The Fallen Angel

PART SEVEN
ONE

Teresa Lupo looked at the corpse on the gurney in the basement studio, scratched her straight brown hair, screwed up her broad, pale face and said, ‘Well, I can tell you one thing, Leo. You’ve got your murder now.’

It was nine fifteen. Costa felt dog-tired after a few restless hours at home. Just before seven Falcone summoned him to the Questura for a questioning that carried much of the same mute aggression he would have used on any witness. Then a team of officers assembled, Peroni among them, and he was ordered to join them and the forensic team that was already working in the basement of the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci.

The morgue people had made up their minds long before Falcone arrived. Costa could see it in Teresa’s body language, the insistence with which she’d made them all climb into white bunny suits before setting foot inside the scene, the way she was getting her team to mark out the whole of the basement area. She’d been a fixture of the Questura for as long as Costa had been a cop, a bright, occasionally incandescent spark of intelligence, intolerant of laziness, generous to those she admired, kind and sympathetic to the bereaved who passed through her department. The relationship with Peroni, almost fifteen years her senior, had mellowed her somewhat. But no one would dare take her for granted.

‘You’re sure of that?’ the inspector asked.

She was a cautious worker, never one to rush to judgement. It was unusual for her to reach a conclusion before returning to the Questura and a careful consideration of all the options.

‘Absolutely. See for yourself.’

Peroni coughed and went to stand by the doorway leading back to the lift cage. Falcone and Costa joined her by the gurney. She was pointing at Joanne Van Doren’s neck. The insubstantial white nylon noose, washing line he guessed, had been removed to reveal a mass of livid bruises, more than Costa would have expected.

‘The technical term is “ligature furrow”,’ she said. ‘The mark the rope makes on skin, under pressure. If this woman had committed suicide by hanging herself I would have expected to see just one. Diagonal, like an inverted V. It’s there.’ Her gloved fingers traced the lines of some pinkish marks on the American woman’s neck running from her throat back into her scalp. ‘But it’s not alone, is it? She was already dead when she got that.’

Another strip of bruising ran horizontally around her neck, joining the fainter one at the front, separate as it ran round to the back of her head, the two lines joined by what looked like grazed skin.

‘Horizontal furrows are what you get from strangulation. Someone. .’ She stood up, turned her assistant Silvio Di Capua round, and made to slip an imaginary noose over his head. ‘. . came up behind her, dropped the rope over her head, tightened it on her neck.’ A brief demonstration. ‘And pulled till she was gone. Then he ran the rope over that heating pipe in the ceiling and suspended her next to the chair he’d kicked over. That’s why we’ve got abrasions running from the original furrow to the one she got from being hanged like that. The rope dragged when she was hauled upright.’

‘He?’ Peroni asked.

‘Well,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Someone with a lot of strength, anyway. I’d guess a man. Asphyxiation is a man thing. Women tend to be either more direct or more subtle.’

Costa couldn’t quite work this out.

‘And then he tried to make it look like suicide?’

She nodded.

‘Pathetic, isn’t it? I can give you more proof once I have her back in the morgue. Really, you don’t need it. How anyone could think they’d get away with a trick like that, I can’t begin to imagine. I’ll take a look at the Englishman later on today and see what we can come up with there. But this one, I guarantee, is murder, pure and simple. I’d guess he wore disposable surgical gloves. You can smell the latex on the rope. If we’re lucky he dropped them somewhere around here. If we find them I can give you something from the lining.’

Falcone didn’t look terribly hopeful.

‘I want to go through this whole building,’ Teresa told him. ‘Floor by floor, room by room. Top to bottom. If we’d done that yesterday we’d have found this little secret studio of hers. Perhaps things would have turned out differently.’ She frowned at the corpse on the gurney. ‘Maybe if our American friend had been a little more co-operative and candid she’d still be alive.’

‘Do whatever you think is necessary,’ Falcone said, then glanced at Costa. ‘We need to find the brother.’

‘I can understand that,’ Costa agreed.

‘Seeing that you managed to let him go last night. .’

‘Managed? He had a gun on me. I tried to call you, Leo.’

‘You might have left a message. Since you didn’t see fit to tell any of us you were meeting him. .’

‘It was one of his conditions!’ Costa felt embarrassed, on shaky ground. He shouldn’t have agreed to the meeting without telling someone, even if he was off duty, on holiday, at something of a loose end. ‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake. I should have told you. It was a long day. I was tired. Confused.’ He recalled the brief meeting with Agata and the way she disappeared with her slick boss inside his silver Alfa Romeo. ‘Not thinking straight.’

Falcone allowed himself the briefest of smiles then patted him on the shoulder.

‘Well, now you can make amends. The holiday’s over, sovrintendente. Consider yourself back on duty. It seems to me we have a suspect.’

Costa sighed.

‘Why would Robert Gabriel bring me here in that case? He was trying to tell me something.’ He glanced at the bed, which was now being pored over by men and women in white suits. ‘He wanted to say this was nothing to do with them. His father’s death too. Joanne Van Doren gave them a home when Santacroce kicked them out. She was Mina’s friend.’

Peroni was at the door, watching, listening, expressionless.

‘She wasn’t the mother’s friend from what I saw,’ he said. ‘Someone needs to tell the Gabriels this has happened, by the way. Someone sympathetic.’

Falcone brightened.

‘Good idea. Go back to the Questura and get what you can out of narcotics about Robert Gabriel. Then break the news about this to his mother and sister. The two of you. See what their reaction is. I want the brother.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ Costa murmured. He still couldn’t reconcile what he was seeing in this strange subterranean lair with the family who’d been the only people to live there, several floors above. ‘What is this place?’

‘Porn palace,’ Silvio Di Capua announced cheerily. ‘A very well-appointed one too, I’d say. The darkroom out the back is fully functioning and ready to go. Used very recently. Popular place. Look.’ The young pathologist got them to bend down and peer at the bed, showing them the promising signs — stains, traces of hair, possible tissue. ‘It’s like Christmas down there.’

‘When will you know whose it is?’ Falcone demanded.

‘A day. Two maybe. Matching it, well. . We’ve got a couple of bodies we can check. When it comes to the living, that’s down to you.’

‘Precisely,’ Teresa added with a smile. ‘Now, unless you have some other questions, I’d be grateful if you could get out of the way.’

Falcone instructed some of the other officers to pressure narcotics about Robert Gabriel’s contacts. Teresa issued a series of orders to her own people then looked up at the ceiling and said, ‘This is a big place, Leo. We’re going to need a few days to go through every floor. Can you find us some help?’

He stared at her. She shrugged and said, ‘OK. It’s that time of year.’

In the far corner of the room, near some metal filing cabinets, someone squealed with glee. They all looked. Costa recognized one of the young work-experience trainees, the same girl who’d been alone on duty at the weekend when the dead Malise Gabriel was taken into the morgue and tagged as a simple accident victim.

She was plump with a ponytail and a bright, happy face.

‘Look what I found in the cupboard!’ she said, full of juvenile pride.

In her gloved hands was a large old-fashioned camera, black and box-like, the type with a pop-up viewfinder. Unusual, which was why she was playing with it in an injudicious way, flicking up the top, turning the big eye of the lens.

Di Capua wandered over, making admiring noises on the way.

‘Oh. . my. . God,’ he sighed. ‘Pornographers with taste. How often do you see that?’

‘What is it, Silvio?’ Teresa asked. Then, somewhat testily, ‘Maria, will you kindly stop messing with the thing like that?’

The trainee seemed fascinated by the object, as if it had come from another age. In a sense, Costa thought, it had. He hadn’t seen anything like it in years.

‘Hassy 503,’ Di Capua crooned, holding out his hand. ‘Hassel-blad to you. Pentaprism with a one-twenty back. The Americans used adapted versions of this to take pictures on moon-shots, for pity’s sake. Though if I’m honest. .’ He stopped and scratched his bald head. ‘I’d imagine it’s pretty damned perfect for a porn studio too. And. .’

Costa caught a glimpse of something yellow on the back. A memory returned.

‘It’s got film inside,’ he said.

Silvio Di Capua looked at him and grinned.

‘Film! I love film!’

The girl holding the Hasselblad pressed a couple of buttons. The back came off. Then, as Costa watched, she somehow managed to unlatch the cover and he caught a glimpse of dull grey emulsion.

‘Remind me,’ she said, looking a little puzzled. ‘Film?’

Age could prove a terrible divide on occasion. A good half of the people in the room were already staring in horror at the brief length of exposed stock in the Hasselblad, open to the bright light of the floods that was already wiping away any image it might once have held. The rest looked baffled, as if trying to retrieve some distant memory of a time when photographs didn’t appear instantly on the back of a little digital screen.

Di Capua was on her in a flash, snatching away the camera back with a ferocity that left the trainee shocked and reeling, then fumbling it back onto the body as best he could.

‘Did I do something bad?’ she asked, suddenly close to tears.

‘Again,’ Di Capua snapped. ‘Get in there.’

He pointed to the door in the corner.

‘The dark place?’ she asked.

‘The dark place,’ he agreed, half-pushing her ahead of him.

Costa put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him, and asked, ‘How much is a camera like that worth, Silvio?’

The young pathologist paused for a moment, thinking, turning the camera round and round in his gloved fingers.

‘Late eighties, 503CW. Eighty-millimetre planar lens.’ A closer look, an admiring glance. ‘No scratches. Not a sign of fungus.’ He winced. ‘You’ve got to be looking at a thousand euros. You could pay that new for the lens alone. This thing’s mint. Doesn’t look as if it’s ever set foot outside this place.’

‘Thanks.’ Costa looked at Falcone and knew the inspector had to be thinking the same thing. A piece of equipment like this was surely beyond the reach of Malise Gabriel.

‘Men and their toys,’ Teresa said. ‘They can be starving and their families near destitute. But if something’s shiny and smells of sex. .’