The Fallen Angel (31 page)

Peroni laughed.

‘I’ll pass on that. You always said you were going to go there on a pushbike.’

‘Too old. Too little time.’ Costa looked at him. ‘I’ve never worked organized crime, Gianni. Not seriously. Tell me something.’

‘What?’

‘How many ride-by killings do we get a year? Gang assassinations? Two? Three?’

‘Not as many as we used to get.’

‘And why’s that?’ Costa continued. ‘Because it’s an Italian thing. The Sicilians, the Neapolitans. They love all that show-off stuff. But they’re not running
these rings any more. They’re more interested in easy, safe money. Bribery, corruption, skimming.’

‘Riggi wasn’t involved with the Sicilians.’

‘Precisely. Here’s another thing. If you’re going to kill someone from a motorbike, surely you need two people. One to ride. One to shoot. Have you ever known a mob ride-by
where there was just one person on the bike?’

Peroni was smiling and shaking his head.

‘No,
sovrintendente
, I haven’t.’

‘And the small matter of the Ducati?’

Costa folded his arms. Just before they left they’d heard that the red motorbike had been located at four that morning, at an autostrada service station on the route north to Florence. Two
cops had performed a textbook arrest and taken a thirty-three-year-old man into custody. It took a local inspector only thirty minutes to realize he had a case of theft on his hands, not murder.
The bike had been abandoned shortly after the shootings, left in a side street near the Via Beatrice Cenci with the keys in the ignition. The man in custody was a city bus driver who’d been
on duty till midnight and seen the machine by the side of the street on the way home. He was planning to drive the Ducati north to a relative in Florence and sell it on. The original rider’s
clothes were still missing. The machine itself had fake number plates. No weapon had been found, no real clue as to the identity of the man who had killed Riggi and Robert Gabriel the previous
night.

Peroni screwed up his flabby face and said, ‘Even the stupidest gangsters I’ve met, and there’ve been quite a few, would never have left a machine like that in the vicinity,
with the keys in the ignition. Why take the risk? They’d have whisked it out of Rome in a van or something. Taken it out into the countryside and burned the thing. Or repainted it, changed
the numbers, and put it in an empty dope crate back to Turkey or somewhere. That bike’s worth, what, seven, eight thousand euros? Either they’d destroy it or sell it.’

Exactly as Costa had thought. ‘So?’ he asked.

‘So Leo knows all this. He’s just working with what he has.’

‘We’re here to talk to this Cakici guy for no other reason than he was Riggi’s contact with the Turkish mob?’

Peroni’s bright blue eyes sparkled.

‘A contact who was trying to flee the country on a false passport, remember.’

‘Probably just scared we’d come looking for him. As we have. My guess is he’s as innocent of these murders as Mina Gabriel is of the death of her father.’

‘I hope your guess is correct,’ Peroni said quietly, unwrapping a chocolate bar and taking a big bite of it. ‘On the latter anyway. I truly do.’

Costa thought of the interview ahead.

‘All the same, I don’t like scum who sell drugs to teenagers,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a point, shall we?’

Teresa Lupo liked Toni Grimaldi, the chief resident Questura lawyer. He was a friendly, portly man in his fifties with a genial face and a walrus moustache rather amateurishly
dyed black to match his full head of hair. His role was not always an easy one. He acted as the conduit between the police and the judiciary, the internal Questura expert who would tell an
investigating officer whether he or she had sufficient evidence to merit a search warrant, an arrest or a charge.

Officers trusted Grimaldi, a man who’d worked in the Piazza San Michele longer than almost anyone else still serving. He rarely gave the green light to a case that would fall at the first
hurdle, as many a young lawyer was wont to do. He was frank and open with his advice, sometimes suggesting routes of inquiry that had not occurred to the detectives concerned or, on occasion, the
forensic team. Over the years he had become a vital cog in the workings of the Questura, an impartial eye who would not shirk from telling an investigating officer when it was time to give up. For
this he was admired even if his advice was not always welcome.

Every last file Falcone possessed, and the latest information from the forensic department, had been in his hands for two hours. Teresa now sat next to Leo Falcone in Grimaldi’s bright
fourth-floor office overlooking the courtyard at the back of the building, waiting for his opinion. Much, she thought, as a patient waited for a doctor to pass on news of a diagnosis. There was the
same nervous resentment, in Falcone at least. The same presentiment of bad tidings too.

Grimaldi took off his reading glasses, looked up at them over his desk and asked, ‘Is this it?’

‘Of course,’ Falcone snapped. ‘Do you think we’d withhold something?’

‘Only if it damaged your case,’ Grimaldi replied. ‘And since you have no case . . .’ He shrugged. ‘What would be the point?’

‘No case? No case?’

‘We’ll be getting more forensic, Toni,’ Teresa said quickly. ‘We’ve got the photos to show Malise Gabriel had a sexual relationship with the Van Doren woman. Once
we get the report back from the girl’s mattress we’ll know whether he had sex in his daughter’s bed too.’

‘Malise Gabriel’s dead,’ Grimaldi pointed out. ‘Can’t put him in the dock. Even if you could you can’t place him in the girl’s bed or say he had sex
with her.’

‘Not yet,’ she said.

He looked at her, frowned and said nothing.

Falcone added, almost calmly, ‘The father’s behaviour establishes motive. On the part of the mother. On the part of the daughter and the adopted son too.’

‘And the motive for killing the American woman?’

Falcone looked desperate for a moment.

‘Jealousy? Perhaps she discovered something? I don’t know. I want the chance to ask them.’

Grimaldi didn’t answer. He shuffled the papers again.

‘Who killed the son and this bent cop of ours?’ he asked.

‘Probably the drugs people they were involved with,’ Falcone told him. ‘We think we have a suspect out at Ciampino. Costa’s talking to him now.’

The lawyer didn’t look happy.

‘It’s a bloody old affair, isn’t it? Families.’ He shook his head. ‘And drugs. You always hope the two won’t meet.’

‘Malise Gabriel wasn’t murdered because of drugs,’ Falcone insisted. ‘He was having an affair and abusing his own daughter. Racked with a terminal illness. A
monster.’

‘Just like the Cenci father,’ Grimaldi cut in. ‘So the papers got it right.’

‘Perhaps! But I need a search warrant for their home. I need to arrest the mother and the daughter and bring them in so we can question them properly. They’re so damned
slippery.’

Grimaldi’s walrus moustache wrinkled. He stared at the papers in front of him and asked, ‘On the basis of what I have here? Nothing more?’

‘Precisely.’

‘No,’ the lawyer said straight out. ‘You don’t have the evidence. I’d let you bring in the son, but he’s dead. Even if you can prove the father was abusing
the daughter there’s no live criminal case there for precisely the same reason. You surely aren’t suggesting we try to prosecute her for incest instead? This isn’t the Middle
Ages. The monstrous regiment out there would riot in an instant.’

‘Of course I’m not suggesting that!’ Falcone insisted. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. This whole affair is distressing. But we have to—’

‘Leo!’ Grimaldi looked cross. This was rare. ‘Will you kindly try to see this with some perspective? The
commissario
has made it clear to me we must proceed with the
utmost care here. The media. The public interest.’

‘To hell with the media!’

The lawyer sighed.

‘You’re too intelligent a man to mean that. In order for me to approve a warrant I will require more than mere motive. I need you establish an evidential link between the mother and
the daughter and one or more of these crimes. Is there anything to suggest they were there when the American woman died? Quite the contrary. The mother has a firm alibi and a seventeen-year-old
girl couldn’t strangle a grown woman and then suspend her corpse from the ceiling. Is there any evidence that they, not the son, tampered with the scaffolding, or scuffled with Gabriel,
causing his head to fall against the radiator and give you your convenient blood stain? No. In fact I see no evidence that anyone was with Malise Gabriel at the time of his death. He was drunk.
He’d had sex with someone unknown earlier. Perhaps he stumbled against the radiator, and went outside for a cigarette as the daughter says. Nothing you have proves otherwise.’

He thought for a moment, then added, ‘We’ve had cases before, you know, where disgruntled children have set traps for their parents. Accidents in waiting, ones that may never be
triggered. The son, or the daughter, could have removed those stays from the roof, thinking, if this monster does walk out there for a cigarette he could tumble to his death. It’s an easy,
cowardly way out, isn’t it? You leave the man’s fate to chance or God. If he lives, you carry on. If he dies, you forgo the blame. In your own head anyway.’

‘Let’s leave God out of this, shall we?’ Falcone replied.

‘If you feel that’s possible. The fact remains. You need to persuade one of these two to confirm your suspicions. To confess, perhaps.’

‘Which is why I need to arrest them,’ Falcone exploded. ‘Without that they simply won’t talk.’

‘Then,’ Grimaldi said, with a smile, ‘you’ll have to go back to work and find me some real evidence to support these theories of yours. What you have is flimsy,
circumstantial and insufficient. The crimes of a dead man, however vile, are insufficient to justify throwing these women into an interview room for twenty-four hours and leaving you to try to
break them. This is not the sixteenth century. We are not the Pope’s inquisitors.’

He closed the folder in front of him ostentatiously and looked at Teresa Lupo.

‘More evidence please. Until you have I won’t look at this case again.’

‘You do realize I have yet to persuade these two even to set foot inside the Questura!’ Falcone bellowed.

Grimaldi looked puzzled.

‘What do you mean? They’ve been in to identify the brother’s body, surely?’

Teresa shrugged and said, ‘Not yet. We’ve asked them. The mother said she’s still too upset. It’s standard practice to leave the timing up to the relatives. It’s
not critical in this case. So I’ve never pushed them.’

The two men stared at the pathologist.

‘They’ve got a dead son on a slab in the morgue and they don’t want to see him?’ the lawyer asked.

‘Dead son, dead father,’ she said. ‘You’d be surprised, Toni. Sometimes people are like that.’

‘Then . . .’ Grimaldi extended a hand. ‘There you have it, Leo. Tell them it’s important you have an ID, however upsetting that may be. Once you have them here I bow to
your improvizational skills. Just don’t expect me to pick up any debris you leave behind. Consider yourself warned.’

By the time they were back in the morgue, waiting on the Gabriels to arrive for the formal identification of Robert, Falcone was in an oddly foul mood. The nature of this case,
and the way it had propelled him into the usually cherished role of antagonist, had come to haunt the man in some way. Peroni had told Teresa how Cecilia Gabriel had slapped him that day in the
Casina delle Civette when he first broached the subject of incest. Falcone was thoughtful, intelligent and, in spite of himself sometimes, deeply sensitive. His personal distaste for the case was
obvious. The very fact that its successful prosecution might depend upon his own resolute curiosity into these dark and disturbing secrets unsettled him, she felt. Grimaldi’s comment –
that success might lie in breaking Mina Gabriel or her mother – weighed on his mind. He was never happy or predictable in such moods.

‘Can you tidy him up a little?’ Falcone asked as he stared miserably at the body on the silver table, shifting on his shoes, uncomfortable. More from the prospect of questioning the
family than any squeamishness, she guessed. ‘I don’t want this to be any worse than it has to be.’

‘We’ve done as much as we can,’ she said. There was a folded sheet covering the gaping wound in the skull. The blood had been washed off his face. He had olive skin, and deep,
sunken eyes. Seen like this she began to understand he could only be an adopted child. There was no physical resemblance at all to the young girl she’d seen in the newspapers.
‘Let’s get the ID out of the way and then I’ll finish. It’s not as if I’m looking for any surprises, am I?’

‘I imagine not,’ Falcone answered.

‘I hate this part,’ Teresa murmured, staring at the still, sad corpse. She liked to think of herself as a professional, someone who worked alongside the inevitable, death in all its
forms, an officer of the state who brought, on occasion, some justice to the living. But comfort? That was rare, and slow to arrive if it ever did. Grief was the invisible spirit that rose from the
dead, swiftly, bringing with it anger and resentment. She and Falcone had enjoyed many long conversations about the popular notion of ‘closure’ for the relatives of those who had died
through violence, accident or any one of the everyday diseases that stole breath from the mouths of both young and old, most of whom who never dreamed for a moment that their lives would come to
such an end, without warning, often without explanation or any rational need. Both she and Falcone hated the term, thought it a misnomer, an easy lie, like ‘moving on’. The bereaved
needed such fantasies, perhaps, as a way to allow them to survive the difficult days. But these were convenient lies that fooled no one, fabrications designed to hide the plain truth: death was a
cruel intrusion, an ever-present ghost dogging the footsteps of the living as they trudged through the world.

Leo Falcone loathed this necessary legal ceremony as much as she did, even when he hoped to gain some insight from it. The tall inspector, serious in a darker suit than he normally wore, went
out of the room then led Mina and Cecilia Gabriel back into the morgue. They looked like mother and daughter, Teresa thought, both tall and slender, with very English faces, classically beautiful
in an old-fashioned way. She rather envied women like this: high cheek-bones, large, sad eyes, pale, perfect skin, a timeless kind of beauty, that of women from the pages of glossy magazines or
canvases on the walls of galleries.