The Fallen Angel

THREE

The chemicals were fresh, the film still within its use-by date according to the box tag on the camera. Silvio Di Capua had weighed up his options. The Questura no longer possessed its own photographic darkroom; that corner of the forensic department had been handed over to a whirring server farm for the office network. Rome still had a few specialist photographic developing companies for the dwindling band of professionals who refused to use anything but film. But they’d take their time, cost money, and. . and. .

He caught the eye of Maria the intern, smiling at him in the red glow of the safety light, looking both pretty and extraordinarily gullible. Di Capua was developing the film from the camera in the darkroom next door to the makeshift porn studio for no other reason than because he wanted to. A good five or six years had passed since he’d last laboured over the delicious and demanding task of bringing emulsion to life through a patient mix of chemicals and skill. He missed that tactile experience, and since the equipment and the facilities were here on the spot already it seemed ridiculous not to use them.

Maria came close to him and stared at the dishes, sniffing the acrid aroma of old-fashioned photography, seemingly impressed.

‘How do you know. .?’ she began to ask.

‘School,’ he said. All those years ago, when he was twelve or thirteen, learning how to develop black and white film — colour was too hard and a little. . common was the word that came to mind.

Outside the firmly closed door a couple of inquisitive morgue monkeys were chatting as they worked the scene by the scarlet bed. This was a little unusual, Di Capua thought. But Teresa didn’t screech at them to stop. She had enough problems of her own, finding the resources to perform a basic forensic job and manage the caseload back at the Questura.

‘Watch,’ he said, then read the instructions on the bottles, just to make sure he remembered correctly. ‘And pray there’s something still left that didn’t get ruined.’

It took time. It was gradual, revelatory. Silvio Di Capua realized that, at the age of thirty, he’d somehow forgotten how to appreciate these slow and tantalizing processes.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Twenty. Nearly twenty-one. I went to college a year early. I’m bright.’

Ten years, enough to create a gulf between them. So much had happened, so much had changed, while she was still little more than a child.

‘Of course you are. How much longer are you with us?’

‘A month.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘Unless there’s an opening. .’

They all wanted jobs. Decent jobs, the kind they thought they were owed. Di Capua had walked out of college to find the world at his feet. A good degree, a bright, inquisitive brain that could see him through any interview. Academia, finance, science; so many opportunities lay open to him when he was fresh to the market. Today they were all desperate, chasing a narrow and diminishing number of opportunities. Over-educated, over-qualified, young men and women praying they could find some niche to save themselves from the dull drone of badly paid service-industry jobs. And most of them never made it, just slumped into routine, dreary positions, hoping that one day the economic climate would improve and provide them with the kind of middle-class career they thought would arrive at so easily.

He wondered about Robert Gabriel, the brother they sought, the one they assumed had murdered the woman not far from where they now worked. Was he like that too, a kid who’d slipped through the cracks? And if he was, how might he have turned out a decade before? If there’d been work and hope to keep him engaged, too busy and too involved to waste his life in the dive bars of the Campo and Trastevere, where the drink and the dope led nowhere?

‘I’m getting old,’ Di Capua murmured. Worse than that, he thought, he was starting to think old.

‘No, you’re not,’ Maria said with touching, sweet enthusiasm.

He felt the briefest twinge of interest and fought to stifle it. Then he swilled the developing tank once more. The timer sounded and he embarked upon the once-familiar round of processes that would first reveal then fix the silver halide on the negative stock inside the plastic barrel. He didn’t think about Maria, didn’t think about anything else. Her inexcusable clumsiness out in the studio, beneath the floodlights, had wiped at least a couple of frames from the film. That was certain and, as they waited, he told her so again.

She stared at him in the eerie red light of the darkroom lamp.

‘You mean there’s no way of going back?’

‘What? Like some kind of undelete?’

His words shocked him, mostly because he sounded so like Teresa Lupo. Yet, to this young woman, the question was utterly logical. In the digital world there was always a way back, even if it was one that only lasted for a few steps. The notion of permanent loss, of something precious becoming irretrievable, was a ridiculous anachronism. Like polio and fax machines and last year’s fashions.

‘If it’s gone, it’s gone,’ he said, and then the second buzzer went off and he was able to unscrew the tank and take out the film.

Silvio Di Capua pinned the strip to the line, let it dangle over the sink to drain and asked Maria to turn on the light, the real one. She hesitated, double-checked she understood, scared there’d be another accident. Di Capua reassured her and then, when the fluorescent tube came on, looked up and down the strip, reaching for the hairdryer next to the nearby socket, getting ready to play a careful stream of hot air onto the surface to hurry up the process of making this fragile, damp film stock turn into something solid.

The portion that had been exposed to the light was gone forever, two, perhaps three frames turned into nothing but black mush by Maria’s ignorance. But there was a half-frame of something left as the exposed film rolled into the hidden part of the camera back. And five more frames beyond that, each perfect, each depicting close up in negative the kind of physical act he associated with places like this.

Porn palace had turned out to be the right phrase, he thought, scanning the negatives, trying to imagine what they’d look like when he ran them through the enlarger at the end of the table and turned them into prints.

There was something else he’d forgotten too. How it was always impossible to recognize faces in negative, even people you knew very well, members of your own family. This inverse image was like a code, locking up the truth, scrambling it until you switched black to white and vice versa and finally got back to the image that the camera lens had seen some time before.

The individuals there were unidentifiable. The subject matter was easy to see.

‘Maria,’ he asked. ‘Are you. . er, religious? I mean when it comes to sex?’

There was an alarming sparkle in her keen brown eyes.

‘No. Not at all. Not one little bit.’

He still wasn’t sure. And this part of the process would be quick too. In a matter of minutes he’d have a result. He’d know who was in these photographs, would put faces to the entwined bodies that were anonymous in negative. Falcone had refused to return to the Questura. He was outside, poking around the building, annoying Teresa’s army of forensic officers in bunny suits. In half an hour or less the inquisitive inspector could have a set of prints in his hands.

Di Capua scratched his bald head and didn’t look at her when he said, ‘It’s just that. .’

‘Silvio,’ she interrupted, standing so close he felt her bunny suit rustle against his. ‘I just watched a dead woman, a murdered woman, get cut down from the ceiling. I know why I want to do this job. Honestly.’

She touched his arm. He wasn’t sure what he felt at that moment.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Well, in that case, turn out the lights again. Let’s find out what we’ve got.’