The Fallen Angel (21 page)

He looked at his watch. Then, in a tone that told them this interview was over, he said, ‘Even a low-grade runner like Robert Gabriel could make two, three hundred a day shifting pills and
smoke. How many Polish hookers do you have to pimp to bring in that kind of bread? No. I told you already. He’s not your man. Not for murder. Or anything else.’

Rosa stared at Costa.

‘Porn’s for old people,’ she told him. ‘If you think that’s relevant somehow. Trust me, you really are looking in the wrong place.’

‘And that’s it,’ Riggi said, getting up from the table. ‘That’s all we have to tell you.’

The chemicals were fresh, the film still within its use-by date according to the box tag on the camera. Silvio Di Capua had weighed up his options. The Questura no longer
possessed its own photographic darkroom; that corner of the forensic department had been handed over to a whirring server farm for the office network. Rome still had a few specialist photographic
developing companies for the dwindling band of professionals who refused to use anything but film. But they’d take their time, cost money, and . . . and . . .

He caught the eye of Maria the intern, smiling at him in the red glow of the safety light, looking both pretty and extraordinarily gullible. Di Capua was developing the film from the camera in
the darkroom next door to the makeshift porn studio for no other reason than because he wanted to. A good five or six years had passed since he’d last laboured over the delicious and
demanding task of bringing emulsion to life through a patient mix of chemicals and skill. He missed that tactile experience, and since the equipment and the facilities were here on the spot already
it seemed ridiculous not to use them.

Maria came close to him and stared at the dishes, sniffing the acrid aroma of old-fashioned photography, seemingly impressed.

‘How do you know . . . ?’ she began to ask.

‘School,’ he said. All those years ago, when he was twelve or thirteen, learning how to develop black and white film – colour was too hard and a little . . . common was the
word that came to mind.

Outside the firmly closed door a couple of inquisitive morgue monkeys were chatting as they worked the scene by the scarlet bed. This was a little unusual, Di Capua thought. But Teresa
didn’t screech at them to stop. She had enough problems of her own, finding the resources to perform a basic forensic job and manage the caseload back at the Questura.

‘Watch,’ he said, then read the instructions on the bottles, just to make sure he remembered correctly. ‘And pray there’s something still left that didn’t get
ruined.’

It took time. It was gradual, revelatory. Silvio Di Capua realized that, at the age of thirty, he’d somehow forgotten how to appreciate these slow and tantalizing processes.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Twenty. Nearly twenty-one. I went to college a year early. I’m bright.’

Ten years, enough to create a gulf between them. So much had happened, so much had changed, while she was still little more than a child.

‘Of course you are. How much longer are you with us?’

‘A month.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘Unless there’s an opening . . .’

They all wanted jobs. Decent jobs, the kind they thought they were owed. Di Capua had walked out of college to find the world at his feet. A good degree, a bright, inquisitive brain that could
see him through any interview. Academia, finance, science; so many opportunities lay open to him when he was fresh to the market. Today they were all desperate, chasing a narrow and diminishing
number of opportunities. Over-educated, over-qualified, young men and women praying they could find some niche to save themselves from the dull drone of badly paid service-industry jobs. And most
of them never made it, just slumped into routine, dreary positions, hoping that one day the economic climate would improve and provide them with the kind of middle-class career they thought would
arrive at so easily.

He wondered about Robert Gabriel, the brother they sought, the one they assumed had murdered the woman not far from where they now worked. Was he like that too, a kid who’d slipped through
the cracks? And if he was, how might he have turned out a decade before? If there’d been work and hope to keep him engaged, too busy and too involved to waste his life in the dive bars of the
Campo and Trastevere, where the drink and the dope led nowhere?

‘I’m getting old,’ Di Capua murmured. Worse than that, he thought, he was starting to think old.

‘No, you’re not,’ Maria said with touching, sweet enthusiasm.

He felt the briefest twinge of interest and fought to stifle it. Then he swilled the developing tank once more. The timer sounded and he embarked upon the once-familiar round of processes that
would first reveal then fix the silver halide on the negative stock inside the plastic barrel. He didn’t think about Maria, didn’t think about anything else. Her inexcusable clumsiness
out in the studio, beneath the floodlights, had wiped at least a couple of frames from the film. That was certain and, as they waited, he told her so again.

She stared at him in the eerie red light of the darkroom lamp.

‘You mean there’s no way of going back?’

‘What? Like some kind of undelete?’

His words shocked him, mostly because he sounded so like Teresa Lupo. Yet, to this young woman, the question was utterly logical. In the digital world there was always a way back, even if it was
one that only lasted for a few steps. The notion of permanent loss, of something precious becoming irretrievable, was a ridiculous anachronism. Like polio and fax machines and last year’s
fashions.

‘If it’s gone, it’s gone,’ he said, and then the second buzzer went off and he was able to unscrew the tank and take out the film.

Silvio Di Capua pinned the strip to the line, let it dangle over the sink to drain and asked Maria to turn on the light, the real one. She hesitated, double-checked she understood, scared
there’d be another accident. Di Capua reassured her and then, when the fluorescent tube came on, looked up and down the strip, reaching for the hairdryer next to the nearby socket, getting
ready to play a careful stream of hot air onto the surface to hurry up the process of making this fragile, damp film stock turn into something solid.

The portion that had been exposed to the light was gone forever, two, perhaps three frames turned into nothing but black mush by Maria’s ignorance. But there was a half-frame of something
left as the exposed film rolled into the hidden part of the camera back. And five more frames beyond that, each perfect, each depicting close up in negative the kind of physical act he associated
with places like this.

Porn palace had turned out to be the right phrase, he thought, scanning the negatives, trying to imagine what they’d look like when he ran them through the enlarger at the end of the table
and turned them into prints.

There was something else he’d forgotten too. How it was always impossible to recognize faces in negative, even people you knew very well, members of your own family. This inverse image was
like a code, locking up the truth, scrambling it until you switched black to white and vice versa and finally got back to the image that the camera lens had seen some time before.

The individuals there were unidentifiable. The subject matter was easy to see.

‘Maria,’ he asked. ‘Are you . . . er, religious? I mean when it comes to sex?’

There was an alarming sparkle in her keen brown eyes.

‘No. Not at all. Not one little bit.’

He still wasn’t sure. And this part of the process would be quick too. In a matter of minutes he’d have a result. He’d know who was in these photographs, would put faces to the
entwined bodies that were anonymous in negative. Falcone had refused to return to the Questura. He was outside, poking around the building, annoying Teresa’s army of forensic officers in
bunny suits. In half an hour or less the inquisitive inspector could have a set of prints in his hands.

Di Capua scratched his bald head and didn’t look at her when he said, ‘It’s just that . . .’

‘Silvio,’ she interrupted, standing so close he felt her bunny suit rustle against his. ‘I just watched a dead woman, a murdered woman, get cut down from the ceiling. I know
why I want to do this job. Honestly.’

She touched his arm. He wasn’t sure what he felt at that moment.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Well, in that case, turn out the lights again. Let’s find out what we’ve got.’

There was a crowd outside the Questura. Women mainly, five, six deep. They were shouting and waving banners from one of the left-wing groups that campaigned against sexual
violence. The day promised to be the hottest, most humid yet. The black shapes of a few wannabe storm clouds were beginning to dot a brilliant sky that seemed to weigh down on the city as if ready
to fall. Rome could turn bad-tempered on mornings like this, though these people were there already.

Costa looked at the sea of faces blocking the Questura entrance and the gates to the car pound, turned to Prinzivalli, the old uniform sergeant who was monitoring the demonstration, and asked,
‘What the hell is going on?’

‘You haven’t turned on the TV recently, have you?’

‘We’ve all been a touch busy,’ Peroni said.

Prinzivalli glanced at his watch then led them back into the entrance hall and gestured at the TV in the side office with the words, ‘Just in time for the midday news.’

They listened in silence. The lead story concerned the deaths of Malise Gabriel and Joanne Van Doren. But the picture on the screen was a snatched shot of Mina, head down, tears in her eyes,
striding into the Santacroce palazzetto, turning briefly to face the photographer’s lens. Costa felt his blood run cold. She looked so innocent, so damaged. Everything he’d come to feel
about this young woman was captured in that single image: the mix of strength and vulnerability and, most of all, the impression that somewhere beneath her simple, beautiful features there lay a
secret waiting to be uncovered. It was the kind of shot the media would seize upon, the kind of story too, one that mixed death and sex and mystery. And something unique.

He watched as the newsreader handed over to a reporter standing outside the Gabriels’ former home in the ghetto and listened to a phrase he knew would come to signify the investigation
from this point on.

‘They are calling her,’ the female journalist said briskly, ‘the English Beatrice Cenci. How much did she know of her father’s suspicious death? What was her relationship
with him? Did someone consciously copy the murderous plot of Beatrice, the young Roman girl who lived across the road from here, five hundred years ago? And if so, is her family also involved, as
was Beatrice’s? These are the questions we understand the police are beginning to ask. For the people of Rome? Another reason, I think.’ A theatrical pause for the camera. ‘Four
hundred years ago we executed a young woman for taking vengeance against the man who abused her. What would we do today? This is . . .’

‘Turn it off,’ Costa ordered.

The uniformed
agente
in front of the set looked at him, puzzled.

‘Turn it off!’

‘Nic,’ Prinzivalli said, putting a hand on his arm. ‘We have to watch the news. It’s the rule. Besides . . .’ The grey-haired uniformed officer, a calm and sensible
man, a rock inside the Questura at times, looked at him. ‘This is out there now. You have to deal with it. We all do.’

‘Where the hell did they get all that nonsense from?’ Peroni demanded. ‘I mean . . .’

His words trailed off. The Questura was always leaky when there was a controversial case around. Cops, forensic people, civilians working the offices and the phones . . . If the death of the
Englishman did come to look like homicide it was always going to be difficult to keep the investigation quiet. The murder of Joanne Van Doren had perhaps simply accelerated a process that was
inevitable.

The officer at the TV switched channels and got another long and detailed report, one that had taken up the selfsame line.

‘The English Beatrice!’ Peroni was outraged.

Yet it seemed logical to Costa, not that he liked to admit it. The media was an imitative beast, one that fed on itself. Mina Gabriel lived opposite the Cenci palace, a short walk from the
private church at which the family had worshipped. She was a little younger but possessed the same air of youthful innocence. Somehow the media had picked up the gist of her response to the police
too. They knew that she was refusing to discuss any sexual relationship with her father on the grounds, the reporter said, that this was an insult both to her and to him. Then there were the
circumstances of Malise Gabriel’s death, which were remarkably similar to those of the dreadful Francesco Cenci.

‘Who the hell put this story out there?’ Peroni wondered. ‘Is this the mother getting her defence in first?’

‘What makes you say that?’ Costa replied. ‘It could be anyone. Someone here. Forensic. Those building inspectors, even. They must know something’s going on. We’ve
been pressing them hard enough.’

‘You haven’t met her yet,’ Peroni muttered. He glanced at Costa. ‘There’s something . . . calculating about her. Scared the life out of me. As hard as
nails.’

Costa thought of the shouting when Mina called the previous night, and what sounded like a slap.

‘But why, Gianni? What possible advantage can she get from having an appalling accusation like that out in public?’

There was a moment of silence.

‘We’re on the defensive now, aren’t we?’ the old cop grumbled. ‘Let’s go ask her.’

‘You’ll need to walk,’ Prinzivalli said. ‘Since that story broke those nice people out front have been blocking the vehicle exit. I’m trying to reason with them. It
would be best to avoid any arrests. If I can . . .’

‘We don’t need a car,’ Costa said, as he walked across the corridor and took a spare police motorbike helmet from the cloakroom, then retrieved his own from the storage area.
‘Here.’

He threw the spare helmet at Peroni, who stared at the thing in horror.