The Fallen Angel

SEVEN

They were back in the squad room. Costa stood behind one of the intelligence officers working a couple of huge computer screens simultaneously. Teresa and Silvio Di Capua were with him, liaising with forensic on the phone. Peroni was calling the UK, trying to locate Malise Gabriel’s brother. Finally, Costa thought, they might be on the brink of finding a way into this case.

The young woman officer on the desk had just come off the phone to Scotland Yard. She looked at them and said, ‘There’s no one called Julian Urquhart at the address where the bike was registered. The police in London say they went back two months after the theft was reported. The apartment was rented to someone else. The new people didn’t know anything about the previous occupant. There was no mail, no forwarding address.’

‘Why would someone with a false identity want an expensive new motorbike?’ Costa demanded.

She peered at the screen. Emails kept coming in almost by the second.

‘A crook with money doesn’t steal any old junk off the street. You buy something new under a false ID then fake a theft to get it off the register. Take it abroad. Use it without running the risk of getting stopped for driving something hot. Also. .’ She tugged at her short dark hair. ‘Crooks are normal too. They like nice cars. Nice bikes. You can do things to them. Tweak the engine. Build some compartment for explosives or guns or dope.’

Silvio Di Capua brightened.

‘We found cocaine in the frame.’

‘We know the bike’s supposed to have come from a drugs gang,’ Costa said. ‘Where’s the surprise there?’ He stared at the screen, trying to think. ‘We’re back on the same assumptions again. I hate that. Give me some different ones.’

Teresa Lupo got the idea straight away.

‘The photos in the basement were taken to incriminate or embarrass Malise Gabriel.’

‘Good,’ Costa told her. ‘I like that. But why? He didn’t have any money. He didn’t have anything. He was dying.’

‘The photos from the bedroom are real,’ said Di Capua, ignoring the question. ‘He’s our man.’

‘So who is he?’ Costa wondered, not expecting an answer.

Di Capua’s face was a picture of exasperation.

‘Give us time, Nic! I told you. We’ll get there.’

‘Why is it,’ Costa asked, ‘that I don’t think we’ve got time? We appear to be dealing with someone who can steal a Ducati in a different country and bring it into Italy without a soul noticing. Falsify photographs, force a man like Malise Gabriel into sexual situations, possibly against his will. Murder two people, one a kid, one a cop, in the street and disappear afterwards. Do you think he’s waiting around for us to knock on the door?’

They went quiet. This was not Costa’s normal, calm tone.

‘No,’ he went on. ‘Forget that question. Let me offer another assumption. Someone’s trying to put Mina Gabriel in the frame for her father’s death. Take another step. If they’re trying to do that, aren’t they trying to set up her brother too? Easiest way in the world to cover a crime. Blame it on a dead man.’

‘His sister can still talk,’ Teresa added.

‘Except she’s too scared and has been all along.’

Ever since that night in the Via Beatrice Cenci, he thought. For any number of reasons. Fear. Shame. Something else. A terrified silence that would always, in the end, come to be interpreted as complicity.

‘I still don’t understand. Why do any of this?’ he asked suddenly. ‘If it’s not for money. .’

‘For the girl?’ Di Capua suggested.

Costa shook his head.

‘If you’ve got this kind of money and control you surely don’t need to go to all this trouble for a seventeen-year-old kid.’ He tried another tack. ‘What about the Italian connection? Gabriel’s grandmother? She was called Wilhelmina something?’

‘Wilhelmina something doesn’t really help,’ the woman at the keyboard told him. ‘I’ve got someone trying to track back from the British births and deaths records to ours. It’s going to take a while.’

‘Is there anything that doesn’t take a while?’

‘Sovrintendente,’ Teresa Lupo said firmly. ‘We’re all doing our best.’

‘I know that. But why didn’t we see this till now? Why?’

He knew the answer already: they thought they understood what this case was about. Beatrice Cenci brought back to life. Brute incest leading to murder. Even he’d begun to believe there was something in that story after a while.

The intelligence officer was still hammering the keyboard.

‘What are you looking for now?’ Costa asked.

‘I thought I’d try the Europol database. It’s pretty recent stuff. A bit rough at the edges in places. The best quick way we have of sharing records across the EU. I don’t know.’ Costa watched as she typed in the name ‘Julian Urquhart’. The little icon on the screen span round slowly. Then nothing.

He wondered what Falcone would try in a situation like this. Much the same? Probably. There was little else one could do except carry on thinking about the questions that no one had yet asked or answered. There were so many, and he didn’t feel close to penetrating any of them. Every step of this strange investigation, starting with the death of Malise Gabriel that night in the ghetto, had seemed oddly predictable, as if they were being guided towards the conclusion they sought. A conclusion, he reminded himself, that had been in his own mind almost from the moment he saw Mina Gabriel’s pained, pale face as she bent over her father’s broken body in the Via Beatrice Cenci.

‘Nic,’ Peroni said, interrupting this sudden reverie.

Peroni had a notebook in his huge paw and a pen behind his ear. His face, so human, so familiar, was full of the alert intelligence Costa had come to admire. Peroni didn’t even cast a glance at the woman and her computers. He’d been doing what he did best, working the phones, working people.

‘You’ve got something?’ Costa asked.

The big man took a deep breath and said, ‘I don’t know. This younger brother.’

‘Simon. Banker. Didn’t get on with Malise.’

‘I know,’ Peroni continued. ‘You told me that. You’re wrong. That’s not true. It can’t be.’

‘Mina told me. She said she’d never met him but her mother. .’

‘I don’t care. I got nowhere with that name. In the end I phoned Malise Gabriel’s old college at Cambridge. These university people keep themselves close. I guessed there had to be someone there who knew. Kept in touch.’

Costa laughed. It was so obvious. A phone call. A conversation. A stab in the dark, reaching out for another human being, not some record in a database.

‘And?’

‘They loved Malise Gabriel in Cambridge. In spite of everything. The professor I talked to was an undergraduate with him. Hadn’t been in touch with the man for years. Seems Malise didn’t want the company. I couldn’t get this college guy off the phone. He wants to come to the funeral. That’s how much they adored him.’

Costa tried to imagine what this meant.

‘And Simon? The brother?’

‘The brother disappeared years ago when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. According to my Cambridge man it wasn’t that Simon didn’t get on with his older brother. He hated him. Malise was the bright one, the clever academic everyone admired. Simon was a wastrel, not so bright. He couldn’t compete. All that trouble Malise got into, the pregnant student, the book, that was nothing compared to the brother. He was into student riots. Trouble. Drugs. You name it.’

Simon Magus. The magician. Flying through the air, taunting the world.

‘We don’t know where he is now?’ Costa asked.

Peroni looked at his notebook and said, ‘In Cambridge they think he changed his identity. Went to Morocco, Afghanistan, South America. Became some kind of dope king with a high-and-mighty English accent. The prof’s emailing me some newspaper cuttings. Apparently the guy was a bit of legend in England ten, twenty years ago. The cops named him as one of their principal suspects for smuggling hard drugs into the country. Never caught up with him though.’

The intelligence officer hammered at her keyboard, waited a second and said, ‘Let me try the narcotics records.’ A flash of fingers. ‘Simon Gabriel. Nothing, sorry.’

‘According to my man in Cambridge he had lots of names,’ Peroni said. ‘These university types are fastidious, you know. He even had a cutting from a crime story in The Times of ten years ago. He read it out to me. Look.’

Peroni held up his pad. Costa scanned down the names, got to the last one and groaned.

‘Have you got the Italian births and deaths database online?’ he asked the intelligence officer.

‘Of course.’

‘Look up the name Wilhelmina Santacroce.’

The answers were starting to fall into place already.

‘Married 1922. Address. .’ She blinked at the screen. ‘It’s that place you’ve been going to, isn’t it? The palazzetto?’

He wondered how much of what Mina had told him was really the truth, how much lies that she’d passed on unwittingly from the stories and excuses she’d been fed.

The Santacroce palace once belonged to one side of her own family. When Malise Gabriel returned to Rome he was, in some small sense, coming home.

‘Sir,’ the intelligence officer said, bringing him back to earth. ‘That third name on the list. Scott Mason Nicholson. I’ve got him. I’ve got data.’ She typed frantically again. ‘There’s a mugshot on the FBI wanted list.’

Costa looked at the screen and knew what he’d see.

‘Peroni,’ he called as he strode out of the room.

The big man couldn’t keep up. When Costa got downstairs the traffic was backed up to the Questura rear gate. Noisy demonstrators were waving placards, yelling at the bored cops in blue uniform, waving banners about Beatrice Cenci and the cruelty of the police.

It didn’t make sense that this case had generated quite so much heat. Someone had stoked it. He was starting to think he knew who and why.

There was no way he’d be able to get a vehicle out of this crowd. He shouted back to Peroni, now lost behind him, and asked for a patrol car with uniform officers to meet him outside the Palazzetto Santacroce.

Then he turned out of the Questura, pushed his way through the crowd and began to run, across the city, down towards the Tiber.