The Fallen Angel

FIVE

By eleven the teams were in place and looking at the details that Costa had ordered them to explore: the red Ducati, the photographs found in the basement of the house in the Via Beatrice Cenci and the ones secreted in Mina Gabriel’s mattress.

Peroni was heading up the police group pressing the UK authorities for more information. Di Capua had brought in a photographic expert he knew to help with the pictures. No one had even mentioned Falcone’s name in a while. There was too much work to do, too much interest in what was beginning to emerge.

The expert turned out to be a gruff and burly individual from the city’s paparazzi pack. After twenty minutes spent poring over the prints through an eyeglass the man stood up, massaged his back, casually inquired whether it was OK to smoke, grunted when this was refused and said, ‘Don’t you people take your clothes off sometimes? These shots. .’ He indicated the prints from the basement. ‘They’re two different men. Isn’t it obvious?’

Peroni walked in, looking busy.

‘Am I interrupting something?’ he asked.

‘Bear with us,’ Costa told him.

‘Yes,’ Teresa said, glaring at the paparazzo and Di Capua in turn. ‘We do know that. Is there nothing else you have to tell us?’

‘He’s hiding his identity. The second man. Not him, obviously.’ He placed a fat thumb on the face of Malise Gabriel, hovering over the naked and rather drowsy-looking Joanne Van Doren. ‘The other one. He doesn’t want to be seen. I’ve done a little porn in my time, who hasn’t?’

Teresa put up her hand and smiled at him.

‘What I meant was, who in the business hasn’t? Sometimes you have to keep people’s faces out of the picture for obvious reasons. Men usually. Women don’t mind too much. Or if they do, they don’t say. It’s not easy either. If they’re pros, maybe. They know how to pose. But when you’ve got amateurs performing, and this woman is an amateur, trust me, it’s difficult to stop them getting carried away.’

He leaned down and looked at the picture again.

‘Though not her. She looks drunk to me. Or stoned or something. Not good. Where’s the joy? Where’s the passion? You could never sell these.’

‘Are we learning anything here?’ Teresa asked.

‘You’re learning what I think, lady,’ the paparazzo said. ‘Two different men, one of them doesn’t want to be seen. Miserable woman. Though quite hot on a good day, I’d say.’

‘And the other pictures?’ Costa asked, indicating the ones of Mina Gabriel.

The photographer’s face wrinkled with disgust.

‘Please. There are standards, you know? This is different. Horrible, dirty stuff. No self-respecting photographer would get involved in something like that. It’s just plain grubby. The kind of thing kids take with their phones. Sexting, they call it. Yuk.’

Teresa put a finger on the earlier prints, the ones from the Hasselblad.

‘So you’re saying these are good?’ she asked.

‘Pretty good, yes. They’re well posed. They do the job. No face except the woman. No obvious identification. You’ve got all the frames?’

The pathologist glared at Di Capua and said, ‘Most. There was a little accident.’

‘Well, if he managed to shoot a roll of film without any obvious identification in there, he knew what he was doing. An amateur wouldn’t manage that. Even a good one. Of course, someone set up this guy for the first shot.’ He pointed at Malise Gabriel. ‘Then changed places for the rest.’

‘You mean this man,’ Costa pointed to Gabriel, ‘could have taken the rest of the pictures? Even if he didn’t know what he was doing?’

‘Fix a tripod and a monkey could use a camera. That kind of shot, it’s focus, lighting, frame. The real guy screwing the woman could just shout out when he wanted, I guess. Odd thing to do.’

He scratched his head.

‘You know the worst thing?’ He picked up the shots of Mina Gabriel. ‘Someone would pay money for these. Some creep somewhere. That’s the kind of world we live in.’

‘I suppose,’ Teresa said glumly.

‘That’s all I can tell you,’ the man added.

‘Not much, is it?’ Costa complained. ‘I hope we’re not paying you well.’

‘I do it as a public service,’ the paparazzo said. ‘Just a hundred euros will do.’

He held out his hand. No one took any notice.

‘Well?’ Costa asked Peroni.

‘Robert was adopted. The story about the kid who died? It’s all true. We found the inquest.’

‘It could still be Robert on those sheets,’ Teresa suggested. ‘Let’s wait for the DNA.’

‘We’ll have to, won’t we?’ Costa said. ‘At least we know Mina Gabriel told us the truth about him.’

‘Seems so,’ Teresa agreed.

Costa looked at Peroni. He was remembering the conversation with Mina at Montorio, the story about St Peter and a dead magician. Simon Magus. A story that came from her father.

‘Mina said she had an uncle in England,’ he said. ‘A banker. She thought he was called Simon. Didn’t get on with Malise. She’d never even met the man. See if you can track him down.’

Peroni’s face creased.

‘The police in London didn’t say anything about any relatives. I asked them if they’d been to see next of kin. You’d expect it in a violent death. They said there wasn’t any.’

‘Simon Gabriel,’ Costa repeated. ‘Go back to them. Ask.’

‘Will do.’

‘Anything else?’

Peroni looked at his notes and frowned.

‘The Ducati was bought from a dealer in London nine months ago. Reported stolen one month later. The Metropolitan police said there’d been a lot of thefts of fancy motorbikes recently. Some kind of ring operating.’

Costa wasn’t convinced.

‘A ring stealing Italian motorbikes and shipping them back here? Why?’

‘When it’s stolen,’ Di Capua said, ‘who knows where’s it’s going?’

‘Doesn’t work like that,’ Costa said. ‘Who did it belong to in the first place?’

‘Some. . Englishman. .’ Peroni stuttered, checking his pad. ‘Name of Julian Urquhart. Lived in Hampstead. No current address. He moved not long after he reported the bike stolen.’

Costa took fifty euros out of his wallet, gave it to the paparazzo, and said, ‘Thank you.’

‘Fifty?’ the photographer asked.

‘On an hourly rate you’re still beating any of us. Good day. Sir.’

He waited until the man had left.

‘Urquhart was Cecilia Gabriel’s maiden name,’ Costa told them. He looked at Peroni and asked, ‘Are you in the mood for coincidences?’

‘No,’ the big man said.

‘Good. Me neither.’

There were so many questions that should have been asked. A stray thought occurred to him: Falcone had allowed his own personality, his distaste for the idea that the girl had been abused by her own father, to intrude into this case. That mistake had coloured everything.

‘Forget about the DNA and the Ducati for the moment,’ Costa ordered. ‘The answers are in that family. Find out everything you can. Everything.’

He stopped. A memory came back to him. Mina Gabriel, pretty and distraught, pale-faced in the cafe near the Piazza Venezia, getting ready to play that haunting piece by Messiaen, one that brought tears to her eyes in the darkness as the organ of Aracoeli seemed to enfold her like a mechanical beast.

Before that happened she’d talked about herself and the Gabriels. Her father’s maternal grandmother was Italian. Their arrival in Rome was not entirely by chance.

‘Get someone who can work the births and deaths database,’ he added. ‘I want to know who these people really are.’