The Fallen Angel

SIX

Falcone and Toni Grimaldi walked to the Casina delle Civette, talking amicably all the way. Their route crossed the centro storico, from the Piazza Navona through the busy open space of the Campo dei Fiori, where tourists and locals alike were wandering through the market stalls, onto the back lane where the Palazzetto Santacroce lay. The lawyer was pleasant company as usual, frank, intelligent, interesting, and always willing to offer an alternative point of view. It was men and women like these, Falcone felt, who made working life in the Questura tolerable. The two were of the same age, on the cusp of retirement. The lawyer spoke openly about the country cottage he’d bought in Puglia to restore. Grimaldi was sufficiently sensitive not to ask Falcone about his plans for life after the Questura. No one could imagine that eventuality, certainly not the man himself.

The press pack had gone, bored by the lack of opportunities. So they were able to walk into the place unhindered, and deal with the caretaker in his cabin, Grimaldi making flattering noises about the beautiful building, which was in truth more palazzo than palazzetto. Then Cecilia Gabriel came out to meet them and the three of them strolled beneath the courtyard arch into the garden with its palm trees, shady corners and gaudy beds of canna lilies.

She seemed a little more amenable than on the previous afternoon. The lawyer’s charm could be considerable, Falcone realized. The woman was, perhaps, easier when she was not in the presence of her daughter too.

‘Your home is so lovely, Signora Gabriel,’ Grimaldi declared, sweeping his hefty arm across the green space in front of them. ‘I’ve lived in Rome most of my life. I never imagined there was so much beauty hidden away in this grey corner by the river.’

He was smiling at her narrow, lined face. She wore a green shirt and dark slacks, more elegant than before.

‘I’m sure you gentlemen didn’t come here to talk about the garden,’ she said in good Italian. ‘This affair is growing very tiresome, Inspector. How many times do we have to have this argument?’

‘Never again,’ Falcone said. ‘At least I hope not.’

‘You mean you’re not here to arrest me? Or accuse us of some terrible crime?’

‘Signora Gabriel.’ There was an old wooden bench in the shade beneath a well-trimmed orange tree, its branches heavy with fruit. ‘Please. May we sit down and speak frankly? My colleague here is a lawyer, not a police officer, though he works for the Questura. However, this visit. . I would wish you to regard it as private. We’re not here on official duty, or official time even. Should nothing come of our discussions, no record will be made, no report written. I would like this dreadful affair to be brought to an end. Just as much as you.’

She beckoned them to the seat. Falcone was glad to take the weight off his feet after the long walk.

‘I can assure you there’s nothing I’d like more,’ Cecilia Gabriel responded. ‘But how? Whatever I tell you, you seem to reject it immediately.’

Falcone nodded. The two men sat either side of the Englishwoman. It was a beautiful day in this hidden little corner of Rome, a fragrant, private place, the air rich with the scent of orange and oleander.

‘There are facts we cannot ignore,’ he began. ‘What I would like to do is find a way in which we can deal with them, set them to one side, and allow this case to be closed.’

He took her through the primary issues: the clear evidence that Malise Gabriel had abused his own daughter, and the new information he’d received from Silvio Di Capua the previous evening, about the scaffolding plans that Mina Gabriel had sent to her brother’s phone by email.

The latter part was new. It didn’t surprise him she rejected the idea immediately as ridiculous. Still Cecilia Gabriel listened, her eyes a little moist, with no small measure of repressed anger in her taut face.

When he was done she sighed and said, ‘Inspector. The first time we met you brought out a private photograph of me, naked. An old and personal photograph taken when I was eighteen years old. One intended for my husband’s eyes only. One you regarded, quite stupidly I must say, as evidence that my husband was having sex with our daughter. On the second you told me Malise was having an affair with Joanne Van Doren. Now some nonsense about an email. My daughter doesn’t have an email address as far as I know. She’s not like other teenagers. Haven’t you realized that yet?’

The last part threw him. Di Capua was adamant the night before. The message had come from the girl.

‘The evidence,’ he began.

‘What evidence? I’ve slapped you in the face twice now. I’m not proud of that, if I’m honest. But are you surprised?’

‘I have a job to do,’ he insisted.

‘What you resolutely fail to appreciate,’ she went on, ‘is that I still do not believe any of these things. I knew my husband. I knew Joanne Van Doren. They were friends, acquaintances. Nothing more.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘My husband was very ill. He had been for some time. Sex wasn’t easy for him, not without a little help.’

She stared at the tower of the Casina delle Civette rising from the lawn, checking to make sure that her daughter wasn’t at the window, Falcone assumed.

‘There,’ Cecilia Gabriel added. ‘You have an intimate confession. I trust it pleases you. Whatever your photographs say I find it impossible to believe that Malise was engaging in some squalid tryst with Joanne.’

Yet Falcone remembered well the moment he’d suggested this.

‘You turned on your own daughter and asked her if it was true,’ he pointed out.

‘I did. I was being an idiotic mother. Mina’s a secretive girl sometimes. The way she doesn’t look you in the eye. I don’t know. It’s probably me. Probably what any mother feels. Left out.’

She turned and stared at him intensely.

‘I don’t believe for one moment Malise abused Mina in any way. It’s impossible. He could be a difficult man. An argumentative one. He had a terrible temper. But he was incapable of cruelty. The very thought of it appalled him. He loved her. He loved all of us. He adored Robert above all others, I think, because he was the most difficult of all to love. And now you’re telling me he was some kind of a monster, and that Mina and Robert conspired to kill him.’

Grimaldi leaned forward and peered into her eyes.

‘Signora Gabriel,’ he said. ‘You must understand. It will be difficult for me to end this case without some answers to these very real questions.’

‘Answers?’ she interrupted. ‘Very well. Malise printed that first photograph of me from an older picture that was fading. He said he wanted to keep me that way. The way I was when I was eighteen or so.’

Her fingers toyed nervously with a twig of sprawling oleander falling over the back of the bench.

‘The words on it, “E pur si muove” — I wrote them. You know where they come from already.’ Her eyes fell briefly on the tower again. ‘Galileo. You know the circumstances. It was Galileo’s way of saying, “This I still believe, in spite of all the violence and pain you may bring to bear.”’

Her eyes were glassy. She wiped them carefully with a tissue from her sleeve.

‘That was the name of the project he was working on for Bernard. It upset him for some reason. He wouldn’t tell me why. These last few months. . I sometimes felt I hardly knew him. I hated seeing him depressed. The night before he died I found him rereading his own book, using that photograph as a bookmark. I wrote those words on the back of that picture. It was my way of saying the same thing as Galileo. In spite of all the pain and heartache, in spite of the fact Malise was very ill, this I still believed. That I loved him and he loved me.’

She took a deep breath and then looked at each man in turn.

‘A few weeks ago Malise told me that he’d given up on the treatment for his cancer. I knew already, I think, in my own heart. It was written in his face. The way he acted. The sadness. What little money we had was gone, which was what troubled him more than anything. The idea he would leave us alone, to fend for ourselves. He had a few months left, perhaps less. At some stage he would have to enter some kind of charity hospice. He wanted to spend his last few weeks rereading his own book, pointing out all the errors, all the statements he wanted to correct, to improve, to expand, and never would. He hoped I could sell it after his death.’ She smiled. ‘A ridiculous idea, of course, not that I told him so. All I wanted to say to him was that he was loved and always would be.’

‘You could have told us that in the beginning,’ Falcone pointed out.

‘I could,’ she said with a smile. ‘But I thought it was none of your bloody business, Inspector. And I was right.’

Grimaldi shrugged and said with a wry smile, ‘Signora, the bookmark is not a piece of evidence that concerns us any more.’

‘Shouldn’t it?’ she asked. ‘Doesn’t it tell you something? What do you want of me? Ask. If it will bring this to an end. .’

‘There were photographs taken in your daughter’s room,’ Falcone went on. ‘Evidence of sexual activity.’

‘Not Malise,’ she insisted. ‘That’s impossible. Mina’s seventeen. I don’t own her. I never did. Besides, when they’re that age these days. .’ She laughed at herself, lightly, briefly. ‘Who am I fooling? I was sleeping with Malise when I wasn’t much older. Everything happens so quickly. One moment you feel this life will never end. The next it’s running through your fingers like dust.’

The two men glanced at one another. This had to be said. Falcone wanted the words to come from Grimaldi.

‘We need your daughter to make some kind of statement,’ the lawyer told her. ‘It will never be made public. But the evidence that exists requires some kind of clarification.’

Cecilia Gabriel shook her head and stared at them.

‘You still believe my son and daughter conspired to murder their own father, don’t you? That this Beatrice Cenci nonsense in all the papers is true?’

‘Your daughter knew all about the Cenci girl,’ Falcone reminded her.

‘That was for Joanne! Nothing else. Some childish fantasy, perhaps. Mina’s a dreamy girl, not quite one thing or the other. It’s impossible.’

‘Signora Gabriel,’ Grimaldi interrupted. ‘We cannot sit here arguing forever. The fact is this. If your daughter is willing to tell us the truth, and it’s a truth I can bury, then I shall do so. If, for instance, she confirms the abuse by her father. .’

She swore, an English word, a common one.

‘If she does this,’ Grimaldi went on, ‘and says, merely, that she passed on this building information to Robert because he asked for it, that she knew nothing of any conspiracy, well. .’

He watched her wringing her hands, waiting for the woman to calm down.

‘Then,’ he went on, ‘we’re finished here. I can write honestly that this is a family tragedy with an unfortunate conclusion. One with several victims. One that should not waste the time of the courts, since the principal perpetrator, Robert, is now dead.’

‘You’re asking her to tell a lie! To make out her own father was some kind of animal!’

They waited for a moment.

‘We can only help the living,’ Toni Grimaldi said eventually. ‘I don’t know if you honestly believe Mina has told you the truth. From what you say, I suspect not. Understand me, please. We’re not here for her confession. We’re here to beg her for sufficient information to allow us to declare this case closed in spite of the evidence that exists. Surely you understand it would be better, for you and for her, that this bleak episode is laid to rest? A brief conversation is all I ask. Just us, you, your daughter. No lawyers, no friends. No notes, no. . commitments. Simply something I may use as a justification to end this once and for all.’

‘Even if it’s a lie?’ she asked.

Grimaldi didn’t answer. Falcone found himself looking into Cecilia Gabriel’s clear blue eyes and admiring what he saw there. This woman wished to protect her daughter more than anything. As an individual he was deeply uncomfortable with the relentless bonds of family, the ties of closeness, which so often seemed unbreakable, resolute. From time to time Falcone had privately wondered what kind of parent he would have made. A bad one, surely, willing to abandon a wayward child in the end. In Cecilia Gabriel’s stiff and determined face he saw something he could never possess: a fiery sense of protective loyalty, whatever the circumstances. In terms of the law this was awkward and problematic. Yet it seemed to him that there was, in such blind, unthinking devotion, a degree of decency and love that no law, no court, no sentence could possibly deliver. It was a private judgement, and one he would never commit to paper, but he was now convinced that no good would come of dragging any of these people into court if that eventuality could be avoided.

‘Even if you feel it’s a lie,’ he responded. ‘It’s of no consequence. We cannot ignore the evidence we have. If Mina will give us reason to tell our own superiors that there is insufficient material to continue with the investigation. .’

He waited for her reaction.

Cecilia Gabriel stared at him candidly.

‘I’m rather sorry I slapped you, Inspector,’ she said. ‘We’ve all got a temper in this family unfortunately. Except Mina, of course.’

‘I’ve had much worse,’ he confessed, and found himself wondering if he would encounter this woman again. Some time beyond the black mist of mourning and despair that had hung around her on every occasion they’d met, and would stay there until the moment Toni Grimaldi caused the fog to lift.

‘I imagine you have.’

She then did something which struck Falcone as curiously English. Cecilia Gabriel clapped them both simultaneously on the knee, palms down, like some schoolmistress from a period movie who had come to some momentous decision.

‘I’ll ask Mina to talk to you,’ she declared, standing up, stretching, a long, lean athletic figure under the sun. ‘Just us. But I warn you now. I doubt she’ll agree to some convenient fabrication. Not even to save herself.’