chance or God. If he lives, you carry on. If he dies, you forgo the blame. In your own head anyway.’
‘Let’s leave God out of this, shall we?’ Falcone replied.
‘If you feel that’s possible. The fact remains. You need to persuade one of these two to confirm your suspicions. To confess, perhaps.’
‘Which is why I need to arrest them,’ Falcone exploded. ‘Without that they simply won’t talk.’
‘Then,’ Grimaldi said, with a smile, ‘you’ll have to go back to work and find me some real evidence to support these theories of yours. What you have is flimsy, circumstantial and insufficient. The crimes of a dead man, however vile, are insufficient to justify throwing these women into an interview room for twenty-four hours and leaving you to try to break them. This is not the sixteenth century. We are not the Pope’s inquisitors.’
He closed the folder in front of him ostentatiously and looked at Teresa Lupo.
‘More evidence please. Until you have I won’t look at this case again.’
‘You do realize I have yet to persuade these two even to set foot inside the Questura!’ Falcone bellowed.
Grimaldi looked puzzled.
‘What do you mean? They’ve been in to identify the brother’s body, surely?’
Teresa shrugged and said, ‘Not yet. We’ve asked them. The mother said she’s still too upset. It’s standard practice to leave the timing up to the relatives. It’s not critical in this case. So I’ve never pushed them.’
The two men stared at the pathologist.
‘They’ve got a dead son on a slab in the morgue and they don’t want to see him?’ the lawyer asked.
‘Dead son, dead father,’ she said. ‘You’d be surprised, Toni. Sometimes people are like that.’
‘Then . . .’ Grimaldi extended a hand. ‘There you have it, Leo. Tell them it’s important you have an ID, however upsetting that may be. Once you have them here I bow to your improvizational skills. Just don’t expect me to pick up any debris you leave behind. Consider yourself warned.’
FIVE
By the time they were back in the morgue, waiting on the Gabriels to arrive for the formal identification of Robert, Falcone was in an oddly foul mood. The nature of this case, and the way it had propelled him into the usually cherished role of antagonist, had come to haunt the man in some way. Peroni had told Teresa how Cecilia Gabriel had slapped him that day in the Casina delle Civette when he first broached the subject of incest. Falcone was thoughtful, intelligent and, in spite of himself sometimes, deeply sensitive. His personal distaste for the case was obvious. The very fact that its successful prosecution might depend upon his own resolute curiosity into these dark and disturbing secrets unsettled him, she felt. Grimaldi’s comment – that success might lie in breaking Mina Gabriel or her mother – weighed on his mind. He was never happy or predictable in such moods.
‘Can you tidy him up a little?’ Falcone asked as he stared miserably at the body on the silver table, shifting on his shoes, uncomfortable. More from the prospect of questioning the family than any squeamishness, she guessed. ‘I don’t want this to be any worse than it has to be.’
‘We’ve done as much as we can,’ she said. There was a folded sheet covering the gaping wound in the skull. The blood had been washed off his face. He had olive skin, and deep, sunken eyes. Seen like this she began to understand he could only be an adopted child. There was no physical resemblance at all to the young girl she’d seen in the newspapers. ‘Let’s get the ID out of the way and then I’ll finish. It’s not as if I’m looking for any surprises, am I?’
‘I imagine not,’ Falcone answered.
‘I hate this part,’ Teresa murmured, staring at the still, sad corpse. She l
iked to think of herself as a professional, someone who worked alongside the inevitable, death in all its forms, an officer of the state who brought, on occasion, some justice to the living. But comfort? That was rare, and slow to arrive if it ever did. Grief was the invisible spirit that rose from the dead, swiftly, bringing with it anger and resentment. She and Falcone had enjoyed many long conversations about the popular notion of ‘closure’ for the relatives of those who had died through violence, accident or any one of the everyday diseases that stole breath from the mouths of both young and old, most of whom who never dreamed for a moment that their lives would come to such an end, without warning, often without explanation or any rational need. Both she and Falcone hated the term, thought it a misnomer, an easy lie, like ‘moving on’. The bereaved needed such fantasies, perhaps, as a way to allow them to survive the difficult days. But these were convenient lies that fooled no one, fabrications designed to hide the plain truth: death was a cruel intrusion, an ever-present ghost dogging the footsteps of the living as they trudged through the world.
Leo Falcone loathed this necessary legal ceremony as much as she did, even when he hoped to gain some insight from it. The tall inspector, serious in a darker suit than he normally wore, went out of the room then led Mina and Cecilia Gabriel back into the morgue. They looked like mother and daughter, Teresa thought, both tall and slender, with very English faces, classically beautiful in an old-fashioned way. She rather envied women like this: high cheek-bones, large, sad eyes, pale, perfect skin, a timeless kind of beauty, that of women from the pages of glossy magazines or canvases on the walls of galleries.
The mother’s cheeks were a little hollow, her eyes and mouth surrounded by lines, as if marked with some long-standing pain. This was the first time she’d seen the girl in the flesh and she appreciated immediately how someone as careful and attentive as Nic would find her fascinating. The daughter had none of the detached, incurious disdain of her mother. She wore a simple black T-shirt and jeans. Her pale young face was bright, intelligent, alert, with sharp brown eyes that swept these strange, perhaps frightening surroundings, and avoided nothing. With her fair hair swept back her appearance seemed astonishingly close to that of the famous image of Beatrice Cenci that had appeared to be everywhere, on TV screens, in newspapers, on magazine racks, over the past few days. There was an intelligent, touching grief about her, not the blank, raging anger Teresa felt she saw in the mother.
There was a man behind them. He wore a dark navy suit, a pale pink shirt and a black silk tie, a little overdressed for a lawyer, she thought.
Falcone stepped forward and said, ‘Signor Santacroce. This is a family affair, I think.’
‘If they want me, Inspector,’ the man said in a patrician tone that bordered upon condescension. ‘I’m a family friend after all. But only if I’m needed.’
‘Stay, Bernard,’ Cecilia Gabriel announced without turning her head for a moment as she approached the corpse on the metal table. ‘But don’t look, please. This is distressing enough for us. It’s not for you.’
The man nodded and stayed at the door, out of sight of the corpse on the table.
The two of them, mother and daughter, of similar height and stature, and the same stiff, upright English stance, reached the body and stood there in silence. Then Mina Gabriel reached beneath the white sheet, lifted the fabric and took the still right hand there, holding the fingers in her own. Teresa watched and felt a deep, wordless sadness at this sight. The youth’s cold flesh was, for a few moments, enclosed in her thin white fingers, those of a musician or an artist. Brother and sister, in name if not blood. They grew up together, must once have held hands this way as they walked down the street.
Teresa was conscious of Falcone, glowering at her. She stepped forward and took the girl’s elbow lightly.
‘Mina. I’m sorry. There are rules in these situations. Please. You mustn’t touch.’
‘He’s my brother,’ she said softly, staring at the waxy, frozen face on the table, and the folded sheet that covered the dreadful wound to the skull.
‘He’s a murder victim,’ Falcone replied, quietly, respectfully. ‘I must insist . . .’
Slowly, reluctantly, she placed the youth’s hand back beneath the sheet then looked at her own fingers.
She went and stood closer to the mother. Neither said a word.
‘Don’t you want to know anything?’ Falcone asked.
‘About what?’ Cecilia Gabriel said.
‘About how Robert died?’
She seemed cold, unmoved almost, as if this were not quite real. Mina’s arms were wound round herself. The girl was starting to weep in silence.
‘My son was a drug dealer, Inspector,’ Cecilia Gabriel said in very precise, clipped tones. ‘You know that. You know, also, that in a sense we lost Robert a long time ago. He chose the kind of people he wished to be with. I’m sure you have a much better sense of how he came to die than I can ever begin to appreciate. Does it matter? He’s . . .’ Then the mask cracked, the real woman, a mother, Teresa thought, was visible, though there were still no tears. ‘He’s gone for good. I imagine you can heap on him all the blame you wish and none of us can object, can we?’
A brief touch of colour rose in Falcone’s cheeks.
‘I’m trying very hard to understand the circumstances of four violent deaths. Your husband. Your son. Joanne Van Doren. A serving police officer.’
‘From what I’ve read in the papers about him . . .’ the Englishwoman began.
‘The papers,’ he retorted, ‘are full of material I find deeply questionable. I can’t help but wonder where some of it came from.’
Mina Gabriel as Beatrice Cenci, Teresa thought to herself. He was making a good point. The girl’s hair, her very manner, almost seemed to be modelled on that now infamous portrait. The publicity was inevitable, though the Roman media had picked up the connection very quickly indeed.
Santacroce intervened, in a mild, conciliatory tone.
‘I was under the impression that Cecilia and her daughter were asked here to identify Robert,’ he said. ‘Nothing more. If that’s the case, then I think this distressing, if necessary, appointment is concluded, isn’t it?’
Falcone glared at Santacroce.
‘No, sir. It is not. Mrs Gabriel, I would be grateful if you and your daughter joined me in my office. Alone. These are personal matters.’
‘I came here to identify my son,’ Cecilia Gabriel interrupted. ‘That is all I intend to do.’
‘Please . . .’
‘You heard what Cecilia said,’ Santacroce interrupted. ‘If you’ve anything to say, then say it now.’
Falcone glanced at Teresa Lupo and she knew what he was thinking, understood how reluctant he was to take this step.
Then he walked over to the desk, removed the folder with the latest set of photographs, and handed it, unopened, to the mother.
‘I’m deeply sorry I have to raise this in such a way,’ he said. ‘But you leave me with no choice. Please. Look at them.’
SIX
Bedir Cakici was alone, bored, hungry and down to his last stick of gum. He’d been sitting in the immigration police’s interview room for four hours. It was a small, windowless cubicle with noisy air conditioning that didn’t work. The place was as hot as an oven and stank from the cooking fat of some nearby canteen drifting in from the single vent.
He shook his handcuffs and wondered again when there might be some avenue of escape. From here it was impossible. But they’d been making noises about the police wanting him, about a move to the city Questura. If he could make a phone call, get the right guy. If the men he knew were willing to take a couple of risks to spring an old friend from some sleepy cop car as it tracked down the Via Appia Nuova. Then he could do the smart thing, hide out for a while, work his way to the Adriatic, get across in one of the smuggling speedboats that brought in contraband tobacco from Croatia.
If, if, if.
He couldn’t believe they�
��d stopped him. Or that he’d been dumb enough to use one of the oldest fake passports he carried. Life had been a little hectic since Tuesday evening. Now he was paying the price.
One of the immigration officers, a man who looked like a prissy schoolteacher, walked back in followed by a couple of surly-looking individuals in shapeless suits who announced themselves as state police. He believed this. They had that nasty, suspicious look about them. Nevertheless they were the oddest couple of cops he’d seen in a while, one youngish, slim, good-looking with features that seemed as if they ought to be pleasant, smiling, but weren’t. He had dark hair and the kind of stance the Turk associated with sportsmen, football players and the like. The older one was tall, heavily built and ugly, a scary individual with a battered face that might have been through a windscreen once or twice. Yet the tough guy seemed strangely deferential around the younger man, as if he were the boss, not the other way round, as Cakici could have expected.
They didn’t show ID. They just yawned, pulled up a couple of chairs at the table, then stared at the immigration officer.
‘You want me to stay?’ the man asked. ‘I’m supposed to stay. That’s what the rules say.’
The big ugly one had his huge hands behind his balding head and was giving him a very nasty look.
‘I mean, I think that’s what the rules say,’ the immigration man added.
‘Sir?’ the big one asked the cop with him.
Sir? Cakici thought.
‘No, we don’t,’ the younger officer told him. ‘Isn’t it your lunch time or something?’
The immigration man left, mumbling under his breath.
The one who’d ordered him out waited, then got up and walked round the room, examining things, ignoring Cakici entirely.
‘There’s a microphone here, sir,’ the big cop said, pointing at a little plastic stick in the middle of the table.
‘I don’t think we need that, do we?’
The big guy reached over with one huge arm and ripped the mike out of its housing, wrapped the cable round the body, then threw the thing into the corner of the room.
