The Fallen Angel

THREE

Mina Gabriel leaned forward and said, ‘Excuse me. .?’

‘The young man in the photo. The one who died. My guess. .’

He pulled out the photo he’d got from Ciampino two days before. The immigration officer he’d met when he went to see the Turk, Cakici, had let him run through the departure camera records. He only had the old photo of the brother to use, and a tentative link.

‘. . is that he’s an Albanian kid called Arben Dosti. Someone of Robert’s age flew from Ciampino to Tirana using a passport with that name. It’s on a low-level drugs-watch list we have. Not sufficient priority to stop him. He was leaving anyway.’

He showed her the picture taken at the immigration control booth and said, ‘That’s Robert, your brother. Using the passport of the young man we have in the morgue, identified as him.’

Mina Gabriel’s face contorted the way he’d seen in so many teenagers: marred by an angry disdain at the apparent stupidity of the question.

‘What are you talking about? Robert’s dead.’

He relaxed in the comfortable chair and threw the passport across the table, towards her. She didn’t pick it up.

‘No. That passport’s been tampered with. It’s genuine enough. It was Robert’s. I asked a friend in forensic to take a look at it. Someone clever. Discreet. So it’s just between him and me. He said someone had changed the photograph. They did a good job. I imagine that, through Santacroce, Robert had some contacts in the drug trade who could do that kind of thing. Arben was one more dope dealer in the ring. For Santacroce maybe. For Cakici. Does it matter?’

Costa studied her icy, frozen face for some sign of defeat.

‘He’s still out of the country, Mina, isn’t he? I don’t think you’d dare allow him to stay here. Not right now.’

‘Nic! You know it’s Robert. You met him in that bar in the Campo.’

‘I briefly saw him,’ Costa said, stabbing the passport on the table. ‘You made sure of that. One more piece of bait along the trail. Arben got paid to pretend to be Robert. To carry one of his phones. The one you’d set up with the incriminating email. He thought it was all part of some scam. And it was. You’d worked it out in advance, just as you’d worked out everything else.’ He stopped, remembering that night. ‘The kid I saw in the bar never spoke English. I just got a message on my phone. That seemed odd at the time. When I was in the building, with Joanne Van Doren’s body, that really was Robert, which was why he wouldn’t let me see him. He couldn’t. That would have broken the spell.’

Her eyes turned wide and limpid, the way he had come to recognize.

‘You set up this Albanian kid,’ he went on. ‘Just as you set up Bernard Santacroce. It was very clever, very calculating. Why would we check his identity? You’d confirmed it. I’d seen him. We knew it was Robert.’

‘My brother’s dead!’

‘No,’ he insisted. ‘He’s not, Mina. You wanted us to think we were trying to unravel some scheme to kill your father. That way we’d never notice that the real plot had only just begun. That was to give your mother the opportunity and the motive to murder Bernard Santacroce, Simon Gabriel, the uncle who’d really been abusing you, all of you, one way or another. A plot you planned very carefully, minutely, step by step. From the time your father died in the street to the moment your mother stabbed Santacroce in his study here. You brought the suspicion on yourself, you left us the evidence that would first incriminate and then clear you. And when we reached the conclusion you’d concocted for us, your mother murdered him, as you’d planned all along, knowing that public sympathy would keep her out of jail.’

‘Why are you saying these awful things?’ she asked in a voice that was beginning to break. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please. Haven’t I been through enough?’

Her arm came up to her face, wiping away the tears. She was the teenager once more, the damaged innocent pleading for understanding, for mercy.

‘You tried not to lie, I guess,’ he said.

‘I told you the truth!’

He pushed the passport closer to her.

‘Look at the picture,’ he ordered. ‘Look at it and tell me that’s your brother. Lie to me now, Mina. I want to see what that looks like.’

She was thinking, he guessed. Scheming. Wondering what avenues were left to her now. There were none. None he could think of anyway.

Mina snatched the passport, got up and stumbled to the bright windows, staring at the palm trees moving in the placid breeze. The years had fallen from her. This was the girl he first saw, beneath the street lamps of the Via Beatrice Cenci and later, lovingly feeding the cats in the ruins where Julius Caesar had lost his life. Young, bright, pure.

She was crying, half-sobbing, clutching the document to her, unopened. Then she tucked it beneath her arm and rubbed her eyes with the back of her fists, trying to recover her composure.

‘I can’t believe you’re saying all this. .’

‘Look at the photograph!’

She wiped her face once more then opened the pages of the familiar red document and stared at it.

Costa got up and walked to stand by her side, peering into her face.

‘Is that your brother Robert?’

‘I didn’t do this,’ Mina Gabriel cried. ‘Any of it. Robert must have. .’

She looked up at him, her glassy eyes full of fear.

‘Please, Nic. Believe me. You. Of all people.’

‘Sorry,’ he said simply. ‘It doesn’t work.’

‘But. .’

‘If I’m honest,’ he added, ‘I’m not sure it ever did.’

She placed her palm on his chest, held it there and asked, ‘What do you want?’

He glanced out of the window. September in Rome. Heat, lethargy, people too tired, too lazy or too honest to wish to witness the deceit that lay beneath the city’s radiant facade.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said.