The Fallen Angel

TWO

In the Questura’s largest forensic lab office Silvio Di Capua gazed at the grubby object in front of him, grinned and said, ‘You’ve no idea how lucky we are. There are a million illegal dumps around Lazio and most of them would have this stuff in ashes by now. Behold.’

Forensic had tracked down some of the household material taken away by Joanne Van Doren’s builders the previous Sunday. It had been found on a site near Latina, untouched since it arrived. Di Capua’s attention had come to focus on a mattress from a single bed, one that looked depressingly familiar. The sheet was still on it, with the white and green mosaic pattern Costa and Peroni had seen when they walked into Mina’s room the previous Sunday, before the place had been cleared.

‘Why wasn’t it burned?’ Costa said.

Falcone looked at him and sighed. Judging by the expressions on the faces of Teresa and Peroni they found the question baffling too.

Di Capua shook his head.

‘It was some crappy little place that was behind schedule or something. Am I meant to care? Maria?’

The stocky young assistant who now seemed permanently attached to Teresa’s deputy beamed as she showed them the marks left by her aerosol.

‘Semen,’ she said proudly. ‘We’ve sent off a sample for analysis.’

Costa took a closer look at the mattress.

‘Do we know for sure this is Mina Gabriel’s?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Peroni objected. ‘We were there. In the room. We saw this ourselves. It’s hers.’

Teresa placed a gloved finger on the mattress and said, ‘I’ll be able to confirm it’s the girl’s from skin residue if nothing else. Mattresses are full of it. It might help if you can persuade her to give me a DNA sample we can match, of course.’

Costa wouldn’t give up.

‘If it turns out the semen was the father’s, it could have been one more place he slept with Joanne Van Doren.’

The pathologist stared at him.

‘His daughter’s room? Why would he use that? He had his own secret little sex club in the basement. Why take the risk in the house?’

‘Some people like risks,’ Costa began. ‘I don’t know. Why don’t we wait for some facts? Instead of trying to concoct a case to match some theory that keeps bobbing up in front of us every time we’re stuck for an idea? Why. .?’

‘Let’s not allow our personal feelings to colour this investigation,’ Falcone interrupted. He nodded at Di Capua. ‘Good work.’

‘And another thing,’ Costa began, then saw Falcone’s stony face, gave up, realizing it was pointless.

Teresa Lupo was working her gloved hands along the side of the mattress, underneath the white and green sheet. She’d seen something that Di Capua and his assistant had missed. There was a fabric handle built into the side, for carrying and turning. It protruded a little more on one side than the other.

She raised the sheet, took out a pen and poked the end down the hollow cotton loop of the right-hand fastening. Something popped slowly out of the other side. It was a tiny USB memory stick, the kind people used for storing and moving files around computers.

‘Well, what do you know?’ Costa murmured. ‘We’re in luck again. Am I the only one who finds this steady stream of evidence a little. .?’

He stopped. They weren’t taking any notice. Their eyes were on the memory stick, and they were listening to Di Capua wonder whether it would be protected by a password or not.

‘Most people aren’t sad geeks like you,’ Teresa told her deputy, taking the thing in her gloved fingers over to a laptop on a nearby desk. ‘They wouldn’t even understand how to encrypt something. They’d think hiding it down a mattress would be enough.’

‘A mattress!’ Maria said gleefully. ‘What kind of thing would you want to hide down there? Bad things. Dirty things. I wonder. .’

Peroni gave her a filthy, judgemental look. She shut up. Teresa plugged the stick into the side of the computer. It wasn’t encrypted at all. Not even protected by a password. A flood of images began to fill the screen automatically. Costa stared at a couple, understood what he was seeing, and turned away.

This part of the forensic department was at the front of the Questura, in a modern annexe tacked onto the original building in the seventies. It faced the cobbled Renaissance square of the Piazza San Michele. Before being turned over to the police in the late nineteenth century, the Questura had been a palace belonging to the Vatican, home to a famous Cardinal, one known for gambling and sexual licentiousness. The spiritual and the sensual were never far apart in Rome.

From his viewpoint he could see the gang of demonstrators milling around in the street. The protest had reached a lull. The figures outside were swigging bottles of water, wandering around in the heat, their faces sullen with boredom. Banners stood at half-mast. The mainly female crowd chatted mostly, barely remembering to hand out leaflets to those passing through the square on the way to the Pantheon.

He wondered what these same women would say if they could see the photographs being revealed on the nearby computer screen, stored secretly on a tiny digital device hidden in the crevices of Mina Gabriel’s mattress. One more convenient clue, it seemed, pointing to the obvious conclusion.

‘Sovrintendente,’ Falcone barked. ‘Would you care to give us your opinion?’

Costa took a deep breath and went back to the screen. There must have been thirty photos there or more. All of them, he felt sure, were of Mina Gabriel. Her face was visible in many. The shapes, the poses, the contortions. . his eyes told him this was from the same photographer who took the pictures they’d found in the basement. In many she could have been interchangeable with Joanne Van Doren. Except these were more explicit, more visceral. More amateurish too, somehow.

Mina looked scared, tired, reluctant, even drugged in some, as if taking part in a performance she was unable to refuse. There was only one part of the man that was visible, the predictable part, though in a single shot it was possible to make out the barest outline of a hand reaching out to the back of her head, pulling her face towards him.

‘Well?’ Falcone persisted.

‘What do you want me to say?’

The inspector scowled.

‘Malise Gabriel was committing incest with his own daughter while simultaneously conducting an affair with Joanne Van Doren,’ Falcone said. He sounded more than a little disheartened and disgusted by what they’d found, but there was relief in his voice too, and determination. ‘He kept his secret with the American woman in the cellar. He hid his abuse of his daughter in her own bed.’ Falcone glared at the computer screen. ‘Turn that off. I’ve seen enough.’

‘Bastard,’ Di Capua spat. ‘No wonder they wanted him dead.’

There were no words left, Costa realized. No possible objections he could raise.

After a long pause Peroni asked Falcone, ‘What do you want to do next?’

‘I’m going to get an arrest warrant out of Grimaldi,’ the inspector said. ‘The girl and the mother. Mina Gabriel has to admit to what went on here. She’s not leaving the Questura until I get that. We’ll show them this. .’ His hand swept towards the screen. ‘If we have to.’

‘Do you think you have enough to justify a warrant?’ Costa asked.

‘Scaffolding tampered with on the roof?’ Falcone asked. ‘Cecilia Gabriel round there the very morning her husband died, clearing the place so quickly we don’t get to look at what was there? Some kind of a struggle in the girl’s room? And she never noticed a thing? Please.’

‘And Joanne Van Doren?’ Costa asked.

‘Perhaps she found out. She must have known what kind of man Gabriel was.’ Falcone looked at him. ‘Try and distance yourself from this girl. Look at the facts dispassionately. We may not know the full story, but we surely understand the direction it’s taking. Alone, or in concert with the mother and daughter, Robert killed them.’

Peroni was staring at Costa from across the room. The big old cop was, in some ways, one of the smartest people he knew, a man in touch with his own emotions and those of others, even if his physical appearance belied this fact entirely. At that moment Costa was sure Peroni was trying to share something, to say that he’d his doubts too.

A uniformed officer came through the door. He looked happy.

‘Immigration got the Turk at the airport,’ he announced. ‘The one called Cakici. Riggi’s contact. Picked him up waiting for a flight to Izmir from Ciampino. Trying to leave the country on a false passport.’

There was a contented murmur of approval in the room. Riggi was still a cop. People wanted his killer brought to justice.

‘Fetch him,’ Falcone ordered. ‘This man murdered a serving police officer. I want him here. In the Questura.’

‘They say we have to interview him there first,’ the officer said. ‘False passport. That’s their territory.’

Falcone swore, pulled out his phone, was about to start yelling at someone, then thought better of it. The tall, thin inspector was thinking, finger on his tidy silver goatee, striding round the forensic room, silent.

He turned to Costa and Peroni, aware, perhaps, that they’d exchanged some unspoken misgiving a few seconds before.

‘Go to Ciampino,’ he told them. ‘Get him out of their hands. You can leave Mina and Cecilia Gabriel to me.’