The Fallen Angel (42 page)

She dragged herself off the desk, off the man, walked towards them and placed the long, stained knife in Falcone’s outstretched fingers.

‘There, Inspector,’ Cecilia Gabriel said. ‘You wanted to find yourself a murderer. Now you have.’

Costa’s eyes fell to the expanse of verdant lawn outside. The girl sat near the fountain at its centre, knees drawn up to her chin like a child, face hidden in her skinny arms, a tight,
hunched bundle of misery struggling to withdraw herself from the bright, golden day.

Eight days later Costa found himself alone outside the tiny pink-washed church of San Tommaso ai Cenci, in the little square at the summit of the gentle mound behind the bleak
old palace where Beatrice had lived. There were so many churches in Rome, and this one was unremarkable except for its connections.

He watched the small crowd of mourners, mostly women, dressed in black, enter through the narrow single door. When they were inside, and he began to hear the tremulous tones of an organ, Costa
came out of the shadows and walked up to the façade, trying to remember enough Latin to decipher the inscription on the imperial tombstone set high on the wall, between two tiny circular
windows that would surely have allowed in little light. The Cenci, who had built this terraced place of worship, seemed to thrive in darkness. He could read a name on the tombstone: Marcus Cincius
Theophilus. Cenci. Cincius. One of their ancestors, or so the family had wished to think.

And four centuries on Romans still gathered here each year to mark the execution of Beatrice. There were flowers on the Ponte Sant’Angelo that morning. Some worshippers would, he knew,
visit the spacious interior of Montorio on the Gianicolo hill opposite, wondering as they prayed whether any trace of the Cenci girl still remained in the dun, dry earth beneath its marble
stones.

No one would mourn the man who, in Rome, had called himself Bernard Santacroce. His body still lay in the Questura morgue, awaiting instructions, and would probably remain there for months to
come. Cecilia Gabriel had made it plain she would not be responsible for any burial. No other relatives existed. The British and American authorities had expressed an interest in the case
immediately Santacroce’s true identity became known. Simon Gabriel, it seemed, was a man with an international reputation, wanted around the world for drug and people smuggling, money
laundering, fraud, a litany of twenty-first-century sins. All of them pursued, for almost a decade, from behind the genteel walls of the Palazzetto Santacroce, a property he had bought back from a
distant relative, apparently through legitimate means, and used as an opaque front for his activities.

The legal accountants were now poring over Santacroce’s empire and finding, for the most part, little but obfuscation and mystery. The palazzetto itself had been signed over to the
Confraternita delle Civette, the charitable organization he had revived in order to lend his presence in Rome some plausibility. Control of that would now, ironically, fall to his sister-in-law,
Cecilia Gabriel, the woman who had been charged over his death. She had been released on bail after a brief court appearance for manslaughter, a heroine it seemed to the Roman crowds, who had
followed the story of this English family with the same voracious appetite that their predecessors, four centuries before, had shown towards the Cenci.

Some things never changed in this city, Costa thought to himself. Though there was, perhaps, a little more mercy now. Everyone knew that the Gabriel woman would never see the inside of a jail.
She’d lost her husband, her son, and the honour and dignity of her daughter. The popular consensus was that she had done nothing wrong. That a crime committed in the defence of innocence was
no real crime at all. Beatrice and her stepmother went to the scaffold; Mina and Cecilia Gabriel stepped onto the front pages of the newspapers and magazines, becoming a
cause
célèbre
in the worthy fight against domestic violence and abuse.

Costa had taken Falcone’s advice and gone back on holiday. The two men needed a little distance between them. Both had recognized this. Falcone himself had taken sudden leave and
disappeared to Sardinia to stay with an old colleague from the Questura. This case had tested their closeness and left each a little wary of the future. The younger officer was growing, working
towards the inevitable, the next promotion, a rank that would one day equal that of Falcone. He did not feel in any way in competition with a man he regarded as both mentor and one of his closest
friends. Yet the Gabriel case had created difficulties that would not easily disappear. Falcone hated mistakes, in himself most of all. The hurt he felt for the way he pursued Mina and Cecilia
Gabriel would, Costa judged, take some time to subside.

Investigations such as these always possessed some kind of aftermath, a lingering sense of doubt and failure. This one in particular.

He’d stayed at home as Falcone had suggested, calling Agata, who’d gone to the convention in Milan with her boss, with no success. Concerned, Costa had phoned her school repeatedly
only to be told she wasn’t there. The messages he left on her phone went unanswered until two days before, when a single text promised that she was fine and would soon be back in Rome.

So he worked on the Vespa, painting out more rust, tidied the garden, and paid a neighbour to harvest the vines and take away the grapes to be made into the usual soft red table wine, the
humblest of vintages, that his field produced.

And from time to time he visited the Questura, forensic in particular, asking questions. He was the only one to do so. The matter was closed, with gratitude mostly. The tantalizing, unanswered
details shelved. Why spend money out of academic interest? Bernard Santacroce, Simon Gabriel, the monster at the heart of this tragedy, was dead.

The singing ceased in the church opposite. Someone came and threw open the shiny green wooden door into San Tommaso ai Cenci. Costa retreated back into the shadow beneath the wall of the vast,
sprawling palace that overlooked this tiny piazza.

He barely recognized Mina when she came out. Her hair was cut short and dyed a chestnut colour. She wore large black sunglasses to hide her features, which was understandable since her face was
now well known in Rome. With her black skirt, black jacket and white shirt she could have been twenty or more, no longer the child in pink pyjamas he’d seen curled into a close ball of agony
on the lawn of the Palazzetto Santacroce a week before.

Without a word to any other mourner she set off on foot, back down the alley, towards the Via Beatrice Cenci and the river. The route to the tower of the Casina delle Civette, the place that, in
spite of all its memories, still seemed to be home.

He followed her from a distance, across the busy Via Arenula where she waited for a tram from Trastevere to pass, then on into the dark nexus of lanes that led towards the Campo dei Fiori. When
she went back into the palazzetto he found his courage failing.

In a tiny cafe near the footbridge across the river he drank a macchiato slowly, called Agata again and got no answer. Then he walked out to the road by the river, thinking of the point a little
further along where Beatrice had died four centuries before by the pretty bridge of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, with its marble angels bearing the instruments of both ecstasy and torture.

The funeral cortege would have passed close by. He could almost imagine that he saw it crossing the Ponte Sisto with its ragged beggars hunched on the ground and their mongrels tethered with
string.

Costa called Agata. When there was no answer he walked back into the darkness, knowing he needed to see Mina Gabriel again. One more time. One more.

The girl was alone in the living room in the upstairs apartment of the Casina delle Civette, curled up on the sofa with a book in her hands. Her adult black business suit had
been replaced by fashionable tight slacks. Mina Gabriel wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt with a beaded necklace. This close he regretted the loss of her young, blonde hair, its replacement with a
short, stylish cut, more sophisticated, more adult. The young, distressed girl he’d met that dark hot August night seemed to be gone for good.

It was just past midday. Bright, sunny, cloudless. The palms shimmered in the heat beyond the windows. The room hummed gently to the tune of the air conditioning.

He took the chair opposite her and asked, ‘Where’s your mother?’

‘Sorry? I was deep in the book.’

She showed him the title:
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings
by Edgar Allan Poe.

‘ “
Mon cœur est un luth suspendu: sitôt qu’on le touche, il résonne
”,’ she recited, reading from the page in front of her.

‘I’m afraid my French isn’t so good,’ he said.

Mina screwed up her nose. For a moment she was childlike again.

‘I suppose you could translate it as, “My heart is a silent lute, touch it and it sounds.” Poe uses it as an epigraph, misquoted unfortunately. I think I prefer
The
Tell-Tale Heart
, to be honest. Usher’s a bit . . . I don’t know. A bit
too
creepy.’

Her words trailed off into silence.

‘You’ve done something?’ he said, indicating her hair.

‘You like it?’ She bobbed the side with her long fingers. ‘Photographers. I had to do this magazine shoot. What a pain! They said I couldn’t look like a schoolgirl. Not
that I ever was one. Apparently it was some famous cutter. I don’t know. And these clothes. I don’t care much for them really. Appearances.’

‘Your mother?’

‘She’s seeing the lawyer again. Everyone’s so kind in Rome. I’m glad this happened here. Anywhere else . . .’

Something he remembered brought a shadow of a smile to Costa’s face.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘A friend of mine from Turin says all Romans are children, really. We spend our days luxuriating in one long daydream, trying to imagine we’re in a world that’s always
beautiful, one without pain and grief, cruel reality. That if we were left to our own devices everything, ourselves, Italy even, would fall apart.’

‘It’s a compliment, isn’t it? We’d all stay children if we could.’

He nodded and said, ‘Perhaps. How is she?’

Mina Gabriel frowned.

‘Mummy will survive. We’re good at that. Plenty of practice. The lawyers say she won’t go to jail. She got bail easily enough. I don’t know who put up the money. Why am I
telling you all this? You’re a policeman. It can’t be news.’

He was aware of the details. They were insignificant.

‘A million people would have put up the money to keep her out of prison,’ Costa said. ‘If it was left to most Romans she wouldn’t be in court at all. She’d be
getting a medal. A heroine. The mother who stood up for her child against the man who violated her. It’s as if the Cenci case happened all over again. Only this time we got it
right.’

She put down the book and sat upright on the sofa.

‘I never thought of it that way.’

‘I’m sure you didn’t. Will you stay here? In Rome?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she replied immediately, shaking her head. ‘When Mummy’s free to travel again and they’ve sorted out wills and ownership and things,
she thinks we might sell this place and move to New York. I’m supposed to need a college education.’ She grimaced. ‘I keep getting all these offers. Talking. Writing.

Media. Why? Because I’ve something to say? I don’t think so. They just want to stare at me and say: so that’s what she looks like. That’s the one it happened to. Perhaps
they want to . . .’ She hesitated a moment before continuing. ‘They want to picture it in their own heads. I’m theirs now, aren’t I? I belong to them. They can imagine
whatever they like.’

‘It’s not easy being in the public eye,’ he said.

‘I’d be an idiot to turn it down, though, wouldn’t I? I’ve never really been outside my own family before. I ought to see what’s there. And I get paid.’

He looked around the beautiful apartment.

‘Everyone needs money,’ he agreed. ‘Independence. Self-respect. It’s when we deprive people of these things . . .’ He thought of the many troubled individuals
he’d dealt with over the years. How difficult it was to reconcile the evil they inflicted with their own ordinariness. There were no monsters. Every murderer he’d ever met, however
vicious, however cruel, was someone who would never turn a head on the subway. ‘The miracle is how often we treat others badly, how people suffer with poverty and hatred and cruelty and still
turn out sane and decent in the end. Not everyone, though.’

‘What makes the difference?’ she asked, suddenly interested.

‘One unkindness too many. Some brutal act that goes beyond the pale. I don’t know. I don’t think those it affects understand either. They feel the pain and the anger and crave
some way to release it, to let all that disappear by passing on the hate to someone else. And then they’re a little happier for a while. Not cured. Not quite. But free for a time. Able to
pretend that it was all someone else’s fault, another man’s evil.’ He thought about it a little more. ‘In a way it is, I suppose. Mine. Yours. Everyone’s. I think we
created the Devil for a reason, a selfish one. He makes it easier for us to accept the imperfect, fallen state we’re in. He allows us to shrug off the blame.’

The sun edged into the line of the window. A shaft of piercing golden light fell on her face. Her hand went to her eyes. She shuffled along the sofa, looking a little uncomfortable.

‘Why did you come?’

He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the deep red document.

‘I brought back the passport I found in Robert’s jacket.’

‘Thank you.’

Costa held it up, open at the photograph: a young man with dark hair and a sullen, dusky face.

‘Who is this?’ he asked. ‘Who is it really?’

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.