The Fallen Angel

NINE

Towards the end of the afternoon Costa, Falcone and Peroni stood on the roof of the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci waiting for the arrival of the building inspector Di Lauro. Teresa sat nearby, going through some documents, head down, absorbed. Some eighty police and forensic officers were now in bunny suits searching the floors below, sifting through dust and building debris for the most part, finding little they hadn’t picked up already.

Costa gazed at the Cenci palace on its little hill across the street. Now it was one more apartment block in Rome, of the kind the late Joanne Van Doren had hoped to create: doubtless full of elegant, private residences behind its stylish arched entrance. The vast bulk of the building was easier to appreciate from this height. Behind he could just make out the pink-washed wall of their private church, the place where the dismembered remains of Beatrice’s brother Giacomo had been interred, in the grave meant for his father. The place where a select band of mourners would, in little more than a week, assemble to mark the anniversary of the young woman’s execution by the bridge to the Castel Sant’Angelo.

He turned round and realized that he could also see, beyond the rooftops running by the river towards the Via Giulia, the summit of the Casina delle Civette, surrounded by palms, little more than half a kilometre away. The tragedy may have possessed a foreign cast but it also owned one truly Roman characteristic. This case was local, interior, close. A family affair, or so it seemed.

They’d all watched the media coverage. In spite of denials from the Questura, the story continued to grow, to the extent that it was beginning to slip beyond Falcone’s reach, out into the public imagination. Mina Gabriel had been transformed into ‘the English Beatrice’. One of the later editions had even morphed her picture over Guido Reni’s supposed portrait creating a trompe l’oeil image that fused the past with the present. These were the dog days for hacks too, Costa reminded himself. There was little else to fill the pages, except this story of love and death and sexuality.

A little hard evidence was beginning to emerge, however, and it only seemed to add to the mystery.

Teresa Lupo sat on a dead air-conditioning duct a few metres away, flicking through some medical research on her laptop, reading out loud a list of obscure terms, none of which he understood.

Falcone let her finish then asked the question they all wanted answering: ‘He was dying?’

‘Pancreatic cancer. Final stages. Matter of months.’

‘Well, that rather complicates things,’ Peroni suggested. ‘Why would somebody murder a dying man?’

‘The family didn’t know it was that serious,’ Teresa said. ‘At least that’s what the consultant told me. Gabriel was very specific about keeping them in the dark. Didn’t the mother confirm that too?’

Peroni scowled.

‘Sort of. But you don’t believe her, do you? She must have suspected. You can’t hide something like that, not from your wife and children.’

Falcone sighed, unable to decide which argument made more sense.

‘Let’s try and find a question we can answer, shall we?’ he said. ‘What are the consequences of his illness? How would he behave? What effect would it have on the Gabriels?’

‘Ask his wife and daughter,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Theoretically he’d be in the usual cycle — denial, anger, acceptance. Where was he on the scale? Who knows? From what I’ve heard it sounds as if he didn’t have to go far to find the anger part.’

‘And sex?’ Costa asked. ‘Would he be interested in that?’

‘You’ve seen the pictures from the basement. The disease would affect his desire. There are drugs that can help.’

‘He couldn’t afford drugs,’ Peroni said.

‘Didn’t he have a son with pharmaceutical connections?’

‘There’s no mention of drugs in the autopsy,’ he pointed out.

‘I am trying to help here,’ Teresa barked at him. ‘No. Clearly he didn’t take drugs the night he died. Perhaps he didn’t need them. Malise Gabriel wasn’t an invalid anyway. Not yet.’

Costa wasn’t happy with this idea. They’d peered at Silvio Di Capua’s pictures, trying to see whether there was more information to be extracted from them. But what? Two naked bodies, coupling. Joanne Van Doren looking a little blank, as if drunk, or drugged, or guilty. And Malise Gabriel, his face contorted by an expression that could as easily have been pain as ecstasy. There was something anxious, almost staged in the way they splayed their bodies for the Hasselblad camera that had so caught Silvio Di Capua’s attention.

‘Well,’ Peroni said, ‘at least we can rule out the daughter, can’t we? You’ve got pictures of her father in bed with Joanne Van Doren. It’s pretty obvious who he had sex with that night, isn’t it?’

Falcone and Teresa had got together beforehand, while Costa and Peroni had been checking the roof again. Something had passed between them.

‘Gianni,’ Teresa said. ‘I’m afraid that doesn’t stack up either. Joanne Van Doren was having her period. That doesn’t mean she didn’t have sex with Gabriel that night. But I would have expected to have seen some sign of menstrual blood somewhere in this building. On Malise Gabriel. On the sheets. Somewhere. Also, why would he have used a condom in that case? She couldn’t get pregnant. I don’t get the impression this was some highly promiscuous sex ring. Would they have been worried about disease? Sorry. Don’t see it. This is all infuriating, I know.’

The big old cop murmured a groan of deep despair. Costa looked at Peroni’s face and knew what his friend and colleague was thinking. Sweat. Spit. Semen. Blood. All the bodily fluids. The tell-tale physical stains of humanity. These were the keys to unlocking the secret of the palace in the Via Beatrice Cenci, or so it seemed. What offended Peroni, all of them, perhaps, was the idea that the perpetrator of a vicious murder could not be unmasked by decency, honest intellect and diligent inquiry alone, that justice required this prurient and microscopic search into the baseness of life.

Someone coughed. The building inspector, Di Lauro, had walked in on their conversation, so quietly no one had noticed.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If this is private. .?’

‘You said you had something,’ Falcone replied, ignoring the question.

‘Perhaps,’ the stiff, middle-aged man from the council agreed. He looked unhappy, with the company, and with what he had to say. ‘I don’t know if this is of any use or not. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It’s why I asked to meet you here. Not inside. You need to see. To comprehend. Or not.’

He strode over to the edge of the building. They followed, Costa feeling the fluttering of vertigo in his stomach. Di Lauro was in a grey office suit but leapt onto the mechanism of the scaffolding structure as if he were still the builder he’d surely once been.

‘You must understand,’ the man said, banging a fist against the rusting pulleys that had once held the timber platform which had collapsed beneath the weight of Malise Gabriel, sending him plunging to the hard cobbled street. ‘I can only tell you the facts. Nothing more. How any of this could happen. .’

‘What?’ Falcone asked impatiently.

‘These ties,’ Di Lauro said, indicating some rusty hook-like mechanisms that seemed designed to hold the ropes that bore the strain of the structure below. ‘They’re incomplete. I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw them. I asked Signora Van Doren — she was an architect. She found this as baffling as I did.’

‘Incomplete?’ Peroni said.

‘That’s what I said. A small part of the mechanism is simply missing. It’s supposed to fix the rope to stop it running through. I could only imagine that perhaps the workmen had taken them away after the accident for some reason. Otherwise I would have told you earlier, but I needed to speak to Signora Van Doren’s team to be sure. It seems such an extraordinary omission I couldn’t believe it was accidental. But we’ve now interviewed all of the men. They all say the apparatus had not been changed since it was first assembled six months ago. So the pulleys were secure when they finished work on the day before the accident happened. In which case. .’

He shrugged, as if the conclusion were obvious.

‘In which case what?’ Falcone demanded.

Di Lauro looked at him as if the question were stupid.

‘In which case it wasn’t an accident. These things were removed. Once you do that this end of the platform will collapse under the slightest weight. Immediately. It had nothing to hold it in place except the residual tension in the rope itself. A cat might have sent those planks tumbling to the ground. A man certainly.’

‘These workmen could be lying to cover up their own incompetence,’ Teresa said.

‘No. They’re decent people. I know them. Professionals. If there’d been some kind of mistake I would have expected the missing pieces to be around here somewhere. They’re not.’

He frowned as he stared at the stork-like rusting mechanism that protruded over the edge of the roof.

‘This was deliberate?’ Falcone asked. ‘Sabotage? Murder?’

Di Lauro shrugged.

‘I’m a building inspector. I can only tell you what I find. This is something entirely new to me. I cannot and will not say in my report that this was an accident. Nor will I allow Signora Van Doren’s men to take the blame, since I do not believe in my heart that they could possibly be responsible. It’s unthinkable they would do such a thing, as a prank or anything else. Any one of them, more, could have died if they’d stepped onto that scaffolding in this condition.’

Falcone looked at Teresa and said, ‘Get a description of these parts he’s talking about. Pass it on to your people. Let’s find them.’

The council officer stood there, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

‘Is there anything else?’ Falcone asked.

‘You saw the blood?’ Di Lauro asked. ‘Downstairs? In the girl’s room? The smear on the radiator near the window?’

Teresa came and stood in front of him and asked, ‘Yes?’

‘I didn’t think this was important. Perhaps it isn’t.’

‘Yes?’ she repeated.

‘When I first came here we walked into that room together, Signora Van Doren and I. This was early the Saturday morning. When. . it was just an accident, nothing else. She was dreadfully upset. There was still. . in the street. . you could see where the man had fallen.’

They were all looking at him.

‘When we walked in the first thing she saw was the blood on the radiator. The unfortunate woman burst into tears. There was a lot of it. I thought perhaps some hair too. At least, something dark. Signora Van Doren seemed a good woman. I felt embarrassed. So. . I thought this was an accident.’

‘So you what?’ Teresa asked.

He licked his lips and said, ‘I tried to clean it as best I could with my handkerchief. It seemed only kind.’

‘Oh my God,’ she began. ‘You stupid man. How on earth. .?’

Di Lauro pulled a clear plastic bag out of his pocket, the sort used in a freezer. A crumpled bloodied hankie was inside.

‘I managed to get it before my wife put it in the wash. Only just,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’d no idea you would be dealing with something so horrible. If I’d known. .’

‘We weren’t supposed to know, were we?’ She stared at the stained handkerchief. ‘You do realize that thing is now of intellectual interest alone? If I had to stand up in court and prove there was no contamination. .’

‘Thank you,’ Falcone cut in, and removed the plastic bag from Di Lauro’s hands. ‘Go downstairs, find one of my officers, and make a statement. Then it’s best you left.’

They watched him go. Falcone phoned the Questura and called for orders demanding search warrants for the Casina delle Civette and the examination of the Gabriels’ financial and medical records.

When he’d done he looked at them and said, ‘We should assume Robert Gabriel murdered his adoptive father and Joanne Van Doren. One way or another we have to try to understand how much Cecilia Gabriel and her daughter were involved. I’m damned certain one of them knows where that kid is. We’re going in there.’

Costa looked at his watch. It was getting late and he said so.

Falcone nodded then said, ‘Fine. Let them sleep as easily as they can. We can take the mother and daughter back to the Questura while we search the premises. Bring along Santacroce too. I doubt we could exclude him.’

Peroni looked sceptical.

‘What are you saying, Leo?’ he asked. ‘That the newspapers got it right? It is the Cenci case all over again?’

‘I don’t care about the newspapers. Look at the facts.’

‘What facts?’ Peroni demanded. ‘A few blood and semen stains and a lot of possibilities that don’t join up. Are those really reason enough for tearing this family apart? I don’t think you have sufficient reason. You may find a magistrate thinks so too when we send a lawyer for that warrant. Nic?’

Costa hated taking sides. Both men had a point.

‘We need to talk to them,’ he said. ‘Separately, together. I don’t know. Joanne Van Doren was murdered. Robert Gabriel clearly has material information about her death. There’s enough here for a formal interview. We’d be remiss if we didn’t carry it out.’

‘Fine. And until then?’

Falcone glanced at his watch.

‘Forensic can keep going here. Keep trying to find the trash that was taken out by the builders. You two can go home. Tomorrow may be a long day.’