The Fallen Angel

SIX

There was a set of external metal stairs at the back of the building. They climbed up the steps to the roof. The view was extraordinary, a sweeping prospect of Rome stretching from the Campidoglio to the Gianicolo hill and St Peter’s across the Tiber.

A heavily built man in council overalls was clambering over some bulky apparatus at the front. Joanne Van Doren walked over and said to him, ‘You’ve got company. The police are back and want to know what happened.’

He was about fifty, with a brutish, ill-tempered face and a grey moustache. He didn’t look as if he wore an overall often, particularly on Sundays.

‘Signor Di Lauro is the building inspector in charge of the investigation,’ she explained with a friendly wave. ‘I am, of course, offering all the help I can.’

‘Any ideas?’ Peroni said, flashing his card.

‘Don’t you people ever talk to one another?’ Di Lauro grunted. ‘I went through this with those guys I spoke to this morning. I really have better things to do.’

‘Please,’ Costa interrupted. ‘Just briefly.’

‘Briefly.’ He climbed down from the mechanism he was looking at, a complex set of wheels and pulleys and platforms, and put his hands on his hips. ‘This is what’s known as a suspension scaffold. That means the strain is taken by the anchorage and counterweights you see here. On the roof.’

‘How much can it support?’ Peroni wanted to know.

‘This apparatus is licensed for a load of three hundred and fifty kilos. Three men.’ He waited to see if they understood. ‘So if there was just one man on it. .’

‘Got you,’ Peroni replied. ‘And. .?’

‘And what?’

‘Why did it break?’

Di Lauro closed his eyes as if in pain.

‘I don’t know. Maybe structural failure in the scaffolding itself. Metal fatigue. Or maybe someone did their job wrongly. It happens.’

He grimaced. Something didn’t seem quite right.

‘Often?’ Costa asked.

‘This scaffolding was erected by Signora Van Doren’s own people. They worked on it. They stood to suffer if it went wrong. No. Not often. Scaffolders are meticulous men. The paperwork’s in order. The tiebacks, the counterweights. . this seems to be a professional job.’

Costa grabbed hold of a piece of loose cable, took one step towards the edge of the roof and peered down over the edge at the distant cobblestones below. The view down to the street made him feel a little queasy. He looked at Di Lauro and asked, ‘Would it be easy to make it fail deliberately?’

The council man sighed.

‘No. Possible. But not easy. You’d need to know what you were doing.’

‘Nobody has access to this roof,’ Joanne Van Doren cut in. ‘The building’s empty except for my workmen and the Gabriels. Trust me.’

‘So when will we know?’ Peroni asked.

Di Lauro shrugged.

‘Impossible to say. A week at least. Possibly longer. We’ve taken away the debris from the ground. Tomorrow I’ll find some people to look at it.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Costa asked.

The man sighed. ‘It’s. .’

‘Sunday. I know. And August.’

‘Listen,’ the council man snapped. ‘You do your job. I do mine. I will find out what’s happened here. If it’s negligence, there could be criminal charges, Signora Van Doren.’ He didn’t look at her as he said this. ‘In cases of extreme negligence it can be manslaughter.’

‘I was at home drinking a glass of wine in front of the TV,’ she said with a wan smile. ‘That would seem a little cruel.’

‘The last case of this kind took three years to come to court. It got thrown out after four months.’ Di Lauro shook his head. ‘None of this is easy.’

‘More lawyers,’ the American woman grumbled.

‘Thanks,’ Costa said, and led the way back downstairs. He was glad to be inside again. Joanne Van Doren was starting to look impatient with their presence.

‘What are you going to do with this building now?’ Costa asked.

‘Try to sell something,’ she said, as if the question were idiotic. ‘Get this damned apartment finished so I can put it on the market. I need the money. Otherwise everything goes to the bank and I’ll be as broke as my old man back home. These aren’t good times for the private sector, gentlemen. Haven’t you noticed?’

She looked briefly ashamed and for a moment seemed on the verge of tears. It struck Costa that this woman appeared genuinely affected by the death of her tenant, though she did not, perhaps, want this to show.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. This is nothing next to what Mina and her mom are having to deal with. Malise loved them. I can’t imagine what life’s like without him. You know. . instead of poking around here you might be better off trying to help them get through the next few days.’

Costa nodded, then watched as some new men arrived at the door.

‘I’ll pass that on to the appropriate authorities,’ he murmured as she walked away to greet them.

Peroni was poking around in the living room, going through the newspapers and magazines that were piled in a jumble on the glass table in front of the sofa.

‘This is where he must have been drinking last night before he stepped outside,’ the big man said. ‘There’s a ring from a glass here. Just one.’ He bent down and sniffed it. ‘Whisky. Got spilled too. Good point you made back there.’

‘Which one?’

Peroni stared at him, surprised.

‘If that kid was wearing headphones in that music room a small army could have walked through here and she’d never have noticed. Also, there’s this. I don’t get it.’

He stood up, a thick book in his hands. It was an old edition, a fat, tall paperback. The title was All the Gods are Dead. The author’s name was Malise Gabriel. Bells were ringing in Costa’s head again.

Joanne Van Doren saw what they were doing and came over.

‘I put that under the table myself,’ she said. ‘We had to sit down and use it when the council people turned up. They wanted to see some plans. I should have told Cecilia when she came round. She was looking for all the little personal things she could find. The conversation got a little. . tense. I kind of forgot.’

Peroni flicked open the book and glanced at Costa.

‘So this is what he was reading,’ Peroni said. ‘His own book? And it’s. .’ He turned to the front and checked the date. ‘. . twenty years old. Why would someone read a book they wrote themselves? An old one?’

‘Maybe to remember the good times?’ the American woman suggested. ‘Who knows? Excuse me. I really need to talk to these guys.’

She crossed the room and began addressing the newcomers in overalls. Costa couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

Peroni was flicking through Gabriel’s book.

‘You know something, Nic? I doubt I’d understand a word of this even if my English were better. It’s all jargon and academic-speak. Almost makes me want to step outside for a cigarette. Do you have the faintest clue what “non-overlapping magisteria” means? Or why it should be a bad thing?’

‘I’d have to say no on both fronts. How do you know he was reading that chapter?’

‘Bookmark,’ Peroni replied, and showed him the page.

There was what looked like a postcard in it with a line in Italian, the script in a cursive, elegant hand, ‘E pur si muove.’

Peroni stared at the words in front of him.

‘Now I’m an uncultured oaf. But the way I’d spell that is “eppure si muove”. Maybe these foreign academics aren’t as clever as they think. Funny thing to write on a bookmark, though. “And yet it moves”. What moves?’

‘No idea,’ Costa said. He picked up the bookmark, stared at it, thinking about the words. Then he turned it over, saw what was on the back, and felt his heart sink.

‘That’s unusual,’ Peroni said, his broad, pale face wrinkling with puzzlement.

This wasn’t a real postcard but a black and white photo from a domestic printer. It showed a naked girl writhing on an off-white crumpled sheet, her slight frame posed artfully, the way a sculptor might have placed it. There was a visible stain next to her thigh. Her willowy body was that of a teenager, with pale, perfect skin, thin legs crossed and turned, so that the lens saw only her thighs and a side view of her navel, nothing else. It was if she was struggling to hide. As if some inner sense of shame or shyness wished to protest, to say that what was happening felt wrong.

The picture was cut off at her neck — decapitated, he thought for a moment. In the topmost portion of the image two taut sinews stretched up towards the smooth white skin of her throat, as if extended by pain or guilt. There was a tantalizing lock of hair in shadow cast by a light or an object out of view. It was light hair, fair or blonde perhaps.

‘Is that the daughter?’ Peroni asked.

‘It could be.’

‘Could be?’

‘Yes,’ he said with audible impatience. ‘Could be.’

The American woman had stopped talking to her workmen. She was watching them and Costa didn’t like the curiosity in her face.

‘Let’s talk about this outside,’ he suggested.