The Fallen Angel

by David Hewson

  Falcone recalled the difficult meetings he’d had with Cecilia Gabriel and her daughter.

  ‘I’m not sure how easy that’s going to be.’

  ‘The girl hasn’t even admitted there was abuse, has she? Even with those photographs you have.’

  ‘True, but—’

  ‘No,’ Grimaldi cut in. ‘I won’t move on this. If she won’t give me even this small thing, you must continue the investigation. Find more evidence than a single incriminating email. I can’t bury four murders without a reason. It’s not as if I’m asking for some sign of complicity. Only a brief and understandable explanation. In return they may be getting away with murder. Or at the very least being party to one. You asked for a deal. How good a deal is that? The best they’re likely to have.’

  Falcone scratched his tidy silver beard, thinking.

  ‘The trouble is,’ he asked, ‘how on earth do I sell that to them? I haven’t managed to have a civilized conversation with Cecilia Gabriel since we met. She’s slapped me in the face twice. I don’t know . . .’

  ‘You need a lawyer with you,’ Grimaldi told him. ‘We possess what those bright young things in human resources call a different skill set. Come.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I can make the time. Let’s walk round there now. This House of Owls sounds an interesting place. We can have a full and frank conversation, just the four of us. No notes. Nothing formal. A little chat, one that in legal terms doesn’t even exist. I will make the situation plain. All I require is a little candour on their part. In return I shall see that the file goes no further on the grounds that a prosecution would not be in the public interest.’

  He opened his hands in a very Roman signal of generosity.

  ‘What more can I offer, Leo? Please. Tell me.’

  Falcone thought about this. It was what he’d hoped for, though he still felt uncomfortable leaving his team rudderless that morning.

  ‘I should call Costa and explain.’

  ‘That,’ Grimaldi said, ‘is the last thing you’re going to do. Trust me. With arrangements of this nature you do not involve the Questura. Not till the deed is done.’

  The lawyer tapped the side of his bulbous nose.

  ‘Agreed?’ he added, though it was not, in truth, a question.

  FOUR

  The prints were spread out over the desk in two separate heaps. No one had looked too carefully at these, Costa realized. There hadn’t been time and they all quietly shared Falcone’s distaste for the prurience of this case from the outset. No one wanted to peer too closely at such material unless there was a very good reason. That seemed absent. Everyone involved, police and forensic, thought they knew what was there.

  ‘These pictures are different,’ Costa said.

  ‘Technically, they’re bound to be,’ Di Capua piped up. ‘The ones in the basement are taken using film. That nice old Hasselblad we found. That’s why they look so much better. That and my processing skills. The ones on the USB stick are from some digital camera we still haven’t located. From the EXIF on the jpeg I can tell you . . .’

  Peroni uttered a long, loud sigh.

  ‘We know from the data,’ Di Capua went on, ‘it was taken with an inexpensive Fuji pocket camera. It couldn’t possibly look as good. If—’

  ‘I’m not talking about quality,’ Costa interrupted.

  He steeled himself to stare again at both sets of photographs: the ones of Joanne Van Doren, the shots which were, without any doubt, of Mina. It was nothing to do with sharpness or depth of field or anything else photographic. They were entirely different in nature, in the way they’d happened, the story they were trying to tell.

  ‘These,’ Costa said, indicating the Hasselblad prints, ‘are posed. As if Gabriel was trying to take shots to order. For a pornographic magazine or something. I don’t know. Also . . .’

  He understood very little about photography. But he remembered the way his own father had struggled to take family portraits using the awkward clockwork timer on their ancient Kodak. It rarely worked. There were always shots that caught the cameraman walking back to the group, back to the lens, arriving too late. It was messy and unpredictable.

  ‘The ones in the basement. I’m not even sure it’s just him, is it?’

  They crowded round and stared hard themselves.

  ‘Oh God,’ Teresa groaned. ‘Why didn’t we see that?’

  ‘We weren’t looking,’ Di Capua grumbled.

  They had all assumed that it was Malise Gabriel in this set of shots because he appeared, full face, in a single frame early in the sequence. That one picture showed him on the bed with the American woman, poised over her, as if they were about to begin making love. But they weren’t even touching, and the expression between them was one of false lust, theatrical expectation. All the other prints were principally of the woman, and they were different. Real. Visceral. Full of a bleak animal heat, the way pornography often was.

  ‘How,’ Costa asked, ‘could Malise Gabriel have taken those shots on his own? With a timer? She’s having sex with someone. You can see that. How could you set up an old-fashioned camera, any camera, to take something as carefully shot as this? So that you can easily identify the woman but not the man?’

  ‘They could have cropped it,’ Maria said. ‘Deleted things.’

  ‘It’s not digital,’ Di Capua snapped. ‘What’s there is what was on the film.’

  ‘A second man,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Either it’s Malise having sex or he’s behind the camera. We can look at what we can see of him and compare it with what we’ve got in the morgue. I can tell you definitely once there’s a DNA report I can trust. Sorry, Nic. It just looked like one more white male having his fun. We didn’t have any reason to think otherwise.’

  Costa bristled.

  ‘We had every reason not to make assumptions. Let’s try to remember next time, shall we? And these . . .’

  He stabbed a finger at the vile shots of Mina.

  ‘It’s the same, isn’t it?’ the girl said. ‘You can see it’s the daughter. You can’t see who the man is.’

  ‘It’s not the same at all,’ Costa replied. ‘These are rushed shots taken by hand. Look.’

  He held up his arm and pretended he was snapping off shots of himself.

  ‘He’s doing this while he’s having sex with her. Camera in hand. Arm up here, just firing away. It’s secret and squalid, as if he’s capturing some kind of conquest, not something that’s meant to be erotic. This is just for him. Or them.’

  Di Capua was nodding. He could see this.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘And he’s bound to get his own face in there at some stage. Has to happen. So he goes through the shots afterwards, deletes the ones that identify him, copies the rest onto the memory stick then keeps it safe in her mattress.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ Maria asked. ‘It seems an unnecessary risk.’

  It did too, Costa thought. One more unanswered question.

  Teresa told Di Capua to get a team looking at the prints, trying to find some features that would enable them to identify any second individual in the frames.

  Costa shook his head.

  ‘We’ve been racing round Rome, yelling at Mina Gabriel and her mother. We didn’t even look at what was here, right in front of us.’

  ‘I said I’m sorry,’ Teresa told him.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to blame anyone. We’re as guilty as you. It’s as if . . .’ He wasn’t sure what he was saying himself. ‘As if we were meant to be chasing these ghosts.’

  Maria had her hand up, like a schoolgirl with a bright idea.

  ‘Yes?’ Teresa said.

  ‘I got a tweet about the Ducati a couple of minutes ago. The company never got back to me. Some geek dealer in Milan’s got the records database.’

  ‘Tweet?’ Peroni asked, aghast.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Teresa told him. ‘And?’

  ‘It’s not Italian at all.’ They waited.

  ‘It’s an export model,’ Mari
a said. ‘Made for the British market. Never sold here or anywhere else.’

  FIVE

  By eleven the teams were in place and looking at the details that Costa had ordered them to explore: the red Ducati, the photographs found in the basement of the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci and the ones secreted in Mina Gabriel’s mattress.

  Peroni was heading up the police group pressing the UK authorities for more information. Di Capua had brought in a photographic expert he knew to help with the pictures. No one had even mentioned Falcone’s name in a while. There was too much work to do, too much interest in what was beginning to emerge.

  The expert turned out to be a gruff and burly individual from the city’s paparazzi pack. After twenty minutes spent poring over the prints through an eyeglass the man stood up, massaged his back, casually inquired whether it was OK to smoke, grunted when this was refused and said, ‘Don’t you people take your clothes off sometimes? These shots . . .’ He indicated the prints from the basement. ‘They’re two different men. Isn’t it obvious?’

  Peroni walked in, looking busy.

  ‘Am I interrupting something?’ he asked.

  ‘Bear with us,’ Costa told him.

  ‘Yes,’ Teresa said, glaring at the paparazzo and Di Capua in turn. ‘We do know that. Is there nothing else you have to tell us?’

  ‘He’s hiding his identity. The second man. Not him, obviously.’ He placed a fat thumb on the face of Malise Gabriel, hovering over the naked and rather drowsy-looking Joanne Van Doren. ‘The other one. He doesn’t want to be seen. I’ve done a little porn in my time, who hasn’t?’

  Teresa put up her hand and smiled at him.

  ‘What I meant was, who in the business hasn’t? Sometimes you have to keep people’s faces out of the picture for obvious reasons. Men usually. Women don’t mind too much. Or if they do, they don’t say. It’s not easy either. If they’re pros, maybe. They know how to pose. But when you’ve got amateurs performing, and this woman is an amateur, trust me, it’s difficult to stop them getting carried away.’

  He leaned down and looked at the picture again.

  ‘Though not her. She looks drunk to me. Or stoned or something. Not good. Where’s the joy? Where’s the passion? You could never sell these.’

  ‘Are we learning anything here?’ Teresa asked.

  ‘You’re learning what I think, lady,’ the paparazzo said. ‘Two different men, one of them doesn’t want to be seen. Miserable woman. Though quite hot on a good day, I’d say.’

  ‘And the other pictures?’ Costa asked, indicating the ones of Mina Gabriel.

  The photographer’s face wrinkled with disgust.

  ‘Please. There are standards, you know? This is different. Horrible, dirty stuff. No self-respecting photographer would get involved in something like that. It’s just plain grubby. The kind of thing kids take with their phones. Sexting, they call it. Yuk.’

  Teresa put a finger on the earlier prints, the ones from the Hasselblad.

  ‘So you’re saying these are good?’ she asked.

  ‘Pretty good, yes. They’re well posed. They do the job. No face except the woman. No obvious identification. You’ve got all the frames?’

  The pathologist glared at Di Capua and said, ‘Most. There was a little accident.’

  ‘Well, if he managed to shoot a roll of film without any obvious identification in there, he knew what he was doing. An amateur wouldn’t manage that. Even a good one. Of course, someone set up this guy for the first shot.’ He pointed at Malise Gabriel. ‘Then changed places for the rest.’

  ‘You mean this man,’ Costa pointed to Gabriel, ‘could have taken the rest of the pictures? Even if he didn’t know what he was doing?’

  ‘Fix a tripod and a monkey could use a camera. That kind of shot, it’s focus, lighting, frame. The real guy screwing the woman could just shout out when he wanted, I guess. Odd thing to do.’

  He scratched his head.

  ‘You know the worst thing?’ He picked up the shots of Mina Gabriel. ‘Someone would pay money for these. Some creep somewhere. That’s the kind of world we live in.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Teresa said glumly.

  ‘That’s all I can tell you,’ the man added.

  ‘Not much, is it?’ Costa complained. ‘I hope we’re not paying you well.’

  ‘I do it as a public service,’ the paparazzo said. ‘Just a hundred euros will do.’

  He held out his hand. No one took any notice.

  ‘Well?’ Costa asked Peroni.

  ‘Robert was adopted. The story about the kid who died? It’s all true. We found the inquest.’

  ‘It could still be Robert on those sheets,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Let’s wait for the DNA.’

  ‘We’ll have to, won’t we?’ Costa said. ‘At least we know Mina Gabriel told us the truth about him.’

  ‘Seems so,’ Teresa agreed.

  Costa looked at Peroni. He was remembering the conversation with Mina at Montorio, the story about St Peter and a dead magician. Simon Magus. A story that came from her father.

  ‘Mina said she had an uncle in England,’ he said. ‘A banker. She thought he was called Simon. Didn’t get on with Malise. She’d never even met the man. See if you can track him down.’

  Peroni’s face creased.

  ‘The police in London didn’t say anything about any relatives. I asked them if they’d been to see next of kin. You’d expect it in a violent death. They said there wasn’t any.’

  ‘Simon Gabriel,’ Costa repeated. ‘Go back to them. Ask.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Peroni looked at his notes and frowned.

  ‘The Ducati was bought from a dealer in London nine months ago. Reported stolen one month later. The Metropolitan police said there’d been a lot of thefts of fancy motorbikes recently. Some kind of ring operating.’

  Costa wasn’t convinced.

  ‘A ring stealing Italian motorbikes and shipping them back here? Why?’

  ‘When it’s stolen,’ Di Capua said, ‘who knows where’s it’s going?’

  ‘Doesn’t work like that,’ Costa said. ‘Who did it belong to in the first place?’

  ‘Some . . . Englishman . . .’ Peroni stuttered, checking his pad. ‘Name of Julian Urquhart. Lived in Hampstead. No current address. He moved not long after he reported the bike stolen.’

  Costa took fifty euros out of his wallet, gave it to the paparazzo, and said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Fifty?’ the photographer asked.

  ‘On an hourly rate you’re still beating any of us. Good day. Sir.’

  He waited until the man had left.

  ‘Urquhart was Cecilia Gabriel’s maiden name,’ Costa told them. He looked at Peroni and asked, ‘Are you in the mood for coincidences?’

  ‘No,’ the big man said.

  ‘Good. Me neither.’

  There were so many questions that should have been asked. A stray thought occurred to him: Falcone had allowed his own personality, his distaste for the idea that the girl had been abused by her own father, to intrude into this case. That mistake had coloured everything.

  ‘Forget about the DNA and the Ducati for the moment,’ Costa ordered. ‘The answers are in that family. Find out everything you can. Everything.’

  He stopped. A memory came back to him. Mina Gabriel, pretty and distraught, pale-faced in the cafe near the Piazza Venezia, getting ready to play that haunting piece by Messiaen, one that brought tears to her eyes in the darkness as the organ of Aracoeli seemed to enfold her like a mechanical beast.

  Before that happened she’d talked about herself and the Gabriels. Her father’s maternal grandmother was Italian. Their arrival in Rome was not entirely by chance.

  ‘Get someone who can work the births and deaths database,’ he added. ‘I want to know who these people really are.’

  SIX

  Falcone and Toni Grimaldi walked to the Casina delle Civette, talking amicably all the way. Their
route crossed the centro storico, from the Piazza Navona through the busy open space of the Campo dei Fiori, where tourists and locals alike were wandering through the market stalls, onto the back lane where the Palazzetto Santacroce lay. The lawyer was pleasant company as usual, frank, intelligent, interesting, and always willing to offer an alternative point of view. It was men and women like these, Falcone felt, who made working life in the Questura tolerable. The two were of the same age, on the cusp of retirement. The lawyer spoke openly about the country cottage he’d bought in Puglia to restore. Grimaldi was sufficiently sensitive not to ask Falcone about his plans for life after the Questura. No one could imagine that eventuality, certainly not the man himself.

  The press pack had gone, bored by the lack of opportunities. So they were able to walk into the place unhindered, and deal with the caretaker in his cabin, Grimaldi making flattering noises about the beautiful building, which was in truth more palazzo than palazzetto. Then Cecilia Gabriel came out to meet them and the three of them strolled beneath the courtyard arch into the garden with its palm trees, shady corners and gaudy beds of canna lilies.

  She seemed a little more amenable than on the previous afternoon. The lawyer’s charm could be considerable, Falcone realized. The woman was, perhaps, easier when she was not in the presence of her daughter too.

  ‘Your home is so lovely, Signora Gabriel,’ Grimaldi declared, sweeping his hefty arm across the green space in front of them. ‘I’ve lived in Rome most of my life. I never imagined there was so much beauty hidden away in this grey corner by the river.’

  He was smiling at her narrow, lined face. She wore a green shirt and dark slacks, more elegant than before.