The Fallen Angel

FIVE

The apartment extended across the entire top floor of the palace. It consisted of a spacious living area, an attached open kitchen, and five or six rooms off, bedrooms, bathrooms, it was impossible to tell at a glance. The furniture was old and worn, the walls badly in need of paint. There were no carpets, only scratched floorboards that hadn’t seen polish in years and a few threadbare mats. The dining table was the kind of cheap plastic stuff sold by the discount warehouses. There was a battered, baggy sofa, with a woman on it, sitting back, eyes closed, listening to music from the speakers of a portable audio player in her lap. Jazz. Costa recognized the familiar tune: Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat played by a piano trio.

To add to the confusion, gangs of men Costa assumed were from the city construction department were wandering to and fro carrying instruments and cameras, treading the dirt of the building work from the lower floors into the bare floorboards and occasional scattered rug. Two of them came out of the furthest room in the corner, the one where he assumed Malise Gabriel had stepped out onto the balcony. They were talking in low tones, looking bemused.

The music came to an end. The woman pressed a button to switch off the player, looked at them and asked, ‘Can I help?’

She was about forty, very thin with short blonde hair and a pained, mannish face. Her eyes were raw and pink. Costa guessed she’d been crying very recently. He thought she looked a little anxious. Nervous. Scared even.

‘We’re police,’ Costa told her.

‘I’ve already spoken to the police.’

She had a curious accent. The Italian was good but not native.

‘You’re with the construction company?’ Peroni asked.

‘I am the construction company.’ She pulled out her card and passed it over. It said: Joanne Van Doren, CEO, Cenci Enterprises.

‘You speak good Italian,’ Peroni noted.

‘My mother came from Rome. My father was on Wall Street. I grew up in New York. Some strange sense of belonging, a recovered memory maybe, persuaded me to come to Italy and try to do my own thing.’ She stared around at the apartment. ‘More fool me, huh?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Costa said. ‘I don’t follow. Your people were responsible for the scaffolding?’

‘I’m responsible for everything. I own this entire block. Bought the dump for a song five years ago, when songs cost a lot more than they do now. I employ the construction crew. I design what’s supposed to become of this place. That’s what I am, really. Or was. An architect. This. .’ One more caustic glance at the bare, grim apartment. ‘. . is meant to be one of the most prestigious condo blocks in Rome. If I can get ten thousand euros per square metre I might even manage to scrape a profit.’

She ran a lean hand through her hair and stared at them.

‘What do you think? Interested?’

‘A little out of my range,’ Peroni said. ‘Not that I’m looking.’

‘Who is?’ she asked. ‘I’m the person everyone sues, of course. The banks when I default on payments. The city when they think I screwed up over something as simple as a suspended scaffold. Oh, and Cecilia Gabriel, who seems to have decided I’m responsible for poor Malise’s death. You’d think she’d have waited a day or two before threatening me with the lawyers. I let her family have this place for next to nothing. I know enough not to expect thanks from the English aristocracy but even by their standards she seems a little eager with the ingratitude.’

‘You’ve spoken to Signora Gabriel?’ Peroni asked.

‘She was round here at ten thirty this morning. Picking up things. Telling me she wouldn’t set foot in the place ever again. Oh, and saying she’d be serving a writ real soon.’ Joanne Van Doren licked her lips. ‘You mind if I see if there’s a beer left in their refrigerator? This has been one hell of a weekend.’

They followed her into the kitchen where she found a bottle of Moretti. Then they came back and sat down in the living room, listening as she talked freely and frankly about the Gabriels, her tenants.

It was the kind of story Costa had heard before. A foreign family coming to Rome, the parents hoping to forge a fresh life in the city, to chance upon some thread of luck, some new opening in their lives that had never been there elsewhere. The American woman seemed to like them, in different ways. The father was friendly, intellectual, a little intense. The mother seemed quiet, committed, perhaps a controlling influence, she was never sure. The son, Robert, was wayward, unpredictable, but never caused any trouble that she knew of.

Joanne Van Doren’s face lit up when she said the girl’s name.

‘Mina,’ she said, beaming, ‘is a doll. If I were ever to have a kid, which seems somewhat unlikely, I’d pray for one like her. Bright as a button, interested in everything, so talented it makes you sick. Put her in front of a piano and you can lose a couple of hours of your life. Same for drawing, books, poetry, literature. Malise and Cecilia can take the credit for that, I guess. They taught her at home. Said it was the only way.’

‘They did that with Robert too?’ Peroni asked.

She thought for a moment and said, ‘No. Now you mention it. Robert said he went to some boarding school in Scotland, the same one Malise got dumped in when he was a kid. Perhaps that’s why he turned out the way he did. These snooty families have strange habits. You could never send Mina away. It’d be too painful to have her out of the house. Let me show you something.’

They followed her into a room at the far end of the floor, as distant from Mina’s bedroom as it was possible to be. There was a digital piano there, the kind that could be played in silence through headphones. Alongside was a violin case, a classical guitar and a little laptop computer.

‘Cecilia played violin in some amateur orchestra. Good, but Mina left her behind as a musician long ago from what I gathered. Listen.’

She hit the keyboard of the computer. A kind of software Costa didn’t understand came up. A few more taps and deep, powerful organ music, very familiar, began to emerge from the headphones.

Joanne Van Doren flicked a switch and it came out of the little speakers seated on the desk.

‘Bach,’ she explained. ‘Touch cheesy, I guess, though that’s because it’s been so misused over the yeara. Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Or the voice of God in human form as someone once said, hopefully not within earshot of Malise. Mina had scarcely been here four weeks before she’d talked her way into understudying the organist at the church on the Campidoglio. This is her playing there. She’d record it on the computer then bring it home to listen, try to make it better. Can you believe that? Also she speaks Italian better than I ever will, and for the life of me I don’t actually recall Cecilia even teaching her. God, I love that kid. This is my old laptop. I gave it her. Bought her the music kit too. Malise and Cecilia didn’t have two pennies to rub together.’

Costa was thinking.

‘She’d work on her music in here? With her headphones on?’

‘Usually,’ she agreed. ‘Mina was very particular about not disturbing people. Incredibly thoughtful. Not your average teenager at all.’

He closed the door.

‘Like this? So she wouldn’t know if someone came or went from the apartment?’

The American woman looked puzzled.

‘I guess. So what? How is Mina? They said she found Malise outside. Jesus. . it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

She reached for a tissue, dabbed at her face, then apologized.

‘I just can’t believe it happened here. Then Cecilia blames me. .’

‘People don’t think straight in situations like this,’ Costa said. ‘She’ll feel differently in a day or two.’

‘You don’t know her.’

Costa bent down and looked at the computer. In an open window there was a piece of notation, one that looked as if it was being worked on recently. He hunted round the menus until he found a way to pull up some information about the piece. It had last been saved at a quarter to midnight on Friday evening. The girl had told uniform she was practising when her father died. The computer seemed to corroborate this.

‘Can we see her bedroom?’ Costa asked.

‘Sure. It’s a mess, mind. Not Mina’s fault either.’

They followed her to the door at the far corner of the building. The men in city council overalls were still in there, peering out of the window at the shattered scaffolding tubes and cables. Peroni showed some ID and asked them to leave for a moment. Costa glanced at his colleague. The room was filthy with dust and dirt. There were boot marks on the single bed by the wall, stamped on the sheet, which had a distinctive design: white and green, with a repeating square pattern like an antique Roman mosaic. Books and CD covers lay scattered on the bare floor. These men were interested in the outside only. Nothing within.

A poster on the door had fallen down at some stage and now lay crumpled on the bed, covered in shoe marks. He picked it up and found himself looking at Guido Reni’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci from the Barberini, the one from the books, a good print which brought out the sensitive, sad beauty of the subject.

‘She liked that story,’ Joanne Van Doren said. ‘Found out about it soon after they moved in. I’d never even heard of it. Mina took me all over Rome, to places that had connections with Beatrice. We thought it might be good publicity when I got around to selling the condos. That’s why I put the Cenci name on my company. Mina was going to be the guide for potential buyers. I promised her a little pocket money.’

There was a bookshelf on the wall opposite the bed. Costa bent down and looked at the titles. One shelf was entirely devoted to works on the Cenci and their time: Dumas, Stendhal, Shelley, Moravia. Then he shook the duvet on the bed. Dust and dirt and bits of plaster and rubble fell on the floor. He threw back the cover and examined the sheet underneath. Fresh boot marks apart, it was spotlessly clean, newly ironed. Newly changed.

Costa was about to move on to the mattress beneath when Peroni coughed loudly and gave him a black look. This wasn’t the time.

The older cop walked towards the window, glanced out, then asked, ‘Why did the scaffolding collapse?’

Joanne Van Doren shrugged.

‘If I knew I’d tell you. Whether it’s the fault of my workmen or not. Do you imagine I feel good about this? I liked Malise. He was a decent, caring man. I guess that’s why Mina turned out the way she did.’

‘The scaffolding. .?’ Peroni persisted.

She didn’t like being pressed.

‘Do you have a head for heights?’ Joanne Van Doren asked. They didn’t have time to say anything. ‘Good. Then follow me.’