by David Hewson
‘You’ve got something?’ Costa asked.
The big man took a deep breath and said, ‘I don’t know. This younger brother.’
‘Simon. Banker. Didn’t get on with Malise.’
‘I know,’ Peroni continued. ‘You told me that. You’re wrong. That’s not true. It can’t be.’
‘Mina told me. She said she’d never met him but her mother . . .’
‘I don’t care. I got nowhere with that name. In the end I phoned Malise Gabriel’s old college at Cambridge. These university people keep themselves close. I guessed there had to be someone there who knew. Kept in touch.’
Costa laughed. It was so obvious. A phone call. A conversation. A stab in the dark, reaching out for another human being, not some record in a database.
‘And?’
‘They loved Malise Gabriel in Cambridge. In spite of everything. The professor I talked to was an undergraduate with him. Hadn’t been in touch with the man for years. Seems Malise didn’t want the company. I couldn’t get this college guy off the phone. He wants to come to the funeral. That’s how much they adored him.’
Costa tried to imagine what this meant.
‘And Simon? The brother?’
‘The brother disappeared years ago when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. According to my Cambridge man it wasn’t that Simon didn’t get on with his older brother. He hated him. Malise was the bright one, the clever academic everyone admired. Simon was a wastrel, not so bright. He couldn’t compete. All that trouble Malise got into, the pregnant student, the book, that was nothing compared to the brother. He was into student riots. Trouble. Drugs. You name it.’
Simon Magus. The magician. Flying through the air, taunting the world.
‘We don’t know where he is now?’ Costa asked.
Peroni looked at his notebook and said, ‘In Cambridge they think he changed his identity. Went to Morocco, Afghanistan, South America. Became some kind of dope king with a high-and-mighty English accent. The prof’s emailing me some newspaper cuttings. Apparently the guy was a bit of legend in England ten, twenty years ago. The cops named him as one of their principal suspects for smuggling hard drugs into the country. Never caught up with him though.’
The intelligence officer hammered at her keyboard, waited a second and said, ‘Let me try the narcotics records.’ A flash of fingers. ‘Simon Gabriel. Nothing, sorry.’
‘According to my man in Cambridge he had lots of names,’ Peroni said. ‘These university types are fastidious, you know. He even had a cutting from a crime story in The Times of ten years ago. He read it out to me. Look.’
Peroni held up his pad. Costa scanned down the names, got to the last one and groaned.
‘Have you got the Italian births and deaths database online?’ he asked the intelligence officer.
‘Of course.’
‘Look up the name Wilhelmina Santacroce.’
The answers were starting to fall into place already.
‘Married 1922. Address . . .’ She blinked at the screen. ‘It’s that place you’ve been going to, isn’t it? The palazzetto?’
He wondered how much of what Mina had told him was really the truth, how much lies that she’d passed on unwittingly from the stories and excuses she’d been fed.
The Santacroce palace once belonged to one side of her own family. When Malise Gabriel returned to Rome he was, in some small sense, coming home.
‘Sir,’ the intelligence officer said, bringing him back to earth. ‘That third name on the list. Scott Mason Nicholson. I’ve got him. I’ve got data.’ She typed frantically again. ‘There’s a mugshot on the FBI wanted list.’
Costa looked at the screen and knew what he’d see.
‘Peroni,’ he called as he strode out of the room.
The big man couldn’t keep up. When Costa got downstairs the traffic was backed up to the Questura rear gate. Noisy demonstrators were waving placards, yelling at the bored cops in blue uniform, waving banners about Beatrice Cenci and the cruelty of the police.
It didn’t make sense that this case had generated quite so much heat. Someone had stoked it. He was starting to think he knew who and why.
There was no way he’d be able to get a vehicle out of this crowd. He shouted back to Peroni, now lost behind him, and asked for a patrol car with uniform officers to meet him outside the Palazzetto Santacroce.
Then he turned out of the Questura, pushed his way through the crowd and began to run, across the city, down towards the Tiber.
EIGHT
There were just the four of them in the apartment in the tower of the House of Owls. Bernard Santacroce was in his rooms in the palace, Cecilia Gabriel said. They wouldn’t be disturbed.
The girl sat in the centre of the living room on a chair tugged from the dining table. The rest of them formed a semi-circle around her. Falcone watched this happen, realizing, to his dismay, that they had so easily adopted the pose and the characteristics of an interrogation.
It was now nearly midday but Mina Gabriel still appeared to be in her night clothes: loose pink pyjamas, plain cotton, cheap. Her hair was uncombed and a little lank, her eyes listless and unfocused. Like a kid on the edge, unable to contain for much longer the black truth Falcone was convinced she held trapped inside.
The mother talked a little, in a calm, almost friendly voice. She did her best to reassure the girl that this was nothing formal. Not some kind of grilling. Not even a formal interview. There would be no notes, no pressure. And if it came to nothing, then every word would be forgotten afterwards.
Mina listened, eyed each of them in turn then asked, her voice brittle with hatred, ‘Do you think I’m an idiot?’
‘We’re here to help,’ Grimaldi insisted.
‘That’s what they told Beatrice Cenci,’ Mina snapped. ‘The Pope’s inquisitors. The lawyers. The torturers with their chains and pincers.’
‘Mina,’ Grimaldi said quietly. ‘We’re not those men. This is not that time. You’re not Beatrice Cenci.’
Her pretty head lolled a little at that, as if she was thinking. Falcone caught an expression on the mother’s face, one of shock, of revelation perhaps. They didn’t talk much, these two. Mothers and daughters had a certain distance sometimes, one that emerged in the early teens and, usually, would have begun to dissipate at this point. He’d recognized that often enough even though, in his own head, he still believed he knew little of families.
‘What do you want?’ she asked.
‘The truth,’ Cecilia Gabriel said quickly, before either of the men could speak.
‘The truth?’ She looked at her mother and laughed. ‘Why?’
‘Because . . .’ Cecilia Gabriel closed her eyes for a moment, trying to stem her tears. ‘It’s time, Mina. This secret . . .’
Her voice had a frail, pleading tone. It didn’t appear to move the girl.
‘What secret?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know!’
There was a tension between them, one taut with intimacy.
‘So this truth,’ Mina hissed. ‘You think it’s going to set us free? Can’t you hear in your head what Daddy would say to that? How he’d rip that coarse little cliché apart?’
‘Daddy’s dead,’ Cecilia Gabriel told her. ‘I can’t hear him any more.’
‘Can’t you?’ the girl spat at her.
Cecilia Gabriel pulled her chair over then placed her arm around Mina’s shoulders. The girl stiffened, with all the false yet hurtful loathing that a child could sometimes display towards a loving parent.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said and kissed her cheek tenderly, then stroked her hair, the way one did with a child. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
Mina pulled herself together and sat bolt upright, pushing Cecilia Gabriel away.
‘You’re on their side now, aren’t you? You’re one of the torturers too.’
Cecilia Gabriel stared at her daughter, her eyes full of sorrow. Falcone asked himself again: without some point, some hope
of justice or redemption, was it worth inflicting this amount of pain on anyone? Even those stained with guilt?
‘Something’s wrong,’ the Gabriel woman whispered. ‘I’m not blind, Mina. I’ve known since the beginning. Something’s wrong and it’s inside you. I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to think sometimes.’
‘You’re my mother! You’re supposed to defend me! Not ask questions!’
The woman closed her eyes. She seemed to possess no more words.
Falcone shifted his chair closer to the girl and tried to catch her eyes.
‘No one’s defended you more than your mother,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea how hard it’s been for us to get this far. But she needs to know, Mina. As do we. The law demands that we deal with these facts, and until you help us do that this will go on. It must, however much we’d like to end it.’
The girl was silent, thinking, her small fist tight against her lips, tears streaming down her reddening cheeks.
‘Did you have any idea that Robert planned to kill your father?’ Grimaldi asked.
She said nothing.
‘This email we found on his phone.’
‘What email?’
Grimaldi explained, adding, ‘It has your name on it. It’s an incriminating document.’
‘It’s an invention. Like everything.’
She bit her fist with her even white teeth.
‘Did Robert feel he had good reason?’ Grimaldi persisted. ‘Because of what your father did?’
The skin on her fingers turned scarlet. There was blood there. Cecilia Gabriel uttered a cry of agonized despair and tried to force the girl’s fingers away from her mouth.
‘All we need,’ Falcone added, ‘is to know that you sent him that document because he asked for it. If you can just tell me that. The rest . . .’
He glanced at Grimaldi who looked deeply unhappy at what he believed Falcone was about to say.
‘Inspector,’ Grimaldi objected. ‘There are limits.’
‘If you say you sent him something because he asked for it,’ Falcone continued, ‘the rest I will deal with, Mina. I promise. This evidence, this apparent proof, I cannot hide. But I can choose to set it to one side.’
‘I loved Daddy,’ she chanted. ‘Daddy loved me.’
The words came out like the lilting refrain from a child’s song. Then again. And again.
NINE
The guard on the gate of the palazzetto said he’d no idea where Bernard Santacroce was. But he told them they weren’t the first police officers there. That Falcone and another man were with the Gabriels in the little tower in the distant garden.
Costa cursed his own stupidity. He told the uniformed officers to stay by the gate. Then he strode on through the courtyard, beneath the arch, through the exquisite garden, to the Casina delle Civette.
The ground-floor door was open. He took the stone steps of the circular staircase two at a time. They were in the living room of the second-floor apartment, silent, grim-faced, seated awkwardly around Mina. The harsh midday sunlight fell through the arched windows. The girl blinked at him, shielding her eyes against it, as he entered.
‘Nic?’ Falcone began, standing up as Costa entered.
‘What is this?’ Costa asked, waving at him to stay seated.
Cecilia Gabriel was a little way from her daughter, distraught, face puffy with tears, a tissue in her hands, her eyes fixed on the floor.
‘We’re trying,’ Toni Grimaldi said, ‘to bring this matter to some kind of conclusion.’ He sounded exasperated. Costa wondered how long they’d been here, throwing questions at the girl again. ‘To get Mina to tell us just a little of the truth so that we can close this case for good. Unfortunately without some degree of co-operation, the evidence we have is too strong to be ignored.’
‘What evidence?’ Costa demanded.
‘The photographs,’ Grimaldi said, as if the question was ridiculous. ‘The email to her brother—’
‘The photos aren’t what you think,’ Costa interrupted. ‘The email’s a fake.’ He glanced at Falcone. ‘If you’d only left your phone on, Leo. If you hadn’t tried to take this case on to your own shoulders . . .’
Falcone’s lean, tanned face flared with fury.
‘I am the inspector here,’ he declared. ‘I will decide the course of action.’
‘Not now,’ Costa cut in.
He pulled up one more chair from the dining table and set it next to the hunched young figure in the childish pyjamas, hugging herself in silence in the centre of the room, trying to pretend none of this existed.
Then Costa sat down, very close to her, tried to catch her eye, did so eventually and said, ‘I know, Mina. I know. Not all of it. Not yet, and maybe I don’t want or need to know everything. But I know enough. I know you told us the truth when you said your father loved you. I know enough, I think, to understand your brother was not what we thought.’
‘Aren’t you the clever one?’ she murmured in a thin, petulant voice.
‘Not really. Not at all. I’ve been stupid. Blind. I just saw what I wanted to see. What you wanted me to see sometimes. And sometimes, mostly maybe, what I felt like seeing myself.’
She clutched herself and rocked backward and forward, staring into the space in front of her with damp, unfocused eyes.
‘Where’s your uncle?’ he asked.
Costa watched both of the Gabriels avidly. Mina didn’t react, didn’t say anything, but Cecilia Gabriel’s head came up and her acute eyes were clear and sharp with shock.
‘I know it was him, Mina,’ Costa continued. ‘I understand, I think, the kind of pressure he must have placed on you. Why you felt you couldn’t tell us, even though—’
‘Even though what?’ she snapped.
‘Even though he killed your father.’
‘Mina!’ Cecilia Gabriel shrieked. The woman stood up, a tall, skinny picture of despair. The girl put her hands to her ears, closed her eyes, let her mouth droop in an expression of teenage disdain that didn’t suit her, didn’t seem real for a moment.
Cecilia Gabriel came and knelt in front of her daughter, taking hold of her hands, trying to unwind the tight fists.
‘What’s he talking about? What . . . your uncle?’
The two of them were so close, they seemed to be a single person.
‘You weren’t supposed to know,’ Cecilia whispered. ‘None of that. You weren’t supposed to . . .’
‘Know what?’ the girl yelled, her eyes suddenly alive and desperate, her face full of fury. ‘That the mythical Uncle Simon in England didn’t exist? I’m seventeen, mother. Do you not understand that?’
‘Darling . . .’
‘I wasn’t supposed to know he lived here all the time, paying to keep us alive. And in return? Fucking you and Joanne and anything else that moved and you didn’t dare say no, did you, because then . . . then . . .’
Her features contorted until they were those of an infant gripped by agony.
‘Children shouldn’t use words like that, should they, Mummy? Not a baby like me. Bright Mina. Obedient Mina. The good daughter. The one who was never any trouble.’ She laughed and it was a dry, dead sound. ‘You never saw me in my room with Bernard. He never got round to showing you those pictures he took. Not yet. He was going to. That was what came next. You and me. With him. Maybe Joanne. Robert. Daddy too if he was still alive. That would have been fun, wouldn’t it?’
She leaned forward, stared into her mother’s face and asked, ‘Did he hurt you too? Not just here . . .’ She snatched away her hands and tapped her fair hair. ‘I mean hurt?’
‘Oh God,’ Cecilia Gabriel moaned. ‘Oh God.’
Costa watched them both, wishing he was somewhere else.
‘You could have told me,’ Cecilia Gabriel murmured. ‘You are my child. I would have done something.’
‘What?’ Mina shouted. Then, more quietly, ‘What?’
Her fingers went to her mother’s face.
‘He owned us.
You. Me. Robert. Daddy. We were just his playthings. We didn’t have a voice. We weren’t even human beings, were we? Just things. Do this or Daddy doesn’t get his treatment. Do this or you’re on the street.’ She fell quiet, staring at her mother, then said very quietly, ‘Things. Not people. You. Me. Robert. Joanne. Daddy. All of us. We were just his toys. And when he did it . . .’
The girl closed her eyes. ‘He saw Daddy, didn’t he? He imagined Daddy’s pain, not ours. That was all it was about. Hurting him. Killing him.’
‘What made your uncle hate his own brother so much?’ Costa asked.
Cecilia blinked away the tears, then brushed at her hair.
‘Because Malise was the brighter one. The happier one. Because, whatever problems we had, we were a family. Simon could never have that. He’s a hateful, spiteful, avaricious man. Everything that Malise stood for – honesty, virtue, decency – appalled him.’ She gazed at her daughter, trying to see something that wasn’t there, and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘For the same reason you never told me,’ Mina replied. ‘Or Daddy. Because I was frightened. Because I was ashamed.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Because I am ashamed.’
She shook her her head as if wishing away the memories.
‘Daddy found out in the end. About me. Bernard told him. Bernard boasted. He couldn’t stop himself, could he? All his conquests.’
‘Stop it!’
Falcone sat stony-faced and shocked in his chair. Grimaldi had a hand to his florid face, thinking. Costa listened to every word, every syllable, making the links.
‘Where is Bernard Santacroce now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Cecilia Gabriel murmured, shaking her head. ‘Really I don’t.’
‘He can hear,’ the girl said. ‘Everywhere. He can hear us. He knows.’
‘No, Mina,’ Costa told her. ‘He can’t harm you.’
‘Really?’ The child again, scared, resentful. ‘He said he’d kill Daddy and he did. He said he’d kill Robert and he did.’ She looked at her mother. ‘Then you. Then me. If I told . . . If I told . . .’
