The Fallen Angel (36 page)

‘What,’ Maria asked, sounding a little disappointed, ‘is that?’

He knew at once, could feel the excitement that came from seeing two seemingly unrelated circumstances finally joined together by some ridiculously serendipitous connection.

‘It’s a set of instructions on how to erect the brand of suspension scaffolding used on the roof of the Gabriels’ apartment. Or, if you like, how not to erect it. How to remove
the right pieces to ensure it’ll come toppling down if you throw a body out onto the platform.’

‘Oooh.’

Her eyes were wider than ever. Her fleshy hands performed one little clap then fell still under the gravity of his gaze.

‘Are you going to call the boss?’ the girl asked.

They were all out for dinner. He didn’t want to spoil that. Teresa deserved a break as much as any of them. Besides, she was off duty, unlike him. His first point of reporting was clear.
Falcone never really rested.

Di Capua checked his watch, told them what to do with the evidence, and what tasks to prepare for the following day. Then he bade them good-bye and walked outside. The night was still sultry and
stifling. Usually he loved this time of year. September was when Rome began to wake after the hazy stupor of August. Life returned. They hadn’t got there yet.

He didn’t feel elated by Maria’s discovery and he wondered why. Perhaps because a part of him had always hoped that everything they suspected about the Gabriel girl would turn out to
be wrong. From what he’d read, from looking at her pretty, intelligent face in the papers, she seemed a nice enough kid, one who’d suffered under the nightmare of an abusive and
terrible father. She deserved a few more hours of freedom before the storm cloud that had been gathering around her bright young head broke with a vengeance.

All the same, he knew he had to make the call. Not now, though. Now there was time for a beer and some solitary thinking. A Baladin. A cigarette. Some respite from the sea of questions, doubts
and possibilities that refused to stop running through his overactive mind.

They left the restaurant just after ten, happy, well-fed, a little drowsy from the long day. Costa offered to walk Agata home but she declined, making an excuse he didn’t
believe. Something was wrong in this new life of hers. It was obvious, just as it was clear she didn’t want to discuss it.

He watched her go. Teresa and Gianni Peroni stood, arms linked, at the edge of the Piazza delle Cinque Scole, laughing and joking with one another. The night had brought an unexpected
revelation. Leo Falcone really had abandoned a difficult case, one they all suspected was more complex than it seemed. This had never happened in all the time Costa had known the man. There were
failures, plenty of them. Cases that fell down in court or, more often, investigations that simply went nowhere. But he couldn’t recall a single instance where Falcone had decided that he
would accept the obvious, the status quo, and no longer pursue an inquiry that, in all probability, still had some way to run. Even the matter of the brother’s death and the murder of Gino
Riggi would now be handled by some other officer. A part, the private, personal part, of Costa wanted to welcome this decision. The professional side of him was quietly appalled.

They said their farewells. Teresa and Peroni wandered off looking for a cab. Costa picked up his helmet. He’d had just a single glass of wine. It was fine to ride home. He wanted to. The
city became too close, too constrictive at times, particularly in the narrow lanes of the ghetto. He’d parked the scooter near to the tiny arch beneath the Palazzo Cenci, a grim, dark alley
with a small shrine supposedly marking the location of an ancient murder.

‘Safe journey,’ Falcone said, emerging from the dark and still amused by the idea of the Vespa. ‘I never had one of those things, you know. Straight from a bicycle to a car.
Nothing in between.’

Costa hesitated.

‘Is everything all right, Leo?’

‘Of course it is. Did Agata enjoy herself? Shouldn’t we be worrying about her?’

‘A little, I imagine. But she’s like you. She’ll never tell you when something’s wrong. You have to learn the signs. Then pluck up the courage to say
something.’

He left it at that. Falcone didn’t.

‘And you think that came from me?’ he asked.

‘You were the only outside figure in her life when she was in the orphanage, weren’t you?’

The older man leaned against the restaurant wall and stared back into the piazza.

‘I was a kind of father, I suppose. A very poor and distant one. I remember realizing, when she was seven or eight, that she saw me that way. I retreated a little after that. Frightened.
Yes, I was frightened by it. The dependence. The closeness.’ He shrugged, amused at his own frailty. ‘Some of us aren’t cut out to be family men.’

‘I think you did more than you realize. More than you accept.’

‘Perhaps.’ His face had grown long and gloomy again. He was tired. They all were. ‘How could a man like Malise Gabriel do something like that? To his own daughter?
How
?
I don’t understand. That’s not sexual desire, is it? It’s power. Bullying. Violence. Just one more form of rape. A worse form, if that’s possible. And that girl. That child
. . .’ He shook his head. ‘I think she actually feels guilty herself.’

These questions troubled Costa from time to time. There were crimes that sprang from comprehensible sources. Greed. Jealousy. Hatred. Despair. But not this one.

‘We can’t see inside the minds of everyone we deal with.’

‘We see inside the minds of their victims though, don’t we?’ He began to walk towards the square, and the place where Costa had left the scooter. ‘You know . .
.’

The night was beautiful when they reached the open space of the piazza. There were lights in the apartments of the Palazzo Cenci, faces at the glass, some blank, a few happy, staring out at the
sea of cars parked on the cobblestones.

‘I stood in the Questura today and did everything I could to try to force Mina Gabriel to talk. To get that young girl, woman, I don’t know, to tell me the truth. Or rather confirm
the truth. That her father abused her. And somehow everything we’ve seen – the deaths, the agony – followed from that terrible, disgraceful act. Why did I do that? Who benefits?
If she, and perhaps her mother, were accomplices, what will happen? A lengthy and expensive trial. A few months in jail at the most. Probably not even that. And . . .’ He shook his head, as
if scarcely able to believe he’d left the most important point till last. ‘More than anything, the pain. The agony I put them through. Why? Because it’s my job. Because, as I so
pompously told Teresa, we’re all equal under the law. Are we?’

Costa could see the scooter now, against the wall by the low, dark arch. Malise Gabriel had died on the cobblestones beyond. ‘We can’t afford to make choices.’

Falcone stopped, put an arm on his and said, ‘We can, Nic. We do. All the time. It’s pointless pretending otherwise. I chose to pursue this case because their reticence offended me.
Almost as much as the idea that a father could do such a thing to his own child. I felt there was something here that deserved punishment, and it was my job to deliver that. But there’s no
one left to punish, is there?’ He looked into Costa’s eyes. ‘God knows, haven’t they suffered enough already?’

‘They have,’ he agreed. ‘I’m still not sure . . .’

‘Well, I’ve thought about this long and hard and I am.’ He pointed at Costa in the dark. ‘When you become an inspector remember this case. We need to be conscious of our
humanity too. That’s more important than the law sometimes. Just don’t ever quote me on that. Especially in the Questura. Now . . .’

His phone rang. Falcone apologized, seemed ready to ignore it, then saw the number on the handset.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, and stepped away to stand by a parked car.

Costa waited. It seemed necessary for some reason. The call was short. Falcone barely spoke at all, though he listened intently, nodding all the while, his face a picture of introspective
concentration. Something else too. It was difficult to tell in the dark, but it seemed, to Costa, to represent a return of the bleakness he’d seen in the man these last few days, a desolate
gloom that had been dispelled by the time they arrived at Al Pompiere that evening.

Finally Falcone ended the call with a curt ‘
grazie
’, no more.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said and patted Costa on the shoulder, not looking into his eyes for one moment. ‘I’m glad you did.’

‘Something from the Questura?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Falcone replied immediately. ‘Routine stuff. Come in tomorrow and tidy up the papers. Then take some days off. Go back on holiday. Enjoy
yourself.’

‘Holiday?’

‘Speaking of which,’ Falcone added, ‘I won’t be at my desk in the morning till around lunch time. Some . . . personal matters to attend to. Please tell people not to
contact me. It’s rather delicate.’

‘I see,’ Costa replied, in a tone that said he saw nothing at all, and would happily be enlightened.

‘Good,’ Falcone said and then loped off into the night, a tall, solitary figure striding through the ghetto, head down, thinking.

The Questura felt odd the following morning. Falcone, as he promised, was nowhere to be seen. The murder detail had turned up to work only to discover they were to stand down
from the Gabriel case until further notice. This puzzled Costa deeply. Falcone had assured them the investigation was finished. No one else had been told that. It simply seemed to be on ice.

Peroni felt equally baffled, so the two of them gravitated to forensic and the morgue, mooching around the staff there, trying to find some answers. No one knew why the case was in limbo,
neither dead nor alive. Or if they did they weren’t telling.

Then Silvio Di Capua and the young work-experience girl, Maria, who seemed permanently attached to him, wandered in complaining loudly, a furious-looking Teresa Lupo behind them.

The pathologist eyed Costa and Peroni. Then she said, ‘My office. Now.’

They followed the three forensic staff into the glass cubicle overlooking the rear of the Questura and the crammed police car park. The demonstration outside seemed to have picked up momentum
again. Marked police vehicles were struggling to get out through the crowd. A line of ten or so blue Fiats was backed up against the fortified gates trying to find an opportunity to make their way
into the street.

‘Did you know about this last night?’ Teresa demanded, staring at Costa.

‘Know about what?’

She ordered Di Capua to tell them. Costa listened as he explained the discovery of the email on the dead brother’s phone, the document detailing the structure of the scaffolding, and where
it had originated. Falcone’s distraction the previous evening, after the odd call he’d taken in the piazza in the ghetto, started to make sense of a kind, and he told her so.

‘So where is he?’ she demanded. ‘His phone’s off. He’s not returning calls. I sent someone round to his apartment. He’s not there. We need to talk to him.
Where the hell has he gone? To see the Gabriels?’

‘He wouldn’t go there on his own,’ Costa said.

‘Well, then where?’

‘Leo’s a grown man,’ Peroni retorted. ‘We’re not his keepers.’

‘Women,’ Teresa said. ‘That’s it usually. Who’s the current one?’

‘Search me,’ Costa added. ‘Leo doesn’t talk about his private life unless there’s a reason. I’ve no idea if there’s a girlfriend or not. Anyway, why do
you need him so urgently? This can wait, can’t it?’

She scowled at Di Capua.

‘That rather depends on what he’s up to. The information this department . . .’ There was an icy stare at her deputy. ‘. . . provided last night was not as full or as
accurate as I might have liked.’

‘Mail headers,’ Maria chipped in. ‘You have to look at the mail headers. They’re not right.’

Peroni, never a man happy with technology, was squinting at her, mouthing, ‘What?’

‘I’ve got this friend in America,’ she went on. ‘He knows mail headers inside out. I tweeted him and he took a look. Had to repeat tweet of course which is not good
twittiquette. You can’t get a whole header over with just a hundred and forty characters. He was in a bar in San Diego.’

‘San Diego? Headers? Twittiquette?’ Peroni asked. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’

Teresa told him. A little of the heat drained from his face.

Costa thought about what she’d said. The header was some hidden information in the email that revealed the name of the server from which it had originated, and the path by which it had
reached its destination, Robert Gabriel’s phone. Usually this was predictable and tied to whatever mail service was used for the individual email address. But in the case of the email on the
phone, the server was part of an anonymous service designed to hide the true origin of the message. It could have come from anywhere and the sender must have deliberately used this route in order
to disguise his or her identity.

‘This doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘Why would Mina Gabriel use an anonymous service and still put her name on the message?’

Di Capua cleared his throat, glanced at Teresa and said, ‘She probably didn’t.’

Maria took out her phone and ran her fingers across the keys.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘I just sent a message to that address. What happens? Boing. It gets bounced. Either it’s not a real email address. Or the server is down. Unlikely. Or
it’s a real email address that’s expired. Or . . .’

‘What does it all mean?’ Peroni demanded

‘It means that either Mina Gabriel is a very poor criminal,’ Costa said, ‘or someone is trying to frame her for the murder of her father. Which, if true . . .’

His mind was starting to race. Sometimes investigations ran on assumptions, through the process of trying to transform an invented truth developed from hypothesis and plain guesswork into some
form of reality that one could touch and turn into an arrest, a conviction. It had been troubling him for some time that the assumptions they had about the Gabriel case had scarcely changed from
the outset, even though in the very beginning they were based on the flimsiest of observations. Cases normally developed, shifted, changed shape and character with time and a growing sense of
perspective. This had been the same from the start: a case of murder stemming from incest. Just like that of the Cenci family.