The Fallen Angel

FOUR

Teresa Lupo liked Toni Grimaldi, the chief resident Questura lawyer. He was a friendly, portly man in his fifties with a genial face and a walrus moustache rather amateurishly dyed black to match his full head of hair. His role was not always an easy one. He acted as the conduit between the police and the judiciary, the internal Questura expert who would tell an investigating officer whether he or she had sufficient evidence to merit a search warrant, an arrest or a charge.

Officers trusted Grimaldi, a man who’d worked in the Piazza San Michele longer than almost anyone else still serving. He rarely gave the green light to a case that would fall at the first hurdle, as many a young lawyer was wont to do. He was frank and open with his advice, sometimes suggesting routes of inquiry that had not occurred to the detectives concerned or, on occasion, the forensic team. Over the years he had become a vital cog in the workings of the Questura, an impartial eye who would not shirk from telling an investigating officer when it was time to give up. For this he was admired even if his advice was not always welcome.

Every last file Falcone possessed, and the latest information from the forensic department, had been in his hands for two hours. Teresa now sat next to Leo Falcone in Grimaldi’s bright fourth-floor office overlooking the courtyard at the back of the building, waiting for his opinion. Much, she thought, as a patient waited for a doctor to pass on news of a diagnosis. There was the same nervous resentment, in Falcone at least. The same presentiment of bad tidings too.

Grimaldi took off his reading glasses, looked up at them over his desk and asked, ‘Is this it?’

‘Of course,’ Falcone snapped. ‘Do you think we’d withhold something?’

‘Only if it damaged your case,’ Grimaldi replied. ‘And since you have no case. .’ He shrugged. ‘What would be the point?’

‘No case? No case?’

‘We’ll be getting more forensic, Toni,’ Teresa said quickly. ‘We’ve got the photos to show Malise Gabriel had a sexual relationship with the Van Doren woman. Once we get the report back from the girl’s mattress we’ll know whether he had sex in his daughter’s bed too.’

‘Malise Gabriel’s dead,’ Grimaldi pointed out. ‘Can’t put him in the dock. Even if you could you can’t place him in the girl’s bed or say he had sex with her.’

‘Not yet,’ she said.

He looked at her, frowned and said nothing.

Falcone added, almost calmly, ‘The father’s behaviour establishes motive. On the part of the mother. On the part of the daughter and the adopted son too.’

‘And the motive for killing the American woman?’

Falcone looked desperate for a moment.

‘Jealousy? Perhaps she discovered something? I don’t know. I want the chance to ask them.’

Grimaldi didn’t answer. He shuffled the papers again.

‘Who killed the son and this bent cop of ours?’ he asked.

‘Probably the drugs people they were involved with,’ Falcone told him. ‘We think we have a suspect out at Ciampino. Costa’s talking to him now.’

The lawyer didn’t look happy.

‘It’s a bloody old affair, isn’t it? Families.’ He shook his head. ‘And drugs. You always hope the two won’t meet.’

‘Malise Gabriel wasn’t murdered because of drugs,’ Falcone insisted. ‘He was having an affair and abusing his own daughter. Racked with a terminal illness. A monster.’

‘Just like the Cenci father,’ Grimaldi cut in. ‘So the papers got it right.’

‘Perhaps! But I need a search warrant for their home. I need to arrest the mother and the daughter and bring them in so we can question them properly. They’re so damned slippery.’

Grimaldi’s walrus moustache wrinkled. He stared at the papers in front of him and asked, ‘On the basis of what I have here? Nothing more?’

‘Precisely.’

‘No,’ the lawyer said straight out. ‘You don’t have the evidence. I’d let you bring in the son, but he’s dead. Even if you can prove the father was abusing the daughter there’s no live criminal case there for precisely the same reason. You surely aren’t suggesting we try to prosecute her for incest instead? This isn’t the Middle Ages. The monstrous regiment out there would riot in an instant.’

‘Of course I’m not suggesting that!’ Falcone insisted. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. This whole affair is distressing. But we have to-’

‘Leo!’ Grimaldi looked cross. This was rare. ‘Will you kindly try to see this with some perspective? The commissario has made it clear to me we must proceed with the utmost care here. The media. The public interest.’

‘To hell with the media!’

The lawyer sighed.

‘You’re too intelligent a man to mean that. In order for me to approve a warrant I will require more than mere motive. I need you establish an evidential link between the mother and the daughter and one or more of these crimes. Is there anything to suggest they were there when the American woman died? Quite the contrary. The mother has a firm alibi and a seventeen-year-old girl couldn’t strangle a grown woman and then suspend her corpse from the ceiling. Is there any evidence that they, not the son, tampered with the scaffolding, or scuffled with Gabriel, causing his head to fall against the radiator and give you your convenient blood stain? No. In fact I see no evidence that anyone was with Malise Gabriel at the time of his death. He was drunk. He’d had sex with someone unknown earlier. Perhaps he stumbled against the radiator, and went outside for a cigarette as the daughter says. Nothing you have proves otherwise.’

He thought for a moment, then added, ‘We’ve had cases before, you know, where disgruntled children have set traps for their parents. Accidents in waiting, ones that may never be triggered. The son, or the daughter, could have removed those stays from the roof, thinking, if this monster does walk out there for a cigarette he could tumble to his death. It’s an easy, cowardly way out, isn’t it? You leave the man’s fate to chance or God. If he lives, you carry on. If he dies, you forgo the blame. In your own head anyway.’

‘Let’s leave God out of this, shall we?’ Falcone replied.

‘If you feel that’s possible. The fact remains. You need to persuade one of these two to confirm your suspicions. To confess, perhaps.’

‘Which is why I need to arrest them,’ Falcone exploded. ‘Without that they simply won’t talk.’

‘Then,’ Grimaldi said, with a smile, ‘you’ll have to go back to work and find me some real evidence to support these theories of yours. What you have is flimsy, circumstantial and insufficient. The crimes of a dead man, however vile, are insufficient to justify throwing these women into an interview room for twenty-four hours and leaving you to try to break them. This is not the sixteenth century. We are not the Pope’s inquisitors.’

He closed the folder in front of him ostentatiously and looked at Teresa Lupo.

‘More evidence please. Until you have I won’t look at this case again.’

‘You do realize I have yet to persuade these two even to set foot inside the Questura!’ Falcone bellowed.

Grimaldi looked puzzled.

‘What do you mean? They’ve been in to identify the brother’s body, surely?’

Teresa shrugged and said, ‘Not yet. We’ve asked them. The mother said she’s still too upset. It’s standard practice to leave the timing up to the relatives. It’s not critical in this case. So I’ve never pushed them.’

The two men stared at the pathologist.

‘They’ve got a dead son on a slab in the morgue and they don’t want to see him?’ the lawyer asked.

‘Dead son, dead father,’ she said. ‘You’d be surprised, Toni. Sometimes people are like that.’

‘Then. .’ Grimaldi extended a hand. ‘There you have it, Leo. Tell them it’s important you have an ID, however upsetting that may be. Once you have them here I bow to your improvizational skills. Just don’t expect me to pick up any debris you leave behind. Consider yourself warned.’