by David Hewson
‘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.’
‘Holiday?’
‘Speaking of which,’ Falcone added, ‘I won’t be at my desk in the morning till around lunch time. Some . . . personal matters to attend to. Please tell people not to contact me. It’s rather delicate.’
‘I see,’ Costa replied, in a tone that said he saw nothing at all, and would happily be enlightened.
‘Good,’ Falcone said and then loped off into the night, a tall, solitary figure striding through the ghetto, head down, thinking.
PART TEN
ONE
The Questura felt odd the following morning. Falcone, as he promised, was nowhere to be seen. The murder detail had turned up to work only to discover they were to stand down from the Gabriel case until further notice. This puzzled Costa deeply. Falcone had assured them the investigation was finished. No one else had been told that. It simply seemed to be on ice.
Peroni felt equally baffled, so the two of them gravitated to forensic and the morgue, mooching around the staff there, trying to find some answers. No one knew why the case was in limbo, neither dead nor alive. Or if they did they weren’t telling.
Then Silvio Di Capua and the young work-experience girl, Maria, who seemed permanently attached to him, wandered in complaining loudly, a furious-looking Teresa Lupo behind them.
The pathologist eyed Costa and Peroni. Then she said, ‘My office. Now.’
They followed the three forensic staff into the glass cubicle overlooking the rear of the Questura and the crammed police car park. The demonstration outside seemed to have picked up momentum again. Marked police vehicles were struggling to get out through the crowd. A line of ten or so blue Fiats was backed up against the fortified gates trying to find an opportunity to make their way into the street.
‘Did you know about this last night?’ Teresa demanded, staring at Costa.
‘Know about what?’
She ordered Di Capua to tell them. Costa listened as he explained the discovery of the email on the dead brother’s phone, the document detailing the structure of the scaffolding, and where it had originated. Falcone’s distraction the previous evening, after the odd call he’d taken in the piazza in the ghetto, started to make sense of a kind, and he told her so.
‘So where is he?’ she demanded. ‘His phone’s off. He’s not returning calls. I sent someone round to his apartment. He’s not there. We need to talk to him. Where the hell has he gone? To see the Gabriels?’
‘He wouldn’t go there on his own,’ Costa said.
‘Well, then where?’
‘Leo’s a grown man,’ Peroni retorted. ‘We’re not his keepers.’
‘Women,’ Teresa said. ‘That’s it usually. Who’s the current one?’
‘Search me,’ Costa added. ‘Leo doesn’t talk about his private life unless there’s a reason. I’ve no idea if there’s a girlfriend or not. Anyway, why do you need him so urgently? This can wait, can’t it?’
She scowled at Di Capua.
‘That rather depends on what he’s up to. The information this department . . .’ There was an icy stare at her deputy. ‘. . . provided last night was not as full or as accurate as I might have liked.’
‘Mail headers,’ Maria chipped in. ‘You have to look at the mail headers. They’re not right.’
Peroni, never a man happy with technology, was squinting at her, mouthing, ‘What?’
‘I’ve got this friend in America,’ she went on. ‘He knows mail headers inside out. I tweeted him and he took a look. Had to repeat tweet of course which is not good twittiquette. You can’t get a whole header over with just a hundred and forty characters. He was in a bar in San Diego.’
‘San Diego? Headers? Twittiquette?’ Peroni asked. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’
Teresa told him. A little of the heat drained from his face.
Costa thought about what she’d said. The header was some hidden information in the email that revealed the name of the server from which it had originated, and the path by which it had reached its destination, Robert Gabriel’s phone. Usually this was predictable and tied to whatever mail servic
e was used for the individual email address. But in the case of the email on the phone, the server was part of an anonymous service designed to hide the true origin of the message. It could have come from anywhere and the sender must have deliberately used this route in order to disguise his or her identity.
‘This doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘Why would Mina Gabriel use an anonymous service and still put her name on the message?’
Di Capua cleared his throat, glanced at Teresa and said, ‘She probably didn’t.’
Maria took out her phone and ran her fingers across the keys.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I just sent a message to that address. What happens? Boing. It gets bounced. Either it’s not a real email address. Or the server is down. Unlikely. Or it’s a real email address that’s expired. Or . . .’
‘What does it all mean?’ Peroni demanded
‘It means that either Mina Gabriel is a very poor criminal,’ Costa said, ‘or someone is trying to frame her for the murder of her father. Which, if true . . .’
His mind was starting to race. Sometimes investigations ran on assumptions, through the process of trying to transform an invented truth developed from hypothesis and plain guesswork into some form of reality that one could touch and turn into an arrest, a conviction. It had been troubling him for some time that the assumptions they had about the Gabriel case had scarcely changed from the outset, even though in the very beginning they were based on the flimsiest of observations. Cases normally developed, shifted, changed shape and character with time and a growing sense of perspective. This had been the same from the start: a case of murder stemming from incest. Just like that of the Cenci family.
‘We need Leo,’ Teresa began.
‘He’s not here,’ Costa said. ‘I’m in charge in his absence. I’ll deal with this.’
Teresa’s eyebrows rose. Her plain, friendly face wore a wry, amused smile.
‘Well, sir,’ she said. ‘What do you want us to do?’
‘Is that it?’ he asked. ‘Is that all you wanted to say to Falcone?’
The forensic team exchanged another set of maddening, silent glances.
‘Not exactly,’ Di Capua replied.
TWO
‘Semen,’ Teresa’s assistant said. ‘That’s the problem. We expected—’
‘Don’t tell me what you expected,’ Costa ordered. ‘Tell me what you found.’
The forensic officers glanced at one another.
‘Perhaps we won’t miss Leo after all,’ Teresa mused. ‘The honest truth is we’ve found nothing. Because of the holidays and the stinking budget cuts we’ve got to use an outside lab for DNA sampling. Takes time. Saves money. The latter seems more important than the former, at least to the bean-counters upstairs.’
‘On with it, on with it,’ Peroni urged, waving a hand at her.
She took a deep breath then said, ‘We don’t have a positive ID for any of the semen yet. The reports that came back from the outside lab aren’t usable. I’ve rejected them and said they need to be carried out again. They won’t get round to that until tomorrow.’
‘Wonderful,’ Costa muttered under his breath.
‘The best case you can come up with will still fall in court if the defence can question the DNA,’ Teresa said. ‘It’s happening more and more. I can’t take chances.’
‘We’ve been waiting days!’
‘I know.’ She paused to add a little drama, the way she always liked on such occasions. ‘The problem is the data we’ve got back doesn’t match. It’s close. But it’s not identical, as it should be. I think this is because it’s been handled badly. But there is an alternative explanation.’
She took another deep breath then said, ‘It’s just possible that we have semen specimens from two men, not one.’
The two cops didn’t say anything.
‘We didn’t look at the results until this morning,’ Di Capua said. ‘It’s probably a mistake.’
Costa looked at Teresa Lupo and said, ‘Probably?’
She frowned.
‘Look, I hate this as much as you do. I want certainties. We don’t have them. The most likely answer is that the lab screwed up. If they didn’t . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Then we have two men involved in sexual encounters. One of them, I assume, is Malise Gabriel. But I can’t tell you which yet. Or who the other might be.’
‘The son?’ Peroni asked.
‘That was my first thought,’ Teresa replied ‘It seems logical. As logical as anything else in this case. I’ve sent off a sample to check. Tomorrow . . .’
‘I don’t want to wait till tomorrow,’ Costa insisted.
‘Well, you’ll have to,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Go shout at the bean-counters. There is a problem with the son, though. These two samples are different but similar, which is why we assume there’s been some mistake and really it’s two samples from the same man, contaminated somehow.’
Peroni growled and said, ‘Make this simple.’
‘If these do turn out to be from two different men, then I’d hazard a guess that they’re probably related.’
That pause again. She gazed at Costa.
‘Are you absolutely sure Robert Gabriel was adopted?’
‘Mina said so. The mother too.’
‘Quite. Are you sure?’
He thought about it and said, ‘There’s no physical resemblance. Robert was nothing like her. His habits. His personality.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll get someone to check.’
Everything needed to be re-examined. Every last piece of evidence they’d lazily taken for granted.
‘While we’re at it,’ he said, ‘let’s look at those photographs again, shall we?’
THREE
‘A deal?’ Toni Grimaldi asked. ‘What kind of deal?’
They sat at a quiet table outside the Caffè della Pace, not far from the small temple-like church of Santa Maria. When the place was quiet Falcone liked to use it for such meetings. It was close to his old home near the Piazza Navona, a pleasant, ancient establishment with an atmosphere conducive to the kind of frank conversation that was, on occasion, impossible inside the formal corridors of the Questura.
He’d called the lawyer that morning, catching him on the train in from Ostia as Falcone had hoped. Timing was important in such matters. It was vital to plant the seed of this idea early, outside the office.
‘A deal that suits us all,’ Falcone said, picking at his breakfast pastry. ‘This case is damaging everyone. The Questura. The family. The judiciary, if we allow it to get that far . . .’
‘You sound very different from yesterday,’ Grimaldi noted. ‘Then you wanted me to give you carte blanche to throw these two women into a cell and leave them there until they signed a confession to murder.’
‘Yesterday was yesterday.’
‘And today you have firm proof the girl was involved in the death of her own father! Now you wish to pardon her! Please.’
That was not what Falcone was suggesting. He repeated the idea. Grimaldi listened, nodding. He was a good, decent man, one who would stop at nothing to put a criminal in the dock. But a solid Catholic, with a large family and a happy home life too. An honest, hard-working citizen with an open mind. The kind of individual the Questura depended upon.
‘I want this to go away,’ Falcone continued. ‘We all do. Unless that happens, we’ll have those people demonstrating outside the Questura every day of the week. Headlines in the newspapers. Officers engaged in fruitless inquiries.’
‘Fruitless? You still have two unsolved murders. That’s if we apportion the brother and our friend Riggi to this drugs gang. You’re not suggesting we forget them, are you?’
‘Not for a moment. The deaths of Malise Gabriel and Joanne Van Doren are not unsolved. Robert was responsible for both. That’s what I’ll put in my report. But this new evidence. The email linking the daughter to her father’s death. Much as I’d like to, I can’t bury it. She, perhaps the mother too . . . there needs to be a statement. An
admission of some prior knowledge. She can say she never knew why he wanted the information. I don’t want an admission of guilt, but I do require an explanation. In return . . .’
Grimaldi finished his coffee. His walrus moustache bristled.
‘In return what?’
‘An agreement that the case will go no further. You tell me. You’re the lawyer.’
The man opposite thought about this for a while.
‘If there was a prosecution she’d never go to jail, you know. The daughter. Even if you could gain an accessory conviction on the basis of a simple email. And the mother? You’ve nothing, have you?’
‘Nothing. I know all this, Toni. Why do you think we’re having this conversation?’
It was a beautiful morning. The air had the first breath of autumn in it, a subtle chill beneath the heat that had pervaded Rome night and day for weeks. This harsh summer would come to an end.
‘There are four people dead, Leo. Even if one of them was a crooked cop. Another a murderer. The third some kind of monster.’
Falcone wished Grimaldi hadn’t said that. Mina Gabriel did love her father in some way, he believed. This was one reason, an unspoken one, why he didn’t wish to pursue the case. He feared what else it might uncover, to no one’s benefit.
‘All the more reason I’ll be happy if we can close this for good today,’ Falcone said. ‘That would be best for all of us. No one need suffer more.’
Grimaldi nodded.
‘So be it.’
‘What? A pardon? A caution? What?’
The lawyer laughed.
‘A pardon? I’m a Questura lawyer. Not a judge. I can’t hand those out. Besides, I want this girl, the mother too, to understand we know they’ve been less than frank with us. That we’re choosing not to take this any further. I want to hear Mina Gabriel acknowledge that email you found and tell me, in her own words, she didn’t know why Robert wanted it. I’m no priest, Leo. I don’t offer forgiveness to the guilty. For our sake and for theirs I want to hear some word, some expression of responsibility on their part. If I get that, they’ll hear no more from me. I’ll concur with you that there’s insufficient evidence for anyone else to be charged. Which is probably true, by the way.’
