The Fallen Angel

PART FIVE
ONE

Teresa Lupo gazed at the body on the mirror-bright table in the morgue, a skinny male corpse beneath a white sheet rolled back to reveal everything from the waist up. The information sheet her assistant Silvio Di Capua had provided gave the basics. Malise Gabriel was sixty-one years old, pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital in the early hours of Saturday morning, two days before. The duty morgue officer, a college intern, had examined the body, read the report from the police, and written the probable cause of death as severe head injuries consistent with a fall from a substantial height. This could not be a formal finding. She was a temporary worker. In the absence of suspicion of foul play the full autopsy would naturally be delayed due to staff shortages. Nothing much had happened since.

‘Leave it to the Monday people,’ Teresa grumbled. Not that there was anything to indicate the duty junior had done anything wrong. The bruised and bloodied corpse in front of her looked the way she would have expected from seeing the police incident statement. There were no indications of other injuries. No obvious inflicted wounds. No cuts or abrasions that spoke of anything but a fall.

She looked at the face of the man on the table. Features sometimes changed with death, particularly an end such as this. His skull had suffered multiple fractures and there were severe injuries to his forehead and the right side, above and below the ear. Teresa had found a photograph of Malise Gabriel from his brief time in the spotlight. Twenty years before he’d seemed like the aristocrat he was, handsome, a little arrogant perhaps, with the face of a sportsman, the broken nose of a rugby player. A strong, physical man. Not like this.

‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,’ Di Capua cut in, ‘the answer’s no, you can’t.’

She glowered at him.

‘How do you know what I’m thinking?’

‘I’ve seen it before a million times. You’ve got that look.’

‘That look?’

‘The one that means work. And trouble.’

She sighed.

‘This man deserves a full autopsy, and he will get one.’

‘Yes, but he doesn’t need to get it from the head of the department, does he? We’ve got a team going into that house in the ghetto. Half our people are on holiday.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she snapped. ‘I get the point.’ She knew where this was leading. ‘You want to do it, then?’

Di Capua smiled. He’d turn thirty soon. The little that remained of his hair was now close cropped. His clothes were standard white office garb. The failed hippie she’d first employed seemed to have metamorphosed into an impertinent dentist somewhere over the past few years.

‘I suggest I handle this and you go round and see what’s happening in the house.’ He smiled. ‘Let’s face it. This is just one more autopsy. You can do that with your eyes closed. From what Peroni said. .’

She’d listened to the phone call asking for a team to seal off the Gabriels’ apartment. Judging by the tone of Di Capua’s response, Falcone was not in the best of moods.

‘They’re trying to dredge up a speck of evidence in a building site,’ he went on. ‘Now that’s going to be hard.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with false grace, passing him back the file. ‘I was going to do that anyway. He’ll want something by the end of the day, you know.’

‘So what’s new? I’m not promising miracles. I’ll do the best I can.’

‘Good. Here’s a starter for you.’ She leaned down and indicated the bloodied, torn scalp. ‘This man is suffering from some kind of hair loss. I suggest you discover who his doctor is and get what records you can. Also. .’

She picked up Malise Gabriel’s right hand.

‘There are scratches here that don’t look like the kind of thing you’d get from a fall from a building. I could be wrong, but they may be worthy of further investigation.’

He nodded, with an ingratiating pleasantness that told her he’d seen all this already.

‘Anything else?’ he asked.

‘Enough for now. We can talk later.’

She walked out of the room trying to recall those happy days when Silvio Di Capua lived in fear and awe of her. He was up to something. She just knew it.

So Teresa Lupo waited outside for a few seconds then reopened the swinging door to the morgue and poked her head back in.

Di Capua had rolled back the fabric completely. The body of Malise Gabriel lay naked on the table, white and purple and bloody. Her assistant was staring at the lower part of the torso. He jumped visibly as she banged open the door very deliberately. It was worth it just for that.

‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me, Silvio?’ she asked.

His large, wide-set eyes rolled upwards. The young pathologist’s composure returned.

‘When I’m ready,’ he said.